Visual evidence of the Japanese occupation was abundant … There were the railway traces, well ballasted, which made excellent estate roads, excavations into the low hillsides in which locomotives sheltered from air attack; unserviceable Japanese arms, grenade casings and ammunition littered the ground. There were also large amounts of Japanese ‘banana’ money lying about, and all this some five to six years after the re-occupation … A rather grand entrance to these railway works had been reduced to two badly leaning brick pillars. On Seaport Estate there were still Japanese drugs in the dispensary. At Sungei Senarut Estate in Batu Anam the manager’s bungalow had formed part of the Gemas Line; there were six Japanese war graves in the garden and a greater number of Australian dead … There was a great deal of hearsay evidence of paranormal activity related to this.5
As for the inmates of Changi, when asked if she hated the Japanese, Freddy Bloom replied ‘No’, since they did not have a monopoly on evil.6 ‘I never felt vindictive towards the Japanese on the basis that two wrongs do not make a right,’ admitted J. S. Potter, ‘but some of my fellow planters felt more strongly on the subject.’7
The cataclysmic ending of the Pacific War had a strange consequence. Victory had been achieved, but the victorious Allied troops were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Malaya was in the grip of a power vacuum. The British could be counted in mere hundreds (apart from the defenceless prisoner population). Force 136 officers, supported by technical experts and other ranks, British, Malay, Chinese and Gurkhas, a total of 380 men, had landed in the final months of the war. Their allies in the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army were 7,000 strong, but together they were no match for a Japanese occupying force estimated as high as 130,000. Undismayed, however, as news of the surrender percolated into the jungle the MPAJA began to emerge from their hideouts, eager to take over, although in Kelantan and upper Perak their political rivals of the Kuomintang (KMT) still had a residual hold. The peace proved at best uneasy. At worst, anarchy threatened as Chinese guerrillas thirsted for revenge on suspected collaborators.
From the British standpoint, Force 136 was there to maintain stability until the arrival of a large military force and a new administration. Shortly before the dropping of the A-bombs, its officers received a covert warning to lie low and refrain from offensive action. On 17 August they were notified of the ceasefire by wireless and were instructed, via John Davis, to ensure that the capitulation terms were observed. Preparatory to measures to bring them under control, the Japanese were to concentrate at surrender points in the main towns and the MPAJA would remain outside.
In the charged atmosphere of political hiatus, individual British officers of Force 136 acted with considerable courage and sang-froid. Having survived a traumatic existence throughout the war, John Creer was determined to reassert a British presence in Kelantan. Despite his emaciated condition, accompanied by KMT supporters he walked into Kota Bharu, the town where the Japanese had first landed, and took it over in the wake of their departure. At the same time, early September, Spencer Chapman, who had parachuted back into Pahang at the end of August, entered Raub and the capital, Kuala Lipis, accompanied by his liaison officer, Major Leonard. They were the first Britons to be seen in the area since the Japanese invasion. Chapman then went on to Kuantan, where he welcomed the indomitable Nona Baker, who finally waved goodbye to her Communist colleagues in the MPAJA.8
In upper Perak, meanwhile, Major Dobree, with Bob Chrystal and a KMT group, had already taken control of the township of Grik after a tense and potentially dangerous six days which ended on 22 August when the Japanese followed orders to withdraw to Taiping and Ipoh. Dobree went on to Kuala Kangsar (where he was soon installed in the Sultan of Perak’s palace), leaving Chrystal and his KMT guerrillas to hold Grik. Chrystal’s nerve was promptly tested again when a band of 200 Communist guerrillas approached the town. While he averted violence in Grik by powerful persuasion, he was powerless to prevent the shooting of Malay villagers and threats of anti-Chinese rioting by Malay peasants in the area. But from Singapore up to Pahang, a wave of bloodthirsty reprisals was under way. Communist lynch mobs seized suspected collaborators, spawning reprisals such as the slaughter by Malays of forty Chinese villagers – mostly women and children – in Negri Sembilan. These acts continued over several months. ‘Each act of vengeance was like a pebble dropped in a pond,’ declared John Gullick, creating ‘widening ripples of fear and hate’.9
A confrontation in August between Japanese and Force 136 troops highlighted the fragility of the peace. After Japan’s capitulation, on the 15th two Force 136 units based north of Rawang in Selangor emerged from the jungle and headed for Serendah. The first, led by John Davis (who had walked down the spine of Malaya from Perak in early August) and including Douglas Broadhurst, Group Commander for Selangor, and a Gurkha platoon, stationed themselves in the Serendah Boys’ Home. The second, under Major Philip Thompson-Walker with Flight Lieutenant James Robertson and a group of Chinese Communists, were billeted in the police station. Shortly after, in the anarchic mood of the time, a cohort of Chinese guerrillas shot up a convoy of Japanese soldiers on their way to surrender twenty miles away at Tanjong Malim. Enraged, the Japanese took their revenge, directing a company of troops from Rawang on an all-out attack on Thompson-Walker’s men, killing their sentry. Jimmy Robertson recounted in low-key style what happened on this first and last military clash between British and Japanese troops since 1942:
We were in the police station. It was a wooden building. There was lots and lots of small-arms fire, and hand grenades were being thrown from the other side of the road. I suppose I thought I’d better put a stop to it, so I nipped out to the front. There was a defence point in front of the police station at the side of the road, so I nipped across into this thing. I bawled in Malay at the Jap officers and tried to tell them that the war was over. Eventually the fighting died down. Their officers came across into my defence point with a couple of soldiers, and I was taken prisoner. This brought Major Thompson-Walker out to the defence point. Just then John Davis, who had heard all the shooting, came marching down the road with the Gurkhas, waving a Union Jack. He was furious. He persuaded one of the officers to go to Kuala Lumpur and make contact with the powers that be. There was no more hostility after that. I suppose the shooting lasted half, maybe three-quarters, of an hour.10
From the Boys’ Home a quarter of a mile away, John Davis had, indeed heard ‘the shemozlle’. ‘The important thing was not to have a confrontation,’ he affirmed, forcing the British to intervene in a Japanese-Chinese shoot-out. Ordering the Gurkhas to carry their guns over their shoulders, indicating they were not about to fire, and in company with the local Communist commander, Davis pushed the Jap sentries aside.
We bluffed it up, and it worked. We soon got Robertson out, and then we tried to settle the fuss with the Japanese commander. It went on for quite a while, and he had the local O.C.P.D. as interpreter, but ultimately it all quietened down. We phoned the Jap headquarters in K.L. and told them to send a lorry for us. And then Dougie Broadhurst and I and the Chinese Communist leader, we went into K.L., and the beautifully kept lawyer’s house which the Japanese officer had used became our headquarters.11
The seizure of key points by Force 136 was planned as a prelude to Operation Zipper, the reoccupation of Malaya. Intelligence about conditions in the camps and instability in the kampongs indicated the need for urgent action, and there was understandable impatience when America’s supremo, General MacArthur, insisted there should be no landings until after the principal peace-signing ceremony in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Britain’s second in command in the Pacific, Admiral Walker, sailed for Penang on 15 August but was forced to kick his heels until the 28th, when he finally arrived to begin the vital task of clearing the Malacca Straits of mines. Penang’s surrender was duly received on 2 September aboard the Nelson, after which the Royal Marines occupied the island. Singapore’s turn came on the 5th, when Lieutenant-General Itagaki and Vice-Admiral Fu
kudome boarded the Sussex to sign the island’s surrender, and afterwards the men of the 5th Indian Division marched in triumph from the Empire Dock to the Cathay Building.
The retaking of the mainland began on 9 September, when British troops landed unopposed at Morib beach, the first of several points on the Selangor coast. They entered the federal capital of Kuala Lumpur on 13 September. With his long experience as a marine pilot in Malaya, Captain Harry Rawcliffe of Force 136 piloted the first ship into Port Swettenham after the surrender.12 Japan’s humiliation was already complete when on 12 September Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten received from Itagaki the genernal surrender of all Japanese forces in South-East Asia. ‘As I speak there are 100,000 men ashore,’ declared Mountbatten from the steps of Singapore’s Municipal Building, and, as if to signify that Britain was reclaiming her imperial birthright, a Union Jack which had been hidden inside Changi since the fall of Singapore was hoisted to the strains of ‘God Save the King’.13 In Kuala Lumpur the final act came with the victory parade in October.
Given the circumstances of Japan’s defeat and Britain’s restoration, it is small wonder that two interpretations of history were to emerge. ‘To this day, it is the Chinese belief that it was they, and not the British, who reconquered the country’ asserted Norman Bewick, a man dedicated to Malaya, who saw in this Communist conviction the seeds of the later Emergency. Among the general lawlessness, ‘the only organised force was the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army’. The British returned, but they did not reconquer Malaya. In December 1945 ‘the MPAJA were just told to disband, hand in their arms and collect three hundred dollars apiece in payment; but they said, “Oh! to hell with you!” and went back into the jungle.’14 John Davis, who was much involved in the process of restoring British authority, saw things differently. The British, he argued, retrieved 80 per cent of the arms supplied in the war to the Chinese Communists, together with 3,000 additional weapons which were handed in by unattached guerrillas.
However it was fortunate that British control was not put fully to the test, for there seems no doubt that had the local Japanese command decided to oppose Operation Zipper the result would have been mayhem, since the British were working from inaccurate second-grade maps of the Selangor coast.15 Naval officers discovered too late that the terrain was unsuitable for an amphibious landing, and gullies were soon littered with ‘drowned’ vehicles. An officer in the Sappers and Miners charged with making captured airfields quickly operational told how their landing zone
was reported to be a wide, sandy beach … and we went forward but the heavy machinery needed for airport repair had to be unloaded. The tide was coming in over my entire heavy vehicles and lorries – the sand was 8-10 inches deep and under that was thick mud, and as the vehicles landed they punched holes through the sand and got bogged down. It was just as well the Japs were not fighting. But we were not operational the same day as we had planned.16
In the view of K. A. Brundle, a former PWD official in the new British Military Administration, signs were that ‘the old lethargy crept back in to military organisation’.17
The organization Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees was another target for criticism: ‘exasperation at the slowness of events has sent several people, mostly officers, a bit queer in the head, and there’s one case of attempted suicide,’ John Soper noted.18 After a month languishing in Singapore, men bitingly referred to RAPWI as ‘Retain All Prisoners of War Indefinitely’. At Sime Road, frustrated internees also waited through September. ‘Events are beginning to move at last, but slowly, even now … We have not heard definite arrangements regarding our repatriation,’ one of them complained. Unfavourable comparisons were drawn with American efficiency. ‘Still nothing has happened regarding our repatriation … About 40 American internees were whisked away yesterday … Events seem to move very slowly now.’19 The Y.W.C.A., meanwhile, flew in from India and pipped the Army to the post by commandeering Raffles Hotel for the women and children internees. Anne Langlands recalled their plight – ‘some of them just literally draped in rags’ – before she and her co-workers set about raiding local bazaars, making clothes, and loading trucks of soft bread baked by the Navy to replace rock-hard Army-issue biscuits.20
At the death camps, only the unexpected appearance of Lady Mountbatten, unblinking at the stench and the sight of jungle ulcers and skeletons in loincloths, gave waiting prisoners some special comfort and cheer. Her humanity contrasted with the treatment meted out under RAPWI to Whiteaway Laidlaw’s Manager William Price. Prevented from returning to Penang, he was hustled on board a ship for the UK, as his wife records:
Five ships left Singapore with the prisoners, my husband being on the fifth and slowest. Those on board were mostly Civil Servants and men of good rank in that service. What happened to cause the Captain to punish the men I don’t know but I do know he punished all of them by stopping their allowance of beer and chocolate. This to men who had been starving for years. Someone in authority went ashore at Colombo and contacted London. Result, rations were restored and the Captain was removed at Port Said and replaced by another. He was treating them as he would men in the army.21
Freddy Bloom was similarly disillusioned. Repatriated on the Monowai with several hundred men and a few women, they were all emaciated, tense and ‘fed up with the way they were being treated’. The unsympathetic attitude of the officers and crew meant ‘it was not a happy ship’.22 On the Tamaroa, ‘the rough food’ was Pat Warin’s only criticism. However, on reaching Fremantle that was forgotten:
The welcome we … received was just marvellous. Crowds lined the wharf and a band struck up as we pulled alongside … Red X workers gave us warm clothing – all very well organised. Refreshments were also provided. The kindness of everyone was overwhelming … Arriving in Perth … we were again received with every kindness and telegrams were immediately despatched to our loved ones. Exchange of greetings and news completed, we were supplied with a very good tiffin … We then strolled down some of the main streets. The people and the shops were literally dazzling. I feel like weeping for joy. I shall never forget the day.23
In a Britain suffering acute shortages and rationing, there was far less sympathy for colonials who had lost everything. It was Norman Bewick’s view that this hard-nosed indifference came from anti-colonialism at the top, in Britain’s new Labour administration:
The government at home couldn’t have cared less. They’d won the war with Germany and that was all there was to it … We were just humbug, you know, the prisoners of war from the Far East. All the flag waving and all that sort of ballyhoo, they’d washed themselves of that. When we got home, there was nothing except the Mayor of Bootle and the Mayor of Liverpool to welcome us!24
On an individual level, insensitive behaviour usually sprang from thoughtlessness or embarrassment rather than callousness. After his father’s release, Gordon Snell and his parents were asked out for a meal and were given rice pudding as a special treat! Bewick remembered how ‘you became rather an exhibit – “Oh! you must meet my brother, back from the Japanese” – and this sort of thing’.25
Others had problems with the British Military Administration, which ran Malaya for eight months until 1 April 1946. Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, fresh from the death camp at Pekan Baru, resented being spoken to in baby talk and being offered ‘nauseating pity’. His reception by the BMNs Chief Civil Affairs Officer in Singapore, Brigadier Patrick McKerron, was singularly inept: ‘We don’t need you chaps around here …’ he was told. ‘Everything is new nowadays you know, and you have a lot of things to catch up with. We are doing very well without you people.’26 Fortunately for Cunyngham-Brown he found a sympathetic administrator (a contemporary in the Malayan Civil Service) who was glad to use him in Johore.
Though far from fit, a few ex-prisoners – Colonel W. M. James, and his second-in-command, Major Arbuthnott, for instance – insisted on staying to help with the repatriation of Tamil labourers from Thailand. Captai
n Mervyn Sheppard received permission to spend October rounding up Kempeitai in the Riau Islands, where, as it happened, he unearthed all the mess silver of the Royal Scots and the Argyll and Sutherland Regiments, stolen by the secret police, and extracted information to compile a list of the interrogators and interpreters involved in the Double Tenth episode. On his release from Sime Road, Dr Winchester delayed a family reunion in Australia to start the reorganization of the administrative, technical and medical operations at Singapore General Hospital, of which he subsequently became Chief Medical Officer.
Some internees were reluctant to leave Malaya. Mrs Edith Rattray, owner of the Green Cow Tavern (where visiting parents of Tanglin pupils used to stay before the war), defied official protests to return to Cameron Highlands. In 1943 the Japanese had turned the hill station into a rest camp for their troops. Like the Pensionnat Notre Dame, which had been declared Japanese property and transformed into a hospital, her hotel had been stripped of its contents, but it was still standing and Mrs Rattray set about re-establishing her business; the convent sisters were instructed to reopen their school, too. James Anderson, an elderly Scotsman, said, ‘Well, I wish to go back to Trengganu and see what property I have lost and what I’ve got to do. Then I’ll go back to England … And I didn’t go home till the May of ‘46.’27 Instead of going back to Ireland, John Woods was determined to restart his law business in Ipoh and he set up a merger to create the firm Maxwell, Kenion, Cowdy & Jones. He had to secure a BMA pass to return to Perak, and holed up at a RAPWI transit camp in Singapore before sailing home to Europe in March 1946.
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