Weller's War

by George Weller

  The British bank-managers often worked attired in the fire warden's khaki in which they had watched the night before, a peculiar brassy helmet riding their desks amid the flotsam of checks, flimsies, and government permissions. As a rule their tempers held under the deluge, but sometimes burst into a thunderbolt of rage. There were few adding machines and no bookkeeping apparatus. Everything was done by pen and pencil and longhand computation. People never gathered in lines but always in clusters around the cages, exchanging horror tales—particularly about Penang's nine hours of bombing raids—and naming ships' names with a freedom that would have made every hair of the Admiralty stand on end.

  Penang was the first city to demonstrate the depths of Chinese courage and Malay stoicism. The Asiatics refused to take cover, and were machine-gunned in the streets. The hospitals filled; they were still bringing in terribly wounded people two days afterward. Here sat a wrinkled old man, his body curled like a seashell around his grandchild, the only living member of his son's family of eight. They found an old woman, wounded, with both her legs broken. When they brought her to the hospital grounds and laid her on the bare floor—there were not nearly enough cots—she piped up: “I'm not going to die yet. I'm going to live to see the Japs beaten.”

  Most truths can stand tempering. All refugees and escapees are alike, including correspondents. They all came out on the last train, saw invaders enter the town, knew themselves inefficiently protected from the first but were never able to do anything, slept on hard train floors, had only canned milk for the baby on the way down, left the silverware in the sideboard and the radio blaring. War upsets family routine. Invasion followed by flight leaves everybody distraught and dispossessed.

  Pressure was being put upon Sir Shenton Thomas, the tall, sharp-nosed Governor, to evacuate women and children from Singapore, but he found this order difficult. He had already pledged that all races should receive equal rights at the gangplank. To carry this out would mean evacuating 400,000 women and children, Chinese, Indians, Malays. Where were they to go, and who was to support them?

  Many native families returned to Madras and Calcutta. White women and children who possessed the means arrived in the Indies and Ceylon, sleeping in the holds of freighters, and proceeded to Australia and Africa. Until the end, from a governmental point of view these escapees were merely making use in wartime of the privilege of going wherever they pleased. They were not officially evacuees. Some 3000 white women and children, along with thousands of Chinese, Indians, and Malay mothers and children who wanted to get away, were left behind.

  What about the Singapore of Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and the early Bruce Lockhart? What about the island Raffles had bought, Manhattan-style, for only £13,500 from the Princes of Johore? Had it ceased to exist? Had Singapore Sal1* reached her blowzy end at the foot of some greenish pier where feeble equatorial tides sucked and sighed? Or was Singapore just another of those seaport cities that have lost their character through the leveling influence of marine industrialism?

  At first it was hard to say, for ten brothels do not make a Singapore, nor twenty. There were rickshaws, yes, drawn by toothpick men with gaunt runners' faces and sunken, leather-colored cheeks. But these coolies looked not starved and filthy but clean and somehow healthier than nearly anyone else. They obeyed winking traffic lights, as modern as in Atlanta. For short runs, the canny Chinese rickshawman charged as much as the fat, bearded Hindus did for their groaning taxis.

  This was a different Singapore, home port of broad fishing junks that creaked beside the watery staircases of the river, but also port of call for the “Australian fishing fleet,” that December sea caravan of eligible and enthusiastic Australian girls who cast their lines in the clubs from Penang to Singapore, who fished in the Malayan grounds where lurked the timid bachelor hornpout, and for whom a single catch, landed and basketed, would satisfy each fisherwoman for a lifetime.

  Another un-Singaporean thing about Singapore was that it did not smell of opium or tar, of smoke or whisky, of lamp oil or sawdust, of perfume or sweat. Singapore, in fact, did not smell at all. It was scrubbed and clean, and even where it was poor it was not dirty. The very rickshaw runner, sweating through his thin cotton shirt as his scuffing sandals rose and fell, seemed to perspire odorlessly.

  The only sign of food restrictions was that at the Singapore Club one had to be satisfied with two principal dishes instead of three, and a single pat of butter. There was plenty of rice, even though Indo-China was cut off. Transport going up to the front had hurt but not halted the trucking of fruit and vegetables into Singapore Island. Mangoes, passion fruit, and pineapples were abundant.

  There had been three “cabarets”—large Oriental dance halls—the New World, the Great World, and the Happy World. The first Japanese bombers, with impeccable symbolism, not only hit downtown in Raffles Square, but placed a direct hit on the Happy World. Sadly smashed, the aviators having probably mistaken its rambling broad roofs for the hangar buildings of the adjacent Kalang airdrome, it remained closed. That left the Japanese with two Worlds still to conquer.

  All the Worlds were more or less alike, with a curved and fretted Oriental archway over the entrance. Inside was a long pavilion, flanked by booths under whose blinding white lights had been sold sea-chest keepsakes, conch shells with maps of Singapore Island, pocket combs decorated with nude Chinese Junos. The church was once the mother of the theater; in Singapore each dance establishment looked like a rather noisy and blatant temple. The central shrine was the large dance hall, with the nearly continuous music of the big Eurasian dance band pumping through the dragoned doors. The architecture was a pastiche of Buddhist temple, Teutonic modernism, and World's Fair 1939. Inside were the Chinese hostesses, sitting together in slit-legged flowered silk dresses. “I come Canton. I splik English, yess.” Not one in a hundred did speak English.

  When war came, the big temple remained and the dance music went on. The room was vast, and domed high. Thick heavy curtains were hung about the doors and windows. The hostesses stayed, in their tubular flowered dresses covering their flat tiny breasts and narrow hips. None needed a brassiere. They wore high heels to gain a little on the soldiers and sailors with whom they danced. The girls sat in fours and fives by the dance floor, their big red and white handbags lying on the tables.

  Soon the Great World was closed; more raids were coming. But the New World went on, through the bombings and the deaths all around, straight through to the fall of Singapore. It was the hugest and hottest of the Worlds. There was a ceaseless come and go, because there was no admission fee. One was expected to drink, and the charges were not more than at a soda fountain. From the waiters one purchased tickets to dance with the girls, for about 4¢ each. The dance ticket said: Night dance—good for one dance only. N.B. Coupons not bearing the Chop of the Managing Director, Mr. Ong Peng Hock, are not Valid. The atmosphere was so shadowy that it was necessary to take a girl out under the central lights to see her face.

  Some girls seemed no older than thirteen or fourteen, and most were far from being Singapore Sals. When asked to dance, they never showed either vivacity or enthusiasm. For many the New World was undoubtedly not a way of either being wicked or earning a living, but simply a way of seeing what the world was like and meeting men. The Chinese are businesslike people, but these girls never would ask to collect the dance ticket from the man, as would a Broadway hostess. She would receive it with un-commercial negligence, flipping it carelessly into her handbag. Singapore's judgment of these girls ran: “The Chinese girl who has been kept by a white man and then put aside is on a higher social stepladder than the girl who is still a virgin. But she can never give you love, because she is not capable of it.”

  It was probably true. The girls seemed to make no effort to attract men or to hold them, other than the scrupulous and identical cultivation of their own beauty. Their eyes were expressionless. When men failed to show interest, they danced with each other, using a fast lindy hop and s
hag step. No one can say what conversations went on, after the band played Good Night, Ladies and God Save the King, and Chinese girls and Occidental men went out and stepped up into one-and-one-half-seat rickshaws, usually with the soft rain of the Malayan night pattering on the canvas canopy overhead. But many of the girls, even pretty ones, went home alone.

  To send in anything American larger than a destroyer, it was recognized, would be useless in the face of Japanese aircraft superiority. The Japs had started by getting air superiority through aircraft-carriers in the South China Sea, and now they were rapidly taking bases in northern Malaya and getting land-based and sea-based superiority. The distinction is important because if the British had been able to control the land bases, even though their fighters were inferior and few, they might have held off the larger naval force. Now the Japanese had both, and their carrier-based fighters were superior to the best British land-based plane (the American Brewster). After the Japanese got air fields and put extra gas tanks on their fighters, the margin of their Army 97 and the Zero over the Brewster was even greater.

  Singapore was a naval base, but almost as empty of activity as the great dock was of warships. On the south side of the island was the cruiser Exeter, a hospital ship, and dozens of other interisland ships and international freighters. There was little dispersal; the only place where Japanese bombers could have found more compact targets was Rangoon, where the freighters had lain in the Irrawaddy River like sucking pigs alongside a sow. After a little experience one looks on ships and harbors and military stores and field quarters with the same questions: How well are these objectives dispersed, how many would be lost in an intense air raid without fighter protection, and where will the human beings take cover nearby? With more experience these queries are supplemented by another: Where shall I take cover? Only two phases of the invasion of Malaya and the attack upon Singapore could be treated reportorially with any frankness: (1) the creeping jungle-seashore-and-road fight southward, and (2) the simultaneous air attack upon Singapore itself.

  Major Fisher and Captain Hooper were ready and eager to arrange a trip to the front. An advanced correspondents' base had been established in Kuala Lumpur, the Federated Malay States' capital, which one early learned to refer to as “K.L.” A train with sleepers left for it every night; and, although jammed to the luggage racks with human beings on the way south, it was usually empty going north.

  On the matter of equipment the situation was characteristically Singaporean. There were plenty of water bottles, web harnesses, belt boxes for emergency rations without the emergency rations, and combined ponchos and ground sheets of greenish-grey rubber. There were gas masks, hundreds of gas masks. The Japanese had not used gas, although a smoky shell had been mistaken as such. Everyone was supposed to carry a gas mask over his shoulder, through all the six weeks. Fisher and Hooper never failed to have theirs, as regulations specified, hung upon their thin shoulders. They grew a little lopsided, like caddies, in their gas-mask direction, but mercifully did not insist that correspondents be so scrupulous as themselves.

  But what about tin hats? With the Japanese concentrating upon air attacks, strafing buildings, dive-bombing, high-and low-level bombing, how about a tin hat to go to the front with?

  “I'm dreadfully, terribly sorry, and we're trying to do everything we can about it,” said Fisher, “but we've just received word that no helmets can be issued to correspondents.”

  FRONTWARD

  “Going to the front” in a battle area where the enemy controls the air is a metaphysical term. Nobody can go to the front. Everyone is at the front already. The front is too much with one, not only late and soon, but all day and all night. The only time when the front is not there overhead is when it rains. Sometimes there is position bombing even in the rain, when the target is as familiar by landmark as were Singapore Island's four chief air fields. But one still speaks of the front as a place where men are fighting, tommy gun against tommy gun or even hand to hand. The front, like Doctor Faustus's Hell, was everywhere, nor were we out of it.

  It was the first trip to the Malayan front for General Pownall also. From the train, which was about an hour late reaching Kuala Lumpur, he stepped down from his compartment, gave a friendly wave and a “Hello, Weller,” and went into the shadows of the station. Captain Emerson, an Englishman who had been leader-writer for a Calcutta newspaper and was now press officer for Indian troops, met Chicagonews. There was breakfast in the deserted little waiting-room, then off to the press headquarters. These consisted of two long rooms in a warehouse. They had wooden bunks, without mattresses, for correspondents with bed rolls but unable to get rooms at either of the two comfortable hotels. The place was clean and busy.

  In a few minutes, with the Malayan morning still hesitating, trying as usual to give showers upon the mountains and ricefields, with blue skies over the roads and villages, the mustard-colored car was pulling north along the rock-ballasted highway.

  It was a green country, green and wet. Flooded paddy fields alternated with rubber plantations right and left. The rubber trees, their trunks slitted herringbone fashion, sped past in one long artificial forest, their glades clean and neat.

  It was a country soft and wet, like a brown girl standing in a foggy shower. The shoulders of the low Malayan mountains could be seen on the right-hand (east) side of the road. Wet grey clouds moved over the shining leaves of the jungle trees, making them glitter. As the sun tidied up the day, evaporating fragments of morning dew, by nine it was all blue overhead. Morning was the time, in this early phase of the campaign, for bombing and machine-gunning by the Japanese. Unless there were raging storms, morning visibility was perfect. Around one, the atmospherics usually changed, and a heavy solid block of cirrus clouds moved across the sky at about 6000 feet. The Japanese could not see if they flew above this blanket, and knew themselves silhouetted targets for anti-aircraft fire if they flew below it.

  The Japanese suffer from the defect of the scheming mind; they always behave as though a trap has been set for them. They are brave in combat, since to be taken prisoner is worse in the Nipponese culture than to die, spelling loss of citizenship, loss of property, and loss of the right to marry and have children. But they are cautious in planning action, and their plotters' mentality sometimes slows them down. They were under the illusion that British anti-aircraft guns existed in Malaya, whereas except for Singapore, the only thing north of Johore causeway bigger than .50-caliber machine guns was a battery of Bofors 40-millimeters, which first appeared at Ayer Hitam.

  The Anglo-Indian officer drove at about 50 miles an hour, although the road where it passed through the shadow of rubber plantations was still wet and slippery. He drove fast because there had been occasional sniping from the side, perhaps by single infiltrated Japanese or Malayan fifth-columnists. The rest of the press party came suddenly into view, under the leadership of Captain Henry Steel, a slim man of about thirty, one of the few undisillusioned press officers anywhere in the world.

  Most newspapermen who begin to work for the services start glowingly, kindled by an enthusiastic resolution to see that word of the war, hitherto garbled and watered by professional military men, reaches the public in a form that while maintaining all the needs of security is still lively and real. Within a short time they find that they are limited in power by their rank. Those who emasculated the word before them are now in power above them. The only difference between their status outside the forces and inside them is that they are now obliged to say “sir” to the same comptrollers. There follows a painful period when the former newspaperman makes up his mind whether to become a company man in the great corporation of the service. Sometimes he decides to ask for a transfer to a fighting post, and to postpone his dream until that ideal war which can be described as it is being fought.

  Somehow Steel seemed to have managed to go around this alternative. He had his moments when he wished to renounce it all, but then he would bounce back again. Nothing takes the pla
ce of energy, and Steel had the gift of energy. Where he could not smuggle the correspondents actually into the confidence of the general, he smuggled himself in, standing negligently by during telephone conversations and putting in questions where he could. He was absolutely honest about the military situation, and treated American correspondents with the same confidence he treated the British. He had capacity to plan, and ingenuity about getting stories back from the front: two rare, invaluable characteristics in a press officer. Sometimes he anticipated dangers that did not arise, but this was refreshing in an atmosphere where so many in authority tended to pooh-bah sensible premonitions. But when a correspondent wanted to go up to a post under fire, Steel never refused to take him.

  The party got as far as Ipoh. Japanese bombers were over the town. For a hundred miles back toward Kuala Lumpur every shop had been shuttered and closed. At Ipoh the streets were full of youths. Where most women and children had gone nobody seemed to know; back “into the rubber.” People with wheelbarrows and tiny carts pulled behind bicycles crowded the streets, their faces taut with fear. One man was going into the rubber with nothing on his bicycle but a big sack of rice. It was too heavy for him to pedal, so he pushed it. Women went by with babies twisted like dolls into their sarongs and clinging like limpets to their hips.

  Chinese merchants in Ipoh were frightened, for they knew how long the Japanese had been trying to incite the Malays against them. In the Japanese political pattern for Malaya, the Chinese had the role that Jews had in Poland, France, and the Balkans. They were the shopkeeper class who exploited the Malays and led them away from their old ideals as warriors. They were urban parasites, and the Malays were the rural producing peoples. They were the money-chasers, and the Malays were the fighters … The Chinese, like the Jews, developed their own clannishness; in Singapore there was even the Tiger Swimming Pool especially for Chinese.