Themes
Jim Fallace
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Prison camp
After taking the defenders captive, the Japanese forced them to march to various parts of Hong Kong in search of a suitable prison area. The prisoners experienced seriously overcrowded conditions. Despite adequate supplies in the Dockyard, the Japanese issued no food to their captives for five days.
Their ultimate destination was to be Shamshuipo Camp, in northern Hong Kong. Usually prisoners arrived via a badly overloaded ferry which took them to the cCamp’s pier. Fallace and his fellow prisoners landed three miles away where their captors forced them to march the long way around to the camp. It seemed as if the Japanese were making an exhibition of the prisoners to the local population.
They arrived at the camp at 1700 where their captors issued the prisoners with their first meal of the day which consisted of half a cup of rice and water. The conditions in camp were extremely poor. It was filthy with dirt and rubble everywhere. There were no beds, no furniture, no windows and very few doors.
During January 1942 the Japanese moved the prisoners to North Point Camp. Three months later they moved them back to Shamsuipo. All British and Canadian prisoners were under the authority of the Japanese ‘Chief Interpreter’ Nimori who was at all times brutal and callous. His power was far in excess of his innocuous title.
The Japanese military police, the Kempeitei, were most anxious that no information from the outside world reached the prisoners and made frequent searches for radios. They would torture, interrogate to death and summarily execute prisoners if they had a suspicion that a radio existed.
Fallace remained at Shamshuipo until September 1942. It was then that his captors marched him and 1815 other prisoners to the docks and put them on board the steamship Lisbon Maru.
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