Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [243]
In the midst of all this, prisoners were occasionally permitted to dispatch cards to relatives at home, couched in terms which mocked their condition, and phrases usually dictated by their jailers. “Dear Mum & all,” wrote Fred Thompson from Java to his family in Essex, “I am very well and hope you are too. The Japanese treat us well, so don’t worry about me and never feel uneasy. My daily work is easy and we are paid…We have plenty of food and much recreation. Goodbye, God bless you, I am waiting for you very earnestly, my love to you all.” Thompson expressed reality in the privacy of his diary: “Somehow we keep going689. We are all skeletons, just living from day to day…This life just teaches one not to hope or expect anything…I cannot explain my emotions, they are just non-existent.”
In the face of institutionalised barbarism, some prisoners displayed unselfishness and nobility. In Rangoon Jail, a Gurkha subadar invited by the Japanese to compose an essay on the British wrote simply in block capitals: THE BRITISH ALWAYS690 HAVE BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE FINEST RACE IN THE WORLD. He was sent to solitary confinement. The Australian prison camp surgeon “Weary” Dunlop became a legend in his country. Others behaved less well. Corporal Paul Reuter of the USAAF slept on the top deck of a three-tier bunk in his camp at Hirahato on Japan. When disease and vitamin deficiency caused him to go blind for three weeks, no man would change places to enable him to sleep at ground level. “Some people would steal691, no matter how much they were punished,” said Reuter. “There was a lot of barter, then bitterness about people who reneged on the deals. There were only a few fights, but a lot of arguing—about places in line, about who got a spoonful more.”
Sapper Edward Whincup692, in a camp on the Burma railway, was shocked by the prevalence of pilfering by comrades, especially of blankets, their most precious possessions, which were sold to Thais in exchange for food. Two Australians caught stealing drugs in Hall Romney’s camp were forced to parade outside the guardroom through thirty-six hours of blazing sun and chill night. “No one has any sympathy693 with them,” wrote Romney. “They merit most severe punishment.” Australians showed themselves both the best and worst of POWs. Their finest possessed extraordinary courage, endurance and tribal loyalty. Their basest were incorrigible thieves and ruthless bullies. This was a world in which gentleness was neither a virtue which commanded esteem, nor a quality which promoted survival. Philip Stibbe, a former Chindit officer in Rangoon Jail, wrote: “We became hardened694 and even callous. At one time bets were laid about who would be next to die. Everything possible was done to save the lives of the sick, but it was worse than useless to grieve over the inevitable.”
Self-respect was deeply discounted. Every day, in every way, prisoners were exposed to their own impotence. On the Bataan death march, Captain Mel Rosen watched Japanese soldiers kick ailing Americans into latrine pits: “You don’t know the meaning of frustration695 until you’ve had to stand by and take that,” said Rosen. Some British officers in Rangoon Jail remained morbidly sensitive to their status as representatives of the power which claimed hegemony over the Burmans. They were thus ashamed to find themselves pushing carts of manure through the streets of the city in their loincloths, watched without sympathy by local people. “I wonder what the Poona Club would think!” muttered one British officer gloomily.
They strove to preserve tatters of “face” and discipline. For instance, when a working party