War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  Their officer came up from the rear, and Eddie offered to help as a guide. The officer brought out a tourist map of Singapore, and stabbed his finger at Paya Lebar airfield, which he called ‘Paya Ropa’. Then shells started landing nearby. The unit moved off the road and into the jungle, taking Eddie with them.

  For two days they crept through patches of jungle and the Serangoon rubber estate towards the airfield, emerging in Upper Serangoon where they linked up with other Japanese units. Eddie helped write letters in English urging surrender. Shells landed around them. Vast pillars of black smoke came from the oil tanks at the naval and air bases, smaller plumes from blazing buildings in the city. On 15 February the guns stopped. The Japanese soldiers waved their arms and shouted ‘Banzai’.

  Eddie was sent home by the Japanese unit. He passed dejected groups of British soldiers, some clutching bottles of liquor. The door of the house was open, the lock removed. Looters had already been through, taking everything portable. Eddie lay on the floor and fell into an exhausted sleep. In the morning, he heard heavy footsteps in the hall, and a coarse shout in Japanese. He answered, and met a Japanese sergeant with the arm band bearing the two characters identifying him as belonging to the Kempeitai.

  The Kempeitai took Eddie back to their base in the old Outram Road police station, interviewed him about his family background, and put him in a cell occupied by several others who bore the bruises and cuts of bashing. Three days later, Eddie was brought out and told his details had been checked with police in Yokohama and found to be correct. He was now to work for the Kempeitai as an interpreter.

  Eddie’s first assignment was with a search party sent down to the Ministry of Information offices in the Cathay Building. Eddie found the Japanese most interested in the Chinese language section, and while they were distracted, he managed to find and tear up documents and records with his father’s name on them. Later he heard that one of the shop assistants in the Japanese grocery store, Baba & Co., had turned up in a Japanese army uniform at their old house, looking for Charles.

  Somehow the Kempeitai in Singapore never connected Eddie with the Charles Bavier who had tracked the espionage and subversion before the conflict, and who, within a few months, would be broadcasting against Japan from Melbourne. Or if they did, they took Eddie at face value. By then Eddie had adopted a quintessentially Japanese alias – Tanishiro Taro – and his real name was forgotten by the people around him.

  Eddie spent the next few days in the police station, translating documents and letters that were brought in from searches of British offices. All the senior figures in the unit were away on an operation. He heard its codename – Shikusei or ‘clean sweep’.

  When they came back, the unit leaders were grim-faced and silent. Lieutenant Onishi Satoru was a man in his late thirties, clean-shaven, with round steel-rimmed spectacles. It was only gradually, after many months of working and drinking with them, that Eddie put together what had happened in those early days after the surrender.

  Four days after that triumphant entry into Singapore, which was hastily renamed Syonan or ‘Light of the South’, the Japanese commander issued an order for all ‘Overseas Chinese’ aged between 18 and 50, to report to one of five assembly areas on 21 February, bringing enough food and water for three days.

  Onishi and his Kempeitai field unit were assigned one of the assembly points, at a stadium on Jalan Besar. Their orders were to screen out and detain anyone who had belonged to British volunteer forces, communists, donors to Chinese patriotic causes, members of anti-Japanese organisations, and known criminals. Onishi found 10,000 people crammed into the stadium, and with the help of local detectives and hooded police informers, and a list compiled from pre-war petitions against Japan, began trying to look for hostile elements.

  In the chaotic conditions, he found 70 people worthy of further investigation. One young Chinese man turned out to be a woman dressed in male clothes to protect herself against assault. Onishi’s cautious pace angered the staff officer, Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, who had devised the mass screening and what was to follow as a precaution against any uprising while the Japanese went from Singapore into the East Indies.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tsuji rebuked Onishi. ‘I intend to cut the population of Singapore in half.’

  The selection of suspects became hasty, random. Fate turned on a look, a wrong answer, a nod from an informer, writing one’s name in English letters rather than Chinese characters. On 23 February, Onishi got an order to dispose of those detained by ‘severe punishment’. His auxiliary staff, assigned from infantry units, drove them out by the truckload to the beach beyond Changi prison, made them walk into the sea, and machine-gunned them.

  There were other massacres, on isolated roads, off jetties and barges. But not all the mass graves or disposal of bodies at sea could prevent bodies washing up and even a few lucky survivors coming back. The word about the Sook Ching operation, as ‘clean sweep’ was rendered in Chinese, and similar purges up in Malaya, spread through the Chinese part of the population, creating even deeper resistance to the idea of Japan as liberator of the Asians.

  For a while, the feelings of the Chinese did not seem to matter. Singapore came quickly back to life, with the shops and cafés reopened and the lights and water restored. The white faces may have disappeared, but the institutions still operated without them. At schools, children bowed towards the emperor in the East. Captured Indian soldiers and local Indian volunteers paraded in the new Indian National Army under Subhash Chandra Bose, brought in from Nazi Germany by U-boat. The Malays welcomed the suppression of the energetic and commercially minded Chinese who had been migrating into the peninsula.

  Eddie moved in with the Wells family and gained their permission to marry Leonie despite their young ages. Eddie’s employment with the Kempeitai gave them all protection, and as conditions worsened during the occupation, helped them with food supplies.

  For many other citizens in Singapore and Malaya their lives rapidly slid into hardship. The open economy that depended on exports of its commodities to pay for imports of food and necessities from Thailand, Burma, Britain and the Antipodes contracted rapidly, and services from government departments deteriorated under supervision of untrained Japanese managers with little grasp of local languages. Corruption and black markets flourished. The Malays found themselves a minority in their own land when the peninsula’s four northernmost states were handed over to Siam in thanks for its cooperation with Japan’s conquests near its own borders.

  The indignities of occupation mounted, including the slaps on the face given by Japanese sentries to anyone not showing enough deference and the frequent lies about prosperity and friendship. For the Chinese in particular, but not exclusively, there was the constant fear of arrest, torture and execution in follow-ups to the ‘clean sweep’ operation. To the police stations and jails were added buildings such as the YMCA on Stamford Road that became bywords as interrogation and torture centres. Eddie went in and out of these places, with their sour smell of unwashed prisoners and wafts of ammonia from the latrines. He walked past the open doorways of rooms where Kempeitai soldiers and local detectives crowded with raised batons around thin, kneeling prisoners. He heard the thumps, the screams, as worthless confessions were extracted from mostly innocent prisoners, if they didn’t die from their injuries or illness first.

  The Onishi Butai, as Eddie’s unit was known, was a cut above this brutal ignorance. Operating from the Oxley Rise police station, its members wore plain clothes and drove civilian vehicles, and had access to all resources the Japanese administration could provide. It was charged with smashing the only serious resistance to the Japanese, the underground Malayan Communist Party and Kuomintang networks among the Chinese, and the British instructors who had either remained behind after the surrender or were later infiltrated by submarine from India.

  Eddie came to marvel at the successes of Onishi, for he was
indeed a master at counter-espionage. Only much later did Eddie learn about the quickness of Onishi’s understanding of an intelligence opportunity, and then his patience and ruthlessness in exploiting it.

  A month after the Sook Ching horror, one of his sergeants, Nakayama Mitsuo, was running a checkpoint with the help of two local police officers from the Special Branch, who now worked alongside the Kempeitai. They pointed out a man known to them as an official of the Malayan Communist Party who was also an informer for the Special Branch.

  Taken before Onishi, the man who named himself Wong Show Tong admitted belonging to the Party. Onishi put him in comfortable accommodation, and saw him frequently in a friendly atmosphere. Within some weeks, the prisoner volunteered that he was actually Wong Kim Giok, the secretary-general of the Party, known to ordinary members under the cover name Lai Tek, and to the local personality cult as ‘the beloved leader of the Party’ and ‘the most loyal disciple of Stalin’.

  A Chinese from Annam, Wong had been an agent for the French security service within the Indochinese Communist Party, moving to Singapore in 1936 when exposure was threatened. There he continued a double life, feeding the Special Branch enough information to roll up some minor communist elements while rising through the Party and pursuing an active agenda of strikes and worker organisation throughout the mines, factories and plantations of Malaya.

  He and Onishi reached a bargain. Wong would put all of the Party’s central executive in a position where the Kempeitai could capture or eliminate them, and thereafter continue in covert liaison with Onishi. In return Wong and his family would be spared, and amply rewarded.

  Wong was released by the end of April, with a supply of funds, and thereafter was to keep in contact via supposedly chance meetings at a café in Orchard Road with Lee Yem Kong, a former photographer in Johor who had become a Chinese interpreter for Onishi’s unit, or by dropping messages at his home while cycling past.

  He delivered on his bargain. Over the following month, his tip-offs allowed Onishi to kill or arrest members of the Party’s Singapore committee in raids on their homes or places of work. Onishi helped Wong acquire a small car and enough petrol coupons for him to visit Party branches across the causeway. Raids followed and shattered Party organisation in Johor Bahru, Malacca, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan.

  In August, Wong began work on his biggest strike. He convened a meeting of the Party’s central executive committee along with commissars from its armed wing, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, close to the famous Batu Caves near Kuala Lumpur. The caves, in the base of limestone pinnacles rising from the surrounding fields and forests, with stalactites and stalacmites on roof and floor, were a cool and eerie place that attracted crowds of townsfolk on picnic excursions, even in wartime. The bustle would be ideal cover for Party leaders meeting in a nearby village.

  Onishi sent his Kempeitai agents out to survey the caves and their surrounds, in the guise of off-duty soldiers cavorting with local bargirls hired from the nightclubs of Kuala Lumpur. Early on 1 September, as the Party officials woke for their meeting, a ring of a thousand Japanese troops moved in. In the gun battle that ensued, 29 Party leaders and their bodyguards were killed and 15 arrested.

  A few of the communists escaped the ambush and conveyed news of the disaster to the remaining elements of the Party. The one good outcome, they reported, was that Lai Tek had been delayed – ‘due to a car breakdown’ – and had not been eliminated. Such was the aura around Lai Tek that even word of his arrest by the Kempeitai and his unusually prompt release did not arouse suspicion by his comrades, even after the string of betrayals that followed. When two of the arrested leaders did work it out, Wong persuaded Onishi to have them released. Then he denounced them as traitors and had them executed by the Party itself. Wong’s motive, apart from an affinity for the double game, might have been to eliminate all opponents from the Malayan communist movement, protecting his unrivalled leadership for the struggle against whichever of the Japanese fascists or British capitalists won the war.

  But his information for Onishi was not enough for the Kempeitai to smash the Party’s armed wing or its emerging leader, Wong’s young protégé Chin Peng. It was not until 1948 that ‘Lai Tek’ was finally exposed, partly by the efforts of Chin Peng. He disappeared into Indochina with a large amount of Party funds.

  Onishi held a big party for all the members of his unit on the Sunday when the results of the Batu Caves swoop reached Singapore, though the knowledge of Lai Tek’s information was held by only Onishi himself and two of his non-commissioned officers, Shimomura and Yamaguchi.

  After this massive blow to the communists, Eddie’s work with the Kempeitai took him on missions up and down the peninsula with Sergeant-Major Ishibe Takuro, an energetic and athletic man with a shock of black hair. With communist activity in the towns largely neutralised, thanks to Lai Tek, Ishibe concentrated on weakening the anti-Japanese guerrillas camping in the mountain spine of Malaya. Raids and patrols in the mountains were left to regular units. The Kempeitai looked for the food supply and communication chains in the settled areas along the roads.

  It was made easier for the Japanese by the racial divide that the war had widened. Most of the guerrillas were Chinese, as were most of their sympathisers in the towns and plantations. The Malays were friendly to the Japanese, except for a few from among the British-educated elite, as were the Tamils, and many other Indians were cooperative. The rank and file of the Malayan police, Malays and Sikhs, worked willingly with the new rulers, helping them set up neighbourhood associations to look out for suspicious activities.

  As the occupation got into its second year, the Ishibe detachment operated more in the state of Perak, on the western coast at the northern end of the Malacca Strait, where informers had reported landings of armed white men from submarines nosing at night into its bays and estuaries. Ishibe took over a large shop-house on Chairman Road in the main town, Ipoh, and put up a commercial signboard to give his unit some civilian cover for its work in building up an informer network, through a combination of bribery and rough interrogations at local police stations. Two of his men were assigned to an outpost in the village of Keling Wang on Pangkor Island, where submarine incursions had been reported. They rented a house and put up a sign as office of the ‘Syonan Shipbuilding Company’.

  Ipoh had been a quiet town before the war, with its vices kept discrete. The main outlet for its Chinese and Europeans had been the regular race meetings at its track, where thoroughbreds and bookies from all over Malaya would converge. In the occupation it became a resort of debauchery for the Japanese forces and local war profiteers, who drank and consorted in brash nightclubs in the company of garishly made-up bargirls.

  Eddie went along with it all, drinking with Ishibe’s men at their favourite nightclub, but deftly avoiding their attempts to pair him off with any of the hostesses. He spent other nights out on patrols and ambushes with Ishibe, paddling along creeks on moonless nights between riverbanks ablaze with fireflies. Malay villagers told them, usually too late to intercept, about the small groups of British commandos put ashore, but helped locate the caches of weapons, explosives and radio sets hidden for collection.

  Once, for want of a better craft, Ishibe paddled out into the night in a large metal washtub borrowed from a nearby house. He came close to the bulk of a British submarine that had come close inshore. Wisely he retreated as quietly as possible.

  Eddie was there too, when suspects were brought in and interrogated. Ishibe was cheerful about the violence applied. He and his men meted out bashings, kicks and beating with canes, with little prompting. When it got more serious, they applied the ‘water treatment’. The suspect was made to lie down close to a standpipe, and a hose was put in his mouth and turned on, with Ishibe or another guard blocking any attempt to avert the head with their legs. Ishibe would then kick or stand on the man’s swollen belly. It went on for hours.

&nbs
p; Another routine technique involved electric shocks from a hand-cranked telephone wired to each thumb. Some who were interrogated in this way later told Eddie it felt ‘as if a million needles were going through my body’ or ‘as if my bones were coming out’.

  ‘Nothing permanent,’ Ishibe would say breezily when he saw Eddie’s worried face. ‘Nothing more than our police give to suspects back home. They usually talk and they’ll survive.’

  On one occasion in Teluk Anson, three Chinese plantation workers were brought in on suspicion of ‘banditry’ and refused to act as informers. Beatings went on without obtaining any confessions. A bamboo rod was handed to Eddie. ‘Go ahead, keep it up,’ said one of the Kempeitai soldiers.

  Eddie gripped the bamboo uneasily, and tried a stroke that hit the floor with the tip of the rod on the other side of the prone man to break the force of the blow.

  None of the soldiers seemed to notice what he was doing, and he kept it up. The victim was groaning and loudly protesting his innocence anyway. After a few minutes, Eddie stopped and the rod was taken from his hand. Ishibe ordered the water treatment. As no tap was nearby, soldiers brought in buckets of water to tip on a towel placed over the man’s upturned face. The drowning victim struggled against his bonds. Eddie went outside, feeling ashamed.

  Onishi must have been frustrated that Lai Tek was unwilling or unable to tell what the succession of landings from submarines throughout 1943 was all about. Only at the beginning of 1944 did it become clear. Three officers had been landed after training in India: the British Army’s Colonel Davis and Captain Broome, and the Kuomintang government agent, Lim Bo Seng, a Singapore businessman who had organised anti-Japanese campaigns before the war. They had joined the local militia raised belatedly by the British, then evacuated to India before the fall. Along with other pro-Kuomintang Chinese, they were the nucleus of an intended non-communist resistance force, codenamed Force 136.