Through this radio, too, I always had an exact picture of how the war against Japan was going, and this picture unfortunately heightened my sense of the special peril of which I have spoken; because nowhere in any of the many theatres of the campaign in Asia did it show, either in the minds of those responsible for Allied war policy or those of the enemy, the slightest hint of what the Japanese would regard as an ‘honourable’ alternative to fighting according to the logic of their spirit, and their sense of history: namely, the annihilation of themselves and of all those of their enemies whom they held as prisoners.
Then, suddenly, towards the end of 1944, by what seemed to me at the time a miracle, I established contact with a source which enabled me to look as it were through a keyhole into the minds and intentions of the Japanese military command. I owed this again to my Chinese friends still at liberty outside our prison walls.
They sent me a message one day that a Korean Christian working for the Japanese military intelligence in the island had asked to be put in touch with me.
At first I feared a trap, and for many weeks I sent no reply to his offer. For once I did not even consult Nichols, who was so close to me, because I felt it vital that, if I accepted the offer and it proved a trap, he should in no way be involved and that I alone should pay the penalty, which would, of course, have been death by one of the several disagreeable forms of execution I had witnessed.
I do not know, however, whether I would have taken up the contact, much as it might have helped me, if, despite my silence, this Korean had not begun to send me scraps of information which were proved true by subsequent events and were of real value to us.
He would inform me, for instance, that the Japanese were planning to send some hundreds of prisoners from other parts of the island to join us. He would give me both numbers and dates accurately, and well in advance, so that we could make plans for their reception and readjust our resources accordingly. He it was, for example, who told me of the coming of a party of British prisoners-of-war who had been sent not long after our capitulation to build an aerodrome on the small island of Haruko, near the greater island of Ambon in the far east of the Javanese Archipelago. He told me how hundreds of them had died on the island, through both the inefficiency of the Japanese system of logistics and the brutality of the Japanese military in command there. He said that the prisoners were coming back starved and dying, travelling in such terrible conditions that not many of them would survive the journey. He also warned me that the members of the Japanese prison staff responsible for the worst of the atrocities on Haruko would be returning with the party, to assume positions of high responsibility in prisoner-of-war camps in Java.
This communication from him, even in the staccato form of transmission in which it reached me through the Chinese, proved not only to be true, but established clearly that, to know details of events so far away from Java and of plans so far in advance, he must occupy a central position in the Japanese system of intelligence.
I think none of us who saw the day that his story proved true could possibly ever forget it, because the few survivors of an original party of some fifteen hundred men who came into camp looked like pictures of the last inmates of Belsen on the day of their liberation. The story of their journey from Haruko to Java was in every way as terrible as my Korean informant had predicted.
Among the survivors was a Royal Air Force officer whom I had known well. Yet I did not recognize him until he spoke his name ‘Blackwood’. He did so in a voice which I could hardly hear. Blackwood told me that on the long journey by sea, in a small ship short of water and food, guarded by soldiers who never went short of either, his men died so fast that they were throwing the corpses over the side at the rate of seventeen to twenty-seven a day and that they hardly had the strength to do even that.
Moreover the worst of their guards appeared on the staff of our own camp, like the unbelievable warrant officer Gunzo Mori and his Korean satellite – a tiny young man of unlimited energies, resource, and variety of mood: a complex mixture of extreme sadistic impulses and unpredictable generosity, who had adopted the Japanese name of Kasayama and who was to be condemned later by a war crimes tribunal to death by hanging, side by side with his Japanese over-lord.
Their end has never ceased to haunt me, because in the thick fog of unknowing that enshrouded the spirit of our captors these two, Mori and Kasayama, among all the many extremes of character I met, seemed to me to know the least what they were doing.
Yet even this, important as it is to me, is not the reason why I mention the Haruko incident. I do so because of the role it played in making me begin to realize how reliable and valuable an informant the Korean on the Japanese staff could be. By way of confirmation, soon after this he told me of a plan to move hundreds of the fittest of our men and officers to work on some Japanese scheme in Sumatra.
Without yet committing myself fully to a system of exchange with him, beyond a brief word of thanks delivered through the Chinese, I took him at his word and warned Nichols, so that it enabled us to select the fittest among our men and officers for this move, and to put them on as generous a diet as we could afford, so that they would have the greatest possible chance of surviving the ordeal in front of them.
With the impact of Haruko still fresh in our minds, we had no doubt that the ordeal would be extreme and that even with a maximum increase in their diet, considering at what a low level the physical stamina of the average person in camp already was, few of them might survive the experience.
This forewarning alone put us in debt to this Korean, for without it I am certain most of this great working party, which indeed left our camp for Sumatra some weeks later, could not have survived – as we were overjoyed to find at the end of the war most of them had done.
From this moment on I was convinced that I had no option but to do all I could to encourage this contact. Yet I was still not sure that all this might not be some bait, some subtle Japanese means of finding out whether I, who had been released in the beginning into a regular prisoner-of-war camp under extreme suspicion, and had been lucky indeed to escape instant execution after my capture, was not plotting in some way against them – though heaven knows what one could possibly have plotted in such horribly reduced and restricted circumstances!
I am ashamed to say that this suspicion of my Korean informant never entirely left me until the end, and that I took the utmost precautions in any answers I sent him to make them as innocent as possible; though I knew that if the Japanese ever discovered that I had been in touch with him at all, no innocence of answer on my part would be enough to save me from extreme retribution. I doubt whether I would have been able to persuade myself to continue some eighteen months of underground association with him in spite of the usefulness of his information if it had not been for three factors: one, that my Chinese friends obviously trusted him and that they themselves were never exposed and never got into trouble with the Japanese military. Two, that he never asked me for information about ourselves and our life in camp. All he did was to stress repeatedly that he was doing what he was doing because he was a Christian and hoped that as a result of any services that he might have rendered through me, he himself would be excluded from the Allied retribution on the Japanese that would follow their defeat (of which he appeared to be as convinced as I myself was). This reassurance I readily gave him.
The third factor was that he bore the endearing Kipling name of Kim. I did not know at the time that there are as many Kims in Korea as there are Smiths in Britain or Joneses in Wales. In this tiny prison world of isolation and danger, it was extraordinary how one’s imagination, always in danger of drowning in the sense of death and disaster which surrounded us, clutched at straws. Ridiculous as it may sound, it was the coincidence that his name was the same as that of one of my favourite characters in fiction, and that this character was known to all the multitudinous world of India as ‘Little friend of all the world’, that perhaps more than anything else encouraged me to go on communicating with him to the end.