Singapore Swing

by John Malathronas

  Brutes.

  But brave brutes, nonetheless. It was here that 4,000 Japanese of the 5th and 18th Division landed in small, collapsible – but motorised – landing crafts holding about a dozen people each. The Australians were spread thinly, lacked proper defences and were demoralised because of the relentless bombardment. The barrage had cut the telephone lines and orders to turn on the searchlights over the straits never arrived. Australian artillery cover was inadequate, communications were dismal, and the soldiers had confusing orders to defend or withdraw to a line further in. Within hours, the Australian lines started disintegrating to retreat and regroup. One of the soldiers whose headstones I surveyed in Kranji – that R. Currey of the 2/20 Infantry Battalion – was almost certainly killed during the retreat from this very position; the dates and the battalions match.

  ‘What is that fence structure?’ I ask MJ pointing at the huge wall erected near the jetty we are standing on.

  ‘It is to prevent the illegal immigrants,’ he replies. ‘They come swimming from Johore. During high tide all this will be covered and part of the mangrove forest as well.’

  ‘This small wall? Can’t they swim around it?’

  ‘No. Can you not see it going all the way round the beach? In both directions?’

  I squint in the dark. ‘Oh yes. OK then – can’t they climb over it?’

  ‘No, look, the top of the wall slopes back towards the sea and you can’t climb it if you are swimming. It goes on for kilometres all the way to the other end of the island. We call it the Great Wall of Singapore.’

  Just like that legendary Cape of Stakes: a wall to prevent not an attack of flying swordfish, but maybe an attack by pirate praus. Has anyone thought of that?

  ‘What about conditions like now? The tide is well on the ebb.’

  ‘It’s dangerous. They would get caught in the mud.’

  I think of the Chinese cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay and agree that MJ is right. You don’t want to wade here at low tide.

  ‘There are also infrared cameras and movement detectors further on among the trees. The border guards will quickly get to them. Do you see that light? It is a police patrol boat coming to check on us.’

  Nice to see that the north part of the island is well-defended for once.

  - 33 -

  It takes us hardly any time to reach our next destination, the famous Kranji beach, which was the second landing site of none other than the Emperor’s elite troops, the Imperial Guards.

  ‘This is where the invasion force suffered some of their greatest losses,’ MJ tells us. ‘Why? Because the Woodlands fuel depot is very near to this place. The Imperial Guards landed on the night of the ninth and found it very difficult to walk in the mud. The Australians started to release the fuel and set fire to it. Many of the Japanese were burned to death. There’s been a folk belief since that whenever someone starts a fire here, a Japanese spirit appears in their vicinity.’

  Astonishingly, and despite the casualties they were inflicting on the enemy, the Australians again withdrew under the orders of Brigadier Duncan Maxwell who overrode Bennett’s contrary instructions. Afraid that he might be outflanked, Maxwell wanted to face the enemy behind the Kranji river that was running north/south. It was most definitely an operational error, possibly the biggest in the defence of Singapore – especially since he didn’t tell anybody else about it, like the Gurkha Regiment to his right who found themselves suddenly under attack.

  I stop daydreaming while my nostrils pick out the acrid smell of burning flesh. Is it my imagination? I think, but then I see the flames, then the shadows…

  ‘There are a lot of people having barbecues here so there must be a lot of Japanese spirits around,’ I hear MJ say in his deadpan voice. ‘I suggest you take a lot of pictures and let us examine them afterwards.’ He’s right. The orbs I will pick up in my night images afterwards can keep SPI in business for a year.

  I peer through the tall palm trees and the scattered, flickering barbecue sparks into the distant, captivating lights of Johore.

  The city looks very pretty, its skyline curvier than Singapore’s, like Kate Winslet posing next to Nicole Kidman. MJ approaches to absorb the vibe. I want to say something memorable in this warm and pleasant night, but I end up with just ‘Full moon.’

  ‘Yes,’ says MJ, ‘full moon. Somebody feeling werewolf?’

  Uranium might be, since he’s turning creepy: ‘A family of four were killed over there including a mother and two of her kids. They were wandering along the low tide area in the vicinity of the reservoir release zone. Then the reservoir overflow opened because of heavy rain, and water suddenly flooded the area. Somehow, they didn’t hear the warning siren and everyone was swept away. Drowned,’ he says in a tone partly-concerned, partly-horrified and most certainly fascinated.

  I retire to the bus.

  We have driven quite some time before Uranium again takes the mike: ‘A small clue for our destination number three: during the attack on Singapore, it saw the most intense fighting. We’ve been ourselves there before and we know this fighting has not stopped. But it’s not between the Allies and the Japanese. It’s between the monkeys!’

  ‘Bukit Timah,’ I hear some voices shout.

  ‘I’m sure many people have heard about the Kranji war memorial over the junction, but hardly anyone knows about the Bukit Batok War Memorial in the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, a Shinto shrine built during the occupation.’

  So far we’ve travelled up through Choa Chu Kang to Sarimbun and are now driving down from Kranji to Bukit Timah. This is, this is –

  ‘We’re following the routes of the Japanese invasion force,’ I tell MJ.

  ‘That’s the point,’ he replies.

  As it’s a long way to Bukit Batok, Uranium tells us a story to pass the time. ‘There used to be this Indian temple in Sungei Tengah that was demolished for some reason. It has since been occupied by a makeshift prayer altar with a number of Chinese deities. One day – some of you may have heard this story – a worshipper smelled something bad. He looked around. There was a small bundle by the statue of Tua Peh Gong, the Hokkien god of wealth. He opened it layer by layer. The cloth was covered by inscriptions and inside the cloth was a dead baby!’

  He pauses for emphasis.

  ‘So we went there to investigate whether this was a real “child spirit” having been offered to the gods. When we arrived, we set our equipment to measure humidity and any breezes, the infrared cameras and all. At twelve midnight, MJ’s alarm watch went off. Now, he never sets his alarm. In fact, he didn’t think it was him. He was quite surprised – we caught his look on video. Only in the end did he realise it was him. Everyone stopped and there was a bad smell like rotten eggs. One of our members, Yellobie, was at the bottom of the hill and he didn’t know anything about what was happening with us. He said afterwards independently that, at midnight, he saw a shadow going past, but when we reviewed the tape we saw nothing on camera. Now listen to this: on a second visit to the same hill, our founder and president Kenny noticed that his watch had also stopped at twelve midnight! Coincidence or what? Some of you here were there on that trip and you know I’m not bluffing.’

  The bus plunges into silence. I look at the Chinese faces around me; if they were scared, impressed or nonplussed, they didn’t show it, as they wouldn’t.

  ‘This is the spookiest place we will visit today, and since it is the spookiest place we will do the spookiest thing,’ says Uranium whose range of adjectives is rather limited tonight. ‘We will make an offering. Anyone know about Japanese culture? To help us with the offerings?’

  Karaoke. Sushi. Hara-kiri.

  I must have thought aloud, because my neighbour – with whom I haven’t spoken during this period – gives me a ‘you-are-not-taking-this-seriously’ look. I am, I just want to see a ghost, and I don’t think my wish will be fulfilled tonight.

  ‘During the offering we will invite you to take as many photos as you can and check t
he environment. Avoid doing crazy things – unless you want something to follow you back.’

  A tape of old Japanese songs starts playing on the radio ‘to create an atmosphere’ and I can’t help thinking that they sound so vampishly Western. I am also wondering what those crazy things are. Those I shouldn’t do.

  The first sight that greets us as we climb out of the bus at Bukit Batok is a sign with a monkey face, a hand holding a banana and a red, diagonal prohibition stripe across both. ‘Don’t disturb the monkeys; they are extremely aggressive,’ Uranium keeps warning us. I examine the surroundings anxiously but I see none, and I am hardly listening anyway. I am soaking up the mood of this place.

  The Bukit Batok War Memorial was a plan of Yamashita’s that was executed after he had fallen out of favour with Tokyo and had been semi-exiled to Manchuria to put the frighteners on the Russians. The Yokohama Engineering Regiment and 20,000 POWs worked for six months to build it. Once it was completed in early 1943, those same POWs would be sent to die in Burma on the notorious Death Railway. A plaque shows us how it looked: set in two large platforms with wide, steep steps, it was a Far-Eastern rendition of the Mesoamerican Aztec pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. A long obelisk on top, more than seven metres tall, towered over the remains of the Japanese soldiers; in a rare display of chivalry, a large wooden cross commemorated the Allied dead a short distance behind. It must have been the most short-lived of all grandiose structures: just before the surrender in August 1945, the Japanese Army razed it to the ground.

  That’s where I catch MJ again.

  ‘Today everything is demolished,’ he is saying. ‘When the Japanese leave a place, they take everything with them and that includes their soldiers’ remains. The only original item left behind are these two concrete structures that stood at the bottom of the staircase on either side of the gate.’

  He takes a breath to ask one of his rhetorical questions.

  ‘Why did they choose this spot for a war memorial? Because it overlooks that site which saw the most intense fight in Singapore between the Japanese and the Allied Forces.’

  I run up with Uranium and Wisely who are setting up the offering: sake, sweets, incense, four candles. It’s windy and the candles won’t light. The two short red ones are OK, but the two tall white ones are impossible. If Uranium tries to light the right one, the left one goes out. If the left one lights up, the red one goes. This is beginning to look like a failed experiment. But then MJ’s young son places a small Japanese flag in front of the sweets and, magically, both candles light up with no problem.

  ‘Did you see that?’ asks Uranium. ‘When the boy brought the flag –’

  ‘Yes. I saw it.’

  ‘Coincidence?’

  Of course.

  As the rest of the group comes up, the snap of cameras eclipses the sound of crickets. We watch the candles intensely, waiting for something to happen. Someone takes a picture of me. Just watch out, in case he tries to pass me off as an apparition. I don’t think SPI will be fooled; one thing I’m not is ethereal.

  ‘Look,’ Sunkist whispers to me.

  The white candles burst into a large flame that is then suddenly reduced to a small bright point at the end of the wick. The candles are almost blown away, but then they flare up again. Sunkist looks at me and than at the flames that are still oscillating from zero to max with an unnerving regularity. ‘What do you think?’ she says.

  I say nothing. It was, of course, the wind – but if, purely for the sake of argument, this were a signal from outer space picked up by that panoply of NASA radars, we’d be talking ‘Intelligent Life Exists’ headlines by tomorrow.

  - 34 -

  Our last stop is the most spectacular: it is the hilly reserve of Kent Ridge Park, the scene of the battle of Pasir Panjang that produced some of the most heroic acts of the week-long siege. It overlooks the south-western coast where the illuminated maze of the oil refineries at Pulau Bukom glow in the night horizon. Our arrival disturbs several courting couples in the car park and, as I climb up to the highest observation point, I upset another one that sits up dishevelled in a gazebo. Our glances cross; their amorosity has gone rather far. I swallow hard as I realise that I have my digital camera all cocked and ready. The girl’s eyes shout ‘pervert’ and the boy’s eyes cry murder. I decide to walk down back to safety.

  ‘By 14 February 1942 the Japanese had fought all way south towards here,’ says MJ. ‘Look down and you can see how strategic this place was and why, after it fell, Percival surrendered.’

  Even before the surrender, Singapore was steeped in a cloud of capitulation. The previous day – Friday the thirteenth– bottles of alcohol were being smashed at Raffles Hotel, so that the Japanese troops would find nothing to drink and stay sober. In Keppel Harbour, the naval base was being dynamited and Australian deserters were storming ships carrying civilians to Jakarta. Like his troops, Gordon Bennett was the only high-ranking officer who left Singapore. He faced censure for abandoning his command and never held another commission. As for that popular expression that bears his name: although some etymologists claim that it precedes his appearance in history, the first written record we have is from the 1960s, so it could well be attributed to the general’s existence.

  I walk around in the park which has been subject to a heavy dose of reforestation. The National Parks Board is fighting a constant war against invasive plant species such as the bearded smilax, an aggressive local vine you can see all over Singapore and Koster’s curse, a perennial shrub that forms dense thickets that shade out all other vegetation. But next to the local flora such as the thorny kapok trees, the short-stumped silverbacks and sweet-smelling tembusu, they seem to have left intact the Australian wattles, one of the fastest-growing trees known to Man that has become a pest almost everywhere else. Never mind, they will soon learn.

  I reach the edge of the car park.

  The last stand of the 1st Malay Regiment took place just down from here. It was the Battle of Opium Hill, named after a fully-fledged opium factory that was based there. The Malays had not been used earlier because no one knew the strength of their fighting spirit; Percival need not have worried: the regiment didn’t believe in surrender. Thinking them green and unbloodied – which they were – the Japanese dressed like Punjabis and started marching in formation in order to deceive them. But the Malays were sharp: these soldiers were marching in fours and the British-drilled troops marched in threes. The Japanese troops were slaughtered, and it was because of those heavy losses that their comrades ran in a rage towards Alexandra hospital a few hundred yards away when the battle was finally over.

  As it would be, for Yamashita concentrated the last remnants of his artillery on Opium Hill. After a 48-hour struggle, the Malays fought down to the last man led by the Second Lieutenant Adnan Saidi of ‘D’ Company. He was caught alive by the Japanese, put in a sack, hung upside down from a tree and used for bayonet practice. After a few days, the Japanese took him down and burned his body, knowing that for Muslims this was the worst fate that can befall their remains. The corpses of many Malay soldiers who fell on Opium Hill were never found which is why their names, including that of Adnan Saidi, are inscribed on the Kranji Memorial. I know; I saw them there.‘So why was it the Japanese won the war? I’m sure John here knows about it.’

  Know about it? The greatest defeat of the British Army, maybe ever, has been the subject of analysis and counter-analysis by armchair strategists for decades. It has recently become fashionable to blame the Australians for allowing the Japanese to get a foothold on the island. While they bear some of the blame, the fish starts stinking from the head. Within 48 hours Yamashita was on the island himself; Percival remained in the underground bunkers of Fort Canning. Nuff said.

  So long after the event, the whole sorry episode seems like an exercise in the punishment of hubris: the haughtiness of the bungling, buck-toothed Brits and the overconfidence of the Australians who believed their own propaganda deserved to be pricke
d. On the other hand, the jaw-dropping cruelty of the Japanese who committed so many atrocities just had to be avenged. It is the details that hurt. When one English couple Charles and Kathleen Stapledon – lost their housekeeper during the bombing, they received a message that he had been knocked off his bicycle by a shell but was recovering in hospital and wanted to see them. It was then they realised they couldn’t find him, because they didn’t know his name; he had always been ‘Boy’ to them, like every other Chinese servant. Then again, how could the Japanese ever be the good guys when the punishment for those who listened to Allied broadcasts was to hammer sharpened pencils into their ears to quote from the Kempeitai’s official torture manual? The fall of Singapore and the subsequent horror of the nuclear bombings look like justified divine censures for two different styles of imperialism, especially since the Japanese divisions who carried out the massacres were mostly recruited from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s enough to make you believe in collective karma.

  Still, that it was a momentous event there is no doubt: the speed of the collapse of the British presence in Malaya cast a shadow which never quite left. It is 800 kilometres from the top of Malaysia at Kota Bahru to Singapore. The Japanese plan allowed for 90 days to completion. They did it in 70; if only IT projects could run half as well. The shambolic manner of the retreat down the peninsula was deeply shameful: the tuans and the mems leaving their plantations and houses without regard for their servants; the implementation of a scorched earth policy with no heed for the native population; the way the army abandoned Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca and their Chinese communities to their fate. If you lose face in Asia, you lose it forever.

  The rest follows from that, really.

  The Chinese resistance fighters in the jungles of Malaya trained by British Special Operations tried to wrest control after the war, in the manner of the Yugoslav and Greek partisans in Europe. Malaya was created as a barrier to the tide of communism. Security Acts involving detention without trial were passed in Singapore which still mire the statutes now. Without a European war, Britain concentrated its troops on Malaya and won the insurgency. Singapore benefited immensely as the headquarters of an army that reached, at its peak, 60,000 men. It profited further when another war started in neighbouring Indochina; it was American troops this time that came to Singapore to recuperate. At a time when developing countries begged for foreign capital, Singapore didn’t need to advertise. As any estate agent will tell you, all that matters is location, location, location.