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

badly treated, pushed about and abused, but he’d arranged a halt in the firing and a surrender.’
    Even though Hong Kong had been effectively defenceless against the Japanese, no one on the British side had thought that the colony would only hold out eighteen days.Irene Drewery, a child of eight at the time, remembers the incredulity with which her family greeted the news of the surrender: ‘A soldier was walking past and shouted up to my mother, “It’s over.”He didn’t say, “It’s over, we’ve won,” or “It’s over, we’ve lost.”It’s just that he said, “It’s over.”So Mother being Mother, thinking that the Japs would never beat the British, started gathering the servants and all the kids and started walking down the hill towards Stanley.She said, “I can’t be bothered to wait for transport to come and take us.”’For Irene’s mother it was ‘unthinkable’ that the Japanese could have defeated the British in Hong Kong.Incredibly, she had understood the soldier’s remark — “It’s over” — to mean that the British had won the battle.‘Before war actually broke out, everyone was going round saying the Japanese wouldn’t dare fight us, because they were only little and they were ill equipped and they didn’t know how to fight.’
    The inability of Irene Drewery’s mother to accept the possibility of a Japanese victory was to have tragic consequences for her and her family.‘Probably about halfway down the hill,’ says Irene, ‘we were confronted by six Japanese soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets.’They took Irene’s mother away and then ordered Irene, her nanny, her twelve-year-old brother and two small girls who were staying with the family to wait in a hut at the side of the road.‘We were sitting in this hut and I started to get really agitated because we’d never been treated like that.I used to go down to the village all the time and the Chinese people there were lovely — we made lots of friends.I got beyond upset, I got angry, and I said to Nanny, “I want to go over and get Mummy,” and she said, “You can’t go, you’ve got to stay here, the Japanese won’t like it.”And I said, “Well, you can’t stop me, I’m going to get my mummy.”And my brother said, “Well, you’re not going to go alone.”’Irene, her brother and the two other girls left the hut and started banging on the door of the nearby garage where Mrs Drewery was being held.‘The door opened and they dragged us inside.And when I first went in my mother was sort of half lying up against the wall.She didn’t look like my mother looked.My mother was always beautiful and her hair was always well done and her clothes were always neat and she just didn’t look like my mum.That’s the only way I can explain it — she didn’t look neat and tidy any more.’Only years later did Irene understand exactly what had happened to her mother — she had been raped.
    As Irene stood looking down at her mother she felt cold steel on the back of her neck: ‘I thought to myself he’s going to chop my head off.And I just saw this sword go up.I didn’t even know if it was a sword — it could have been a bayonet.’At that moment, the Drewerys were the beneficiaries of an extraordinary piece of luck.‘The next thing the door opened, there was a bang and the soldier fell down, and we were being pushed outside.And a man with a Japanese-American accent said, “Stay here!”’A Japanese officer had arrived — a member of the Imperial Army who would not tolerate the rape of women or the murder of children.He went back into the garage where Mrs Drewery had been raped ‘and there was a hell of a lot more noise and then he came back outside and said, “Those soldiers will never hurt another living person” or something like that.And he told us he wasn’t going to fight women and children and that he’d been in New York and he was called back and sent to fight.Then he stopped a truck that was coming