Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp: View pages

There is a service at 9.45 a.m. to mark the third anniversary of the united Protestant celebrations (see Chronology, January 25, 1942).

Frank Short, Chairman Stanley Ministers and Clergy, has previously advertised the service by circulating  'A Message to all Christians in Stanley.' part of which reads:

Many people have had a clearer vision of God and of duty than was theirs before internment.....Many facing the future today are aware of little but the small things of life that will be possible once again. The old round and routine is to be resumed.

Now, unless life has come to mean more to us than it did prior to internment we have not 'redeemed our time,' we have wasted it. Each one must face for himself the question, 'After internment, what?'

God has nothing greater to give to man than the gift of life wih its truly amazing range of opportunity and of service...are you going to give yourself to the battle that will continue ceaselessly after the present battle is over, the achievement of the Kingdom of God upon earth?

Source:

David Faure, A Documentary History of Hong Kong: Society, 1997, Kindle Edition, Location 4752

Evelina Edgar enters Tweed Bay Hospital to have an operation on her right leg. The scar will be noted on her post-war Hong Kong Defence Force identity card (October 21, 1949).

Her husband Thomas Edgar will buy her an egg on the black market to help her recover. It will cost about £27/HK$270 in today's terms.

Death of Dr. Hermann Balean from acute anemia. He joined the BMA in 1902 and was appointed to the Hong Kong Medical Board in 1937.

Source:

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2057605/pdf/brmedj03889-0030.pdf

This gives January 19 as date of death, but the MacNider Diary and the garvestone establish today.

L. A. Collyer, head attendant at the Mental Hospital before the war, admires the work of the nurses but is in cynical mood:

All of the Civilian, Army & Navy Sisters & The Volunteer Nursing Services have done marvellous work, both during and after the war, & some of them paid heavily. The work the Sisters have done in the Camp Hospital certainly deserves recognition, and thus makes me doubt very much that they will get it, more likely it will be ignored. But I don't think there's a man in the Camp who doesn't feel the same.

Collyer goes on to note that some of the Eurasians are also deserving of sympathy: they weren't allowed to take part in  the 1940 evacuation, 'but the Govt. were pleased to make use of their husbands, etc. during the war.

Source:

Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, entry for today

George Wright-Nooth is on a firewood loading party in town. He gets a rare glimpse of the dying days of Japanese Hong Kong:

There was no traffic and we travelled at great speed.  {At} Repulse Bay there was no sign of life. The Hotel is a hospital but no-one was about. The centre of the the race course was being hoed up by several hundred men - possibly POWs...Not a cheery face to be seen, everyone was dull and lifeless. Down every side street there were signs of the recent bombing, and looking down Hennessy Road it was quite clear that Wanchai had been heavily damaged....Everybody stared at us...we got plenty of fun watching the taxi bicycles and the 'lang tsai' {young layabouts} who were still trying to keep up appearances. Our biggest laugh - suppressed - was when a European man rode solemnly past on a bicycle with wheels about a foot in diameter...At 4.30 we returned back to Stanley.

Source:

George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 231-2

Death of John Owen Hughes, a former unofficial member of the Legislative Council.

Note: Susan Ellen seems to have been his second wife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Owen_Hughes

Death at the age of 70 of Chief Engineer Officer Harry Stainfield. He'd worked for the Merchant Navy on the SS Shun Chih.

At this time, ((after the Bungalow C deaths)) the Japanese allowed the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong into camp to visit his flock for the first (and only) time. We gathered to greet this venerable figure with flowing beard. Although he was surrounded by armed Japanese officers, he spoke to us fearlesly about 'the day of victory' and gave us words of encouragement. We lay folk were not allowed to speak with him, but our senior priest Father Meyer was permitted to address him with the body-guards in attendance.

Sources:

Death: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=15287667

Bishop: Mabel Winifred Redwood, It Was Like This...2001, 178

Charles Littler, a marine engineer, marries Mavis Lilian Lush, a missionary teacher at St. Stephen's College. E. W. L. Martin, the Warden and Chaplain of St. Stephen's College, officiates and J. E. Montgomery and H. de V. Booten are witnesses.

Source:

Greg Leck, Captives of Empire, 2006, 635; Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 2008, Additional Appendix 1

Death of Sydney Harry Batty-Smith.

Captain D. A. C. Mathers, a Hong Kong POW, receives a card from his mother-in-law, Mrs S. Mather, a Stanley internee:

Dearest Dave - All our wishes this year - had cheery Christmas New Year - Revue went with terrific swing!! Greetings, thanks, lads - God bless darling - our love -

Mother

The Censor's stamp shows the letter was passed by Kiyoshi Watanabe.

Source:

David Tett, Captives in Cathay, 2007, 197

The Awa Maru delivers Red Cross supplies to Hong Kong. Captain Hamada's ship has been given safe passage by the American navy; it has already delivered Red Cross goods to Formosa, and will now proceed to Saigon, Singapore and Batavia. At Saigon it will take on 480 survivors of Japanese merchant ships sunk by the Americans and in Singapore loads about 1,700 businesmen and officals who are returning to Japan.

On her homeward voyage she's observed by a number of American planes and submarines which note the white crosses she's covered with or have been informed of her protected status and allow her to proceed.

Late on the night of April 1 the Awa Maru was spotted by the American submarine Queenfish, mistaken for a destroyer and sunk. There were a few survivors but only one accepted the offer of rescue. It took him six hours to recover and be able to tell the Americans they'd sunk a ship that had been granted safe passage.

A court martial found the commanding officer, Charles Loughlin,  guilty of negligence but not guilty of two more serious charges. He received a letter of admonition.

The American Government formally apologised to the Japanese and offered to replace the ship with one of a similar standard if it was agreed to only use it for humanitarian purposes. Negotiations about this offer were going on at the end of the war.

The Awa Maru was in fact carrying war-related material, in breach of at least the spirit and perhaps the letter of its safe passage agreement. Neverthless, this wasn't known to the submariners and had no influnece on the decsiion to sink it, which arose from a tragic series of errors and misudnerstandings.

Source:

David Miller, Mercy Ships, 2008, 136-142

The dreaded Colonel Noma, head of the Kempeitai (Gendarmes) since the start of the occupation, is recalled to Japan. This seems to have been partly in consequence of the removal from the Governorship of Rensuke Isogai, his patron, partly of disquiet amongst the Japanese authorities at the power and ferocity of the Hong Kong Kempeitai - it seems that his removal was ordered by the Japanese War Office, and that during February 1945 about 150 of the Hong Kong Kempeitai were replaced by personnel moved from Canton.

His replacement, Colonel Kanazawa Asao, is also Commiossioner of Police.

Noma will be brought back from Japan after the war, tried for war crimes, and executed at Stanley Prison. Asoa was also sentenced to death, but the Judge Advocate, on reviewing the case, was unhappy with one of the charges on which he'd been found guilty and recommended a commutation. Nevertheless, he was hung at Stanley Prison in 1948.

Sources:

Date: South China Morning, October 25, 1945, page 2 (I've assumed that the date given here, February 26, is correct but that the year, 1944, is a slip)

War Office: Hong Kong Sunday Herald, December 29, 1946, page 2

150 replacements, Kanazawa: Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 210-211

Asao: http://hkwctc.lib.hku.hk/exhibits/show/hkwctc/documents/item/78

Death of Lionel Ernest Norwood Ryan.

Lionel Ryan was born in Kingston, Surrey in 1888 and he entered Christchurch College, Oxford in 1907. He seems to have sailed to Hong Kong, via Quebec, in September 1926. He was employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company as a freight agent, and more generally in 'shipping'.

According to an obituary created by his old Oxford College he was the 111th person to die in Stanley.

Source:

http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/cathedral/memorials/WW2/lionel-ryan

Death of the architect James Smith Gibson, husband of Alice Maud, at the age of 72.

Source:

http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/searchgarrison/nonuniformedcivilians.ht…

Death of William Spark, a purser with Jardine Matheson, at the age of 62.

G. P. de Martin ends today's lecture on 'Proverbs and Aphorisms' with some examples that must seem highly pertinent to his audience:

'Everything comes to him who waits' including the end of my remarks to which you have listened so patiently.

I will make you a present of my favourite proverb. 'If every man his doorstep kept the city would be clean.'

It is not a bad code of ethics.

Source:

G. P. de Martin, Told in the Dark, undated but perhaps 1946, 15 (the printed form of the lecture is called 'Wise Saws and Modern Instances.'

There are almost no 'Europeans' left in town now, and it's the Chinese who are the unintended victims of the American bombing that's necessary to destroy the military and economic capacity of Japanese Hong Kong.

But today a bomb falls on the French Hospital in Causeway Bay and the popular Norwegian Pastor Neilson, who has a room on the top floor, loses everything to the resulting flames. Also destroyed are a set of accounts documenting in detail the loans raised for Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke's illegal by the bankers and others. These were given to Dr. Po-Chuen-Lai (who, along with Helen Ho continued Selwyn-Clarke's work after his arrest) and hidden in her room.

Désirée Gunderson, whose father is in Stanley, suffers a minor back  wound, and she and her mother, Ruth Yvonne (née Baretto), are forced to seek new living quarters. Désirée is eventually sent to Macao on a junk, while her mother stays in occupied Hong Kong until the end, hearing the reading of the Imperial Rescript announcing the surrender outside the Gloucester Building on August 16.

The re-opening of the Hospital was announced on April 20th., although the Chinese school the Sisters had also been running remained closed at that date.

Sources:

Accounts: HKRS931 6-485 (Transportations)

Re-opening: Hong Kong News, April 20, 1945, p. 2

Neilson, Gundersons: Statement of Ruth Yvonne Gunderson, 10 -  in HKPRO, HKMS100-1-6

Bowen Road Hospital was moved to a separate area of Shamshuipo Camp about a month ago. Today it's transferred to the former Central British School in Kowloon. This is a good location for a hospital, and it continues here for the rest of the war.

Source:

Charles Roland, Long Night's Journey Into Day, 2001, Kindle Location 1523

Death of James Owens, mariner, aged 44.

He was one of the Stanley Camp's Irish community. His father (also James) had died in 1934 and his mother Annie in 1939. His brother Frank drowned at sea in 1915. The family were from Baltray, County Louth.

Source:

http://www.termonfeckinhistory.ie/graveyard_inscriptions_17.html

In the afternoon Franklin Gimson meets the interpreter who's taking over from Kiyoshi Watanabe. He's impressed. Kochi has a better knowledge of English than his predecessor and seems 'quite a cheery, pleasant fellow'. He believes that the Japanese are generally trying to strengthen the staff at the Camp. John Stericker also notes Kochi's arrival, saying he's replaced 'our nice but ineffectual Mr Watanabe'.

Sources:

Gimson: Diary, Weston Library, Oxford, p. 139 (recto)

Stericker: Captive Colony, Chapter 13, p. 16

Note:

A source from the immediate post-war period states that Watanabe had a good command of English but spoke it slowly - he was recommended for employment as an interpreter for the British in any form of work except judicial proceedings.

His dismissal was not connected with a Japanese desire to provide the camp with a better translator - this was almost certainly the time when Watanabe was summoned by Colonel Tokunaga - the head of all Hong Kong's camps - to be abused, threatened and stripped of his office for the humanitarian assistance he was giving to the prisoners. Lucky to escape with his life and freedom, he returned to Stanley where he was 'thumped and hit and spat on' by the other Japanese who regarded him (wrongly) as a traitor. He seems to have spent the next period  in a state of confusion, ended by the eventual offer of a new job from a Japanese official in the last week or so of the war (See Liam Nolan, Small Man of Nanataki, 1966, 137 ff.)