Whole blocks of shophouses were a mass of flames, while dead and injured seemed to lie every few yards in the streets … At least 1,000 bodies were buried under the debris. The General Hospital admitted over 1,100 injured. The other aid-posts dealt with many more. For sheer intensity of attack on a comparatively restricted area, nothing else in Malaya can be compared with it.17
Hospital staff under Dr Evans and the Medical Auxiliary staff, European and non-European, including two stalwarts, Nella Macdonald and Iris Parfitt, worked unstintingly. But despite the efforts of individuals in the ARP and the depleted Fire Service, fires continued to blaze around the island for several days. Law and order collapsed; policemen, transport workers, labourers all melted into the kampongs, leaving to the rats the debris and putrefying corpses on the streets. The horror of it all, particularly the images of machine-gunned civilians, played havoc with the emotions of Renee Parrish, wife of Penang’s pharmacist. After further raids on the desolate town, the Japanese concentrated their destructive fire on Penang Straits. Leaving her home in Brown Road, Mabel Price sought the safety of Penang Hill, where many Europeans were congregating. There with her two young sons she watched ‘the bombing of the harbour and the ships sinking or going round and round in circles to dodge the bombs. It was a tragic sight.’18
While the Japanese moved inexorably down the mainland, as many of the civilian population as could fled by car, boat or train from Province Wellesley and Penang, fearful of the consequences of capture by Japanese soldiers. A party of Eurasians from Kedah reached the Perak border by car on the 11th and were helped by the Volunteers to move on to Ipoh. A much larger body of some 600 Penang Chinese appeared down the Perak coast on the 13th, intending to find refuge with friends and relations in the fishing villages around Kuala Krai. Meanwhile, Captain Hartley’s wife, alone in Butterworth since he was in Penang, ‘only just got out … She had two babies and had to find her own way down the peninsula.’19 Kathleen Price and her eight-year-old daughter took temporary refuge on a rubber estate, but when the surrounding padi fields were strafed by machine-gun fire they returned to Butterworth, packed a few essentials, and boarded the train at Prai on Friday the 12th to join the Froggatts in Singapore.
The official evacuation of Penang began the following evening, when around 550 women and children crossed by ferry to Prai to catch the train. A Penang mother remembered what happened. ‘Then came the word. Secretly the women and children were to be taken to Singapore for safety and instructions given to be on the jetty ready for evacuation at 9 o’clock in the evening.’ Since its Asian crew had deserted, the ferry was manned by ‘the boys of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse who had been taken out of the sea 24 hours previously’. ‘We waited from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. before we could sail and daylight was breaking which made it dangerous for us to get away. I understand the enemy was only a few miles behind us.’ At Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur residents appeared on the station platform offering much-needed food and water, and ‘we had a bath and refreshed at the Spotted Dog Club before boarding the train for Singapore’.20 In Segamat, Nancy Wynne also did her bit for those fleeing from upcountry. ‘We have had people staying every other night, coming at all times for a bed or a meal. Several of them have lost everything except what they stand up in and others have lost their beautiful houses in Penang … I have a lady staying with me now whose husband is “missing believed killed” and who was living in what is now enemy territory.’21 The last train from Prai left on the night of 15-16 December. By the time they boarded it, Charles and Violet Samuel, a senior Penang lawyer and his wife, had already lost most of their luggage in the journey from Penang Hill. It was a traumatic departure for a middle-aged couple, and their leaving marked ‘a terrible break with the past’.22
That same night Province Wellesley was cleared on military orders. After dark, Bill Price of Sungei Nyok Dockyard and Straits Steamship engineer Bobby Moffatt drove off from Butterworth. They travelled mainly at night to avoid being dive-bombed, navigating with a handtorch in the blackout all the way to Singapore. H. B. Hall, Manager of the Straits Trading Company’s Butterworth works, escaped in the nick of time without being able to demolish anything in the smelting complex. On the 16th, by military order, Penang’s remaining European civilians and military personnel were packed aboard one of the old Bagan Luar ferries and the Straits Steamship’s little SS Pangkor to make for Singapore. So within nine days British rule in the Crown’s oldest Malayan territories came to an abrupt end.
The Penang episode sparked a wave of public recrimination. Not only had the scorched-earth policy been botched, allowing loads of oil, petrol, tin, rubber and rice to fall into enemy hands, but critically the wireless station had been left in working order. In no time Penang Radio was taunting, ‘Hello, Singapore, how do you like our bombing?’ There followed a flow of disinformation and propaganda aimed at sowing disunity and undermining morale. One official remembered hearing shortly after ‘that Tunku Abdul Rahman, the District Officer of Kulim [in south Kedah] … broadcast from Penang. His speech was anti-British.’23 Equally serious was the authorities’ failure to scuttle the armada of small craft and self-propelled boats scattered in and around the harbour, which proved invaluable to the Japanese in their seaborne operations along Malaya’s west coast during the next month.
But the issue which outraged many people was the racial discrimination implicit in the evacuation, which was apparently condoned by Duff Cooper, Churchill’s transient Special Adviser in Singapore.24 Since there was neither time nor means to organize a mass evacuation of Asian civilians, some 500 Asian Volunteers stayed behind to face the Japanese. ‘The British, so it was universally held amongst Asiatics, had ratted out of Penang, had thought of saving no skins but their own, and left the Asiatics to their fate at the hands of the Japs, as if they didn’t give a damn what happened to them,’ noted Ian Morrison of The Times.25 Official renunciation of responsibility reinforced the private guilt which many British Malayans felt in the coming weeks and months. As Kenneth Brundle, an architect with the Public Works Department, admitted, ‘This sudden order to pack up and leave without a word to our Asian staff threw me into utter confusion as it did many others. There were mixed feelings of hope, defeat and nausea.’26 However, he had the satisfaction of helping his Chief Draughtsman, a Eurasian, to leave Johore Bahru with his family, thus saving their lives.
Leslie Froggatt afterwards wrote with feeling:
I betrayed my Malay gardener. He cut my hedges, watered my flowers, cut and rolled my tennis lawn, and brushed up the leaves that blew down from the trees. I betrayed my round fat amah, who liked me, and amused me with her funny ways. I betrayed my Hokkien cook, who had a wife and four lovely children, whom he kept beautifully dressed at all times on the money he earned from me. I betrayed ‘Old Faithful’, our No.2 Boy, who knew no word of English or Malay and padded round the house silently in bare feet, always working cheerfully. I betrayed the caddie who carried my bag, searched for my ball, and always backed my game with a sporting bet. I betrayed all the little helpless babies with their almond eyes and soft black shining heads. From the college student to the Tamil coolie who swept the street, I betrayed them all.27
Muriel Reilly also felt ashamed. As the danger grew, ‘Our Malay Syce was so good … It still hurts to think how the white race “let down” hundreds of similarly faithful servants who trusted in us, and looked to us for protection from the hated Japs.’28 Tom Kitching, Singapore’s Chief Surveyor, did not want to be accused of leaving the sinking ship. ‘There is great argument, should all Europeans leave? I say no. Most people say yes.’29 In his Pahang fastness, Vincent Baker also knew he could never abandon his workers. The European staff had been drafted elsewhere as Pahang Volunteers, but to Cheng Kan, his foreman, as to the rest at the Sungei Lembing tin mine, ‘the idea of the Tuan Besar deserting them was unthinkable’.30
The Penang débâcle, meanwhile, resulted in withdrawal to the line of the Krian river. Perak was the next battleground. F
rom the border with Province Wellesley ‘the stream of southward traffic was as intense as ever: convoy after convoy of troops, guns and material moving in an endless line’. John Soper, who lived nearby at Parit Buntar, braced himself for ‘the blow of leaving all our household and personal possessions to the mercy of looters, the army and the Japs: furniture, silver, books, bedding, typewriter, electrolux, pictures, wedding presents, radio, all the treasures collected during thirteen years of married life’.31 Everyone had cherished belongings. Penang’s Chief Surveyor, Aylward, ‘lost everything, of course, including his tiger trophies, which cuts him more than anything else does’.32 Typically, Kathleen Price of Butterworth and Ethel Barnes of Malacca never saw their precious china, silver or crystal again. The Vowlers were remarkably lucky that their silver sporting trophies were saved, thanks initially to their devoted household servants, but Tom Kitching felt the blow of losing his collection, especially the silver cup presented to him by the Sultan for winning the Royal Trengganu Golf Club competition, and his first ‘pot’ for the long jump at Peterhouse Sports.33
Another distressing moment for many British civilians came when they parted with much-loved pets. It was small consolation that the Soper mongrel dog had a habit of getting in the way of a ball, so ‘the odds are that he was killed by the first shell that landed’.34 The Barretts and the Prices lost their golden cocker spaniels, Leslie Froggatt his aviaries of prize budgerigars and tropical birds, and Katharine Sim her pedigree Siamese cats. Knowing her two bull mastiffs, Brandy and Brutus, could not possibly accompany her, Nona Baker reluctantly had them destroyed. At the end Muriel Reilly and her husband took the same heartbreaking decision to have their six racehorses shot:
we weren’t going to leave then to the Japs to use as beasts of burden … They were our pets … They knew my voice and would ‘talk’ to me whenever I came to see them. Another thing that hurt more than I can tell. I had a most lovely dog – a Kangaroo Hound … he was almost human. I called in a Veterinary Surgeon and had my ‘Bluey’ put to sleep … it took three hours and I sat beside my lovely ‘Bluey’ until he at last stopped breathing.35
Meanwhile, the speed with which the Japanese persistently forced the British back down the peninsula baffled those who knew Malaya. Soper agreed with Tom Kitching’s assessment. ‘I should have thought there was no better line to hold them than Taiping–Port Weld, only ten miles of it, with mangrove swamps and the sea on the west, and steep jungle-dad hills running up to 4,500 feet on the east. Yet this was apparently given up without a thought.’36 This was not quite true: withdrawal was forced by the threat which was even then developing from the townships of Kroh and Grik.37 Japanese air supremacy was another factor. On 17 December central Ipoh was bombed, and the next day Taiping in a raid reminiscent of that on Penang the week before: ‘Because of the large number of civilians in town and the crowded nature of the market and its surroundings, casualties were heavy. Fires broke out and were fanned by a wind,’ the Resident recalled.38 Four days later, on a dismally wet Sunday, the civilian evacuation of Taiping was completed.
Soper, with the Volunteers at Ipoh, heard with disbelief the news of the army’s withdrawal across the Perak river: ‘we reckoned that this river would be a formidable obstacle, and might indeed prove the turning point of the campaign’. The Perak Volunteers, however, were soon on the move again, this time to Kampar, some twenty-five miles away, where Soper’s company, stationed in the Anglo-Chinese school, were ordered to prepare defensive positions. It was Christmas 1941.
I shall never forget that Xmas morning: it dawned cool and fair, the mist still clinging to the hills behind us, and with the dawn we set off on our mission of destruction [demolition] … It was a strange Xmas dinner: seven of us seated round a table improvised from school desks … a marvellous assortment of tin mugs, mess tins, enamel plates and ill matched cutlery, the whole scene lit by a solitary hurricane lamp. We had caught a turkey that morning but it … had to be eked out with bully beef rissoles and tinned vegetables. This was followed by a good tinned plum pudding with which we found some brandy to burn, then followed the port, chocolates and a sing song … in such surroundings and conditions the old Xmas carols seemed rather incongruous. On me they had a very morbid effect, bringing back memories of the year before with happy children’s voices singing them in a peaceful, contented home.39
Elsewhere in the Far East the picture was even darker. Kuching, in Sarawak, was overrun by the Japanese on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day Hong Kong had surrendered. In central Malaya there were still hopes of containing the enemy, if not indefinitely, at least until reinforcements arrived. On Boxing Day ‘the military authorities announced that they were going to make a stand North of Kampar and hoped to hold the line for six months.40 Other misleading stories reached Singapore that British troops had ‘inflicted terrific slaughter on the Japs in Perak – “wave after wave mown down”’.41 But that same day the old capital of Selangor was the focus of a well-targeted raid, raising serious alarms about fifth-column activity. The local bank manager recorded, ‘26th December was Klang’s Waterloo for from that day it ceased to exist as an organized community.’42 There was no halting Japanese progress: Ipoh fell on 27 December, Kuala Lumpur was repeatedly bombed. ‘In the Kinta valley the first really serious attempt at some sort of scored earth policy was begun. Estate rubber factories, stores and smoke houses were systematically fired by the local defence forces, and tin mining machinery was blown up by contingents of Royal Engineers. In Kuala Lumpur some of the large stores and godowns were also blown.’ As someone whose peacetime career was in agriculture, John Soper was appalled by the impact of huge fires all around: ‘it seemed stark madness thus to consign to the cosmos the hard won fruits of a bounteous earth’.43
In eastern Malaya the story was similar. As the Japanese were thought to be approaching and since no evacuation orders had been received in Trengganu, the civilians of Kuala Trengganu decided to take matters into their own hands. On 11 December a group of sixteen – members of the Malayan Civil Service, Police, Customs, Education and Public Works, with Dr Cecily Williams, two other women and two Malay policemen – embarked on a phenomenally difficult 120-mile journey. They travelled by car, motorboat, flat-bottomed boat, raft and cattle truck, their route taking them by the headwaters of the Tembeling river across jungle terrain of the central mountain range in monsoon conditions. Finally in the evening of the 18th they reached Kuala Lipis, the capital of Pahang and a railway junction, which promised to be a stage nearer safety. Shortly after, on 29 December, Vincent Baker was ordered by the British Resident at Kuala Lipis to flood the massive Pahang Consolidated mine at Sungei Lembing. As he dumped the tin and fuel-oil stocks and stopped the pumps, he gazed at the complete disintegration of his life’s work.
But it was not simply careers and lives that were in jeopardy, but seemingly civilization itself. The full facts about Japanese atrocities, of the bayoneting and beheading of prisoners, wounded soldiers and civilians, did not emerge for some time, but there began to trickle through stories of the indiscriminate rape and killing of Chinese, of a British planter and his wife being hanged by soldiers on a tree in the garden in front of their servants, and of the establishment of an execution ground at Telok Sisek.44 In much of the Malayan peninsula the British presence ceased, colonial communities evaporated.
The Volunteer system was another casualty of the swift enemy advance. As one by one the Malay States fell, according to the terms of their embodiment the Volunteers were disbanded to give way to the regular forces. Many Volunteers, it may be remembered, had held responsible positions in pre-war Malaya, as well as being university-educated, and among some of them disillusionment over the conduct of the war set in rapidly. M. C. Hay, a contemporary of Alan Morkill in the Malayan Civil Service, who was with a Light Battery unit from mid-December when his civilian job ceased, was soon convinced that ‘the authorities never meant to make any serious use of us’: his battery’s morale was undermined when a week
later regular troops took over their guns, leaving the Perak Volunteers with ‘ancient weapons’.45 Kenneth Brundle, who had joined a machine-gun company of the Straits Settlements Volunteers, felt strongly that Malaya Command never exploited the Volunteers’ potential, their facility in Asian languages, their knowledge of terrain and the local population, but instead set them to dig ARP trenches and perform other secondary tasks. As a result, ‘Sadly, the Volunteer Forces up and down the length of Malaya were prevented from making a proper contribution to the campaign.’46
There were, of course, individual exceptions, but there is no adequate survey of the various tasks undertaken by British Malayans in uniform, nor of the sacrifices they made.47 After his fleeting command of a company of Penang Volunteers, Charles Hartley joined ‘Dalforce’, a formation of Chinese irregulars which was hastily organized in Singapore by a former Director of Criminal Intelligence, Kuala Lumpur, Colonel J. Dalley. But it was typical of the Heath Robinson nature of Singapore’s defence that Hardey’s unit had ‘fourteen different kinds of rifle scrounged from all over Singapore’, and his priority was to teach his inexperienced Volunteers from scratch how to use them.48 Disbanded Volunteers undertook high-risk missions because of their intimate knowledge of the countryside. Four men of the former Drains and Irrigation Department – ‘Wilson, Pelton, Cubict and Wynne (the last Nancy Wynne’s husband) – were willing to try their hand at commando raids behind the lines, but ended as prisoners of war in the notorious Pudu Gaol, Kuala Lumpur.49 Douglas Broadhurst, another Volunteer, formerly in the police and based at Sungei Patani and Butterworth, served as liaison officer with the 11th Brigade, which saw heated action in the northern and central sectors. He found himself behind enemy lines. Major Barrett, ex-planter and former second in command of the Kedah Volunteers, spent the rest of the campaign as a liaison and intelligence officer attached to the 11th Indian Division, moving between the divisional headquarters and Singapore. There was inevitably a good deal of haphazard promotion and some resentment over the way commissions were granted, especially in the Indian regiments: ‘Some did a wangle … they became “two-or-three pippers” in the S.S.V.F. [Straits Settlements Volunteer Force],’ observed Sapper Guy Hutchinson – the peacetime Assistant Estate Manager – ‘we called them “Robinson’s Commissions” as that was where we reckoned they bought their pips.’50
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