HARD AND BITTER

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 61, 10 September 1945, Page 5

HARD AND BITTER

IMPRISONMENT AT SINGAPORE

SYDNEY, September 9,

The prisoners of war in Singapore, whose morale remained high for three and a half years, have found the three weeks since Japan's capitulation one of the most trying periods of their imprisonment. After the first feeling of joy and relief had passed, the men waited hopefully day after day for their release.

Three weeks after the arrival of the rescue forces they are still in the prison buildings. They are beginning to feel perplexed and are showing signs of restiveness. What it is hard for them to understand is that the removal of thousands of people in ships is not an overnight .job.

About 4600 fit A.I.F. prisoners would be shipped fgrom Singapore direct to Australia between September 16 and 21, said the Australian Minister of the Army (Mr. Forde) in Canberra yesterday. Nearly one-third of the total number of Australian prisoners located in Malaya, Siam, Indo-China, Sumatra, and Java were believed to be sick, he added.

New Zealand and Australian men and women residents of Malaya comprised a substantial proportion of the Europeans in the Sime Road internment camp, says a special Australian correspondent. The camp was a collection of crumbling huts in the picturesque surroundings of the former R.A.F. barracks and the Singapore Golf Club. Dr. B. M. Johns, of the Malayan Medical Services, a surgeon who was ill treated in a Gestapo gaol, was the New Zealanders' representative and chief medical officer of the camp. Sime Road was not another Belsen or Buchenwald, but certain periods of the imprisonment were hard and bitter. At .the outset the civilians were mustered and marched seven miles in a hot sun to Changi prison, where they Were put into small cells. Five thousand civilians were herded into a space meant .for 700. The women and men were segregated, and husbands and wives were permitted at the most to meet for one hour a week. Prisoners found ingenious ways of conversing by whispering down inter-connecting drains and hiding notes in the food.

When the internees were sent to Sime Road the conditions greatly improved by comparison, but food was an obsession with the inmates and almost their sole subject of conversation. Breakfast consisted of rice, gruel, and tea without milk or sugar, lunch of boiled rice and vegetables, and supper of rice-flour bread and some form of vegetable dish with dried fish. The huts were open in front, and were full of ingenious improvised cooking utensils. With carefully-hoarded clothes flying from rafters, and sticks of furnitm-e standing in the sun, the women's quarters looked like a row of stalls in a market.

The bright side of the camp was the relatively low rate of sickness among the women and children, clue partly to open-air exercise and partly to superb care by the doctors and nurses, including Sisters Gladys Tomkins (Hamilton) and Mary Uniack (Stratford), who nursed,, washed clothes, scrubbed, ironed, cooked, and kept up the women's spirits.