The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  Singapore began to resemble less of a boomtown and more of a frontier town. As reinforcements continued to pour in tensions between the Australians and the Argylls sprang up and regularly spilled over into massive punchups and wild drunken brawls. The Argylls were even known to take their bugler with them to summon reinforcements when the inevitable boozed-up battles broke out.

  On 2 December HMS Prince of Wales, the brand-new battleship that was the pride of the British Navy and which a few months earlier had hosted Churchill and Roosevelt’s North Atlantic talks, steamed into Singapore accompanied by the mighty HMS Repulse, a First World War-vintage cruiser. These two naval giants and a handful of destroyers were intended to act as a deterrent against Japanese aggression, in what seemed like a throwback to the era of gunboat diplomacy.

  But the Army also had a plan, Tommy revealed. ‘Matador’, he said, swearing me to secrecy, was the codeword that would signal an imminent Japanese invasion. The British, Australians, Indians, Gurkhas and Malayans would launch a pre-emptive strike and turn our beaches into killing fields, forcing the Japanese back into the seas.

  At Fort Canning we waited for the inevitable. We waited for Matador, and we waited and waited . . .

  Three

  Land of Hope and Glory!

  One evening Tommy sat down next to me in the mess with a worried look on his face. ‘I think the Japs are coming. Keep it to yourself – the bosses are talking about launching Matador.’

  The news was hardly unexpected but having your worst fears confirmed was still pretty grim.

  ‘I thought they would be coming,’ I said, reading the seriousness etched on Tommy’s face. He was greying at the temples now, the distance between him and his family ageing him more than any number of late-night nappy changes or trips to the park with his young children.

  He said, ‘Hopefully we’ll be prepared for them but I doubt it as much as you do. We are going to be in for a rough ride.’

  ‘Let’s just hope the Nips are as disorganised as we are.’

  ‘Invaders are always organised,’ he observed glumly, slumping back in his chair.

  ‘Are you scared, Tommy?’

  ‘You betcha. You?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  Britain was on the horns of a dilemma. It wanted to defend Malaya and Singapore but did not want to provoke the Japanese into a war, especially with Britain standing alone against Germany. It was an unenviable position and led to constant dithering and indecision at the top.

  Our commander, General Arthur Percival, had an unfortunate appearance and looked like a typical upper-class ‘chinless wonder’. He was nicknamed ‘The Rabbit’ but in fact was a tough and brave soldier who had been heavily decorated in the First World War and had fought in Ireland, where in 1920 the IRA put a price of £1000 on his head. He had also fought in Russia against the Bolsheviks. Percival was fully aware of the Japanese threat and of their likely tactics. Yet Singapore, despite its immense prestige and strategic value, was critically lacking in heavy armour and air power.

  I also felt that everything was far too laid-back in Singapore. In one sense it was understandable. Britannia had ruled the waves since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. And we had defeated the Germans in the 1914 – 18 conflict. Undoubtedly, though, there was an undercurrent of complacency and racial supremacy too. It was inconceivable that the greatest Empire the world had known could be defeated by little yellow men who had poor eyesight and could not see in the dark. All kinds of mumbo-jumbo was repeated in relation to the Japanese and their alleged weaknesses. We were told that they were inferior soldiers and had only ever fought other ‘inadequates’ like the Chinese. We were even told that their pilots were hopeless because they had a poor sense of balance, owing to their being carried on their mothers’ backs as babies! We would soon learn the hard way.

  The eighth of December 1941 in Singapore was a balmy summers’ day just like any other. The only unusual thing was the failure of our ‘trusty’ Tamil to show up for work as normal. The tempo of work at the base had really increased and late in the evening I was still dealing with papers in the office when, at around 10 p.m., a tremendous explosion just fifty yards from my small office sent me diving under the desk for cover. Japanese bombs had started raining down on Fort Canning.

  The first bomb had exploded on the nearby tennis court, leaving a ten-foot-wide crater on the baseline and rocking my office. Huddled under the desk, scared to death and waiting for the next bomb to drop, I realised this was it. War. I would finally learn why my father’s hands shook during thunderstorms.

  I should have known that 8 December was to be the day. The mystery of the Tamil’s non-appearance was now solved. He was never seen again, confirming in my mind my earlier suspicion that he was a spy for the Japanese and had been ciphering secret information and documents out of our office, from beneath our noses.

  While the Japanese were targeting Fort Canning and the naval base at Singapore from the air, their army was landing up-country on the eastern coast of Malaysia – on the undefended beaches originally identified in Matador as landing points. Imperial shock troops blooded against Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist army, Mao Tse-tung’s Communist guerrillas and Marshal Zhukov’s mechanised Red Army in Mongolia strolled ashore in neutral Thailand and walked into Malaya virtually unopposed.

  Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific, in a separate time zone, it was still 7 December, a sleepy Sunday morning in Hawaii. The bulk of the United States’ Pacific Fleet was moored at Pearl Harbor when Admiral Yamamoto’s dive-bombers struck without warning on a day that President Roosevelt predicted would ‘live in infamy’.

  For the next two days the bombs kept falling. Oddly Fort Canning suffered very little. Whether it was because the fort was situated on a hill or because the Japanese calculated that they could not get to the underground complex, I never knew. But we escaped most of the bombs. They always seemed to fall short and the main buildings bore little actual damage.

  Singapore was not so lucky. The city was ill-prepared for this oriental blitz. On that first night no order was issued to black out the lights in the city and from Fort Canning I looked down to witness the incredible sight of Singapore ablaze with street lights, their glow acting as a magnet for Japanese bombers and their fighter escorts, which buzzed around the city like wasps around a jam pot. There was insufficient British air support either. Hopelessly outnumbered our pilots took to the air on suicide missions. Tragically some of our planes were also shot down by our own anti-aircraft batteries. Soon the Japanese had mastery of the skies and a great black pall of smoke hung over the city. Singapore was burning.

  At the same time reports came flooding in from up-country in Malaya and most were utterly depressing. Japanese troops under General Yamashita, who would later become known as ‘The Tiger of Malaya’, were storming south at an unbelievable speed, relying on bicycles and the ingenuity of their engineers, who quickly restored sabotaged bridges and roads. Critically the Japanese infantry was supported by three hundred tanks. The war machines that the British Army had decided were unsuitable for conditions in Malaya cut swathes through our lightly armed troops.

  On 10 December General Percival issued a special order of the day. He announced, ‘The eyes of the Empire are upon us. Our whole position in the Far East is at stake. The struggle may be long and grim but let us all resolve to stand fast come what may and to prove ourselves worthy of the great trust which has been placed in us.’

  On the very same day we received the shocking news that HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse had been sunk by Japanese bombers with heavy loss of life. A vital component in our defence had gone and the loss of these mighty ships had a devastating impact on our morale.

  Incredibly, with the enemy bearing down on us, the bungling continued. Colonial civil servants refused the Army use of civilian telephone lines or transport for the wounded from up-country. Railway officials were adamant that civilian passenger trains r
un as normal while Red Cross and troop trains were shunted into sidings. It was yet another example of the complacent colonials and their snooty attitude towards the Army, Navy and Air Force. Did they think we were out there for a picnic? Their lack of cooperation played right into the hands of the Japanese whose active fifth column was wreaking havoc with our lines of communication and had been working on intelligence for many years prior to the invasion.

  The paperwork was dropping on my desk even more frequently than the bombs that fell around us. I had moved a camp bed into the office so I could be there twenty-four hours a day to handle urgent papers. Besides, sleeping in my small wooden hut all on its own, exposed on the banks of the reservoir, was an unattractive option.

  On the day the Prince of Wales went down a lance corporal marched into the office and handed me a piece of paper signed by Colonel Graham himself. The Gordon Highlanders were sending three boy soldiers to Fort Canning and I was to be put in charge of them. It ordered me to look after these three boys, two of whom were brothers, for ‘the duration of hostilities’. They had joined the Army as bandsmen and Colonel Graham had given them the option of trading their uniforms for civvies and going with the civilians. To their credit they decided that they had joined the Army as Gordon Highlanders and it was their duty to stay on and fight.

  And so fourteen-year-old Freddie Brind, his elder brother James, fifteen, along with sixteen-year-old John Scott were sent to me that very day. It was a bit scary. I had never had the responsibility of looking after anyone other than myself. It would have been bad enough if there hadn’t been a war on! I had no idea why I was chosen to look after them. There must have been some discussion at Selarang as to what they should do with the boys and perhaps they thought they would be safer at Fort Canning than anywhere else. They could hardly have sent them out with the troops.

  When the boys arrived they looked as if they had just walked in from the Bridge of Don barracks. Shiny as new pins they were in full Gordon Highlander uniform with kit bags at their sides. They were petrified, like startled rabbits caught in headlights, and twitched nervously at the constant air raids. I had not had a chance to think what to do with them but felt the safest thing was to accommodate them in the basement below the office. It was not very habitable but it was safer than being above ground, especially in my isolated hut just begging to be bombed. At least here I could keep an eye on them. Acquiring three iron bedsteads and an old wooden cabinet, I took the boys down and set them up a makeshift home. I commandeered as many magazines from the mess room as I could and took those to the boys as well – anything to keep their minds busy.

  They were pretty relieved to be ensconced in the basement and were so glad to be out of harm’s way, relatively speaking. When the siren sounded to signal a momentary all-clear I let them up into the office and kept them occupied with some work. They were fairly obedient, through sheer terror more than anything else. Freddie, despite being the youngest, was most definitely the ringleader. A little under five feet tall, with hollow cheeks, he was darkskinned with a mop of curly brown hair and brown eyes. He was the dominant personality by far and always getting his older pals to follow him. He was very cheeky and ribbed me endlessly but in quite a likeable way. I could never be mad with Freddie. He had a way of flashing a smile, with big wide eyes that glinted in good humour, or turning a phrase, which made you think butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Even with people telling him to go to hell he would break into a grin and shrug. He was the most charming of rogues and a real artful dodger.

  If Freddie was the extrovert, his brother Jim was the exact opposite. He was about the same height but slightly sturdier and had very little to say, to the point where I thought he had a speech difficulty. He did not stutter or stammer yet he was a slow speaker and found the right words hard to come by. Maybe because Freddie spoke so fast and so frequently Jim had allowed himself just to fade into the background.

  The Brinds lived in Singapore. Their father had completed a twenty-three-year stint with the Gordon Highlanders and his last posting was in India, where both boys were born. On leaving the Army he moved the family to Singapore where he took over warden duties at Changi jail, the purpose-built prison constructed by the British. He stayed on at his post in Singapore and was subsequently captured by the Japanese. The boys’ mother and sisters successfully escaped from the besieged island on one of the last ships out and returned to the family’s original home in Brentwood, Essex.

  Like Jim young John never said a word either. He was an Aberdeenshire farmer’s son, tall and gangling, but dour and rather simple. He followed Freddie around like a lamb and I could not get through to him.

  Christmas Day 1941 was a day like any other. Bombs were falling and in Singapore City innocent men, women and children were dying. Up-country in Malaya the fighting was intense. Reports cascaded into the office and the boys were as scared as hell. It was the first time in my life that I had not celebrated Christmas and I smiled to myself as I thought of what it would be like back in snowy Aberdeen. How I longed to be there with my loved ones. It was always my job to polish the silver and set the table, a task over which I took infinite care. After gorging ourselves we would gather round the piano and Mum and Doug would take turns to play our favourite tunes. The festivities always ended the same way, with Auntie Dossie singing her party piece, ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. I had a good singing voice too and would join in. I thought of them all that Christmas and wondered when if ever we would meet again. And then I vowed that we would meet again and that I would join in singing with Dossie, at the end of a perfect day.

  Across the South China Sea in Hong Kong it was anything but a perfect day. After a seventeen-day siege the British surrendered to the Japanese. Hours earlier Japanese troops had entered the city and celebrated Christmas in their own special way – by torturing and massacring sixty wounded patients and doctors in St Stephen’s College Hospital.

  Watching the progress of the war through the correspondence that passed over my desk only heightened my anxiety. It was like a tide that could not be stemmed and the Army was in full retreat, fighting valiant but ultimately doomed rearguard actions. Civilians were fleeing down the Malay Peninsula and heading for Singapore, desperate to escape.

  During this time, when boredom had well and truly set in for the boys, they either got hold of my hut key or opened its door by force. Whatever their method of entry they managed to get in and rummage through what few personal possessions I had. They found my gramophone and records and went through all of my photographs. When I found them ransacking the hut I chased them out and ordered them into the basement, where I gave them a hell of a rollicking. I lectured them about respecting other people’s property and privacy. Jim and John were very apologetic while Freddie was typically all milk and honey.

  They were lucky lads. Just two days later the hut received a direct hit during an air raid. It was blown to smithereens. Nearly everything I owned, including all of my personal belongings, was lost. Luckily I still had some clothes and personal photographs, including snaps of my family and Hazel, in the office and counted myself lucky not to have lost them.

  Up-country, meanwhile, Malaya was the scene of bitter hand-to-hand fighting. Australian, Indian, Gurkha and British units distinguished themselves with heroic but increasingly ineffective resistance. The Japanese were ‘distinguishing’ themselves too, and there were alarming reports of barbaric massacres of civilians and allied prisoners. In Penang the occupying Japanese promptly massacred seven hundred local Chinese, beheading and bayoneting them.

  The fighting was getting closer to Singapore all the time. So were the atrocities. On 22 January 1942, after fierce fighting at the village of Parit Sulong in Johore, retreating Australians were forced to leave behind their wounded. What followed became the first of many atrocities against allied prisoners. The Japanese General Takuma Nishimura ordered them killed and his subordinates gleefully obliged, bayoneting, drowning and burning alive the w
ounded men. Over 160 Australians and Indians died. In a separate incident at Bukit Timah twelve captured Argylls were tied up with barbed wire and bayoneted. One survivor played dead and was helped to safety by friendly Chinese.

  At midnight on 31 January 1942 the Australians and Gordons withdrew from the mainland and the ninety remaining survivors of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were ordered by General Percival to retreat across the causeway that linked Malaya to Singapore. Bagpipes defiantly skirled the Argyll tune ‘Hielan Laddie’ as the last men out of Malaya crossed on to the island. Some high-ranking officers used Red Cross ambulances for their retreat over the causeway before it was blown up by the Royal Engineers.

  Now Singapore was on its own. The only force that could have helped us was lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. A mish-mash of eighty thousand men from at least half a dozen nationalities and from both regular and volunteer regiments, some with little or no training, were defending the island with rapidly diminishing air support.

  Morale plummeted and when our engineers blew up the huge British naval base to deny its use to the Japanese it plunged even further. The whole point of ‘Fortress Singapore’ had been to protect the giant Keppel naval base that we had just blown up on Churchill’s orders. It was obvious that the game was up and troops began to desert in large numbers. Singapore, which had very few air raid shelters for the civilian population, stood in chaos and an epidemic of lawlessness and looting broke out. There were thousands of deserters, particularly among the Australians, who were more ‘bolshie’ than us and who could see that it was impossible to fight without air cover. Many of these men fought to get on to the ships sent to rescue women and children and the military police were forced to fire over their heads to stop them storming the gangways on to the ships. Dozens swarmed aboard by shimmying up the mooring ropes so desperate were they to get out and escape. Yet incredibly troop ships were still arriving, disgorging into this abyss more young Australians, many of them poorly trained. Some had literally never fired a shot. They were lambs to the slaughter. It was an awful waste.