Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  I do remember that there seemed to be no love lost between the groups of people in civilian jobs and those in the military side. My mother always recalled how at a party once when they were discussing security in Singapore, she did actually mention to a military person that all the defences were directed seaward, and couldn’t an invader come by land down the Malay peninsula? The military person pooh-poohed this as an impossibility.68

  Though servicemen might denigrate Malayan society, they were less vocal in this than a section of the press. Somerset Maugham’s literary portrayals of a decadent and philistine community had been augmented by Noel Coward’s aphorism about Malaya (‘a first-rate country for second-rate people’). In 1937 an attack on the colonial regime by the American scholar Rupert Emerson added academic weight. Then, when the situation became grave, journalists such as the Daily Express war correspondent O’Dowd Gallagher turned on ‘the white civilian population [who] evinced no interest in the war whatsoever’ and for whom the war news simply ‘gave them something exciting to chatter about’ at the breakfast table.69 The American CBS newsman Cecil Brown (who was expelled from the country early in 1942) later castigated the colony’s leadership and the hedonism of British Malayans as reasons for the country’s downfall. Lady Brooke-Popham allegedly accused the women of Singapore of being too busy playing golf and tennis to help with voluntary services – an accusation that was indignantly denied. Whatever the truth, all the criticism was deeply and bitterly resented in European circles. One Singapore resident tried to rationalize the mood:

  We did have a tendency to fête our visitors … And so they often went away full of headache and hangover, to print and publish criticisms of a way of life that was planned primarily for their amusement, and was not in any way typical … The nastiest jibe of all was made by a visiting journalist who charged us publicly with ‘swilling’ while our Rome burned. Out there, we didn’t condemn them for making merry in the Cafe de Paris while the bombs came racing down [but] the brave face that Singapore tried to put on in spite of the growing sense of bewilderment, confusion and utter chaos … was condemned as foolish frivolity.70

  Others, however, felt ashamed that the regime failed. The malaise, they believed, was deep-rooted. The British and the Asiatics lived their lives apart … and the small British community formed no more than a thin and brittle veneer,’ wrote Ian Morrison, the London Times correspondent.71 In European circles ‘the social round … proceeded at the level of the least intelligent … This state of affairs … was symptomatic of the deadness of our thought.’ At its root was ‘the aversion to treating any members of the Asian races on a basis of equality. We would mix with them on business, on government committees, in games, at Rotary clubs, at big functions, and yet many of our clubs had rules which specially excluded them.’72 This same mentality precluded the mass mobilization of Malaya’s Asian population on a properly organized basis. ‘Allies with our servants and cooks, allies with our tailors and our sewage coolies, may Heaven forbid! We’ll manage this show by ourselves or perish,’ a British Volunteer recalled – adding, ‘My own cook implored me to get him enlisted in something; he would shoot, he said, but there was no sort of organisation which wanted him.’73 Only after the Pacific War began did the authorities recognize the defence potential of the Chinese in particular, but by then it was a matter of ‘too little too late’. One colonial servant gave his verdict:

  To sum up, the invasion found the country incompletely prepared and considerably under-equipped. The population was partly apathetic (the Malays), merely existing (the Tamils) and partly ‘on the make’ (the Chinese and Europeans), with no uniting force to bind them into a resistant whole. The climate and social life was such as to damp initiative and discourage original thought. I had the strange feeling that the spirit of the land [was] … waiting to take vengeance and indeed it would seem that only some supernatural force can account for the follies and blunders which were committed.74

  The confusion continued up to the eventual eve of hostilities. Japanese troop concentrations in Indochina were still interpreted as bluff, while other warning signals went unchallenged. Reports in August of the night-time penetration of two strange ships up the Endau river were three weeks late in reaching the colonial authorities, and there was no apparent response to the evidence of Japanese submarine operations in Malayan coastal waters. The final evacuation from Singapore of Japanese civilians in mid-November 1941 perhaps sent critical signals (more than half the Japanese community having already left since July). By late November the intensification of diplomatic exchanges and increased activity in the Japanese armed forces finally set alarm bells ringing. On l December 1941 all military, naval and air personnel were ordered to return to their bases in a general mobilization. On the 2nd the battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse arrived in Singapore to reinforce Malaya’s defences and reassure the British tuans. However, when Japanese armed convoys were spotted in Thai coastal waters on the 6th, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, dampened ‘alarmist’ reports in the press. The same day the Governor told his cipher clerk in private, ‘You can take it from me there will never be a Japanese bomb dropped in Singapore – there will never be a Japanese set foot in Malaya.’75

  In the early hours of 8 December the Japanese landed on the northeast coast of Malaya and simultaneously bombed Singapore and Pearl Harbor. The final irony was that as ‘Japanese bombs were falling on a perfectly illuminated Singapore … our preparations, precautions and general arrangements were such that the lights were still fully on at the end of the raid!’76

  12

  Terrible Forfeits

  In seventy days the Japanese 25th Army had swept the British from Malaya – a month faster than General Yamashita, ‘the Tiger of Malaya’, had predicted – and had laid the foundation of a Greater East Asia New Order. In a vain effort to stem the Japanese tide, a joint American, British, Dutch and Australian Command (ABDACOM) had been set up on 10 January 1942 under General Wavell, but ten days after Singapore fell this Allied directorate was dissolved, on the irrefutable grounds that there was nothing left to command.

  As if to reinforce this point, on 27-8 February a makeshift Allied fleet was badly mauled in the battle of the Java Sea, enabling the Japanese to proceed with their invasion of Java. Meanwhile, the Japanese 15th Army had pushed from Thailand into Burma, forcing British troops into an unparalleled retreat of l,000 miles to Assam. Rangoon fell on 8 March – the very day on which the Dutch colonial authorities surrendered the Dutch East Indies unconditionally to Japan. Then in Easter Week Vice Admiral Nogumo’s powerful fleet entered the Indian Ocean to threaten Ceylon. In the bombing of Colombo the cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire were sunk, and a few days later the carrier Hermes. The remnants of Britain’s Eastern Fleet were forced back to Bombay and Mombasa, there to face prolonged inactivity. In the interim, American resistance in the Pacific collapsed, and by May 1942 Japan’s conquest of the Philippines was complete. In six months Japanese forces had occupied empires stretching from Rabaul in New Britain to Rangoon – a massive region containing 88 per cent of the world’s rubber, 54 per cent of its tin and 90 million people. Churchill had expected that there would be ‘terrible forfeits in the East’ if Japanese arms went unchecked, but not the true cost, the terminal decline of British authority in the Orient and a horrendous price paid in human terms.1

  When Singapore fell, there remained a residual European presence on the peninsula. ‘Small groups of British and Allied troops and civilians, including a number of former planters, tin-mine managers and district officers, still moved in a kind of twilight freedom around the jungle fringes.’2 Some had decided to remain in expectation of a British counter-offensive. Men like John Creer, a thirty-five year-old Manxman and District Officer at Kuala Trengganu, the Game Wardens T. R. Hubback and E. O. Shebbeare, and Pat Noone, a brilliant young anthropologist, commissioned in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and an expert on the Sakai aborigines, all had invaluable
knowledge of the people and terrain. With a band of experienced rubber and tin executives, they had the potential to form an embryonic guerrilla movement. This included the Glaswegian Bob Chrystal, General Manager of Guthrie’s Kamuning Estate, near Kuala Kangsar, his Assistant Boris Hembry and neighbour William Robinson, experienced planters Bill Harvey, Frank Vanrennan, Ronald Graham, Maurice Cotterill and James Hislop, and mining engineers Pat Garden and Brian Tyson, the latter assistant to Pahang Consolidated’s Manager, Vincent Baker, who refused to leave Sungei Lembing. A few Britons had stayed at their posts for humanitarian reasons. Dr Evans, Medical Officer at Penang General Hospital, and Dr Gordon Ryrie, Superintendent of the Sungei Buloh Leper Colony near Kuala Lumpur, had decided to brave the Japanese for the sake of their patients. Meanwhile, somewhere in Kedah or north Perak were survivors of the European mining community in southern Thailand who had trekked south in December 1941 after narrowly missing death in a Japanese massacre of Europeans inside a bungalow on the Betong road. There were in addition dozens of servicemen scattered through the jungle, casualties of the swiftly moving battle front, lost, wounded or left for dead by Japanese executioners.3 Finally, a nucleus of irregulars had infiltrated the mainland, supported by Chinese volunteers, many of them Communists released from prison, who after the Japanese invasion had been hurriedly trained at 101 Special Training School in Singapore to act as ‘stay-behind parties’. Their task was to disrupt the enemy’s advance.

  Early in 1942 the planter turned Defence Security Officer John Theophilus was busy preparing the ground for these ‘behind the lines’ guerrillas. He turned to the only help available. In a mission to leave a dump of provisions for a stay-behind party high up in central Johore,

  I had a British forest officer and I had ninety kerosene tins full of ammunition, rice, foodstuffs – all to be put on top of this mountain. I had only one lorry and one car, so I said to someone I could trust, ‘I want to see the head Communist in Kluang’ – this was January ‘42 … he came along. I said, ‘One man, one tin.’ ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Eight o’clock tomorrow morning, on the outskirts of Kluang, I’ll have a hundred Chinese, and they will take the stuff and dump it at the top.’ Well, I managed to get two or three other chaps with cars. I had about a dozen Communists in my car. The lorry was piled with bodies on top of the stuff, and the Forest Officer took them up to the top and I waited down below. When they came down, I said to this head Communist, ‘How much do you want?’ – not that I had much money. ‘Nothing!’ he said. ‘It’s against the Japanese. ‘ Then he took all the men back to Kluang, and that’s the last we saw of them. I also put in two loads of food and receiving sets for some Dutch officers and N.C.O.s and Javanese pirates, one up the Johore river and one at Kota Tinggi.4

  Another officer involved in the Training School was Spencer Chapman, who became leader of No.1 Guerrilla Group. He was joined at different times by two members of the School, a New Zealander, Frank Quayle, and an ex-army demolition instructor, John Sartin. In the next three and a half years they all faced formidable difficulties as they operated in the jungles of Perak, Pahang, Kelantan and Selangor. In addition to evading capture, finding secure sites, maintaining supplies of food and munitions, and surviving in isolation in impenetrable, poisonous vegetation, they had to adapt to the competing presence of Chinese Communist guerrilla bands and those supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s rival Kuomintang or National People’s Party. But all that lay ahead: little had been activated in February 1942 when Singapore – or Syonan, as the Japanese now called it – lay under a canopy of smoke from smouldering fires, its streets scarred with corpses and the flotsam and jetsam of war.

  The logistics of organizing the imprisonment of Allied soldiers and civilians taxed the conquerors, and at first there was little outward sign of the promised new order. A number of lucky Europeans – civil engineers, technicians, fire officers, clergy, ordered to keep essential services going – continued to enjoy a certain degree of freedom, but on Monday 16 February the former rubber planter Captain Harry Malet of the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force had his first encounter with the reality of capitulation. ‘Outside Brigade H.Q. was a sandbag barricade with a notice printed in English stating that anyone found disobeying or disregarding orders given by Japanese soldiers would be “shot to death” by order of the Imperial Nipponese Army.’5 As Adjutant to Colonel W. M. James of ‘James Force’, he accompanied his CO to Fort Canning for a conference to agree arrangements to move the British prisoners of war.6

  A huge Jap flag was floating from the top storey windows of the Cathay building which was being used by them as General HQ. [In Fort Canning] I saw quite a number of Malayan Civil Service … all looking very lost … Among them was Hugh Fraser, Federal Secretary [sic] … He had been ordered to muster on the Padang on the following morning … together with all other civilians. At the Conference … we learnt that all European and Australian Forces would be sent to Changi Cantonments … Indian and Malay troops were to go to Farrer Park for subsequent dispersal.7

  At 7.30 a.m. the next day James Force set off on the fourteen-mile march through comfortable Chinese and Eurasian districts to Changi, once home to the Royal Artillery and the Gordon Highlanders. In Captain Malet’s words,

  we were actually the first troops to march out of Singapore to ‘prison’, and as Adjutant I marched beside Col. James at the head of the column and so became actually … the first man of the 30,000 British troops to march into captivity – a somewhat doubtful distinction! … Here every house, or so it seemed, hung out the Jap ‘poached egg’ flag and all looked at us in a sort of dumb, sullen way, but not unkindly. Malays we passed en route were inclined to snigger and jeer and also the unpleasant type of Southern Indian shopkeeper. Tamil coolies were plainly horrified and many salaamed as we passed. One Chinese stepped off the footpath into the street and said quite clearly to us, ‘Keep your chins up’ and ‘Good luck’. We marched out entirely without guards and actually saw few Jap soldiers … about midday we arrived and parked ourselves at Kitchener Barracks B. Block … My feet were almost raw.8

  John Soper, ever a practical man, had changed his socks during the hourly halt, to prevent feeling footsore. Bringing up the rear of his column, he found they were scheduled to start in the worst of the midday sun, and marching through the damaged village of Payar Lebar, they passed a charred body curled up in the back of a burnt-out car. It was evening before he and two fellow officers finally staggered the last mile to their billets in India Lines, stripped off their kit, and lay down on the grass to breathe in the cool air, which for once was untainted by death or excreta.

  Earlier that day, at 10.30 a.m., over 2,000 European civilians had assembled, as ordered, on the grass at Singapore Cricket Club. Harold Cheeseman of the Education Service sensed a viciousness in their captors’ mood. ‘We were … harangued bitterly, passionately, contemptuously on the utter and permanent defeat of the white races.’9 Tom Kitching’s memory was of intense heat, a fearful thirst and interminable delays. His chivalrous instinct bridled at the way 500 women and children (including the wives of senior personnel) were forced to undergo such treatment during the hottest part of the day; despite promises of transport, many of the women had to walk the five miles to internment at the Sea View Hotel, Tanjong Katong. Kitching’s eventual destination, with about 600 others, was a large Muslim compound with houses at Karikal, ‘absolutely bare, dirty, everything smashed to atoms, very little water, no sanitation, no light … nothing to sleep on of course, and no food, only a trickle of lukewarm water to drink’. As gnawing hunger intruded into fitful sleep, he reflected ruefully on the end of a Shrove Tuesday without the traditional pancakes.10

  Tanjong Katong was a brief interlude which ended on 6 March with official notification that ‘the Japanese army is going to accommodate all civilians of enemy nature in Changi Prison’, twelve miles from Singapore town. ‘Well, I never thought I’d be in gaol,’ thought Kitching as he prepared to sleep on sacking over concrete with a sandba
g pillow. There were four lorries for the aged and infirm among the 2,000 male internees, and separate motor transport for sick and pregnant women, the elderly and children under twelve. ‘The others will walk’ was the order.11 To protect themselves from the scorching sun, the women scrounged every kind of headgear imaginable, from newspaper, cardboard boxes and towels to lampshades and men’s hats. This column of 400 women entered Changi legend. The march started with an unexpected glimpse of Japanese bushido and ended with a bold display of bravado, as Harry Malet explained:

  As they stepped out of the Hotel drive into the roadway they were met by a jeering crowd of Asiatics, mostly Malays. The Jap Guard promptly turned the column back into the Hotel grounds and proceeded to clear the street, chiefly by means of piles of metal ready at the roadside, kept for road repairs! This was a friendly gesture and much appreciated. No more trouble was experienced except at one point where more Malays had gathered by the roadside to have a good laugh at the ‘Mems’ and children, now being herded to the common gaol like ‘Orang jahat’ [wicked people]. The Jap soldiers set about them and beat them unmercifully teaching them a lesson in manners. At the end of this exhausting march, in the heat of the afternoon, the women and children swung into the gaol courtyard through the huge doors, singing at the tops of their voices, ‘There’ll always be an England’ – and if that isn’t splendid, I’d like to know what is.12