Shanghai's Bridge House
World War II's Most Infamous Japanese Prison
Bridge House was built in 1935, one of the many Art Deco structures that adorned the booming city in the 1930s. Located on 478 North Szechuen Road, it got its name from a bridge that spanned Soochow (now Suzhou) Creek a couple of blocks away. The Japanese took it over in 1937, shortly after defeating the Chinese in a bloody struggle that lasted three months. Bridge House became the Shanghai headquarters of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police who gained a reputation as “Japan’s Gestapo.”
Allied Prisoners in Japanese Hands
At first most victims were Chinese. Foreigners—mainly British and Americans—were technically neutral and relatively safe inside the city’s International Settlement. That changed on December 8, 1941, when the Japanese army seized what was left of unoccupied Shanghai.
Arrests soon began. First on the list were American and British journalists who had exposed earlier Japanese atrocities against the Chinese, or who had displayed an “anti-Japanese” attitude. One example was John B. Powell, editor of the China Weekly Review.
Others were British and American corporate executives, bankers, or ordinary businessmen. Torture might reveal usually imaginary “hidden funds” Foreign businessmen might be accused of “espionage.” Prisoners were men like Hugh Collar, director of Imperial Chemical, and Henry Pringle, of the Shanghai Telephone Company
World War II Japanese Prison Life
There were fifteen cells in Bridge House’s ground floor, where the garages had once been located. They were essentially wooden cages, with wooden bars on two sides, wooden walls on the other two sides. Toilet “facilities” was usually a wooden bucket that was infrequently emptied.
Once a new prisoner adjusted to the dim light and horrible stench, he’d see his fellow sufferers—men and women described in Quentin Reynold’s Officially Dead as ”filthy as human beings could be.”
Prisoners had to squat motionless, sitting on their heels, for long periods of time. As a result of the forced posture, and also catching beri beri, Powell’s feet grew black and swollen to twice their size. Eventually his feet were amputated.
Japanese Atrocities
Japanese interrogations usually included torture. There were two main techniques: electrical torture and the “water cure.” In the former, a victim was stripped naked and bound to a bench face up. The prisoner was then wet down, and given electric shocks. The pain was excruciating. In his memoir Bridge House Survivor Henry Pringle recalled “They laid the electrodes on the tenderest parts of my body and I thought I was going mad.”
In the “water cure” a towel was stuffed in a victim’s mouth, and copious amounts of water poured down his throat. Pringle remembered that after his abdomen was filled almost to bursting “the swine (Japanese guard) who was sitting on my stomach jumped up and down.” Pringle passed out.
The Doolittle Raiders
Allied prisoners were also incarcerated at Bridge House. Lt. Commander Columbus D. Smith, skipper of the Yangtze Patrol gunboat Wake, and CommanderWinfield S. Cunningham, commander of the celebrated Wake Island garrison, both found themselves in Bridge House after an earlier attempt to escape. But perhaps the most famous inmates of Bridge House, at least for Americans, were the eight Doolittle Raiders who had fallen into Japanese hands.
The Doolittle Raid consisted of sixteen American bombers and 80 airmen who took off from the carrier Hornet on April 18, 1942 to bomb targets in Japan. The raid was a success, and a psychological boost for the American people. Unfortunately eight raiders were captured and later sent to Bridge House. They were Lt. William Farrow, Lt Robert Hite, navigator Lt. George Barr, engineer/gunner Harold Spatz, Bombardier CorporalJacob De Shazer, Lt Dean E. Hallmark, Lt Robert J. Meder, and Lt Chase Nielsen.
The Raiders endured beatings and torture. Three of them, Farrow, Spatz, and Hallmark, were executed by the Japanese in a cemetery outside Shanghai
Bridge House in Modern Shanghai
After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Bridge House was reconverted into an apartment complex once again. Current Chinese tenants are in denial. They acknowledge the Japanese presence, but say the atrocities and cruelty went on somewhere else.
Sources
Henry F. Pringle, Bridge House Survivor (Earnshaw Books, 2009)
John B. Powell, My Twenty-Five Years in China (Macmillian, 1945)
Quentin Reynolds, Officially Dead (Random House, 1945)
Bridge House today
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Bridge House(white)
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