3lst August.—Another clear morning. From the port the whole harbour appears calm and quiet. Sampans crowd along our side; they have produced flags that must have been carefully hidden during the occupation. The harbour is filling up and showing signs of life. A few of the tugs and water-boats are in commission once more. Chinese ferries run between the island and Kowloon. Hong Kong is suffering the pangs of rebirth quietly.
We wander ashore in search of Japanese labour, to find that the whole crowd has been kicked out of the dockyard and is now quartered in the Wellington Barracks. A weary interpreter digs up a Japanese officer from somewhere and barks out instructions. Yes. If we can produce a lorry from somewhere and drive out to the barracks a working party will be produced. We find a Studebaker lorry ; it runs uncertainly and noisily on Japanese petrol and lubricating oil. The Japanese officer climbs into the back with the men of our guard, who lean over the cab, their tommy-guns pointing dangerously.
Since the riots of the night before the Japanese have cleared the streets outside the dockyard. It is very quiet. Every hundred yards along our route stands a motionless Japanese marine his rifle at the ready. They do not appear to see us. They will have to do an awful lot of eye-shutting during the next few years.
The Wellington Barracks appear rather more orderly than the rest of the naval area. Sentries are on duty outside the gates and a small group of men stand in the guard-house. They look at us with surprise. Our little passenger beams with excitement at being among his own men once more. He is rather too keen to rush in through the gates, and therefore becomes a bit of a problem. Theoretically he is not a prisoner, since the surrender has not yet been signed. Our control over him is also limited because we are in enemy territory and outnumbered on every hand. Since he is our only method of contact, however, we hang on to him, and the guns of the guard cross noisily between him and his friends. The Japanese sentries shuffle their feet and bob around like embarrassed children.
Negotiations for collecting the working parties proceed with a great deal of shouting. A small crowd gathers and argues. We brandish our guns and look at our watches, giving a great show of imperial impatience. In fact, we shall be very glad indeed to get back behind the somewhat figurative boundary of the dockyard gates. Minutes shuffle past. When we are about to show real impatience a very tattered group of seedy-looking Japanese naval ratings marches out into the roadway and lines up by the truck. They are brought to attention with a rather terrifying shout; they are dressed and numbered. We wave them to the truck, and all is set for the triumphal return. At this moment we suffer a considerable loss of face because the truck refuses to start.
Later we were to become resigned to these mechanical failures, but on this occasion it was infuriating. What on earth were we to do now? The day is saved by the arrival of another truck belonging to the Hong Kong police. They give us a sharp push and we are off. We drive down the street, past a screen of Japanese sentries and into a crowd of silent Chinese. The faces of this crowd are a polite blank. They make no gestures at our batch of prisoners ; they have yet to be convinced that the Japanese have lost their sting.
Back in the dockyard we divide our party into two. One half goes off to clean out the dockside lavatories, a suitable job for them in this hot weather ; the other half is instructed to clear the jetty alongside the Maidstone. This is a very necessary job, and, besides that, it occurs to me that it will satisfy the scores of our men who are watching from the decks above.
The poor condition of these Japanese is obvious. They cannot work for long without showing signs of strain. They sweat profusely and idle whenever possible, not through laziness but because they are not capable of taking it. They keep going all morning until we drive them back for lunch; but somehow the results are not in proportion to the amount of energy they use.
Afternoon.—We are driving out to the internment camp at Stanley. The jeep sweeps up the broad curves that lead to the pass at the top. In the back are our passengers who have been interned here for three and a half years. They are returning to their prison after a quick visit to the town. They are father and son. As we rattle up the road the boy is full of excitement—old landmarks recognised and new buildings noted. The father tells us that the last time he came along this road it was covered with English and Canadian dead. Of sixtyfour men who took refuge in a certain house on our left, only six are alive. He is one of the six. He becomes silent, looking back over his shoulder at the blue harbour with the British fleet spread neatly in the anchorage.
We pass many beautiful houses. Nearly every one of them is looted to a skeleton. Even the roofs have been carted away for firewood. This wholesale destruction of most of the finest houses on the island shows clearly that the Japanese had no real future in Hong Kong. Either they decided to let the grass grow over the whole place and end the Crown Colony for ever, or they realised that they had not come to stay.
We sight the cream-and-white buildings of the camp. Our passengers beam. It is now a prison without doors. As we drive in through the gates a Chinese guard salutes carefully ; he grins in undisciplined glee. The rifle in his hands is a Japanese high-velocity .25.
Except for the prison there is nothing particularly grim about the outward appearance of Stanley. It might have been a very pleasant place before the war. As we see it now, the Formosan guards absent and the flags standing out against the sky, there is a ridiculous holiday-camp atmosphere everywhere. This is exaggerated by the bright two-piece coverings of the girls.
In the little rooms there is a complete lack of comfort, but most of the internees seem to have collected a few bits and pieces. Food, of course, is coming through now in ever-increasing quantities.
It is necessary to see and hear a good deal before getting a true picture of life in the camp as it was before the Japanese pulled out. The food was frightful. I tried some of that Stanley stew when I was, by my own standards, hungry. One spoonful was enough. The staple diet was rice and some sort of spinach, which was cooked up in a communal kitchen and dished out evenly by the kitchen staff. There was not nearly enough of this to satisfy, especially where the men were concerned, and the lack of vitamins had visible effects on them all. Sometimes the Red Cross parcels did get through, but a great deal of the contents was put into a reserve or handed over to the camp doctors. There were ways of getting food from the guards. A super Black Market was run by some of the Chinese internees and one or two of the white men. Watches and clocks, even wedding rings and gold fillings from teeth, were sold for a trifling amount of food. The guards played up, but they were, rather naturally, out to make what they could. None of them was particularly pro-Japanese ; they were conscripted from their farms and fishing-boats, poorly paid, almost forgotten ; so it is not surprising that they made capital out of their duty.
By the time that we arrived many of the men had gone into town to help the military authorities, and a few were part of the new-fangled civil administration. The rooms that we visited were, therefore, not as crowded as they had been. One married couple shared a room twelve by seven feet with another man, their privacy relying on a partition of two dangling sheets.
The horrors that branded the Japanese during the first few days of their occupation were true enough. We heard, in simple, unemotional sentences, so much that we, like the internees, became a little hardened. From the most southerly rooms it was possible to see into the prison courtyard. Torturing and executions were frequent. As we walked round the prison walls one of the girls told us that the Japanese had closed this path because they carried out their executions at some point along it. During the first few weeks bodies of British and Canadian soldiers lay on the rocks below the camp. Permission to bury them was refused, and the corpses gradually whitened to skeletons before the eyes of the whole camp. Just before we left we saw the graves of three nurses who had died in the hospital after being raped and bayoneted. It was said that the blood of the patients who died at the same time still stained the stone steps. We knew this to be true, and thought of the Japanese sick and wounded in the hospitals in Kowloon. These men had been sent down from the China front and were now being allowed to stay in their beds until a ship arrived to take them home.
Depressing as it was, the camp had made us feel better. To help in securing the freedom of British, Dutch, Norwegian, and Chinese subjects from such a place was surely sufficient reason for any struggles. It was certainly a fine ending to our war effort.
Driving back over the sun-drenched slopes we pass Chinese families wheeling their possessions back to the town —happy peasants, smiling at us from under their wide hats. The girls walk easily, undulating their hips under tight black trousers. We take a look at the Lido in Repulse Bay. Here, it seems, the Japanese officers are still quartered. Dark shadows of armed Japanese sentries lie across the road, but they let us pass, and in some cases salute sloppily. The water is very inviting, so we leave the jeep by the roadside and walk down to the beach. A Japanese officer comes from the house behind us and shouts. We turn and briefly give him some unprintable instructions. His Chinese girl friend watches the scene from the doorway. Leaving our clothes on the rotting woodwork of a small Japanese suicide boat, we swim slowly in the cool water. Towels are not necessary, because the sun is hot and the wind comes softly round the bay. On our way once more, we pass through the fishing village of Aberdeen. In the narrow creek the junks lie tightly packed, bows to the stone wharf. Drying fish lie around in flat heaps. The smell is that of any fishing village magnified many times and less pleasant. For all that, the place has its charms. Every junk and nearly every house flies the flag of China. It certainly looks as though there is unity among this people, whatever our political economists might say or wish. If the Chinese do not achieve complete unity it will not be their own fault.
Back in the town all is quiet. The crowds cheer and clap as we pass by. They smile broadly, but I have a feeling that they are laughing at our little jeep.
Some Japanese are pushing huge barrows full of their private gear; they are watched by the Chinese, who remain impassive, but give the impression of great restraint. The crowd is like a giant volcano that will erupt in due course into a stream of joyous firecrackers. This, in fact, did happen later, but not until the last Japanese rifle was put away in the British armoury. Discretion was still the order of the day.