War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  His culminating offence may have been a mock-sabotage exercise involving Ivan Lyon and several other adventurous officers. They smuggled themselves into the new naval dockyard, laying dummy explosives against the caisson gates of the graving dock. They swam out to the floating dock and found its seacocks unwatched by the dockyard police on duty. They drove a lorry through the flimsy gate of the air force fuel dump, tied up the solitary Indian policeman who was on guard, and moved among the great tanks of high-octane fuel. They walked into the main civil telephone exchange. Outside the power station, they found the cables providing the entire city electricity supply accessible from a manhole in the street outside.

  Relations with the Special Branch of the police, which had set up its own Japanese section around the same time as Hayley Bell’s appointment in 1936, were delicate as well. The section chief was Ken Morgan, a major in the Indian army with excellent Japanese and Russian language skills, who had the disconcerting habit of falling asleep mid-sentence. He was highly protective of the files he had built up on the Japanese residents, catalogued under a system that only he and his English secretary could manage. His operations did uncover one of the more serious spy rings, resulting in the expulsion of five Japanese at the end of 1937, but his reluctance to cooperate with Hayley Bell had required an intervention by the police inspector-general, René Onraet, for it to be overcome.

  When Eric Holt-Wilson was sent to do a survey of MI5’s posts in the Far East early in 1939, he received many complaints against Hayley Bell that suggested he was ‘unsound’, lacked ‘tact’, ‘did not appreciate the service side of the problem’ and was meddling outside his Malayan area of responsibility. At a gathering with his trusted agents, Hayley Bell gloomily confessed a feeling that he had not managed to convince Holt-Wilson to the contrary.

  In April, his fear was realised. Hayley Bell was recalled to London. MI5 sent out less assertive colonels as his replacements, and the function of watching Japanese activity was concentrated in the Straits Police. Charles’ contract was amended, with his duties split between assignment to the Special Branch at Robinson Road and to the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation at the Cathay Building.

  The police work was meticulous, picking up the fine grain of the Japanese espionage and subversion but ignoring, from habit of career and probably political pressure, the bigger picture that was there to see. The blackmail of local Chinese with relatives back in occupied China, the cultivation of the Malay royalty with trips around the sights of Japan and meetings with its more urbane statesmen, and the spreading of independence messages among Indian soldiers pointed to a great strategy.

  Once war broke out in Europe, the probing of British resolve began. The Japanese picketed the British concession in Tientsin after some Chinese assassins took refuge in it, and subjected British civilians to humiliating strip searches before Chinese crowds. The word went out to all the dominions and colonies in the East not to offend the Japanese; this filtered down to the guidelines for the commentaries Charles gave for the radio.

  Gradually word of his connection with the government must have spread among the local Japanese, whose dealings with him became more formal. His workload of monitoring broadcasts and reading the press took up longer hours anyway, and he rarely had time to hang around the Japanese haunts.

  Naka went about her daily shopping routine, apparently quite oblivious to the rising hostility emanating from her country towards the British. John was enrolled at another Catholic school, St Patricks. Eddie, their eldest boy, had turned 16 and undertaken commercial studies at the YMCA. He soon got a job in the office of NYK, the biggest of the Japanese shipping firms. Increasingly, he was spending his evenings out, moving between his crowd of young Japanese colleagues working at NYK and other offices, and his Chinese schoolmates. Charles learnt accidentally that they’d all rented a small place in the eastern side of the city as their ‘club house’ for whatever experiments in life they were making.

  They seemed to spend a lot of time at the amusement parks – the New World, the Great World – where sometimes Naka and Charles would find them, suddenly looking abashed and coming over to greet their parents. They seemed like miniature versions of Singapore itself, these places. Crowds of all races would wander in through the great gates under the bright electric signs – Malays in sarongs, Chinese in smart suits and dresses, sailors from many navies, Tommies with their caps tucked under their epaulettes, Indian soldiers in their turbans.

  They’d all stroll idly among the Chinese and Japanese booths selling cheap mechanical toys, listen to the gongs and cymbals in the Cantonese opera, puzzle at the Malay theatre Mashdur, watch a film, see an exhibition basketball or boxing game, or watch the sleek young Chinese and Eurasian men at the dancehall in their white suits, patent leather shoes and slicked-down hair whirl around the taxi-girls in their tight silk dresses split down the sides.

  For those in the intelligence sphere, even those in the outer circles like Charles, this fantasy world in Singapore started coming down to an alarming reality in the middle of 1940 with the abrupt end of the phoney war in Europe.

  The trap that Colonel Takeda had outlined in his drunken rant in Bangkok was closing. The Japanese had taken Hainan in February 1939. Three months after the fall of France in June 1940, they forced the Vichy authorities in Indochina to accept their control of Annam and its seaports, closing the last route from the Pacific into Chiang Kai-shek’s southern bases in Yunnan. The next month, Pibul launched his attack to regain territory for Siam in Laos and Cambodia, helped by aircraft piloted by Japanese. The Americans offered to mediate, but the Vichy government was ordered by the Germans to refuse. Instead, Japan stepped in as peacemaker, forcing the cession of Angkor Wat and other symbolic areas to Pibul, and winning more concessions for Japan to send forces through Indochina and station its aeroplanes at Saigon.

  The British had been helpless in their weakness. When the cruiser Liverpool had taken some Germans off an NYK ship in sight of Mount Fuji, London had caved in to indignant protest and handed the men back. The British garrisons were withdrawn from Peking and Tientsin. In July, the Kempeitai had rounded up 17 British nationals in Tokyo, including several old acquaintances of Charles’. The Reuters correspondent James Cox had been thrown out the window of the Kempeitai building in Marunouchi to his death. Even the leaders of the Salvation Army had been arrested and expelled, along with scores of other foreign missionaries, after a lifetime of work among the Japanese.

  In Singapore, the authorities responded by arresting the information attaché at the consulate-general, and getting him convicted of espionage. At the beginning of 1941, they were well aware of their exposure, alleviated only slightly by the arrival of new Indian and Australian troops. The air defences comprised a few tubby Brewster Buffalo fighters and Swordfish biplanes. All the submarines had been withdrawn from the Far East to the Mediterranean.

  Mid-year, further reinforcements began to arrive at the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation and the Ministry of Information in the Cathay Building to launch a futile barrage of words. They included George Sansom, the revered diplomat-scholar in the Tokyo embassy who had been brought back from academia. Charles saw him in the corridor and asked what he thought of the outlook. ‘The fall of France means the fall of Singapore,’ he said. He’d said the same to Duff Cooper, the minister assigned by Churchill to report directly on the Far East from Singapore. Cooper had asked him on arrival whether the Japanese were going to attack. ‘I told him: There isn’t any question about it.’

  Sansom and a few young experts on Asian countries joined a new outfit called the Oriental Mission, connected to the Special Operations Executive that had been started to set ‘Europe ablaze’ under the German occupiers. Charles met him occasionally for a bowl of noodles downstairs, and told him about the encounter with Takeda in Bangkok. Sansom whistled appreciatively. A few weeks later, he introduced Charles to a Siamese man called Luang Sarabhaya, and told him Sara
bhaya had been the instrument of a failed plot to engineer a coup d’état against Pibul by royalist army officers. Their anti-Japanese leaflets had set off more indignation from Crosby, the British ambassador, who’d complained to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Much later, it was learnt from records in Bangkok and Tokyo, Crosby had been quite supportive of Pibul’s aggression. The coup machinations were halted, and Sarabhaya was pulled out of Singapore by John Becker, now in the army, to save his skin.

  Another effort to organise stay-behind resistance groups among the Chinese encountered stiff opposition from Sir Shenton Thomas. The governor and General Percival, the armed forces commander, agreed that this implied both an invasion and the capture of Malaya and Singapore, which would be bad for morale if the idea got around.

  The same objection, they heard, was raised when the new chief military engineer, Ivan Simson, arrived in the middle of 1941 and was horrified to learn that no obstacles had been started on the roads down to Singapore, or fortifications on the landward shores of the island itself facing Johor.

  The one front where reinforcements were ample was in words. The work at the broadcaster came under direction by a new branch of the Information Ministry, the Far Eastern Bureau. Its head was a mysterious British man, Robert Scott, who had been organising resistance in China against the Japanese and who seemed to have high-level contacts with British intelligence. Others were John (‘Jack’) Proud, a former journalist who had been sent up from Melbourne with a paymaster-commander’s rank in the Australian navy and another Australian newsman, Lionel Wigmore. Ian Morrison, the correspondent for The Times, came in and out.

  The aim was to sow doubt in Japanese minds. They prepared commentaries quoting ‘experienced observers’ and ‘highly placed sources’ suggesting that Singapore’s defences were more formidable than revealed, and that powerful new aircraft and weapons were now on station. These articles were planted with compliant editors in newspapers around the region. In one case, the office used secret service money to finance a major Australian newspaper to station correspondents in Chungking, Manila and Singapore, on condition they ran planted material as well as their own reports.

  But the Japanese had their own eyes to see, and knew the truth of the situation in Singapore. The only people the propagandists fooled were their own public, who continued with their gay social round and dilly-dallied over suggestions to get families out of harm’s way.

  Arthur Dickinson, who had replaced René Onraet as inspector-general of police just before the war began, was in no doubt about the Japanese menace, nor was his deputy Mervyn Wynne. At the Special Branch, Charles and colleagues kept watch around the clock on the recently appointed consul-general Tsurumi Ken, whom they knew to have military and Black Dragon Society links.

  The Sultan of Johor had donated a large sum to the British war effort, but his third son was in contact with the Japanese through his radio transmitter. The owner of a photographic studio close to the naval base, they were told, was a former Japanese army colonel, as was the chief steward at the officers’ club in the base. When the security service and the army sent officers in mufti across the border into southern Thailand, they encountered Japanese counterparts.

  In November, as negotiations between the Japanese and the Americans over the oil and strategic materials embargo broke down, the vigilance was stepped up. At the Far Eastern Bureau, the personnel were briefed on an impending operation, called ‘Matador’, to advance into southern Siam and seize control of landing places such as Songkhla and Pattani. Their job was to prepare scripts for broadcast, in Siamese and other languages, to explain this pre-emptive attack.

  It was called off. Brookes-Popham, the theatre commander, couldn’t summon up the nerve. They waited. The battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales sailed into Singapore, and their propaganda efforts made much of the arrival. But the new Hurricane fighters came in crates, and the brand new Beaufort bombers flown up from Australia lacked bomb-racks.

  Charles and the others sat up for two nights at the Cathay Building. Finally, the war came in the early hours of 8 December. Formations of bombers droned over the city with its lights still ablaze, dropping lines of bombs. Telephone calls came in, reporting landings at Kota Bharu and Pattani.

  In the morning, the Malaya command issued an order of the day: ‘We are ready. We have had plenty of warning and our preparations are made and tested … Now Japan … will find out that she has made a grievous mistake. We are confident. Our defences are strong, our weapons efficient … We see before us a Japan drained for years … by her wanton onslaught on China. We see a Japan whose trade and industry have been dislocated by these years of reckless adventure …’

  The two great battleships sailed out into the monsoon, and almost made it to the Japanese convoy before the weather cleared. Charles and his colleagues continued to broadcast their bulletins of optimism, about stiffening resolve and weakening Japanese pressure, as the front line moved down the peninsula. The government continued to resist the chief engineer’s plans to build defences along the north side of the island. The bombs fell. The dinner-dances continued at the Raffles Hotel. John sat for his Senior Cambridge exams.

  Both boys were detained briefly at the Joo Chiat police station, but released. At Scott’s invitation, Charles moved with Naka and the boys into the house vacated by the Japanese consul-general. Eddie’s office was closed down and the Japanese on the NYK staff interned, but Charles managed to keep him at home. He stayed there, or spent his days over with the Eurasian family of his sweetheart, Leonie Wells, a sales assistant at Robinson’s department store. When air raids began, they all retreated to a dug-out shelter in the garden.

  At the end of January, with the Japanese army advancing into Johor and artillery fire audible in the city, Blades, the chief of the Japanese section in Special Branch, packed up the files and departed by air for New Delhi. He left Charles a letter for the immigation office. On 30 January, the officials there gave him a certificate of naturalisation as a British subject. At the Malaya Broadcasting Office, the staff were told to pack up and report by that evening to a ship leaving for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. ‘You must certainly go, Bavier,’ Scott said. ‘They’re bound to have your name.’

  Charles shook hands with Scott and the journalist Rohan Rivett, both of whom were staying on as skeleton staff until the last possible minute. Both were to be captured when their boats were sunk. Rivett went to the Burma railway, and Scott was to be viciously tortured.

  Charles walked out of the Cathay Building. The streets were deserted, the shops shuttered. The rumble of gunfire seemed louder. A taxi puttered along the road. A young Eurasian man ran in front of Charles. ‘Please, sir, please,’ he said, with his hand on the door. Charles waved him into the cab, and walked home. He found another free taxi just as he turned the corner into his street.

  Naka was waiting with several suitcases packed. She was weeping. John sat quietly. Eddie paced up and down, nervously.

  ‘Otosan,’ Eddie said to Charles. ‘I will stay. I can’t leave Leonie. As Eurasians and Christians her family will be under great suspicion. They will need my help.’

  There was no convincing him, not about his own mixed blood, not about his father’s police connections should they become known to Japanese authorities. They embraced, and loaded up the taxi. Eddie stood waving from the porch as they turned the corner.

  Chapter 14

  PAPER BULLETS

  Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

  — On War by Carl Von Clausewitz

  Melbourne 1942

  Grief-stricken at having to leave Eddie behind, Charles, Naka and John didn’t have much time to reflect on the impending outcome of his decision as their taxi sped towards the Singapore docks.
A Special Branch local officer waited at the gate and helped Charles and his family carry their suitcases along to a small ship. Some of the others from the broadcasting office were already aboard and looked down from the decks. Sobbing European women were being embraced by men in uniform as their children stood by, clutching toys.

  The ship cast off after dark, pushing out among the black ships at anchor. As it headed south, they could see the flashes and booms of an air raid and anti-aircraft fire over the city. By morning they were well clear. Thick clouds helped them creep down the coast of Bangka Island without being attacked. A day later, the ship pulled in to Java at Tanjung Priok, and a waiting bus took the passengers into Batavia. The broadcasters were billeted at a Dutch civil service hostel, not far from the radio station facing the wide Koningsplein.

  It was only a short respite. Singapore surrendered. The Dutch were in a quiet panic, assuaged by the enormous meals they ate, washing them down with beer and gin at all hours. John asked about Eddie. Charles assured him Eddie would be fine. Naka was very silent.

  Two weeks later, they were all bundled into a motor convoy and driven over the winding road across Java, up through the tea plantations and volcanic mountains. They had lunch in a modern hotel in Bandung, surrounded by British and Dutch officers from General Wavell’s staff, served by grave Javanese waiters in white tunics and brimless black caps. They soon progressed onwards to the little port of Tjilatjap, to board a Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij ship with its tall funnel spewing black smoke. At nightfall it sailed immediately, the foul weather protecting them from Japanese submarines, while the roaming Japanese carrier groups (they later learnt) were engaged in the Timor Sea region to the east preparing for the attacks on Darwin and Timor.