The Real Tenko: Extraordinary True Stories of Women Prisoners of the Japanese

me.

Introduction

The horror of that first afternoon of war is burned in my memory – the dead, the dying, the dismembered who filled every inch of our small hospital are epitomized for me by a legless 16-year-old who had lied about his age to get into the Army.

LIEUTENANT RITA PALMER US ARMY NURSING CORPS, PHILIPPINES, 1941

The courage of women in war is often the forgotten story of many conflicts down the ages, even those in our own lifetimes. Nineteen-year old Private Michelle Norris, inevitably nicknamed ‘Chuck’ by her comrades, jumped down from the Warrior infantry fighting vehicle she was travelling inside and immediately began to climb up its side as bullets slammed into the armour plating all around her, while others cracked by her head. One bullet struck her medical rucksack, fortunately not injuring Norris. On reaching the vehicle’s turret, Norris immediately went to work applying emergency first aid to the Warrior’s commander, Colour Sergeant Ian Page of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, who was bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to the mouth. Norris then helped other soldiers drag Page back into the vehicle, all the time under continuous enemy fire. The 5-foot-tall Royal Army Medical Corps orderly was later awarded the Military Cross by the Queen for her bravery that day in Iraq on 11 June 2006. Norris was the first woman ever to receive this decoration. ‘At the time I knew someone needed help so I went out there and did what I could,’¹ recalled Norris afterwards.

A woman intentionally placed in the front line of a war is a very modern phenomenon. Today, British and American women are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and several have already lost their lives in combat. However, it is only quite recently that women have started to serve in the combat units of Western armed forces. For most of modern history, war and killing has been considered the preserve of men, with women usually relegated to forming the supporters of warriors, homemakers on the home front and camp followers.

The Second World War witnessed the beginnings of a change in how women associated themselves with warfare. Although women were not permitted to enlist into combat arms of the Allied forces, except in the Soviet Union, many nonetheless found themselves under fire and many were unfortunately killed, wounded or captured. Army and Navy nurses were especially vulnerable as their jobs took them into the thick of the action in all theatres. When the Japanese war machine was unleashed upon Asia on the morning of 8 December 1941, many of these nurses, alongside tens of thousands of civilian white women, suddenly found themselves in the front lines, and later incarcerated in concentration camps.

The suffering inflicted upon dozens of young female nurses from Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States was horrific, and appalling scenes of carnage and brutality were played out in Hong Kong, Singapore, Rabaul and the Philippines. In some cases, the British and American governments simply abandoned nurses to their fates when they should have been evacuated out of harm’s way before the situation had deteriorated so badly. Although knowing that they could only look forward to being made prisoners of war, most of these women stood resolutely at their posts, tending to the wounded and sick, until Japanese soldiers arrived at the door and a new catalogue of horrors was unleashed upon them. Raped, beaten, humiliated and thrown into Japanese internment camps, these women soldiers endured a terrible captivity that should never have happened. Many never returned home when the guns fell silent.

Alongside the military nurses stood thousands of civilian women and children who found themselves trapped by the Japanese invasions with few options and an uncertain future ahead of them. Some could have been evacuated but had chosen to stay, not believing that the Japanese would be victorious and anxious not to be parted from husbands and sweethearts, some wanted to go but had been abandoned by their own governments, and some tried to escape the Japanese at the eleventh hour but suffered horrible consequences. The Japanese separated families, sending husbands and wives to single-sex camps, and later taking away the young boys from their mothers as soon as they turned ten or twelve years old, before sending them to rough men’s internment camps.² Most women simply endured the internment camps where starvation and disease were part and parcel of the daily routine, and random violence and sadism the rule rather than the exception. The Japanese forced some young women to become sex slaves, while others were tortured beyond endurance at the hands of the dreaded Japanese military police, the Kempeitai.

This book is not the complete story of white women under the Japanese. Volumes could be written about the cruelties visited upon the fairer sex by their Japanese conquerors. It is instead a compendium of horror, each story demonstrating a facet of life under the Japanese jackboot, a massacre, a crime, a camp, to elucidate upon the vastness of female maltreatment the length and breadth of Hirohito’s shameful empire. Where possible, I have used the words of the women and children who suffered at the hands of the Japanese, and who were fortunate to survive and tell their stories after the war. All of them were scarred in some way, either mentally and physically or both, by the abuse that they endured, and the terrible sights that they witnessed. Many remain committed today to trying to seek justice from a Japanese government that is officially unwilling to take responsibility for its wartime past, and officially unwilling to recognize the victims of that aggression.

The survivors are mostly white-haired pensioners now, whose blood may be thin and their eyesight and hearing dimmed by time. But they once felt the tropical sun bake their heads while Japanese soldiers screamed guttural orders. They once heard the terrible high-pitched screams of those receiving punishment, and they smelled the sweet stench of fresh blood spilled upon foreign fields. The nightmare years of captivity and the memory of the depravity they suffered at the hands of the Japanese has not been erased in minds of survivors by over sixty years of peace and quiet.

The white women of the war in Asia are the forgotten victims of a vicious conflict that drifts further out of the collective national memory in Britain and America with each passing year. The place names may have changed and the colonial flags have long since been lowered, but the visceral nature of the events played out across Asia six decades ago still have the power to shock and awe the generations who have only known peace. Lest we forget.

Notes

1     ‘The day 5ft Army girl defied enemy guns’ by David Wilkes, Daily Mail, 10 August 2006.

2     ‘Life in the camps’, Dutch Resistance Museum, http://www.verzetsmuseum.org, accessed 1 January 2009.

CHAPTER 1

Black Christmas

‘I shall never forget my first sight of our Japanese conquerors; grubby little men, with bicycles, in dirty khaki uniform and white tennis shoes, wearing tin hats.

Surely, I thought, a British garrison cannot have surrendered to men like these?’

SISTER KATHLEEN THOMSON, QUEEN ALEXANDRA’S IMPERIAL MILITARY NURSING SERVICE, HONG KONG, DECEMBER 1941

The nurses stood clutching each other in terror, tears of anguish and sorrow running down their weary, grimy faces. Japanese soldiers were all around them, their bayonets glinting dully in the early morning sun, their khaki uniforms dirty and their faces blackened by smoke and streaked with sweat. Near the nurses stood twenty-one men, some British, some Canadian, some Chinese, all of them completely naked. They were kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs, waiting for something to happen.

A Japanese officer strode imperiously around, his katana sword held stiffly in his left hand. His commands were sharp and guttural. Standing near the British and Chinese nurses was Major Barfill of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), commanding officer of the Salesian Mission Advanced Dressing Station in Hong Kong. He was pale and strained by the last few days of hectic work. Kneeling on the grass in a rough line before the Mission were five of his fellow army doctors. Men who had dedicated their lives and their military service to easing the pain of others now were to become victims of a military force who had no concept of compassion, mercy or honour. The nurses were terrified, and rightly so, for the Japanese had a fearsome reputation for murder and sexual assault, gained during their barbarous war of conquest on the Chinese mainland.

The Japanese officer strode towards the kneeling medical men, drawing an automatic pistol from a brown leather holster and cocking it with a harsh metallic click. Standing behind the first British doctor the officer levelled his pistol at the back of the man’s head, as Major Barfill watched with unbelieving eyes, muttering ‘NO, no, no…’ as surrender degenerated into massacre.

The hospitals in Hong Kong were overwhelmed with thousands of casualties, both military and civilian, from the fierce fighting that had raged across the island until the British surrender on Christmas Day 1941. The main British Military Hospital was at Bowen Road, staffed by twelve British Army nurses from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (known as QAS) and two Canadian Army nurses, supported by RAMC male doctors and medics and a large number of Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses who were a mixture of European and Chinese women.

Bowen Road had beds for 200 casualties during peacetime, but many times that number were now crammed into its hallways and wards. The hospital had been hit several times by Japanese artillery and aerial bombardments, the Japanese indiscriminately targeting a clearly marked medical facility. The attacking force made no distinction between combatant and non-combatant – to the Japanese anyone wearing a uniform was fair game, and any military facility a valid target. Many of the wives and children of British businessmen, civil servants and soldiers in the colony had not been evacuated before the Japanese attack on 8 December, and many wives and daughters had joined the VAD, all under the command of Matron ‘Billy’ Dyson. Everyone, civilian or soldier, European or Chinese, found themselves in the front line as the Japanese assault developed, and enemy aircraft bombed and strafed with impunity across the colony.

In the other British colonies in Asia,¹ war had also arrived unannounced or would shortly arrive. Plenty of warning was given to colonists regarding Japan’s intentions, but most preferred to stay put rather than evacuate to India or even to war-torn Britain. Their reasons were of course complex, but generally they could be summarized thus. Firstly, for the civilians living in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin (now Tianjin) or a host of other treaty ports along the China coast, or in Malaya and Singapore, the Far East was their life. They had invested all of their finances and time into building lives in Asia, and packing everything up, resigning from steady employment, and starting again somewhere else was too difficult and unattractive for most to contemplate seriously. Secondly, many genuinely believed that British and Empire forces in the Far East, alongside the Americans, wielded enough military muscle that they would defeat the upstart Japanese if they dared to attack the world’s largest empire. It was inconceivable to most Britons that the world’s mightiest nations could be humbled by a small island kingdom with an industrial capacity of only one tenth of the United States. Many conveniently forgot that Britain’s Asian forces had been severely depleted by the need to send men and machines to Britain and the Middle East where the fighting was very real. Thirdly, returning home to Britain was not an attractive option when placed alongside peacetime Asia. Britain had been heavily bombed, the danger of German invasion had certainly diminished though not yet entirely evaporated, and the nation was suffering from severe food and goods shortages because of the very successful German U-boat offensive in the Atlantic. The journey home was also long and hazardous, involving a lengthy sea journey around the Cape of Good Hope as the Suez Canal and Mediterranean were off limits because of fighting in the Middle East and North Africa. And fourthly, many of the colonists simply would not leave their lives in Asia because they were so much more comfortable than their lives back in Britain. Even a modest salary in Hong Kong or Shanghai meant servants to take care of the house and children, and an exciting social life with its endless whirl of dances, parties and other socializing opportunities to attend. Even those whites in what were considered to be in the lowliest of professions, such as policemen, nonetheless were much better off than their colleagues in Britain, and no matter what one’s social rank all whites at least could feel superior to the locals. Seeing things through seems to have been the prevailing attitude among the colonists, and it shows how little an interest most whites took in the affairs of the Chinese that the Rape of Nanking and numerous other atrocities failed to wake them up to what the Japanese might do to them if they came flooding across the colonial borders. Many of the younger, single British men out in the Far East did go home to enlist, while others joined local volunteer military forces to do their bit should a Japanese attack have actually occurred.

At Bowen Road there were two Canadian nurses, Sisters Kay Christie and May Waters, and they had both eagerly volunteered for the job, having only recently arrived in Hong Kong. ‘I was just as impatient to go overseas as any of the men,’ recalled Christie. ‘I was a registered nurse who joined the forces as a nursing sister with the rank of lieutenant.’² How she ended up in Hong Kong was rather by chance:

After a number of hospital units sailed to England in 1940 there weren’t any more major moves from our area for some time so that, in mid-October, 1941, on being informed that I was slated for duty in a semi-tropical climate and that I had only five minutes to make up my mind, I threw aside my usual caution and immediately accepted this new posting.³

Christie and Waters were the only women travelling west from Vancouver via Honolulu on the troopship Awatea. The ship was crowded with men from the Royal Rifles of Canada and Winnipeg Grenadiers, all going to reinforce Hong Kong’s tiny garrison. ‘On November 16, we docked in Kowloon,’ recalled Christie, ‘and two days later we were on duty in the British Military Hospital, which was located between Magazine Gap, where the ammunition was stored and the China Command Headquarters – not exactly an ideal place to be during the hostilities.’⁴

Aboard the luxury liner Empress of Australia were fifty-five QAS who were destined to be stationed in Singapore and Hong Kong respectively. They had departed in high spirits from Liverpool in July 1940, travelling in the first-class accommodation aboard ship, and having fun with the many young British officers also aboard. The Matron-in-Chief, Violet Jones, sternly warned the young women to behave themselves properly aboard the liner, but many soon found themselves romantically involved with officers during the voyage east. When the Empress of Australia docked in Hong Kong in September, five of the QAS disembarked, with the remaining fifty destined for the several military hospitals located in Singapore and Malaya.

The British were initially surprised by the ferocity of the Japanese attack on their colonial possessions in the Far East, but they had for too long appeased Japanese militarism and ignored the gathering storm clouds of war. They now paid the price for ignoring all of those signs that had begun with Japan’s undeclared war against China in 1937. The British living and working in Asia fooled themselves into believing popular racist stereotypes regarding the Japanese military. It was widely held that the Japanese were individually inferior in every way to the white soldier. They were short, with bandy legs and poor eyesight, and although they had certainly easily defeated the disorganized Chinese, when faced with Anglo-Saxon soldiers the Japanese would soon be put in their place. Many of the whites living in Asia believed that their lives were ultimately worth more than those of their Asian subjects, so when many of them were subsequently captured by the Japanese they were genuinely surprised that their captors treated them with the same mixture of casual brutality, sadism and neglect meted out with alacrity to Asian captives.

The British colony of Hong Kong, located on the southern coast of China, had found itself Ill-prepared for total war. The British Government had been steadily drawing down its armed forces in China as the war grew hotter in Europe and North Africa. Churchill and the British Government naturally viewed the large numbers of British troops, aircraft and ships idling in Far Eastern ports as a useful boost for the home military forces desperately trying to fend off German ambitions. It made short-term sense to make the best use of all available military forces, and to strip the colonies of their garrisons when the need arose. With hindsight, it is easy to see that the Japanese viewed this drawing down of forces as British military weakness, and as providing a golden opportunity to beat the British quickly while their attention was elsewhere. British infantry battalions had been withdrawn from Shanghai for the last time in the summer of 1940, and the defences of Hong Kong reduced to only a pair of battalions. Their job was simply to guard the border, across which could be seen Japanese soldiers occupying the Chinese mainland, and supporting the local police. Those military forces that did remain in Hong Kong were not on top form as the debilitating effects of a tropical climate and an active social scene had sapped the strength of the men. At the time Hong Kong boasted 10,000 prostitutes who worked the hundreds of bars, dance halls and knocking shops busily frequented by the local garrison. The 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots had not seen Britain in seven years, one soldier recalling a dance hall that had been renamed the ‘gonorrhoea racetrack’ by its patrons.⁵ It was these casualties of peace that the young nurses sent to Hong Kong were expected to spend most of their time treating, alongside the usual tropical diseases, training accidents and routine surgeries. None expected a full-scale bloodbath. The life of a young army nurse in Hong Kong prior to the Japanese invasion was magical compared with the austerities and dangers of wartime Britain. ‘I had a wonderful year,’ recalled one QA recently arrived in Hong Kong. ‘It was very social, as it often was overseas. Male officers far outnumbered us girls and there were endless parties. I went sailing. I played squash and tennis. I went dancing … nobody thought there was going to be a war.’⁶

Military strategists in London soon realized that leaving the defence of one of Britain’s most important colonies, and symbol of British prestige in China, to a couple of understrength and physically unfit infantry battalions was astounding folly, and actually invited an attack from the Japanese by demonstrating that Britain had no ability or willingness to defend its Asian colonies. The Japanese ranged throughout eastern and southern China, including along the border with Hong Kong, and could have struck with ease at the colony at a time of their choosing. The British even lacked reconnaissance aircraft in Hong Kong with which to keep a weather eye on Japanese deployments close to the frontier.

The defence of Hong Kong, although a British colony, was not to be a wholly British affair. The territory’s defenders in December 1941 included Chinese, Indian and Canadian soldiers, all of whom were under the command of the competent and brave fifty-year-old career British soldier, Major General Christopher Maltby, who knew more than most the ultimate futility of the resistance he was being asked by Churchill to undertake. Maltby, though brave, faced very serious difficulties in Hong Kong that threatened to scupper any attempt to fight off a Japanese attack when it inevitably came. By November 1941 it was clear to everyone that the Japanese were on the verge of hostilities, but Maltby was chronically short of experienced soldiers and equipment with which to make such a stand militarily sustainable. In other words, if the Japanese attacked, the British would eventually lose. But although they would undoubtedly lose, Churchill knew that it was important, indeed paramount, that British prestige be maintained in Asia. One way to make sure of that was a fight to the death, with the British only being kicked out of Hong Kong after an extremely bloody and terrible defensive battle – a ‘to the last man, last round’ show.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of British Far Eastern Command, demanded that Hong Kong be reinforced forthwith to prevent a complete walkover when the Japanese attacked, and his recommendations caused a policy u-turn in Whitehall. Brooke-Popham argued that a limited reinforcement of Hong Kong would allow Maltby and the garrison to delay any proposed Japanese attack, thereby gaining time for the Empire elsewhere in Asia. It might also have prevented a swift and humiliating capitulation, as mentioned, that would have damaged British prestige at home and abroad. Certainly the thought of buying time for other British colonies in Asia had its appeal to Churchill, and it was probably this factor that convinced the Prime Minister to order reinforcements be rushed to the territory.

To have defended Hong Kong properly, and actually fought off a Japanese invasion, military analysts calculated that at least six full infantry brigades would have been required, which equated to eighteen infantry battalions, or exactly half the infantry strength of the modern British Army in 2009. Britain’s military commitments elsewhere meant that this level of force could not be spared; most battalions sent east were being shipped to Singapore and Malaya where the main showdown was predicted to occur. Instead, Brooke-Popham believed that two brigades totalling just six battalions could impose a sufficient delay on Japanese plans to buy the British time in Malaya and Singapore, which remained Churchill’s primary strategic focus in the Far East. The Hong Kong garrison would be sacrificed for the sake of the Empire and the honour of the British Army. General Maltby was told in no uncertain terms by his political bosses in London to fight on for as long as possible before surrendering, and to expect no relief.

The forces Brooke-Popham had shipped to Hong Kong were a mixed bag regarding their training, ability and combat experience. Maltby had two regular, though understrength, British battalions for the defence: 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots and 1st Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment. Canada, at Churchill’s insistence, had recently shipped two infantry battalions to the colony to support the British, the 1st Battalion, Winnipeg Grenadiers and the 1st Battalion, Royal Rifles of Canada, along with some nurses, but neither unit had