Adults were beaten up all the time and we got quite blase´ about seeing this and it ceased to mean anything.
Moira Chisholm, British child internee
Shanghai, 1943
The time it took for the Japanese to intern Allied civilians differed from place to place. Sometimes they moved incredibly quickly to gather up and throw into camps enemy aliens, but in other places the Japanese seemed content to allow Allied civilians limited freedom of movement for many months after assuming power. In Hong Kong, internment had occurred within a couple of weeks of General Malby’s surrender on 25 December 1941, an event the local Chinese had christened ‘Black Christmas’. Elsewhere, the process was convoluted. In October 1942, Allied nationals living in Shanghai were required to purchase red armbands from the Japanese, who were quick to realize that they could make some money out of the new regulations. Allied civilians had to wear the armbands whenever they left their houses, as degrading a symbol as the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to display on their clothing throughout German-occupied Europe.
Allied civilians in Shanghai had been living under an increasingly invasive Japanese occupation authority since the takeover of the International Settlement on 8 December 1941, but they had still been theoretically ‘free’ in many aspects of their lives. People could still go out and meet friends, dine in restaurants and attend the cinema. Children had continued to attend school. Also, at this stage, most of the Allied civilians were still living in their own homes, though many were under constant surveillance by the Kempeitai, Japan’s dreaded military police. They could be subject to arrest, interrogation and detention at one of a number of torture centres that had been set up throughout the city.
The new red armbands were each printed with a letter denoting the wearer’s nationality (‘B’ for British, ‘A’ for American, ‘N’ for Netherlands and so on) and an individual identification number below the letter. Local Germans, allies of the Japanese, took to wearing Nazi swastika armbands so that they would not be interfered with by Japanese sentries, who were extremely suspicious and wary of all Westerners in the city. At the same time that Allied civilians were being forced to buy armbands, the Kempeitai also issued new rules concerning the behaviour of Westerners. The Japanese had been content to permit Allied civilians to run occupied Shanghai for them until they were in a position to replace the multitude of Western managers, technical personnel and foreign experts who kept the city functioning. The Shanghai Municipal Police officer corps still primarily consisted of British and American men, the public utilities were still run by foreign engineers, and the banking houses and great businesses of Shanghai like Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and British-American Tobacco continued to function under their pre-war managers.
However, although the Japanese decided they would have to tolerate whites running the city’s utilities for a time, they did decide to ban Westerners from the social life of Shanghai. They gave orders that Allied nationals were forbidden from entering theatres, cinemas, dance halls, nightclubs, the Canidrome in the French Concession or the Race Course (which now forms People’s Square in modern Shanghai). In addition, all Allied nationals were ordered to surrender their radios, cameras and telescopes to the Kempeitai. Failure to do so would lead to individuals being tortured as suspected spies. Such measures heightened the atmosphere of fear and insecurity that gripped the foreign population of occupied Shanghai. Fathers feared a knock on the door in the middle of the night, wives feared being separated from their husbands, and children were confused by the sudden changes to routine and much-diminished social standing. ‘The honeymoon period was over,’ wrote North-China Daily News reporter Ralph Shaw, who was himself later interned. ‘The Japanese were showing their teeth and, from their record of cruelty on China, we knew that many of us were going to suffer indescribable illtreatment.’1
One British boy decided at this stage to leave Shanghai and to embark on a hare-brained adventure through Japanese-occupied China. ‘When I ran away from home, I was a child of eleven, and had the silly notion to go to the next large city, which was Nanking, some 300 miles away,’ recalled Norman Shaw. ‘I just followed the railway tracks far out into the countryside, where there was nothing for miles and miles.’2 After Shaw had walked for several hours through the night he was stopped by a Japanese railway worker who was manning some signalling equipment. ‘He searched me, found my identity card with the red band on it – the sign of an enemy national. He then made me take off my woollen sweater, which he kept, and told me to go on my way.’ Shaw trekked on until he came to a small village. ‘It was a cluster of bungalows built on stilts, about twelve in all, which housed Japanese troops!’ Undeterred, Shaw approached the dwellings in the darkness. ‘As I got up to one … I saw a man on the porch, so I dived under the bungalow but he saw me, shone a torch and fished me out. I was terrified as it was a Japanese officer with his huge samurai sword.’3 Encounters between Allied children and the Japanese were often very different from the experiences of their internee parents with the occupiers, and very often rather surreal. ‘He searched me, got my identity card out and saw I was British, so he practised his English on me, with a few questions. He took me inside and gave me something to eat and a cup of tea. Then he got some English children’s books out and got me to teach him to read. He was quite kind to me and told me to go back home.’4
The following morning the kindly Japanese officer placed Shaw on a train back to Shanghai, not realizing that the English schoolboy was not yet done with his hair-brained scheme. ‘I got off at the next stop and carried on my adventure on foot,’ said Shaw. ‘I kept walking and it was soon dark again and you had to watch your footing otherwise you would be in the paddy fields. As I kept going I heard voices in the distance where there was a convoy of Chinese farmers all carrying sacks of rice and grain – men, women and children. I joined them on their journey to Shanghai city, they were smuggling goods to the black market.’ This was incredibly dangerous work as the Japanese normally bayoneted smugglers to death on the spot if they were apprehended by army patrols. On his return to Shanghai, Shaw stayed with a friend’s family. ‘As a runaway from home and school, the school informed everybody to notify them or my parents of my whereabouts if seen or contacted. Later I found out that my father was in deep trouble with the Japanese for not producing his family for internment. He told them he could not find me so they thought he was stalling confinement.’5 Shaw was eventually reunited with his parents and spent the rest of the war in internment camps in Shanghai.
Many British and American fathers and husbands did suddenly disappear from their families in Shanghai on the night of 5/6 November 1942, when the Japanese launched a huge raid on addresses across the city. The aim was to arrest all Allied men that they considered a threat to security, or who were seen as potential troublemakers. A total of 243 Britons, with 65 Americans, 20 Dutchmen and an assortment of Greeks, Canadians and other Allied nationals making in all 350 men, were taken into custody by the Japanese. Labelled by the Japanese as ‘Prominent Citizens’, they were bundled into army trucks and driven to a rudimentary internment camp set up at Haiphong Road in former US Marine Corps accommodation. Shortly after these arrests, the final internment of an estimated 7,600 Allied men, women and children living in Shanghai was put into effect by the Japanese. In achieving the internment of all of these people the Japanese forced the British Residents’ Association to collaborate with them in drawing up lists and deciding who went into which camp. It was probably better for everyone that the British organized this themselves, and the Japanese in Shanghai and Hong Kong recognized the organizational abilities of the British and by and large let them get on with it.
Between January and July 1943, Allied civilians were rounded up and told that they could bring into the camps whatever they could carry. Their homes and the remainder of their possessions now belonged to the Emperor. Entire lives carefully constructed in the Far East were wiped out at a stroke. Schools were closed, education for white children was now officially at an end and the process of segregation enforced. The whites were force-marched through downtown Shanghai by Japanese soldiers toting long rifles and fixed bayonets, the new masters of the city trying hard to humble the Caucasians by parading them before huge crowds of mostly silent Chinese onlookers. Moira Chisholm was nine years old in 1943 and recalled the round-up: ‘The Japanese came and collected us in trucks and took us to a football pitch to sort everyone out in alphabetical order.’6 Single men were sent over the Huangpu River to Pudong (then called Pootung) and interned in a dilapidated old three-storey godown, or warehouse, belonging to British-American Tobacco (the site today occupied by the Pearl Oriental TV Tower, the symbol of ‘New Shanghai’), while the rest went into six other camps in the city or at Lunghwa (immortalized in J.G. Ballard’s book and Steven Spielberg’s film Empire of the Sun) just south of the metropolis (today’s Longhua district). Fortunately for the internees, only the Haiphong Road Camp was run by the Japanese Army, and the other seven camps came under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Consul-General and his Consular Police. Food was always short, there was severe congestion, minimal washing facilities and sporadic bouts of brutality, but on the whole disease claimed a greater number of lives than Japanese beatings or firing squads. ‘Almost everyone who had diabetes died,’ recalled Ronald Calder, who as a child was imprisoned in Lunghwa Camp, ‘because of the poor quality of insulin.’7 Dysentery was also rife among the internees. ‘Every time you got an illness it spread and there was never a chance to get well again.’8
Child internee Moira Chisholm later recalled that in her camp there were numerous beatings handed out to adult internees by the Japanese guards. ‘Adults were beaten up all the time and we got quite blase´ about seeing this and it ceased to mean anything.’9 Children were quickly desensitized by the cruelty and meanness of their everyday lives inside the camps. At least, unlike in the Netherlands East Indies, in the China camps families remained together for the duration of the war. Chisholm’s father had been a prison officer in Shanghai before internment. ‘We got a family room for my Mum and Dad and sister, who was four at the time’, remembered Chisholm.10 The Chisholm family was probably sent initially to Chapei Camp in Shanghai, in today’s Zhabei district. The camp was the former Great China University Campus, and the accommodation consisted of two three-storey blocks and a chemical factory on a fifteen-acre site that had been badly damaged by fighting during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 – the remaining buildings were in a state of disrepair. The camp housed 1,536 internees at its height.
Conditions in the Shanghai internment camps were generally good when compared to the hell-holes run for civilians in the Netherlands East Indies, such as the infamous Tijdeng Ghetto discussed in the following chapter. Everyone mucked-in, families lived together, and the prisoners took to organizing the camps themselves. ‘The camp-dwellers were at least able to obtain basic levels of food and shelter and, with notable exceptions, were not subjected to the kind of barbaric cruelty routinely inflicted on Allied servicemen in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.’11
The internment camps in Shanghai make an interesting study of how the Japanese dispersed the large Allied civilian population after initially concentrating them for sorting and recording. The Japanese method of creating internment camps was brutally simple and economic – requisition some buildings, throw a barbed wire cordon around the area and establish a small guard detachment. None of the camps in Shanghai were purpose built. Children went with their parents into one of several ‘family camps’ located in and around the city. Chapei Camp has already been mentioned, but others of comparable size were Ash Camp on Great Western Road, Columbia Country Club Camp, Lunghwa Camp and Yu Yuan Road Camp.
Ash Camp was a former British Army barracks complex that gained its name because of the ash that had been used during the construction of the foundations for the buildings and pathways. Before the withdrawal of the British North China Command in 1940, it had served as barracks for a famous Scottish regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The eastern half of the former barracks complex was still in use as a military base in March 1943, when the internment camp opened. These blocks housed Chinese troops loyal to the Wang Ching-wei puppet regime that was created by the Japanese to try to give the impression that the Chinese had some say in governing the city. The western half of the camp was used to house Allied nationals, a majority of whom were former employees of the Shanghai Municipal Council, along with their families. The wooden barrack blocks were partitioned into family rooms. Older teens and unmarried inmates lived in six-or seven-bed dormitories. Just over 500 internees were held in the camp, which suffered from frequent flooding when it rained heavily in Shanghai.
The former Columbia Country Club, once an American expatriate social centre with tennis courts and beautifully manicured lawns, was also turned into a family camp by the Japanese. From the autumn of 1942 until the end of the winter it was used to house enemy nationals from the so-called ‘Outports’, who were awaiting repatriation. The Outports were smaller foreign concessions that had been established in Chinese towns and cities, particularly along the Yangtze River. In May 1943, the Columbia Country Club became a standard internment camp. It consisted of just the two-storey clubhouse building that was set in five acres of grounds. Fewer than 400 internees were held at the camp during the war.
The Lunghwa Camp was opened in March 1943 and held almost 2,000 internees. Its commandant was the pre-war Japanese Consul-General in Shanghai, Mr Hayashi, though later in its history a far stricter commander was appointed. ‘[Hayashi] was considered quite civilised,’ recalled teenaged internee Heather Burch. ‘He had been to London before the war.’12 The buildings were formerly the Kiansu Middle School. The complex had been badly damaged during fighting in 1937 and consisted of 7 large concrete buildings as well as wooden barracks and numerous outbuildings and ruins. There were 59 dormitories, and a total of 127 family rooms.
Rachel Bosebury remembered when the Japanese arrived at her family’s apartment building to intern the British civilians living there. ‘We went in April of 1943,’ recalled Bosebury, who was nine at the time. ‘A big, old truck came for us. We were allowed to take one box of stuff for all of us and we weren’t allowed any knives. You had to have tin plates and cups.’ The journey to Lunghwa Camp was not memorable to Bosebury. ‘I don’t really remember that much about the truck. When you’re a kid, anything like that is a bit exciting. I was always wondering where we were going and what the Japanese were going to do to us.’13 Ten-yearold James Maas also recalled the moment of internment: ‘We were allowed to take our clothes and took as much as we could. I took some toys and books.’14
On arrival at Lunghwa Camp, the Boseburys were assigned a family room in D Block. Also interned alongside them were the Tullochs, a Scottish family working in Shanghai. Valerie Tulloch, who was eight years old at the time, recalled how her family was soon split up because her mother was ill and was sent away by the Japanese to a hospital in the city. ‘We were allowed to visit her only three or four times. I think whenever the Japanese guards thought she might be going to die. We missed her terribly, not only on an emotional, but also a practical level. She was good at knitting and sewing. Life would have been much easier if she had been in there with us.’15 The Tullochs were assigned a room in the block nearest the Japanese guardhouse, and next door to another Scottish family, the Calders. Valerie Tulloch would become close friends with the Calders’ eight-year-old son Ronald. James Maas recalled the spartan accommodation at Lunghwa: ‘We used a heavy trunk to sit on and had a folding table and three folding canvas chairs, which had our numbers on the back … It was a change, true, but we were with the same people, our friends, all together. So a boy of my age adapts pretty quickly and I took it in my stride.’16
The other camps in Shanghai were soon filled up with internees as the city was systematically cleared by the Japanese of enemy aliens. Yu Yuen Road Camp in the centre of the city incorporated the former Western District Public School and the Shanghai Girls Public School. Most of the inmates, who numbered just under 1,000, were former Shanghai Municipal Council employees and their families. The remaining internment camps were either ‘menonly’ or for religious personnel such as priests and nuns.
Not all of Shanghai’s foreigners were incarcerated in or near to the city. The Japanese shipped out over 1,400 internees on barges and river steamers up the Grand Canal to Yangchow (now Yangzhou), where the canal bisects the Yangtze River. In and around the small city of Yangchow the Japanese established three camps: Yangchow A, B, and C. Camp A held 377 British civilians in the former Southern Baptist Mission hospital, the internees living in the wards, corridors and even the bathrooms, as there was no running water in the camp. Yangchow B was the former Baptist Mission Julia Mackenzie Memorial School, and 382 internees were herded inside. Finally, Yangchow C was three miles northwest of Camps A and B, in the former American Episcopalian Boys’ School. It consisted of a walled compound, numerous houses and a church, and accommodated 673 internees in harsh and spartan conditions. At all three Yangchow camps, the internees faced water shortages to add to their misery. Camps A and B were shut by the Japanese in September 1943 and the internees transported by train back to Shanghai, where they were sent to the camps established within the city. Yangchow C remained in operation as an internment camp until October 1945, the inmates having been overlooked following the Japanese surrender and the arrival of American and Nationalist Chinese forces in the region. In Shanghai in April 1945 the Japanese closed Yu Yuen Road and Columbia Country Club Camps and transferred their prisoners to a new centre called Yangtzepoo Camp, located inside the Sacred Heart Hospital in Shanghai. Over 1,300 internees were crammed into the hospital buildings.
The regime at Lunghwa Camp has been recalled by several former internees as dreadful, but not nearly as bad as Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. ‘We did learn right away to behave, not to say a word if the Japanese were talking, you shut up,’ recalled child internee Rachel Bosebury. The daily tenko roll-calls were taken very seriously by the Japanese, the camp being administered and guarded by the Consular Police and not by the Imperial Army. ‘You had to learn to stand up at roll call every morning and not make a sound until they went through the buildings and told them you were all clear to go back in your rooms.’17 The Consular Police were reputed to be more humane in their treatment of prisoners than the regular army, though they wore military uniforms, while the ordinary soldiers carried rifles and the officers were armed with samurai swords and automatic pistols. Many of the camp guards were press-ganged Koreans, and several did abuse the prisoners on occasion. ‘If you moved or went in your room or had to go to the bathroom or anything, it didn’t matter if you were a little baby or a grown-up, you didn’t dare do that because you could get slapped around or beaten for moving,’ recalled Bosebury of tenko time. ‘You learned very much to be afraid of the Japanese guards and not to dare do a thing you weren’t supposed to.’ Bosebury remembered two Japanese guards in particular, whom the children had nicknamed ‘Snake Eyes’ and ‘Never Smile Again’, and who were deemed to be quite malicious. ‘One would do the roll call and you’d think they were down and out of the building, another would come up the other stairway and try and catch anybody who moved before the all clear for our building was sounded,’ said Bosebury. ‘They caught a woman; she was the Belgian Consul’s wife … we heard her getting slapped because she was ill and turned to go back to bed before the all-clear sounded. The other guard came around and I remember everybody had to stand and watch and listen.’18 James Maas also recalled tenko and the assault on the Belgian Consul’s wife:
We had inspection twice a day – roll-call. We all had to stand to attention outside the door and a very small Japanese with a very big sword would come clattering along and check off the list. If you weren’t standing up, it was very serious. One lady, the wife of the Belgian consul, was feeling a bit rotten one day and sat down. Another guard spotted her and came up and gave her a tremendous slap. Her son had to be restrained … All the while, that violence was under the surface.19
For young white children from respectable homes to suddenly be exposed to the worst kinds of brutality and violence was a steep learning curve for most of them. ‘If you want to know what it was like, it was pretty awful,’ said Bosebury, though she and other former internees have made the point that Japanese brutality at Lunghwa was constrained because the Swiss Consul continued to oversee the prisoners’ welfare from his office in Shanghai. ‘The Japanese didn’t dare go too far because there was a Red Cross presence – other nations observing.’20
Fear of the guards was the one constant for the internees inside Lunghwa Camp. ‘I don’t recall anything but total fear of the Japanese guards,’ said Bosebury. ‘We kept away from them as much as possible, any guards. You didn’t go anywhere near the guardhouse, you knew not to even walk anywhere close to the no-man’s land [by the perimeter wire] … I never got to know them,’ admitted Bosebury. ‘They didn’t speak English anyway. They roamed camp and they could walk in on you or anything anytime they wanted to.’ The guards were always on the look-out for contraband, and perhaps an opportunity to steal from the prisoners. ‘They did periodic searches if they thought you might have a knife or something. They could come in in the middle of the night, wake us all up and go through our rooms.’ Everyone, including young children, witnessed acts of Japanese brutality in the camp and they all knew what the Japanese were capable of if anyone stepped out of line. ‘They were people to be feared,’ said Bosebury, ‘because they had the guns, and they were cruel. You had this constant fear that you might have been shot, picked up, tortured, anytime. That was a fear, and it’s terrible.’21
Fortunately for the internees at Lunghwa, the Japanese authorities administered the camp in a similar fashion to Stanley Camp in Hong Kong, leaving the mostly British internee population to organize themselves, with minimal interference from the Japanese commandant or his men. Guards ‘roamed camp’, occasionally terrorizing the inmates, and they conducted the twice-daily tenko roll-call, but the day-to-day running of the camp was the responsibility of the prisoners.
The Swiss Consul-General made sure that Red Cross parcels were delivered to Lunghwa Camp regularly, which was an almost unheard-of luxury within the Japanese prison and internment camp system. As with Stanley Camp in Hong Kong, food was a major preoccupation for the internees, as the Japanese simply did not provide enough of it. However, because the British were left to create a camp organization, an efficient system of committees and work details meant that nobody actually starved to death. ‘Lunghwa Camp was mostly British. We did have Americans and Dutch and a few other nationalities, but it was mostly a British camp, and they organized, and they had different people doing various duties,’ recalled Bosebury. ‘My mother had to take turns in the kitchen, and my dad had to work in the kitchen.’ A small farm was established, ‘so that the little children got milk. They had goats.’22 ‘We had a camp council which we voted in and a labour exchange to distribute jobs, which everyone had to have,’ recalled Heather Burch. ‘People were allowed to choose and we worked normal working hours.’23
The few American citizens in the camp made a big impression on the British children. ‘It was a family camp, there were not too many young men,’ recalled James Maas. ‘We got the crew of an American ship, which had been seized at the beginning of the war. They were transferred to the camp to do some work. The Americans weren’t too cooperative, but they produced a little bit of colour and excitement when they played softball and would get angry and noisy, which amazed us kids. To us, this was un-British behaviour!’24
Bosebury recalled the maggots present in the food issued by the Japanese, which some prisoners nevertheless ate, claiming that it was at least ‘fresh meat’. Bosebury had a hard time accepting the poor quality of the rations. ‘I couldn’t eat it. It was really ghastly awful. They say when you’re really starving you’ll eat anything; it’s not necessarily true because I just about starved. The gosh awful, rotten smell that permeated our building when they brought that stuff in two or three times a day,’ recalled Bosebury. From the central kitchens ‘huge cauldrons of stew and rice were toured in on carts by camp service and we all queued,’ remembered Heather Burch.
Money still played an important part in the lives of the internees in Shanghai, and Burch’s family was fortunate to have been wealthy before they were interned. ‘We had left money with some Portuguese or Norwegian friends in Shanghai and once a month we were allowed a food parcel, but they had trouble finding this in the city for themselves let alone us.’25 Eight-year-old Ronald Calder ate all the weevils and maggots that he could find in his food, understanding the value of the protein in a diet largely devoid of meat. ‘My father made my mother take them out. I would shout “Can I have those, please?” Since then I have eaten whatever is put in front of me.’26
As at Stanley and many of the other camps, education for the children was seen as very important. The Japanese provided no dedicated teaching facilities, so it was left to a committee of prisoners to scrounge for books and writing paper and to find teachers from among the many professionals who had been interned. The head of the Lunghwa Camp School was the former headmistress of the British School in Shanghai. ‘At first the Japanese allowed us to have a school in the buildings that we used for kitchens and stuff,’ recalled Bosebury, ‘and then they moved us to another building.’ For paper, she remembered they used cigarette packets, which were opened up to provide a rudimentary writing surface. Some internees had brought books with them into the camp. ‘People loaned whatever they had so that you could borrow books to read,’ said Bosebury. Bosebury described one elderly gentleman by the distinctive name of Mr Riddler, who became one of the few sources of entertainment for the children. ‘Mr. Riddler had some books, and because he didn’t want to loan them to the kids in our camp, he would sit and as long as the light held in the evening, we’d sit out on the lawn and he’d read to us from some of the great books … He would read in such a way that it was like storytelling time, but that was our only entertainment.’27 Valerie Tulloch enrolled in the camp’s Brownie Pack, begun by an industrious woman who had been a Brown Owl before the war started. ‘She embroidered little badges for us to earn,’ recalled Tulloch. ‘We did things like gardening and hostessing and I really enjoyed it.’28
James Maas stressed how important educating the children became to the internees. ‘There were a lot of ex-missionary teachers. My mother was also a teacher, and we kept up quite a good standard. They kept to the normal curriculum and everything was quite well taught – maths, English, French, history, geography, all the usual subjects, science and biology … It was fairly relaxed, but I began to work quite hard for the exams when I was about twelve, I began to realize I worked for myself, not for my parents or the teacher. They did give exams. Whether they counted I don’t know.’29 Like Rachel Bosebury, Maas recalled the poor facilities and equipment that the students had to contend with because of Japanese indifference to educating interned children. ‘There was a building set aside for the school, and we had desks; we didn’t have much paper to write on. We had to open cigarette packets and bind them together for paper …’30
Children soon adapt to new environments, and the youngsters imprisoned inside Lunghwa Camp did so very quickly indeed. ‘We children just played our games together – we were always outside shooting or exchanging marbles,’ remembered Maas. ‘We had a strict code or rank of marbles and that took up a lot of our time. And then there was football and softball – the American influence. We were always kicking a ball around because there was a big playing-field right outside the block. The camp would have covered forty-three acres, so plenty of space to wander but not too close to the boundary. Certain parts would have been out of bounds … We didn’t mind being restricted to camp. We kept busy all the time and we just accepted it, up to my age anyway. I adjusted.’31
Adding any more children to the camp population was not seen as desirable by the internees, though with many married couples and single adults in the camp it was inevitable that women fell pregnant and children were born under Japanese rule. ‘Malaria was a big problem and we all took quinine,’ recalled Burch. ‘It was also supposed to act as a contraceptive, so the married women used it for this as well. They wanted to avoid getting pregnant, because if you did then you had to go to a hospital in Shanghai and then to a different camp for mothers and babies.’32 Married women were better off than in the Netherlands East Indies, having been permitted to remain with their husbands, and no one wanted their family unit to be broken up during such uncertain and stressful times.
Even though becoming pregnant was actively avoided, in the early months of internment many women had entered the camps shortly after having conceived. Although in most cases they had subsequently been separated from their husbands, their babies were carried the full term and born into the straitened circumstances created by Japanese rule. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese made absolutely no allowance for pregnant women or nursing mothers inside the camps, but the prisoners themselves banded together to create a hospital and maternity facilities with the limited equipment and drugs at their disposal. Fortunately for all, there was an abundance of doctors, surgeons, nurses and midwives among the camp populations, so at least medical professionals were available in most cases to assist with births, and to help the babies and mothers afterwards.
Nel Halberstadt was a young Dutch woman who was pregnant when she entered Camp Kares-e in Bandoeng. The camp was located in West Java in the Netherlands East Indies. Her husband was in the Army Air Force and he was taken as a military prisoner and sent away to slave for the Japanese. ‘I was growing enormous,’ said Halberstadt, describing what it was like as the months passed. ‘The baby started to assert itself and one evening, when my pregnancy was in its seventh and a half month, I was scared to death by a Jap, who suddenly appeared in front of my nose, just when I went outside.’ A calamity ensued. ‘I slipped down the few steps and ended up lying in a puddle of amniotic fluid. At my shrieks people flew towards me to help. My father almost attacked the Jap, but managed to chase him from the yard. I think the man was shocked by all the chaos.’ Fortunately Halberstadt’s parents were with her in the camp and they would prove invaluable. ‘supported by papa and mama I walked to the small hospital, which had been set up by a midwife. There, the midwife, Sister Martha, welcomed me and a Salvation Army nurse dressed me in an old gown and took me to the delivery room. It already contained three women with legs up high in various stages of labour.’33
Halberstadt’s labour was very short, but memorable. ‘I strained a few times … and out slipped a small parcel. The baby was lying, completely wrapped in the membrane, in the bedpan. Sister Martha and the other nurse threw themselves on me and the bedpan, removed the child and took it out of its membrane. ‘Aduh, born with the caul,’ Sister Martha exclaimed. Apparently this is supposed to be a sign that the child will have second sight,’ recalled Halberstadt. ‘I was totally confused. I have born a child without very much pain and no shriek had passed my lips. “It has been born too early,” Sister Martha said. “She will need to go into the incubator.” ’34 Both mother and daughter were to face three more years of grim internment camps before eventual liberation, and providing sufficient nutrition for a growing baby was to prove nearly impossible in most of the internment camps. Many children suffered the effects into adulthood, including being small in stature, or still carrying the residue of infectious tropical diseases or deficiency disorders.
The famous British writer J.G. Ballard, who was imprisoned with his parents inside Lunghwa Camp for the duration of the war, provided an analysis of the internee population that he had carefully observed as a young boy, and that later influenced his writing of the internment camp novel Empire of the Sun: ‘Some of the prisoners behaved with great steadfastness. Most were withdrawn and listless. A few were scrimshankers, petty thieves, or open collaborators with the Japanese. But you’d expect that. I was happy there. It was like having a huge slum family.’35 Ballard particularly recalled how parents sacrificed themselves to protect their children: ‘Our parents starved themselves for us.’36 The point has often been repeated by other child survivors of the camps. ‘My mother once told me that I said, “Oh, Mummy, I’m so hungry!” I don’t remember saying that, but I remember being hungry,’ recalled James Maas. ‘But on the whole it wasn’t too bad because parents were very sacrificing, and we did get Red Cross parcels, which were a godsend, and I got most of the contents of those, and there were a few treats in them. I have a photograph, which was taken in August or September ’45, of Mother looking very cheerful, although very thin, and I look entirely normal.’37
Cleanliness was a major issue and concerned the internees in Shanghai greatly. ‘The camp had previously been a Chinese dormitory and after being disused for so many years after the bombing [in 1937], there was nothing but lice and bedbugs, and filth that you had to learn to live with or fight,’ recalled Bosebury. The internees did what they could to eradicate the filth, but the Japanese did not issue disinfectant, which made the job of cleaning the camp extremely difficult. ‘I can remember my mother staying up most of the evenings with a match trying to go around the seams of our mattresses to make sure there weren’t any bed bugs there at night.’38 Fresh water was a problem in Shanghai and clean water sources were very important to prevent any outbreak of cholera. ‘Everyday a drinking water truck arrived,’ recalled Heather Burch. ‘My father was one of the people responsible for dishing water out. We called it the Dewdrop Inn. We had to boil it to make it safe.’39 Another water collection shack was christened ‘Waterloo’ by the prisoners, complete with a mocked-up London Underground sign.
The death rates for civilian internees in the Shanghai camps were low compared with the huge numbers of Allied prisonersof-war who died in Japanese slave labour camps, and compared with civilian deaths elsewhere in Occupied Asia. Figures derived from incomplete records for the Shanghai camps list a total of 26 deaths in 1943, rising to 39 in 1944, and 49 in 1945.40 Most victims were the middle aged or the elderly, though at least 10 children also died. All along the China coast and in the interior ports British and other Allied nationals were interned. They were business people and missionaries, language teachers and university professors, engineers and administrators, and many had lived in China for decades, some had even been born there. It was a terrible wrench for most of them to be plucked from jobs and professions that they loved and to be parted from their Chinese friends and colleagues. The psychology of internees was as important a factor for survival as their ability to combat disease and starvation. For many of the older people, the shock of being plunged into a camp in old age was simply too great to bear. Perhaps the most famous British person to die in an internment camp in China was Eric Liddell of Chariots of Fire fame. He had been Olympic 400 metres gold medalist at the 1924 summer games. Liddell had been born in China, where his father was a missionary and after retiring from athletics he had returned to the land of his birth to assist with his father’s mission in Shandong Province. Liddell and fellow Allied nationals were interned at Weihsien Camp in the city of Weifang, and he died there from a brain tumour in February 1945, at the age of only forty-three.