One other escape story is worth recording. It concerned seven Ghurkas who were cut off in the severe fighting around the Slim River. Ten days later they reported back, grinning, to their battalion, after having covered 200 miles. During that time they had been captured no fewer than five times by the Japanese and each time they escaped. In the last break for liberty, they swam a wide river and then dressed themselves in sarongs and strolled calmly along a railway line in full view of the Japanese, who did not take the slightest notice of them. There were many other escape stories just as strange.
January saw ‘successful disengagements of our forces’ a nightly affair. The Japanese were infiltrating down the west coast, and apparently our Generals could devise no counter measures except a constant straightening of the line right across Malaya. The British and Indian troops were showing signs of physical exhaustion after weeks of unrespited battle. There were no reinforcements in sight and no chance of a rest. They were always on the move day and night. After a day of persistent air bombardments there was little chance of sleep after dark and the jungle and rubber country was nerve-racking at night. The Japanese would let off firecrackers in an attempt to draw counter-fire and so pinpoint our positions, and there was always a feeling that small parties of Japanese soldiers with Tommy guns and mortars were padding through the shadows of the trees in sandshoes. In the morning the Japanese might be behind you instead of in front of you. They were audacious and fanatical and flushed with success.
Indian drivers were falling asleep at the wheel with fatigue as the convoys wound like a fat snake along the roads. The roads were choked with convoys and the time came when the drivers were so tired that they didn’t care whether the regulation distance between trucks was observed or not. When a bomb straddled the road, the whole line of trucks had to come to a halt while the bomb crater was filled in. Japanese bombers did not neglect the opportunity. Red Cross trucks, ammunition trucks, water trucks, food trucks. Malaya was crammed with motor transport. The food problem was almost insoluble. The British ate one kind of food. The Indians all ate different kinds of food and had to get it. The Japanese carried a little bag of rice that lasted him for days; he lived off the country as he marched through it; therein lay the secret of his bewildering mobility and speed. Everything our soldiers ate had to be transported to them by road. There was nothing growing in the country that they could eat and there was dysentery and other diseases in the running streams. Back and back they went towards the sea, down a peninsula which has been described as hanging from the greater peninsula of Indo-China like the tail of a possum. Miles behind the line, squads of Indian sappers were systematically laying charges on every bridge on the road, ready to be blown up when the troops passed through. The Indians would step aside as we drove over, and there was something dreadfully dispiriting to see them take up their task again.
We drove back to Kuala Lumpur to replenish the unit’s supplies and reached there the day after it had received its first big bombing. The bathroom annexe of the famous ‘Spotted Dog’ Selangor Club had received a direct hit, and one of the only two articles I souvenired (which is a polite form of looting) in Malaya was a club bath towel of which I was sorely in need. ‘Daisy-cutter’ bombs had fallen plumb on the club cricket ground, and a swarm of natives were gathered curiously around the small craters from which the bombs’ contents had ripped along the grass, giving them the appearance of spoked wheels. On a hill overlooking the town we saw a house utterly shattered and a mound of earth where there had once been a slit trench. It had received a direct hit and it was now the grave of an officer. He had taken shelter there during the raid and he was still there, we were told. Nobody seemed to be bothering about digging him out.
One incident will illustrate the curious mentality of a certain type of British civilian in Malaya. One of the banks had also been hit and business, we were told, was being conducted at the private house of one of the bank officials. Henry Steel had an account at the bank, and we were short of money. We drove to the official’s house on a hill to see what could be done about it. Unfortunately it was after banking hours and the official was resting from his arduous labours and enjoying a stengah with a lady friend and another man. Henry went inside, saluted, and explained that he had just come from the front. Could the official oblige him by cashing a cheque for a small amount? I didn’t hear the conversation myself, but when Henry came out white-faced and angry, I gathered that the official had testily resented the intrusion on his privacy and had refused point-blank and rudely to do anything until the following morning. It seemed that this man was accustomed to having his stengah at this time of the day and such a minor thing as a war was not going to interfere with it. As for offering Henry, a British officer, a drink, such a thing never entered his head. It was the only occasion on which I have seen Henry really angry. Of course, all Malayan officials and civil servants were not like this.
Not many days later we watched the death agonies of Kuala Lumpur, queen city of the Malayan Peninsula and the greatest prize the Japanese had yet captured. We drove into the town on the day of its evacuation, and of all the fantastic scenes I saw in Malaya the fall of Kuala Lumpur was the most fantastic of all. In many ways it was the most tragic because with the fall of Kuala Lumpur, the heart fell out of Malaya. It was a lovely town and the Europeans loved it genuinely and many women wept as they took the last train to Singapore. The end of Kuala Lumpur was the end of Malaya as we knew it and the end of an epoch. From the materialistic point of view not many tears need to be shed over it, but from the sentimental and human point of view, it was heart-rending in the extreme and you could not but feel a flood of sympathy for the victims of it. Without doubt Malaya fell that day, and from then on it was merely a question of time before the whole structure collapsed.
There were two groups of native refugees in Kuala Lumpur that day; one group was trying to get out of town and the other group was trying to get into the town to share in the wholesale looting. The city was littered with wreckage and the shouts of excited natives were punctuated with louder detonations as British and Indian troops destroyed bridges and public utilities. The city was too big to police properly at this stage and looting was rife. The big stores were wide open and natives staggered out carrying rolls of silk and cotton, sewing machines, radios, gramophones, perambulators, bedding, tinned food, topees, women’s hats and frocks. Half of the stuff they looted was absolutely useless to them, but the looting-bug had them in its grip.
We found ourselves at the hospital, and there we met some of the bravest people of all. Two young Indian assistant doctors and some Malay nurses were voluntarily staying behind to look after 150 patients, including 14 expectant mothers. The doctors were also doing all the cooking for the hospital and burying the dead. One of them said to us, ‘What else can we do? We can’t leave these sick people in the lurch. We are sure that the Japanese will not harm us. We are not white and we feel the Japanese will be less harsh on us for that reason.’ We shook them by the hand and wished them good luck.
We drove out of town and came to the ‘King’s House’, official home of the British Resident. The superb, close-cropped lawns and gardens where the British elite of Kuala Lumpur had so recently gathered on social occasions slumbered in the hot Malayan sunshine, but there was an air of complete desolation, and out here it was as silent as the grave. The front doors, facing terraced lawns, were locked, but a back door was open and we went inside. There was every evidence that the occupants had beaten a very fast ‘hasty’, and indeed the High Command had ordered a quick withdrawal after the Japanese landed at Port Swettenham. The King’s House had a Marie Celeste atmosphere. In one big office, rows and rows of official publications stood in glass cupboards, and masses of papers, probably valueless to the enemy, were strewn all over the room. In the dining room news of the Japanese advance had apparently interrupted a meal; plates were still on the table; table napkins were lying on the floor. In the drawing room a half-drunk whisky-and-soda with
a soda water bottle threequarters full stood on an oval rosewood table. Upstairs a woman’s light-blue evening frock lay on an ironing board, half-ironed. The beds were made in the bedrooms. In glass cases in the drawing room were all sorts of brass and silver articles and other treasures were hanging on the walls. There was one lovely little brass Siamese dancing girl which I could not resist putting in my pocket. I always intended returning it to its owner if I ever met him, but unfortunately I left it behind in Singapore. Looting is an insidious temptation because you can produce the unanswerable argument to yourself, ‘Well, if I don’t take it now, the Japs will take it tomorrow.’ It always made me self-conscious and uncomfortable, but this time I fell because the Siamese dancing girl fascinated me and I thought I would appreciate her more than the Japanese would. Apart from the ‘Spotted Dog’ bath towel it was the only time I fell from grace. There was a pair of perfectly made tan shoes in Robinsons store in Kuala Lumpur which I eyed enviously several times, but I could never bring myself to souvenir them. I suppose some Japanese officer is wearing them now.
We left the British Residency and drove back into Kuala Lumpur. It was time for us to leave as they seemed to be about to blow the last of the bridges. On our way through town we stopped outside a wellknown Chinese store. The proprietor was preparing to leave, and when he saw us he told us to wait and came out with four bottles of Heidsieck 1927 champagne. He said he would sooner we drank it than the so-and-so Japanese. We drove out of Kuala Lumpur and in the abandoned clubhouse of a local golf course smashed the necks of the champagne bottles and drank the vintage wine warm. We were very short of rations that day and hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I remember feeling very ‘wuzzy’ in the head afterwards. We looked back over Kuala Lumpur from the clubhouse, and saw billows of smoke arising from the railway station and the Majestic Hotel. We heard the sound of explosions as British troops fired the last demolition charges. We all knew with certainty that these were the funeral pyres of Malaya.
*
The P.R.O. unit could not handle all the war correspondents at once, and so we took it in turns to go to the front. The others ‘rested’ in Singapore. During my periods of rest I shared a flat with Jim Henry, Singapore manager of Reuters. Jim was a burly, good-natured fellow and nobody could have asked for a more congenial companion. I wasn’t very pleased with my efforts as a war correspondent, although I preened myself for some days when a cable came from Buenos Aires saying that my despatches were popular in South America. I was managing to write fairly good descriptive articles of the things I had actually seen, but I found it singularly difficult to give any bird’s-eye picture of the campaign as a whole. Some of the other correspondents, veterans of many campaigns, had this faculty; and, after all, what the public wanted most of all at this time was a picture of the whole situation and an explanation of the puzzling retreat. I did not feel competent to attempt to answer the question and I think my Army intelligence training was a distinct drawback. I was censoring my own despatches far too rigorously instead of leaving it to officials who were there for that purpose. It is the duty of a war correspondent to draw attention to mistakes and official stupidities if he has irrefutable evidence of their existence – if he can bully his messages through the censor. I wasn’t sure of my ground, and when I learnt it was too late.
There wasn’t much rest in Singapore these days. Reuters office was in the Beam Building near the docks, and Jim had a hectic time trying to run Reuters between raids. Jim was very proud of the air-raid shelter he had had built on the tennis court near his flat, and it was certainly an impressive-looking affair. There were also slit trenches around the property, but these were usually half-full of water. We spent a lot of time in Jim’s air-raid shelter, especially when the moon was at its full. For a while the air-raid warnings functioned splendidly and there was plenty of time to reach the shelter before the bombs fell. Later on, when our air observers had to leave Johore, the sequence of events was usually bombs, siren, bombs, all-clear, bombs. But that was nobody’s fault.
Admitting the excellence of Jim’s shelter, I always felt much safer in an open trench at the front. There’s a horrible trapped feeling in being five feet underground with only a few feet of wet earth over your head. Our shelter was usually full of people including a completely nerveless middle-aged Australian woman who wore khaki slacks and a tin hat and worked with a first-aid unit. Two or three Chinese amahs also sheltered with us, and they were invariably followed into the shelter by one or two dogs. Then there was a young English bride from Penang who had charge of a little girl she had offered to take to Australia when a boat was available. The little girl, poor thing, was frightened when the bombs fell, and whimpered. And there was an American girl, widow of a British officer, who lived nearby. Let us call her Bobbie, which isn’t her real name. She was the most charming and intelligent woman I have ever met. She had university degrees for philosophy and languages and wrote the most delightful children’s stories. She loved Malaya and loved and understood the Chinese. When the last boat left Singapore with American refugees, they pleaded with Bobbie to go, but her loyalty to the Chinese was too strong. ‘We can’t leave these people!’ she said. ‘Don’t you see, they trust us? We can’t leave them in the lurch.’ So she stayed behind; like the Dutch were to stay behind in Java.
They weren’t pleasant, those nights in the shelter, with the little girl whimpering and crying. One night as we moved tardily to the shelter we saw a Japanese place come down. Nine of them in perfect formation were caught in the search-light beams and ack-ack shells burst about them like splashes of orange sealing-wax in the sky. The middle plane of the first three fell out. As it did so the middle plane of the second three moved into the vacant place and the formation flew on with meticulous neatness. The Japanese were good at that sort of thing; their pattern bombing was brilliant and destructive.
When there wasn’t a ‘flap’ on we sat in Jim’s big lounge room and listened to the radio. The Japanese had the Penang station going full blast. Some of the propaganda was terrifyingly accurate; some of it was very far from the mark. I’ve forgotten how many times they ‘annihilated’ the 8th Division and ‘captured’ General Gordon Bennett. Our own radio did their best to offset this propaganda. Some day I would like to know who ‘John’ and ‘Michael’ were. Two or three times a day the Singapore radio sent out messages to them. ‘John,’ one of the message might say, ‘if you take a compass bearing of 260 degrees from the old house and walk 500 paces you will come to a big coconut tree. Twenty paces east from the tree is food and a change of clothing.’ Or it might say: ‘Michael. Are you listening, Michael? Go downstream from the dam on the river for 300 paces and you will find what you are looking for under a log.’
I wonder who ‘John’ and ‘Michael’ really were?
*
Early in January I caught up at last with the 2/19th again. With Ian Fitchett, official Australian war correspondent, and Ronnie Matthews, of the London Daily Herald, I drove up the east coast to write a story about the Jemaluang and Mersing sectors where the 22nd Infantry Brigade group was still waiting for some Japanese to fight.
The 2/19th were at Jemaluang. We got there in the late afternoon and the reunion with them was something to remember for the rest of my life. I never saw them again, but some day some of us, I pray, will paint Sydney red when they come marching home again. I paid my respects to Colonel Anderson and other officers in a tent that was the officers’ mess. It was an odd sensation being in the officers’ mess for the first time, and I suddenly went back to the status of a private again and felt nervous. I saw a couple of batmen gazing at me open-mouthed and I winked at them.
Then, after all courtesies had been observed and Colonel Anderson had plied us with shrewd questions about the situation at the front and Japanese tactics, I went in search of the ‘I’ section. I found them in foxholes amongst the trees, and Ben, as usual, had the neatest and most elaborate foxhole of them all. And there was Jack, and we looked in each o
ther’s eyes for a moment and grasped hands.
Then he said: ‘You bloody fool, Gil!’
‘That’s a nice way to welcome me back,’ I said.
‘Well, you are! What did you want to come back for? You ought to be kicked from here to Singapore … Gee, it’s nice to see you again.’
Then they were all around me – Bill and Stan and Alan and Ben and Stuart Burt and the others. I was like a visitation from another world, and I swear there were tears in my eyes as I talked to them. Presently we shoved Stuart Burt away and I brought out from my suitcase a bottle of Scotch whisky and a bottle of gin. It was strictly against orders and maybe because of that they were emptied in approximately seven minutes. They let me do the talking, and I talked and talked in the dusk. I told them what I could about their families and I told them about Sydney. They were hungry for news of home. I told them about Bondi Beach and the Sydney girls in their flimsy summer frocks. They were home-hungry and woman-hungry, which is much the same thing, and they wanted to know not the big things about Australia, but the little things. Whether the pubs still shut at six and whether Maroubra still looked the same and what were the latest tunes they were singing.
One of them said: ‘Gosh, it’s funny to think that you have been in action before us after all.’
‘I’ve only seen it,’ I said. ‘It’s not the same, you know.’
They wanted to know what it felt like to be bombed, for they were still frustrated and champing at the bit. At night they heard formations of Japanese bombers droning overhead on their way to bomb Singapore, but they had not yet been attacked themselves. Their time was to come very soon, although they did not know it.
We talked late into the night and they dosed me with quinine because they were in malaria country, and presently it began to drizzle with rain. I slept beside Jack under a makeshift tent made with a mosquito net and a ground sheet slung on branches. The rain came through in the night and it was pretty miserable, and when we got up in the morning everything underfoot was damp and steamy with heat.
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