Atrocities by Japanese troops against hospital patients and Allied medical staff in Hong Kong began shortly before the crown colony’s surrender on Christmas Day 1941, when nurses were raped and murdered, doctors slaughtered, St John’s Ambulance men bayoneted and wounded soldiers tortured. Japanese forces had started their attack on the crown colony within hours of the 7 December raid on Pearl Harbor, which led to the US declaring war against Japan.
The garrison held out for seventeen days against overwhelming odds before the Governor General of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Aitchison Young, along with a group of colonial officials, formally surrendered. But the violence didn’t stop. The number of casualties on the morning of the surrender was impossible to confirm but of the nurses who were raped and murdered two were reported to be VADs. In addition, there were claims that more than fifty wounded Allied soldiers were executed as they lay in bed.
Then on 13 February, patients were murdered on operating tables and hundreds of injured troops and medical staff were executed at a British military hospital in Singapore. It was just after 1 p.m. when heavily armed Japanese soldiers were spotted advancing towards Alexander Hospital, where a British army captain held up his arms, clearly marked with red crosses, in surrender. A shot was fired at him and a grenade was thrown, but he escaped by jumping over a wall. A white flag waved from a window was met with an outbreak of rifle fire. By then the Japanese had marched into the hospital. The staff of a surgical unit, standing with their arms aloft in surrender, were bayoneted and a patient under anaesthetic was mutilated and murdered on the operating table.
By late afternoon the Japanese had trained their rifles and machine guns on a group of more than two hundred staff and soldiers whose arms were tied behind their backs. They marched their hostages to tiny huts, where they were held through the night without water or food. The wounded who failed to keep up or fell over on the short march were hacked to death where they lay.
The next day half the group were taken from the huts after being promised water and fresh air, but were systematically butchered. While the morning slaughter was taking place a stray shell loosened a door of one of the huts and several men escaped. The remaining prisoners were murdered before the Japanese accepted the surrender on St Valentine’s Day of Allied forces that totalled almost eighty thousand.
Details of the outrages that had taken place in Hong Kong and Singapore slowly began to emerge within the close-knit medical community that served throughout the Burma Campaign. Nothing official was ever revealed, but anger expressed by the boys on the wards over the beheadings and bayoneting in Singapore and Hong Kong left little to the imagination.
On a swelteringly humid morning in February 1945, the nursing staff were gathered and told that a casualty ward for Japanese prisoners of war was to be opened at 56 IGH. By lunchtime the new ward had become the focal point of heated and often tearful arguments that went on in the nurses’ mess for days as fierce debate raged over the rights and wrongs of British nurses being told to care for an enemy who beheaded and disembowelled our boys as a matter of course.
‘That came out of the blue. I wonder when the ward will be opened,’ said Madge.
‘I’m not sure what I think about it,’ said Phyl. ‘I know it’s our job to care for anyone who needs medical attention. But you have to ask if it’s right after the way our boys have been treated by the Japanese.’
‘What I would like to know,’ said Vera, ‘is what the powers-that-be in New Delhi really think.’ She was referring specifically to Jane Patterson, Chief Principal Matron and Director of Medical Services, and, of course, Gertrude Corsar.
‘I suppose the truth is that they have to do what they’re told like the rest of us,’ said Madge.
Rather than precipitating confrontation by arbitrarily listing everybody on the Japanese POW ward rotas, Matron Ferguson spoke to nurses individually but at the same time made it clear they would be expected to follow orders if they were assigned to duty there. Judging by the response in the mess, Madge thought that was a wise move. One of the nurses refused point blank to have anything to do with the Japanese because she had a brother who had been taken prisoner during the defence of Singapore. The family simply didn’t know whether he was still alive. ‘I won’t nurse a single one of those people,’ she said.
One of the hardest-working and most dedicated nurses at the hospital had a first cousin who had died in the Battle of Kohima and said that she thought it totally unacceptable that the latest drugs, like penicillin, would be used to save the lives of people who tortured and mutilated Allied soldiers. Madge felt overwhelming sympathy for girls who had suffered such grievous and heartbreaking personal losses, but as a nurse she simply felt morally bound to help those in need and made her position known to Matron Ferguson.
‘I’m willing to do whatever’s required of me, Matron,’ she told her.
Matron Olive Ferguson eventually announced to a group of her nurses that Japanese prisoners of war were expected to arrive at the hospital early in March 1945. ‘Rest assured that security has been discussed in great detail,’ she said. ‘The POWs will be guarded day and night, with responsibility shared between British
