Within Changi's Walls

L Peet George

Description

When the Japanese captured Singapore in February 1942, the European population was rounded up and sent to internment camps, where they were kept till the end of the war. This is the story of one such internee - George L. Peet - whose diaries and records preserve a stunningly vivid portrait of the triumph of the human spirit in those trying times. Interned first at Changi Gaol, then at Sime Road Camp, Peet paints a detailed and moving picture of the world behind walls. The internees - mostly British and mostly the top tier of pre-war Singapore society - find themselves in vastly reduced circumstances, dispossessed and humiliated. Fortunately, their Japanese wardens, while enforcing strict security, left the running of the camps to the internees. And so, drawing on their respective skills from their peace-time occupations, the internees soon organized themselves into an elaborate functioning microcosm of society. Those who had been doctors served as camp doctors. Those who had been in the Department of Agriculture grew vegetables. The engineers saw to water and sanitation. The chemists made yeast for bread. And experts from every conceivable field took turns to lecture at the unofficial, in-house Changi University. In the author's own words: a veritable war-time "Swiss Family Robinson" indeed. With a sympathetic eye, Peet reveals the strength as well as the ugliness of human nature. Food, comfort, survival, morale, and a longing to be reunited with his wife and children - fortunately evacuated to Australia - form the main part of the author's thoughts, as well as the backbone of this riveting record.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Diaries
• World War II
• Singapore
• Prisoner of war
• History of Asia
• Singapour

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814677240
• Langue: English

Extrait

2011 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Peet, George L.
Within Changi s Walls : A record of civilian internment in World War II / George L. Peet ; edited and with an introduction by Emma G. Peet. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2011.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-981-4328-85-2 (pbk.)
eISBN : 978 981 4677 24 0
1. Peet, George L. - Diaries. 2. Changi POW Camp (Changi, Singapore) 3. Concentration camp inmates - Singapore - Diaries. 4. Prisoners of war - Great Britain - Diaries. 5. Prisoners of war - Singapore - Diaries. 6. World War, 1939-1945 - Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 7. World War, 1939-1945 - Personal narratives, British. I. Peet, Emma G., 1968- II. Title.
D805.5
940.53175957092 -- dc22 OCN704887349
Cover photograph shows the author on his way to work at The Straits Times , c. 1938. Other images: SXC.hu (Andrew Eldridge, Shlomit Wolf, B.S.K., Kriss Szkurlatowski)
Cover design by Lock Hong Liang
Printed in Singapore by Times Printers Pte Ltd
CONTENTS
Introduction by Emma G. Peet
Last letters home before internment
BOOK I: CHANGI GAOL
The Fall
Karikal
The Gaol
Settling Down
The Day s Work
The Community
Life in the Sun
Rice, Rice, Rice
Changi University
The Early Days
Within the Walls
Three in a Cell
Our Health
East and West
Ugliness
Human Nature in Changi
Under the Stars
The Women
The Last Six Months
Sime Road Camp
Book II: SIME ROAD JOURNAL
First letter home on release from internment

Letter from the author to his children in Australia, 1941
INTRODUCTION
My grandfather, George Lamb Peet, was born in Secunderabad, India, on May 27, 1902. He was born the son and grandson of poorly paid Methodist ministers and grew up in England following the ministers circuits. At school s end, the only affordable profession that attracted him was journalism, and George s first placement was as junior reporter on the Essex County Standard in Colchester during the Great War.
In 1923 George decided to apply for a job as a junior reporter at The Straits Times in Singapore; he was successful in his application and was soon leaving Colchester and heading off to the unknowns of Asia. The salary was 300 a month as junior reporter; he covered such subjects as the crime beat, the courts and the municipal council of Singapore. It was like stepping into another world, he wrote, marked by social lines rigidly drawn down the years by colonial convention. Being the son of a Methodist minister, Grandpa was more conscious than most colonials of the injustice of discrimination and Singapore was certainly a far cry from his bedsit in Colchester - this is a theme that you become aware of while reading his diaries.
Whilst living in Singapore, George met Lora Buel, an American teacher working at the Methodist Girls School. On May 23, 1930, they married in Kuala Lumpur, in the Wesley Church on Petaling Hill. They bore three children: George B., Lorinne and Ronald.
George worked in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1930s before being recalled in 1934 to the Straits Times head office in Singapore to serve as the Assistant Editor; after a time he rose to Acting Editor.
On September 3, 1939, George was seconded to the role of Director of Information in the Straits Settlements government, and thus became privy to highly classified information. In 1940, acting on confidential advice, George sent his wife and children to the sanctuary of the U.S.A.; this proved to be a life-saving decision. George himself remained in Singapore. After nine months Lora, wanting to be closer to her husband in Singapore, moved the little family to Bolingbroke Parade in Manly, New South Wales, Australia. George was to be re united with his family there whilst on four months leave in 1941, before again returning to his post in Singapore. This was to be their last reunion until the war ended in 1945. George wasn t able to flee Singapore before the fall as every fit man under 60 must stay and play his part in the defence of Singapore, the last remaining Europeans being evacuated only when it was realised that Singapore was to shatter and burn.
From my family s recollections, in February 1942 George boarded the Giang Bee , an old island freighter and one of the last to leave Singapore, with his second-in-command from the Department of Information as well as some newspaper colleagues. George in later years said that whilst on the ship he had a premonition the boat would be sunk and that he smelt the stench of death on the boat s decks. At the risk of leaving his only route of escape behind him, he hailed a passing sampan and climbed aboard to return to the shellfire and the hell that Singapore had become, in the face of the invading forces.
Grandpa s colleagues were on the other side of the boat and didn t see him alight from the ship. Devastatingly, the Giang Bee was bombed and sunk by the Japanese, with much loss of life, including many of George s former colleagues. One of the few survivors happened to be George s 2IC, and as George was one of the first men hunted by the Japanese, his companion was quickly captured and tortured by the Kempeitai - the Japanese secret police - to ascertain Grandpa s whereabouts. Fortuitously he could not divulge the story of George s survival as he had not seen him get off the boat, and it was assumed George had drowned and perished.
Once back on land, Grandpa headed to the Cathay building and took shelter in the basement. When the surrender of Singapore was imminent, he made his way back to his home at Mount Rosie, where he found an Australian machine-gun regiment taking refuge. There, after the British surrender, he was given an Australian private s uniform, and then marched in with the other Australian soldiers under the assumed surname of Dunphy, the name of his cousins in Australia. George grew a moustache and beard as disguise, and spent three months in an Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.) camp. He must soon have realised that his English gent s accent would sooner or later give his identity away, and somehow managed to get himself placed in the civilian camp at Changi Prison. He is still on the WWII Changi Prison Register as George Dunphy, not Peet, and with the occupation of rubber planter.
Lora had no news of her husband s survival for all of 18 months after the sinking of the Giang Bee , until a radio message from the Red Cross got through to the Dunphys in Australia. His relatives handed on the message to Lora as both she and the children were mentioned by name in the message, and that is when Lora realised he had survived.
George s identity was discovered by the Japanese halfway through his internment, even with his moustache and beard; it is thought the camp s Japanese librarian recognised him. During a Japanese military police enquiry where, according to Grandpa, fifteen out of 45 internees died at the hands of the Japanese, he miraculously escaped torture, perhaps because any information he could have provided at that point was out of date and hence useless.
This is where George s story begins. His records and journal were written while in the Sime Road Prison camp after the stint at Changi and these are his recollections, opinions and observations as written at that time during the war. George takes a very fair view of his treatment during his internment, which is partly due to the measure of the man but also because he experienced internment as a civilian, not as a prisoner of war. From George s observations the civilian internees seem to have run the camp themselves and had little contact with the Japanese. Mary Thomas was a civilian internee in both the Changi and Sime Road camps as well, and supports his views in her excellent account of camp life, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun , where she feels that compared with the horrors of the European camps, the Changi and Sime Road camps had probably the best conditions, despite the lack of food, overcrowding and lack of resources.
In August 1945 the war ended. Just days after the declaration of peace, George got together with a couple of colleagues from his former life in newspapers - Henry Miller and Eric Jennings (who had also survived the internment) and a couple of Indian typesetters. On September 7, 1945, using a hand press, they got the first post-war edition of The Straits Times on the streets of S