Forgotten Wars Read online

  The central battleground of the peninsular war was the frontier to the west of the densely forested central range. Here, Malay and Chinese peasants had been caught in a cycle of raids, reprisals and extortion. Mustapha Hussain was a witness to this. He was one of the most prominent Malay radicals who had marched in the baggage train of the Japanese army in 1941. However, he had been disillusioned by the betrayal of Malay hopes. As they marched into the capital, Kuala Lumpur, Mustapha told his young Malay followers: ‘This victory is not our victory.’ Deeply traumatized by the violence he had seen in the wake of the fall of Singapore, he withdrew from public life. Before the war, Mustapha had been a lecturer in a government agricultural college; now, like many educated townsfolk, he returned to the land, at a village in northern Perak. Life for him and his family became a hard struggle for survival. Yet Mustapha was persuaded to return to politics in mid 1945, when the Japanese began to lay plans for a declaration of independence for Malaya. Mustapha helped draft a constitution for a free republic. But again, he and his friends were cruelly disappointed. As nationalist leaders gathered in Kuala Lumpur to realize their dream, the news of the surrender broke: the collapse of Japan had forestalled the declaration of independence for Malaya by just forty-eight hours. Ibrahim Haji Yaacob fled with the Japanese to Indonesia, the lost leader of the greater Malay nation. Mustapha, disillusioned and ill, and fearing the wrath of the British and the resistance army, had returned to his village. But it was no longer a sanctuary. All around him were rumours of violence; Malay policemen had been attacked by Chinese guerrillas in a nearby town. ‘The heat closed in on us’, he wrote, ‘when we saw a Chinese banana seller emboldened into giving a speech. A normally timid Chinese buffalo herder was openly declaring: “All Malay heads must be shaven!”’29

  The resistance army was dominated by young armed Chinese. It had mobilized out of the remnants of National Salvation movement in late 1941 when, at Singapore’s eleventh hour, it was armed by the British. It was given the name ‘Dalforce’ after John Dalley, the policeman who acted as its liaison officer, but in local memory it was the Singapore Overseas Chinese Volunteer Army. It was the first forgotten army of the Great Asian War. Some 2,000 townsfolk, men and women together, fought fiercely in their makeshift uniforms to resist Yamashita’s final assault on the island. The Malayan Communist Party also sent some of its most committed cadres to be initiated into the black arts of clandestine warfare at British ‘jungle training schools’ in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. As the Japanese advanced, they infiltrated the jungle to become the nucleus of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). In many places the mobilization of patriotic young men and women was already well advanced, having been accomplished by unlettered labourers and a sprinkling of graduates of the Chinese schools of the small country towns. The nominal leader of the British ‘stay-behind’ forces was the mountaineer and explorer Major Freddy Spencer Chapman, whose heroic but lonely war is portrayed in his memoir, The Jungle Is Neutral, a tropical Seven Pillars of Wisdom. More ‘left-behind’ than ‘stay-behind’, the few Europeans who made it into the forest were utterly dependent on the guerrillas. Chapman whiled away the months trying to contact other Europeans and providing basic military training to the MPAJA. The communists even exploited the expertise of a stranded civil servant and anthropologist, Pat Noone, who had gone native with one of the aboriginal communities of the forest, the Temiar, and began to win their trust. In these years, the jungle was red.

  Little of this was known to Allied commanders in India. Special Operations Executive, the British secret warriors, only began to launch their own operations from Bengal in May 1943. Two British officers, John Davis and Richard Broome, who had briefly contacted the communist forces in February 1942 before escaping to India in an open boat, returned by submarine, together with some Chinese agents. Part of what later became styled as ‘Force 136’, the Chinese were recruited chiefly from Kuomintang circles; many were students from Malaya who had been stranded by the war in Chiang Kai Shek’s capital, Chungking. They were, by definition, staunch enemies of the communists, but on landing in Malaya they passed into the hands of the MPAJA and operated out of their camps, chiefly from Blantan, 2,000 feet above the towns of Bidor and Tapah, in the state of Perak. It was a mining area with some of the densest concentrations of Chinese in Malaya, and a bastion of MPAJA support. The resistance laid networks of supply and intelligence, particularly among the tens of thousands of Chinese workers and peasants who had taken refuge on the jungle fringes to grow food. The war years had seen a massive move of Chinese pioneers into the hinterland of the towns, mines and estates. They had begun to migrate in the Depression years when wages were low, and workers moved between farming and industry as conditions dictated: a reserve army of the proletariat. But during the war many had become established peasant farmers, with atap (thatched) dwellings, vegetable plots and pigs. The squatters provided the MPAJA with food, intelligence and recruits. Their ramshackle settlements were a screen from Japanese policing, and provided lines of communication. A hut or a coffeeshop was used as a staging post, and behind it a trail would lead into the hills. In the undergrowth, the trails would connect to jungle tracks, running up watercourses and mountainsides. The central range was a matrix of such paths. Outside the jungle, couriers on bicycles linked these networks.30 At Blantan, Davis and Broome finally made contact with Freddy Spencer Chapman, but they were as isolated as Chapman had been before their arrival; they had no radio contact with India until January 1945. Their attempts to set up an independent intelligence organization with their Kuomintang Chinese agents in the towns ended in disaster when it was betrayed in March 1944. Its leading personality, a Singapore businessmen turned secret agent, Lim Bo Seng, died of dysentery in a Japanese jail. He was Force 136’s only casualty of the war, and was to become Singapore’s national martyr.

  The fragile alliance between the British and the MPAJA was sealed by an agreement, sketched on a page torn from a school exercise book, at Blantan on 26 December 1943. The communist leadership was represented by a new arrival in the camp, a man the British called ‘the Plen’, and who signed the agreement as ‘Chang Hong’. It placed the MPAJA under South East Asia Command and promised communist ‘co-operation’ in what ‘Chang Hong’ insisted was to be called ‘the retaking’ of Malaya. Future relations between the British and the Malayan Communist Party were not discussed. But at a further meeting, in mid April 1945, when agreement on practical arrangements had become pressing, it seems that the British officers went further in promising that, in return for support, the Malayan Communist Party would be able to operate legally as a political party after the war. This was later disavowed, but most communists assumed that the concession had been won, and so too did many British officials. In the wake of this second agreement, British officers began to parachute into the Malayan jungle in greater numbers. On the day of the Japanese surrender the head of the Malaya section of Special Operations Executive, Innes Tremlett, a Singapore Special Branch officer, summarized the situation for Mountbatten. There were 308 Force 136 men in Malaya: 88 British officers, with their Gurkha guards. The British had supplied around 2,000 guns and other weapons to the MPAJA. This was but a small part of the MPAJA’s armoury, which was stocked with pickings from the battlefields of 1942. The force had between 4,000 and 5,000 men and women in arms, organized into eight regionally based regiments; there were several thousand more workers in the towns and villages and the number was rapidly rising. The British had some information on the workings of the Malayan Communist Party, but only a hazy view of its higher command. There did not, Tremlett reported, seem to be a standing committee in any one place; leadership was in the hands of a man known as ‘Mr Wright’, the party’s ‘most secret and revered personality. He is known to Davis, myself and one or two others. He is a shrewd and clever man but no fanatic.’ Then there was ‘Chang Hong’, the man who led the negotiations in the jungle.31

  It seems that Davis and his friends failed to reco
gnize ‘Chang Hong’, and did not realize that he and ‘Mr Wright’ were one and the same person. But Freddy Spencer Chapman had met him, masked with dark glasses, along with Tremlett in December 1941, in a room above a charcoal dispensary in the Geylang area of Singapore. It was the secret rendezvous where they had negotiated the arming of the Malayan Communist Party. ‘Chang Hong’ had appeared at their jungle meetings without dark glasses, and at the second meeting was wasted by illness, and leaning heavily on a stick. He was a man of many guises, a political phantom whose name, background and motivations remain deeply obscure to this day. From the best available accounts, his given name seems to have been Hoang A Nhac, and he was born in Nghe Tinh province in Vietnam, of Chinese or Chinese-Annamese descent, though he could neither read nor write Chinese. In 1945 he was perhaps in his early forties.32 Only a Special Branch photograph of him survives; it shows a lean-faced man of ambiguous ethnicity, with large deep-set eyes, marks of dissipation perhaps. He is staring at the camera with thin-lipped severity, later to be recalled as cold callousness, ‘like the treacherous villain in a Chinese opera’.33 He came to prominence in Singapore around 1934, a rising star in the Malayan Communist Party. His growing mystique derived from his claim to be a representative of the Comintern. Few communists in Malaya were so well travelled, so well informed on world affairs. Of the many aliases he used in this period, the name that has endured is Lai Teck: it seems the British thought this was merely a Chinese mispronunciation of the English name ‘Wright’, and so ‘Mr Wright’ became yet another layer of pseudonymity.34

  Lai Teck’s early career is an extraordinary journey across the underground of the port cities of Asia; the stuff of the cloak-and-dagger fiction so popular in the region at this time. Lai Teck liked to surround himself in its aura. He became a convert to communism in Saigon in the 1920s, but then he joined the French navy, only to flee when faced with arrest for disseminating communist literature among his fellow sailors. He reappeared in Hong Kong and from there travelled through the revolutionary circles of Shanghai and Tientsin. In 1931, in a strange sequence of events, he was arrested at Mukden on the Soviet border, apparently en route to Moscow, and was imprisoned in a Chinese jail, only to be released in a general amnesty when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. He then retraced his steps to Shanghai, where he was again arrested in the French concession and deported to Vietnam. Given a choice between prison and co-operation with the Surété, Lai Teck chose the life of a double agent. His career was short lived: in 1934, whilst working undercover in Annam, he was exposed and, useless now to the French, Lai Teck was gifted to the British in Hong Kong. Special Branch supplied Lai Teck with communist documents they had seized in raids in Hong Kong and Shanghai. These were to authenticate a cover story that he was a Comintern agent sent to advise the Malayan Communist Party. He was then introduced into Singapore as an informer. His betrayals over the next few years assisted his rise in the Party’s secret hierarchy. By 1939 he had been elected Secretary General, and was known by the rank and file as ‘Ah Le’ – ‘Our Lenin’.35

  When Singapore fell, Lai Teck did not take to the jungle. He thrived in the cosmopolitan underbelly of the city: it was said that he had two Vietnamese wives, one of whom owned a coffee shop on bustling Orchard Road, as well as a Chinese mistress. But he was arrested in the security sweep that followed the Japanese takeover. Faced once again with a choice between death or betrayal, he bartered his release by agreeing to supply information to the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai. The fact of Lai Teck’s arrest could not be hidden from Communist Party circles, but such was the power of his personality cult that it was believed he had charmed his way out of jail. In a curious way, the very audacity with which he conducted his business over the next few years, cycling around Singapore on his red sports bicycle, driving to the peninsula in a Morris 8 saloon given to him by the Japanese, preceded by a string of female couriers, all helped support the myth of his invincibility and mastery of clandestine struggle. At the same time his betrayals tore apart the Party leadership in Singapore and southern Malaya. His motive of self-preservation in this seems clear, but he was also carefully consolidating his hold on the Party and, by the end of the war, was effectively a one-man central committee. In August 1942 he enacted his greatest betrayal, when he alerted the Japanese to a meeting of senior commanders of the MPAJA near Batu Caves, a Hindu temple complex just outside Kuala Lumpur. On 1 September the delegates and their bodyguards were ambushed: twenty-nine of them were killed and fifteen more arrested. Lai Teck claimed that he had been delayed in attending the meeting by the breakdown of his car; in fact, he had remained in Singapore. Of the pre-war leaders of rank, only a few now survived in isolated parts of the peninsula, just leaving the younger men who had made their reputations fighting with the MPAJA. By this time, some of the communist leaders imprisoned by the Japanese had begun to suspect Lai Teck. However, as a smoke screen, a number of them were released by the Kempeitai, in the sure knowledge that their former comrades would eliminate them immediately as turncoats and bearers of misinformation. This had the effect of dampening down and discrediting any evil rumour surrounding the Secretary General. But Lai Teck did not betray all he knew. He did not fully expose the Force 136 agents; nor, it seems, were the Japanese aware of the agreement he had signed with the British. As the war changed its course, Lai Teck tried to play all sides and win. In August 1945 only a few communists and some Vietnamese émigrés in Singapore had begun to suspect that ‘Mr Wright’ was not all he seemed.

  One of the new leaders to emerge out of this was the liaison officer with Force 136 in Perak, known by his Communist Party alias, Chin Peng. Like much of the new-generation leadership, he had been introduced to the Party through the anti-Japanese movement which had taken hold of the Chinese Middle School students after 1937. Chin Peng was born as Ong Boon Hua, in Sitiawan in Perak, where his parents ran a bicycle shop. As a schoolboy, he dreamed of enlisting to fight in China and began a process of self-education in the works of Mao Zedong. He was recruited to the Malayan Communist Party organization in 1940, aged only fifteen, by a charismatic fellow-student, Tu Lung Shan, who was best known by his nom de guerre, Lai Lai Fuk. Tu Lung Shan had extraordinary influence in Perak, by making party work seem a natural extension of the close-knit, multi-ethnic networks of friendship in a small town. As one prominent Malay recruit, Rashid Maidin, put it, he ‘usually began with conversations on topics which touched on everyday happenings. He did not bring books or pamphlets. Probably, at that time, the party was not rich enough to produce books’.36 Trilingual in Chinese, Malay and English, Tu Lung Shan personified the kind of Malaya-born Chinese men and women who were to take the Malayan Communist Party in a new direction; although they still looked for inspiration to the struggle for China, their revolutionary patriotism was rooted in a Malayan context, and made emotive by their sacrifices there. Chin Peng was to mourn the loss of Tu Lung Shan, beheaded by the Japanese in Taiping jail in 1943.37 Chin Peng also had many near arrests, but through his underground work as state secretary in Perak he developed his own following. As John Davis reported, he was: ‘Physically robust with round boyish face. Courage marked and commands natural respect without fuss or formality. Quiet character with incisive brain and unusual ability. Frank and reliable. Very likeable.’38 It was a source of ironic pride to Chin Peng that the British officers acknowledged that it was ‘entirely due to him’ that South East Asia Command possessed armed and trained guerrilla allies in Malaya. Yet Chin Peng was also unflinching in the use of violence to attain his objectives. Lai Teck, too, identified him as a useful man.

  Chin Peng had arranged the Blantan meetings, and was present at a gathering of party cadres in October 1944 in the jungle near Serendah, some miles north of Kuala Lumpur, at which Lai Teck announced the alliance with South East Asia Command to the surviving MPAJA hierarchy. However, this agreement, he told them, was not to be honoured. The MPAJA was to be split: an ‘open’ army would work with the British, as agreed at Blan
tan, while the rest of the forces would remain underground. When the Allied invasion came, it would rename itself the National Liberation Army and seize control. Since it would not be possible to hold on to the big urban centres of Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh, the small country towns were to be the base areas of the liberation struggle. ‘It was’, Chin Peng remembered, ‘a rousing call to revolution. Our spirits soared’.39 As this directive filtered through to the jungle, British Force 136 officers in the camps sensed that they were being kept in quarantine, away from many guerrilla units. But there was little they could do about it. These were the first intimate encounters between British soldiers and Asian revolutionary fighters, and they made uneasy comrades. The Europeans experienced the culture shock of a relentless routine of Marxist education, community singing and self-criticism sessions in the camps. Some viewed it in a sympathetic spirit. The sister of a tin miner in Pahang, Nona Baker, who spent most of the occupation hiding with the local guerrillas, wrote an improvised life of Lenin for propaganda purposes.40 But many of the Force 136 recruits had been civilians in Malaya before the war, businessmen or, more often than not, policemen. Although they admired the self-discipline and sacrifice of the guerrillas, they struggled to come to terms with the sight of a rubber tapper or house-boy in arms. A former rubber planter in Kedah stepped down from Force 136 in the field, claiming he could not be party to a policy of co-operation with communists, ‘as I intend to spend many more years in Malaya’.41 Major I. S. Wylie’s assessment of the commander of the 700-strong 5th Independent Regiment of MPAJA in Perak, the formidable Liao Wei Chung, or ‘Colonel Itu’, is typical in its condescension: ‘a man of lowly origins’, he reported, ‘advanced to a position of power and authority which he was not properly fitted to fill’.42 The leader of the 1st Regiment of the MPAJA in Selangor, Liew Yao, might sign off letters to his liaison officer, Major Douglas Broadhurst, formerly of the Singapore Special Branch: ‘chins up and keep smiling, Cheerio’, and end a request for money and arms (and an English–Chinese dictionary), ‘your loving firend [sic], Ah Yeow’.43 But Itu and Wylie, Liew Yao and Broadhurst, would soon be on opposing sides in a new and bitterly personal war.