25 Jul 1945, Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp

Submitted by brian edgar on Sat, 06/02/2012 - 18:46

Bombs fall on the camp again. There are injuries but no deaths.

Many decades later May (aka Mavis) Hamson, 8 years old in 1945, described the scene in Bungalow A:

The bomb exploded on impact. The bath was positioned against our adjoining wall, and the blast blew straight through the brickwork, showering debris everywhere. The shockwave tore Richard from Grannie's arms, picked him up in its wake and threw him straight out the door onto the ground outside. He just disappeared. I was stunned and disorientated, and apart from a high-pitched ringing in my ears, I could not hear anything. I was still clinging tightly to Leilah, but her body was limp. I looked up at her face and her eyes were open, but she looked like the dead people I had seen. I was crying hysterically and looked across to Grannie, who was covered in blood. The light faded and the ringing in my ears stopped. And that's the last I remembered.

Later I was told that Richard had found himself sitting on his behind in the garden some distance from the bungalow.

 

Another bomb falls through the roof of St Stephen's College. Noel Croucher was digesting lunch:

On July 25, 1945, a few minutes before noon, I was in my room with Professor Robertson, T. Ramsay, and Hampden Ross, resting after our midday meal of four ounces of rice and soya beans. I was reading a novel when I heard the sound of an approaching plane. Judging from the noise the plane was making, I would suggest that it had engine trouble. Ramsay stretched out to see the plane as it flew overhead. At the same time, I turned over in my bunk to catch a sight of the plane from the hut window. As I did so, the whole world seemed to split in two, and fragments of the roof crashed into the room which became a tangle of plaster work and dust.

The building was quickly evacuated. Croucher was left with an inured shoulder from the flying debris.

Sources:

Hamson: Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the East, 2002, 263

Croucher: Vaudine England, The Quest of Noel Croucher, 1998, 149

 

Date(s) of events described