Forgotten Wars Read online

  Attlee took a personal interest in the morale of army personnel. The BBC Home Service was urged to broadcast encouragement to people to keep a constant flow of letters posted to serving men who now had time on their hands, time to brood. One of the first units into liberated Malaya was an advance party of ENSA, the armed forces’ entertainments association. By the fourth day of reoccupation they were giving an impromptu performance to the POWs in Changi: Gracie Fields appeared there on 1 October. They reclaimed the Victoria Theatre on Singapore’s Esplanade – killing around 5,000 swallows who had roosted there throughout the Japanese occupation – for John Gielgud to perform his Hamlet.56 But what was on offer fell far short of what was desired by weary, frustrated men. Malaya’s allocation of 15–16,000 barrels of beer a month was well below the target of 25,200 for the NAAFI canteens.57 Soldiers turned to other diversions. One unit in Ipoh discovered an antiquated provision in the King’s Regulations for fodder for horses, and they used this to resurrect the Perak Turf Club. The first race meeting was on Boxing Day 1945. It drew a bigger crowd than the victory parades, and made a considerable profit for the British ‘owners’ of the horses.58 But such events made a mockery of the BMA’s calls for people to be patient in the face of scarcity. ‘We ask for bread’, the Malaya Tribune remarked, ‘and we are given… horse-racing!’59

  Men gravitated to the dance halls and to the kupu-kupu malam, the ‘night butterflies’, who were everywhere to be seen in Malayan towns. The dramatic post-war increase in prostitution was rooted in coercion, trafficking and poverty. It was perpetuated by a lack of education and alternatives, and aggravated, particularly within the Malay community, by chronically high levels of divorce.60 It was now seen by military commanders as ‘a real danger to the health of troops’. In 1943, casualties from VD within SEAC were sixteen times greater than those in battle. By early 1946 the rate of infection in the military peaked at 7.2 per cent. Some service chiefs wanted to revive the nineteenth-century Indian Army remedy of regulating the trade in controlled lal, or ‘red’ bazaars, but welfare workers argued that the only course was to raid the brothels and bring more women to treatment.61 There was some success in this, but in the long term, police officers were unwilling to take responsibility for it because ‘there was too much money to be made by junior police officers’.62 Women were often the first victims of war, and now among the first casualties of peace. People noticed that there was a discomforting continuity between the sexual violence of Japanese occupation and the new red-light economy and air of sexual predation in the garrison towns. From October the Chinese press published a catalogue of reports of robberies and rapes around Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Klang. Stalls were attacked and taxi drivers beaten up by drunken soldiers. Many of these incidents involved British servicemen, but the worst of the accusations fell on common outsiders: Indian soldiers. They were increasingly unpopular, especially when the British used them to break strikes. Indians called in to maintain the coal mine at Batu Arang were accused by the communists of molesting women as they tended to their food crops.63 There were other reports: for example, of a man shot trying to stop a rape in Morib; women attacked cutting timber, and of a reported ‘unnatural offence’ against a young boy in Ulu Salong.64 Near Taiping, it was said that a Chinese girl was taken in a lorry and repeatedly raped in a barracks. She, like others it seems, was afraid of coming forward.65 By the end of the year only one case of sexual assault had gone to courts martial. Victor Purcell confronted military commanders with this, and warned them that the incidents were being covered up.66 The public came to their own bitter conclusions. As the leftist Kuala Lumpur daily Min Sheng Pau put it: ‘Now there is no distinction between Japanese fascists’ outrages and those of the present Indian soldiers.’67

  As the reputation and moral authority of the military regime began to disintegrate, it established the first ‘public relations department’ in Asia. Initially it was used to monitor press opinion and to dispel rumours. Letters to Malay village headmen in the ‘best Malay traditional style’ helped damp down ethnic tensions. Then it launched campaigns of mass education to improve people’s diets and combat inflation: ‘A dollar is always a dollar. It becomes smaller because people are spending it in a ti-da-apa [carefree] way.’ The accompanying slogan – ‘Goods are coming. Don’t buy now!’ – was an easy target for satire: a better message, one Chinese newspaper suggested, might be: ‘Don’t eat now!’ or ‘Don’t live now!’.68 As the British became more aware of the impact of three and a half years of Japanese anti-Western indoctrination, they responded with exhibitions and lectures on the war, reading rooms, public address vans, travelling theatre and Chinese story-tellers, and even a film studio. Victor Purcell himself had run a smaller information bureau before the fall of Singapore. Many old Malaya hands, he complained, disapproved, calling it ‘meretricious, loud and ungentlemanly (which of course it was)’. This was a dramatic change in the way colonial rule manifested itself and ‘PR’ was now a permanent arm of government. The British saw themselves as impresarios of public opinion and in active competition with the local press and political parties. By early 1946 the department had distributed 140,000 posters and notices of a ‘political nature’. But the senior Malay officials involved felt they were a waste of effort. The people of Malaya were speaking very different languages of politics.69

  A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

  ‘When we arrived’, O. W. Gilmour observed, ‘everything had stopped. There was no money, no public transport, no Post Office services, no newspapers, no trade, no courts of justice, and to all intents and purposes no police protection.’ The Asian banks opened on 12 September and the British banks on 1 October. The Post Office ran a free letter service from 17 September – even the Singapore Museum reopened on 12 September. Much of this, as Gilmour claimed, was to the credit of the BMA, and achieved at the price of the ‘sickness and partial breakdown’ of many of its officers. When, on 5 September, he first turned on the switches and taps in the Singapore Municipal Building, there was light and water but the electrical power supply in Singapore was strained beyond capacity, and as Gilmour investigated further, he discovered that an entirely new system had come into being:

  Inside many houses, long lengths of flex made spider’s webs connecting every type of electrical gadgets, wires in hundreds emerged from windows and doors to hawkers’ stalls and outside lights of every description. Many hundreds or thousands of people had connected their supplies to the mains outside the meters, and, over all consumption, there was a light-hearted irresponsibility. Wires lights and gadgets entwined buildings in the town with a gay abandon and one judged that many a suburban house had been combed to make a down-town display.70

  A transfer of power had taken place, in all senses. For three and a half years, Malaya had its own form of black market administration.

  The invisible cities that had arisen in the shadow of the old colonial towns had come into the light. During the war, the focus of much of urban life had gravitated towards the new Asian urban settlements on the fringes of towns such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Ipoh. They were at a safer remove from the settlements of Japanese, and closer to opportunities for small-scale cultivation and trade. They were worlds of constant change and movement, a place where migrants – often young, unmarried men and women – might lodge and begin to make their way in the towns. There was poverty, risk and danger here – armed men still roamed the streets – but also opportunity. The new middle class of clerks, skilled labourers and entrepreneurs could acquire some property and standing; in the war urban land was the surest form of investment. These settlements were villages within the city, but entirely adapted to it. For Mustapha Hussain, Kampong Baru, the Malay ‘New Village’ near the heart of Kuala Lumpur where he brought his family to live in a small room after he lost his job with the British, eking out a living as a seller of sotong bakar (highly-spiced grilled dried squid), was a place to regain some freedom. Although these village-cities were often a patchwork of ethnic encla
ves, settlement demarcations became blurred. This was a rich environment where communities met, often for the first time, and with no language in common, learned to communicate, borrowing services, forging trust and, over time, sharing a popular culture.

  One of the first writers to attempt to describe this was Chin Kee Onn, a Chinese schoolteacher from Ipoh who had worked for the Japanese military administration in Perak. His Malaya Upside Down, published in 1946 and reprinted twice in its first year, was a darkly humorous account of the tragedies, absurdities and social transformations of the war. It recounted events which people had witnessed only in fragments or heard through rumour. The war years, Chin wrote, were ‘a muddled hallucination conjured by some super-surrealist imp in which hordes of dwarfs suddenly became bloodcurdling ogres, turning everything topsy-turvy…’ Men of high standing, civil servants and lawyers, had joined the ranks of the urban poor. The emblem of bourgeois status, the neck-tie, was abandoned. In the Japanese regime, those who made money were not the tycoons ‘of the Rolls-Royce type. They were humble-looking and inconspicuous rice importers, fishermen, tobacco manufacturers, oil millers, hardware dealers and gambling-stall owners!’ Now status was entirely precarious: war was a great leveller. ‘The prevailing style of dress for men in this period’, Chin wrote, ‘consisted of an open-collar shirt with breast pockets, “shorts” or long trousers and rubber sandals or slippers, without socks.’71 This simple style was adopted by a new generation of young urban activists; and the open-necked, short-sleeved shirt became a uniform for would-be politicians. In the war, there was little privacy; in a time of informers, solitude invited suspicion; in a time of hunger, survival demanded that life be lived in the open. Thousands of women – refugees, mothers and children without a male provider, homeless Cantonese amahs, house servants and housewives – took to hawking in the streets and parks. Once it would have been shameful for a bourgeois to be seen eating in public; now everybody ate by the wayside, and mingled in the impromptu markets. People of all ranks approached one another with ease. The cosmopolitan energy of the village-city was turned inwards, and new solidarities were being formed across Malaya’s ‘plural society’.

  And in late 1945, after the years of fear and austerity, and despite the continuing shortages, the cities and towns came dramatically to life. The barometers of urban life in Malaya were the Worlds, the amusement parks that were to be found in all the major towns. The oldest and most spectacular was the New World of Singapore: an open labyrinth of fantastical halls and pavilions, connected by alleyways of restaurants, hawkers and sundry stalls. There were theatres, nightclubs, dances, and open-air cinema that played continuously through the evenings. The crowds could wander from each to each, and impresarios would attract their attention by entr’actes of boxing, magic and other ‘special turns’. The Worlds were a playground for all ethnic communities and income groups, a place of high and vulgar culture; a place of escape for the poor. The Worlds were a fantasy of Asian modernity, enacted nightly for the invisible city, in a walled enclave within the colonial town, but outside its order and exclusions.72 During the war the Japanese had allowed gambling farms to operate in the parks, but they generally stayed away from them. Here, in the absence of Western movies, local culture such as the Malaya opera experienced a revival: a new scripted form called the sandiwara became ‘the drama of modern daily life’. The troupe of a Malay radical, Bachtiar Effendi, the Bolero, took the lead in attacking the corruptions of the age, and popularized new political languages.73 After the war there was a boom in entertainments. Theatres screened continuously the movies people had missed. In this free and democratic time, the Worlds became showgrounds for the new spectacles of mass politics.

  As the Malayan Communist Party emerged from the undergrowth in which it had hidden so long, it embedded itself in this urban landscape. In most towns an MPAJA ‘Anti-Japanese Union’ office became the nucleus of a cluster of communist-led organizations. Its fighters, many of whom were now unemployed, moved into the informal economy. After its first triumphs through the streets, the MPAJA adopted the Worlds as a platform for its work; the cabarets in the daytime became used for political ‘tea parties’ and even schools and crèches. In the evening they staged fund-raising events with ‘glory tickets’ for workers at $1 or de luxe ‘emancipation tickets’ for businessmen at $100.74 Theatre groups such as the Mayfair Musical and Drama Society, which had around 300 members, raised awareness of the communist cause in China and elsewhere. The Worlds were sites for many of the great rallies and commemorations that marked the first weeks of peace. It began on 2 October, with the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. In Singapore Indian soldiers fraternized with a crowd some 7,000 strong. The slogans were Long Live the Independence of India! Long live Mr Gandhi! Long live the Communists in India! Long Live the Malayan Communist Party!75 A week later, the national day of China – the ‘Double Tenth’ – was celebrated for the first time in four years in Singapore, by a procession five miles long led by the communists and Kuomintang, sometimes in unison but increasingly separately. In Penang there was a grand parade, with bands and lion dances, but also three minutes’ silence for the war dead: the day was also the first anniversary of some of the most brutal Kempeitai arrests and tortures. Afterwards, 20,000 copies of the ‘Eight Principles’ of the Malayan Communist Party were distributed.76 A few days later, the Russian revolution was celebrated by the arrival of the 8th Regiment of the MPAJA in Wembley amusement park in George Town, and there were events and film shows elsewhere. In the months that followed, appalled by the anarchy on the streets, the British would attempt to seize back urban space; they rounded up hawkers and prohibited processions, but as they cleared the streets the revolution continued in the Worlds.

  With Lai Teck’s decision not to oppose the British by force of arms, the MCP embarked on the ‘democratic’ path to power. For the first time it began to acquire a public personality. In Singapore the chosen voice of the MCP was Wu Tian Wang, a Party organizer from Ipoh. To the British he stood apart because of his fluency in English; Victor Purcell described him as ‘an elegant young communist intellectual with eyes gazing into utopian space’. His ease in colonial circles would earn him the resentment of his comrades upcountry. The other ‘open’ representative, Lee Kiu, had been a propagandist for the MPAJA during the war: ‘a young Chinese coolie girl of 26 with a neo-Jacobin toilette’, recorded Purcell, somewhat perplexed, but ‘energetic, indomitable’.77 Wu Tian Wang and Lee Kiu put Britain’s ‘democratic’ policy on trial by repeatedly testing the extent of recognition the British were prepared to give the MCP. Lee Kiu outmanoeuvred the churches and charities to bring a substantial part of the relief work of the BMA in Singapore under the aegis of the MPAJA; by late September eight of its eighteen relief centres were run by the resistance organization, and the British officer who worked most closely with her praised her highly.78 These were some of the first direct encounters between senior colonial mandarins and the new Asian revolution. These autodidactic young Marxists were at a long remove from the new ‘Malayan’ leadership that men like Purcell were hoping to promote, and so too was their vision of democracy.

  In the jungle, a book widely read by Communist Party leaders was Mao Zedong’s 1939 tract On New Democracy. It spoke of two stages of revolution: the first demanded a broad alliance across society before the second, full communist revolution, could be accomplished. It was a product of Mao’s need, in his base areas in the border regions in China, to consolidate his political control with policies that would appeal across a diverse social landscape. In Malaya the MCP had not seized the moment to create their Yenan, but, by analogy, New Democracy seemed well-tempered to Malaya’s plural society.79 The vanguard of New Democracy was the generation that had come to consciousness during the war, young people who had perhaps been too young to serve in the MPAJA, but were in awe of its patriotic mystique. The MCP targeted school students, many of whom, because of the closure of the Chinese middle schools, were now re-enrolling as young adults,
experienced well beyond their years. Successive British governors were severely taxed by having to explain to ministers why their colony seemed to be continually under threat from schoolchildren. The Party’s principal open organization, the New Democratic Youth League, absorbed a giddying panoply of groups into its ranks: the Penang branch included propaganda, singing and theatrical parties, school unions, basketball and volleyball clubs, hairdressers and barbers, coffee-shop keepers and lion dance troupes.80