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

along from the direction of the village and it was driven by one of our soldiers and the Japanese officer asked them to take us back up.’
    On the same day as Irene Drewery’s ordeal, Christmas Day 1941, Connie Sully too had her first encounter with soldiers of the Imperial Army.At seven o’clock in the morning about fifty Japanese soldiers came down from the hills and burst into the makeshift hospital at the jockey club.‘We felt a bit scared,’ says Connie.‘But we’d all been told just to sit down and do things.We made dressings, we rolled bandages, unrolled them, rolled them up again.’One of the Japanese (Connie suspected he was drunk) came in and threatened the twenty or so nurses who sat preparing bandages.After a few terrifying moments the nurses realized that he only wanted one of the nurses to remove her tin hat.‘And when she took it off and threw it away, he just nodded and walked off.The Japanese had arrived so quickly that nobody had a chance to clear the booths upstairs of alcohol.And of course they made their way up there first.And once they got into that there was no stopping them.’When it was dark the Japanese soldiers confronted the nurses once again.‘Someone came and shone their torch round and they went looking round and picked out the youngest.’The soldiers took Connie and two young Chinese upstairs.‘And unfortunately for us, we were all raped.Wasn’t very nice.But if you’d tried to do anything you’d have got a bullet.So that was the only way — you had to grin and bear it.I think I valued my life too much to take a bullet.And then when they’d finished they marched us back downstairs again.’To Connie the rape came as the most brutal shock.‘I don’t think I’d even had a boyfriend,’ she says.‘But we knew what they wanted and we were told “Don’t resist” because they don’t think twice — they just either stab or shoot you.I didn’t really feel anything.I sort of kept my body closed off from anything.’In an extraordinary display of bravery and stoicism, the next morning Connie was back on duty as a nurse: ‘We didn’t put up a show,’ she says.‘It was finished.What could we do?It was the way you were brought up.You didn’t run away.That wasn’t our upbringing at all.It was just something that happened that you tried to forget, but you never did.Stays with you for ever.’
    Appalling as the experience of these British residents of Hong Kong was at the hands of the Japanese, it was, from the first, the Chinese community that suffered most.As Anthony Hewitt was marched through the streets as a prisoner of war he ‘saw dead bodies everywhere.I’d watched them, the Japanese, kill people on a cricket ground along the Queens Road.They were just hitting the Chinese all over the place.Knocking them down with rifle butts, shooting people for no reason, robbing them.It was quite ghastly.I felt terrible.Here we were marching towards imprisonment, and we were the people who were meant to look after the Chinese of Hong Kong and should have defended them, and now we’d left them at the mercy of these ghastly people.’
    Demonstrably, the behaviour of the Japanese soldiers who descended upon Hong Kong in December 1941 did not gradually become more brutal as the campaign wore on.As the first-hand testimony demonstrates, from the outset these troops acted in the most appalling way.But the behaviour of the Imperial Army in Hong Kong is explained by conditioning, not by genetics.The soldiers of the Imperial Army’s 38th division who invaded Hong Kong had fought in some 400 actions since being posted to south China more than two years before.And the Imperial Army as a whole had been engaged for the previous ten years in a struggle on the Asian mainland against a people who, they were told, were ‘below human’.That Japanese soldiers did not exempt Westerners from brutal treatment is, in the circumstances, understandable.Unlike the men of the Imperial Army, German