Forgotten Wars Read online

  The missing haunted the post-war years, their suffering unrecorded in the official documents. It is clear that the British were aware of forced sexual slavery in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Singapore: escapees spoke of it, as did reports from local police officers.22 Soldiers began to find more evidence, but the Japanese were covering their tracks. At the hill resort of the Cameron Highlands, for example, some girls were found in a former convent: the Japanese colonel passed them off as convalescent pulmonary tuberculosis cases, but it was clear that they were there under coercion as ‘comfort women’. In cases like this, British soldiers would transport the women to the main towns, but then they often disappeared from view. Press pictures sent home to Britain of Malayan women and their babies liberated in the Andaman Islands had a description of them as ‘comfort women’ excised by the military censor.23 Half a century later, the full story of the ‘comfort women’ had yet to be told. Many of the girls, recruited locally, could not return to their families for shame of what had happened to them and fear of rejection.24 The social welfare officers who arrived with the BMA were aware of these women, but the military were unable to discern the nature of the ‘comfort women’ system, and unequipped to deal with mass rape. They saw the problem as one of ‘rehabilitation’ of prostitutes. But an attempt to use welfare homes run by the Chinese community for the ‘reclamation’ of fallen women, the Po Leung Kuk, collapsed because victims were repelled by the stigma it carried. The British fell back on the view that those who were not going into prostitution had rehabilitated themselves and that the others were already prostitutes.25 This abandoned many young girls to the insidious free market in women. As Victor Purcell acknowledged, ‘the facts, as known, would bring the government into grave disrepute. Girls of 10–15 are suffering from venereal disease.’26

  The experience of war was etched in people’s faces. With the collapse of food exports from Burma and Thailand, Malaya’s rice bowl was broken. The British shouldered the massive responsibility of distributing and rationing supplies, through relief in cash and kind and public canteens on the lines of the spartan wartime ‘British restaurants’ at home. But the government failed in one of its most fundamental tasks: it could not import enough rice to feed its people. By December the average individual ration was a mere 4.5 ounces a day, and not everyone received it. The British, like the Japanese before them, campaigned to get people to eat more tapioca and grow more food. But as it was, Malay peasants said that they could not bring in the harvest as the women who did most of the work had no clothes to wear. The opening up of new land often meant encroaching on the forest, and the forest could strike back: marauding boars and elephants ruined rice crops. The rare Malayan tiger was more often seen. In one village in Malacca, eighteen people were taken by crocodiles in one year. Pioneers opened up badly drained areas where the Anopheline malculatus mosquito thrived and malaria was endemic. There was, doctors warned, little point asking people to open up land for food crops ‘if it was merely to provide a grave for the occupants’. In the towns the need for food was such that there was even a brisk market in ‘night soil’ – human waste – as fertilizer for vegetable farms. Fragile mechanisms of disease control were breaking down: there were outbreaks of cholera and doctors felt a rise in tuberculosis might be ‘the worst aftermath of war’.27 S. K. Chettur enraged local opinion by reporting back to India that famine did not exist in Malaya. This was technically true, but the full effects of the shortages were disguised. Nutritionists reported that Indian labour was incapacitated by beriberi and tropical sores. Malaya escaped the horror that was visited upon Bengal in 1943, but by a narrow margin, and lived with its effects for many years. The growth of an entire generation was stunted – little difference could be discerned between children aged 6–9 and those aged 10–14 – and there was ‘permanent damage to the working capacity of the population as whole’.28

  The military now demanded vast regiments of local labour for the docks, airfields and roads. But families could not survive on wages set at a pre-war rate, when cheap food had been taken for granted. European employers complained that workers had lost the habit of toil, and turned to old methods of recruiting and disciplining them, particularly by engaging them through labour contractors. This was bitterly resented: contractors took a cut of their workers’ pay, and ensnared them in debt for the supply of their basic necessities. People remembered the contractors who dragooned labour for the Japanese, but the BMA took them on with few questions asked.29 By the end of the year it had become the biggest single employer Malaya had ever seen, with some 102,000 people on its books in Singapore alone.30 Such was the demand for labour that 1,500 Indian, brought back to Singapore from the Burma–Siam railway by the military, were classed as ‘essential persons’ and put back to work in the shipyards.31 As an incentive to toil, the BMA took the extraordinary step of importing 50 million grains of opium into Malaya for issue over a six-month period. This was classed as ‘a military necessity’. The opium appeared in early October in the form of distinctively coloured tablets, marked as a government monopoly.32 This was a clear breach of international agreements; the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal would put great emphasis on Japanese culpability in the Asian narcotics trade. The illegal traffic also revived. In mid November one smuggling syndicate staged several days of theatrical shows in thanksgiving for the arrival of three ships bearing over 3,000lb of opium. ‘There is a sigh about the lack of rice’, a Chinese newspaper correspondent commented, ‘but the “black rice” which is strictly forbidden by the government seems to be able to come in continuously… This is indeed Heaven helping the lucky man.’33

  Fortunes were lost and made overnight. One of the British government’s first proclamations was to announce that the Japanese wartime currency would not be recognized. This was an exceptional step, intended to sow confusion behind Japanese lines; it reaped chaos for the people of Malaya. In the interregnum, the Japanese money kept some of its value as people hurriedly sold off hidden hoards of Straits dollars to pay off debts in the Japanese ‘banana money’.34 But when Japanese themselves offloaded their freshly minted notes, it soon became worthless: ‘Everywhere’, one Chinese trader observed, ‘you find the Japanese notes everywhere – along the roadside, five-foot ways, people just throw them away.’35 A petition to the government described the resulting hysteria: ‘Many civilians have registered their names with the lunatic asylum, commit suicide and daylight robbery due to the non-recognition.’36 The Malayan Communist Party was reported to have lost most of its funds. Mountbatten was furious: the policy was, he said, ‘un-British and disastrous to our reputation for fair play’.37 The British put Straits dollars into circulation by issuing cash relief and advances on salaries, and a surprising amount of pre-war money came out of holes in the ground. The transience of wealth was inseparable in the popular imagination with the proliferation of open gambling in the streets. But a more abiding legacy was a lingering suspicion of paper money, particularly among peasants who were reluctant to part with their rice crops for cash at the low official prices; they bartered or put it on the black market. Weimar-proportion price inflation resulted: rice was now at thirty to forty times its pre-war price, and banana and sweet potato skins were sold as staples in the markets.

  The black economy eclipsed the old colonial economy almost entirely. It was a parallel world that reached from maritime trade to industrial production on the forest frontier. Quiet tropical islands such as Karimun, just southwest of Singapore, suddenly became chaotic ‘free ports’ for the smugglers’ trade from Thailand, Sumatra and Java. Pirates staged audacious raids on Penang island. Taking advantage of the liberal policy towards societies, the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood united the notorious gangs of Penang and, by the end of the year, mass initiation ceremonies – involving hundreds at a time – were held in the Relau hills. Lorries cruised through the streets of George Town, picking up men with cries of ‘This way for the Show!’ and ‘Any more for the hills?’38 During the BMA period, 600 murders were
reported and 470 instances of gang robbery, as against thirteen in 1939. Before the war the British had governed this volatile world at a distance. Labour had been controlled principally by employers and contractors. But the European managers had disappeared and many Chinese industrialists fled abroad. Those who remained had found it difficult to refuse to join Japanese-sponsored community organizations, and now carried the stain of collaboration. They lost considerable prestige; some retired from public life altogether, or had to struggle to regain their standing in the community. The power of the towkays was weakest in the countryside, where, for a time, the rule of the bosses was broken.

  The production of strategic commodities such as rubber, tin and timber was taken over by the informal economy. Rubber was collected on a ‘self-tap, self-sell’ basis. An everyday sight around mining pools was large numbers of women panning for ore, a process known as dulang washing. There were violent confrontations when the police tried to stop it. Gangs of ‘democratic workmen’ elected their own bosses and demanded logging rights. Chinese peasants moved onto disused plantation land or forest reserve. The first British visitors to reach these areas were grudgingly impressed. ‘Although these people may be given to gang robbery’, a forester wrote in his diary, ‘they are nevertheless remarkably good gardeners.’39 Townsfolk were almost entirely dependent on their terraces of vegetables and tobacco. Many labour and forest departments and district and land offices had ceased to function. But to the British these people were illegal ‘squatters’, and as order slowly returned they came into conflict with the colonial regime and European rubber planters. Foresters were ‘constantly being threatened with calamity’, and in October two were killed trying to prevent some Chinese from felling timber.40 For the first time the squatters – slash-and-burn farmers, freewheeling tappers and loggers, ‘wild rat’ miners and charcoal burners, illicit distillers and wild-game hunters – had political muscle and military backing. Kuomintang guerrillas still controlled most of the routes across the Thai border, and in the squatter hamlets and small towns it was the fighters of the MPAJA who were the law. Those towkays brave enough to restart their business paid them ‘taxes’. Large tracts of the peninsula – including much of the central range – were no-go areas for Europeans: a state within a state. There were around half a million ‘squatters’ in Malaya, one in five of the population.

  The British were desperate to put the legitimate economy back to work. They flew in leading Chinese financiers from exile in India as ‘sponsored civilians’ to reopen the banks. The European businessmen who were still awaiting repatriation resented their head start. The old network of Teochew merchants revived the junk trade with Siam. Although loans were scarce, for a businessmen with cash there were tremendous new opportunities. By the age of twenty-five, the Chinese trader Ang Keong Lan had acquired $50 million by trading pigs for copra and castor oil with the Japanese. He was slow to sell on his ‘banana’ currency, and had to exchange it at $10,000 to the Straits dollar. Still he managed to bounce back: he obtained a motorboat and, with the connivance of customs men, was able to trade flour and cigarettes from Singapore to Penang, where they fetched a much higher price. It was slow business, but in this way Ang laid the foundation of a business empire – the Joo Seng Group – that would extend from trade to banking and insurance.41 The Japanese military government was staffed by businessmen and run for profit, and had brought the worlds of money and administration closer together. After the liberation, commercial success remained conditional on squaring police officers and customs officials.

  The BMA evolved into a form of what was later to be called ‘crony capitalism’. In its transit camp in India, officers were overheard to regret the delay of Operation Zipper because ‘there would not be any loot left’.42 Wherever British and Commonwealth troops were deployed, graft followed them. The Sydney police warned British commanders in Japan that Australian criminals were enlisting solely to get at the black market opportunities.43 Ralph Hone himself later admitted that his officers were among the systematic offenders. Many British businessmen from the pre-war days were now in uniform, and in this, as one Penang newssheet remarked acidly, ‘they have found an ideal combination’. New arrivals cheerfully accepted treating and pleasing from local businessmen, and some connived in local scams. Military stores and ‘rehabilitation’ goods disappeared en route to Malaya, or were landed in the wrong place; in the docks, goods vanished, invoices never appeared, or when they did, charges were paid three times over. This was known locally as ‘the multi-million scandal’ and, when an audit report finally appeared two years later, the scale of the losses from short deliveries, looting and pilfering was over $15 million. The BMA officers’ mess at Fu Court in Singapore was, reported one old Malaya hand, H. T. Pagden, ‘full of such loot’.44 The British practice was to give a commodity to a company to distribute, and there were kickbacks right down the line to the distributors’ agents and salesmen.45 Competition between suppliers forced up the price of sweeteners. Even when BMA supplied its own transport to move vegetables to break the black market, food control officers charged for access to the lorries, and the drivers charged ‘tea money’ to the suppliers. Yet traders were still willing to pay as there were profits of 1,000 per cent to be had.46 The NAAFI was notoriously venal; one case alone – which was prosecuted – involved the robbery of £20,000 worth of cigarettes; service goods were sold openly in the market at Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur, and Indian soldiers levied a toll on the transport of pigs and other foodstuffs to Singapore.47 It was reported in Ipoh that merchants could not even get their calls connected at the telephone exchange without being asked for a ‘loan’ by the operators.48 The notoriety of the ‘banana colonels’ and ‘banana majors’ of the BMA struck a savage blow at the reputation for clean, impartial government that the British were so anxious to maintain. It gave further encouragement to people to avoid government altogether. As the Chinese proverb observed: ‘Don’t enter a government office with no money even if you are right.’49

  At a fundamental level, British rule had lost its legitimacy. The first men ashore put a great deal of store in the spontaneous celebrations and the loyal processions that had greeted them. O. W. Gilmour rejoiced to be welcomed at his old house in Singapore by his gardener, his driver and his cook. That the leaden paternalism of the British was preferable to the arbitrary violence and psychological trauma of Japanese rule was a point few Malayans, of the middle classes at least, would dispute. For this reason, most of them deferred to the old hierarchy. But Asian civil servants resented that the fact that they had stayed at the posts, when the Europeans had not, was interpreted by their British masters as unquestioning ‘empire loyalty’. Malayans who had kept basic services going were roughly pushed aside. One leading Chinese doctor, Benjamin Chew, who had kept a tuberculosis ward going at Tan Tock Seng hospital in Singapore, was told by a British medical officer, ‘Chew, your cases can go into the streets.’ Dr Chew left the government service in disgust.50 The ‘colour bar’ was restored at its pre-war level. One of ‘sponsored civilians’ brought in from India by the BMA was the Selangor mining tycoon H. S. Lee. He was one of the first of the China-born towkays to be educated at Cambridge University, and had the honorary rank of colonel in the Nationalist Chinese Army. But on his first arrival back in Malaya he experienced crude racial affronts. As a BMA officer he was entitled to buy NAAFI goods at a service price, but was refused them on the grounds that he was Chinese. ‘I can hardly believe’, he wrote to Victor Purcell, ‘that racial discrimination still exists.’51 The general responsible was challenged on this. He did not deny the discrimination, his argument being, Purcell was told by a sympathetic colleague, ‘that whisky is not a natural part of the standard of living of a Chinese. I agreed with him that they preferred brandy, but as that is not obtainable they are prepared to put up with whisky as a second-best.’52 These slights would never be forgotten by the individuals who suffered them.

  The second colonial conquest was more aggress
ive than the first. ‘The army’, wrote H. T. Pagden, ‘behaved as if they were in conquered territory.’ Singapore became a staging post for hundreds of thousands of men in uniform shipping to points further east, and this soon deflated any sense of elation that war was now over. At the beginning of December, at huge expense, Mountbatten moved the HQ of South East Asia Command to Singapore. He took the city’s landmark skyscraper, the Cathay Building, as his offices. It had many associations with the war, as a Japanese headquarters and where, in its auditorium, Subhas Chandra Bose declared a government of Free India. The supremo’s personal staff was regal in scale: the previous year it reached 7,000 people. The military requisitioned 2,227 houses and 51 institutions and clubs, and they took the best: navy officers messed in the Adelphi Hotel and the RAPWI organization at the Goodwood Park. Even the luxury department stores in Raffles Place – Little’s and Robinson’s – were taken over by the NAAFI; the elite Singapore Cricket Club became the Army YMCA. By contrast, Raffles Hotel was a dismal haunt for European refugees and ex-internees. The military soon became unpopular with the locals for forcing up prices still further. But the good life for which the Singapore garrison had been famous in 1941 began to revive: roadside cafés sprang up, with ‘singers and young girls acting as waitresses; and beer drinking. There were no holds barred.’53 The senior civil affairs officer on the island called the extravagant public entertainments ‘nothing short of criminal’, and Mountbatten was compelled to issue draconian standing orders for a curfew on other ranks, the closure of service bars and clubs by midnight, a ban on meals or drinks in civilian-run establishments and detailed checks on bad traffic discipline.54 This was mostly on the part of Indian drivers who had learned to drive in the desert of North Africa or the dirt-tracks of Burma, but it seemed to symbolize the arrogance of the new regime. In the words of one Chinese newspaper, people saw military vehicles ‘as snakes and scorpions, and streets and thoroughfares as hells’.55