Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast, the still-intact Japanese war machine ground to a complete halt within days, so saving millions of Chinese lives, as well as our own. For a hint of what might otherwise have happened, we can look at the vicious battle for Manila, the only large city in the Pacific War fought for by the Americans, where some 100,000 Philippine civilians died.
By the summer of 1944 the conditions in Lunghua Camp had changed markedly for the worse. Japanese forces in the Pacific were falling back under fierce attacks by American air and naval power, and US submarines were taking a heavy toll of Japanese shipping to and from the home islands. Japanese cities were one by one being devastated by American bombers. The Tokyo high command could barely feed its own soldiers, let alone the groups of civilian internees scattered throughout the Far East.
The behaviour of the Japanese guards in Lunghua became more brutal as Japan faced defeat. Far from wanting to ingratiate themselves, the guards would lash out at the male internees during the roll-calls. The Japanese soldiers making up the original force of guards were replaced by older recruits, and then by Korean conscripts who had themselves been brutalised by the Japanese NCOs, and were particularly vicious.
After the war we learned that throughout our internment there had been three clandestine radios in the camp, and that an inner group of internees were closely following the progress of the war. Sensibly, they kept their news to themselves, for fear that the few collaborators in the camp would tip off the guards. A married Englishwoman in G Block spoke fluent Japanese and worked in the commandant’s office, and she was widely suspected of passing on information to the Japanese, knowingly or otherwise, perhaps in return for medicines for her sick son.
I assume that she knew nothing about the camp radios, but the encouraging news about the war may have prompted the first escape from the camp in 1944. A group of five or six men stepped through the wire and set off for the Chinese lines 400 miles away, and they were followed by others. One group made it to freedom, but others were betrayed by Chinese villagers terrified of ferocious reprisals from the Japanese.
An immediate result was the sacking of the camp commandant, Hyashi. Lunghua was placed under the direct command of the Japanese military, and a harsher regime followed. The food ration was cut, and a second inner barbed-wire fence was built around the central cluster of buildings that housed the unmarried internees. The gates were shut at 7 o’clock, which meant that G Block was cut off from much of camp life in the evenings. Presumably the Japanese decided that married men with children were not likely to escape. Roll-calls were stepped up, and took place twice daily, when we stood wearily in the corridor outside our rooms as the guards laboriously checked that we were all present. Whenever there was a major infraction of camp regulations, or a significant defeat of their forces in the Pacific, the new commandant would impose a curfew and close the camp school, sometimes for two or three days, a real punishment for the parents forced to endure their fractious children.
The shower block was closed, and from then on we had to carry buckets of warm water from the Bubbling Well and Waterloo heating stations, an exhausting daily chore that I performed for my mother (my father was working as a stoker in the camp kitchens). The two dining halls were also closed, and food arrived on metal- wheeled carts pulled by two of the G Block internees. As ravenous as ever, I would listen out for the metal creaking of the cartwheels, and then rush to be first in the queue as our ration of congee and sweet potato was doled out in the entrance hall. Later, while everyone recovered from their meal, I would help push the cart back to the kitchens and be allowed to scrape the bottom of the potato bin.
Lunghua winters were fiercely cold. We were living in unheated buildings, and many people retired to bed for as long as they could. My father learned from George Osborne that many of the windows in the school classrooms had lost their glass during the 1937 battles around Lunghua. Somehow my father persuaded parents to contribute whatever old pieces of cloth they had kept. He cut these into dozens of small squares, melted candles into a shallow tray and soaked the cotton in the molten wax. Tacked into place by the teachers, they kept much of the icy wind from our classrooms.
My mother liked to brew tea to keep warm, and one of my chess opponents, a garage owner named Richards, taught me how to build a chatty, a primitive Chinese stove constructed from a five-gallon oilcan that we pilfered from the guards’ refuse tip. We gouged reinforcing bars from the flaking concrete of the ruined buildings, slotted them through the can above a draught door and then moulded wet clay to form a venturi. The kitchen ovens burned a low-grade coking coal, and in the tips outside the furnaces one could find small pieces of coke. I squatted on the still-warm ash-tips, poking with a bent piece of wire through the dust and clinkers, and thinking of the Chinese beggar boys who picked over the Avenue Joffre ash-tips. I remember reflecting on this without comment, and I make no comment now.
My father sometimes brought small portions of boiled rice for my mother, but as a principled man refused to bring any coal to fuel the chatty. In my roamings around the camp I found a broken Chinese bayonet, a handle and three inches of snapped blade. Over a few weeks I sharpened this to a point, rubbing away at any hard stone I could find. One evening, in the darkness an hour before curfew, I led Bobby Henderson to the rear wall of the coal store behind the kitchens, and used the bayonet to scrape away the mortar. After removing two of the bricks, I drew out several handfuls of coal, which I divided between us, then replaced the bricks in the wall.
My father said nothing when I showed him the coal, though he must have known that I had stolen it from the kitchen storeroom. I soon had it glowing brightly in the chatty outside the rear entrance to G Block, and my father carried a warming cup of black tea to my bedridden mother. Both of us knew that he had compromised his principles, but at the same time I felt that I had gained no merit in his eyes. I take it for granted that if the war had continued for much longer the sense of community and the social constraints that held the internees together would have broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem. At the time, as the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what Henderson would do with his share of the coal. Later I saw him in the darkness, hurling the pieces into the deep pond beyond the perimeter fence.
In late 1944 conditions in Lunghua continued to worsen, not through deliberate neglect by the Japanese authorities, but because they had lost all interest in us. The food supply fell, and the internees’ health was eroded by malaria, exhaustion and a general resignation to further years of war. The Americans had advanced island by island across the Pacific, but they were still hundreds of miles away. The huge Japanese armies in China were ready to defend the Emperor and the home islands to the last man.
Nowhere had Japanese soldiers surrendered in large numbers. Fatalism, fierce discipline and a profound patriotism shaped their warrior spirit. In some way, I think, the Japanese soldier assumed unconsciously that he had already died in battle, and the apparent life left to him was on a very short lease. This explained their vicious cruelty. I can still see two of the guards beating to death an exhausted Chinese rickshaw coolie who had brought them from Shanghai. As the desperate man sobbed on his knees the Japanese first kicked his rickshaw to pieces, probably his only possession in the world and sole source of income, and then began to beat and kick the Chinese until he lay in a still and bloody pulp on the ground.
All this took place some thirty feet from me by the rear entrance of G Block, and was watched by a large crowd of internees. None of the men spoke, as if their silent stares would force the two Japanese to end their torment. I knew that this was a naive hope, but I also understood why none of the British, all of whom had wives and children, had tried to intervene. The reprisals would have been instant and fearsome. I remember feeling a deep deadness, which may have been noticed by one of my father’s friends, who steered me away.
I think that by this time, early 1945, I was already (aged 14!) starting to worry about the future of Lunghua. I realised that the state of Japanese morale was more important than that of the internees, and I was glad to see the Japanese guards helping the internee working parties to repair the main gates of the camp and keep out the destitute Chinese peasants who had crossed the stricken countryside and were hoping to find sanctuary in Lunghua. Starving families sat around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their skeletal children, like the beggars who had clustered outside the office buildings of downtown Shanghai. If the Japanese abandoned Lunghua we would be exposed to roaming groups of militia soldiers, little more than bandits, and to units of the former puppet armies left to fend for themselves, all armed and eager to ransack the camp.
I kept careful watch on the barbed-wire fence, and turned my back on the younger children still playing the traditional games that I forgot when I came to England and sadly never passed on to my own children – marbles and hopscotch, and complicated skipping and ball games. I had read the camp’s entire stock of magazines several times over, but I still visited the American seamen. Cheerful as ever, they were obsessed with their pheasant traps, which I helped them lay in the open ground between E Block and the perimeter fence. I suspect now that they were really marking out an escape route beyond the eyes of the Japanese, in the event of a major emergency like the sudden closure of the camp.
