A PRISON CAMP IS NOT A GARDEN CITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 337, 7 December 1945, Page 6

A PRISON CAMP IS NOT A GARDEN CITY

This is the fourth of a series of articles written for "The Listenér"

by

JAMES

BERTRAM

S"*_yXHE prisoner," Stephen Spender says somewhere, "ought never to pardon his cell." He isn’t likely to:, anyone who has been in solitary confinement anywhere-and this applies equally to the conscientious objector as to the _ political revolutionary-has entered a new dimension of experience. He has tasted the final bitterness of "man’s inhumanity to man." For there is nothing worse than this. Beatings or torture are easier to bear, because these are signs of a kind of interest, however perverted, on the part, of one’s captors. And I shall return again to a curious but now familiar rule of prison behaviour: that morale-a clumsy word, but we all know what’s meant by it-automatically goes up when the bashing begins. The same thing happens to cities under bombing. It is not an original comment, but I sometimes feel-watching the neighbour’s ear drive off to the beach on Sunday, with Dad in his shirt-sleeves and Auntie May watching the children and Yvonne taking a crack at the Government because there are still no imported dress-patterns-that it’s a pity we didn’t have at least one serious air-raid in New Zealand. But we did have prisoncamps; and there are still people locked up because of the war. These. are random observations, and it isn’t particularly my business to follow up their implications. All I want to suggest here, by a somewhat devious approach to the whole subject of Japanese prison-camps, is that I hope New Zealanders come to it with a vivid sense of reality; and with a reasonably clear conscience.

O Horror, Horror! But it still isn’t easy. "Does the public want to hear about atrocities?" is the sort of question a News Taster might put to his colleagues, fingering a sheaf of films and documents. And it’s the wrong question. The public should hear of them; but it should hear of them the right way. For this is a very dangerous blend of sensation and social dynamite, and though I have been a journalist, off and on, for ten years, I’m still positivé the right way isn’t through scare headlines and obscene photographs. These things happened all _ right: Belsen and Buchenwald and Auschwitz and the rest. We ought to realise them with every protesting nerve, let them burn in deep upon our consciousness. But there was Oranienburg before Belsen, and an English poet wrote in 1938: "Ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie: And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau." : If people are only interested in horrors as horrors, they had much better go to a Boris Karloff film. The point about atrocities and persecution and prison-camp records is not that men.can behave like sub-men; we all know that

now. It is that these are the symptoms and by-products of a whole social system and mental environment that lives on terror and breeds monsters like Kramer and Tokata just as dung breeds flies. And the whole thing isn’t washed out when a few of the leading butchers have been shot or hanged. (Krupp is indicted @s a war criminal; but Duponts are still the guardians of the atomic bomb.) It is important for us-especially in New Zealand-to realise just what happened in Japanese POW camps. It is far more important for us to realise why it happened, and what the militaryfascist set-up in Japan did to unspoilt young Japanese peasants and fishermen as well as to the victims whom war threw in their way. For if this lesson is learnt thoroughly, it may yet be possible to help build up a decent Japan, and _ incidentally do something about Hong Kong and China, too. That is why I want first to make some "general statements about the Japanese

Army. Back in New Zealand in 1940 I wrote: "I do not think anybody has done justice to the fighting quality of the Japanese Army." This was based on my own observa--tions in China over some years of war, declared and undeclared. And the brief combat-experience we had in Hong Kong certainly confirmed it. We had been outnumbered, of course; but we had also been out-generalled and out-fought. And by and large the Nips fought fair. I don’t think anyone who was at Hong Kong would deny this. The Japanese bombed military objectives with as much precision as they were capable of; their. artillery was excellent and extremely well-directed. The conduct of their troops during the fighting and the occupation, if mot exemplary, was generally good. With the exception of some inexcusable bayoneting of wounded prisoners, the few instances of "atrocities’ were not without provocation; they were promptly investigated and the offenders punished by the Japanese Command, After the surrender, British troops as a whole were not insulted or injured until they were rounded up and brought behind the wire. All this was an agreeable surprise to most of us. I had seen a great deal of the China fighting, and I knew that there the Japanese did not take prisoners. Sometimes, if they wanted a road built or some heavy military work done they would keep a few thousand captives alive-battle-derelicts working in chain-gangs-for just long enough to finish the jab. More often what prisoners they

took, or what villagers they rounded up in "partisan" areas, were tied together in long lines and used as dummies for bayonet practice to break in raw troops. If anyone is moved to call this inhuman, I would suggest that in wartime it is merely logical (and I would recommend that he or she abstain from acquiring first-hand details of our own commando training; or of the savagery on both sides of the later fighting in the Pacific Islands), But the point I really wish to establish here is that the things we are only too glad to put out of our minds now that the war is over, were routine in peace or war to the soldiers of the Emperor. That is why Japanese civilians hated the Armybecause of what it did to their young men. The System Made Them And if this was true of the Japanese Army-which as a fighting service had its points, as I have tried to indicatehow much more’ was it true of the Gendarmerie, the Japanese kempeis or Military Police who bore to the Army much the same relationship as Himmler’s SS to the Wehrmacht. This is where we move into the habitual realms of shadow, the gangster-land of a postInquisition whose symbols, less familiar than the steel whip and the rubber truncheon, are the knotted cord and the water-torture. Religious zealots are at least honest zealots, and materially disinterested. Of the Japanese Gendarmerie it might be said that this was the dirtiest racket on the whole sordid fringe of Japanese imperialism. One would need an 18th century vocabulary to do justice to either its personalities or its methods. And I am sure it will be found, when all the thousands of reports are added up, that it is the kempeis who are responsible for the abominable crimes. I do not suggest, of course, that the Japanese Army was incapable of atrocities: the evidence is there, of Bataan and Borneo and Thailand. But brutality, not torture, was their accustomed weapon; and accident and callousness played a larget part in their misbehaviour, I believe, than calculation. That is why I personally regret the fact that the first Japanese war criminal on public trial should be General Yamashita in the Philippines. For after all Yamashita was a fighting soldier and a commander who made our own generals look pretty silly at times. Homma, of China ill-fame, or the aloof and aristocratic Count Terauchi, would perhaps be fairer game to start on, if the Army is to be the first in the box. Or Tojo, the prime mover in Japanese eyes. But the men the Japanese people, as well as all Allied prisoners whose comtades- disappeared in their net, most want to see tried and convicted are the heads of the Gendarmerie-the slimiest and most cold-blooded vampires who ever sucked their. profits from the carcase of war. All this is a long preamble. But there , have not been enough political distinctions of this kind made in Europe, and there have certainly not been enough de in the Far East, since VE and VJ days. At the risk of reopening an ancient centroversy, I cannot too strongly insist that it is not a nation but a system that is under indictment in Tokyo today. The Spoils of War Back in Hong Kong, then, in the last days of 1941, . pies Fagg. ~ A military surrendér is an ‘unforget,table experience. I suppose there is (continued. on next page)

(continued from previous page) something, in King’s Regulations to cover this situation; but in Hong Kong the pages must have been missing. The first few days were chaos. Some batteries, for instance, had spiked their guns and destroyed their equipment, which seemed the logical thing to do. Sensible officers turned a blind eye, courageous ones set an example. In Stanley, however, where we were under the orders of a Brigadier whom nobody had heard of until after the surrender, the best guns in Hong Kong-9.2’s-were turned over to the Nips intact. Our first parade was to pile arms. I could not help thinking, as I watched the long line of carefully-oiled rifles and tommy-guns and -automatics, of those Chinese guerrillas over on the mainland. Indian gunners repacked the ammunition for their ack-ack batteries, their dark faces inscrutable (it was all very well to make fun of those highlycoloured, strangely-worded missives the Nip planes had showered on us: "Shake hands with us all!!! This is the only and best way remained to you!" They had not been without effect). Sobn we were at work, carrying our own six-inch shells up from the magazines. Over the Border The first thought in many minds was of escape. We knew already of the break for the mainland that had been made by David MacDougall, lately of the Ministry of Information, with Admiral Chan Chak and his party, in the last of the M.T.B.’s, This, the most daring bit of initiative in the Hong Kong debacle, was crowned with complete and well-deserved success, and MacDougall was to come back to Hong Kong four years later (with the rank of Brigadier) as the senior British military officer in the relieving force. (How. I cursed my own luck, that I had been at Stanley at the finish! We were marooned on our little peninsula, with the Nips across the ‘isthmus and their patrol boats all around us). But escape after a surrender is not a simple business, as the much-publi-cised case of General Gordon Bennett would seem to indicate. King’s Regulations need revising again. All we knew on the subject was \the familiar formula -coined for countries that recognised the rules of ‘war-that it is the duty of a, POW at all times to escape if he can. But the most extraordinary advice was given by our senior officers; and there was a good deal of bitterness later on the part of those-especially Chinese members of the Field Ambulance, and so forth-who followed instructions to remain with their units in the days when they could easily have slipped out’ of uniform and lost themselves in the civilian population. There is a great deal more that could be said upon this topic; but it is all dangerous ground, Escape in the first months in Hong Kong, even after we had been transferred to four main prison-camps was not so difficult, if you had money and food and some sort of contact outside. Later it became more difficult, and then the Nips forced everyone to sign a paper stating that no attempt would be made to evade the Imperial forces, That one wouldn't have bothered us; we had plenty of lawyers to tell us all about signatures under duress; but what did was the matter of reprisals. For months at Shunshuipo we lived on starvation rations because some. of our people got away. And after the first weeks, one would have needed to place a very high value on one’s own freedom

to consider it worth the lives of one’s mess-mates and civilian friends, whom the gendarmes would then pick up as a matter of course. Prisoners at Home How does one begin to describe the life we led in Hong Kong in those days? The irony of it all, of course, was pointed by the fact that we were prisoners-of-war in our own country, or something like it. Imagine the Auckland Home Guard interned on Mt. Victoria, and brought out every day to work in the Domain, and you have some idea of it. Even the British regulars had their Chinese girlfriends coming down to the wire on

Saturday mornings to signal a bit of news and Hfand in a parcel of foodstuffs. (One of these days I shall write a dramatic poem and dedicate it to those unsung heroines of Hong Kong, the Flower Girls of Wanchai. They were grand during the fighting and they stuck to their men in prison-camp, and they deserve a lot more than they’ll ever get for it.) ' The Hong Kong Volunteers, of course, many still obsessed by the fate of their houses and their bank-balances, had dropped abruptly from the social heights of the Peak to basic coolie level. But many of them-remember we had more than 20 nationalities represented in our ranks!-still had families or friends in Hong Kong, and when we marched out to work on the airfield at Kaitak the roads were always lined with Portuguese or French or Scandinavian wives and sisters and ghildren. A friendly guard would ‘allow a prisoner a few minutes together with his wife and baby, moments of almost unbearable poignancy for all concerned. In Retrospect Looking back now on nearly two years of it, I feel we didn’t do too badly in Hong Kong, In the first place, the Nips had decided to take prisoners, and they did make a genuine, if half-hearted, effort to cope with the considerable problems of running ‘a large-scale prison camp. They early hit on the device, applied throughout to the largest camp for all ranks at Shumshuipo, of running the camp internally through a weak and

neurotic British officer with his own little hand-picked staff of "stooges" and informers. This officer is still under arrest awaiting court-martial; so I suspend further comment, There were shocking lacks, of course. In the first year, most of us had all the deficiency diseases, including a form of polyneuritis ("dry beri-beri") which was as painful as any known torture. There was a diphtheria epidemic thrown in, which didn’t help matters. When the death-roll was at its highest (averaging about five a day) ofie was struck by. cer-' tain odd features of Japanese military mentality: in spite of their normal cheese-paring, which would not allow the purchase of medical equipment or serum, they would still spend money to buy cheap box-coffins and wreaths df flowers, and sometimes the Camp Commandant, whose squeeze at this time must have been’ enormous, would solemnly attend funerals himself (perhaps he had an interest in the local undertakers!). What kept us going at Shumshuipo, after a really grim first year, was a change of Commandant and the arriva! of a shipload of Red Cross supplies from Africa. This, and the medical supplies and foodstuffs brought aleng each week by the ‘local people, mainly Chinese and Portuguese. No pizise is too high for the loyalty and sacrifice of these "parcel-bearers’" of Hong Kong. They proved that even a British Colony can have better citizens than it deserves. And in Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, Director of Medical Services, who first organised the flow of funds and medical supplies into the prison-camps, Britain had a colonial ser-vant-and a hero and martyr-worthy of her oldest and best governmental traditions. A Story to be Told All this is inadequate. But any casual comment must be inadequate to the story of the Japanese prison-camps. There are probably only two methods of presenting a fair picture. One of these is statistical. That pattern will appear in due course, and I sincerely hope its figures will be studied in this country. The final percentagescasualties, disease, persecution, and atrocities-will tell their collective tale better than any individual record. The other method is imaginative treatment. All these prison experiences are the raw material for novels and plays and short stories that may make a new contribution to literature, and may do nearer justice to the extremes of human depravity (never a racial or a national monopoly) and of human fortitude and dignity. The effect here depends on the artist’s power of selection, as in Ernst Toller’s Swallow-Book. To Japan One of the stories that will make a play or a film by itself is the tale of the Lisbon Maru, which was torpedoed and sunk off the China coast while carrying the first big draft of prisoners from Hong Kong to Japan. I was lucky enough to miss that one; but now the drafts were becoming regular policy. And it was in Dai Nippon, the heart of the Japanese Empire, that we were soon to find ourselves in conditions that made Hong Kong, in retrospect, seem like a distant and Mediterranean rest camp. (To be continued)