Forgotten Wars Read online

  Across their empire, the Japanese were still killing prisoners, and orders had been given in Taiwan, Borneo and elsewhere to exterminate whole camps. But there was, in the end, to be no mass slaughter.8 After the initial confusion, a strange mood of equanimity and freedom prevailed. Allied prisoners in Japan travelled without restraint, ‘commandeering’ cars and trucks, disarming Japanese servicemen on trains, entering houses in search of food and looking for women. There was an epidemic of venereal disease. Some prisoners even went into business, one Australian opening a hotel in Kyoto, where he sold sake and Asahi beer. There was remarkably little violence. The Japanese had all along feared this vast captive army, but now it was too weak to take its revenge. Many Allied servicemen visited the ruins of Hiroshima. They understood little of what had happened there: some thought the city had been a huge ammunition dump. In the words of one Australian major, they ‘did tours with cut lunches and hot boxes etc. and on a picnic. All parties boiled the billy, had their lunches, picked up souvenirs and generally picked around the debris and the ruins.’ There was little feeling of elation. The Japanese had, in every sense, been humbled. As an Australian private in Kobe recalled: ‘our former enemies became polite, likeable, respectful people, only too pleased to help wherever possible’. But, equally, the men felt little guilt or even compassion: ‘they had seen the shelters dug into the hills by them to be [put] into and set alight’. Then, on 9 August, came the bomb at Nagasaki, and the whole valley around it felt the fury of the impact; afterwards ‘not a sound. No birds, Not even a lizard. Just brown, treeless soil like cocoa, no grass, and twisted girderwork…’9

  The day before the first bomb was dropped, most military commanders in mainland Asia believed that the war would go on for many months more. The British 14th Army had pushed down into Burma since their defeats of the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima on the borders of Assam in June and July 1944. The British took Rangoon, the country’s capital, in May 1945.10 But Japanese troops were still numerous in Burma’s southern peninsula, Tenasserim, and in the recently liberated areas the mood was tense. Long-range B-17 bombers were pounding Singapore. The Japanese continued to occupy Thailand, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia. Despite the island-hopping advance by General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the Pacific, the Japanese had held on to the main islands of the Philippines, and pockets of resistance remained in Borneo. The Japanese army was also engaged in a huge and bloody war of attrition with the forces of nationalist China to the north of the capital, of Chiang Kai Shek’s republican government at Chungking. Across this vast area, the pursuit and killing of Japanese troops came to a halt only slowly. The political outlook was uncertain, while food and clothing were alarmingly scarce.

  Malaya and Burma had borne the brunt of the fighting in Southeast Asia. Here, as word of the bomb spread through the bazaars and villages, the mood was ambivalent and the air full of new menace. It first arrived as ‘black-market news’. The past three and a half years had been a time of virtual isolation and rumour ruled: now there was rumour of a secret weapon, of an American invasion, that the Chinese were coming.11 In Malaya, when parachutists from the British Special Operations Executive began to break cover, in all their garb of modern warfare they seemed like visitors from another world. This was the first of a series of strange new wonders, along with jeeps, penicillin, walkie-talkies and atomic power. The news of the surrender was confirmed by radio broadcasts from the Allied headquarters in Ceylon. Only a few days before, to be caught listening to Allied radio would have meant arrest, torture and possibly even death, but the Japanese no longer had the will to enforce their diktats. In the camp for women internees in Singapore, Sheila Allan, the Eurasian daughter of a British mining engineer, kept a secret diary of a youth in captivity. On 10 August she marked her twenty-first birthday by writing: ‘Baby born to crippled Jewess – prophecy concerning her – a Jewess Rabbi dreamt that when a crippled woman gave birth to a boy we’ll hear of Peace!’ The next day she heard one of the POWs bringing the news by singing, ‘The war is over’.12

  Then came other portents: war businesses liquidated overnight; the gambling syndicates and lotteries that had flourished in the occupied lands cashed in their assets. There were celebrations that ranged from the quiet consumption of hidden bottles of brandy and whisky in Malaya to outright rejoicing in Burma. In the mountainous forest fringes of Malaya, the Chinese peasants who taken shelter there slaughtered their pigs and fowl. In the towns, Chinese papermakers and tailors prepared flags of the four victorious powers: Britain, the United States, Russia, and Chiang Kai Shek’s China. Then, in a sudden rush of confidence, Malaya burst into light. The blackouts during the Allied bombing had created ‘cities of dreadful night’; but now light bulbs appeared on verandas and the ‘five-foot’ walkways of shophouses.13 The great ‘Worlds’ – the amusement parks where the townsfolk came to play and to trade in one of the great spectacles of local life – turned on their show-lights and resumed their gyre. People went on a spending spree with freshly printed Japanese notes bearing their distinctive ‘banana’ design. But the mood was soon deflated. Inflation spread like a virus. Famine loomed. Everywhere people were anxiously on the move, to reach their families, or to get to the port cities where a sudden bounty of food and clothing was expected. And there were others – Taiwanese auxiliaries, mistresses of Japanese officers, informers, police and profiteers – who took to the shadows, fearing the reckoning that was to come.14

  Only slowly were these rumours and portents confirmed by the behaviour of the Japanese themselves. In August 1945 there were around 630,000 armed Japanese across the whole region. Much of the rank and file was too young to have been complicit in Japan’s lurch towards militarism in the 1930s. Many of the over 100,000 Japanese civilians had lived in Southeast Asia before the outbreak of the war, and called it home. They were all victims in a sense. Their conditions varied. Many of the soldiers who had been involved in the fighting in Burma were diseased and malnourished. Those surrendered in Malaya, Indo-China and Indonesia were likely to be relatively healthy and better fed. There were emotional announcements in camps and work places. Many felt humiliated by the terms of Japan’s surrender. In Singapore the regional commander, Lieutenant General Seishiro Itagaki, announced that he would resist the Allies. He had laid plans for guerrilla warfare. His supreme commander, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, stated that he would submit only to a personal order from the emperor. A prince of the ruling house, Haruhito Kanin, flew with it to Terauchi’s headquarters in Saigon on 19 August, and Itagaki was summoned to receive it. Only then was the Imperial Rescript published in the Singapore press, together with Itagaki’s emotional appeal to his men that the imperial command was now ‘absolute and irrevocable’.15

  Many Japanese officers – 300 in Singapore alone in one account – saw the surrender as a racial apocalypse, and took their own lives: some in the lounge of the luxury Raffles Hotel where they heard the news from Itagaki.16 Others who submitted to surrender and the prospect of imprisonment were anxious as to whether they would receive the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which Japan itself had not observed. Books on military law were at a sudden premium. The officers disposed of their plundered goods, burnt archives and, in some cases, killed witnesses to their atrocities. In the end the bulk of the Japanese garrison at Singapore marched itself into internment at Jurong, in the west of the island. British and Allied prisoners of war remained concentrated in the east, at Changi. But after the surrender Japanese units were ordered off the island and across the short causeway to the Malay peninsula. At Kranji, where the Commonwealth war cemetery now stands, they first met the Allied forces: Gurkha paratroops from Special Operations Executive. As one local POW observed: ‘It went full circle – we saw the whole lot, thousands and thousands, marching their way to Woodlands, past our camp.’17 These were the beachheads the Japanese had stormed in February 1942. They headed into the desolate, deserted rubber estates of the interior, and there amid a wrack of military machinery
and surrounded by the spoils of war – furniture, bedding, refrigerators, carpets – they sat waiting for the end. They became ‘Japanese surrendered personnel’, a term of art introduced by the British in order to avoid implementing the Geneva Conventions’ protocols towards prisoners of war. Although a few remained arrogant and uncooperative, the majority were compliant and patient. But it was still unclear what was happening to the more remote garrisons. Some of Itagaki’s officers tried to flee to Sumatra, where there was rumoured to be last-ditch defiance. One Japanese officer of the Imperial Guard in northern Sumatra, who had fought down the length of the Malay peninsula and into Singapore in late 1941, wrote that after the announcement the mood was so mutinous that it was dangerous for officers to walk in the barracks.18 As the Allies brought ahead plans to reoccupy the region, it was still unclear whether or not large numbers of Japanese would fight to the death.

  These events can no longer be viewed as a minor theatre of a global war centred upon Europe. This was the Great Asian War: a connected arc of conflict that claimed around 24 million lives in lands occupied by Japan; the lives of 3 million Japanese, and 3.5 million more in India through war-related famine. The Great Asian War was longer and ultimately bloodier than Europe’s civil war. The number of European, American and Australasian casualties – substantial, tragic as they were – was perhaps 1 per cent of the total. The first skirmishes began in 1931, erupting into open war in China in 1937, and in 1945 it was not yet at an end. Its impact was all the more dreadful for the fact that many of these societies had not known war on any large scale, still less the full ferocity of modern mechanized conflict. The Great Asian War was the most general conflict in Southeast Asia since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, and the most intense since the great struggles for primacy on the mainland of Asia in the seventeenth century. And it had its serial holocausts, in the extermination of civilians, the coercion of slave labour, and mass rape.

  For Asians, the horror of the bomb was accentuated by the fear that their war had merely paused. The Europeans, Americans and Japanese had ceased fighting, but Asians would be embattled with each other and, from time to time, with Europeans and Americans for the next generation or more. None of the fundamental causes of the Great Asian War had been eradicated. Imperialism, grinding poverty and ideological, ethnic and religious conflict continued to stalk the land. In many ways, they had been strengthened by the destruction and butchery of combat. It was plain to see that the war was continuing under another guise. Those huge forgotten armies of malnourished soldiers, prisoners of war, guerrilla bands, coolie labourers, sex slaves and carpetbaggers were still on the march. They were to march on for decades more as the British Empire dissolved and new nations were born amid racial and religious strife. A new ‘great game’ of diplomacy and subversion broke out between communism and capitalism, and provoked some of the most tragic, and forgotten, wars of the twentieth century.

  The pivot of this long struggle was the crescent of land that stretched from Bengal, though Burma, the southern borderlands of Thailand, down the Malay peninsula to Singapore island. It was the hinterland of the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s greatest arteries of oceanic trade that separates the Indian Ocean from the South China Sea. In 1941, this vast crescent was under British control: the apex of a wider strategic arc that encompassed Suez and Cape Town in the west and Sydney and Auckland to the south. Even the independent kingdom of Thailand had for a hundred years been under the sway of the British diplomats and the expatriate business community in Bangkok. In the late nineteenth century, imperial visionaries had dreamed of blasting a new Suez Canal through the narrow isthmus of Kra, and after war broke out Churchill raised the possibility of ‘some sort of protectorate’ over this area, rich in tin and rubber. This was encouraged by the expatriates, many of whom were signed up for British secret-service operations in the region.19 At this point the imperial gaze extended even further afield. If the neighbouring empires of the French in Indo-China and the Dutch in Indonesia had survived until 1941 largely unchallenged, they had done so under the sufferance of British power. And it would be British power that would restore them.

  The crescent was one of the great frontiers of modern history. For centuries it had drawn in millions of people in search of a livelihood, particularly from the ancient agrarian civilizations that bordered it. The advent of the imperial economy had created new opportunities. Waves of Chinese migrants, mostly from the hinterland of the southern seaboard, had come to the Nanyang, or the ‘South Seas’, as traders and artisans. They pioneered the plantations and mines of Malaya, and still provided the bulk of their labour force. South Asian communities were to be found in an infinite variety of specialist trades: Muslim shopkeepers, Malayalee clerks, Chettiyar money-lenders, Sikh policemen, Ceylonese lawyers. The train service of Malaya was known as the ‘Jaffna railway’ because of the monopoly by Tamils from Ceylon on the post of ticket-collector. The large-scale European rubber enterprises in Malaya pulled in another three-quarters of a million Tamils from the hinterland of Madras. Many more Indians made the shorter journey from eastern Bengal and Orissa into the rural economy of Burma. Migrations from Java and Sumatra kept alive a sense that the Malay peninsula was the heart of the Islamic civilization of the islands, that dated back to the fifteenth-century empire of Melaka. The traditional Malay rice, fishing and trading economy survived in the midst of some of the most advanced and regimented systems of wage labour on earth.

  The main points of arrival for most of these pioneers were the great port cities such as Rangoon and Singapore: dynamic and diverse, they were built for play as much as trade or government, and their citizens were obsessed by their own modernity. They were glittering outposts of the West, where the colonial elite enjoyed a lifestyle they could never aspire to at home. Yet the lives of the Europeans, contained by their gross obsessions with race and hierarchy, barely touched the complex Asian worlds around them. The cosmopolitanism of a place like Singapore, for example, was built by Chinese, Indian, Arab, Armenian and Jewish merchants and professionals, many of whose own businesses were now regional in scope. Not least among them, and concentrated in new ‘modern’ sectors, were the Japanese: as dentists, photographers, and shopkeepers. Like the British before them, they saw Southeast Asia first as a frontier for private commerce, and then as a field for empire. In 1942 they renamed it ‘Syonan-to’, or ‘light of the South’. Singapore was the Paris, or even the New York, of the East, and more of a global city than either. Its fall seemed to herald the collapse of an entire civilization and all its certainties. But the colonial city was enveloped by another, invisible city; an Asian metropolis of artisans and labourers, prostitutes and players, itinerants and peddlers, teachers and preachers, artists and writers, spies and revolutionaries: people of all communities who began to interact and explore the commonality of their lives and ideas. In the years after 1942, the invisible city would come into its own.

  There was a curious insubstantial quality to Britain’s Asian empire. Its political topography baffled the layman: as colonial power stretched to the south and east, the great traditions of the Raj gave way to complex arrangements of indirect rule. Even the 80 million people of Bengal, the oldest British possession in India, were governed at a distance. Assam to the northeast was an uncertain border region. Burma had been part of British India until 1936, and although the predominant Burmese population of the lowlands was governed on a Raj model, the ethnic minorities of its hill regions enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. British Malaya was a cluster of Islamic sultanates; there was no central government as such: British rule rested on the treaties of ‘protection’ that had been signed with Malay rulers from 1874 to 1914. The British governed, but they did not, strictly speaking, rule. The Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca were older outposts of the islands: models of Anglo-Saxon municipal management with oriental trappings. To all this the war gave a flaking veneer of coherence. If there was an ‘imperial system’ it really fu
nctioned only in wartime: men and materiel were mobilized across the crescent: Indian soldiers for the garrisons of Malaya, Chinese labourers for the Burma Road that supplied Chiang Kai Shek’s war effort. But in Malaya, the mobilization and the defeats of 1941 and 1942 exposed all the inadequacies of an administration that was ‘more suited to the days of Clive’.20 The final, squalid exodus from Singapore laid bare the complacency and racial arrogance of its colonial masters. When the city fell on 15 February 1942, General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s armies shattered the myth of white invulnerability, and broke the mandate of ‘protection’.

  This loss was catastrophic to Britain’s global prestige and material strength. As India became a drain on the domestic balance of payments, Southeast Asia had emerged as one of the Empire’s prize assets. The region exported two-thirds of the world’s tin, and British Malaya alone provided half the world’s production of rubber. Most of it passed through the port of Singapore. These industrial colonies were a major buttress of the sterling area: before the war, rubber exports to the USA were running at $118 million a year; tin, another $55 million.21 Even Burma, although something of backwater, had oil and rich reserves of timber, and its export economy was intimately tied to the rest of the crescent. The frontier economies of Southeast Asia were dependent on the food production of the basins of the great river systems of the mainland, particularly the 3.7 million tons of padi exported annually from the Irrawaddy delta: Burma was the rice bowl of Malaya.22 Japan’s blitzkrieg to the south in 1941 had as its principal target the oilfields of British Borneo and Sumatra, and the iron and bauxite mines of Malaya. The assault on Burma and India was dictated by the need to throttle the supply route over the ‘hump’ of northern Burma to Yunan in China. The economic resources of Southeast Asia were seen by Britain as so vital to its domestic recovery that it was willing to expend an unprecedented amount of blood and treasure in its reconquest.