In the hundreds of mourning Malay homes, the words of Mohammed for the dead were read. On little altars in the Chinese homes Pu-tai, the laughing Buddha with the fat creased belly and almost audible merriment, was a god to whom the wounded could no longer turn. The Chinese not only hate the Japanese; they despise them, and laugh at them. But it was not a time for laughter. It was a time, every other recourse having failed, to turn to Kuan Yin, the goddess of Mercy, “She who looks down and hears the cries of the world.” The Chinese, the tin-miners and the houseboys, the baby-loving amahs and the swing-loving taxi dancers, in their temples and in their homes were calling on Kuan Yin to hear the cries of Singapore.
Earlier the Japs had announced that large numbers of Indian troops had surrendered and were fighting the British. This was a somewhat awkward build-up for an ambush the next day, when the enemy dressed as Indians and approached the British lines crying “Do not shoot, we are friends!” The radio-planned disguise was a new one. In spite of help from the Penang radio station (which, left undemolished, was sending Japanese propaganda a day after Penang fell), the attack was a failure.
Sometimes, however, the Japanese, in order to lend efficacy to their constant radio threat of dropping parachutists on Singapore, would promise simpler things elsewhere and carry them out, a kind of institutional advertising to instill the idea that Nippon, like Gimbel's, always told the truth.
For example, Penang announced that in seventy hours from the broadcast, the hospital at Malacca would be bombed, and that if the British allowed their wounded to remain they would do so at their own risk. The hospital was bombed in seventy hours. They announced similarly that they were going to bomb the Johore hospital just north of the causeway, where many of the worst wounded cases from the front were concentrated and where many brave doctors and nurses remained behind. Right on time, they did so. No military purpose was served in either case, but by the announcement they thought they took the sting out of the atrocity while they built up institutional credit for doing what they promised, with the hope of winning more credence for their threats to drop parachutists on Singapore, which were lies.
The leaflet campaign was not open to description by correspondents for some reason vaguely related to morale. The leaflets were not precisely snowed down over the city, and probably most got lost. They were on cheap paper, colored to attract attention as they fluttered down, designed to ingratiate, to terrify, or to encourage “honorable surrender in a hopeless struggle.” One had a picture of Japanese soldiers distributing gifts, cigarettes, food, and sweets to the Malay and Chinese populations. In the background, peeping timidly from behind a rubber tree, was a British soldier. One leaflet even asked the Chinese—who hated the Japs more intensely than did any other group—to illuminate their homes “to protect them from being bombed.”
The Indian pamphlets showed Indians being wiped out in the front lines by Japanese bombing and mortar fire while behind the lines in far-off Calcutta, and at Singapore, British officers frolicked in safety and lust. Such propaganda might have had some effect on the Indian troops—though certainly never on the Gurkhas—were it not that most of them had seen their British officers die in the brow of battle.
The Japanese also went to work on that minority of Anglophobes present in any group of Australians. They dropped one pamphlet reading: English not only name the Australian sheep farmer, but treat you as the countryman and make you stand in the first line on the battlefield while behaving as rearguards watching you fight and die. It is doubtful whether many were able to unscramble the ideas.
After the siege began, the responsive Yamashita3* changed from threats to baby and mammy themes. One photograph of a small chee-ild was captioned Come home, Daddy, before it's too late.
The troops on Singapore Island were tired and embittered by the lack of aircraft support, but they were not yet ready to bite at such ham propaganda as this. They expressed what they felt, occasionally what they thought, by scribbling something upon a wall. Walls not only have ears; to political minds they sometimes have voices too. The Daily Mail said of Malaya: “It is heart-breaking to reflect that so much might have been saved by so little,” and an Australian plodding back from Johore scrawled upon the wall his weary rejoinder: “England for the English, Australia for the Australians, but Malaya for any son-of-a-bitch who wants it.”
CLEARING FOR BATTLE
One who believed that Malaya was all pampered wives and drunken planters and complacent officials needed only to see the morning train of evacuees from Kuala Lumpur coming into the station, disgorging worn-out women with babies, followed by frightened amahs and bewildered children. They had said goodbye to their husbands, who were fighting somewhere in the Volunteers. They did not know where they were going next, and frequently received little help from the mining and rubber companies that had employed their husbands. The government officials did well; exiled in Australia and India, they still drew heavy salaries before going on to new jobs in the East and West African colonies. But for the planters little was done.
The Dutch in Singapore were self-possessed and cool and left no one behind, even bringing out two final planeloads in the last week of January. Only a handful of Chinese ever got away; there was nowhere for them to go. To give the Chinese a chance, Australia was induced to let down its barriers. Immigration for Malay's two million Chinese was restricted to fifty families annually; granted permission for a single year's stay, they had to offer as security enough funds for two years.
For months the Singapore widow was a familiar character in the plan-less unrolling of war in the Pacific. You found them everywhere, these wives who had stammered goodbye to their husbands amid hasty cautions about what to do with the silver, which houseboy should have the big radio, and where to address letters. They did not know when they would see their husbands again. They went off, sleeping in freighter holds with hundreds of other worried women and frightened children.
When they arrived in Java, the overcrowded Dutch put them up in convents and schools and did their best as invasion darkened over the islands. Then once again the wives had to go from one steamship office to another, the companies themselves unable to say when rescue ships would arrive because Japanese bombers and submarines were pounding them through Bangka Strait into the Java Sea. Things were rapidly approaching a pass where women and children would have to be dropped behind to carry the essential executive personnel of the war to be.
Few Singapore widows received letters from their husbands before the island fell. They were in doubt even whether their husbands had remained in Singapore. As the Japanese bombers intensified their attacks, they feared rather that their husbands had got away and gone down with one of the burning or exploding ships. Everything was anxiety and the uncertainty that makes for more anxiety Most women had little money or none; though the unsung heroes of institutions like the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation steadfastly telegraphed money southward, some was lost and some necessarily misdirected. Women and children who had left fathers in Ipoh saying they would go to India found themselves at the Singapore docks obliged to go to Java or not at all. Sometimes it was the other way round. But Colombo wanted as little of these refugees as did Java; they had to be sent from one back door of the war to another, sitting on stoops as long as they could before being pushed on, feeling the tether to a lost husband and father growing weaker and weaker, and eventually spreading themselves from Bombay to Capetown, London, and New York, and around the world from Perth to Auckland or Spokane to San Diego.
Far different, these pathetic fugitives, from those “refugees” of Central Europe whom one had seen playing for $100 greenbacks outside Lisbon, and who struggled and fought to have priority over American evacuees returning by plane—American Export line was not good enough—to the United States. The Singapore wives had no plans, and the last airborne clipper for California had left long ago. Perhaps those who were childless were the most pathetic; they drifted from clerical jobs with the U.N. headqu
arters outside Batavia to other jobs with the American Army and Navy in Australia. Few had training for office work, almost the only kind open. Although participation in the war effort can be exhilarating, the atmosphere of general headquarters—making war seem a problem of in-baskets and out-baskets—was not happy for such wives, their minds uneasy with their missing husbands.
Some sent their children to sheep stations or country schools in Australia; some tried to settle down in South Africa. They haunted the offices of the Malayan Far Eastern Information bureaus, much different from the institutions of propaganda they resembled by name. There you could learn by hearsay, when official sources were mum or uncooperative, which ships had been sunk and which had come through, whose husband or sweetheart had sent a last letter mentioning a precious name or two of the friends still with him, and alive. Then the Singapore widow could go to the boarding-house of the one who had received this news and hunt for the name of her husband, son, or lover in the letter of another Singapore widow.
Usually the information was far out of date. Noel Martin, say, whom one had once met at a party, thought he had seen your husband—or it might have been your husband's brother—in a Bren-gun carrier coming up toward Malacca about the third week in January. Noel had waved and shouted, but your husband—or brother-in-law—could not hear above the clatter. There had been many retreats; some had been cut off on the mainland, and some had fought on the island. Had the Japanese captured all those left in Sumatra? Perhaps they did and perhaps they did not. Where was he?
Men as well as women civilians went through the experiences of Singapore widows. There was the Chinese clerk at the transfer window of the Chartered Bank, which kept a Punjabi to knock down any European or Asiatic who tried to fight his way into the vaults when the air-raid siren sounded. This Chinese was in his fifties, bald, with the subdued face of a slave of documents. The Friday morning before the causeway was blown, the people—Australian, British, Malay, Dutch—were clotted close around his window, Chicagonews among them. The routine was maddeningly slow, as in all Far Eastern banks, but the crowd was patient. The Chinese wrote, took out tissuey carbons, rewrote them, signed, checked them, counterchecked them, wrote something extra special sideways in their margins and suddenly pushed them all violently away from him. Throwing up his hands in a completely un-Chinese way, he lifted his face to the people at the bars of his cage and cried passionately: “What am I doing here, will you tell me that? My house was bombed and destroyed last night. My young wife and I were in the shelter, and she had a miscarriage. I took her to the hospital this morning. I should not be here”—he pointed to the papers—“I cannot concentrate. I know this work is very important to do, I know you want to go away, but I cannot concentrate. What am I doing here, will you tell me that?”
No one moved, no one had anything to say, no one had an answer. Finally the Chinese took up his pen. There was moisture at the back of his eyes. He reached out and took a paper, any paper, from the pile. He looked at it seriously for a moment, but it was strange to him. Then, for the third time that morning, the siren went.
Slowly the Chinese clerk of Singapore put down his pen, and slipped like a rag from his stool. He followed the evacuees to the shelter under the vault.
Three months after Singapore fell, the Naval Intelligence officer at Fremantle received a visitor. He was a small man, probably unfit for military service, about fifty years old. He looked like the little men who are aged messenger boys, dishwashers, busboys, and pushers of rolling stretchers in hospitals, those who try to work up to be assistant bartenders and streetcar conductors.
“I want to get some information,” he said, “about a ship. It's a ship that left Singapore for Ceylon in the first week of February. Look, I've got the name.” He unfolded the piece of paper with the name of a ship penciled in another hand.
The Naval Intelligence officer read the name of the ship, but did not change expression. It was against the rules for him to give any answer. But sometimes you have to bend the rules. “Can you take it?” he said.
The little man looked him in the eye and nodded.
“She went down.”
The little man did not move. Finally he picked up his hat.
“I think I'll go out,” he said. “I think I need a beer.”
He came back again in a few minutes. His step was not altogether steady.
“There's something I didn't tell you,” he said. “My family was on that boat.”
“What kind of family did you have?”
“I had the five kids and my wife.” (He said them in reverse order, as the husband who has long been a father is liable to do.)
The Naval Intelligence officer did not know just how to put it. “We do not have any list of survivors from that one,” he said.
“And it's almost three months now,” said the man. “Is that right?”
The officer's eyes were mild. “Yes,” he said.
“And still no survivor list?”
“Except for a lascar seaman on a raft.”
The little man took his hat. “I guess there isn't much left for me to do,” he said. “Not until I get out of these clothes.” He put his hat at a wrong angle on his head. “Where do you go when you want to ask them to take you?”
He never came back. The Naval Intelligence officer does not know whether they took him. He could hardly have made a good sort of soldier. Perhaps they made him a storekeeper or a military watchman. A security job, the army would think, would be the right place for a small man, a man no longer young, whose dearest reasons for living slept forever, slept in each other's watery arms at the bottom of the dark well of the sea.
THE LAST STAND
When complete histories are written, the valiant fighting of the Indians will not be a lost chapter. The 9th and 11th Indian divisions, together with two battalions from the 6th Punjabis and one from the Southern Punjabis, fought intermittently all through the campaign, some with Indian officers, some with white, some with both. The Indians were everywhere, from when they backed the Argylls [Scots] in the early campaign to when they camped in the road below Caldecott Hill radio station, sleeping in trucks and using the same shelter from bombings as Chicagonews.
White officers of Indian regiments are in many cases the most liberal-minded of English forces, for they know that the Indian is a hard-bitten soldier. A member of a Gwalior regiment lost his rifle, a true crime. “Can I make amends in my own way?” he asked. Permission was granted. He crawled out in the night, bearing only his long knife. He came back with three rifles and seven Japanese ears.
The Indians suffered greatly through Japanese tanks and anti-tank fire. In armored cars they were withdrawn from roadhead to crossing to coastline village, regrouped and resupplied, then attached and moved somewhere else. The fact that it was impossible for a war correspondent to be with these troops and stand better than an even chance of getting back made the narratives of their courage so incomplete.
Better, but still only fragmentary, justice can be done to two battalions which held the frontal road blocks through the hardest days: the Gurkhas, and the Argylls and Sutherland Highlanders. Mile after mile the little men from Nepal in the highest mountains in the world, and the freckled Scotsmen who had waited for battle for twenty-six months of draining tropical heat, held the “line” while the withdrawal proceeded. Not many of either battalion came through.
When the Australian force on the main road pushed fresh troops before the Japanese offensive, the hard-hit Gurkhas were beckoned to coastal positions on the western shores of Johore, and the worn-out Argylls took up rear positions behind the line. This was the first breather for either. Five weeks of fighting, day and night, was behind them; the island's defense lay ahead. Such uninterrupted dive-bombing and machine-gunning has seldom been suffered for so long.
The Gurkhas were almost unmentioned throughout the war. Only by finding their one remaining major was Chicagonews able to uncover part of their story.
Since Kipli
ng's day there has always been comradeship with the “Johnnies” [Gurkhas]. Even though they do not speak the same language, the British soldier and the Johnny sit down, smoke, and gamble together. The mutual respect of fighting men has broken down racial barriers. Like the Maoris, the Gurkhas have never been beaten in the field. Proud to be Nepalese, they serve under the condition that they must always have British and never Indian officers; these officers in turn have an obligation to expose themselves to fire in the front lines with their troops, and do so. The Johnnies went into action in northern Malaya with not much more than Gurkha tradition to hold them up. “Please remember our men are little more than seventeen or eighteen,” the major said. “They're in a strange climate, almost more oppressive to them than to a white man. Six months ago most had never seen a machine gun or a lorry, to say nothing of a tank. Furthermore, our own officers are new, and many have just been learning to speak Gurkhali and to tell a kukri from a bread knife.”
The Gurkhas took the Japanese onslaught from Thailand in a series of bloody crossroads the length of Malaya. The Japanese had stored their tanks just across the border, where the single road comes in, and thanks to Thai complicity, were able to strike the Gurkhas with three light tanks led by a heavy tank. The Gurkhas still had their equipment and were able to knock out the first tank and thus delay the column. However, the Japs pressed onward, using more heavy tanks equipped with cannon and also mortars. The Gurkhas were obliged to fall back. Until the last moment they tried to hold bridges, but totally lacked aircraft support. “I give you my word that for five weeks we positively did not see a British aircraft of any kind,” the major said.
At Simpong, where the Japanese were already slipping coastwise up the Kedah River, the Gurkhas established their headquarters in a duplex house with two large wings. Japanese fighters dropped a stick directly across the house. In one wing ten men were killed. In the center passage twenty-five were wounded. In the other wing four officers, the operations staff, were sitting in a room working over maps. The bomb came through the roof and landed in a far corner. Two walls were blown away, and the officers were left sitting in the open air, completely unmarked.
Weller's War Page 24