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The Weihsien Compound was a Japanese operated Civilian Assembly Center in Weihsien, Shantung, China. This compound was an Internment camp created during World War II because of the actions and problems being pursued during that time. The Japanese grouped allied civilians living around Shantung, China into this camp. These allied civilians included British, American, and Australian people. These people situated in this camp were there for nearly two and a half years until the Americans liberated on August 12, 1945 . Information on Weihsien has been learned through papers, diaries, official reports and letters written by internees, family members, and those people affected.

There were several different types of Japanese-run military internment camps during World War II. The Japanese military held many prisoner-of-war and civilian internment camps. Many of these camps were primarily for prisoners-of-war (POW) and some were a mixture of the prisoners of war and civilian internees. Also, several of the Japanese-run camps only held primarily civilian internees. The Weihsien Compound primarily held only civilian internees.

Overview of the War

During World War II, the allied nations were at war with Japan. The Japanese invaded most of the area form the Aleutian Islands in the far North to the Southern regions of New Guinea, and from Western Burma to the Mid Pacific Ocean . Japan historically invaded China on July 7, 1937, which began the second Sino-Japanese War . Overall, the Japanese help approximately 125,000 Civilian Prisoners. Of those 125,000 Civilian Prisoners, 10% were in China and Hong Kong throughout the war . Many allied civilians, mostly Americans and British, lived in some of the Japanese-occupied areas and were forced to relocate themselves into internment camps. The Japanese called these Internment camps Civilian Assembly Centers. In these camps, death rates were high because of the lack of good sanitation, starvation, and poor treatment. There were the occasional executions and some internees suffered cruelty and torture.

Background and Living Circumstances of Weihsien

The Weihsien Compound was founded in a Presbyterian Seminar building in Weihsien, Shantung, China between Tsinan and Tsingtao. It was located about 150 miles southeast of Tsinan in East China on Haipong Road near the sea. The compound consisted of twenty-four acres of attractive landscape. The area had been sixty years old and was filled with shrubbery and fine old trees . Towards the end of the war, the Japanese threatened a reprisal, also known as a retaliation, if this area was bombed or attacked.

Barbed wire and barrier walls with electrified wires surrounded the camp. There were also guard towers that surrounded the perimeters. Everyday, the internees woke up to starvation, guard dogs, prisoner badges and numbers, daily roll calls, bayonet drills, bed bugs, horrible sanitation, and flies .

The Shantung Climate

The climate was not a major problem for the internees. It was nice in the spring and fall. The summer heat began in May and became extremely hot in August. There was also a rainy season that began in August, which included substantial rains. These rains, though, sometimes hurt the environment and the architecture. Occasionally, roads were flooded and walls collapsed. The architecture at this time in China did not fulfill requirements for dreadful rains so sometimes leaking occurred in the buildings. The winters in this area were dry and cold towards December, January, and February. The weather started to warm up in March and the summer head was usually humid.

Daily Activities

In order to survive, the internees knew that they all had to work together. They created kitchens, a hospital, started a library, and educated their children without desks, chairs, a classroom and had few books. Since the internment camp was in squalor conditions, all types of life came together to peel potatoes, stoke the ovens, clean the latrines, and had to perform other repetitive and boring tasks. All of these tasks were necessary for survival, though. Latrines had to be cleaned to keep the sanitation at a good level and some internees had to peel potatoes to make dinner for over hundreds of people at a time. Sometimes, the Japanese even had the internees dig graves for the dead or alive. In these cases, the dead were never recorded .

The Hospital

By the time the Japanese herded the allied civilians to the camp, the former hospital had been gutted out, looted, and supplies were taken. At first, the internees knew that they needed to create a hospital and that the hospital would be their main advantage for survival. The internees knew that a critical part of survival was to adopt a medical center for the sick and incapacitated. Medics and volunteers set up a laboratory and hospital in just a few days using broken medical equipment. This possibly saved lives of hundreds of internees. At one point, the doctors in the internment camp sent a list of drugs they needed to the Japanese. The doctors received only a few drugs. Later on, the Swiss got a hand of this list and brought in the drugs and some food into the hospital . If an internees got badly injured or was terribly sick, they could be sent to an outside hospital that was very difficult to get to and expensive.

Housing

At Weihsien, there were more housing units than most other Japanese internment camps. Weihsien housed approximately eighteen hundred people at a time and each person was allowed to have around forty-five square feet of space. Women and men were separated on different sides of the buildings; women on one side and men on the other. The internees were placed in the basements of rooms of the hospital, school buildings, and previous Chinese dormitories. The dormitories were set up like normal dormitories, having long rows of rooms that usually held a two to four people each. The rooms were approximately nine by twelve feet and were crammed. In the course of finding suitable housing, some internees were placed into classrooms for their sleeping needs. When placed in the classrooms, the number of people could range from around ten to thirty people . These classrooms had no privacy and were extremely overcrowded. Some people had to sleep on the floors. Some lucky people were able to bring cots to sleep on . Others slept on tables, chairs, and the occasional bed. These living situations made it hard to keep warm in the winters and when the summers came, it became too hot to survive.

Facilities

Overall, there were twenty three toilets for eighteen-hundred people and the lines became extremely long when the morning came along . The toilets never flushed since there was a limited water supply. Empty cans were used to flush the toilets because the cesspools were always clogged. There was no toilet paper supplied by the Japanese, which caused contamination, disease, and a bad stench.

There were barely any full-sized bathrooms. There were four bathing areas that had a scarce source of water. Most of the internees used buckets to wash themselves and to keep themselves clean. There was one shower for the men and one shower for the women that were open and had many shower heads. Also, there was a limited amount of water in the showers. Because of this, women were allowed to shower only three times a week and men were allowed to shower daily . In terms of laundry, there were basins and pails in the hospitals basement and some other buildings.

Food and Dining Areas

There were three dining areas that had kitchens. There were twelve refrigerators at first that were eventually taken by the Japanese for their personal use . Because of the lack of refrigeration, most food had to be thrown out. Internees were sent meat from an army slaughterhouse that was brought through the compound by train. This meat was unrefrigerated and many times kept uncovered. The only equipment left over or given to the internees were two large frying pans, two copper pots, some tin pails, a dozen knives and a couple of bowls . Most of the other remaining kitchen equipment was the equipment that the internees were allowed to bring with them into the camp.

"Black Market"

The allied civilian internees had heroes: the Chinese farmers. These farmers lived outside of the compound and risked their lives to smuggle food over the walls to prisoners. The Chinese farmers also smuggled news and messages into the camp for the internees to know what was going on on the outside of the camp. At one point, the farmers even helped two internee men escape from the compound. These escapees lived with the farmers until the Japanese gave up looking .

American Liberation

The Japanese finally surrendered in the war and on August 17, 1945, six Americans and one Chinese interpreter in a plane circled the compound . The plane was a big plane with an American Star on it. As the plane drifted closer and closer to the ground, all seven of the men parachuted down. The seven heroic men were Major Stanley Staiger, Jimmy Moore, Jim Hannon, Ramond Hanchulak, Peter Orlick, Tad Nagaki, and Wnag Chengnan . The mission successfully liberated 1,400 allied civilian prisoners.