Memoirs and biographies of prisoners of war during World War II are not uncommon, but accounts of women POWs remain relatively rare. In Women Interned in World War Two Sumatra: Faith, Hope and Survival, Barbara Coombes tells the story of two British women who were captured by the Japanese military after they tried to leave Singapore by boat a couple months after the city came under attack. They were sent to POW camps on Sumatra. Coombes’s book almost reads like a first-hand account because she includes many pieces of poetry, letters, and sketches from the two women she portrays.
Margaret Dryburgh first sailed to Asia just after World War I to work as a missionary in Swatow, China. A decade later she moves to Singapore to teach and continue her missionary work. By the time World War II breaks out, she is around fifty years old. A woman half her age, Shelagh Brown was born in Singapore a couple decades after her father left the UK in search of adventure and never looked back.

The two women become acquainted when they are taken to the same POW camp in April 1942. Margaret writes about the early days of their imprisonment.
Even worse than the physical discomfort was the sight of so much wretchedness and pain. Former friends were almost unrecognizable in strange, haphazard garments. With hair soaked in oil from sinking ships, hands raw from clinging to ropes, arms and legs and chins covered with sores, faces drawn by suffering. As the days passed, fresh batches of refugees arrived, some at death’s door through exposure and exhaustion. Occasionally there were glad cries of reunion as families or friends separated, met again.
The Japanese military moves the POWs from Muntok on Bangka Island to Pelambang, separating the men from women and children. At Pelambang, Margaret and Shelagh are both housed in the same garage, along with a dozen other women and children. A Charitas hospital had opened Pelambang in 1940 and some of the women POWs find work there, especially if they were already trained as nurses.
The women and children in this POW camp try to keep themselves occupied with singing and writing. Margaret pens a satire of Alice in Wonderland that she calls Alice in Internment Land. But it is often difficult to stay positive, as much as the missionary Margaret tries. Food is always on the women’s minds.
Finding a way to supplement their meagre diet was a constant battle; if they had money it was possible to buy the odd banana, or beans, peas, sugar and tea—hardly top of the range in quality, but anything extra was eagerly sought after from the Chinese trader, Gho Leng, who was allowed into the camp with his bullock cart on Sundays. This sharply divided those who had been shipwrecked from those who had been rounded up from local towns and villages and came into camp with their possessions and money.
The women also worry that their families do not know they are on Sumatra or even that they are alive. Shelagh learns from a Japanese officer in early 1943, almost a year after she’d become a POW, that her father has been interned at Changi in Singapore. She contracts malaria a couple of times, but manages to recover. Other women in the camp are not as lucky and by the time the war ends, only five people in Margaret and Shelagh’s garage are still alive.
One of the most startling details in the book occurs later in the war when the women start obsessively trading recipes even as many of their fellow prisoners starve to death. Coombes writes that this was also common in Jewish concentration camps in Europe, where prisoners would discuss their favorite dishes as they struggled to stay alive under inhumane conditions.
Coombes clearly conveys the unlivable conditions the women and children in this POW camp suffered through for more than three years. Decades later, Shelagh’s daughter and son-in-law visited Muntok in 2012 to place a plaque at a war memorial there and Margaret has been honored in Singapore when the Kuo Chuan Presbyterian School named a gallery after her. Coombes’s book further honors the memories of these brave women and tells a narrative that has not been a traditional part of World War II history.
You must be logged in to post a comment.