The Alexandra Hospital Massacre, 14-15 February 1942

One of the most despicable acts of inhumanity committed in the Far East theatre of war  occurred on 14-15 September 1942.

Dozens of medical staff serving at the British Military Hospital, known as Alexandra Hospital, in Queenstown, Singapore were massacred, along with their patients. This facility, housed in an imposing white colonial-style 1930s building, had a normal capacity for 550 patients, but recent fighting had swelled this number to 900.

Alexandra Military Hospital, Singapore, taken in the 1970s

On 14 February, the hospital found itself caught between Japanese and British troops advancing towards each other. Due to the rationed supply of water and electricity, men from the 32nd Company of the RAMC were struggling to treat patients and corpses were being wrapped in blankets, remaining unburied.

At 1.00 pm on 14 February, the first Japanese soldier approached the building. Captain J.E. Bartlett RAMC walked out to meet him, his hands in the air, and indicated the Red Cross brassard on his arm. The soldier ignored this and fired at him at point-blank range. Amazingly, Bartlett survived and ran back into the building. For the next hour, three groups of Japanese soldiers went from ward to ward, shooting, bayoneting and beating up medics and patients indiscriminately, killing about fifty people.

Captain Lance Parkinson, who had been posted posted to the Alexandra Military Hospital, having lost the toss of a coin with Captain Bill Frankland, was anaesthetising
Corporal Holden of the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire). Holden was bayoneted while on the operating table whilst Parkinson was bayoneted through the abdomen and gravely injured. He escaped to a nearby corridor but collapsed and died less than thirty minutes later.

Captain Tom Smiley, who had been operating on Corporal Vetch – another victim of the Japanese bayoneted on an operating table – was lined up against a wall with several other men. He pointed to his Red Cross brassard and told the Japanese troops that the building was a hospital. In response, one soldier lunged at his chest with a bayonet, striking a cigarette case that had been given to Smiley by his fiancée. This deflected the blow onto his chest. A second soldier bayoneted him through the groin whilst a third attacked him, causing a hand injury. He collapsed onto Corporal Sutton and both men feigned death. Remarkably, both were left alone and survived.

A light and spacious ward at the Alexandra Hospital, December 1941

Around 3.30 pm, 200 men were rounded up, tied into groups of eight and forced to march towards a row of outhouses some distance from the hospital. The gravely injured were not spared and were killed if they fell along the way. Upon reaching their destination the men were divided into groups of fifty to seventy and crammed into three small rooms. Here they were kept without ventilation or water, with no space to sit or lie
down, and many died during the night.

The following morning, 15 February, the remaining men were told that they would receive water. By 11.00 am, the Japanese captors allowed the prisoners to leave the rooms in groups of two on the pretext of them fetching water. However, as the screams and cries of those who had left the rooms could be heard by those still inside, it became clear that the Japanese were executing the prisoners when they left the rooms. The death toll numbered approximately 100 prisoners.

Signaller Reggie Holmes, Royal Corps of Signals. One of the many patients bayoneted to death at the hospital

Suddenly, Japanese shelling resumed and a shell struck the building where the
prisoners were being held. This interrupted the executions and allowed a
handful of men to escape.

Following further cold-blooded murders by his troops, a senior Japanese officer arrived at the hospital at 6.00 pm on Sunday, 15 February and ordered all movement around the hospital to stop. Pointedly, Smiley, having had his wounds dressed by Corporal Sutton, defied the order and carried on tending the wounds of the survivors,
and was soon back operating. For this action, he was later awarded the Military Cross.

The stories of RAMC doctors and orderlies who served in the Far East and across the globe during the Second World War are presented in my recent book Faithful in Adversity: The Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War

Captain Forde Cayley RAMC and the Fall of Singapore

15th February 1942 will forever be remembered as the day that Singapore fell to the Imperial Japanese Army, condemning tens of thousands of Allied troops to horrific years of privations and cruelty at the hands of their captors.

For members of the RAMC attached the captured battalions as Regimental Medical Officers, three-and-a-half years of Japanese captivity would see their medical ingenuity stretched to the limit.

Captain Forde Cayley had been attached to the 5th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, assigned to defend Pongol Point on the north-west coast of the Malay peninsula.

Captain Forde Cayley RAMC

Despite his non-combatant medical status as the Japanese moved ever closer, ‘I was issued with a service revolver and ten rounds and felt now I am really for it.’

Cayley had a dugout to shelter in and, when he considered it safe to do so, visited the
various companies on bike. On his return, he found the dugout had been bombed, leaving many dead and wounded. Withdrawn to the outskirts of the city of Singapore, Cayley’s battalion HQ was established at Raffles College, situated by the riverside quay, and he set up a Regimental Aid Post in the middle of one wing.

The post soon became filled with wounded men. Cayley recalled:

The mortar platoon were under a tree and the mortar hit a
branch above them and blew off an officer’s leg. Another
was hit in the arm and I had to take it off. The Indians from
the units on each side of us sent their wounded in with
bullets penetrating their bowels so the night was made
terrible by their cries for water. A Malay civilian came in
with his sternum ripped away by a shell so that you could
see his heart beating.

By this stage, the Japanese were just 100 yards away so, during a lull in the fighting, Cayley sent an ambulance with the most wounded to a hospital further down the line. Shortly afterwards, he witnessed Japanese tanks in control of the streets, then General Percival being driven along the road to sign the terms of the British surrender. For
Cayley, the war was over, but his nightmare was to last a further three
and a half years.

The moving story of how RAMC doctors like Captain Cayley helped to save the lives of thousands of their fellow prisoners is told in my new book Faithful in Adversity: The Royal Army Medical Corps in the Second World War

Bill Frankland MBE – FEPOW and World-famous Immunologist

You must not go on hating people; it does you harm but it does not do them any harm. Also I am a Christian who was taught to love, not hate. That’s how I live my life.

Those are the words of 103-year-old Bill Frankland, who endured three and a half years of hell after being taken prisoner of war by the Japanese in February 1942.

Dawn and I had the honour of meeting Bill on two occasions; firstly in 2014 in Liverpool when he was due to attend a conference at Alder Hey Hospital, and secondly in the spring of 2015 in the restaurant of the Royal Society of Medicine, London.

 

Bill on his wedding day in 1941

 

When Bill was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore in February 1942, he soon found that the Japanese showed no consideration for the Red Cross on armband of the RAMC.

It made them want to harm you. We were despicable people. We were trying to look after the medical side. They despised us as we’d allowed ourselves to be taken prisoners of war.

Bill had limited access to medicines and his dysentery wing of thirty beds was positioned in the Roberts Barracks, Changi, converted into a hospital with nine hundred beds in all. On one occasion he had to make the awful decision of whether to give the one remaining diphtheria serum to a private who had little chance of survival.

After a year in Changi, Bill was then sent to an internment camp on Blakang Mati Island, then known as Hell Island, now Sentosa. The prisoners were seventy-five percent Australian, with the rest being from the British 18^th Division. Conditions worsened and life became a daily struggle to survive. `You could only think of two things, `when will I next see food, and when will the next beating be?’

In the face of this inhumanity, many men still found the strength to continue the observance of their Christian faith.   After eighteen months on Blakang Mati, the prisoners were given half a day a fortnight during which they could hold a church service led by Australian padre.

The reference to `give us this day our daily bread’ was challenging, `When you haven’t seen bread for three and a half years this is difficult.’ During this time communion bread made was fashioned out of rice and the wine from fermented pineapples.

 

Bill reflects on the many thousands who did not survive the Japanese camps.

 

He finally returned in England in November 1945 and was asked if he wanted to see a psychiatrist to talk through his harrowing experiences. With a typical directness and candour he replied, ‘No, I want to see my wife.’

Bill returned to work and developed an eminent career as an immunologist, continuing to work well past the age of 100.

Bill attends church every Sunday whilst visiting his son in Devon.

Bill Frankland has fought his good fight in many challenging situations. `I’ve been so near death at so many times’, he states. However his uncomplicated Christian faith, his clinical brilliance and his indefatigable mental and physical energy have seen him withstand life’s trials and tribulations.

A fuller account of Bill’s life, based on the two interviews, can be found in my book Fight the Good Fight: Voices of Faith from the Second World War, which can be ordered directly from me at johnbroom@aol.com at a cost of £18 including p+p.

Eric Cordingly, Harry Stogden and the Changi Cross

Two of the most moving examples of the ways in which the FEPOW experience affected the inner spiritual lives of the men who had to endure it are those of Army Chaplain Eric Cordingly, and Sgt. Harry Stogden.

Eric Cordingly was a rector from the Cotswolds when the Second World War broke out.  He volunteered as an army chaplain and experienced the Dunkirk retreat before finding himself in Singapore in February 1942, being captured by the Japanese.

Eric Cordingly inside Changi Chapel

Through three and a half years in captivity Eric continued his ministry, creating chapel wherever he was, including by the infamous Thai-Burma Railway. The first of these chapels was in the Changi Barracks and was christened `St George’ after the insignia of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers of which he was a part.  The building had previously been a mosque used by the Indian army when they were stationed at Changi.  Men set to work creating the fixtures and fittings using what tools and materials they could find and created a beautiful space to worship.

The former mosque which became St George Chapel, drawn by POW Eric Stacy

One particularly charming story was told by Eric in Down to Bedrock:-

`…on a wet afternoon a little bearded Indian arrived on the pillion of a motorcycle.  He came straight to me where I was busy giving a talk in Church.  He introduced himself as the Moslem priest whose mosque we were now using.  He had coem for his prayer books, which fortunately I had saved and kept hidden in my cupboard.  He was overjoyed to receive them, and in `pidgin’ English we introduced each other as `padres’ of religion.  He rather surprised me with his broadminded remark that he was glad that I was using his building, and that it was being used for the worship of God.’

Eric also led the `Theological Faculty’ at the `University’ set up in the camp.  He oversaw the education of around thirty men, with no books or teaching aids to help him.  Regular services were held in the chapel, with a daily morning communion, evening prayers, choir practices and instruction for those wishing to be confirmed as Anglicans.  Communion took place using a concoction of raisins, water and sugar as the wine.

Eric wrote:-

I shall hope to be able to convince the reader of what is at present felt by us all, namely a growing religious life centred around our Church of St George.  No priest could wish for a happier “parish” or sphere of work…We seem somehow to ahve back to fundamentals and simple wholesome worship, and we all feel the need for a real religion and all this in spite of the unpleasantness of Captivity, lack of nourishing food, and the tropical heat.  My own life personally is richer by these experiences…Iam sure this experience is something I shall value forever.’

One of the items made for the chapel was a brass altar cross, the base being fashioned from a Howitzer shell case. Eric drew the design and the cross itself was made by Sgt Harry Stogden of the RAOC.  The cross went with Eric up the line to the Thai-Burma railway, back to Changi and eventually to Eric’s mantelpiece during his subsequent career which saw him rise to the position of Bishop of Thetford.  In 1992 Eric’s family returned to cross to Changi where today it adorns the chapel in the museum as a symbol of hope and reconciliation and to remind visitors of the strength of the human spirit when facing the most adverse conditions.

The Changi Cross – from Changi to Kanchanaburi to Changi to Gloucestershire to Norfolk and back to Changi!

Tragically the maker of the cross, Harry Stogden, died in 1945 whilst en route back to England.  However his son, Bernard, was able to attend the ceremony to place the cross on the altar at the museum’s chapel, bringing him closer to the father he never knew.

Staff Sergeant Harry Stogden

This story is moving in so many different ways – the tragedy of the lives lost unnecessarily due to starvation and preventable diseases, including that of Harry Stogden, the strength of character and moral purpose shown by Eric Cordingly and many others under the most unimaginable conditions, and the inspiration which both Eric, Harry and those mentioned in the books are able to carry on providing due to the generosity of their families in bringing their remarkable stories to a wider audience.

The last word is from Eric Cordingly, writing two decades after these experiences in Beyond Hatred (ed. Guthrie Moir, Lutterworth Press, 1967):-

`It was the most wonderful time of my life, in spite of the grim and hungry times. For once, and for three and a half years, the thin veneer of civilization, or reticence, had been stripped from men. We were all down to bedrock. One saw people as they really were…the truly remarkable thing was the way the human spirit rose to magnificent heights. After months of sheer degradation, gradually the spirit to care for one another revived, incredible kindness and self-sacrifice was in evidence’

The full story of Eric Cordingly and the Changi Cross is one of twenty case studies in my new book, Fight the Good Fight: Voices of Faith from the Second World War