LIFE AS A FEPOW · SINGAPORE 1942–1945

 

Changi Prison

 

Built by the British to hold 600 prisoners, Changi Gaol became home to thousands of civilian internees — and later to Allied prisoners of war.

 

 

 

A British Prison

 

Changi Prison was completed in 1936 by the British colonial government of the Straits Settlements. Built near the Changi military area at the eastern end of Singapore Island, it was a modern civilian gaol designed to hold around 600 prisoners.

 

When Singapore fell in February 1942, the Japanese turned it into an internment camp — not for soldiers, who were held in the barracks of the Changi area, but for the European civilians of Singapore.

 

 

 

The Civilian Internees

 

More than 3,000 civilians — men, women and children, among them British, Australian and other Allied nationals — were marched to Changi Gaol and crowded into cells built for a fraction of that number. Men and women were held in separate sections, and families were divided.

 

Like the soldiers nearby, the internees faced hunger, disease and the uncertainty of not knowing how long the war would last. They organised schools for the children, lectures, gardens and church services to keep going.

 

 

 

The Changi Quilts

 

In 1942 women internees, led by members of the Girl Guides, made quilts from scraps of fabric. Each woman embroidered a square with her name or a personal design. The quilts were passed to the military hospital for wounded soldiers — a way of letting husbands and relatives held elsewhere know that they were still alive.

 

Several of the Changi quilts survive today and are among the most moving objects of the war in the Far East.

 

 

 

The Double Tenth

 

On 10 October 1943 — the “Double Tenth” — the Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, raided Changi Gaol. They believed internees were linked to a daring Allied raid on shipping in Singapore harbour weeks earlier.

 

Around 57 internees were taken away for interrogation. They were tortured over many months, and 15 of them died. In fact the raid, Operation Jaywick, had been carried out by a small Allied commando team from outside Singapore, with no help from the internees.

 

 

The Double Tenth

 

CHANGI GAOL · 10 OCTOBER 1943

 

 

 

Prisoners of War in the Gaol

 

In May 1944 the civilian internees were moved to Sime Road Camp, and the Allied prisoners of war still in Singapore were moved into Changi Gaol and the huts around it. Thousands of men, many of them sick survivors of the Burma–Siam Railway, were crammed into the prison until the end of the war.

 

After the liberation of Singapore in September 1945, the gaol was used to hold Japanese accused of war crimes. Most of the old prison was demolished in 2004, but its entrance gate and a section of wall were preserved as a reminder of all who were held there.