When Agnes Keith was nearly raped
Published on: Sunday, April 24, 2022
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Agnes relating her ordeal after the Japanese surrender.
Agnes and Harry lived in British North Borneo, where she wrote “Land Below The Wind.” The book was about the people, the British aristocracy and the native people of northern Borneo. She and her husband had one son, George.
When the Japanese conquered Borneo at the outset of World War II, she, her husband and son were taken prisoner and were separated in different prison camps.
Her husband and the other British Colonial officials were sent to a prison camp near Kuching, while she and her son and the wives and children of the colonial officials were first sent to the Valhalla camp just outside of Sandakan. Some time afterward, the wives and children were transferred to a camp outside of Kuching in Sarawak. Agnes endured sickness and punishment by the Japanese captors.
A rape attempt by a Japanese soldier which was foiled by the other women of the camp almost led to her death. She made the mistake of telling the Japanese commander of the camp, Ichio Suga, of the attempted rape. The Japanese insisted that she identify the soldier at a line-up.
She was unable to identify the culprit since it was dark outside and a storm was approaching as she was trying to remove clothes from the clothesline.
The Japanese asked her to sign a statement that she had lied and that her story was a fabrication. She refused and was summarily beaten.
Both Agnes and her son came down with a serious case of malaria while in the camp. Life was hard for all the wives and children for they had to work small farms to produce food for their Japanese captors.
They were required to bow and show respect to all Japanese personnel; failure to bow brought on severe beatings from the guards.
The women and children were freed on 11 September 1945 by Australian troops. Soon afterwards the men were freed also.
Harry joined his wife Agnes and his son George and the three of them boarded a US Navy Destroyer Escort for the trip to the Philippines and from there on to San Francisco, California where they visited Agnes’ parents. Agnes wrote her second book, “Three Came Home” in 1948.
A few years later the book was made into a motion picture, starring Claudette Colbert as Agnes, Patrick Knowles as Harry, and the Japanese prison camp commander was played by Sessue Hayakawa.
The movie was a true depiction of Agnes Keith and her son George’s imprisonment on Borneo. – Extracted from Operation Borneo: The Last Untold Story of The War
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