Posted on 09/28/2017 7:21:47 AM PDT by Thistooshallpass9
On the morning of December 8, 1941, tens of thousands of American and British civilians living in China woke up to learn that the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor had been bombed by Japanese forces. Their nations were suddenly at war with Imperial Japan. The Japanese had invaded China years earlier, and the troops stationed there wasted no time turning these Westerners—who were now part of the enemy—into prisoners of war. “They appeared the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked,” Mary Previte told the Trumpet. “We were now the prisoners of the great emperor of Japan, they said.”
Previte had just turned 9 years old when the Japanese stormed her boarding school. Her parents were working as missionaries in central China, while she and her siblings lived in Shandong province on the country’s east coast. There they attended the Chefoo School, which had been established to give British and American children living in China the chance to receive a Western-style education in English.
Before Pearl Harbor, Mary’s time at Chefoo had been peaceful. But after the attack and the subsequent declaration of war, the situation drastically changed. “[T]hey began going through the campus and the buildings and putting seals with Japanese writing, saying, This belongs to the great emperor of Japan,” she said.
For a year, the Japanese let Mary and her schoolmates and teachers continue living on the Chefoo campus. But it was located on a choice piece of seaside real estate that the Japanese soon determined would be useful for military purposes. “They wanted this beautiful school to be a Japanese naval base,” Previte said.
So in November of 1942, the soldiers herded up the Chefoo prisoners and relocated them to a concentration camp three miles across town. The camp consisted of four medium-sized houses, each of which had 60 to 70 students and teachers crowded into it. “We did not have even one inch between mattresses on the floor,” she said.
The camp was cramped, the people hungry, and the situation bleak. But one of Mary’s teachers made a decision that changed everything for her and the other children.
STRUCTURE, GRATITUDE, MERIT BADGES
“She just decided she was going to start a Brownie group,” Previte said. This young teacher decided that in an effort to preserve the students’ childhoods during the war, she would work to keep them full of optimism and gratitude—and busy learning and earning merit badges.
Several other Chefoo teachers joined the effort: Previte remembers Miss Ailsa Carr, Miss Beatrice Stark and Miss Broomhall, all between the ages of 20 and 25. For the boys, they set up a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout troop. For the older girls, they established a Girl Guide unit (known as Girl Scouts in the United States).
From the beginning, the teachers decided to operate these youth units as if they were the same as those in peacetime. Concentration camp or not, they were going to be orderly, cheerful, productive and polite.
“[W]e were to have nice manners like the princesses in Buckingham Palace,” Previte said. “You could be on a wooden bench, eating out of a soap dish or an empty tuna can, and you might be eating boiled animal brains or what the Chinese would feed their animals, and the teachers would come up behind you and say ‘Mary, do not talk with food in your mouth. There are not two sets of manners, one for the concentration camp and one for Buckingham Palace in England.’”
THE MOVE TO WEIHSIEN
After around 10 months in the camp, the Japanese moved Mary and the other prisoners again. They shipped them by boat, train and truck to the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Center. At this larger concentration camp, the Chefoo captives joined some 1,200 other prisoners of war, mostly from Europe and Great Britain.
“There were men, women and children, old and young. People were born there, and people died there,” she said.
In Weihsien, there was a little more breathing room, but food remained scarce, and many prisoners were starving. Previte says they learned to eat certain weeds growing in the camp, such as pigweed, for calories.
Some prisoners also developed a system of bartering over the compound walls, which was hazardous because of the punishment dealt out to anyone engaging in it. But by this system, they occasionally obtained eggs. In such rare cases, the pows learned not to let any part of them go to waste. Her teachers would grind the shells into powder and feed it to the children by the spoonful. The adults said “that was pure calcium for us, and for our bones,” she said.
Mary’s days were filled with arduous work—mopping floors, cooking, scrubbing clothes, swabbing latrines, pumping water, and carrying and burning trash.
The relocation to Weihsien, the unending scarcity of food and the laborious drudgery did not put an end to the youth organizations. By this time, Mary was 11 and had graduated from the Brownies to the Girl Guides.
She remembers that twice a day, the captives lined up for roll call, and the soldiers were often late to arrive to take count. Mary and the others in the youth troops did not let this time go to waste. While waiting, “we were practicing for our semaphore and Morse Code,” she said.
The practice paid off. Mary eventually earned a merit badge for getting the Morse Code down, and one for semaphore. She also remembers earning a badge for folk singing and another for learning to build a fire. “I don’t know where the teachers got the matches for us,” she said, “but somehow or another we would have a little tin can, and we would figure out how to make a little grate inside the can, and practice lighting a fire inside it.”
ADVERSITY BECOMES OPPORTUNITY
Earning merit badges for such activities as Morse Code and kindling fires is fairly standard around the world for members of these youth organizations. But for the children in the Weihsien camp, there were a few unique activities.
For example, in the summers the Weihsien prisoners suffered severe bed bug infestations. “They would get you at night,” she said, “and you would wake up in the morning and find a little trail of bites up your legs, arms and tummy.”
But in this trial, the teachers saw an opportunity for the children. “They said, ‘OK, we’ll make it an adventure,’” Mary remembers. Each child would let one fingernail grow longer than the others, and at a designated time each weekend, they would all wage meticulous war on the pests. “Every Saturday would be ‘The Battle of the Bed Bugs,’” she said. “You went through every crack and cranny. If you had a pillow, you would go through the seam, to kill any egg or any bug. That was the game!”
Bed bugs were not the only pests the prisoners had to battle. “Sanitation was horrible,” Previte said. “We didn’t have nice toilets to flush.” The poor hygiene conditions spawned multitudes of flies, which could potentially spread diseases.
The youth troop leaders again turned adversity into opportunity. “They said whoever gets the most flies will get a prize,” Previte explained. She remembers one occasion when her younger brother, John, won a weekly competition. “I don’t know how many thousands of flies he got in a little can,” she says, but he “got the prize!”
During the winters, the prisoners had to fight against a different enemy: the cold. Each room was furnished with a pot-bellied iron stove, but the Japanese did not give the prisoners coal. They only gave them access to coal dust, which pows had to transport from the soldiers’ barracks to the prisoners’ dorms.
“We little girls in that dormitory, 13 of us, would make a long line of girl, bucket, girl, bucket, girl, bucket,” she said. They found this bucket brigade to be the most efficient way to move the heavy dust into the dormitories. The process took hours, but Mary and the others passed the time faster by singing. “We would make a little tune,” she said, and then burst into the very melody that was the soundtrack to their toil: “Many hands make light work; many hands make light work!”
Mary’s teachers also created a game to see which pair of girls could get their stove the hottest. Mary became overwhelmed with emotion remembering that on one occasion, she and a friend won. “Can you believe this? I’m remembering from more than 70 years ago the pride that I felt when Marjorie Halverson and I got the pot-bellied stove red hot with the fire we started,” she said.
FATHER, MOTHER AND TEACHER
Previte said that the champions of this story were the young Chefoo instructors who led the youth troops.
Even as Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya fell to the Japanese, and even as Burma collapsed and the Philippines was invaded, the teachers kept the children from succumbing to dread. “I did not see my parents for 5½ years,” she said. “So think of this: A teacher becomes substitute parents, but they absolutely were not going to let us forget that God was taking care of us, and that they were going to take care of us.”
Even knowing the atrocities the Japanese had committed in the Nanking Massacre, and even as the Weihsien prisoners slowly starved as the years went by, the teachers kept the children focused on their education, on earning merit badges, on making the best of what they had.
“Did we lose weight?” she asked. “Absolutely. Were we undernourished? Absolutely. Yes, there were terrible conditions, but the teachers were protecting us with everything they could.”
CONVEYING GRATITUDE
Previte said it was only after she reached adulthood that she was able to understand the peril that she and the other children had faced during the war. It was only then that she could grasp the enormity of the Chefoo teachers’ achievement. She said for a child to endure those squalid conditions and still say, “Wow, we did great!” after successfully completing a given activity or earning a merit badge was “an absolutely amazing triumph.”
In 1985, decades after the American forces had liberated the Weihsien camp, she tracked down some of her teachers to thank them. She asked Ailsa Carr what it was like to bear that heavy burden, during a time when the Japanese war machine was devouring more and more of Asia and becoming more ruthless.
Mary’s former teacher told her that she knew the Japanese were digging mass graves outside the Weihsien compound walls. Carr added: “I would pray to God every night that He would let me be one of the first when they lined us up by the death trench and began shooting.”
“I said, ‘Miss Carr, I had no idea. I had no idea,’” Previte said.
Not many situations in life would be as hopeless as a rat-infested, bed-bug ridden, tragically overpopulated and starving concentration camp. And the desolation of life there could have easily overcome Mary Previte and the others of the Chefoo School.
But that did not happen.
Mary Previte is now 84 and living in New Jersey, where she served as a representative of the sixth legislative district from 1998 to 2006. It was some 75 years ago when her teachers established those youth units that shielded her from hopelessness. Speaking about it, she bursts with childlike joy and energy, sounding like she is 10 years old once again. “What a gift those teachers gave to us!” she said.
The teachers’ gift was that they enabled the children to entrust their anxieties to them. This helped them stay positive, productive and grateful through it all.
In 1 Peter 5:7, followers of Christ are instructed to do likewise toward God: “Throw the whole of your anxiety upon Him, because He Himself cares for you” (Weymouth New Testament). Psalm 55:22 assures us that God is more reliable than any physical teacher could ever be in helping to shoulder our worries: “Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken” (New American Standard Bible). The Bible also tells us, in Philippians 4:8, that it is vital, during times of crisis and calm alike, to maintain positivity: “[W]hatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
When any of us is in the midst of a time of trial or crisis, with our anxieties entrusted to God, and with our minds set to remain grateful and positive, we too can survive—and grow.
My aunt, as a child, spent the war in Changi (Singapore) civilian camp with her mother, her father was in a different part of the camp.
I read once where prisoners brought into concentration camps would either succumb to despair and die within a few weeks or become determined to make it through, often finding their strength in God.
Give so much to your captors that they give hou the nickname, “Songbird.”
As a 20-year old, he was taken from Java in the back of a truck at the place he was to register with the Japanese after the Dutch Royal Army capitulated after their first major battle, "Tjiater."
They were brought to wherever the Japanese needed workers for a job done. There they toiled, most often in the hot open air (think Bridge Over the River Kwai, though he didn't work that particular project). They usually bedded down under the stars where there was essentially no obvious camp. That is, there were generally no walls, facilities other than newly dug latrine, no barbed wire, etc. They were told, "Don't cross this line, or that line, or go past that berm, or you'll be shot." It didn't take the regularity of too many men being shot before everyone clearly had the message: You don't do that if you wish to survive. Many other things were "learned" if one didn't want the most common form of punishment, a rifle butt to the face or back.
Escaping into the countryside wasn't really an option, as Europeans would stick out like a sore thumb among the straight-black-haired, darker-skinned population, and even the people who might in humanitarian fashion be sympathetic to a POW's plight could not count on the silence of someone nearby who knew just a little betrayal would likely mean a reward awaiting them if they reported an escaped POW to the Japanese authorities.
Food and nourishment--down to the calorie--was all increasingly honed toward survival just insofar as to return the needed amount of work for the Japanese soldiers. When the food intake's calories had been expended, it was time (in the big, ongoing experiment) for one's body mass to kick in for the rest of the energy that would be required. As this would be discussed among the men, he watched those around him and ultimately he would calculate that the Japanese must have considered only keeping a POW for no more than 2-3 years before he would die to make room for other, "fresher/newer" and healthier prisoners. He called the whole system a meat grinder. The Japanese would put the fresh men in, turn the crank and eventually what would come out was ground meat only the worms could enjoy.
Somewhat by happenstance, the POWs in his area would find themselves near the ocean or a fresh water stream. To lessen the stress on supplies, the POWs were allowed to fish. Circumstances reinforced my dad's love for fishing. He grew to be pretty good at it.
His catches would occasionally allow him to trade fish with other POWs. The more common currency--which wasn't as taboo as trading fish--was cigarettes, which were often "functional" and prized. I gather to minimize (micro) black market activities, dealing in fish was a lower-rung, lesser "crime."
Once my father used some free time to fish in a fresh-water stream in the midst of the village where they were bivouacked. After a Japanese soldier observed him and caught him trading the fish for cigarettes, my dad was brought to his Dutch officers, who were told that he needed to be punished. The actual form of the punishment would be left up to the officers.
There were some prisoners in poorer health, with dysentery and the like. Their clothes and bedding most often became quickly filthy. The undesirable task of tending to those needs fell to healthier men, who rarely seemed poised to volunteer. We may have the meme of a punishment to be "put on KP," but for them lower-level punishment involved washing the clothes and bedding of the infirm as well as one's own.
It was every bit the rotten job from which one could easily fall ill as well, especially if one were tempted to make shoddy work of it all, about which my dad had a sense. So he did a good job with it. But the real eye-opener for him--something that unexpectedly changed his life--was to see the fundamental human gratitude in the eyes of those to whom he returned clean bedding and clothes. These were people who had almost nothing else in the world, and for whom it made all the difference of hope for the future--over which they almost no control, outside their gratitude--that is, to have clean things next to one's skin.
Such gratitude was prized by my father. It offset the awful nature of the filthy punishment he'd been given. So when his punishment ended (noting he didn't seem to grumble about it or object to it as many others were known to do), he was asked if he wouldn't continue, to which he agreed.
To make a long story short, he became increasingly respected, and as they moved to more official camp surroundings, he was willingly assigned to the infirmary and did many of the nursing chores that were required--think wound scaping. His work became prized by the few POW doctors he met and worked with. He got exemption from having to do the heavy mining work assigned to most, where he was eventually placed (45 km across the bay from a city called Nagasaki), Omuta.
To make a long story short, while those "of the vintage" as those with whom he had shared his first evacuation from Java were mostly gone and buried, he was a survivor. Where other POWs daily expended 600+ calories more than they took in, he only expended 200 more calories than he took in (ok, I've forgotten whatever actual caloric numbers he told me. These numbers are just my place-holders, but the gist is correct.)
After that really big Nagasaki "ammo dump" got hit that day, many of the guards fled to the countryside to look after their families, leaving the camp poorly attended, guard-wise. The prisoners at Camp Fukuoka #17 decided (no, viscerally reacted) that the remaining guards' time had come to depart the Earth in thanks for their wonderful POW treatment. No guns, just bare hands, limb from limb, flesh and sinew from bone.
The inmates would quickly overrun the camp and make it their fortress against retribution that never came. They sent out patrols to get more supplies and weapons, if possible. They at some point were showered with Allied leaflets instructing what to do. They were eventually evacuated through ships at Nagasaki's harbor to Manilla where he spent a supremely grateful "Thanksgiving" a tradition previously almost unknown to him, but one which would become an indelibly positive representation of that which would only a decade later become his children's native land.
On January 1, 1946 he appeared at his parents' home in Bandung, Java. Weighing the proverbial 20 kilos (88 lbs.) even after three months of American fatted calves, his parents didn't even recognize him--that is, until the weeping began.
This is an fascinating account. I really appreciate you posting the details of his story.
Thanks both.
This is one of the reasons I tune in to FR.
How different history class would be if every week another hero would be honored from the time being studied. Can’t though because too many would be offended by the evil of some.
That’s why I love the Bible. Always keeping myself aware of the traps the Father of Lies has set, is setting and will set, for mankind is important. Plus I learn how to follow in God’s footprints, evading those mines, knowing He will keep me safe.
Thanks for adding the direct link
Thank you!
not all links on site are active but that’s ok.
You could write books. Amazing story.
Thanks! I’ve got one published.
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