Palmerston resident Maurice Audet, who celebrated his 100th birthday last spring, was living in China in 1940. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Audet was held along with other foreign nationals in a Japanese internment camp in Manchuria until the end of the war. The following is an edited excerpt from his autobiography.
On the morning of Dec. 8, 1941, I was skating on the Soungari River.
Manchuria does not have much snow, but the ground freezes early and deep. Returning to my billeting, I was greeted by Japanese officers.
“Honourable guest, we have declared war on your country and must protect you,” I was told. I held a British passport.
“Nuts, that’s what you get for being a colonial,” I thought.
They seemed to be in a hurry to save my skin. I was allowed a bundle of spare clothes, rushed to Supingkai, a town between Mukden and Kirin, and turned over to the commanding officer of a war camp expecting 120 men: Americans, Canadians and Belgians. Women were accommodated nearby.
The Japanese used grounds and buildings belonging to a Catholic seminary. Just beyond, were an army training camp and air force base for Kamikaze training.
We were closed in by a ten-foot high stone wall. A tall heavy, iron grill swung open for vehicles. a narrow gate, between the grill and the guardhouse, served pedestrians.
We were divided into four dormitories. One large bedspring was shared by four men, separated by a half-metre thin partition. The length of the bed was 5 1/2 feet. It suited me perfectly; but, I felt sorry for the tall fellows.
The food consisted mainly of millet, a grain-like bird seed. Once a month, there was a dish of sugar on the table. Occasionally we were served partially boiled pork. As a result several developed worms of various types. It took me a year and a half to get rid of tape worm.
During one season, carrots became the staple food. An ‘artist’ posted his masterpiece, “Carrot Camp”. The whole building was made of carrots, including a carrot bed on which a prisoner was dreaming carrots.
An officer reported “the crime.’ The next morning, an irate commander stomped onto the platform and blasted the ingrates who were not thankful for the food taken from the mouths of Japanese people.
Threats were issued. Nobody turned in the culprit.
As the war dragged on, many prisoners took ill with Manchu Fever … [it] was especially hard on foreigners, who developed a high fever for three to four weeks.
If the patient had a weak part in his system, the fever concentrated on it and finished its victim. Two of my friends had it. One died. The other was my roommate. I kept him in bed, provided him with ice in the night, when the fever reached its peak.
Ice was easy to get. I put a bucket of water in the hall, outside our room. In a few hours, I had ice. After three weeks, he recovered. The dead were buried in a corner of the compound.
At one point, we had 13 between life and death. To boost the morale, twelve of us formed a Burbage Club, playing comedies. We kept performing until the end of the war. The armed guards sat in the first row. Although they could not understand a word, they kept coming every time.
Another Canadian turned our “safe” radio into a shortwave. At 11:30pm he started catching American broadcasts from Chunking, South China. News was written on slips of paper and placed in a drawer.
Every morning, the radio was returned to its spot for the usual pro-Japanese reports.
At the beginning of August 1945, something like spring fever spread through the camp.
The secret Newscasts were very promising. The Japanese armies had been defeated; the air force was being depleted; the navy had finally come out of hiding to a suicidal finale.
On Aug. 9, at 7pm, a phone call summoned the guards to headquarters. The next day, the emperor ordered the cessation of hostilities.
The atomic bomb had dealt the last blow to resistance. The Russians, poised along the Manchu border, poured in without sacrificing one man.
Three columns advanced towards Dairen and Port Arthur, leaving command posts in each occupied city.
Three days later, they paid us a visit. By then, a number of us had taken advantage of an offer to return home.
American paratroopers had liberated the top brass, held prisoners in a camp 17 miles from ours.
