Malayan Spymaster

by Boris Hembry

  John Hart and his Chinese radio operators had narrowly escaped capture on several occasions. The Japanese had quickly realised that someone with a wireless set was operating across the strait and did their best to catch him. It was certainly nerve-racking for me waiting for him to come up on air. As soon as peace came in August 1945 I pressed for a DSO for John and received the usual response. But, as Winston Churchill once said, ‘Up with this I will not put.’ I wrote a formal recommendation to Brigadier Bowden-Smith, who agreed to pass it on to the Supremo personally, and lobbied every senior naval officer I met, including Mountbatten’s ADC, advising them of John’s contribution to the naval war effort. Eventually, to my very great satisfaction, I was able to signal to John that his richly deserved DSO had been gazetted. I remember his reply with pleasure: ‘Thank you, but you deserve it more than I do.’ Not so, but it was gratifying that he should say so.

  My friend’s story is nearly finished. When I flew to Singapore shortly after the surrender, John Hart and all the officers, other ranks and civilian agents, whom I had ordered to make for Singapore immediately on the cessation of hostilities, met me off the plane and escorted me to the building they had taken over as temporary headquarters. In only a matter of hours John began pressing me to send him on an operation to Java. His parents had been interned somewhere on the island and he was anxious to trace them. There was no way he could go unless it was on an operation. Against my better judgement I formulated a plan and forwarded it to my superiors who approved it. In October 1945 John flew to Surabaya where, almost immediately, he was ambushed and shot dead by Soekarno terrorists. I can only conclude that they thought he was a hated Dutchman. His totally unnecessary death has remained on my conscience ever since. There was no real military reason for him to be in Java. I should not have yielded to his entreaties. I made sure that the DSO was handed to his mother.

  My days were very full. In addition to the six major parties, MINT, and a further two similar smaller operations in the field, more were being planned. Each morning I held a conference in my office at which all the incoming signals were discussed, intelligence dissected and analysed. I would be required to fly down to Ceylon at least once a week for meetings with senior SACSEA intelligence officers, Force 136, and to visit the ISLD training centres on Lighthouse Island and near Trincomalee. Whilst there I would often go aboard Adamant to discuss MINT, and enjoy a few pink gins with the Staff Officer S Lieutenant Commander Sheridan Patterson. While in Ceylon I had the use of my own Beechcraft, usually flown by a very able Sikh flight lieutenant. On my return to Colombo I would take the night mail train to Kandy to attend conferences chaired by Brigadier Bowden-Smith. Then back to Colombo to catch a Hudson or Dakota for the uncomfortable and often very bumpy flight back to Calcutta. It was on one of these flights, during a refuelling stop at Bangalore, that I saw three Mosquito aircraft crash within a few minutes of each other. They simply fell out of the sky, without warning, and for no apparent reason. The RAF put it down to lightning strikes in the clouds. Our departure was delayed for a couple of hours to allow the electrical storm to move on, but the event hardly boosted our confidence as passengers.

  Soon after my return from England in July 1944 I had moved into the large flat vacated by Laurie Brittain, just off Chowringhee, and I invited Harry Hays and his wife Deb to join me. Deb soon created a real home from home, but after a few months she went off to join her sister in Bangalore, so we had the flat to ourselves and it soon became a temporary mess for officers in transit who were usually associated with intelligence work. One such was the Honourable Harold Tennyson, later Lord Tennyson. Harry told many amusing stories about his father, England’s cricket captain in the 1920s, who was a great character. One I particularly remember also involved Harry whilst he was up at Oxford. He had picked up a girl in the bar of the Berkeley Hotel and after a night’s dining and dancing, had taken her back to her flat. The next morning when he slipped her a five pound note for services rendered she said, ‘You mean bugger – your father always leaves me a tenner.’ Harry later became the representative in England for Veuve Clicquot.

  Even after moving the Malayan Country Section Headquarters to Ceylon we kept on the flat as a base in Calcutta. Other visitors I remember were Peter Brooke, nephew and heir to the Rajah of Sarawak, and Leonard Cheshire VC, who stayed for a fortnight. A very quiet and unassuming man, he was on his way, as Churchill’s representative, to witness the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, although, of course, I did not know this at the time.

  I moved my headquarters down to Ceylon early in March 1945, to be nearer the centre of things. SACSEA and ISLD Headquarters were up at Kandy, SOE Operational Headquarters were in the Mount Lavinia Hotel, and the Navy was at Trincomalee. MINT was now my only operation requiring a submarine; all others were positioned and supplied by Liberators now also based in Ceylon. I should have moved earlier, but we were all so busy with operational matters that I did not give it high priority.

  There was already a complete signals unit there, with three or four codists, and I took with me Harry Hays, my RAF liaison officer, my FANY secretary, and my quartermaster, leaving only a skeleton staff in Calcutta to oversee the agent training establishment and recruiting.

  I was so pleased to get away from the Calcutta box wallahs, many of whom appeared to spend more time out at the Tollygunge Club than at their desks. The office worked like clockwork under Harry, leaving me to attend to the operational side of things. These were undoubtedly the hardest and most interesting months of the war for me. With the anxieties for other men’s lives, there were times when I longed for the peace and quiet of the Arakan. During the early stages of an operation, when we were waiting for the first signal that they were safely arrived, and then settling down to jungle routine, there were many nights when I took Benzedrine to keep awake in case of an emergency and panic signals.

  My relationship with Force 136 became even closer. I attended their weekly conferences when every operation was discussed in great detail, news of movements, resupply problems, troubles with the MPAJA and intelligence. I reciprocated as much as I was able – more, no doubt, than I should have done, because ISLD simply did not disclose its field operations and sources of information to anyone. I took a very liberal view of the ‘need to know’ principle. My friends Innes Tremlett and Claude Fenner well understood that I was unable to be as totally open with them as they were with me. By now Force 136 was a vast organisation, concerned mainly with organising, arming and training the forces that would rise up and attack the Japs when we invaded, like the Resistance in France in 1944. The collection and correlation of intelligence material was of secondary importance to them, but was our raison d’être, so they passed everything that came their way to ISLD for evaluation and dissemination as appropriate.

  I was able to bring caution to bear on a matter dear to my heart. In January 1945 I had received evidence that Bob Chrystal was alive and living deep in the jungle somewhere in Pahang with Kuomintang guerrillas. Force 136 had a party not too far away and suggested they contact Bob, get him to the Perhentian Islands, off the Trengganu coast, with a view to lifting him off by submarine or flying boat. I thought this a daft idea. Bob had survived since January 1942 and it seemed crazy to me to risk getting him across to the islands now, with the end of the war now probably only a matter of months away. Fortunately Innes Tremlett agreed and the matter was dropped. In due course Bob and his friend Creer fell in with Dobree of Force 136 and Desmond Wilson, the leader of my ISLD team in Kedah.

  To quote from Denis Holman’s book on Bob’s epic feat of endurance, The Green Torture: ‘Chrystal was thrilled to hear from Desmond Wilson, a cheery Irishman with a heavy black beard, a member of ISLD, that his chief in India was none other than Boris Hembry who, the reader will remember, had been his assistant on his Sungei Siput estate … Chrystal had always thought that Hembry had been captured by the Japs … Chrystal was overjoyed that he would be able to send him a radio signal that very night. He
drafted a signal, asking Hembry to inform his wife in Western Australia that he was alive and well.’

  I received this and wrote a very guarded letter to Babs Chrystal, with no more than a hint that Bob was alive. I did not want to buoy up her hopes only for Bob to die before we could get him out. I posted it in a town pillarbox, rather than sending it with official mail, a mistake as it had obviously attracted the attention of a censor. I was invited to meet a senior security officer two days later, and was surprised to see my letter open on his desk. I was required to destroy it, having first received what I thought, in view of the letter’s carefully worded contents and my own job, an unnecessary lecture on security.

  I then had a better idea, one which I should have had in the first place. I signalled Laurie Brittain in Brisbane asking him to instruct John Sketchley to call on Babs in Perth and personally impart the news, but not before stipulating that she must not divulge it to a soul, not even to her own children.

  When the time came for MINT and CARPENTER to be resupplied we organised a joint ISLD/Force 136 drop. The round trip of 3,500 miles took the Liberator nearly 22 hours, at that time the longest flight, in terms of mileage and duration, in support of a clandestine operation on record, for which the pilot, Squadron Leader Lewis Hodge (later Air Chief Marshall Sir Lewis Hodge, KCB, CBE, DSO, DFC) was awarded the DSO.

  Sometime in April 1945 I was invited to dinner by Innes Tremlett. We often dined together at his small seaside bungalow, usually alone as we could discuss a lot of things more openly, away from the more formal large weekly conferences. On my arrival I was a little surprised to see Claude Fenner too, because not only did he spend most of his working days with Innes and would have been entirely au fait with all aspects of Force 136 operations, but also he had his wife and small daughter living nearby and naturally wished to spend as little time away from them as possible. However, over a stengah it quickly became apparent why he was there. They had decided to attempt to bring Richard Broome and Freddy Spencer Chapman home by submarine, and were interested to hear my comments and suggestions. I was all in favour. The distance that the two escapees would have to travel to the coast was not much more than 60 miles, and most of the route was under the control of the MPAJA. With adequate guides they should be able to reach the coast, possibly in the Pulau Pangkor/Lumut area, in roughly a fortnight from the word go, time to arrange for a submarine to be on hand. In the event the T-class boat originally intended for the rescue broke down and another, smaller, submarine had to be diverted. The pick-up was a success and Freddy and Richard arrived back at Trinco on 19 May – Freddy having been out of circulation for three years and five months.

  Freddy and I had much to talk about, and we spent three whole days almost alone together. Our tongues never stopped wagging and our gullets never ceased swallowing. It was the longest and most enjoyable debriefing that I ever did. Along with all the joviality and enjoyment of his homecoming I extracted much useful intelligence information, particularly about the post war intentions of our communist allies. Freddy’s book, the story of his sojourn in the jungle, and what led up to it, The Jungle is Neutral, rightly became a bestseller. The Force 136 Air Liaison Officer responsible for arranging the RAF air drops was a very attractive WAAF, Flight Officer Faith Townson. Faith was billeted at the Galle Face Hotel and now and again we dined together. She became Mrs Spencer Chapman. After the war, Freddy and I met from time to time at the Special Forces Club in London, and corresponded regularly. He became headmaster of the British school at Plan, in Germany, and then of St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown in South Africa. Disapproving of apartheid, in 1962 he returned to become warden of the Pestalozzi Children’s Village at Seddlescombe in Sussex, from where he moved to Reading University as one of the college wardens. We met at the SFC one night towards the end of July 1971 and I found him very distrait. On 7 August my dear friend and comrade-in-arms took his own life. I, like all those who had the privilege to know him, was devastated.

  At about this time I was promoted lieutenant colonel – temporary and unpaid.

  The war in Europe had ended, and the Japs were retreating everywhere but still putting up stubborn resistance. Life became even more hectic as we asked our agents in the field to acquire yet more information about the enemy’s activities and dispositions. My intelligence reports became increasingly important as D-Day for Operation ZIPPER got nearer, and I was required to present the latest situation reports once a day. By now Force 136 had many teams in the field, so there was a lot of their intelligence to sift through and evaluate in addition to my own ISLD’s.

  I had received orders to sail with the Commander-in-Chief on his battleship, together with my signals unit, so that we could maintain constant contact with the ISLD teams on the ground. I did voice my continued doubts to Innes Tremlett as to the suitability of the proposed invasion beachhead and he agreed with me. But neither of us thought that the opinions of junior officers such as ourselves would be greeted with anything other than derision and annoyance, certainly not at this late stage, and anyway we both had our minds full with our own jobs.

  All was set for a bloody battle when the first atom bomb fell on Hiroshima on 6 August, followed by a second on Nagasaki three days later. On 15 August the Japanese capitulated.

  I must admit that my first reaction was one of disappointment. Quite apart from the enormous amount of work we had all put in to ensure a successful recapture of Malaya, we were looking forward to knocking hell out of the Jap and returning as a conquering army, thus in some way reinstating the British in the eyes and minds of the Asian population whom we had so badly let down in February 1942. And, I thought, the more Japs we killed in the process the better.

  The disappointment quickly evaporated and gave way to a feeling of very great relief. Thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives would be saved, including and particularly the POWs’, as I had received evidence that, had we invaded, the Japs would have massacred every POW and civilian internee they held, male and female. Their safety quickly came uppermost in our minds and I signalled every one of my ISLD teams to report the whereabouts and numbers of any POWs or internees in their areas. The vast majority, of course, were in Siam, having worked on the Railway, and Singapore, although we were aware of numerous internment camps spread around the Dutch East Indies.

  The Allied prisoners of all races had been subject to over three and a half years of the most savage and barbaric treatment by the Japanese, and were continuing to die in large numbers of disease and starvation, and the highest priority should have been given to getting help to them as quickly as possible. This was prevented by the combined chiefs of staff agreeing to General Douglas MacArthur accepting the overall surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay with all the pomp and ceremony that he could devise. America was now the dominant partner and Britain had better accept it. We in SEAC were very bitter. The consequent delay could have had most serious consequences for our men still in enemy hands. The ceremony on board the battleship USS Missouri on 2 September was no doubt a magnificent and historic spectacle, but not worth the life of one Allied POW.

  To quote from General Slim’s definitive book Defeat into Victory: ‘Our men and those of our Allies were daily dying in their foul camps. Thousands were at the limit of weakness and exhaustion. Had we delayed even a few days more in sending in supplies and relief personnel, many more would have died pathetically at the moment of rescue … The evacuation of our prisoners had to wait the arrival of our troops.’

  The mind boggles sometimes at the mentality of generals determined, I suspect for their own egos, to ‘put on a show’.

  Mountbatten and Slim, therefore, ‘jumped the gun’ and began flying in help before the formal surrender. They had already seen the first batch of POWs repatriated from Rangoon and knew what to expect. Some had passed through Colombo before I had left for Singapore. To say that I was appalled by their appearance would be an understatement. Most of us seeing them felt ashamed to think that we had lived more or less com
fortably whilst our fellow Britishers had been so foully degraded. The amazing thing is that, amongst my friends who had suffered at the hands of the little bastards, scarcely one showed any bitterness in later life. I could not have been so forgiving.

  On the Saturday immediately after the surrender I was invited to a party given by Sir Keith and Lady Park. I drove up to Kandy by jeep as I intended to travel back to Colombo via Neuralia, in the mountainous tea-growing district of Ceylon. It was quite a long journey, much of it through jungle. Coming around a bend in the road I saw a large mound ahead in the middle of the road, at the same time aware of a most unpleasant smell. As I got nearer I saw it was a dead elephant. I managed to get around the carcass but the smell had penetrated everywhere and clung to my clothes so that, as soon as I arrived at the Parks’ house I had to creep in through a side door and straight upstairs to my room to shower and change, thankful that I had been invited to stay the night. I found the party a little daunting. I was the only officer there under the rank of admiral, general or air marshal, except for a number of junior WAAFs, WRNSs and FANYs. I spoke to Generals Slim, Carton de Wiat VC, Browning, Oliver Leese and several others. I seemed to be the only member of the clandestine community invited.

  Admiral Mountbatten sat down beside me as I was chatting to Lady Park and said, ‘Thank you, Hembry. Thank you for all your hard work,’ and asked whether I would be taking part in the Victory Parade that was being planned for Singapore. I said not. He got up and excused himself. But I was rather flattered. I was able to give the Parks a message from Colin and to show them on a map his whereabouts in Johore. Before I left the following morning Sir Keith gave me a letter for Colin and I was able to hand it to him when we met in Singapore 10 days later.

  After a week or so, when I was sure of the cessation of hostilities, I instructed my teams to make their separate ways to Singapore, to commandeer suitable houses, and to prepare to receive me and the advanced party on about 2 September. I had arranged for two Catalina flying boats to carry Harry Hays, a driver, some secretaries, codists and signallers and myself. After a 17-hour flight – made more uncomfortable for me because, as the commanding officer, it was my ‘privilege’ to sit in the canvas rumble seat in the cockpit rather than to spread myself out to sleep as usual in the belly of the fuselage – we touched down on the old flying boat base at Seletar. With the exception of Charles Knaggs and Douglas Lee-Hunter, every man jack of my teams were there to greet me, including the two Chinese who had penetrated into Singapore itself, setting up a coffee stall opposite the main entrance to the Japanese GHQ, to report the comings and goings.