Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  Already a flow of hospital cases had returned to Changi from other work camps around Singapore, particularly Blakang Mati (now Sentosa). From May 1942 rumours mounted of more distant transfers: there were hints of rest camps in the Cameron Highlands for convalescence, but also talk of Bangkok and a railway project. Harry Malet grew anxious:

  June 26th [1942]. Bob Hardie left with an up country working party today. I shall miss him … I wish I knew their destination. Guesses range from K.L. to Thailand. Some fifty went from F.M.S.V.F. which pretty well clears us out …

  July 17th. A party of 2,200 (750 from S. area) to go – all colonels upward; B party of Lt. Colonels and below to O.R.s – 1,100 (800 from S. area).

  August 6th. The Japan party is said to be due to leave on the 11th or 12th and the rest of Changi moves to Bangkok soon afterwards to a camp already prepared for 10,000. I do not like this idea as I feel we may be dumped in some fearful fever-ridden hole …

  August 17th [referring to a further party about to go overseas] … Please God the same fate as that which is said to have befallen the second overseas Aussie party (to Rangoon) won’t be theirs. That ship was sunk by an American submarine and 1,500 Aussies were drowned like rats in a trap.88

  Captain Malet’s fears were fully justified. Allied submarine activity in the Malacca Straits accelerated the construction of the railway from Bangkok to Rangoon. The route ran from Bampong to Kanchanburi, past the Mekon river and skirting the high mountains above the valley of the river Kwai to the Three Pagodas Pass into Burma, serviced by a chain of primitive work camps. ‘The line is an amazing feat, running on shelves cut out of rock faces, over bridges made entirely of timber except for cement foundations, and through the wildest and hilliest country,’ wrote one prisoner.89 But the cost was a saga of perverse cruelty, suffering and death, of endurance and superhuman achievement by slave gangs who lost one human life for every sleeper of its 400-mile length. ‘If you should hear stories of ill-treatment which you would be inclined to disbelieve as being far-fetched, think again and believe them,’ begged John Soper, who was with the last of the doomed F Force to leave for Thailand; ‘nobody can invent things worse than actually happened.’90

  Forced into long night marches through pitch-black monsoon jungle until they arrived at the highest reaches of the Kwai, the white coolies of F Force then slaved to clear the ground from the railhead, while H Force followed up, laying the track. Isolated from normal human contact, they were driven without mercy and ravaged by cholera, transformed into hollow-eyed, emaciated human wrecks. The Japanese put European POW deaths on the Thailand-Burma railway at 13,000, but that figure rose to 20,000 as the evacuation of the sick and dying navvies began, while the death rate in the Asian workforce may have exceeded 200,000.91 The causes were ‘starvation, climate, hardship, accidents, occasionally personal violence, neglect, poor physique, despair, neurosis and disease’, as bodies were plagued by fever, malaria, dysentery, cholera, beri-beri, pellagra, ulcers, gangrene, scurvy and skin parasites.92 In June 1943 both Harry Malet and Alex Cullen died from amoebic dysentery at a notorious mud and jungle clearing above Tarsao known as Kanyu, along with many other Volunteers. Malaria, dysentery and cholera killed a tenth of the camp in four weeks, as the torrential monsoon rains were at their height. Letters telling of her husband’s death, written to Dorothy Cullen after the war by fellow Kanyu prisoners, her brother, Robin Band, and the Catholic priest Fr Bourke, tactfully concealed the truth: that it was a malignant place, shrouded in ‘a dim, grim sense of foreboding’. Malet’s diary, which ended in April 1943, came into Dr Robert Hardie’s hands; Cullen’s few possessions – fountain pen, scissors, pocketbook – were also salvaged. His compassionate nurse and friend David Waters survived only two more months.93 On the completion of the railway in October 1943 the remnants of F and H Force returned piecemeal to Changi. They could move only in slow, painful stages – a weak, scarred, bandaged, ‘bedraggled, ragamuffin, pitiful crowd’.94 Some units were reshipped to Japan; others were directed to base camps at Chungkai, Kachanburi or Nakhon Nyok, and remained in Thailand until 1945.

  In 1944 changes occurred in Changi. On 1 May the internees were transferred to a pre-war British service camp at Sime Road. ‘The sense of comparative freedom is a wonderful mental tonic,’ remarked internee Pat Warin: there were timber huts, room to grow vegetables, and the promise of better conditions from the officer in charge, Major General Saito.95 Changi Gaol was then filled with 7,000 military prisoners, including the survivors of F and H Force, employed on light duties, while the able-bodied were deployed on heavy construction work building Changi Aerodrome. The prisoners were plagued by deficiency diseases – the result of cuts in rice, tea and palm-oil rations, a shortage of drugs, and hyperinflation in the black-market economy of Singapore. Despite the relative humanity of Commanding Officer Takahashi, beatings and deaths continued daily. Yet a new-found camaraderie gripped Changi, enlivened by concerts, theatrical performances at the prison playhouse, and illicit daily news bulletins on the progress of the war from the BBC, which proclaimed the advent of D-Day and sweeping Allied successes in Europe. Among the heroes of the war, it was universally agreed, were Volunteers who at the risk of torture and death ran successful radio operations. The brothers Max and Donald Webber, for example, operated in Thailand, giving over 700 news bulletins to camp inmates. ‘It would be hard to overestimate the importance of these regular listenings to the BBC in maintaining and boosting the morale of all of us,’ wrote Robin Band.96

  In 1944 growing air and naval strength began to turn the war in the East decisively in the Allies’ favour. Changi men felt a certain satisfaction when the Allies bombed the Burma-Thailand railway and destroyed a Japanese troop train and an ammunition train, and on 5 November there was great excitement when American Superfortress bombers attacked Singapore harbour. Allied planes were also making reconnaissance flights over the peninsula, to begin shortly the dropping of supplies and personnel to the Chinese resistance groups of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. With Japanese power concentrated in the towns and on the western plain, covert operations were limited to occasional ambushes of troops in transit. In 1943 and 1944 the Japanese struck back with concerted attacks on the jungle plantations supplying the resistance with food. Urban Chinese then took even greater risks in supporting the guerrillas.97

  Meanwhile the British stay-behind officers had suffered mixed fortunes. A number were captured or died from disease in the jungle. When in 1942 their attempted escape from Pudu Gaol failed, Ronald Graham, Bill Harvey and Frank Vanrennan had been beheaded at Cheras Cemetery, Kuala Lumpur, after digging their own graves: ‘the horror of that final scene haunts me to this day’, wrote Cecil Lee, a fellow prisoner and friend.98 One remarkable woman, Nona Baker, who shared her brother Vincent’s jungle ordeal until his death in spring 1944, survived in Pahang by co-operating with a Chinese Communist guerrilla unit, helping to prepare leaflets in English and teaching English songs. In June 1942 Bob Chrystal had become instructor in jungle warfare to a group of young Communists, the No.5 Independent Anti-Japanese Regiment, based in upper Perak. Among them was an intelligent Chinese youth named Chin Peng. Driven by idealism, Pat Noone also co-operated with the Chinese Communists, inducing Sakai tribesmen to work as spies and couriers against the Japanese. However, Noone, Chrystal and his jungle companion John Creer grew disenchanted with the Communists’ tactics and their anti-British propaganda. Creer and Chrystal were forced into an eerie, itinerant existence, spending alternatively months on their own or together, or with Temiar aborigines and the Kuomintang in Perak and Kelantan.

  Maurice Cotterill and Bryan Tyson had joined a Communist company in north Johore, where Spencer Chapman visited them on New Year’s Day 1943. Chapman was a pragmatist and accepted the need to work with the Communists, but he moved between the guerrilla groups in Pahang, Negri Sembilan and Perak. At Christmas 1943 he linked up near Tapah with two intelligence officers who had escaped from Malaya in 1942 but had retur
ned by submarine in August to take over covert warfare in Malaya: John Davis, a Chinese-speaking officer of the Straits Settlements Police, and civil servant Richard Broome of the Chinese Protectorate. The two men made a perfect team, in Spencer Chapman’s judgement. Davis – determined, stocky and immensely strong – was the head of Force 136, the Far Eastern branch of the Special Operations Executive, based in Ceylon.

  Their initial priority was to establish wireless communication between South-East Asia Command (SEAC) and the anti-Japanese forces in the interior, to facilitate intelligence gathering. But 1944 proved a frustrating year. The cumulative effect of lack of food, medicine and technical equipment was exacerbated by the capture in Perak of key Chinese agents; one, Lim Bo Seng, a fiercely anti-Japanese member of Force 136, died under torture. In October two former planters, Major Paddy Martin of Sungei Papan and his estate-deputy Captain Browning, who had also escaped in 1942 but enlisted for special operations, were betrayed to the Japanese and ambushed in Johore: Martin was killed. Spencer Chapman had a lucky escape in Perak. However, as SEAC’s plans to reoccupy Malay took shape, intelligence information became crucial. From the end of 1944 submarine patrols were stepped up in the Malacca Straits to land and retrieve British and Asian agents.

  As head of Force 136 in Malaya, John Davis worked to forge a political understanding with the Communist leadership through Chin Peng of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army in Perak. In return for Allied air drops of arms and supplies British liaison officers would prepare some 3,500 Chinese guerrillas for organized resistance. From January 1945 Force 136 parties of British, Malay, Chinese and Gurkhas were dropped in various parts of the country. Chrystal and Creer linked up with Major Peter Dobree, a Malay-speaker of the Agriculture Department, who with two officers had parachuted into upper Perak in late 1944. Early in 1945 other Force l36 officers moved into Kedah: Major G. A. Hasler was to liaise with a Malay guerrilla group (where he was joined in June-July 1945 by two nephews of Tunku Abdul Rahman in Force 136). Ex-Johore planter and ex-Dalforce officer Major James Hislop, who had been involved in submarine and surface-craft operations, parachuted blind into Kedah, and Tunku Mohamed Mohaidin of the Malay Regiment was sent into Kelantan to prepare for the anticipated British reoccupation. Two planes left Calcutta with another party targeting Selangor. Their mission was to supply and train Chinese guerrillas in anticipation of the coming Allied invasion, when they would be ordered into action. One plane – carrying James Robertson, a former tea planter, Douglas Broadhurst, of Province Wellesley police, and two Chinese agents – missed the dropping zone, and the party spent a hazardous seven months, twice repelling attacks by the pro-Japanese Indian National Army.

  From early 1945 Changi buzzed with rumour. Conditions for both sides were deteriorating. ‘Towards the end we did not have enough food, neither did the Japs … a lot of the chaps were going blind from malnutrition.’99 When Red Cross supplies were confiscated, pessimists forecast, ‘We are to face 5-6 months of starvation culminating in a massacre … Singapore can’t be attacked till August at the earliest, Nips are really putting the defences in order.’100 Apprehension grew as ‘Things here are very muddled but moving fast … They are obviously getting us split up into smaller units so that we are less dangerous … parties are being rapidly organized into 6oos – looks like train loads! Speculation, rumour, order and counter-order are rife.’101 After the news of Germany’s surrender and the fall of Rangoon in early May, hopes and fears see-sawed more wildly, with confused reports of Allied landings and peace moves. By June, relief was not expected before September; in July there were ‘rumours of a move to Penang before fighting starts, which Nips say is August’, then ‘Nips clearing civil population off the island and very busy on earth works.’102 Malaya was evidently one of Japan’s defence strongholds.

  Sinister evidence was also growing that the Japanese planned a bloody confrontation with the Allied liberating forces in which the remaining prisoners of war would be wiped out. In Thailand, prisoners picked up from Japanese papers ‘the probability of our total liquidation about August 21st’.103 In Sumatra, Cunyngham-Brown took a grim view of his prospects:

  Reinforcements of Japanese arrived and we were all suddenly ordered to dig pits thirty feet long, seven feet wide and six feet deep; a work which was undertaken and completed under strict guard of an exceptionally unpleasant squad of Korean soldiers. When we saw the machine-gun positions being arranged, we realized what these pits were for. They were our graves.104

  Then the end came with a miraculous and unimaginable coup de théâtre. ‘It was like the sunlight coming from half a dozen suns instead of one … and right through the centre was this column going up … We watched it forming a mushroom shape.’105 The witness of the phenomenal explosion at Nagasaki was a British prisoner of war, and among the many factory workers who shared the experience was Malayan planter H. S. MacDonald, who had already cheated death three times.106 The news was instantly broadcast around the globe. After five days of unendurable strain, the wife of a British prisoner could hardly contain her relief: ‘What a week of world shaking events – the Atomic Bomb – the entry of Russia into the War and then – Peace.’107 In fact the bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August were celebrated as a sign of divine intervention, saving not just the slaves of Sumatra’s Pekan Barn but hundreds of thousands of other Allied prisoners, soldiers and Asian civilians throughout the East. In Singapore the internees at Sime Road heard the news from an outside working party, who had themselves heard it from a resourceful Eurasian cyclist:

  as this Eurasian slowly pedalled past he sang a little song to himself without taking his eyes off the road. The words of his song were: ‘The Japanese have surrendered. The Japanese have surrendered.’ The cyclist went on but soon returned and overtook the working party, still singing the same song. The Sikh guard escorting the party suspected nothing. This news ran through the camp like wildfire.108

  Changi was instantly rife with speculation, but without official confirmation the prisoners were uncertain of Japanese reactions and were warned against indulging in triumphalism. The suspense made it ‘a very trying nervy week’.109 This was a common experience. When the Japanese surrender was confirmed, at Tamuang Camp in Thailand Dr Hardie noticed that ‘after such long suppression of hopes and fears … one just felt rather numb, rather shaky and rather inclined to sob’.110 Then, in Changi, the elation became irrepressible as suddenly Red Cross cigarettes and food supplies appeared. Spirits ran high and ‘we really began to feel free’, crowed John Soper.111 Anticipating the coming reunion with his wife and children, Pat Warin was jubilant. ‘Not very long surely. What a great and glorious time that is going to be. Oh! The thought of our meeting is almost too sweet to bear.’112

  Joy was invariably tinged with sadness, for friends who had not survived and for their wives and children who had yet to face the truth. The Ipoh barrister John Woods felt only heartfelt gratitude and humility. ‘I have been one of the lucky ones and have come through safe, sane, sound and whole … Even if I have lost everything I had in the world … I have something far better … the realisation that my material possessions were of no consequence whatsoever and that real happiness is possible in complete poverty.’113 To some ascetic souls the Changi episode had been emotionally liberating, offering solace and fulfilment. ‘To lose one’s property, to suffer privation and experience cruelty does not do one any harm, rather good, providing one is not permanently maimed …’, reflected J. S. Potter; ‘the experience of captivity taught me a sense of values.’114 These were minority views: most men longed for the comforts of civilized life; most preferred to look forward rather than back. And for survivors of the Malayan tragedy the prospect of peace was the most precious prize. ‘The biggest thing of all, of course, is that the mad war is all over.’115

  13

  False Dawn

  The legacy of the war and the Japanese occupation gradually worked itself out in the next fifteen years. The eve
nts of 1941-5 had shown that no great power was invincible. The British presence had been benign and just, but sadly impotent in a military crisis. All the same, the relieved people of Singapore gave the returning British a tumultuous reception, lining the streets, cheering and waving flags. Driving north from the island in September 1945, a former internee, John Woods, observed how in Johore

  people did not take much notice of us beyond staring. But when we got to Negri [Sembilan] and Selangor the fun started. Not only in the towns and villages but all the way along the road the kiddies ran out and the grown-ups too, cheering like mad and making the thumbs-up sign and waving … It was really a wonderful feeling. The whole thing was so spontaneous and genuine.

  And at every town, kampong and estate, ‘arcs de triomphe’ lined the route to Ipoh.1 The Japanese, on the other hand, were feared and hated, and, in token revenge, locals defaced their monuments celebrating the victory in 1942.

  Jim Winchester, a child in Malaya in the 1930s, returned as a planter in 1948. He recalled the pockmarked bridge and shophouses at Slim River, where bullets had flown in the vicious battle of 1941. During the 1950s Christina Browne heard stories of Japanese atrocities from the Indian community in Selangor, and in the estate office at Sungei Way, where Tom Kerr was Estate Manager from 1947, he found ‘two school jotters with, it seemed, dozens of Indian names. These were of labourers sent to Siam and never heard of again, I was told.’2 A shipping assistant identified ‘old posts near the Chartered Bank, Klang, upon which the Japanese hung the heads of local people when they had been executed by sword’.3 Even after independence, Edward Read, a marketing manager in Singapore, recalled how in 1958 Chinese and Malay taxi drivers recoiled when he gave his address as 26 Oxley Rise, a Japanese interrogation centre whence few had ever emerged.4 John Anderson, whose distinguished career in the plantation industry began in 1951, noticed the war debris at Petaling, where the railway repair works had been located: