Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II by Laurence Rees

letting the bodies fall forward into the storm drain.‘After about ten minutes everything was quiet.And then I heard somebody walking along the edge of the nullah .Apparently he was going around shooting everybody to make sure they were dead and that there were no witnesses.He came over to where I lay.I heard him draw the bolt, I heard him fire the shot, and the body on top of me gave a kick.It was now my turn.Once again I heard the bolt, heard the shot, and the next thing I felt was this severe blow across my face and blood came out of my mouth.I thought that the end had come.I touched my face and it was empty — there was no sensation.There was no sensation in my teeth.Then I thought that my face had been shot away.I knew that my end was coming and I felt absolutely desperate.I felt a sense of hopelessness — absolutely bleak.And at that moment I decided to end my life.The only weapon I had was my pair of glasses.So I took my glasses off, broke one lens and used that glass to cut my wrist.And as I was cutting through the skin I heard someone crawling towards me — it was a British soldier, a corporal, who had a severe gash over his neck where an attempt had been made to behead him with a Japanese sword.I said, “Stay still,” and he said, “No, I can’t take it any longer, I’m moving.”And so he moved further down the nullah .I suppose he saved my life, because after that all desire to end my life disappeared.’
    Thomas crawled along the storm drain until he reached a series of steps where the water tumbled downhill.Knowing he would be seen if he attempted to escape downstream in daylight, he hid in the stream, shivering and bleeding, until nightfall.When it was dark he made his way down the slippery steps, frightened as he went that he might come across the body of the corporal who had crawled on ahead of him.When he emerged at the bottom of the hill he saw an old woman standing outside a squatter’s hut and pleaded with her to give him some clothes.Then, stripped of his bloodstained uniform and dressed as a Chinese, he hid in bombed out buildings until he was able to make his way to a friend’s house on the other side of the island.‘Afterwards,’ he says, ‘you had an intense revulsion for the Japanese — you hated them for a long, long time.We never realized what was going to happen.We thought the Japanese would take over Hong Kong and life would be very much the same — we’d be led away to a prisoner-of-war camp or something like that — but it wasn’t so.’Of the thirty-two prisoners the Japanese bayoneted by the storm water drain, Osler Thomas was one of only two who survived.
    Whilst Thomas hid from the Japanese after the massacre at the Silesian mission, British troops defended Hong Kong island as best they could: ‘We’d had such a blasting of bombing and shelling that I was pretty well battle-happy,’ says Anthony Hewitt, an officer with the Middlesex regiment.‘I didn’t care what happened.I didn’t care whether I was killed or wounded or what would happen, but I just wanted to kill a few Japs.We had a lovely time.We wrote off four Japs who were trying to pull a gun along.Wrote them off.The three of us fired at the same time, and we wrote the whole four off in one burst.’But by Christmas Day the overall military situation had become desperate for the British.That afternoon, Major General Christopher Maltby, the commanding officer of the Hong Kong garrison, ordered Anthony Hewitt’s commanding officer, Colonel Stewart, to stop fighting, make his way to the Japanese field headquarters and surrender.‘He [Stewart] went absolutely white with anger,’ recalls Hewitt, ‘because he was the last man of all who would ever have surrendered himself.And I got a pole and a white sheet and tied it to it, but he wouldn’t let me go with him and he set off alone in the fantastic fury of that battle.Hours later the firing stopped and he came back and he was very distressed.He’d been very