OCCUPIED ASIA: They Who Were Slapped

The first pictures of U.S. civilian prisoners in Japanese camps reached the U.S. last week (forwarded by plane when the exchange ship Gripsholm touched briefly at Rio). They showed children (see cut) and grown-ups bearing up not too badly in confinement, but the pictures did not tell the worst.

Life in Stanley. A better picture of what life in one of the Japanese prisons is like was given by a U.S. citizen (whose name TIME withholds because his family still is in Japanese hands).

He described costumes that the prisoners (who gathered a few clothes hastily when they were seized) wore in the Stanley prison camp, where thousands of Hong Kong captives were herded together:

“A wealthy Shanghai financier appeared in striped morning trousers and coat and old-fashioned buttoned shoes. Another, attired in full evening dress, was seen hauling a garbage bucket in the Indian quarters. A wealthy old stockholder of the Hong Kong Bank came daily for a bucket of hot water dressed in nothing but a suit of long woolen underwear. . . .

“Food was the worst problem. From the first we never had enough. Beriberi . . . spread like wildfire. . . .

“A coveted prize for an evening of bridge was a prune or a piece of hard candy. . . . Many acrimonious debates took place. . . . The kitchen staff . . . threatened to resign because of criticism by some prisoners who had found fish and slightly moldy bread in the garbage can. The cooks said the fish was tainted and the bread too moldy. Their accusers said the fish had been retrieved to yield 19 excellent filets and the bread turned into a tasty dish of bread crumbs. . . .

“Once we saw a 70-year-old British physician ordered off a roadway by an Indian guard who had gone over to the Japs. The old man apparently didn’t hear, and straightened up to listen. The Indian rushed up and slapped him so hard he fell to earth. Then the Indian kicked him viciously until several Britons carried the old man away. And this was not an isolated case.”

Slappo Club. It was indeed, no isolated case, refugees on the Gripsholm reported. On the whole, the Japanese treated Britons worse than Americans or Dutch, but slapping was so common that victims banded together in a Slappo Club. Otto David Tolischus, dour correspondent of the New York Times, wrote:

“The Japanese military and police followed traditions reaching back to primitive ages . . . ranging from disregard of diplomatic courtesies to the imprisonment and torture of American and British correspondents, businessmen and missionaries, the massacre of British and American wounded at Hong Kong and Wake Island . . . the rape and slaughter of British women, including war hospital nurses.” A U.S. dentist who had practiced in Hong Kong seven years. Dr. J. S. Pyne, told of Hong Kong’s fall: “They lined up about 3,000 British and Americans and marched us down the main street four abreast before the native population. . . . There was no crying and chins were up. Four-hundred of us were put into a hotel where 93 of us shared one dirty toilet and one bath. We were watched by Indian and Chinese police who had gone Jap. They slapped whites for as little as speaking to friends. The servants enjoyed torturing their masters. The Japs made propaganda films of our marching through the streets with burdens.

“There were bodies everywhere. We heard the cries of British wounded in the hills, but they were not allowed admittance to Stanley’s emergency hospital. The Japs went around bayoneting the wounded.”