A NURSING SISTERS STORY

 IN MEMORY OF LIEUTENANT KAY CHRISTIE

 1911  to 1994

 

" WE WILL REMEMBER THEM”

 

Kay Christie
Toronto, Ontario

 

I was just as impatient to go overseas as any of the men.  I was a registered nurse who joined the forces as a nursing sister with the rank of lieutenant and the usual two officer’s pips on the shoulders of my uniform. 

After a number of hospital units sailed to England in 1940 these weren’t any more major moves from our area for some time so that, in mid-October, 1941, on being informed that I was slated for duty in a semi-tropical climate and that I had only five minutes to make up my mind, I threw aside my usual caution and immediately accepted this new posting.

One week later to the day, on October 19, 1941, I was on board a train to Vancouver, final destination unknown.  So great was the alleged secrecy surrounding this whole operation that when a second nursing sister, May Waters, joined me on the train from Winnipeg, neither of us knew for sure that we were both on the same exercise.  However, by a cat-and-mouse kind of discreet questioning of each other, we assumed that we must be.  As it turned out we were.

On October 27 we sailed, along with 1875 other troops, all of them male, on board the troopship AWATEA, while another 100 men traveled in the escort ship, PRINCE ROBERT, an armed merchant cruiser.  The troops were mainly from the Royal Rifles of Canada from Quebec and the Winnipeg Grenadiers, including four medical officers and two dental officers.  Two women and 1975 men!

Six days later, following a stop in Honolulu, we were officially informed for the first time that our destination was Hong Kong.  The tree-week journey across the Pacific was no pleasure cruise.  Our 54 bed hospital on board ship was filled with patients all the way.

On November 16,  we docked in Kowloon and two days later we were on duty in the British Military Hospital, which was located between Magazine Gap, where the ammunition was stored and the China Command Headquarters — not exactly an ideal place to be during the hostilities.

Three weeks after our arrival came the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbour and simultaneously, Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong.  The three small planes that were there and the air-raid warning system were totally destroyed wand within a few days, as the shelling from the mainland began there were several direct hits on our three-storey hospital.  We had to immediately evacuate the top two floors and crowd all the patients and equipment into the ground floor area.

After ten days of aerial and shelling attacks from the mainland, the Japanese troops crossed the harbour to the island and, with their superior numbers, began to overcome the various areas.  Word reached us in the large British Military Hospital, also known as the Bowen Road Hospital, of the atrocities committed by the Japanese as the small auxiliary hospitals were overrun, and we knew that our fate could be the same.  At night in the darkened corridors whenever footsteps were heard, we would wonder, “Is it our turn?”

On Christmas morning, at a brief service, the padre relayed a message to us, allegedly from Winston Churchill, to the effect that the eyes of the world were upon us and not to worry because things were going well. Then we went to the shelters to sleep. During the afternoon, we heard a British army officer talking about surrender, and shortly after that, a message was sent to us to report at once to the Matron’s office where we were informed officially of the sur­render of Hong Kong.

Things proceeded as usual in the hospital that night. The next day several Japanese officers arrived at the hospital to speak to the Commanding Officer.   

The hospital building and the immediate environs were declared “Prisoner-of-War Camp A" which earned for May Waters and me the dubious honour of becoming the first and only Canadian nursing sisters to be prisoners-of-war. Within a few days, a barbed wire fence went up to remind all of us that we were indeed prisoners.  Shortly after that, electrified wire was added just to be sure that nobody tried to escape.

Before long the food shortage was felt and the medical supplies dwindled and could never be replenished. We fully realized that we were no longer free people. That, along with the fact that Hong Kong had surrendered, gave us a feeling of guilt and degradation which the Japanese never allowed us to forget throughout the time of our incarceration.

No longer able to give total nursing care to our “boys, we tried to compensate by spending a lot of time listening to problems and  confessions and offering encouragement to the seriously wounded, the sick and the dying.

As well as taking over our residence buildings, our Japanese captors had also set up a guardhouse right outside the dormitories where the nurses and volunteers slept. Over the ensuing months we had ample opportunity to witness the various methods of torture they used on captives.

We were guarded constantly throughout the hospital building by the soldiers who were never without their bayonets.  They strolled through the wards and our dormitories at any hour, frequently making horrible slurping noises as they ran their fingers up the blade of the weapons.

In one hospital the Japanese soldiers lined up all the females, many of whom were just young girls.  These women were mostly British, who had been employed as secretaries or teachers and so on, or they were wives of British business men or army officers.  They were such a wonderful group who worked so hard at their volunteer duties in the hospital.

As one of the soldiers stood in the doorway with a machine gun, the others took the younger girls, laid them on the floor and raped them while the mothers could do nothing but stand by helplessly and watch.

At one of the other auxiliary hospitals at Stanley Peninsula on Christmas morning where the fighting was bitter, the wounded were on mattresses on the floor. One British nursing sister and six VADs were sent there to look after them. Well, the Japs just roared in there in all their fury, although you might argue that there was some just cause.   This was a hospital with a Red Cross on it, supposedly immune from fighting of any kind; but there in the doorway stood our O.C., the Medical Officer, with a gun in his hand. Medical people were not supposed to be armed. So the soldiers slashed him with their bayonets and gave the same treatment to his assistant who was also armed.

At another auxiliary hospital, on Christmas morning, Japanese troops burst in and began bayoneting the patients on the floor. I remember one of these young fellows, a young Canadian lad of about 17 who tried to escape and those soldiers went after him, constantly sticking their bayonets in his arm. This went on until lie just played dead and they finally stopped sticking him. His arm had to be amputated when he was returned to the British Military Hospital,

By this time they had killed a lot of the other patients, so they dragged their bodies into a smaller room and took the mattresses aud tossed them on top of these corpses.

Then they went after the nursing sister and the volunteers.  They stripped them, they slapped their faces with their Red Cross arm bands and started raping them on top of the mattresses that had the corpses underneath. This went on and on. Then for some reason, which the four girls who survived could never figure out, they took three of the volunteers and, after raping them, cut their heads off and piled their naked bodies outside. One of the patients in the hospital at the time was a British officer whose wife happened to be one of these volunteers. He recognized her screams and he went stark-staring mad, completely out of his mind.

I find all of this very hard to talk about even today, almost 50 years later.  The nursing sister who was involved in that was a friend of mine, a Scottish girl named Molly, who was a bit older than most of us.  I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she and the other three who survived were brought back to the British Military hospital.

After eight months there, during which time we learned to cope with hunger, deprivation and overcrowding, the Japanese moved us to a civilian internment camp on Stanley Peninsula on the south side of the island. With no warning at all and with no reasons given to us, all female personnel were moved from the service hospitals still operating, loaded onto trucks like cattle and taken away.   This of course left these hospitals without nursing care of any kind.

We became part of the 2,400 men, women and children who were herded into all manner of buildings where privacy and the basic comforts of life were conspicuous by their absence. According to the Japanese authorities, we service nurses were being shown "preferential" treatment, which meant only three in one room and luxuries like one three-piece bathroom to serve all 83 of us.  If you didn't live within a few doors of this ‘luxury," your chances of ever getting there for a bath were practically nil.

However we did learn the art of "scrounging" and making do. On another floor that was less crowded, we found two primitive cold-water showers that were sometimes vacant and which some­times even had water.

One of my proudest possessions was a hot plate made from a five­ pound jam pail with tile help of a former electrician in return for a few precious cigarettes. I was lucky in that I didn’t smoke, and I could use for bartering the few cigarettes sold to us by the Japanese. --- which were apparently awful. Since our rations were meager, all of us learned to skimp and save and trade, even crusts of bread.

The ration lorry drove through the camp each afternoon and just threw the supplies for each block to the ground. There was no refrigeration, so whatever small thing we got, meat or fish or whatever, had to be in a stew form to make it go round. The next morning we got the rest made into a thin soup. Each person's daily ration amounted to three-quarters of an ounce of meat or fish; four tablespoons of greens, also known as weeds; eight ounces of rice; and four ounces of flour which was often unfit to eat. Since we were fortunate enough to have a baker in our block who would turn the flour into bread, we accepted the “unknowns" in the flour as extra protein..

Life dragged on like this until the middle of 1943 when we learned that the Canadian government had negotiated to have all Canadian civilian internees from the Far East repatriated along with the group of American civilians remaining in other parts of the Far East. This was arranged by their government in an operation that was to be carried out under the auspices of the International Red Cross.

As far as the Japanese were concerned, May Waters and I were Canadian civilian refugees and we were thus included in the group who left Stanley Camp on September 23, 1943, on the first leg of a ten-week journey home. The first four weeks fr this trip was on a dreadful Japanese ship called the Teia Maru where the conditions were even worse than at the internment camp. Built for.400 cabin passengers, there were 1,530 of us on board.

After our arrival in Goa, four weeks later, the Swedish-American liner Gripsholm arrived with 1530 Japanese internees from the U.S. who were to be exchanged for us. Several days later, the Japanese internees were put on board our ship and we went aboard the Gripsholm which was like a touch of heaven, clean and well-loaded with good food, such a contrast to what the Japanese had forced us to endure.

During the next six weeks on board I gained 20 of the pounds I had lost in captivity and I actually learned to enjoy myself again. Because of wartime restrictions, we had to take a much longer and more circuitous route home, but there were several interesting stops, including one at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where the civic officials and residents were most hospitable. At Rio de Janeiro, we were able to see some of that city, even including a night club.

Exactly ten weeks after leaving Hong Kong we disembarked at New York, where it was a pleasure to note that the armed guards, this time, were American. They escorted the Canadians to a bus which took us to a special train for an overnight trip to Montreal. At the old Bonaventure station next morning we said our goodbyes and our group dispersed, fanning out to homes spread all across the country. We were back in Canada where we belonged and every one of us had a brand new appreciation for a way of life we had previ­ously taken for granted.

When the Second World War broke out, Canada was almost totally unprepared. In most areas we were like babes in the woods, forgetting most of the lessons that we had learned just 20 years before.

Our first boys to enlist were dressed like raggle-taggle soldiers, wearing bits of uniforms salvaged from the scrap pile of the first “war to end all wars." We had old fashioned guns and very little else, except the spirit to face the conflict ahead.

0n the home front, we knew little or nothing about civil defense and nobody was thinking much about it, forgetting that if you fire a shot at somebody in anger they might well fire back at you. There were however, a few people with foresight and not all of them were in government positions.

A young Toronto housewife, Kay Gilmour, had the feeling all through the thirties, through the time of Hitler's rise in power, that a war was inevitable, and that if it did come we should be prepared to look after the wounded.

Kay Gilmour

Toronto, Ontario

 

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