Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  The distinction between patriotism and criminality was merely one of perspective. The end of the war also saw a resurgence of the triads, the Chinese secret societies that combined protection rackets with popular sanction as defenders of their communities. At the beginning of the occupation the Japanese had executed any man they found with triad tattoos. Triad members from Penang took refuge in the Chinese fishing villages of the mangrove swamps on the west coast; they too profited from smuggling and low-level piracy, and used their gains to propitiate both corrupt Japanese officials and the guerrillas in the hills. But in August, under the shadow of the revolutionary wrath of the MPAJA, a new brotherhood was formed to unite the secret societies. It was known as the Ang Bin Hoay – the Brotherhood of the Ang [or Hung] People – a name which denoted kinship with a long lineage of societies in China that claimed to uphold the true ethos of the Chinese people. One fishermen described his initiation rite: ‘We were gathered together and invited to save ourselves against the invasion of communists. There were no prayers. There were joss sticks, and we took our oaths that we would be punished by Heaven if we did wrong.’ They fought to keep the MPAJA out of their villages, and made common cause with the Banjarese Malays in the Lower Perak disturbances. In Singapore and elsewhere, similar gangs claimed to act in the name of the MPAJA, and terrorized locals under names such as the Exterminate Traitor Corps, Blood and Iron Corps and Dare to Die Corps.70

  South East Asia Command’s search for allies, and its bonanza of arms, extended to the Malays as well. There were anti-Japanese groups in Perak and Kedah that called themselves Askar Melayu Setia – the Loyal Malay Soldier – and in the wild west of Pahang, Wataniah – For the Homeland. They had their own Force 136 liaison officers, and the British parachuted in to them some Malay agents: mostly former civil servants or pilgrims to Mecca who had become stranded by the war in the bazaars of Cairo and Bombay. As the tide of war turned, these movements obtained covert support from Malay courts and district officers, not least to counter-balance the influence of the MPAJA. For the British their importance was not so much military as political: they were vital to dispel the idea that the Malay majority were disloyal to the Empire.

  American agents of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, were also becoming increasingly interested in Malaya, and had parachuted in at a late stage. On direct orders from Colombo, and working with Wataniah, a small party captured the Sultan of Pahang en route to Kuala Lumpur, and placed him under armed guard. The sultan was kept in a squalid jungle camp together with a huddle of fractious Chinese refugees for over three weeks. This was ostensibly to prevent him falling into the hands of the communists; it was also to stop him acting as titular head of the independent Malay government that was about to be formed in the capital. But the rumour was put about that the communists had taken him, and this raised ethnic tensions in the state.71 In the event, few of the royal houses were molested. In Kedah, the defence of the Sultan of Kedah’s palace and of Malay villages was orchestrated by a youth organization, known as Saberkas, a co-operative society formed in the state capital in 1944. Among its patrons was a middle-aged prince from the ruling house of the state, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who had before the war enjoyed a reputation as something of a playboy. Like many Malay aristocrats he had lain low in the occupation, working as a district officer and, with quiet acumen, tried to deflect some of the worst excesses of Japanese rule away from the population. In the interregnum he managed to use his influence with Malay young men to recruit four lorry-loads of Malays for Force 136 and to keep racial violence at bay.72 These acts would give him good credentials for the defence of Malay interests when, some six years later, as a somewhat unlikely contender, he would emerge as a major political force.

  The Malay elite had lost ground in the war, and now struggled to reclaim their position. At the height of the violence in Batu Pahat in Johore, Sultan Ibrahim appointed a fifty-year-old local notable, Onn bin Jaafar, as district officer, after the incumbent was assassinated by the MPAJA. Over the years Onn had enjoyed a stormy relationship with his royal patron; he had been raised at court, and his father had been the sultan’s chief minister, but his family had fallen from grace and Onn had made his own way in Singapore as one of the first full-time Malay journalists. In 1928 he was accused of lèse majesté and treason after he wrote a series of articles called ‘Tyranny in Johore’ for an English-language newspaper, attacking the sultan for abuse of power, extravagance and corruption (‘His motor car deals would excite the envy of a Lombardy Jew’).73 However, a talented man of letters was too influential to overlook, and Onn was rehabilitated by Sultan Ibrahim shortly before the war. Onn had stood quietly to one side as the Japanese conquered Malaya; his son, Hussain – a later prime minister of Malaysia – served in the Indian Army. But like other prominent Malays, he had been implicated in Ibrahim Yaacob’s movement for independence in 1945. As the violence in his district reached a head, and Kyai Salleh’s supporters massed to attack the Chinese town of Batu Pahat, Onn made a decisive intervention by opening negotiations with the MPAJA and the Sabilillah fighters. When the talks hung in the balance, Onn is said to have confronted Kyai Salleh in front of some 1,600 of his armed supporters. In a melodramatic account of the incident by an early biographer, Onn bared his chest to the holy warrior, saying: ‘Plunge your dagger into it if you do not wish to obey me.’ Kyai Salleh was overcome by the power of his words.74 In other versions, Onn is said to have flattered Kyai Salleh, warning him that the British were about to arrive in force, and so perhaps offered him an honourable way out by bringing him some local Chinese to sue for peace. But from any telling of this, Onn bin Jaafar’s reputation grew, and Kyai Salleh became one of his most devoted political supporters.75

  During the war communities had learned to defend themselves, and after the surrender of Japan they did not give up this prerogative lightly. All local pretenders to power along the crescent would need to come to terms with these forces of violence, and even cultivate them for a time. For the returning British, however, the central task was to contain and neutralize them. This set in motion a central dilemma of Britain’s Asian crisis as it now began to unfold. Throughout the history of British imperialism, conquest had been legitimated by the argument that without colonial rule, territories would be in a state of perpetual civil war. After the Second World War, British statesmen would argue that Asia could not be free until it was at peace. To this the nationalists would reply that peace was all well and good, but not better than life itself, and that there would be no peace until Asia was free. In national memory, the communal violence of this period remains a dark and eternal point of reference; a time when the bonds of the region’s plural societies were tested to the absolute limit. Although the tragedy in Johore was only one small incident among so many others, it was not untypical, and still hundreds had perished while thousands more were forced to flee their burning villages. It was a prelude to other communal bloodlettings that would play out across the crescent on an even larger scale. Significantly, in Batu Pahat local leaders had restored social peace before the British soldiers arrived. By 2 September, the end of Ramadan, traditionally a time of reconciliation, an uneasy calm prevailed in the area. A short distance up the coast lay the beachheads for Operation Zipper, and the second colonial conquest of Malaya was heralded by the dropping of leaflets announcing the abolition of the Japanese ‘banana’ currency and by the spraying of insecticide from the air.76

  THE FALL OF SYONAN

  On 1 September 1945 a large Royal Navy flotilla appeared off the northwest coast of Malaya. As the island of Penang, Britain’s oldest possession in Southeast Asia, came into view, a ‘Singapore curry’ was served to the officers and men on the command ship, HMS Derbyshire. Its taste was unrecognizable to many of the old Malaya hands present, who remembered the real thing. The landings had been delayed, by order of General MacArthur, until after 9 a.m. on 2 September: the moment when he was to receive the surrender of the Japanese High Command
on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At this ceremony, positioned directly behind him, was Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the man who had commanded British forces in Malaya in 1942. He had been released from Japanese internment on Taiwan and was shortly afterwards to witness the capitulation in the Philippines of his arch-nemesis, General Yamashita. Like many Japanese senior commanders, Yamashita would be tried and executed as a war criminal. Percival would return to London finally to write his despatch on the fall of Singapore. The whole series of events was carefully choreographed to impress on the peoples of Asia that Japan had been defeated by force of arms, and to erase the memory of the earlier Allied capitulations.

  The original battle plan had called for a series of co-ordinated landings: first, a strike at the Thai island of Phuket to capture forward airbases, and then an assault in larger force on two main landing grounds in Malaya, at Morib beach in Selangor and the resort of Port Dickson, some miles to the south. The original codenames signalled martial resolve: Mailfist – the push to the south to Singapore, a replica of the Japanese blitzkrieg of 1941–2 – and Broadsword – a sweep northwards from Kuala Lumpur to secure the rest of the peninsula. Mountbatten had estimated it would take him until the end of the year to fight his way to Singapore, and likely longer if a large garrison was mustered to hold it. However, the operation was now Tiderace: a dash to occupy Singapore. The first landings at Penang were designed to probe the intentions of the Japanese, but no resistance was encountered. After some delay, and a failure to attend an earlier meeting, the Japanese local commander, Rear Admiral Jisaku Uzumi, came aboard HMS Nelson on the evening of 2 September, wearing the DSC he had earned as Britain’s ally in the 1914–18 war, and surrendered the garrison. He fainted and was rushed to hospital; the military policemen who carried him there took his sword as a souvenir.77 The next morning, led by the town band, a detachment of Royal Marines marched to the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. The E&O had been the hub of the pre-war colonial elite, the place where the entire British community had gathered secretly on the night of 16 December 1941 to abandon the island. It had been left to the Ceylonese editor of the local Straits Echo, M. Saravanamuttu, to lower the Union Flag at Fort Cornwallis and surrender Penang to the Japanese. In September 1945, Saravanamuttu once again gathered together the representatives of the Asian communities, this time to pass the administration of their home back to Britain. As the Royal Marines marched they threw Senior Service cigarettes into the crowds. Those who managed to grab them sold them at exorbitant prices to buy food. Across the island, hunger riots were breaking out.78

  On the morning of 4 September the armada passed the old Raffles Lighthouse, at the southern entrance to the Straits of Malacca. After 1,297 days as a Japanese city, ‘Syonan’ was to fall to the British without a shot. As they approached the island the soldiers noted that the Japanese defensive dispositions were remarkably similar to those adopted by Percival in 1941. The first, tense encounter between British and Japanese officers was aboard HMS Sussex. There were still rumours that General Itagaki had defied Hirohito’s orders and ordered a die-hard defence of Malaya. The navy feared Japanese attack boats. Itagaki was furious that the humiliating task of surrender had fallen to him. (His superior, Count Terauchi, had suffered a stroke in Vietnam.) Accompanying Itagaki was one of the architects of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Vice Admiral Shigeu Fukudome. Itagaki was received aboard by the senior British officers, Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison and Major General E. C. R. Mansergh. The contrast between the two delegations was striking. The Japanese were in immaculately starched ceremonial rig, with their swords at their side. The British officers wore crumpled battledress. They had left India at short notice, with no change of clothes; there was no water to wash with on ship, and their skin was stained by the malaria preventative Mepachrin. A Japanese officer was reported to have remarked: ‘You are two hours late,’ only to be met with the reply, ‘We don’t keep Tokyo time here.’ The main issue at the meeting was responsibility for law and order on the island. Then Itagaki was given an agreement to sign. He shut himself with his aides in an anteroom for four hours to translate it. The only concession Itagaki secured, and that only temporary, was the right of his officers to keep their swords. He left the meeting in tears.79

  The next morning advance parties of British and Indian troops landed on the southern islands, and at 11 a.m. reached the docks at Tanjong Pagar. One of the first men ashore was O. W. Gilmour, a civil engineer who had been one of the last to leave in February 1942. ‘Two Indians and a Chinese boy, looking very dazed, appeared from a near-by shed. They were the only people in sight and I addressed them in Malay, getting no response but a stupefied stare. Walking to the Station Buildings, we passed two more Chinese, and exchanged a subdued “Tabek” (good-day), which, in the circumstances, seemed an inadequate greeting.’ The mood was one of ‘overwhelming desolation’. Two hours later Gilmour joined a small convoy of three jeeps that sped through the residential areas of Chinatown, along New Bridge Road. Crowds lined the route, Union Jacks appeared at windows, but as the British crossed Singapore river the ceremonial and municipal heart of the city around the Padang was empty of people. There were no more than a dozen spectators to the hoisting of the Union Flag above the Municipal Building at around 13.45 hours. The Japanese officers assigned to witness the event were nowhere to be found. They were indeed still on Tokyo time, as the whole of Singapore had been for three and a half years. They had come and gone two hours earlier. One of Gilmour’s first tasks was to put the public clocks back two hours.80 On Saturday 8 September the first British libertymen came ashore, including seventy sailors from HMS Cleopatra who marched through the streets to Jalan Besar stadium for a game of football.81

  If the main British landings on the Malay peninsula had been opposed, there is a strong possibility that they would have been swept into the sea by the Japanese. Despite the intimate knowledge of the terrain professed by many British officers, the sites chosen were entirely unsuitable. The first landings at Morib on 9 September were a disaster. On the first day, fifty trucks and tanks sunk or were mired in the sand and very few made it to the beach without being winched out. There was hardly any room on the beachhead and only one good road leading away from it. Vehicles were hemmed in by drainage ditches and a raised water pipe; this meant that the off-road area required to de-waterproof tanks and lorries was not available and the beach road flooded. ‘“Zipper”’, according to 17 Squadron’s war diary, ‘seemed to come slightly “Unzipped”.’ If the 6,000 Japanese at Kuala Lumpur had attacked in concentrated force, British commanders would have had little option but to withdraw their forces.82 Chin Peng stood beside John Davis and watched from the Japanese lines: it was ‘an anticlimax – a dramatic scene – but an anticlimax nonetheless’. He recalled his feelings many years later: ‘We are letting them back unimpeded to reclaim a territory they have plundered for so long.’ Then, in a final humiliation, Force 136 was ordered to break cover and ask the Japanese for transport to allow British troops to move inland.83 The other landing zone at Port Dickson was choked by sightseers. ‘It was’, according to another Force 136 witness, ‘a circus atmosphere. A carnival with roadside stalls, puppet shows and entertainers.’84

  For the next few days the British grip on events was uncertain. Detachments did not reach Malaya’s largest state of Pahang for a further three weeks: along the entire east coast the colonial government was represented by a handful of Force 136 officers. The first British troops reached Kuala Lumpur on 12 September to find the streets deserted. ‘If the populace were happy to see us,’ remarked one officer of the Royal Devon Yeomanry, ‘they proved adept at concealing their emotions.’85 The jungle fighters of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army were already established in the capital. Chin Peng, together with the military commander, Liew Yao, moved into a commandeered bungalow in the elite white suburb of Kenny Hill. Chin had been travelling widely, enforcing the peace between the British and the MPAJA. His mood was bleak. ‘I had been
required to calm and pacify, restrain and arrest. I was mentally and emotionally drained.’86 There were confrontations between the MPAJA and the north-Indian troops of 5 Division, who took them to be Japanese. The Indians did not received a warm welcome; they had no linguistic common ground with the people of Malaya, and after nearly four years of war, all men in uniform were viewed with suspicion. Recognizing this, the local British commander staged a ceremony in front of the Royal Selangor Club, the ‘Spotted Dog’ of pre-war days, at which the MPAJA were allowed to take centre stage.87

  Over 70,000 Japanese remained on Singapore island, another reminder of the fragility of the British position. Many of them were still armed, and the people of Singapore watched in furious incomprehension as the officers continued to wear their swords. But over the next few days the Japanese were paraded and stripped of their valuables. British forces took these piles of ‘souvenirs’ as the legitimate spoils of war. There were few reprisals, however. Many of the troops were newly arrived to Asia, and had not been a part of the bitter fighting in Burma. Those who had were less charitable to the Japanese rank and file. In a public spectacle designed to repay the humiliations of 1942, the captives were put to work levelling the turf of the ceremonial ground of the Padang in preparation for Mountbatten’s arrival. Some turned up to work in white gloves and refused to take them off. A crowd gathered to watch. People jeered and cheered when a European ex-prisoner of war stepped forward, and in mockery of the martial style of Nippon, slapped the face of a Japanese officer.88 Across Malaya most of the Japanese were put to task in grim conditions. In Perak three Japanese died after they had been given the job of dredging a dry dock using empty seven-pound jam tins.89 One Japanese prisoner in Singapore, Shikimachi Gentarō, described how 2,000 of them were cooped up in warehouses near the piers and made to work twelve hours a day. ‘The worst indignity was cleaning out the sewers of the town where Chinese, Indians and Malays lived together. We were told to dredge by hand the dead rats and human excrement that flowed down… if we disobeyed our captors at all we were beaten with rifles and kicked. There were those who went crazy and those who died from malnutrition.’ It was two years before he was sent home. ‘I am not excusing the conduct of the Japanese,’ he said in recounting this years later. ‘War makes all of us lose our humanity.’90