In memory of those killed in the accidental bombing, Jan 16, 1945.
Once on a bright sunny day, a day for celebrating summer, sitting by our bungalow, I watched the battle between what I thought was an aircraft carrier (actually a Japanese lighter) and a swarm of fighter planes. The air was hot. Sultry. But I saw only the spectacle before my eyes. Crouched and leaning against the wall, I saw only the struggle before me.
Silver birds dropped out of the sky, swept across the huge hulk of carrier, and then swung gracefully away.
The scene played out only a short distance from me. I could see, can still see, the antlike figures of men peppering the hull of the craft as the stern lifted and rolled, many of the figures falling to the water, but others, amazingly, tenaciously, clinging to and sliding along the hull as the great rusted hulk turned, the deck slipping away from my view. That's as far as it sank, the upturned hull showing its rusted bottom to the sky, a deep red section now below that, and then the black blending into the water. Ants splashed about around that hull, and more still slid into the water while others, better placed or more agile, crawled their way up to the bottom.
Strangely, while the noise of battle must have been impressive, I recall no sounds. The scene plays out in silence, even though the bombers swooped over the camp, coming to and going from their quarry. They had killed the beast, but they could not sink it. It lay there in the bay from that time on, a warning to our keepers that their defeat was approaching.
The time was January of 1945, I later learned, and it was one incident out of many attacks on and about the camp. While the dockyards in Hong Kong and other strategic sites were the primary targets, we too were subject to strafing and even bombing of increasing intensity as the weeks of 1945 advanced. Others write of attacks involving as many as 300 planes, all of which should not have happened as we were an internment camp, actually a Prisoner of War camp as of early 1944. The problem was that we were not properly identified to the air with large white crosses. In addition, our Japanese captors had gun placements located about the camp, some on the corners of Stanley Prison (a building that had been at Stanley prior to the war and whose existence had probably played a part in the choice of Stanley Peninsula as a site for Stanley Camp) and others hidden about the grounds. These guns fired on passing Allied planes and so attracted retaliation.
There were casualties among the internees. The worst incident occured just below our bungalow, Bungalow B, when Bungalow C was hit with an American bomb. An akak gun had been located below bungalow C and was used to fire out over Stanley Bay at passing planes. A U.S. plane, having spotted the offending placement, came in to destroy it, overshot the target, and blasted Bungalow C. Thirty people lived there but not all were present when the bomb hit. At the time, I heard that fifteen had died in the explosion. Written accounts I have read recently state that fourteen died in the blast. Another indicates that of the five wounded survivors, one or two died later.
Our location was on a steep hillside, and so the Bungalows where located in terrace fashion with Bungalo C on a lower terrace and Bungalow A above us on a higher one. Had the bomb been overshot somewhat more, we would have been among the casualties.
The next day I lay on a bank overlooking the road that passed from Bungalo C heading away from us, towards the main part of the island, and watched through the leaves of screening trees a sorry procession with burlap bags on carts being hauled by Chinese coolies down the road. The body parts of the dead had been collected and deposited in the bags, the assortment of remains in each bag representing a random mix of victims. I understood that these bags were being transported to burial, five bags or so to a grave.
Our keepers made much of the matter that an American plane had delivered the payload of death to the internees. No mention was made of the fact that their failure to mark the camp according to the conventions of war and their actions with antiaircraft guns had precipitated the attack. Apparently, after this event, they set men from the camp to laying out appropriate markings. They may also have removed the offending “ack-ack” gun.
One other bombing incident from this time that had been a mystery to me was the bombing of what at the time I understood was the hospital (with a large number of interned medical personnel we had hospitals in the camp). The mystery was that a Japanese plane had dropped the bomb. And on a clear day when no other planes were engaged. One of my young friends had been injured in the incident, and I recall visiting him in the hospital. The damage could not have been severe for I saw none of it. I had wondered then and continued to puzzle for long afterwards what would have possessed a Japanese pilot to bomb Stanley Camp. Had it been hatred and despair at the deterioration of the Japanese situation in the war? Had the pilot acted prematurely in anticipation of the Japanese army's intent to kill all prisoners should an American and British invasion or Japanese surrender occur? Had he been deranged? Was it an accident?
My readings since suggest that it was a planned event. The bombs were probably recovered American bombs that showed English markings. They had not properly detonated, had perhaps not all been armed. One had lodged, unexploded in St. Stephen's College. The Japanese tried to make propaganda out of the fact that these American bombs had dropped again on civilians. They fooled no one but themselves.
At this time, on one of these early 1945 days, I saw the white parachute descend gently from a clear blue sky. Two of the silver sky fishes, for that was what they looked like when flying high, had collided. From one, the parachute escaped. The other with a parachute tangled in its tail, took its pilot into the ground. That pilot was the more fortunate of the two. The other reached the ground safely but was killed by his captors.
Through all this, the sound of the fury was at times extreme. Jean Gittens, an internee, wrote that the children were terrified and broke down crying at the sound of planes. My memories are of blue skies, dancing silver sky fish, scrambling ants, exploding balls of smoke, a rolling rusted whale, burlap bags, swooping planes, and all of this in silence.
And oh yes, through all of this, the children played. We played at war, for one thing.
Bungalow C today, amazingly reconstructed, viewed from above approximately as I might have viewed it then. The bungalows where built around steel frames, a feature that perhaps made rebuilding feasible.