billPOW

=CHANGI PRISON=



The Changi Prison is a prison located within the Changi region of Singapore. It was opened in 1936 by the British government as a civilian prison, but as the war begun Singapore was under intense threat of the Japanese. In 1942 they successfully captured Singapore, all weapons were surrendered and remaining allies became prisoners of war. They soon detained over 3,000 civilians from within the country and had locked them in Changi prison, despite the prison only having the capacity to fit 600. The Selarang British army barracks became a POW camp, holding approximately 50,000 allied soldiers over its entire lifespan. The demographic mainly consisted of British and Australian men. Although the captured allies were never actually held in Changi Civilian prison, but at the barracks, in British and Australian WWII history, Changi has become synonymous with talk of POW camps. Prisoners recalled the barracks as overcrowded, which during summer made it unbearably hot within the small and cramped walls. The Japanese soldiers let the allied men sleep outside during hot nights and allowed commanders to still control their troops whilst in the prison, so as to maintain order and keep morale and wellbeing up. The soldiers were given rations of food to cook for themselves, these rations consisted of:


 * 1.1023 pounds rice
 * 0.11032 pounds meat
 * 0.11032 pounds flour
 * 0.22 pounds vegetables
 * 0.033 pounds milk
 * 0.044 pounds sugar
 * 0.011 pounds salt, tea, cooking oil

This served as a problem because the British and Australians were unfamiliar with rice and couldn’t cook it, this often lead to the resulting meal to be a lumpy, porridgey type substance. Soon enough the Japanese picked up on the allies’ inabilities to cook certain things and started cooking it themselves but also made the soldiers grow their own communal vegetable gardens, so as to keep them healthy. At first the prisoners were aloud anywhere around the barracks but the Japanese soon restricted certain areas and caged off others. The prisoners soon accepted this and turned their attention to education, a small school within the barracks was opened, the soldiers dubbed it “Changi Uni”. The school ran until the liberation of the prisoners. At first the Japanese were fine with the life that the prisoners had developed but soon grew angry over the happy vibe that the camp was filled with. To counteract this happiness, which the soldiers had introduced to the prison lifestyle, the Japanese started assigning hard labor. The labor included simple tasks of leveling bomb shelters and the like, after a job each prisoner was rewarded with 4 ounces of meat. As time passed on, these simple jobs started to get harder and harder, and the rations of meat were no longer rewarded. During this period the death rate among the prisoners grew. As the end of the war neared and the Japanese faced an imminent defeat, all food supplies were cut, except for the vegetable and rice. On the 15 th  of August 1945, when then Japanese surrendered, the prisoners were liberated. Tragically, only half of the prisons original population was left, most of them died during work.