Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945

by Andrew Barber

  One Galvanic team – Slate – under the command of Major Heine was dispatched from Selangor to a civilian refugee camp at Bahau in Negri Sembilan. They arrived on 3 September to find 1,600 mixed European internees, including ’14 Irish Roman Catholic Brothers and 14 Roman Catholic Sisters.’ In his messages to Force 136 in Ceylon, Heine noted that ‘Every person was suffering from malnutrition and malaria, beri-beri and dysentery were also prevalent.’ In response, supplies were air dropped to the camp and on 8 September a five man team of medics were air dropped ‘under extremely hazardous conditions’. Heine then proceeded to declare that the ‘general situation in the camp was under such good control that Captain Wraith and RAPWI colleagues not required’. Later in the month, however, and following the British return the mercurial Heine complained of lack of food and supplies, noting that ‘so far the BMA [British Military Administration] has been very uncooperative’.

  Chapter Nineteen

  British Military Administration (BMA)

  Following the surrender ceremony, in a speech transmitted by radio and placed prominently in all of the main newspapers, the British commanding officer, Lieutenant General Roberts, announced that Malaya was now under the governance of the British Military Authority (BMA), though in fact this was not strictly correct as it was not until 1 October that the military operational chain of command handed formal authority to the BMA. These were euphoric days but the underlying conditions of scarcity, insecurity and racial tension had not gone away. In his speech, Roberts noted that the BMA’s ‘primary tasks are to restore law and order, prevent diseases and unrest’ and to bring Malaya as quickly as possible back to its former prosperity. He cautioned, however, that the outbreaks of looting that had taken place during the interregnum would not be tolerated and would be dealt with severely. The British were anxious to demonstrate that their governance would be different from the repressive ways of the Japanese but also wanted to keep a lid on simmering social, racial and economic tensions. Nevertheless, a few days later the BMA’s Brigadier Willan emphasised that ‘The public must realise that for now we are living under military law.’

  In an effort to show that pre-war norms were being reintroduced, on 18 September the Malay Mail carried a front-page article, complete with photograph (though it showed a young girl rather than the teenager that she had become) reporting that Princess Elizabeth had ‘bruised both her legs following a riding fall at Balmoral Castle in Scotland’. For a nation pulling itself out of over three and a half traumatic years of war, this might seem somewhat trifling and incongruous, but the symbolism will not have been lost on the readership: the British were back. Meanwhile, and of greater local interest, the newspaper noted that Mr. and Mrs. Foster and their two children had arrived back in Selangor after release from internment in Singapore, the first of a trickle of returning European internees.

  Physically, the British found Kuala Lumpur little damaged or changed, the destruction of the railway sheds and engineering works by the USAAF excepted. It was, however, ‘tired’ and rundown; its physical degradation reflecting the huge collective psychological damage of war. It would prove much easier for the British to rehabilitate Kuala Lumpur’s buildings, roads, and urban infrastructure than it would to tackle the huge political and social legacies of the war. There were, however, some light moments. On entering Carcosa, the magnificent hill top residence of British Governors, the British troops discovered that it had been used by senior Japanese army officers as a mess and living quarters. The magnificent snooker table had survived the war, though the Japanese had chopped four inches off each leg to make it easier for them to play!

  The Sultan of Selangor Restored

  An early priority for the British was to establish contact with Tengku Alam Shah, the ousted Sultan of Selangor, and to remove the ‘quisling’ Sultan Musa Eddin. On 14 September, and having sent warning in advance, a British delegation arrived at Tengku Alam Shah’s house, greeting him in the name of the Supreme Allied Commander. The officer in charge reported that the Sultan was ‘overcome with joy at seeing me. He had tears in his eyes and could not express himself for a few moments.’ Having learned that under the BMA he would not be able to recover his full duties until a full transfer to civil powers occurred, Sultan Alam Shah was then restored to his position as the Sultan of Selangor. The British then drove to the istana at Klang where they met and detained Tengku Musa Eddin, along with his nephew Raja Wahid. With Tengku Musa Eddin sitting in the rear of the lead car, a not inconsiderable military convoy under Lt. Col. Usman, ‘a very fine type of Indian officer’, drove him to the Selangor family residence in Kuala Lumpur, where he was placed under military guard. The telephone was disconnected, he was banned any outside contact and arrangements were made to send him to exile in the Cocos Keeling Islands. According to one British account, there he languished until 1948 when, following pleas from his wife and a legal judgement that his detention was no longer legal, he was allowed to return, but to Singapore, where he became a thorn in the side of the authorities, endlessly pleading poverty. He was brought back to Selangor shortly before his death in 1955 and was buried in the royal mausoleum alongside his father. In the Encyclopaedia Malaysia, however, it is recorded that he returned to Selangor after just one year in exile and was reinstated as Tengku Kelana Jaya and thereafter led an uncontroversial life until his death ten years later.

  While the British were reconstituting the Selangor royal family, they faced another diplomatic quandary after a set of Kuomintang supporters announced that they were the official representatives of the Chinese government, and had printed cards describing themselves as ‘Liaison Officers’ to South East Asia Command. As no one seemed to know anything about these men, who all carried military ranks, the British simply arrested them and pulled them in for questioning. Little more is heard of these men but by December 1945 the Chinese nationalist government in Chungking had made formal approaches to the British to set up consulates in Singapore, Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

  Collaborators and War Criminals

  One of the more complex and testing issues for the British was how to deal with collaborators. As Victor Purcell, one of the senior civilian advisers to the BMA (and later a distinguished historian) noted, the British themselves were in many ways culpable for leaving the people of Malaya to their fate and therefore how ‘could they fault them for coming to terms with the new power’. In assessing levels of complicity, Purcell concluded that ‘It is one thing to have deliberately helped the enemy and another to have carried on with one’s ordinary business… the greatest care must be taken regarding alleged cases of collaboration.’ War criminals were a relatively simple category, but collaborators were a minefield. The case of N.N. Nair, however, was perhaps not so nuanced. He had been appointed by the Japanese as an estate manager in Klang and in October 1945 was arrested for ‘collaboration, corruption, extortion, tyranny, assault also reported rape and murder’.

  Like the Japanese before them, the British arrived with a ‘blacklist’ of names of those they wanted to detain and question. These started with the Kempetei, and extended to intelligence services such as Tokomu Kikan and Hikari Kikan, General Staff intelligence personnel, war criminals and guards of POW and internee camps. But their interests also extended to independence organisations, the KMM, INA and IIL. Herein lay complex judgement calls and often very different perspectives, not only between the British and the local population but also amongst the British themselves. Some officers within the BMA were infused with the new mind set of the recently elected Labour government towards Britain’s colonies, while others were steeped in pre-war orthodoxy. Through different optics, different judgements could emerge.

  An early, and uncontroversial, port of call for the returning British was the Kempetei headquarters at the Lee Rubber building which, not surprisingly, had been stripped of any incriminating documents. Through the interrogation of Japanese POWs, however, the British quickly produced a list of over 35 Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Kempetei of
ficers and men, which formed the basis of their wanted list. Once these men had been located in dispersal camps sited in and around Kuala Lumpur, they were taken to cells in Pudu Prison, the scene of much of their brutality. Alongside Kempetei officers, the British tried to locate their local spies and collaborators. This was a more difficult task as the MPAJA had assassinated many of them, and the remainder were on the run and in hiding. Gaining reliable information proved awkward. In March 1946, the British arrested one Wong Ah Leng as a collaborator but his wife then complained that ‘It is to our knowledge that Wong Ah Leng was one of those energetic members against the Japs during the Japanese occupation’ and claimed this was ‘One of those strange cases brought against persons by false complaints.’

  One problematic area for the British concerned those former members of the Indian Army and Indian civilians who had joined the INA and IIL. The British adopted a generally lenient attitude to regular INA troops, who were confined to a holding camp on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, but were anxious to round up the INA and IIL leadership. About forty senior figures were arrested and taken to Pudu Prison. In response, on 1 November, the ‘Indian Community of Selangor’ petitioned the Deputy Chief Civil Affairs Officer (DCCAO), Brigadier Newboult, to receive a delegation to lobby for the release of those who were ‘detained in gaol on grounds of military security on allegations of collaboration with the Japanese or ill-treating the inhabitants of Malaya’ while stressing that ‘We beg to assure you that the grounds of military security cannot be applied to the Indian gentlemen still under detention in the gaol.’ The British position was made more complex by the negotiations then taking place in India with the leaders of the Congress Party. In January 1946, at the behest of the Viceroy of India, two senior Congress leaders, Pundit KunRu and Mr Kodany Rao, visited INA and IIL prisoners in Pudu and Penang Prisons. The British were by now, in effect, collaborating with the Congress Party.

  A homely and personal appeal, and typical of many received by the British, was from Mrs. E. John who argued that ‘My husband was the Chairman of the Indian Independence League sub-branch Klang and has been detained by the Field Security branch for that reason. He was taken into custody on the 1st of October and detained in the I.N.A camp for three weeks, after which date he has been confined in Pudu Gaol. I am the mother of seven children, four of whom are of school age…I have no income of my own and since my husband’s incarceration, have not received any part of his salary from his department… I humbly beg that some form of assistance monetary or otherwise be given to me…’. By January 1946, 39 Indians were still under detention in Pudu Prison without trial for collaboration. The British, however, soon lost their appetite for prosecuting INA and IIL officials and by mid-1946 most had been quietly released. In early 1947, the British Resident to Selangor enquired whether ‘there is any government ruling’ regarding the employment of ‘members of the Indian National Army’. The Deputy Chief Secretary promptly replied that the ‘Malayan Union [as it was by then] has no objection’.

  In terms of tracking down Malay nationalists, the British blacklist contained the names of a number of senior KMM officers. After the Japanese defeat, its leader, Ibrahim Yaccob fled to Indonesia and joined the independence struggle there (he died in Jakarta in 1979). Meanwhile, his erstwhile deputy, Mustapha Hussain handed himself over to the British in Taiping and was then sent for interrogation to Kuala Lumpur followed by and a year spent in Baju Gajah prison. The British were intent to establish the historic record and quizzed Mustapha Hussain about the pre-war KMM, seemingly keen to see where and how they could have so misread the position and leanings of the pre-war Malay community.

  Japanese Prisoners of War

  The Japanese army proved as disciplined in surrender as it was in battle. Thanks to the early liaison role of the Force 136 officers it had been possible to manage with some deftness the handover of security and civic responsibility to the returning British. There were few incidents and the Japanese proved generally compliant. Nevertheless, in an extraordinary twist, some Japanese soldiers chose to continue their ‘anti-colonial’ battle by joining forces with the MPAJA. In certain areas, whole units moved into the jungle with the communists. According to Chin Peng, following the intervention of Lai Teck (who was a British agent once again) some were taken away by the MCP and shot, but others, around two hundred, were absorbed into the communist forces and fought against the British. When the Malayan Emergency ceasefire was finally signed in 1990, it emerged that two Japanese veterans had survived and both chose to return home. They had left Japan for Malaya almost fifty years before – theirs was, indeed, the longest war.

  But most Japanese troops followed orders and submitted to their POW status. In Kuala Lumpur the troops were initially corralled at key military areas throughout the city, such as Sungei Besi airfield, where they handed over weapons and were subjected to body searches. Officers were made to surrender their ceremonial swords. After this was completed, they were marched off under escort - usually of Indian troops - to ‘concentration areas’ outside the city, though some POWs were retained for rehabilitation work. In this, there was an element of publicly humiliating the Japanese in front of the citizens of Kuala Lumpur. One of the first tasks was to tackle the scourge of malaria, which had been allowed to grow during the Japanese occupation. As early as 23 September, POWs were used on anti-malarial work by cutting grass and clearing drainage ditches. Their tasks also included street cleaning, rehabilitating the airfield and the railway station, and clearing out the huge arms’ depot at Batu Caves (although a military instruction stated that POWs should not handle ordnance, photographs from the time show them hard at it). By October 1945, the British had 2,420 POWs working on a range of projects in and around Kuala Lumpur. The demand for POW labour greatly exceeded the supply as organisations such as the Royal Selangor Golf Club and rubber estates sought help for rehabilitation work and the BMA was soon compelled to restrict their use for essential tasks.

  In October 1945, the decision was made to transfer all the Japanese forces in Malaya and Indonesia to a holding camp in the ‘Riouw archipelago’. In preparation for the arrival of over 120,000 Japanese troops, the Royal Navy had first to blow passages through the coral surrounding the island so landing craft could reach the beaches. Before all this happened, however, the prisoners had first to be vetted. A processing camp was established at Kluang in Johor, where ‘100 % named bad hats and doubtful units’ were interrogated and about ten percent of the remainder were questioned on a random basis. The aim was to pick out those who were likely to face war crime trials or were of security interest. Initially, one thousand POWs were shipped each day from Batu Pahat to Riouw, though this was later to rise as more shipping became available. In early July 1946, The Straits Times noted that ‘117,369 Japanese have been temporarily exiled on Rempang and its associated island of Galang since the first batch of 1000 men were dumped on the mangrove shores in October and told to begin work clearing the rubber and to build themselves homes and then open up the land to fend for themselves.’ As shipping became available, however, the allies began the long process of repatriating them; by 8 July 1946 the camp had emptied.

  Displaced Persons

  Alongside processing the many thousands of Japanese prisoners, another urgent issue was the widespread dislocation and dispersal of civilians, both internally in Malaya and across the region. One example came on 20 September 1945. The British received reports that a large group of INA soldiers had arrived at Kuala Lumpur railway station that morning and had de-camped there. Lieutenant J.S. Forrest and thirty men rushed to the station, keen to arrest these ‘traitors’, but instead were confronted by a sorry group of Javanese workers dressed in Japanese military fatigues. They had been abandoned at the station, their origins unknown, and a ‘great majority …. were ill and starving. They had terrible sores on their bodies and one had died previous to our coming’. The soldiers contacted the hospital and army doctors arrived to help. Forrest instructed his men to sear
ch for weapons but ‘a few irresponsible and senseless people removed Japanese currency, knives and boots…’. Once this was discovered these ‘souvenirs’ were returned. Somewhat defensively, Forrest later noted that ‘…the people had been on the Railway Station since morning and nothing had been done for them. The British Troops proceeded to dress these Javanese people’s wounds with their own field dressings. They gave them their rations and cigarettes’.

  The British were confronted by large numbers of Javanese and Sumatran workers, many in a poor state of health. To handle the rehabilitation and processing of these poor men, the British established a camp at Sungei Besi, which by November housed 2,000 workers. That month, a thirteen-strong Dutch relief team arrived to provide medical and other support, though it is not reported how the displaced Javanese viewed this assertion of Dutch colonial concern (at this time the first shots were being fired in Indonesia’s bloody war of independence). The British authorities in Kuala Lumpur were, however, less concerned with the broader picture and proudly reported that a ‘high Dutch official has visited the camp and has said he will inform the Queen and the P.M. of all that the B.M.A are doing for Javanese Dutch subjects’. With transport at a premium, it took many months to repatriate these Javanese workers. In the meantime, and as their strength returned, the British authorities tried to employ them on rehabilitation work. In January 1946, 600-700 labourers ‘all based at Kyle Palmer & Co’s Printing Works’ agreed to work at the Tanjong Karang plantation (the Japanese pioneer farm at Kuala Selangor) on anti-malarial de-silting work but it was not a success. According to officials involved, ‘the cost of clearing by Javanese is about twice that of Chinese contract workers’ and the Public Works Department was ‘only willing to employ Javanese on a ‘piece-meal’ basis’.