Weller's War

by George Weller

  Over one hillside position the plane began dipping, turning and side-slipping. Anti-aircraft fire had begun. The plane twisted and turned, and the Vickers gun trembled in its clip at the top of the fuselage.

  Suddenly, Al swung about and tugged at our correspondent's sleeve. Half a second later the sky was all around and an invisible hand jammed the correspondent firmly into his seat. The Vickers gun came loose and its butt dealt him a starmaking blow upon the cranium. With a fighting effort our correspondent recovered control of the treacherous gun. The invisible hand jammed him deeper and a tremendous roar filled the air. With a jolt, the hand was lifted from his shoulder and there was a sensation of relief.

  Then there was a bumping sound as though a giant drum had been kicked. Then again. The green hilltop, which had been circling seconds before, suddenly appeared at the right hand side, much larger and clearer than it had been before. Two puffs of smoke were floating away from its top, taller and thicker than those caused by artillery. Hardly visible over the right-hand side, the fortified hilltop was snatched away. A moment later it appeared again on the left-hand side with higher puffs of smoke. A second later it was back on the right again and disappearing.

  Ground-marking troops appeared below. The continual banking and turning, professionally known as “evasive tactics,” were beginning to confuse the vision of the correspondent. Climbing turns over our lines, Al took the plane up again to 3000 feet above the ravines and 2000 feet above the Italian fortifications. Uncertainty as to whether ack-ack, invisible in the daytime unless one is directly in the line of fire, was continuing, made bank dips continually necessary.

  In a moment our correspondent saw a secret signal from the troops' observation post indicating that they were suffering artillery fire from a specified direction. Al saw the signal too and set off thither.

  Smoke shells from the East African gun batteries below eventually pointed like a finger to the hill where Fascist artillery was located. This time Al didn't bother to give warning. Again it seemed the plane's floor could not hold the push of our correspondent's weight. Again came the soft kick of release from below.

  This time there were three strokes from the giant drum. Our correspondent's stomach began to swing with the plane, but slightly slower. Before the next dive he was what the British euphemistically call “ill.” After that he knew little except endless circling, and tops of hills peeping into the cockpit from both sides.

  Climbing out of the cockpit at the field, he noticed that the entire front of the engine was smeared in black oil, and oil covered the wings.

  “Thought we'd better come home after they hit us,” said Al. A single Italian bullet had penetrated the oil pump below the engine.

  Note: Any resemblance to living persons or places in the above narrative is purely “evasive tactics.”

  VICTORY SURE, HAILE SELASSIE DECLARES

  IN MESSAGE TO U.S.

  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—December 15, 1941 (Delayed)

  In ringing words of encouragement from the first and weakest victim of the aggressor powers to the latest and strongest, Haile Selassie today delivered a message to the American people that they be of good hope in their struggle against Japan.

  “The battle will be long but victory is certain,” said the Negus Negusti in a message given to your correspondent in an exclusive audience at the royal palace today. It was the first interview of any kind for Ethiopia's Emperor since Gondar's fall to British troops on November 27 sealed Italy's fate in East Africa and at last restored the Negus to his entire kingdom.

  The Emperor announced for the first time that Ethiopia was formally at war with Japan. “I have sent President Roosevelt word that all America's efforts at stamping out aggression have our prayers and our warmest moral support. While Ethiopia cannot yet offer more than this to the common cause, we give this heartily,” said the Negus.

  The Emperor and his interviewer were seated in the great walnut-trimmed study of the palace. The Negus, a slight figure, was attired in the tunic of a general of the Ethiopian army, with crossed cannons upon his shoulders and triple campaign ribbons upon his left breast. His brow was patterned by many wrinkles, for peace has not brought answers to all of Ethiopia's difficult domestic problems. But his halo of dark hair and his curly beard seemed to add to the intensity and spiritual quality of his face, whose deep religious feeling has impelled many observers to compare it to the face of Christ as imagined by artists.

  “In my farewell message to the League of Nations five years ago, I predicted that what happened to Ethiopia would happen to many other powers, both small and large,” said the Negus in a low, warm voice. “Tell me something. Why did not England and America check these aggressor powers long ago?”

  Your correspondent replied that many peoples have been asking their governments the same question without getting any answer.

  “Wars will end only when the Kingdom of God prevails over all,” said Selassie. “Until then it is inevitable that they will continue with all their suffering.”

  At the same time the Emperor demonstrated that his preoccupation with spiritual matters had not allayed his interest in Ethiopia's political welfare. He revealed that Ethiopia had already laid claim to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland as the parts of Mussolini's empire she seeks to have deeded to her after this war.

  “Ethiopia earnestly desires her own outlet to the sea, independent of French Djibouti [capital of French Somaliland]. She must have a port in order to be able to sell our products, import others and thus raise her standard of living. Now that we have roads to Massaua and Assab [Red Sea towns of Eritrea], Mogadiscio [in Italian Somaliland] and others, we need the right to use those ports. The purpose of my first visit to Europe in 1924 was to try to obtain outlets to the sea, which Ethiopia needs more than ever today.”

  Your correspondent inquired whether the evacuation of Italians from Ethiopia, now being carried on by the British, should, in the Emperor's view, be extended to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.

  “I think it would be necessary in order to ensure stability along Ethiopia's borders,” replied Selassie readily. “The Italians left many cotton, flour, woolen and other mills and factories, some under state auspices, some with private capital. I am recommending that a certain number of Italian technicians remain temporarily until the Ethiopians can take over their work, or until British, American and other foreign experts can assume their jobs. I suggest you make known as widely as possible that Ethiopia needs and wants as many trained, high-caliber men as the United States can spare,” volunteered the Emperor.

  Asked what would be the mechanics of application for work in Ethiopia, Selassie said: “The best course would probably be for the applicants to write the American consul in Aden, and make known their qualifications.”

  VIII

  Singapore Is Silent

  What boots it at one gate to make defence

  And at another to let in the foe?

  —JOHN MILTON, Samson Agonistes

  On the day after Christmas 1941, Weller arrived in the most important British base in Asia and the Pacific: invulnerable Singapore, the prosperous island at the end of the Malay Peninsula. His assignment was to cover the colony's defense. It soon became clear to him that it could not hold. He was there nearly six weeks before managing to escape, on a freighter under attack, to Java.

  The fall of Singapore, for the British Empire, has in psychological terms been compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor—except that it was far worse. The U.S. Navy could be and was rebuilt. The notion of Singapore, as impregnable as Troy, the empire's firmest foothold in Southeast Asia, being smashed and forced to surrender was unthinkable; 130,000 British troops were taken prisoner, their largest defeat. Strategically it was like the fall of several countries, for a glance at the map shows its dominant location. From it the Japanese could control air and sea lanes in all directions. In Cecil Brown's words, “To watch the city crumbling under the crash of Japanese bombs was pure, naked tragedy… a gre
at bastion of heroic Britishers wiped out by Whitehall indifference and Singapore stupidity.”

  Although the Chicago Daily News carried constant dispatches from Weller in Singapore, these were subject to the strictest censorships, both military and political, that he suffered until Nagasaki. Little of what he or other reporters experienced and wrote filtered through in any authentic form to their newspapers, magazines, or radio broadcasts. After escaping to Java in February and from Java in March, over the next few months Weller worked in Australia on what is possibly his finest book, which appeared in March 1943 to unanimous praise. As Singapore colleague Brown wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “His indifference to danger is equal to his skill in writing and reporting.”

  Because only in Singapore Is Silent was Weller finally outside the censors' control, rather than use the original bowdlerized dispatches, I have abridged excerpts from the book. Here he was able to write in long, thoughtful chapters rather than in brief, monitored articles, and he could give voice to his frustration at how much was being endured, and how little understood, from thousands of miles away.

  In an early chapter that I have omitted, Weller discusses how he came to be transferred there from Addis Ababa:

  In a message relayed to Chicago through Intelligence C at Nairobi, the newspaperman offered to go to the Pacific front. Gondar had fallen, the last Italian in Ethiopia was a prisoner, and Chicagonews, as the cable companies called both the paper and its representative, had received the only first-hand account … Now all that was over. When one war ends, another is quick to begin. The new war in Asia must be quickly met and witnessed before history drowned its new participants in the same sea of violence where Haile Selassie and his millions of tribesmen were struggling to keep afloat.

  The catcher of the Chicago Daily News team is Carroll Binder, a playing manager … He accepted the suggestion from the outfield. He lifted his mitt to send a signal to the player, moving him from the African right field to deep center: Asia.

  GRATEFULLEST SINGAPOREWARD AIRWISE IF POSSIBLE

  Weller would solve the problem of what to call himself in the book—since he was often acting not as an individual but as representative of an institution—by referring to himself not as “I” but as “Chicagonews.” There is also a glimpse of how complicated the chess game of correspondents could be. “It is not often that one Chicago Daily News war correspondent on trek meets another, for they are few in number and their paths fly wide apart.” After a long week of air travel from Cairo—stopping in Basra, Karachi, and Calcutta—Weller reached Rangoon and found a CDN colleague, Leland Stowe, who became a lifelong friend:

  It was not easy to work out a modus operandi with Stowe, because there was no truly uninhibited outlet for news in the Far East. There was the further possibility that Arch Steele, the regular correspondent in Singapore who had been summoned into Russia, would be called back again. Nor would it be easy, once we parted, either to speak to each other across the barriers or to explain our problems to Carroll Binder and Paul Scott Mowrer far away in Chicago. The best plan seemed to be for Stowe to write the Burma campaign from Rangoon while the new partner went on to Singapore. If Singapore should hold and Rangoon become static, then Stowe could bypass Singapore southward to Batavia. If Chungking woke up, Chicagonews would go there, leaving Stowe in Rangoon.

  Two philhellenes had met. Stowe learned from the newcomer, his successor in the Balkans, that Greece, in the hour when it fell under Germany, had already prepared thousands of copies of a booklet containing Stowe's early dispatches on the struggles in Albania. His work was felt to be the best that had come out of the Albanian phase of the Greek war. His booklet was intended to be placed in the hands of the Greeks before they met the Germans. Stowe could not have received a better Christmas present; his face lighted up happily.

  Weller was about to witness the Allies' greatest, most inexcusable defeat. And for the next two years he would cover the war in the Pacific.

  His account of Singapore's fall begins in late December 1941, when he arrived, and takes it to the end, a month and a half later.

  SINGAPORE

  Over by the harbor of the Chinese fishermen one saw the low-slung greenish, pink, and yellow four-story buildings, and the closely tethered junks in Singapore River, ranked like slippers in a closet. On the far side, opposite Victoria Memorial Hall, was a pillbox guarding the foot-and-rickshaw way across the river. Singapore was at heart metropolitan, not colonial, a segment of finance capital and government dropped on an Oriental island. The first bombs had hit in Raffles Square.

  The name, associated for Americans only with genteel burglary, slowly took on its special Singapore meaning. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a beginner with the East India Company at fourteen, had landed at Penang in 1805. He took Java from the Dutch in 1811, but on getting his fever-shaken body finally home, died young. In Raffles Square, flanked by department stores, banks, and office buildings, the traffic policeman's kiosk was already nicked with bomb splinters.

  The names of the streets full of bustle and purchase were difficult to sort out. There were the honest Imperial names of the East India period: Raffles, Waterloo, Queen Victoria, and Sofia, and there were also Penang, Malacca, and Pekin streets. There were names like De Souza, too, reminders that it was the Portuguese who took Malaya from its own King Mahmud in 1511. There were also one or two Malay names, such as Brag-Basah Road. Along Orchard Road was the California Sandwiche Shoppe, intended to attract the citizens of a certain World Power better known for their wandering habits than for any resultant political education.

  The Singapore Club with its tall French windows facing out upon the harbor—with its perfectly ordered tables bearing a Sphere, a London Graphic, the morning copy of the Straits Times, and the last copy, now ten days old, of poor Penang's newspaper—was an ideal place to sit and discuss with the army press officers what was known as “the situation.” In the crowded roadsteads of the gleaming bay—holding everything from Chinese junks to the ferry puffing down from Penang that had once connected Prince of Wales Island with the mainland—there was clear indication of what was happening. Singapore's ships were not being bombed. Did the Japanese hope to capture these too? The Japs did not bomb the harbor until Singapore's last days. Why they spared it and allowed ships to escape, even to return and take off more refugees, no one ever knew.

  “We expect the natives to panic like rabbits,” was what they said in the Singapore Club. They didn't.

  On Christmas Day the Japanese began their series of pamphlet propaganda. The first shower suggested that Malays, Chinese, and Indians mark the coming birthday of Jesus Christ by “burning all foreign devils in a holy flame.” The Japs hoped that Singapore's Asiatics were inflammable. Actually the “natives” were learning how to rescue people from the cracking walls of a house with a spitting incendiary bomb in its middle. They were saving foreign devils, not burning them.

  The best commentary on the division of populations in Singapore came when the blood banks at the hospitals began to grow low, when from 60 to 90 planes were coming over every day, when even the official figures admitted 75 to 450 dead. This was the time when people, as strange a mixture as could be seen walking along the arcades by noon or shuffling in the bazaars by twilight—Chinese women in black smocks and wide oyster-shell trousers, Sikh taxicab drivers with carefully curled beards, Malay boys from the Jesuit School, and Portuguese Indian clerks from the social rooms of the Goa Society—all lined up at the clinics to give their blood for the emptied veins of the mutilated and moaning people taken out of smashed buildings. If blood was short, the volunteer nurses, the much-criticized “idle wives of Malaya,” gave theirs, and so did the fresh-faced Australian nurses. For the first time in Singapore's history, the blood banks did as big a job as the money banks. Here was the true mingling of the races; white gave red blood to yellow and the lazy brown Malay bared his arm and let his heart pump for the hated chiseling little yellow merchant from Canton or Hainan. The blo
od brotherhood of Japanese power is well known, but the blood brotherhood of the donors in Singapore, selfish capital of the selfish East, had to be seen to be believed. There was no Malayan armed force except the comic-opera guardsmen of the so-called Independent States, but when blood was asked for there was a line of will-givers ascending the hospital steps. They had no weapons, but they were ready to give their blood for Singapore.

  Perhaps part of the energy of Singapore's civil population was due to the fact that although the island is only 73 miles above the equator, its temperature is never oppressive and frequently is cool. Singapore's climate is never so insufferable, for example, as that of New York City on a muggy day in June. There was more energy on the island than elsewhere in Malaya, and at times the city almost attained the wasteful bustle of a Western metropolis. The banks were so choked with people, almost all refugees, that it was nearly impossible to push through the doors.

  Besides private banking negotiations, there were other matters of banking magnitude afoot. All the bulky bonds of the war loans, in the name of the Federated Malay States and Straits Settlements, had to be destroyed lest they be captured, as they were negotiable on sight. The Chartered Bank kept three women busy cutting off the bond numbers and sending them to the Treasury building vaults.

  The means of transfer would have shocked an American surety company. Every morning the sheared bonds were loaded into a dhobi's wash basket, placed on the seat of a rickshaw. The wife of the director mounted beside it. A guard from the bank walked beside the coolie. The bond shipment moved off at a barefoot trot for the Treasury, £5,000,000 of war effort in a rubber-tired rickshaw.