[Excerpts] ...

[...]

Among other things our liberators felt they needed to reorient our minds. They feared that Japanese propaganda might have played havoc with our enfeebled brains which in any case knew nothing of the tragic events of the conflict. Thus we were required to attend sessions in which we were told about the sequence of events in the Pacific war and its litany of atrocities, ending with the final apocalyptic bombing of Japan which had resulted in the capitulation of the Empire of the Rising Sun. And we knew nothing about the atomic bomb! Loudspeakers had been set up all around the camp and these put out music all day long. Every morning at 7 a.m. we were awakened by the strains of

Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a beautiful day.
I’ve got a wonderful feeling,
Everything’s going my way…

It was not long before we had had enough of being dragged out of our sleep so very bright and early. The more so as one fine morning an absent-minded liberator put the record on at 6 a.m.! The captain charged with our reeducation was somewhat lacking in humour. During one evening’s entertainment with a group of young folk who were used to putting on campfire sketches, we gently depicted him as a donkey: he took the point….

[excerpt]

Such slowness and shilly-shallying seemed to us hardly necessary and was delaying our getting back to work from which we had already been missing for a good thirty months. The young especially were chafing at the bit. Two of them, who couldn’t take any more of it, had stealthily left camp and were following the railway line to get to Tsingtao on foot, a distance of some 100 km. They were caught three kilometres down the line and brought back to camp, sheepish and discomfited.

Finally, towards the end of September, a first contingent was evacuated by lorry to Tsingtao. As for us, we had to mark time until the 17th of October 1945, when we left camp in a lorry which took us to the airfield. There a Douglas DC 47, fitted with sideways-on metal seats, took us to Peking, fifty at a time. This was the only way to empty the camp: the railway and the roads were blocked or cut by the communist army.

A civil war was beginning…

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/hanquet/book/Memoires-TotaleUK-web.pdf

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