A very tough and pushing young officer was made A.P.M. [Assistant Provost Marshall], and he started a counter terror. Third degree was used, and became the rule rather than the exception. This method may have prevented the situation becoming worse, but it didn’t and couldn’t cure it. I objected to it because, although I was all for flogging anyone caught in the act of stealing anything I was dead against beating during interrogation. The whole problem was very difficult owing to the unprecedented circumstances.

For instance, a very feeble-minded member of my own platoon was caught giving his own dose of quinine to a racketeer to raise some money; this fellow had no money at all, had had many long bouts of fever, and was pitifully thin and undernourished. He wanted good food. When he was cross-examined he told me he was given kidney-punches – and that struck me as a vile method to use. On the other hand, when this young A.P.M. himself took out a hefty criminal who’d been caught thieving, and beat him up in the jungle with his own fists, it seemed quite just; the man was a member of a known gang and had been twice previously convicted.

Incidentally Chungkai was the only camp I know of in which a Nip was successfully murdered. One night, a scared N.C.O. woke up his officer and asked to talk to him. He asked the officer whether he knew a certain Nip, who was a peculiarly cruel bastard. The officer did know him. Well, said the N.C.O., he had waited for him that night with a shovel, intending to fix him good and proper – probably breaking a limb or something. But when he spotted the Nip, he saw red, and had killed him. The body was out in the bushes – what should they do? After deliberation the two of them dumped the body down the oldest latrine, and hoped that the maggots would eat it away within a few days. The odd thing was that absolutely nothing more was heard of the affair. No enquiry, no search, nothing! Heaven knows what the Nips thought had happened, because they must have discovered the absence next morning when they all lined up on their roll-call to mumble their daily allegiance to the Imperial Japanese Army and the god Tenno Haika.

One morning we woke up to hear the sound of rifle fire. We learnt later that four men, who had attempted to escape from one of the camps above, had been caught and brought down handcuffed to Chungkai the previous night. At dawn they were taken out near a quarry, made to dig their own graves, and then shot. It must have been done on Yanagida’s orders. Only Japanese were allowed to be present, and no padre was able to read a service over the four graves until after the war.