Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  The men on the other side of the walls cheered themselves hoarse.

  The Asian races in Malaya reacted in different ways to the collapse of British power. The Japanese anticipated that the 45,000 defeated Indian troops would be a soft target. They were immediately separated from their British officers and were harangued by Indian nationalists to enlist in the Indian National Army and fight to free India from British rule. Whether inspired by a desire for independence or by an instinct for self-preservation, some 20,000 followed this advice. The remainder, who mistrusted the Japanese, were incarcerated in inhuman conditions at Seletar Camp. In their ranks were Muslims who feared a Hindu-dominated Indian National Army and those who had witnessed Japanese executions of wounded and captured soldiers.13 The Gurkhas held out to a man against the nationalist propaganda, and suffered outrageously: their senior officers were clubbed, starved, tortured and killed. Indian civilians also endured harsh treatment. A merchant recalled his frightening brush with the Kempeitai, the military secret police, at the house of a neighbour and local headmaster, Mr Krishnan. The Japanese officer

  turned at me furiously, and he took out his sword and put it on the table and said, ‘You are going to be killed today! You are hiding a lot of petrol; you are helping the British!’ In the meantime, Mr Krishnan explained, in the little Japanese he had learnt, that we were naturally happy with him as we were his subjects, but … he was looking for an excuse to take me, so he said, ‘Petrol ?’ I said, ‘Anything you want, I can give you’, so he took the petrol and left me. That was the first time I knew what it was to fear death … If Mr Krishnan hadn’t come in, I think I would have been slaughtered.14

  The British languishing in Changi had little time for the conscripts to the Indian National Army – ‘mostly composed of ex-Bengali bullock cart drivers, jagas, milk wallahs and cattle herds’, one Volunteer remarked heavily. ‘Scruffy looking lot and terrified looking too. They must know what’s coming to them when this show is over!’15 The anti-British speeches of Indian nationalists Mahatma Gandhi and Chandra Bose aroused British indignation. Referring to the prominent Singapore Indian lawyer C. S. Goho, an exasperated internee asked, ‘Could there be a finer example of biting the hand that fed you? He was up at Cambridge with me in the same college. He takes all he can. He comes to Malaya, he makes a very comfortable living and a small fortune and now!’16

  Some of the Sikhs and Punjabis employed by the Japanese as watchmen or prison guards were plainly antagonistic to the British, relishing their power, but others showed kindness and respect.17 One Sikh who refused orders to beat captives was badly beaten up himself and went to the internees’ hospital for dressings, but the Japanese immediately tore them off. Meanwhile thousands of Tamil estate coolies were drafted into the Indian National Army or later press-ganged as slaves on the Thailand-Burma railway, where they ended as starving scarecrows, many left to die in charnel houses thrown up in cholera-ridden clearings. Punishment for attempted escape was instant death – a risk that one young Tamil, K. P. Cherian of Kajang, felt was worth taking when he jumped from a Japanese lorry crammed with coolies and fled into the jungle in the hope of surviving until the day the British returned to Malaya.18

  With their policy of divide and rule, the Japanese treated the Malay people more tolerantly, to gain their tacit co-operation. The Malay Regiment was a patent exception: having won their spurs fighting tenaciously in the battle for Singapore, over 100 Malay officers and men were executed for refusing to disown allegiance to the British Crown.19 Among the remaining Malay officers the old bonds held firm.20 Survivors from the Kuala testified to the courage of Tunku Mohamed Mohaidin, a Federal Councillor and high-born civil servant, in helping those stranded on the islands and Pompong: ‘this Malay was indeed a hero in his self-imposed task of organising rescue missions’.21 But the price for the Malay people was high. Tunku Jamil of Negri Sembilan, who was lucky to escape being shot as a British spy, admitted, ‘I lost everything in the Japanese Occupation.’22

  Since the British had allowed Malaya to become a battlefield, the Malay peasantry were not surprisingly unconcerned about the fate of Britons caught behind enemy lines. Indifference was interpreted as disloyalty, and reports of Malay treachery circulated in Changi, brought in by new prisoners: ‘the Kedah Malays were rotten. They were told by the people in Kelantan and Upper Perak not to trust any Malays lower down the river: “they’d sell anybody to the Japanese for a dollar, tuan!”’23 The Malays’ attitude was ‘Apa boleh buat sudah untong nasib?’: ‘What can one do when Fate takes control?’24 The Lancastrian Tom Kitching observed cryptically, ‘they can’t do owt about it’, so ‘their attitude is entirely “wait and see”’.25 Among civil servants who knew the Malay people there was sympathy, but also shame and regret at the British government’s failure to protect them. In his farewell message to the British community in Changi on his transfer to Japan, Shenton Thomas asked, ‘when the time comes, do what you can for the people of Malaya’.26

  In the meantime Japanese terror methods tested the loyalties of the local races: ‘Posters in the villages printed in Malay and Chinese promised instant death to anyone seen speaking to a European.’27 In Ipoh a newly married Chinese intellectual, Foo Eng Keng, had to watch while his stationery shop was looted by the passing Japanese. ‘I lost everything,’ he said simply, but nevertheless, like Tunku Jamil, he was pleased to find himself still alive. With barely enough to live on, he resorted to black marketeering, despite the agony of being caught. ‘Every time any small crime was committed, everyone … had to go to an open space and stand in the hot sun – it was what you would call mass punishment!’28 Yet Asians and Eurasians still risked their lives by giving food and shelter to Europeans.29 The trauma and uncertainty of war turned the Eurasians into ‘a distrusted, unhappy community, ill at ease with the new regime’.30

  Chinese looters had been active in the twilight of British occupation, but their community paid the highest price for the capitulation, particularly those suspected of being Communist. Thousands of Chinese were covertly massacred, drowned, decapitated, tortured to death or machine-gunned in the first week alone. The Japanese admitted to killing 5,000, but estimates of between 40,000 and 100,000 circulated later, including a putative 20,000 beheaded upcountry. Among the first victims were a group of sixty to eighty Chinese irregulars machine-gunned at Changi Spit, evidence coming from the Straits Settlements Volunteers who were ordered to bury the bodies. Atrocities were regularly flaunted, the heads of executed Chinese and Malays being displayed on spiked railings in public places. In view of this, the exceptional courage of the Christian Chinese, exemplified by Elizabeth Choy, a young teacher tortured for smuggling food and blankets to sick British internees in Changi, deserves the highest recognition.31

  Changi cantonment, meanwhile, was home for thousands of Allied men and women, segregated by race, sex and civilian/military status into their own sections or camps. Subject to a body of rules laid down by the Japanese, discipline and organization were handled in the internee camps by camp representatives, and in the military camps by senior officers following military procedure.32

  Little has been said hitherto about the tensions created by the behaviour of the officer corps in Changi, but in fact some of the Volunteer prisoners were bitterly critical. Norman Bewick, a sugar planter who became Private Secretary to the Sultan of Pahang, had been badly wounded (officially ‘killed in action’), a more honourable status in Japanese eyes than surrender. He was treated with respect by his captors, but regarded the British officers as ‘scum’: ‘they had surrendered while they could still fight. We suffered more from our senior officers than we ever suffered from the Japs,’ he asserted.33 In the secrecy of his diary, Lieutenant Soper also berated the quality of the military leadership, describing his superior officer as ‘a most despicable character, ill-educated, pig-headed, smarmy and extremely selfish; besides that he is dishonest in his distribution of the stores’. As a result, theft and pilfering were rampant, from the hi
ghest to the lowest circles, as if imprisonment had ‘thrown into the limelight the inherent self-seeking and greed which seem to be the main factor in the make-up of most characters’. A man of inherent spirituality, Soper was also scathing of the church parades as unnecessary physical punishment for the rank and file and gratuitous ego trips for the officer corps.34

  Prisoners looked hopefully to the Church for comfort, and occasionally they found it. On his transfer to Singapore, Padre Duckworth, who ‘did a very fine job under awful conditions’ at Pudu Prison camp in Kuala Lumpur, gave a series of evening sermons which were ‘very popular with the troops’.35 But the missionary teacher Josephine Foss, who was for a time Superintendent of the Women’s Camp, observed that ‘The Ministers of Religion have not shown up so well.’36 Leslie Froggatt, a civilian in the military camp, was more explicit:

  The forced confinement of so many thousands of men deprived of their liberty … meant an immense upheaval in senses of value. Things which before the war were necessities – for instance, a new razor blade weekly, decent soap, a clean towel, changed clothing etc – were now luxuries impossible to obtain. Every man had to adjust himself radically to this different scale of living and values, and here it was that the Church should have played an important part in the delicate task of adjustment.

  But the Church missed the opportunity. It was not through lack of Padres and Chaplains – it was not through lack of facilities, nor was it through lack of assistance from the Japanese, who, strangely enough, showed themselves remarkably accommodating in the matter of religion. Church services were extremely well attended and with every prisoner eager for spiritual comfort and guidance to help redress their mental balance surprisingly little effort was made by the Church authorities to take advantage of the circumstances so exceptionally in their favour. There were, of course, individual chaplains who strived hard to meet this need but in the main – especially by example – the Church failed lamentably. In some instances there were cases of extreme selfishness shown by Padres and this attitude did much to destroy the seeds of renascence of spiritual belief amongst the prisoners.37

  Froggatt made no mention of the Bishop of Singapore, who alienated some Changi internees by exploiting his privileged situation and arrogating to the clerics a personal supply of tinned food.38 On the other hand, he singled out the four Australian Y.M.C.A. delegates for their compassionate work in the hospital wards so ‘when the tale is told the Y.M.C.A. can be justly proud that its reputation was in such capable and enthusiastic hands’.39

  However, the picture was not uniformly dark. Shared misfortune produced a certain camaraderie among the prisoners. ‘Quarrels with rare and of short duration, with no malice felt afterwards and idiosyncrasies were borne with sympathy and humour … In the early days of imprisonment the novelty of the new life had something to recommend it’; without alcohol and tobacco, ‘hard drinking old topers, middle-aged men and even younger ones, [were] all losing waist lines and looking clear eyed and clear skinned’; also, sea bathing was unrestricted at first and ‘the sea shore looked more like Ramsgate or Southend on a Bank Holiday than a P.O.W. camp’.40 Despite the gross and demoralizing overcrowding (ten times as many prisoners living in the space of pre-war days), there was still a certain optimism that the war would be over in six months or so.

  However, the buoyancy was intermingled with apprehension. The urge to degrade Europeans who had surrendered, the insistence on their bowing to Japanese personnel, beatings for trivial misdemeanours without exception, and the propaganda value attached to the indignity of defeat quickly created disillusion among the prisoners. In the first month, ‘We were turned out on two occasions to line the roads for Jap High Command officers,’ wrote Harry Malet, observing how smart the officers appeared in their well-cut riding breeches and double-handed swords. The top brass drove in armed convoy, followed by lorries with mounted machine guns. ‘The news reel cinematographer also was very much in evidence and took shots of us as he passed in a specially built car.’41 Within weeks there was a restless impatience for release, followed by apathy, as men joked about the possibility of ‘never getting off the Island’.42 That prediction might be true for some, but in August 1942 the Japanese transferred all senior officials and officers above the rank of colonel, including General Percival, to Japan, in a calculated manoeuvre which deprived the bulk of Allied troops of experienced leadership. Nevertheless, conditions for the internees, though grim, were bearable for the first year, except for the elderly. The failure to repatriate them aroused deep indignation. ‘Injustifiable homicide amounting to murder’ was Tom Kitching’s judgement on hearing that R. H. Young had died at the age of ninety; eighty-three-year-old ‘Abang’ Braddon and ninety-one-year-old H. W. H. Stevens had already gone.43

  Kitching, a conscientious recorder of camp statistics, claimed that twenty-four nationalities were represented in Changi Gaol, with the total numbers fluctuating in excess of 3,000 and including French, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Eurasians and Jews. In the women’s camp the single largest group were wives and housewives, with some sixty children and babies. They were accompanied by a contingent of nurses, a handful of doctors, some missionaries and teachers, and a small number of elderly or infirm ladies. To keep the children under control an open-air school was started, and they were taught in age groups of mixed nationality.44 On the whole the male internees were professional people – intelligent, well educated and skilled, resolved to make the best of the situation.45 Their first priority was to set up basic medical services and camp amenities (including a library of 5,000 books salvaged from homes and collections in Singapore). Despite a lack of space, football, cricket, badminton, hockey and volleyball matches were played before enthusiastic spectators, and there was an insatiable demand for mental stimulus in the form of books, lectures, talks, debates, quizzes, bridge and chess. The Australian concert party drew universal praise among prisoners, while ‘the energy of 10,000 Britons camped up in Changi burst out in a thousand different directions – courses on every subject and language, societies for every hobby and sport, theatres for everything from Shakespeare to Journey’s End, classical concerts and light music’.46 Harry Malet, gave a taste of the exuberance of the early months:

  Amateur talent is abounding. We put up an excellent show here in W block, built a stage with canvas back cloths, curtains and all, in the garden … Bill Riches sang, ‘As you’re strolling down Changi High Street’, all local songs and topical stuff … Russell Weight played his squeeze box and also did all the piano accompaniment … Our Southern Area permanent theatrical party is established in the old Changi village outdoor cinema; the stage and orchestra being covered and the enclosure holding 600 men. This party is composed of mostly ex-professional actors, musicians, etc. and with local talent added, they have … so far put on three vaudeville shows. They have a Christmas pantomime coming into rehearsal shortly.47

  Classical music was equally in demand, and John Soper recalled a symphony concert held in March 1943, ‘a magnificent effort … They played a lovely piano concerto from Schumann, the pianist a professional, Rennison by name.’ Confinement, however, produced frustration. As Lieutenant Soper also remarked: ‘Never have we had so much leisure, never, I hope, shall we be so powerless to make full use of it.’48

  Morale was vital for survival. A joke at Japanese expense was a tonic.

  One small example of this sense of humour that kept us going; Jim Swanton (the Daily Telegraph Cricket Correspondent and Broadcaster) and myself and some others were trying to prepare a cricket pitch out of mud for a Christmas Day cricket match when we were approached by a suspicious looking Japanese who seemed intent on wishing to interfere with our labours and wanted to know what we were doing. ‘Preparing for a religious festival,’ promptly replied Jim Swanton. ‘Cricket is religion in England you know.’ ‘O.K., O.K.,’ said the Japanese, who at that period had some respect for religion, and walked off much to our relief and amusement.49

  However, on 15 Marc
h 1942 Tom Kitching recorded, ‘We have our first suicide today. There will be more if conditions are not improved.’ In May a young police officer lost his reason and was committed to a mental hospital, but died a week later.50 In another case death was attributed to ‘simply not having the will to live or help himself, constantly brooding on his troubles, a mass of self-pity’.51 Malnutrition brought bouts of depression. Although he was involved in vital lifesaving work, Soper became introverted and nursed wild compulsions.

  May 17th 1942. I don’t seem to be doing anything really worthwhile here … What I’ve been doing as my major job these last fifteen years is not of much value …

  7th February 1943. It has been a mentally disturbed week. I think I’ve successfully conquered the idea that I am going to die here which came very strongly some days ago, but I have a sort of general feeling of unrest which may even exhibit itself in some rash attempt to escape. For two or three days I’ve been toying with the idea of working down to Australia by

  sampan …

  21st February 1943. Felt very bad yesterday, mentally and physically … Am I a fool to keep harping on escape? It means almost certain death if caught, but it often seems that a swift death would be better than this slow suffocation.52