What’s It Like to be 10 Seconds from Death?
Survivors’ accounts from the Alexandra Hospital Massacre, Singapore.
By Stuart Lloyd
The front of Alexandra Hospital (1939)
That steamy Saturday, 14 February 1942, the Japanese attacked the hospital in three closely-spaced waves. The first wave was a platoon who infiltrated the hospital front and barracks block around 3pm. A second platoon hit the rear entrance of the Admission room, medical wards 5 and 6, and the patients’ dining room ward. Then a third platoon would wash in through the windows to the operating theatre block and surgical wards 16 and 17 at the south end of the ground floor.
Amid the chaos and confusion they would’ve felt like simultaneous events. It was to be a two-day tsunami of terror.
The 3 waves of the Japanese attack on the Alexandra British Military Hospital (Image courtesy: Stuart Lloyd) (Click to enlarge)
In Ward 17 was 23-year-old Fergus Anckorn. A keen amateur athlete and budding magician who’d leave his fellow gunners spellbound with his tricks, he had signed up imagining plenty of exotic travel in foreign climes. He was half right. But now he lay prone, hand bandaged after it was blown nearly clean off in an air attack, and was surgically re-attached.
The ward door burst violently open. ‘They opened it with a hand grenade,’ said Australian Pte Alex Drummond (1), a Victorian who’d joined the 2/29th just months before. ‘Then an orgy of sadism began. They first fired indiscriminate volleys from rifles, then knocked down and bayonetted all orderlies in the vicinity of the door. They then set out by any means possible to terrorize the patients. They began to loot for valuables, and destroy what they considered to be of little value. This was done with inhuman brutality, those not fortunate enough to have valuables were jabbed with bayonets, tipped off their beds, and clubbed with rifle butts.’
Gunner Fergus Anckorn, circa 1941 (image courtesy: Fergus Anckorn)
Anckorn was drifting in and out of consciousness, probably still in the grip of morphine. ‘Isn’t that a Jap soldier?’’ he asked. (2)
‘Yes, it’s a Jap.’
‘I’d never seen a Jap before at closer than three or four miles,’ he told me. ‘Suddenly I could hear many feet coming into the ward and a kind of thumping noise. Thud! Thud! Thud! “They’re bayonetting everybody,” said the man next to me, calmly. There were no cries, no screams, nothing. I pulled up my pillow with my one good hand and covered my face. I muttered, “Poor mum”. I must have looked dead so they left me,’ he thought.
‘Funny thing when you realize you are going to be dead in 10 seconds, there is no fear at all. There is nothing you can do about it, there is nothing to fear because you will be off the planet. I did not hear one person cry out. It’s amazing isn’t it? Once you realize it’s all over, there’s nothing to worry about.’
21-year-old Gunner Dick Lee, 21, was a keen motorcyclist who enjoyed rides in the English countryside with his girlfriend on the back. He became a dispatch rider for the commander of 11th Division Indian Army, and was blown off his bike in Johor. Now he was receiving a blood transfusion, with one foot in plaster, the other up on a cradle at the western end of Block 4. ‘In other words, anyone coming from the outside in, I was the first one.’
Like Fergus, this would be his first up-close encounter with the Japanese, despite being bombed and harassed from the air so many times.
‘All of a sudden I could hear screams,’ Lee told me. ‘And shooting outside the door. And a few shots here and there now and again. And then it just went silent. A little sense told me somebody was near me. And I looked up and two of the biggest bastards you’ve seen … and the one nearest me lifted up the sheet with his bayonet – about 18-inches long -- to have a look under. Because I had me leg up in a cradle. I don’t know if he thought I had a f***kin’ machine gun or something underneath, I mean you don’t know what they’re thinking. And as he looked at me he grinned down and I could see this bleedin’ gold tooth he had in his mouth, and he let the sheet down.’ Phew!
Gunner Dick Lee, circa 1940 before shipping to India and Malaya (Image courtesy: Dick Lee)
‘Then this Australian came walking down the stairs with his arm in a sling,’ said Dick in bed at the bottom of the staircase. ‘He had his pyjama trousers on, so the top half of his body was bare. He’s come down with all this screaming and shooting outside. And as he’s come to the foot of the stairs more or less opposite where I was, he stopped and leaned against the pillar. And a Jap walked straight over and shoved the bayonet straight into his gut. As he stepped back, I saw the Aussie put his other hand up to his stomach and all the blood was running out of his fingers and he just slumped down to the floor.’
Medical orderlies sprang into action. ‘They came and took the Aussie away and later I found out he survived the bayonet wound,’ said Lee. ‘After that there was groups of them started to come in. You could hear screams, shooting outside. And of course the first lot that come in are pointing to their wrist, their watch, their rings. And they’re wanting all the stuff. The first bunches that came in were getting all the plunder. The watches, the rings, the pens, and everything, whatever there was. Then the shooting started further down the corridor. Then they go out and another lot comes in.’
The demands to turn over their valuables started up all over again. ‘And you’re trying to tell them and they can’t understand you that their pals have got the gear,’ said Lee. ‘And they’re tipping them off stretchers, tipping over beds, looking under the bleedin’ mattresses, thinking we’re hiding the stuff. And bayonetting and killing. Where I was lying, they got nine or ten orderlies that was trying to help the wounded, got ‘em outside, took ‘em outside the door where I was, along with a British officer, and I could hear a lot of talking and shouting outside. And all of a sudden I heard some shooting and some screams, then they sent the officer back in, as white as a sheet. They bayonetted and shot ‘em outside.’
Amid all this madness, at the other end of the hospital, Fergus Anckorn came to again, and something altogether different was taking place. ‘Suddenly all the walking wounded were being walked out of the ward,’ he said. ‘Hands tied together with barbed wire, and behind them a soldier with a bayonet.’
‘What are they doing?’ he asked.
‘They’re using them for bayonet practice …’
In all, up to 300 Allied soldier-patients and doctors were killed that weekend in and around the hospital in a series of war crimes that remained the subject of controversial cover-ups and conspiracies for 80 years.
Citations:
(1) MSS 1530 recollection by Alex Hatton Drummond 2/29th AIF, Australian War Memorial
(2) Gunner Fergus Anckorn, 55th Div, RA, interview with Stuart Lloyd, 11/06/2015
(3) Gunner Dick Lee, RA, 11th Division, interviews and emails with Stuart Lloyd, September 2015.
Bio:
This is an edited extract from A Bleeding Slaughterhouse – The Outrageous True Story of the Alexandra Hospital Massacres, Singapore, February 1942, by Stuart Lloyd, military historian and best-selling author described as ‘the perfect storyteller’ by The Telegraph, UK. See catmatdog.com/ableedingslaughterhouse