Viewed from the top of one of the barrack blocks, Selarang was an incredible sight. Round the whole area, ten yards from the buildings, was a barbed wire fence, manned by sentries. Anyone who approached the wire would be shot. Troops were packed everywhere like sardines on every floor, on the roof, in every nook and cranny, but it was hardly possible to lie down; if you did lie down your body was immediately sandwiched between the sweating bodies of your two neighbours. Outside on the square several thousands camped on the asphalt in the open, seeking to keep the daily rain from their belongings with ground sheet and gas-cape bivouacs. There was absolutely no sanitary accommodation. Huge parties of men worked incessantly day and night to dig latrine trenches, 14 feet deep, sufficient for 17,000 men, in the middle of the parade ground, where Field Officers and O.Rs. squatted together in full public gaze. The stink was atrocious, and the flies, harbingers of dysentery, swarmed. Our population density was over 1,000,000 per square mile.

Within 24 hours the flies were thicker, and there were many dysentery and several diphtheria cases. Reasoning with the Nips was out of the question. It was barely possible to move; the most social thing to do was to keep still and sweat as little as possible.

On the third morning the position was still deadlock. And then the Nips put the screw on again. They threatened that unless we signed by 3 p.m. that afternoon, they would move the whole hospital into Selarang. The doctors were already fearing serious epidemics, and the moving in of the hospital would additionally mean the certain deaths of hundreds of dangerously ill cases. The S.M.O. then advised that we should give in. The senior Lieutenant-Colonel took full responsibility on himself, ordered us to sign, and recorded to the I.J.A. that we only signed under heavy duress. Of course we would all have escaped next day had we had the chance, but the Nips were satisfied since their orders from Tokyo had been carried out. That night we were back in our old lines, which had meanwhile been looted by persons unknown.

The Nips used to send us daily copies of their paper The Syonan Times – Syonan being the new name for Singapore. Their new empire they somewhat humourlessly called ‘The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. But behind all their propaganda, particularly about the time of the Battle of the Midway Isles, it was possible to guess at a little of the truth. We noticed that the paper showed scanty interest in its other Axis partners, and we heard stories of Germans in Singapore who drew the line at Samurai barbarism. One story told of a U-boat commander who sincerely apologised to survivors of a British ship he had torpedoed that he must hand them over to the Nips; as he had to re-fuel in Singapore it was unfortunately inevitable.