Prisoner Of The Turnip Heads: The fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment by the Japanese (CASSELL MILITARY PAPERBACKS) - Softcover

As a police officer in pre-war colonial Hong Kong, George Wright-Nooth was studying for his Chinese language exams when the Japanese invaded on Christmas Day, 1941. He spent the next four years incarcerated in the Japanese Military Internment Camp at Stanley. Daily life became marked by hunger and appalling suffering at the hands of the guards. He regularly witnessed death and torture, and his account of a multiple execution by sword is as moving and horrific as anything one is ever likely to read. While many of his fellow prisoners cracked beneath the terror of such atrocities, the author repaid such treatment with subversive activities, such as the running of secret radios, and the smuggling of food and messages to and from some of those held by the dreaded Japanese Gendarmerie. Perhaps most remarkably of all, the author kept a diary throughout his incarceration which, miraculously, was never discovered by his captors.

George Wright-Nooth CPM QPM was born in Kenya in 1917 where his father was an army officer. In 1938 he trained at the Metropolitan Police College in Hendon before being posted to Hong Kong. When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in 1941 he was imprisoned at Stanley for four years. After the war he was awarded the Colonial Police Medal for Gallantry.