Forgotten Wars Read online

  The anger of British troops deepened as they began to liberate POWs from the camps on the island. They were appalled by evidence of starvation, and worse horrors were soon to be exposed along the Death Railway in Thailand: it was estimated that there were 100,000 POWs to be recovered.91 Hitherto, their condition had been kept secret, so as not to distress their kin. For the prisoners, the last days had been an agony. In Changi Mountbatten was known as ‘Longer Linger Louis’, or invoked in ironic prayer: ‘How much longer, O Lord?’ For five days after the surrender the Japanese continued to transport labourers to the construction sites of the great tunnels they were boring in the central heights of the island, but did not put these men to work. In the words of one POW, an Armenian from Singapore’s volunteer force: ‘we just hung around staring at them and they staring at us’. But the men were in better shape than they had been for months. As the news of surrender began to filter through the wire, so too did food from former Asian employees and friends. Some men succumbed to sudden plenty, or to illicit liquor: a tale did the rounds that two Australians had died gorging on bully beef and butter.92 In addition, there were 16,109 Indians in Singapore and 2,664 on the peninsula who had not joined the INA. They had, wrote one witness to their liberation, ‘a cowed look on their faces as if they were ashamed to be alive and were unsure of their reception’.93 They were not a priority. By 11 October, at Neesoon camp in Singapore, forty-five men had died in the space of three weeks.94 In Thailand it was left to the individual efforts of a former rubber planter from Kelantan, freshly released from a POW camp, to stay on to provide relief for over 70,000 Malayans who had been sent to work there. Here the military agency for Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI) was known as ‘Retain All Prisoners of War Indefinitely’.95

  For the British, some of the most moving scenes were at the civilian internment camp at Sime Road. There 3,160 men, 1,020 women and 320 children were liberated by former colleagues of the Malayan Civil Service, men who had got out of Singapore before the fall and were now in uniform. One of them was O. W. Gilmour:

  A number of my friends were unrecognisable, on account of the great beards which adorned their faces and the deteriorations of physique, while others were equally unrecognisable for the latter reasons only. Some had grown old beyond what the years could account for, and worst of all, a number had obviously changed completely; the change having started in frustration of mind and worked outwards.96

  The women and children had been interned separately from the men and had run their own affairs. The world they had created was abruptly dissolved. Sheila Allan had been a motherless child of sixteen when she was imprisoned, and like many young internees had come of age in captivity. Before the war she had lost her Malayan mother; in Changi she had also lost her father. Her diary records a flood of powerful new impressions: the sudden plenty of Red Cross parcels – ‘powder puff, face cream, lipstick, toilet papers and sanitary towels’ – dances, the sexual attentions of soldiers and, above all, the loss of the close-knit community of the camp. ‘I don’t think’, she wrote, ‘that anyone really knows what he or she is going to do…’ Like so many others, Sheila Allan would have to begin her adult life with no resources of her own.97

  The former civil servants were crushed by the sight of a new administration. They had expected to return immediately to their jobs, and over the long years had drawn up elaborate contingency plans, even down to leave rosters. Whilst the military commandeered the best hotels and the clubs, the internees were left for several weeks in their squalid camps, without even fresh linen. One Malayan civil servant, Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, was liberated from a camp near Pekanbaru in Sumatra. There the POWs cleared a landing strip. A plane circled and landed, and Cunyngham-Brown ran to meet it. He lost his loincloth, his only scrap of clothing, in his excitement. A striking and smartly dressed woman disembarked. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘I do apologize.’ The lady opened a gold cigarette case; ‘What you need is a cigarette!’ As he led her to his camp, he asked her name. ‘I am Lady Louis Mountbatten.’ In her work for the Red Cross, Lady Edwina covered 33,000 miles and sixteen countries, visiting camps in an attempt to accelerate the relief work. Later that day Cunyngham-Brown managed to fly to Singapore, where he presented himself to the island’s chief civil affairs officer, P. A. B. McKerron. There his reception was very different. McKerron refused to meet his eye and told him: ‘To tell you the truth, we don’t want you around.’ Cunyngham-Brown ignored this and made it to his former post in Johore, where later that evening he was put in charge of the northern part of the state. His case was exceptional. The civilians carried with them the stench of the failure of 1942; their physical dilapidation impeded the restoration of white prestige. As Cunyngham-Brown acknowledged, ‘we embarrassed everybody’. He bristled at the new arrivals ‘worming up to us as though we were lunatics, speaking in baby-talk and offering us their nauseating pity’.98

  Some internees made it upcountry to visit their homes. One long-time Ipoh resident, John Lowe Woods, drove north giving a thumbs-up sign – a gesture new in Malaya but popularized by the war elsewhere – to the locals. He travelled through a series of Arcs de Triomphe: ‘at least two in every small kampong (one at each end), lots of odd ones along the road at estate entrances, solitary kedais [shops] and so on, aping the dignity of a large village or small town; quite a number, one for each community and a few private efforts as well’. North of Kuala Lumpur, the mood changed. It was ‘more Arcs and rather fewer thumbs’. He had driven into the triumph of the MPAJA as it progressed from town to town through the Perak countryside.99 Europeans such as Woods showed steely resolve in reasserting the privileges and protocols of their former life. As the first internees departed from Singapore by sea, they complained that cabins were allocated alphabetically, and not by official precedence. A story did the rounds: ‘I used to pass a certain senior civil servant in the camp each morning’, reported an internee, ‘and he always greeted me with “Hullo, Tom, old man, how are things going?” One morning he changed his greeting to “Good-morning, Brown, how are you?” so I knew the war was over.’100

  Military medicine was ill-equipped to deal with the physical and psychological toll of captivity. The depth of anguish was slow to emerge: at the liberation of the camps, army psychiatrists spoke of surprisingly high morale, but they were misled by the initial euphoria of release. If the number of overt cases of psychological illness was ‘remarkably low’, it was perhaps because the most vulnerable people, especially the loners, had perished. Among the survivors, it was noted that if someone left a group, temporarily, there was collective anxiety and exaggerated relief on his return. They meticulously hoarded and shared food, even when it was in abundance. Ragged and ill, they were desperately tongue-tied with women. When nurses responded by jesting that they had seen half-naked men before, their embarrassment deepened. As one woman relief worker noted: ‘It was we who had changed and become more frank, not they.’ This soon gave way to concern about detainees’ ‘elation’ and ‘over-activity’, and a worrying sign that ‘the thought of returning home was not greeted with as much enthusiasm as one might expect’. It was clear the normal means of demobilization would not meet the needs of men who had spent nearly four years in horrific conditions in prison camps, with the long-term health problems that such prolonged periods of deprivation had created. Army psychologists now warned that a delayed reaction could set in – even nine to twelve months after release. Of the first 1,000 repatriates from Malaya and Singapore, 600 showed ‘some degree of anxiety’; over 500 were suffering from ‘mild apathy and depression’.101 Above all, internees and POWs had to come to terms with a ‘Rip van Winkle effect’ of their lost years when confronted with unexpected bereavement, infidelity or estrangement, and public indifference. They had been allowed, at most, five messages in three and a half years. One of the few provisions for psychological support was a series of pep talks: ‘things – and people – have changed… It’s on the whole a good thing too – m
ostly they are wiser and bigger people’. But above all, the POWs were told, it was women who had changed. ‘She’ll be more independent, more used to managing on her own (which you may not like).’ They were also warned to expect disappointment on resuming their lives, but reassured: ‘The Forgotten Army is not forgotten now.’102

  Many of the forgotten witnessed the formal end of Japanese rule at the Singapore Padang on 12 September. Still in scraps of uniform, they stood between the pillars or on the roof of the Municipal Building. It was here, just two years previously, that Premier Tojo and Subhas Chandra Bose had reviewed the Indian National Army. Now with sixty-one Allied warships moored in the harbour, Japanese commanders were made to walk with bowed heads to meet Mountbatten and over a hundred officers of the various components of South East Asia Command, and dignitaries ranging from the Sultan of Johore to Tom Driberg. It was Mountbatten’s finest moment as supremo. Yet, to his bitter regret, his great rival, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, had pleaded illness and was absent. Mountbatten sent his own doctor to verify this. Unlike MacArthur in Tokyo Bay, who let the Japanese keep their swords, Mountbatten wanted to take Terauchi’s. He made it clear that he would allow Itagaki to deputize only on the understanding that Terauchi would make his personal submission to Mountbatten as soon as he was well enough to do so. As he told the Japanese delegation: ‘As I speak, there are 100,000 men ashore. This invasion would have taken place on 9th September whether the Japanese had resisted or not. I wish to make this plain: the surrender today is no negotiated surrender. The Japanese are submitting to superior force, now massed here.’ To impress this on the local population, there was a ceremonial march past of newly arrived troops, in neat dress order. As part of the guard of honour, just inside the Municipal Building, was a double file of men from the MPAJA.103 In a fifteen-minute ceremony, General Itagaki signed each copy of the surrender document, stamped it with an official chop, and then, with great deliberation, applied his personal seal. Once he had finished, the Japanese officers were each tapped lightly on the shoulder and left the building. As they marched away, multiple chants broke out from the crowd of Bakaro! Bakaro! – Bastard! Bastard!104 Shortly afterwards Itagaki left for Japan, there to face his trial and execution as a war criminal.

  In the days that followed the people of Malaya took to the streets to celebrate the second coming of the British. There were ‘loyal’ processions of the Chinese and the Indian Muslims of Singapore. The Kuomintang raised a pavilion in front of the Singapore Cricket Club and Chinese firecrackers were set off. The British read too much into these demonstrations of loyalty. The release of tension and the initial good will mediated some of the problems of peace. But not for long. In most peninsular towns it was the MPAJA that dominated the proceedings. In their stronghold of Ipoh in Perak, the 5th Independent Regiment paraded 1,000 strong. Eng Ming Chin rode with Colonel Itu in a convoy of cars, followed by hundreds of MPAJA supporters on foot, and behind them the representatives of the business community. ‘Before the war’, she explained, ‘the towkays [bosses] always walked in front in public processions, but now poor people like us led the way… the world had changed.’105 The Kuala Lumpur victory parade included a number of local worthies who had been known to work with the Japanese. The British officers ignored them. The treasonous shadow of Roger Casement hovered over them, and the charge of ‘adhering to the King’s enemies’. The fear was greatest among the Indian civilians who had supported the Indian National Army. Some had done so under duress, others from long conviction; their shops still displayed images of Subhas Chandra Bose. Within a week many of them were arrested and detained in the notorious Pudu jail.106

  One of the first acts of 5 Indian Division on 6 September was to pull down the INA memorial beside the Singapore Padang on the Esplanade; Bose had laid the foundation stone only two months previously, and after his death it had become a shrine to his memory, albeit only for a few days. (Jawaharlal Nehru visited the site six months later: a temporary wooden replica was erected in its stead.107) Other symbolic moments followed in which the British attempted to erase the war memory of the vanquished. The Chureito, the wooden obelisk raised up on top of Bukit Batok hill, overlooking Bukit Timah, the final line of defence in the battle for Singapore, was an immediate target of the British. However, the obelisk had already been demolished by Japanese troops – so the engineers of 5 Indian Division blew up its base. The great Shinto shrine constructed on a forested side of the central reservoir and dedicated to the Amaterasu Omikani, the Sun Goddess, had also been destroyed by the Japanese using traditional Shinto purification rites. With less ceremony, the British cleared what remained because it took up land formerly occupied by the Royal Singapore Golf Club, which the military were impatient to reopen. It remained, as British visitors recognized, a beautiful spot. It was approached by a bridge of red and yellow timbers across the reservoir and the shrine itself had been exquisitely crafted in wood, and landscaped with black and white pebbles and rows of lanterns.108 But for many victims of the Japanese there was no known resting place. Chinese families were unable to perform the mourning rituals that Confucian rites demanded, the offerings of food and burnt paper goods that would prevent their ancestors becoming ‘hungry ghosts’ in hell. Rumours spread across the island that the ghosts were wailing from their unmarked graves.109 It was many years before they would be laid to rest.

  2

  1945: The Pains of Victory

  BURMA INTRANSIGENT

  The night of 12–13 August 1945, three days after the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, marked the high point of good relations in Burma between the returning British and the local population, proudly led by their new army. That night news and rumours that the Japanese emperor had offered to surrender spread like wildfire through Rangoon. Streets were soon filled with cheering crowds. Jeeps bulging with people roared up and down the main highways. Ships’ sirens blared forth the victory sign. Very lights stabbed the blackness of the night. The next day’s Rangoon Liberator, the administration-sponsored newspaper, carried the banner headline ‘Japan Surrenders. Rangoon goes wild with joy’.1 In fact, the formal surrender did not come until two days later. Even then no one in Burma was quite sure that the fighting was finally over because units of the Japanese forces were still active in Tenasserim, the southern peninsula, and the southern Shan hills. The atom bomb also stoked fears about the future. Yet most people of whatever background now believed they would survive the war. That shrewd leader of the 14th Army, General William Slim, soon to become commander of Allied land forces, South East Asia Command, had once been worried by the possibility of conflict between Aung San’s forces and the British army.2 Now he congratulated Aung San on his fighters’ patriotic resistance. Relations between the powerful Buddhist priesthood, the Sangha, and the Allied liberators remained cordial, too. Friendly contact had been established two months earlier. A hundred chief monks under the leadership of the Venerable Alatewa Sayadaw welcomed Mountbatten as supreme commander, and thanked the administration for the excellent breakfast prepared for them that day. The meeting also established a committee to advise the British administration on all matters connected with the monks.3

  In the countryside, Japanese forces had been fighting on, pursued by the British and the Burma National Army.4 Slowly the news filtered through to the remotest places. Maung Maung, one of the leading soldiers of the BNA, remembered: ‘One night in August the camp of the Indian Brigade broke up in light and noise. Guns boomed, searchlights danced, flares went up to send out showers of stars.’5 The war began to end here, too. Delicate negotiations were in train as captured Japanese officers and Japanese-speaking British liaison personnel tried to convince the pockets of desperate Japanese troops that the emperor had told them to lay down their arms. Some soldiers surrendered with resignation; others ‘would crumble to the ground weeping and tearing the ground with frantic hands’.6 A few attempted suicide. One man blew himself up with a grenade in front of the victors. Maung Maung recorded that the
strange and ambivalent comradeship between the Japanese and the old Burma Independence Army flickered to life again, despite the mutual killing of the previous four months. Even in the despair of their defeat, the Japanese were easier to deal with than the British, many of whom still seemed ‘snobbish’, determined to reassert their superiority over what they saw as a gaggle of Burmese youths.7

  The British were themselves caught between feelings of relief and horror at the magnitude of the task of reconstruction that faced them.8 Ironically, their only advantage in this was the large number of docile and disciplined Japanese POWs they now held who could be assigned tasks previously reserved for the meanest Indian coolie. The authorities hurriedly tried to improve Rangoon’s conservancy department, which had no more than a handful of sweepers to cleanse the latrines of hundreds of thousands of dwellings. House owners were exhorted to collect and properly dispose of rubbish rather than throw it into the shattered drainage system. There was an ever-present danger of disease. Slowly the city began to creep back to a basic level of normality. The Rangoon Liberator of 27 September carried a letter redolent of the sweet old days of trysts in the shade of the Sule pagoda: to ‘H. H. Princess of Magnolia. My most sincere apologies for the indiscreet note – pray remember memories of Radio – darling, forgive me – meet me at the “MARINA” – always awaiting you there – “S.”’9 Perhaps this was a plant by the secret services to improve morale. More convincing was the advertisement of Tong Hin Co. of 705–7 Dalhousie Square announcing a lottery. The prizes included ‘a piece of silk for making Lady’s Shanghai dress’ and a bottle of hair cream and a box of face powder, all rare commodities in the battered metropolis. Alarmingly, the Lightning Chemical Institute of 314 U Wisara Road announced in the same issue: ‘The old order has changed. Our Lightning Brand gin helped to bring in the new.’10