Civilian Women’s Suffering during World War Two

[Ed. Note: This article is part of a collection of essays entitled “Critical Reflections on the 80th Anniversary of the End of World War II” published in August 2025.]

“5 years ago today since the Sino-Japanese war started and what those years contain—horrors upon horrors—would that God would end it, all and soon.”
—Caroline Begbee, diary entry for 7 July 1942, aboard the Conte Verde

World War Two, the deadliest and most destructive war in human history, cast aside so many rules of war. According to one estimate, the conflict cost the world 3% of its population, with loose estimates rising to 85 million deaths. Soldiers died in huge numbers in this conflict, yet the number of civilians who died was double the number of military deaths. Total war had been waged in the past, but the scale of civilian casualties and suffering exceeded that of any previous war, in part because the mechanization of weapons imposed a far greater death toll. Some civilians, such as Jews, were targeted, though most civilian deaths were the result of military conflict that struck at human populations rather than armies.

This was not where international law was heading. If we go back to Article 68 of the Lieber Code, which Abraham Lincoln issued for the Union Army in 1863, it states that “modern wars are not internecine wars, in which the killing of the enemy is the object. . . . Unnecessary or revengeful destruction of life is not lawful.” Lincoln added that killing civilians was a capital crime. There followed the Geneva Conventions (1863-1949), the Hague Conventions (1899-1907), Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), and finally the Charter of the United Nations (1945). At the European military tribunal at the end of World War Two, Germany was indicted for the “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population” as crimes against humanity.¹ In much the same language, Japan was charged with “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political or racial grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”²

Despite these indictments, our contemporary world has drained international law of its force. Political statistician R. J. Rummel captured this circumstance three decades ago with the term “democide,” “the intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed persons by government agents in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.”³ Death was not the only outcome for civilians during the war. Civilians were relocated in huge numbers as some countries pursued their war aims. Those who survived the war suffered dislocation and the suffering that came with forced removal. “The historian’s task is not to make fault claims against historical actors in the past,” as I have argued. “Instead, it is to investigate the norms and conditions that produced moral subjects in the place and time under study.”⁴

The record of civilian suffering during World War Two is vast. It exists mainly in the form of letters, diaries, and memoirs, which is how we know that it happened and what this experience meant.⁵ For this brief essay let me draw on the diary of Caroline Begbee, a Presbyterian nurse who may have been working in Chefoo (Zhifu) in Shandong province when Japan invaded China in 1937.⁶ While it might be fashionable to dismiss a citizen from a colonial power in China, serving as a nurse was a heavy and serious task. The only portion of Begbee’s diary that survives is the account of her repatriation by a series of ships from Shandong to New York: from the concentration camp in Weixian, Shandong, to the port of Qingdao, on the troopship Rakuyō Maru 楽洋丸, which an American ship torpedoed in September 1944, killing hundreds of POWs; then from Qingdao to Shanghai on the troopship Hōtei Maru; then from Shanghai to Lourenço Marques, a Portuguese colonial port in Mozambique, on the former Italian ocean liner Conte Verde; and finally on the most famous repatriation ship of that time, the Swedish liner Gripsholm, which repatriated Europeans and North Americans from Japanese-held territory to New York in June 1942 and September 1943, in addition to a dozen exchanges from German-held territory.

The only fact I have been able to discover about our diarist is that Caroline Begbee turned fifty-four on May 17, which yields a birthdate of 1888. Her tone throughout the diary is one of frustration and exasperation, as she struggles with surviving while also fulfilling her nursing tasks on board ship. There are times when she writes about the Conte Verde and Gripsholm as though she were on an ocean cruise, for both had highly trained staff and sufficient resources to treat the prisoners better than they had been treated in what the Japanese called “civilian assembly centres.” Yet throughout the diary, she is constantly struggling to manage the tasks, challenges, and uncertainties that imprisonment and repatriation imposed on women.

The diary starts on April 6, 1942, when she writes, “Here we are on the first lap of our 6,000 mile journey—after as many weeks of uncertainty as to whether or not we would be allowed to go.” During her voyage she was responsible for the health of several elderly people, including Dr. Roberts, a female doctor who was accompanied by her husband. Dr. Roberts suffered from a ruptured gall bladder and peritonitis. After much suffering, without access to the surgery her condition required, Dr. Roberts died at 8:40 on the morning of July 10. Caroline Begbee starts her diary entry for that day by writing, “Has it only been 20 hours since I wrote the above? It seems ages since yesterday. So much has seemed to have happened, and I’ve lost another mighty good friend, though she has gained her reward and what a reward it will be.” After the doctor’s death, she writes, “Mr. Roberts was almost asleep on his feet—I told him to take my room as I knew he would not sleep in his own cabin with noise around his wife’s death.” She later reflects that “I saw a marked difference in her condition and could not make out one word she whispered although her mind seemed to clear until I gave her the lion fig.”

By July 17, Caroline Begbee had a splint on her second finger, though she records nothing in her diary about that accident. She remarks, “With my second finger in a split, my work is retarded somewhat.” On July 21 toward the end of her time on the Conte Verde, she could still cheerfully write, “Our last day on the Conte Verde. She has treated us well and I for one of many shall always look back on her with pleasant memories.” When the ship pulled into Lourenço Marques, where the repatriates were transferred to the Gripsholm, she picked up fragments of a conversation between “5 little Japanese-Americans” on the Gripsholm and 4 or 5 Americans and [the] son of [the] Brazilian minister on the Conte Verde.” “Where did they come from?” asked a Japanese American. “From Virginia,” answered an American. “And I don’t mean that,” replied the Japanese American. “I mean where were you before this bloody war started?”

The conversation then shifted to conditions on the ships. “How are the cabins on the Gripsholm?” asked the American. “Oh, they’re fine,” replied the Japanese American. “Plenty room.” “How much baggage are you allowed in your cabin?” he then asked. “As much as you want.” “We are only allowed 3 pieces,” the American confided.  “How much hot water can you have?” “You can have salt water baths as often as you like,” replied the Japanese American. “We haven’t had any baths, and hot water is only 6 hours a day, and swimming pool’s closed since Singapore.” The Japanese American slyly responded, “We thought we smelled something.” Then the Brazilian buy asked, “Did you have a good time in Rio?” “We couldn’t get off the boat,” replied the Japanese American. “Why not?” “’Cause we were alien enemies.” “You’ll have a good time at Singapore,” one of the Americans assured him. The Japanese American responded, “Did you get off there?” “No,” he answered, “we were alien enemies.” Caroline concludes that “the lads were so friendly, for the Japanese Americans were more American than the Japs on this ship. The American boys used perfect English—and were so polite. If not understanding clearly, would say, ‘I beg your pardon.’ While the Japanese Americans would simply grunt a questioning, ‘Huh?’”

Caroline Begbee and several friends got the time to walk around and admire Lourenço Marques on July 22, then boarded the Gripsholm the next day, though they still had several more days to explore the Portuguese town. She then shifted her attention to Miss Jacobs, who was Mr. Robert’s secretary in Saigon. On July 25 she wrote, “I wanted her to feel ‘somebody cared.’ She was feeling so terribly depressed and homesick. I came up to the lounge with her though I wanted to unpack—but this I did later. . . . Miss Jacobs had asked permission to sleep on the sofa just for the night. When she came back from Purser’s Office she found Mrs. Bohelo moved in, so she said she’d go back to the lounge.”

Mrs. Bohelo, the child of a British-Siamese couple, was repatriated on the Asama Maru, a Japanese troopship designated as a diplomatic exchange vessel in 1942. The ship carried diplomats and prisoners from Yokohama, Hong Kong, and Saigon, the last port being where Mrs. Bohelo must have boarded the ship. When the Asama Maru reached Lourenço Marques, the 789 civilians it was carrying were exchanged for 1,500 Japanese and Siamese diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. The Asama Maru was torpedoed in 1944 while carrying 1,383 military and civilian personnel, of whom 1,028 survived the sinking. The war imposed heavier burdens on Mrs. Bohelo than on Caroline Begbee. She writes that she and her husband “were married Dec 13 and he was taken the 23rd and they did not see one another until they got out of the ‘Asama,’ and even there they neither ate nor cabined together. Because women were given 1st and 2nd class accommodations and men (diplomats and all) were in 3rd and steerage. Not until they arrived on board here for 8 months had they eaten together—so who could blame her?”

On July 30, Caroline Begbee shared her diary with another diarist, Dr. Bryan, with whom she had voyaged from Shandong. “He wanted to see my diary, and wanted me to read what he had written. I had finished his but he was still reading mine when Gladys came over and said Sue was acting strangely.” Caroline set aside her diary and stepped in as a nurse. “I had told Gladys she was confused . . . and did not remember things. We think she had taken some atropine this a.m.” Atropine is an anticholinergic medication used to treat certain types of nerve agents and pesticide poisonings, “and she couldn’t remember whether she had taken any this P.M. We went over to her immediately and found Gladys’s idea correct. We brought her to her cabin—on “D” deck and gave her some morphine—and I made arrangements to remain with her tonight with one of her cabin mates is in my berth. There are 2 nurses in this cabin and Miss Jane Hyde of Nanking who is so deaf she won’t hear anything if Sue does make enough noise. One nurse has gone to my berth and the other has offered to ‘spell’ me if necessary. We hope and pray it is something more than aphasia or allopause. She keeps asking all the time where we are—where we are going, and a dozen times or more has asked who were in this cabin. Later after an hour’s sleep Sue awoke and seemed quite clear mentally enough to assure us it is a drug reaction.” By the following day, “Sue was quite O.K. this a.m. as far as her mentality was concerned but somewhat seasick and morphine may account for some of that.”

Once the Gripsholm arrived in Rio di Janeiro, everyone felt that they had completed the worst of the passage from Asia and were back in a familiar cultural context. While docked there on August 18, the steward on the Gripsholm told Caroline that “a wrecked airplane or submarine” was floating nearby. “It proved to be an overturned raft of the large variety—and miles from it the shell of a tanker. The bow entirely gone—no sign of life on the remains but fires still burning in the hold. This ship encircled it and we were near enough to see the thing quite plainly. Twas a very weird sight, as it was at sunset and the lights playing over the water were indeed strange. We heard later a submarine had passed us an hour or so before we came upon the wreck.” Fortunately, the submarine did not sink the Gripsholm. Caroline Begbee’s diary ends on August 23, when someone gave a lecture on Sweden, perhaps to acknowledge the national origins of the ship carrying them home. Four days later they reached New York.

“War raises fundamental questions about what it is to be human and about the essence of human society,” Margaret MacMillan argued five years ago in War: How Conflict Shaped Us.  “We live in a world shaped by war, even if we do not always realize it.”⁷ This assertion is arguably correct, but eight decades downstream from World War Two, I wish to assert that we need to find ways to halt the landslide of destruction that war leaders have imposed on civilians since 1945. We need to bear in mind as we do this research—as Margaret MacMillan has argued and as Caroline Begbee has shown—that civilian women have displayed greater resilience and resistance than civilian men to the destructive capacities of war.⁸. We need to go deeper into the records of their suffering in order to fully grasp what war does to people, then use that knowledge to argue against the corrupt persuasions of war. The existing conventions on the laws of war have not been able to impose the limits that need to be in place.

Notes:

1. The London Charter, signed by the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union on 8 August 1945, to guide the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Nineteen other countries later ratified the Charter.
2. “International Military Tribunal for the Far East,” 23: Section II, Article 5(c), “Crimes against Humanity.” This charge was used against the conduct of the Japanese Army in Nanjing in 1937: see Timothy Brook, Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 257-64.
3. Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 42.
4. Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 245.
5. Chan Yang, “The Legal Contexts of Civilian Internment in China under Japanese Occupation: The Case of Allied Nationals, 1941-45.” Immigrants and Minorities (2024), 2.
6. The diary is held in the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library at Bucknell University. I wish to express my gratitude to librarian Susan Falciani Maldonado, who generously supplied with a copy of this diary.
7. Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (London: Allen Lane, 2020), xi, xv.
8. Ibid., 196-97.