The Silent March

by Former POW Cicero Rozario

Cícero Laertius do Rozario like other young Portuguese men served in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force and after the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941 was interned at Sham Shui Po prisoner of war camp. He was subsequently transferredto Sendai, Japan with other Portuguese from Hong Kong to work in a forced / slave labour camp. In 2001 he wrote the Silent March of his experiences as a POW at Sham Shui Po. He died in 2004 in Canada aged 85.

The Silent March

It took us twelve hours to get to Shum Shui Po. They could only fit so many on the Star Ferry at one

time, two ferries for 10,000 men, and we had to walk the rest of the way from Tsim Sha Tsui loaded

with our belongings, a twelve-hour march.

Nathan Road was eerily silent. People were lined up on the right side of the road while we walked on the left - friends, relatives and curious gawkers, all as uncertain of their future as we were. You could say nothing if you recognized anyone for fear of receiving the butt end of a rifle or the sharp point of a bayonet. Guards were posted every twenty or thirty yards. I saw Irene Tavares. We made eye contact, that was all. I was dating her before the war.

When we finally arrived at the Camp, an hour later, tired and weary from our march, I discovered I was part of fifty men allotted and housed in each quonset hut.

No. 6 Company had their own hut next to No.5 Company and Field Ambulance of the Hong Kong Vounteer Defence Force. As it happened, all the Volunteers were housed in a row under the command of the same Sargeant Major.

There were also prisoners from other regiments - the Royal Scots, Middlesex, Indian Artillery, Chinese Field Ambulance, Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers. For unexplained reasons, the Chinese and Indians were released shortly after their arrival and it was rumoured that the Portuguese were also slotted for release. But it was only a rumour and our hopes faded quickly when it didn’t happen.

The winter of 1941 felt harsher and colder than we could remember. Partly because we were prisoners of war full of uncertainty as to what would happen to us, or that we even had a future, but mostly because there were no windows or doors to our hut! They had all been stolen.

Keeping the Faith

With the help of the Royal Engineers, we were resourceful enough to successfully scrounge (an euphemism for stealing) for pieces of wood and corrugated metal sheets and made our own doors and shutters.

We were allowed one letter a month to the outside world and, because it was closely scrutinized and censored, we could only send small-talk messages like: "Dear Mom. How are you? I am fine. Your loving son." At least it was a way to let our families know we were still alive.

Father Green said Mass every morning in one of the huts. NadoSilva was also at the Camp and his son

Leonel was Father Green’s aide. The Engineers built a brick altar and our makeshift chapel was quite impressive. One day the Japanese beat up Father Green badly. Nobody knew why.

Our Surreal Microcosm

Our mortuary had no windows or doors and on our walks we could look right in and see the doctors doing their business - a constant reminder of our tenuous existence and our own possible fate like those corpses laying there under inspection.

A pig farm and a vegetable garden the size of a football field added to the strange and surreal microcosm of our existence. The tomatoes. melons and greens were only for the hospital patients with no chance for us to "scrounge" being so heavily guarded by the Japanese and even by our own men. The pigs on the pig farm were as large as cows and the Engineers were delegated the duty of slaughtering them, first by hitting them on the head with a wooden mallet.

Once we watched a pig turn on the Engineeers and chase them around the field! Reinforcements were

brought in to take control of this pig who was smart enough to sense his impending doom and would

not go down without a good fight!

Work Duty

We were put to work at Kai Tak Airport. We cleaned nullahs. We were also assigned the chore of

shoveling down a whole hill to enlarge the airport. Some soldiers died from landslides despite out futile efforts to dig them out.

The First Aid Station under a nearby tree was where we would get some rest by feigning illness. But the Japanese sentries caught on to us pretty fast when the sick grew from two or three to ten from one day to the next. They chased us back to work with fixed bayonets. Nonetheless we were able to sneak in some sleep time unnoticed in the tall grasses around Kai Tak.

Our other big job was at Aberdeen where we had to take oil and kerosene drums down to the pier and

load them onto barges for transport to Lai Chi Kok Socony Installation. There were so many drums that it took us six months to clear the godowns. We would be up at 5am for breakfast and then assembled in the parade ground to be counted. Then we were put on a barge for the hour trip to Aberdeen. Most of us napped on the barge, some chatted while others read books. The Japanese supplied us with quite a good library of books.

Every morning while we were working on the drums an Allied spotter plane would fly over us. And

when the air raid siren went off the Japanese guards ran up the hill as far away from the drums as they

could. But we just sat quietly on the drums because our own spies had informed us about the spotter

plane and the American bombers never bombed the prison camp and seemed to know and avoid the

area of our work duty

...The Yanks Are Coming

One day, shortly after we had taken all the drums to Lai Chi Kok, we were watching for our spotter plane when we heard the sirens go off and we knew this had to be "it" and sure enough as we looked towards Lai Chi Kok we saw the gigantic explosions and the huge billows of black mushroom clouds of smoke and we watched in awe as the drums that we had moved with our muscle and sweat burst and scatter like shrapnel. And, almost simultaneously, the fighter planes followed strafing the godowns till there was nothing left.

The ensuing fire lasted a week. And everyday as we took our bowl of rice at dinner and headed out to the field to watch the fire, we sang "Over there, everywhere, the Yanks are coming..." On one occasion the Japanese guards starting singing with us, not knowing what we were really singing about. If they did we would have had surely met the deadly sharp ends of their bayonets!

We were assigned the clean up of Lai Chi Kok once the fire subsided. It was like entering a wasteland. The trees were gone. Charred remains spread over a one mile. There was nothing left of the godown but a burnt out shell. We were told to gather up what was left of the bullet-riddled drums and move them to the camp to be used for storage. What a strange set of circumstances and events we found ourselves in. The same drums we moved from Aberdeen to Lai Chi Kok and watched explode now ended up in our camp, symbols of our sweat and toil but also symbols of our victory, at least a setback for our enemies and captors.

The Americans continued bombing. The main targets were Kai Tak and the Japanese ships in the harbour. And in that bombing we hoped that our liberation would soon be at hand and we would be back with our families once again. But that would not be for a long while yet...

Work Duties

Although it was against the Geneva Convention to put prisoners to work (an interpreter brought this point up once and was beaten badly), we were given all kinds of jobs to do in and outside the camp. When not assigned labour outside the camp, we had general cleaning duties to attend to that included gardening and even tailoring. I used to unload 250-pound sacks of rice that arrived on delivery trucks!

"Our boys" eventually even took over the cookhouse from the Royal Engineers, having also to chop wet knotty trees for firewood with faulty axes that would fall apart. We dreaded this chopping business.

You could also be called at any time for work duty. Once while we were playing cards we heard the Sergeant Major call out that he needed five men. We all jumped out of the window of the hut and hid. When faced with an empty hut, the Sergeant Major left and corralled the walkers and sightseers along the waterfront for the job! And imagine his surprise and anger when he came back to a hut full of men!

Disease and Death Our Constant Companions

By far the most dreaded job was hospital duty and the endless bedpans. I remember wishing they would all die of dysentery so I would have fewer bedpans to clean. Dysentery did claim the lives of several prisoners. My uncle was taken away to Queen Mary Hospital to be treated and I thought the worse would happen, so when he returned and I told him I thought he was dead, he got angry and chased me around the hut.

Then there was the constant companion of dysentery, flies. The Japanese even offered a bounty of a packet of cigarettes for every 100 flies caught! We went around catching them with our drinking mugs. Some of us even broke the larger flies into two to try to get a better count. It wasn't really necessary because the Japanese never counted them and gave us the cigarettes anyway.

Scabies is like having boils all over your body and those of us who got it had to be scrubbed down with brushes that had long hard bristles. Our bloody backs were nothing compared to the pain inflicted. It was so severe that you would faint with the second pass of the brush. The cure would simply have been to be able to have a more nutritious diet. But we all also knew that was never going to happen.

The diphtheria outbreak was the most devastating. Because we had no serum, men were dropping like the flies we caught. Diphtheria victims would last three days in the hospital and each time someone died, the Japanese sounded the bugle. This practice lasted until ten men died from the disease on the same day.

The Camp Dental Plan

We had a Canadian dentist was thin and weak, suffering from malnutrition. I had toothache and couldn't eat. So I decided to join the queue to see him.

Sendai POW Camp

Back: Henry Ribeiro, Francis Reis, Leo Souza, Cicero Rozario, Jeje Pereira, Tonin Sequeira, Alfred Prata, Richard Silva, Gussy Sequeira, Roberto Souza

Middle: Antonio F. 'Butter' Noronha, Johnny Ribeiro, Jimmy Remedios, Johnny Remedios, Henry Souza, A.C. Neves

Bottom: Billy Wilkinson, 'Mimi' Larcina, Jose Xavier, Roque Silva, Hug o Ribeiro, Dicky Noronha, EAV 'Eddy' Remedios

Collection AA "Junior" Remedios