Staying Behind, Internment

Abstract

Most of the British male civilians and some of the British women and children who had been in Malaya and Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion spent the next 3½ years in closely-guarded internment. For those who had survived the hazards of the war and had not left by sea in the late evacuation attempts, only the jungle offered a possible alternative to being imprisoned by the Japanese. It was an alternative which few were in a position to attempt and which even fewer could successfully adopt and survive. Those who, like the hospital medical officer in Penang, stayed where they were when the Japanese arrived simply ended up in the same internment camp as others who had joined the movement south to Singapore. While the largest concentration of British civilian internees was in Singapore, there were other internment centres in the islands further south. Many of those who survived the perils of the Bangka Strait remained at Palembang and others who were too late to be evacuated from Padang remained there for the rest of the war, in some cases for the rest of their lives.