Actor Percy Herbert held the unenviable distinction of being a survivor of the notorious Alexandra Military Hospital massacre of February 1942. A member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Herbert’s incoming troop ship was bombed in Singapore harbour by the Japanese and, suffering from a broken collarbone, was subsequently admitted to the British Military Hospital.
On 14-15 February 1942, Imperial Japanese troops of the 18th Division advanced towards Alexandra Military Hospital which, despite containing over 900 patients, was situated in an area containing key military objectives for the Japanese, namely Singapore’s main ammunition dump and Alexandra barracks.
A key reason for the subsequent massacre lay in the fact that withdrawing British-Imperial forces, contrary to the 1929 Geneva Convention, used the hospital as a fire position from which to cover their tactical withdrawal. Consequently, this contravention, coupled with the brutal nature of Japanese soldiery, meant medical staff trying to surrender were immediately gunned down.
There followed an horrific killing spree in which up to 300 Royal Army Medical Corps personnel and patients were bayonetted, decapitated or shot. Survivors were then imprisoned in cells and even a drain, where many died of suffocation. Tragically, this heinous war crime occurred just hours before the garrison in Singapore surrendered.
Percy Herbert was one of the few lucky survivors but would spend the next four years as a Prisoner-of-War in the notorious Changi prison, from where he was forced to build the ‘death railway’ line from Burma to Thailand. Unsurprisingly, Herbert suffered severe PTSD for the rest of his life but bravely channelled his trauma into film acting.
As for the story of the massacre, it only surfaced after VJ Day when surviving Japanese PoWs revealed the incident to the authorities. Yet, post-war, this harrowing incident was officially airbrushed out of the history of the Far East campaign.
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