The cryptic notices that appeared throughout Hong Kong one morning in mid-January 1942 were the first sign of what the Japanese military had in mind for the colony. The message was ominous. All British, American, Dutch, and Belgian nationals were ordered to report that afternoon to the Murray Parade Ground in downtown Victoria. They were told to bring a blanket and some clothing; that was the only clue to what was planned for them. Those who came lugging suitcases stuffed with whatever they could carry were glad they had done so, for in the coming months they would welcome any creature comforts they could lay their hands on.
The colony’s new military overlords had decided to do the unthinkable: intern all white-skinned enemy civilians. The Japanese rallying cry had become “Asia for the Asiatics!” It was time for the imperialists who had exploited Hong Kong to get their comeuppance; they would experience life as Chinese coolies lived it, with daily hardship, deprivation, and humiliation. The irony of a Japanese army that had itself slaughtered and raped hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians attempting to claim the moral high ground was lost on those in command. No matter. Charles’s dramatic prophecy that the “day of the white man is done out here” was about to come true.
The roundup of foreign nationals went ahead more quickly than anyone ever expected. Initially, at least, there were discussions about confining the internees to an area on the Peak. Sir Atholl MacGregor (derisively known as “Sir Alcohol”), Hong Kong’s chief justice, pleaded with the Japanese to allow this—mainly, as some people suspected, because his own house was there and he wanted to continue living in comfort. In the end, the Japanese military banished the thousands of enemy nationals to a site five miles from Victoria as the crow flies. At Selwyn-Clarke’s suggestion, they were loaded onto old harbor boats and ferried around to Stanley, a historic fishing village on the island’s windswept south coast.
The decision to do this made sense from the Japanese perspective. Stanley Peninsula was isolated and could easily be sealed off. A British prison adjacent to the village was used as the administrative center for the new civilian internment camp as well as a place where military POWs deemed guilty of various infractions were sent to be punished; many of those who entered the prison’s gates did not come out alive.
Just south of Stanley, atop the conical hill at the southern tip of the peninsula, stood Fort Stanley. There Hong Kong’s defenders had held out until the bitter end in December 1941. The fortifications, being well located with excellent views in all directions, had been occupied by the Japanese and were made off-limits to all foreigners.
The Japanese dispatched work gangs of American and British citizens to Stanley to bury the Allied war dead and to ready a camp for the arrival of the other internees, many of whom were elderly people, women, and children. Having the able-bodied men tend to this task suited the Japanese military, because it relieved them of a dirty job, and (just as importantly) it pitted the Americans against the British in a scramble for the choicest locations and facilities. By sheer dint of personality, Bill Hunt, the resourceful businessman who had rescued Carola, was put in charge of the American section of Stanley Camp, as the site was called. Using his Yankee ingenuity to full advantage—a few well-placed bribes and some carefully chosen words of flattery helped—Hunt did his job so efficiently that even the Japanese marveled and many British were resentful. It occurred to Mickey that for now the Japanese seemed to be giving Americans preferential treatment, although that would change dramatically as the war progressed and the tide of battle turned. “Not that the Japanese are ever placatory,” Mickey wrote, “but I could see, myself, from the way they treated me when they knew I was American, that a prejudice did exist in our favor. I think they felt they would be able to make a deal with the United States later on. But their feeling toward the British was one of ruthless, revengeful hate.”1
Despite any preferential treatment of Americans, Mickey wanted nothing to do with Stanley Camp. She had seen for herself in Shanghai how the Japanese treated internees; a Japanese prison camp was no place for her baby. “I was in a tremor over Carola, I didn’t know what to do,” Mickey wrote. “It was out of the question to walk right into it, to take my baby and go into town and throw ourselves in jail. I don’t think my legs would have carried me.”2
Given her relationship with Charles, Mickey knew it would be difficult and dangerous for her to evade internment by hiding out. Nonetheless, she was determined to avoid it, at all costs. Mickey realized she had to act quickly, before Japanese soldiers or the secret police came looking for her. She devised a desperate plan that she hoped would keep her out of prison for now and buy her time to ponder her next move.
She noticed that hospital patients had not been included in the general roundup. With the help of Hilda Selwyn-Clarke and another friend, Mickey got Carola and herself admitted to Queen Mary Hospital. She was supposedly suffering from complications arising from an operation—the cesarean section that she had three months earlier. The ruse worked; Japanese military doctors had not yet gotten around to assessing hospital medical charts. Mickey moved into a four-bed room in the maternity ward, which she shared with just one other woman. This bought Mickey some time to assess her situation. For now, she and Carola were near Charles, and they were relatively safe, even if they were hungry.
When Mickey observed a group of Japanese officers touring Queen Mary Hospital to assess the facilities and equipment, she guessed her days there were numbered. She was right. On January 21, 1942, the Japanese began evacuating the building so they could use it themselves. Within an hour, all the convalescents had been moved out. Later there were reports about the brutality of the Japanese stretcher bearers, who were said to have ripped bandages off Allied soldiers to check their wounds and to have forcibly removed anyone who resisted. Such atrocities may have happened, but if they did Mickey saw none of them.
What she did see was that only the most seriously wounded or ill soldiers—Charles and Bill Wiseman among them—were transferred to the Bowen Road military hospital, on a long cul-de-sac on the hillside below Mount Gough. “Its once immaculate grounds were full of shell holes and obviously some of them had been used as burial pits,” Bill Wiseman recalled. “The main buildings had been quite badly damaged, much of the roof had gone and almost all the top floor was unsafe and useless. And it was bursting at the seams with people, having absorbed the staff and casualties from the Wanchai Naval Hospital when already crowded with Army wounded.”3
Regardless, the patients from Queen Mary Hospital were fitted in. Nearly a dozen of them were put into a cramped psychiatric ward with bars on the windows. “So in little more than a month I had progressed from the mortuary via maternity to lunacy,” Wiseman quipped.4
The walking wounded who were cleared out of Queen Mary Hospital were interned in the various POW camps that had been set up on Hong Kong Island or across the harbor in Kowloon. Most of the British enlisted men were sent to an old barracks at Sham Shui Po, while their officers were held in a camp on Argyle Street. The Canadian officers and men were interned on North Point and the Indians at Ma Ta Chung. All civilians were shipped off to Stanley Camp. Mickey refused to accept that this would also be her fate, even after Charles declined to use his connections in the Japanese high command to obtain preferential treatment for himself or his family. This refusal angered Mickey, who resolved to do on her own what Charles would not or could not bring himself to do.
By Japanese law, a person was considered a citizen of the country in which he or she was born, regardless of place of residence. Mickey knew this law precluded her from claiming to be anything other than American. However, a Russian woman pointed out an intriguing loophole in Japanese law. The provision reflected the same gender bias that prevailed in the East, just as it did in the West at the time: a wife was considered to “belong” to her husband. Thus, when a woman married, it followed that she, too, assumed her husband’s citizenship. Hearing this gave Mickey an idea.
Five years earlier, in mid-1937, she had signed a legal document in Shanghai attesting that she was Sinmay Zau’s concubine; polygamy was legal in China. At the time, Mickey had regarded this more as a matter of procedure than substance. She knew that the “marriage” was null and void under American law. But by becoming one of Sinmay’s “wives,” Mickey had become entitled to claim some important legal rights. One of them had been a permit allowing her to reclaim some of “her” valuables from the Zaus’ house, which had been confiscated by the Japanese authorities, and to assert title to a printing press Sinmay used to earn a living by publishing books, pamphlets, and soft-core pornography.
Now, in 1942, Mickey told her story with bowed head to a Japanese medical officer, who listened intently. “Chinese husband, eh?” he inquired. “How many children?” When Mickey replied just one, the officer nodded. He then produced a wallet-sized card, which he stamped and initialed. It was a pass permitting Mickey to remain free for two more days. This would give her enough time to apply to the Japanese Foreign Affairs Office in Hong Kong for permanent status. Mickey could scarcely believe her good fortune. Neither could Charles when she showed him the pass card that the officer had given her. “God,” he muttered. “Do you think you can get away with that?”5
Mickey was determined to try. With the help of a Persian businessman friend, she arranged for male escorts to take her to the Foreign Affairs Office downtown; the streets still were unsafe for a woman walking alone. Despite the military high command’s efforts to restore order, armed thugs and rogue Japanese soldiers intent on looting the homes of interned foreign nationals were still busy. They were evidently too busy to notice Mickey and her companions, who arrived safely at their destination. Because she was late for registration, Mickey was sent to the office of the Japanese consul, a man whose face she was relieved to discover she recognized. Mickey and Charles had dined with Shiroshici Kimura only a few months earlier; they all had drunk too much that evening, danced, and sung American college songs.
By chance, it was Kimura who drafted the internment regulations for Hong Kong. As they sat down to talk, Mickey sensed that although he was embarrassed and guarded, Kimura was still trying to be friendly. After they had exchanged pleasantries, the consul inquired about Charles. Then he got down to business. He examined Mickey’s pass card, nodding as he confirmed that by Japanese law she was considered to be a Chinese national; as such, she could not legally be interned. Interestingly enough, the Japanese authorities also excluded many Eurasians—persons of mixed parentage—as well as the Chinese wives of Westerners. The Japanese were forced to do so by circumstance. When the initial decision was made to intern foreign nationals, the colony’s military governors had no idea how many people they were dealing with. “They had assumed that only the haughty whites were British,” Mickey wrote. “Naturally [the crowd that turned up at Murray Parade Grounds] was far too big to handle, and besides, [the Japanese] didn’t feel prepared to decide at just a moment’s notice who was ‘Asiatic’ and who wasn’t.”6
When Mickey left Kimura’s office that day she did so carrying a new pass card, this one adorned with official-looking red seals. However, she also had a new and potentially serious problem. Mickey had two days to produce a marriage certificate or sworn statement proving she really was married to Sinmay Zau. Mickey had neither a copy of the Chinese legal document she had signed, nor the time to try to contact Sinmay—even if he was still alive and was willing to confirm their relationship, which had ended abruptly and with some bitterness. Mickey knew her only hope was to find someone willing to sign a sworn statement that she really was Sinmay’s wife (even though she knew the marriage had not been recognized by British or American law). The difficulty, of course, was finding such a person in occupied Hong Kong. “What followed sounds incredible,” Mickey later wrote. “That is the trouble with real life: you can’t write it down as fiction because it is so impossible.… You will have to believe me because this is the truth.”7
Mickey chanced to encounter a student she knew on a crowded Hong Kong street. Freddie Kwai was one of Sinmay’s nephews. When Mickey explained her predicament to him, Freddie agreed to swear she was his auntie, as long as Mickey promised not to tell the Japanese that he had fought as a volunteer in the Chinese army. Mickey did so, and she and Freddie visited the Foreign Affairs Office together. There Mickey was issued a new passport showing that she was a Chinese citizen—at least as far as the Japanese authorities were concerned.
As Mickey was struggling with her passport in occupied Hong Kong, efforts to rescue her were under way back home in New York. Mickey’s sister Helen and literary agent Carl Brandt had begun writing letters and inquiring about Mickey’s fate. All they knew for certain was that she and her baby had been in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941. No one had heard anything more since then. A fearful Carl Brandt wrote to the Secretary of State in Washington on January 15, 1942, seeking information. Two weeks later, Brandt received a reply from the Secretary of State’s office informing him that Washington had sent to Tokyo, through the intermediary of the Swiss government, a proposal for the exchange of the “official personnel” the two sides were holding. American officials also requested that all accredited “press representatives” be included in any such swap; Mickey’s name had been added to the list of American journalists thought to be in Hong Kong.8 For now, nothing more could be done. When Helen tried to transfer money to Mickey’s bank account through the Swiss-based International Red Cross, she was informed that it was no longer possible.
Mickey knew nothing of any of this. It would have made no difference to her even if she had, for she had other more immediate concerns. When Charles was moved out of the Queen Mary Hospital to the British military hospital on Bowen Road, Mickey was discharged, too. She, Carola, Ah King, and Ah Yuk—a new amah Mickey had hired to help care for Carola—returned home to Mickey’s flat on May Road, now officially known as Higashi-Tisho Tori. That was not the only change. Her home was occupied by refugees: two Eurasian women along with their young children, several elderly relatives, and various Chinese servants. There were now a dozen people living in the flat. The Eurasian women, Mickey learned, were sisters named Irene and Phyllis. Both were widows of British soldiers who had died in the battle. Although the apartment building had been damaged in the battle and looters had stolen many of Mickey’s belongings, the flat was still habitable. Ah King had seen to that. He had also continued to care for two of Mickey’s gibbons; Mr. Mills and a younger animal named Junior had survived. The animals looked on with interest as Mickey, Carola, and Ah King unpacked the three suitcases in which Mickey now carried everything she owned.
Now that she had time to assess her own situation, Mickey realized that being spared internment had created a whole new set of problems. Finding food was one of them. Those who had money or gold could buy food on the black market. Unfortunately, when the Japanese seized the colony’s banks, they froze all accounts and issued a new currency—the Japanese military yen (MY), pegged at four to the Hong Kong dollar. In reality it was worthless. Like most foreign nationals, Mickey had been left with only the cash in her pocket. She made do by bartering the contents of her jewelry box piece by piece—a necklace for a bag of rice here, a ring for a can of evaporated milk for Carola there. Mickey knew she could not last long doing this; she was now trying to feed five people: herself, Carola, Ah King, Ah Yuk, and Charles, whom she visited each afternoon. Whenever possible, Mickey took along a food parcel to Bowen Road Hospital. She knew the guards stole whatever items they wanted, but that was the price to be paid. The remaining food in those precious parcels was the difference between life and death for Charles and other patients with whom he shared it.
“It was a nasty period altogether,” Mickey later wrote. “On the part of the public there was an eager rush to make friends with the conquerors.”9 Some Hong Kong women—Russian and Chinese nationals mostly—were stricken with what Mickey dubbed “Sabine complex.” Like the women of the ancient kingdom of Sabine, who had became the wives and lovers of the marauding Romans, these Hong Kong women began sleeping with Japanese soldiers, Kempetai agents, and other officials. This was one way of finding protectors and providers in these uncertain times. Although Mickey understood the women’s motivation, she did not approve. Frankie Zung, a half-American black, half-Chinese hustler whom Mickey knew, insisted he was going to introduce her to a Japanese army major “who likes white women.” Mickey was adamant that he would do nothing of the sort. Still, she knew that she too would have to somehow cultivate “friendships” among the occupying forces while maintaining her dignity. Mickey had a headstart in this regard.
Unlike many Westerners in Hong Kong, prior to the war she and Charles had worked and socialized with Japanese officials and army officers. In addition to Mr. Kimura, one of their friends had been the former Japanese consul in Hong Kong, a young American-educated foreign service officer named Takio Oda. In the wake of the Japanese occupation, Oda returned to Hong Kong from Tokyo to help set up the new military administration. Among his duties as the head of the colony’s Foreign Affairs Office was to assist the gendarmerie in running the civilian internment camp at Stanley. On the surface, Oda seemed to be as callous and unpredictable as other Japanese occupation officials, and he was hated for it by many Europeans. What few of them realized was that Oda was an old-fashioned man of honor. The brutality and corruption he saw in Hong Kong disgusted him. For that reason, Oda quietly intervened with the gendarmerie on the prisoners’ behalf. Unbeknownst to Mickey or Charles, he also had pulled a few strings for Mickey.
“It was the military who decided [who was interned and who was not],” he explained. “But there were two or three important people whom I knew well, and I told them Mickey and Charles were all right.”10 Oda’s say-so was enough reason for Kimura to exempt Mickey from internment, even though he must have known—or at least suspected—that her relationship with Sinmay was dubious. The fact that Oda could intervene on behalf of his friends was indicative of the rivalries among the Japanese officials who were now running Hong Kong. It also helps to explain the outcome of a terrifying incident that happened to Mickey a few days after she received her new passport.
She was having breakfast at Hilda’s flat one morning, when she received a caller: Mr. Cheng, a flabby, tubercular Chinese man in gray flannels and a striped necktie. Mickey knew Cheng was a supporter of Wang Ching-wei, a pro-Japanese politician who was one of Chiang Kai-shek’s main rivals for leadership of the Chinese Nationalist movement. Cheng had little interest in politics. Mickey later learned that he had paid the gendarmerie for the “right” to run Stanley Camp and to squeeze its residents. “[Cheng’s] object was to make hay while the sun shone,” wrote American journalist Joe Alsop, himself a prisoner in the camp, “and besides taking bribes for special favors from the richer internees, Cheng and his gang chiseled on the [camp] rations, keeping back a portion of them and selling it on the rocketing Hong Kong food [black] market.”11
While Cheng had identified Mickey as a prime prospect for extortion, as yet he dared not squeeze her. It was evident to all that she had friends in high places. Cheng knew he needed permission to work his mischief. With that in mind, he studied the papers that Mickey had been given at the Foreign Affairs Office. As he did so he must have seen that they posed a problem for him. After a few minutes, Cheng rose to leave, asking Mickey to return to Kimura’s office that afternoon. She agreed, although she sensed this was an ominous development.
Kimura’s behavior further heightened Mickey’s anxieties. He sat at his desk, staring down at his hands as he spoke. Kimura was apologetic. Colonel Noma, the feared head of the gendarmerie, had been making inquiries about Mickey’s “case,” he explained. Now the colonel wanted to see her about “a small matter.” She was to go immediately to Noma’s office in the former supreme court building. Mickey was filled with dread but knew she must comply with Noma’s summons. She was going into the belly of the beast; there was nowhere to hide.
She had heard stories about people who had simply “disappeared” while being interrogated by the gendarmes; others suffered “unfortunate accidents” while being questioned. “[The gendarmes] are the Japanese Gestapo,” Mickey explained. “They are envied and enviable, because, officially, they take orders from nobody but the Emperor, and everyone knows that actually they don’t even take orders from him. They do just what they like. The chief of the gendarmerie on Hong Kong really rules the roost. There is a Japanese governor, put there for show, but it is always the gendarmerie who make the ultimate decisions.”12
Mickey discovered that the head of the gendarmes, the man who held the power of life and death over her, was an “extra small goblin in khaki.”13 Colonel Noma sat behind a large desk in a very long room. Because he pretended (not very convincingly) not to speak English, he immediately began barking questions at Mickey through an interpreter. At first, she had difficulty answering. Her mouth was parched and a lump of fear blocked her throat. As the interrogation progressed, it became obvious that Noma knew a lot about Mickey and about her prewar activities in China. She later learned that her Soong Sisters book had been translated into Japanese and had been circulated among the Japanese Foreign Affairs staff in China, the senior military, and the Kempetai. She was unaware of this; what terrified Mickey most was that Noma would question her about her friends in Shanghai, especially Sinmay’s brother (a general in the Chinese guerilla army), and about her own occasional work as a Nationalist courier.
Fortunately, the colonel knew none of this, because he had not bothered to ask his counterpart in Shanghai for Mickey’s file. Noma smugly assumed he knew everything worth knowing about Mickey: namely, that she was Charles Boxer’s lover and that she had spent time in Chungking with the Soongs. It was these two aspects of Mickey’s life that Noma questioned her about. He did so at great length, in the process suggesting to Mickey that her loyalties to Charles were wasted because—among other things—he did not really love her and had been unfaithful. Mickey replied that she did not care; after all, she was another man’s wife. After several hours, Colonel Noma grew frustrated. He was convinced that Mickey was a silly woman who had no useful information. Finally, Noma demanded to know why if she was really married to Sinmay she had borne Charles Boxer’s baby. By this point in the interrogation, Mickey was so weary and disoriented she was almost giddy. “Because I’m a bad girl!” she blurted.
On that note, the questioning ended. As Noma and his interpreter huddled, talking in hushed tones, fearsome thoughts flashed through Mickey’s mind. She was certain her flippancy had been a mistake; she was bound for Stanley Camp or someplace much worse. Then suddenly the interpreter laughed. He clapped Mickey on the back like an old friend and told her she could go home. That was it. As quickly as the questioning had begun, it was over. Mickey could scarcely believe her good fortune. She had not been beaten or abused. Even more surprisingly, she was not being interned. For now, at least.
Charles was incredulous when Mickey told him about her interrogation. He knew the Japanese were intent on learning the details of his intelligence work. Despite various threats, he himself had revealed nothing. He refused to do so, and that was that. Charles was prepared to die and to take his secrets to the grave with him. As the warrior’s bushido code bade him, he would not beg, nor complain; Charles had resolved to die with honor, like a true samurai.
He had never discussed his intelligence work with anyone other than his superiors, and he had always been careful never to take documents home with him. At first, Charles’s interrogators either didn’t know or refused to believe it, for the gendarmes had ransacked his flat. In the process, they stole his priceless collection of sword furnishings, some early Dutch drawings from Japan, and many of his precious books. They had also beaten his Chinese houseboy in an effort to extract information. When that failed, the gendarmes tried a subtler approach. They offered the houseboy rice and tobacco to spy on Mickey in the hope she could provide incriminating evidence. When he told her about it, she advised him to go ahead. Mickey had nothing to hide.
Neither her summons by Noma nor the fact that she was now being watched had any significant impact on Mickey’s daily life. The biggest change in her routine came about as the Japanese tightened their grip on Hong Kong. Security at the Bowen Road military hospital was increased, and the daily visiting period ended. Japanese officials claimed this was because of a cholera outbreak, but Mickey learned from Hilda (who heard from her husband) that this was just an excuse. It mattered not. What did matter was that hospital visiting periods were cut back to a couple of hours per week. Visitors were no longer permitted inside the building, and for a time all patients were prohibited from receiving outside food parcels. This latter restriction caused great suffering because food and medical supplies were so scarce inside the hospital. Charles received a small respite from a Japanese guard with a fondness for chocolate. The man turned his back one day when Mickey and Carola came calling. As a result, Charles, Mickey, and the baby had an hour together in private.
Mickey saw that Charles had largely recovered from his chest wound. However, he badly needed rehabilitation therapy for his left arm, which hung uselessly in a sling. As a result, he had difficulty tending to many of the little tasks that are part of daily life—tying his shoelaces and shaving, for example. Nevertheless, Charles refused to complain about his health or about the treatment he was receiving. When asked, he always insisted that others at the hospital were suffering far more. He was probably right. Several of the men remained in perilous shape; others suffered from a variety of painful afflictions.
Bill Wiseman’s experiences were typical. He developed a bad case of impetigo, a highly contagious skin infection. His face erupted in painful, oozing sores. Just after that cleared up, his throat became inflamed. British army doctors decided his tonsils had to be removed. The surgeon who performed the procedure eased Wiseman’s discomfort using local anesthetic, which was all that was available. This was almost useless, though, and the pain was excruciating. “I was cornered,” Wiseman said. “The patient whose turn was next just let out a screech and bolted from the [operating] theater.”14
For all its inadequacies, the treatment afforded patients in Bowen Road military hospital was markedly better than that being meted out in Hong Kong’s POW camps, where conditions truly were grim. The men in these camps faced what Gwen Dew called “the twin horrors of hunger and disease.”15 In many ways, the early months of captivity, in early 1942, were among the worst.
The prisoners got used to living in crowded, dirty barrack-style quarters that lacked even the most basic amenities. Medical supplies were scarce or nonexistent. By day, the prisoners sweated in the tropical sun; by night, they were chilled to the bone by cold. Flies, mosquitos, cockroaches, fleas, lice, bedbugs, rats, and a host of other pests spread misery and disease.
Bill Wiseman recalled that when the power failed at the Argyle Street camp, it was not restored. Thus, for the duration of the war, all outdoor activities for the prisoners were restricted to daylight hours, and those days of endless despair began with mornings of mind-numbing routine. Week after week, month after month, the prisoners were roused from their beds, usually about 4:30 A.M. Following morning parade and roll call, they ate a meager breakfast of a cup of rice—“maggotty, moldy, and full of mouse turds,” as another British POW recalled—washed down by watery tea.16 Many of the enlisted men struggled to survive on a starvation diet of less than nine hundred calories per day; some who tried to turn the tables by eating rats found to their sorrow that rodent meat was unpalatably greasy and made them violently ill.
After the morning meal, the prisoners went to work; only the most ill were excused. Labor gangs were formed to work on Japanese construction projects, one of which was the expansion of the Kai Tak Airport. At first, the prisoners were paid small amounts for their efforts, but this payment soon ended and the work became forced. As the POWs grew increasingly hungry, enfeebled, and ravaged by diseases, such work became well nigh impossible, but still the Japanese insisted. Hundreds of men died as a result. Later, many of the healthiest men were shipped off to Japan to toil as slave labor in coal mines or locomotive works. On several occasions, Japanese ships loaded with POWs were inadvertently torpedoed by American submarines, resulting in horrendous loss of life. Those POWs who did not toil in labor gangs were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the prison camp and its latrines, a wretched job considering the number of men suffering from dysentery and other diseases.
A second parade and camp roll call were held each evening, usually about 8 P.M. Dinner followed. Invariably it consisted of another cup of rice, more watery tea, and sometimes a thin soup of vegetable tops, which the men dubbed “green horror.” Whole fresh vegetables, meat, and protein were as rare in the camps as was privacy.
The inhumane conditions in Hong Kong’s military POW camps caused a myriad of health problems. Bill Wiseman eventually dropped to little more than half his usual weight of 180 pounds; others suffered comparable weight losses. Because of the combination of malnutrition and disease, prisoners died by the hundreds. “Everyone was affected,” Wiseman noted. “We all made the acquaintance of the various diseases: beriberi, pellagra, vitaminosis, dysentery, and there was the odd cholera scare, too.”17
Mercifully, conditions were less severe in Stanley Camp, where Hong Kong’s civilian internees generally were spared the kind of cruelties, although not the deprivations, meted out to the military POWs. “The real story of the camp must be written around food—for that was the subject of nine-tenths of the conversations and it dominated most of our dreams,” one British internee later wrote.18
Under the terms of the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of War Prisoners, which the Japanese had not signed but had agreed to comply with, civilian internees were to receive 2,400 calories per day. Initially, most of the civilians in Stanley Camp struggled to survive on less than half of that. “At ten in the morning in the American quarters we received a small bowl of rice and three quarters of a cup of thin gravy,” Gwen Dew reported. “At five we received another dose of rice and the same small amount of questionable stew. Many times the small amount of meat in it should have been rejected owing to its bad state, but it meant no food at all if it was sent back.”19
The reality was that the rapacious Mr. Cheng, Mickey’s tormenter, was making a fortune selling stolen prisoners’ rations on the black market. The food situation in the camp improved only when Cheng fell from grace in March and was replaced. At that point, Mickey’s friend Takio Oda decided to put a Japanese man in charge of Stanley Camp. His choice to be the new supervisor was a “civilian nonentity” named Yamashita, who formerly had been a barber at the Hong Kong Hotel. “When Takio Oda and Yamashita pressed for reforms, the gendarmes objected that we were getting Japanese army rations—an argument often heard, in which the only flaw is that while the Japanese soldier gets approximately the same food, he receives infinitely more of it, and a far higher proportion of meat, fish, and vegetables,” journalist Joe Alsop explained.20