Forgotten Wars Read online

  The MPAJA was primed for revolution, but the sudden surrender of Japan took everyone by surprise, not least Lai Teck. In the days that followed he executed a dramatic volte-face. He summoned Chin Peng to Kuala Lumpur, but did not meet him personally. By the time the younger man arrived on 19 August, Lai Teck had just left for Johore and Singapore in the south. Chin Peng instead met another of the Party’s new generation of leaders, Yeung Kuo, who – in some distress – informed him that the MPAJA would not, after all, fight the British. Lai Teck had drawn up a new policy: an ‘eight-point programme’. Its first two points were support for the Allies and the pursuit of an open democratic struggle. It was bland enough to receive the endorsement of the British high command: Mountbatten’s Foreign Office adviser, Esler Dening, called it ‘irreproachable’. ‘The Communist Party have rather stolen our thunder’, he complained.44 Lai Teck ordered both the ‘open’ and the ‘secret’ MPAJA to disband; the only concession to armed struggle was that the Party would hold on to its secret caches of arms. To Chin Peng, and to all who had fought and suffered in the jungle, this was ‘a devastating blow’. To his surprise he learned that Lai Teck had made him responsible for implementing the new policy, by appointing him to a new three-man Central Military Committee, together with Lai Teck and the Selangor commander, Liew Yao. Chin Peng was only twenty years of age. Despite his private misgivings, he submitted to Lai Teck’s directive – after all, he later reflected, ‘he was the Comintern’s man’ – and Chin Peng was swayed by the belief, shared by many in the MPAJA, that they had already won legal recognition from the British. He also assumed that the full Central Committee was behind the decision not to fight. In fact Lai Teck was covering his tracks, and had acted on his own.45

  It was unclear to the British what the peacetime role of the MPAJA was to be. Mountbatten’s initial bland directive – ‘Victory is now at hand and your contribution has been important and is appreciated’ – did not impress the guerrillas. Nor did his stipulation that the MPAJA should avoid towns and districts where the Japanese were present. There was, as John Davis radioed the supremo four days after the surrender, ‘a serious risk of disastrous anti-climax’. To Davis, the status of the MPAJA as soldiers under SEAC was crucial: they ‘must be given full share in the honour of victory’. ‘Orders for them to remain half-starved in the hills while the Allies leisurely take over the administration from the Japs will not be reasonable.’ Davis was also worried that, if they remained in the jungle, all control over them would be lost.46 Davis was overridden by Mountbatten’s advisers. General Sir William Slim carried the day by arguing that the guerrillas could upset the delicate ceasefire with the Japanese. Mountbatten relented slightly by allowing the guerrillas to move into towns if they could avoid clashes with the Japanese. He had for months urged the British cabinet to trumpet its liberal intentions for Malaya in order that the tensions of reoccupation might be eased, but to no avail. In London Davis’s views were dismissed as part of a pattern whereby liaison officers in the field went native and ‘become rather imbued with the views of the resistance movement to which they are attached’.47 Already, vague wartime understandings were being repudiated.

  The MPAJA met its moment of revolutionary crisis in a state of confusion and with no central direction. Some jungle companies received Lai Teck’s new directive, others did not. Some who did receive the orders fought on anyway. As the Japanese began to withdraw from many settlements, MPAJA fighters wearing their new SEAC jungle green with three stars on their forage caps, moved to capture village police stations and arms and supply dumps. The Japanese military claimed that in the fifteen days after the surrender there were 212 attacks on its troops. The MPAJA seized transport, and for the first time enjoyed swift mobility. In many areas they began to set up skeleton administrations in the form of ‘people’s committees’: according to one estimate, 70 per cent of rural towns were under their control.48 There they took over public buildings, and in some instances burned land-office records. The ability of Force 136 officers to restrain their allies varied dramatically. In Chin Peng’s sphere in Perak, where MPAJA units were perhaps at their most disciplined, the very night that Force 136 officers gathered to celebrate the surrender, with Scotch whisky and Highland reels, Colonel Itu ordered units of the 5th Independent Regiment into the towns that had been abandoned by the Japanese.49 The hidden networks that had sustained the resistance suddenly revealed themselves. Chin Peng’s female comrade, Eng Ming Chin, turned underground workers into a highly effective propaganda troupe of singers and actors. The MPAJA took over the Perak Chinese Amateur Dramatic Association in Ipoh as their headquarters: ‘neighbours could hear night after night the squealing of pigs and the death throes of poultry as these were prepared in the kitchen for the enjoyment of the hundreds of jungle fighters…’ They were presents from the poor farmers. Even local capitalists fêted the communists: ‘white skin’, it was said, ‘red hearts’. The coffee-shop owners of the town of Pusing gave the guerrillas free meals for a month.50 In the northern states, which had been placed under the nominal government of Japan’s ally Thailand, both the British and the Japanese were thin on the ground, and the guerrillas had an even freer hand. The occupation of Kuala Trengganu was largely uncontested and in Kedah, the local 8th Regiment, who had not heard the new orders, made an all-out takeover bid; it took Chin Peng’s personal intervention to bring them into line. In Johore in the south, Major H. H. Wright of Force 136 reported that the people’s committees ‘were all-powerful in those small towns’. By the end of October there were 233 guerrillas in his patrol alone, well-armed with Brens, Stens, carbines and rifles. There were no British troops in the area. Wright compared them to the partisans in Albania, with whom he had spent nine months: ‘they were the masters and not me’. The local commanders were unhappy at Lai Teck’s policy. As they marched into the towns, they left their jungle camps intact behind them.51

  Around the main garrison areas in Perak and Kedah, senior Japanese officers, impressed by the strict military discipline of the guerrillas, made it clear that they would not stand in the way of the MPAJA if it chose to fight. Japanese police in Kuala Kangsar, Perak, agreed to pass arms in a silent trade, by vacating the police station and leaving weapons behind, including machine guns taken from disarmed French soldiers in Indo-China.52 On one rubber estate in Johore, a Japanese military HQ shared an office with the MPAJA.53 These negotiations were broken off only when news of the new directive was received. This perhaps averted a crisis within the MPAJA: its leaders were deeply split on the issue of co-operation with the Japanese. Some felt that their surrender had changed everything and revealed the true enemy: British imperialism. Others were still governed by their deep hatred for the Japanese. Chin Peng would later estimate that around 400 Japanese went over to the communists.54 Many of them disappeared when they realized that the MPAJA was not to fight. But some remained.

  There was another crucial dilemma for the MPAJA. The local armies that the Japanese had raised could now act freely. The Malay radicals, abandoned by their patrons, sent out feelers to the MPAJA. Ibrahim Yaacob later claimed to have initiated the contacts. A-280 strong Malay militia from Singapore moved up towards Kuala Lumpur. It was intercepted by the MPAJA in northern Johore, where it threw the local communist leadership into confusion. With the new policy in mind, it decided not to arm them and the group disbanded into the neighbouring kampongs (villages). Some Indian National Army garrisons in Malaya also approached the MPAJA. There had been mounting tension between Malayan Indian recruits and the north-Indian regulars. The local men were disenchanted by their appointed role in defending Japanese imperialism, and there were many desertions. In Sungei Siput, Perak, a resistance heartland, INA men supplied a great deal of intelligence to the local guerrillas.55 In Kuala Lumpur, M. K. Ramachandra Naidu, the chairman of the board of the largest Hindu temple in the town, the Sri Maha Mariamman, was approached by emissaries who wanted to hand the INA over to the MPAJA. Naidu attempted to mediate, but the local
communists refused the offer and merely accepted some transport in exchange for guaranteeing the safety of the large Indian community in the city.56 In Party folklore these incidents would later be seen as catastrophic missed opportunities, but they reflected an overriding constraint on the Party: its lack of mass support outside the Chinese community.

  As the Japanese pulled back, the MPAJA unleashed brutal revolutionary terror. Suspected collaborators, officials, policemen and profiteers were hauled before kangaroo courts where they often faced an angry crowd. Eyewitness accounts are chilling: denunciations would ring out, a voice from the crowd would cry for the death penalty and the accused would be taken into the jungle or behind a building, to be executed with a single bullet or hacked and mutilated with knives. Sometimes those accused were cut down by the mob there and then.57 In Perak, Force 136 officers observed that it was often the guerrillas’ helpers from the towns, and not the more disciplined armed bands, who took the lead in this. Ho Thean Fook, a former teacher in an English school, was a non-communist who had fought with the MPAJA in the vicinity of his hometown of Papan. He realized that there was a turf war beginning in the town between the ‘uniformed’ MPAJA and ‘non-uniformed’ men, who were opposed to the Lai Teck policy. ‘These blighters’, he wrote, ‘were more ruthless than the Japanese.’ He saw a stout, elderly Chinese gentleman dragged off and tied to a telephone pole merely for being overzealous in carrying out his duties in the Ipoh traffic office. Only the intervention of a family connection who was a communist state committee member saved him. In disgust, and denied the triumphal homecoming of which he had dreamed, Ho Thean Fook returned to a jungle hideout until a force of uniformed MPAJA with SEAC liaison officers arrived to restore order in the town.58 British officers made speeches urging restraint. However, they were delivered through communist interpreters and often went unheard. ‘They were most annoyed’, reported Major Wright in Johore, ‘when I told them not to take the law into their own hands, after they had beheaded three so-called collaborators in [the] Kulai area.’59

  After the Japanese in Singapore had pulled back into camps on the west of the island, guerrillas from the 4th Regiment of the MPAJA in Johore moved over the two-kilometre causeway that linked the island to the mainland and marched into the urban area. They seized the premises of the old Japanese Club on Selegie Road as their headquarters. A period of ‘whispering terror’ began. Particular targets were the local business and community leaders whom the Japanese had strong-armed into an Overseas Chinese Association, extorting from them a $50 million ‘gift’ as ‘guilt atonement’ for supporting the Allied cause. Most had the means to make themselves scarce, but smaller fry were hauled away and killed. Mistresses of Japanese officers were paraded shaven headed round the town. Areas such as Chinatown became ‘completely lawless’.60 As one Chinese schoolteacher wrote: ‘We could not find it in our hearts to condemn this wild justice, which we were too squeamish to mete out ourselves. Indeed, we were thankful to our guttersnipes for doing it for us.’ Some older men seemed to be directing operations on bicycles, blowing whistles.61 Much of the killing was merely the settling of old scores, but in some areas it began to develop into an ethnic war.

  Mustapha Hussain evokes the mood of the Malays in northern Perak: ‘Abductions and killings were rampant. Kampong folks, suddenly drawn into chaos, moved in indescribable fear.’62 The three stars of the guerrillas – the Bintang Tiga – had become a sign of terror for the Malay community. For several months there had been Sino-Malay clashes in Perak and in parts of Johore during which hundreds had been killed. The MPAJA blamed gangsters and the machinations of the Japanese. Both of these elements were certainly present, and in many areas unlicensed bands extorted and killed in the MPAJA’s name. But Malay village headmen and policemen were often targeted by MPAJA guerrillas. The killings were concentrated in certain locales, on the plain of the Perak river and the coastal area of western Johore. Both these areas had seen recent settlement from Indonesia, especially of Banjarese with a reputation for the tenacious defence of their honour. In many ways the conflict went against the grain of inter-ethnic relations in the Malayan countryside, which were governed by complex links of interdependence and carefully observed forms of trust. Whatever its longer-term causes, a common theme of first-hand accounts was that violence was provoked not by a general breakdown of day-to-day dealings but by the sudden transgressions of armed outsiders: an arrogant demand for food, taxes or labour; abductions and insults to women. The spark was often an incident in or near a mosque – a demand to move the time of Friday prayers, for example – or involving pork, which is unclean to Muslims. Not only the killings, but their method – the mutilation of corpses, say – inflamed Malay sensitivities. And, of course, rumour abounded, often sparking more violence. For the Malays, the occupation was a time of religious uncertainty. The Japanese had played propaganda games with the mosques, and had tried clumsily to liken their war effort to a jihad. It was under the banner of Islam that Malay resistance to the MPAJA began to mobilize.63

  When the times were so out of joint, leadership within Malay rural society could slip away from the established elite. In the Batu Pahat area of Johore, where violence had begun in the middle of the year, the cult leadership of a village headman, Kyai Salleh bin Abdul Karim, came to the fore. A kyai is a local leader of an order of sufis, the mystic brethren of Islam, and sufism was strong in Malaya. This was a tradition of religious leadership that lay outside the established Islamic hierarchy, and had been influential in propagating Islam in the Malay world. As a local religious scholar, Syed Naguib al-Attas, wrote a few years later: ‘Never has the Malay mind soared to [such] heights of sublimity in the realm of abstract thought as when it was steeped in sufism.’ Kyai Salleh, he noted, ‘sports a goatee and has small beady eyes that can at times glow with boyish mischief, or glare with a fury that has been known to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies’. Kyai Salleh’s reputation extended across Malaya, and carried with it the claim that he possessed supernatural powers, such as invulnerability to bullets and weapons. Deputations from Indonesia came to seek his help and sanction. His famous parang panjang, or long sword, was said to have severed 172 heads. He claimed that the medieval founder of the Qadiriyyah sufi order appeared to him in a dream, dressed in black, to warn him of an attack by Chinese ‘bandits’.64 Kyai Salleh’s powers derived from the disciplines of prayer, fasting and recitation of the Quran, particularly the Yasin, the chapter that is read to the dying. An initiate could use these powers only in times of danger and by following an upright path. If the powers left him, it was a reflection on his faith and piety, and his appointed time for death had come. The ‘invulnerable’ wore a cloth of red at their neck and armed themselves with parang panjang, bamboo spears, and the kris – a Malay dagger potent with symbolism. Calling his movement Sabilillah – or the Path of God – Kyai Salleh and his Malay fighters began raids on Chinese villages, and in August and September he spearheaded resistance to the MPAJA.65

  The fighting threatened to engulf large areas of the Malayan countryside. There was a connected incident much further to the north, in Sungai Manik in the Perak river basin, where many of the Banjarese settlers were recent arrivals from Johore and had witnessed the fighting there. In one Sino-Malay clash in this area, over 150 people died. Again, religious men organized the defence of their kampongs. The first British officer to reach the scene recorded that the leader of the Banjarese, Imam Haji Bakri, was said ‘to have given some sort of dope to his men prior to action’.66 The MPAJA saw the fighting as a cynical attempt by the Japanese to divide and rule. There is no doubt that the Japanese supported the Sabilillah bands once their conflict with the MPAJA was underway. They followed up Kyai Salleh’s raids with their own operations, and supplied arms and men in Perak. The fighting gathered intensity as Malays began to fear that the Chinese were taking over their country. An ill-timed airdrop of leaflets in Malay by the British in Johore, promising punishment to those involved, underlined the
fact that SEAC was allied to the MPAJA, and this led the Malays to fear British reprisals. Sultan Ibrahim of Johore was said to have met Kyai Salleh and kissed his hand, asking him to ‘guard our country’.67 The cycle of violence continued into the following year.

  Armed bands of all kinds had been set loose in Malaya. In the far north, operating out of remote lairs in Upper Perak and Kelantan, were a number of smaller Chinese guerrilla groups, mainly comprising small-town racketeers who had moved in on the lucrative smuggling trade across the Thai border. Styled the ‘Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army’, they professed loyalty to Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang and were identifiable by the single star on their caps. Some British ‘stay-behind’ agents had made contact with them, and they tended to find their loose-living picaroon style a refreshing change from the puritan regime of the communist camps. The two groups fought for the allegiance of the Chinese hill farmers. By the end of the war J. K. Creer, a former official who had spent the entire conflict in the forest in Kelantan, reported that the state was ‘at the mercy of Chinese guerrillas of two warring factions’. Creer eventually occupied the capital, Kota Bahru, with an Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army force of around 170 men and repelled MPAJA attempts to enter the town. He felt that his men had fought the Japanese harder than the MPAJA had ever done.68 But Chin Peng saw them as nothing more than ‘Kuomintang bandits’: ‘they spent their money freely on drugs and women. When they ran out of funds they began to loot, pillage and rape.’ He held the large unit in Upper Perak responsible for the abductions and killings of Malay villagers.69