Torrance: Escape from Singapore Read online

  Pasting a smile on his face, Torrance turned to answer the sergeant’s summons. ‘Yes, Sar’nt?’

  ‘Why were ye no’ in yer bunk at oh-four hundred hours this morning?’

  ‘I was in the latrines.’

  ‘At four o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Gyppy tummy.’

  ‘Ye’ve been eating the same rations as the rest of us, have ye no’?’

  ‘Yes, Sar’nt.’

  ‘If I find out ye broke out of barracks, ye’ll be for the high-jump. Do I make myself plain?’

  ‘Yes, Sar’nt.’

  ‘Awreet. Now ye’d better report to the CO’s office.’

  Torrance’s heart sank. He wondered what he was supposed to have done now; it was too soon for the MP’s body to have been discovered. ‘The CO’s office?’

  ‘Is there an echo here? Aye, Torrance, the CO’s office.’

  ‘What does he want to see me for?’

  ‘I widnae ken. He disnae confide everything in me. Why d’ye no’ go to his office to find out?’

  ‘Yes, Sar’nt.’

  ‘And put yer shirt on, laddie. This is an army barracks, no’ Gourock Lido.’

  Keeping his shirt folded in his hand, Torrance entered the hut he shared with Rossi, MacRae and the other men of Lance Corporal Gibson’s section. He tucked the bloodstained shirt in his pack – he did not want someone going through his locker in his absence and discovering the incriminating evidence – and put on a clean one.

  Before he reported to the CO’s office, he gave his appearance a final check in a small mirror hanging from a nail in the shelf above his bunk. Colonel Stewart already knew Torrance was a rotten soldier and Torrance had long since given up trying to pretend otherwise, but he wanted to check there was nothing about his appearance to suggest a couple of hours earlier he had been stealing hundreds of nylons from Seletar naval base and acting as an accessory to murder.

  Gibson loomed behind him. ‘Where the hell have ye been?’

  ‘Mind your own sodding business, Hoot.’

  ‘I heard that!’

  ‘I meant you to.’

  Gibson smiled nastily. ‘Ye think ye can treat me wi’ disrespect and get awa’ wi’ it just ’cause I’m only a lancejack, do ye? Ye mark my words, Torrance, those days are coming to an end. The CO’s appointing three new corporals today.’

  ‘And you think you’ll be one of the chosen few, do yer?’

  ‘I know I will. See ye, I’ve been running this section ever since Corporal Campbell disappeared. Who else d’ye think the CO’s gaunae promote to replace him?’

  ‘What can I say, Hoot? We must really have our backs to the wall if we’re gonna give you a second dog’s-leg.’

  Gibson scowled. ‘Ye keep pushing me, Torrance. Just ye try it. I’ll be watchin’ ye like a hawk. One foot wrong, I swear, one foot wrong, I’ll come down on ye like a ton o’ bricks.’

  Satisfied he looked as smart as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances, Torrance made his way to the atap-thatched administration hut. Through the open doorway, he could see the adjutant on the telephone, remonstrating loudly with whoever was on the other end, while the orderly corporal sat at a typewriter, clattering away.

  After HMSs Prince of Wales and Repulse had been sunk by Japanese bombers two days after Pearl Harbor, there had been enough marines amongst the survivors to form two infantry companies. Since the Argylls had lost the equivalent of two companies in their fighting retreat down the Malayan Peninsula, someone had thought it would be a good idea to amalgamate the survivors with the marines, quite possibly the same wit who had decided to christen them the Plymouth Argylls in honour of Plymouth Argyle Football Club. Although they were kept in separate companies – the Highlanders forming A and D Companies, the marines forming B and C – they had already instituted a friendly rivalry by tackling one another in a football match and a spectacular NAAFI brawl. Now one of the marines stood on sentry-go at the door. As Torrance tried to enter, the marine blocked his way.

  ‘I’ve been ordered to report to the CO,’ Torrance told him.

  ‘The CO’s in a meeting.’ The marine nodded to where Lance Corporals Wilson and McGhee and Privates Hunter and Graham stood at ease on the veranda. ‘Wait here.’

  ‘All right, lads,’ Torrance greeted the others. ‘What are you here for?’

  Wilson shrugged. ‘I was just told to report to the CO,’ he said, and the others nodded.

  The colonel kept them waiting another ten minutes. Occasionally the adjutant’s exasperated voice rose high enough for them to hear clearly what he was saying – remonstrating about a lack of transport, or demanding to know whereabouts the battalion was supposed to be heading to fight the Japanese who had landed last night – and not getting a very satisfactory answer by the sound of things.

  The colonel’s meeting broke up and Captain Slessor emerged with the four company commanders. They descended the short flight of steps and hurried off in different directions with the air of men on a mission.

  ‘Are the five ORs I sent for here yet?’ Torrance heard the colonel call from his office.

  ‘Waiting on the veranda, sir,’ the orderly corporal called back.

  ‘Bring them in.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The orderly corporal stepped out onto the veranda. ‘Inside, you five. Quick march… mark time… halt! Right turn. ’Ten-shun!’

  The two lance corporals and three privates lined up before the colonel’s desk, standing smartly to attention with their thumbs aligned with the seams of their Bombay bloomers, dark sweat patches already spreading from the armpits of their khaki drills.

  A wiry man, Lieutenant Colonel Iain McAlister Stewart, the thirteenth Laird of Achnacone, was referred to behind his back by the men under his command as ‘Busty’, on account of his narrow chest, but no one would have denied he was as hard as nails and tough as old boots. With his bristling moustache he reminded Torrance somewhat of James Finlayson, the Scottish actor who often played the villain in Laurel and Hardy films, but there was nothing comical about Stewart. In fact, he put the fear of God into Torrance. The cockney fixed his eyes on a gecko clinging to the panel of plaited bamboo above and behind the colonel’s head.

  ‘McGhee, Torrance and Wilson, I’m promoting the three of you to corporal,’ the colonel said briskly. ‘Hunter and Graham, you two are appointed lance corporals, you’ll support your respective corporals. Torrance, your section already has a lance corporal.’

  Torrance’s heart sank. ‘Yes, sir. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather promote Lance Corporal Gibson to full corporal?’

  ‘I’m sure. Fetch your stripes from the quartermaster. McGhee, Torrance and Wilson, hand in your Lee–Enfields and take Thompsons instead. The adjutant’s already had a word with him so he’s expecting you. Dismiss.’

  ‘Sah!’ McGhee, Wilson, Hunter and Graham all saluted, turned on their heels and marched out. Feeling sick with despair, Torrance started to follow them. He was almost across the threshold when he decided to make one last plea for sanity and turned back to the colonel.

  ‘With all due respect, sir, you haven’t forgotten what happened the last time I was promoted to corporal?’

  ‘As I recollect, you did an acceptable job until you took it into your head to strike a subaltern. We’re short of NCOs, Torrance. I need you to pull your weight.’

  ‘I’d rather not, sir.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you want, Corporal!’ The colonel thumped a fist against his desk in an uncharacteristic display of anger. ‘I’m not asking you if you want to be a corporal, I’m telling you. And if you try to wriggle out of it by punching another subaltern, I swear I’ll see to it you’ll do so much hard time it’ll make the six months you did at Lucknow seem like a week at Butlin’s! Now get out of my sight.’

  ‘Sir.’ Torrance saluted again, turned and marched out. Descending the steps from the veranda, he marched in the direction of the quartermaster’s stores to collect his stripes and Thompson.
He smiled grimly. At least he could look forward to telling Gibson he had just been promoted over his head.

  * * *

  Colonel Hamilton replaced the handset on the cradle of the telephone and considered the very distinct possibility he had just single-handedly lost the war against Japan. The Allies had not been doing particularly well even before he had blundered in and made a muck-up of things, but until the telephone had rung a few minutes earlier there had always been the possibility that they might yet snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. Hamilton had a nasty feeling he might just have clamped defeat’s jaws shut and pinched its nostrils until it swallowed victory beyond all hope of retrieval.

  He emerged from his office in the long wooden hut at Sime Road which was the Combined Army and Air Force Headquarters. The main room bustled with staff officers, the clatter of typewriters and the trill of telephones. Orderlies in khaki drills were already boxing up files and carrying them out to the lorries waiting to take them to the ‘Battle Box’, the new air-conditioned, bombproof concrete bunker built behind Fort Canning which was to serve as Malaya Command’s new headquarters.

  Hamilton toyed pensively with one end of his moustache: a restrained version of a pilot officer’s handlebar moustache, frizzed at the ends, a memento of his days seconded to the Royal Flying Corps in the last war. One of the few men at Sime Road who did not habitually wear uniform, he wore the Brigade of Guards tie at his throat and had a slight paunch developing beneath the waistcoat of his three-piece suit of white cotton duck.

  He made his way to the Combined Operations Room. Until a few days ago, the room had been staffed by a bevy of young Eurasian plotters recruited locally to the Auxiliary Territorial Service who moved the counters around the map table with their plotting rods. Now they had been evacuated against the possibility of a Japanese victory, and their role was being filled by NCOs from the Royals Corps of Signals. A quick survey of the table showed most of the British counters on the north-east coast of Singapore, with most of the Japanese counters on the other side of the Strait of Johore across from them. There were a few Australian counters at the western end of the island, surrounding a couple of counters indicating which Japanese regiments had been confirmed as having landed at Sarimbun the previous night, including one now sitting plum smack on top of Tengah Airfield. Even as Hamilton watched, another Japanese counter was picked up from the mass to the east of Johore and moved to Sarimbun.

  ‘Sir, are you sure it wouldn’t be advisable to move just a couple of British infantry battalions to support the Australians?’ asked a staff officer.

  General Percival shook his head. He was a tall, skinny man with buck teeth beneath a greying pencil moustache, self-conscious about his height if the way he stooped his narrow shoulders was any indication. His knobbly knees sticking out from beneath his baggy Bombay bloomers, he was an ungainly figure whose ludicrous appearance was entirely at odds with his reputation: he wore no block of ribbons on the breast of his shirt, but Hamilton knew he was entitled to the DSO, Croix de Guerre and Military Cross, all of which he had picked up on the Western Front in the last war.

  ‘That’s exactly what the Japanese want us to do,’ Percival told the staff officer.

  ‘But sir, if the Japs already have a foothold on the western end of the island—’

  ‘Gordon Bennett assures me he has the situation in his sector entirely under control,’ said Percival. ‘I have no reason to doubt him.’

  Seeing what matters of great moment Percival was wrestling with, the matters of his own department suddenly seemed less pressing and Hamilton was tempted to withdraw without adding an additional burden to the load on Percival’s shoulders. But he knew that would be cowardice on his own part: to execute his plan to tidy up the mess he had made, he would need Percival’s approval, and even if that had not been the case, he had a duty to make sure Percival was acting on the best information available, even if that information concerned the failure of a senior intelligence officer.

  ‘Wonder if I might have a word in private, sir?’ Hamilton asked Percival.

  In similar circumstances, any other general in Percival’s shoes might have growled that he did not have time, but Percival, unfailingly polite in all circumstances, merely said ‘Yes, of course’ and asked the staff officer to excuse him before beckoning Hamilton to follow him into his private office.

  The office was small and spartan, with a simple desk and a camp bed against one wall. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Hamilton,’ said Percival. ‘How did that business with al-Jawziyya go?’

  ‘It hasn’t, yet,’ admitted the colonel. ‘You’ll recall I agreed we’d send someone to persuade Mr al-Jawziyya to evacuate to Java?’

  Percival nodded.

  Hamilton swallowed. It was time to drop the bomb. ‘I sent Killigrew.’

  ‘Good choice,’ said Percival. ‘Killigrew’s a fine officer…’

  ‘Killigrew just called me on the telephone. From Istana Mimpi. Al-Jawziyya is still there.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Percival. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

  The general’s reaction was so restrained Hamilton suspected he still had not grasped the full implications of what he was telling him. ‘You haven’t forgotten Killigrew has “Magic” clearance?’

  Only a handful of people still in Singapore had Magic clearance. It meant they were privy to the fact that the Americans had cracked the Japanese diplomatic service’s newest code, code-named ‘Purple’ by the Americans. Adolf Hitler was very candid in his conversations with the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, and since the ambassador used the Purple code to send detailed reports of the Fuhrer’s plans back to Tokyo, it meant intercepts of those transmissions provided the Allies with invaluable intelligence. If the Japanese found out the Allies had penetrated that code – for example, by capturing and torturing an officer with Magic clearance – then they would stop using it and a vital source of intelligence would dry up.

  ‘Of course, if I’d had the least inkling the Japs were going to land so close to Istana Mimpi, I would never have sent Killigrew—’

  Percival waved Hamilton to silence and turned to study a wall map of Singapore. ‘No sign of any Japs at Istana Mimpi yet?’

  ‘No, sir. But with the Japanese now at Tengah Airfield, it means Killigrew and al-Jawziyya are cut off. There’s still a chance we can get them out, though. You remember when the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were on manoeuvres last summer, they succeeded in crossing the Kranji Creek without boats? If Colonel Stewart can spare just half a dozen of his best men, they could ford the creek, make their way to Istana Mimpi and rescue Killigrew and al-Jawziyya—’

  ‘It sounds risky, Colonel.’

  ‘Given what’s at stake, I think the risk is worth taking.’

  Percival shook his head. ‘If the landings at Sarimbun were part of the main Japanese thrust to take Singapore, perhaps. But I’m convinced they’re merely a diversion, intended to fool us into withdrawing some of our troops from between Seletar and Serangoon, where we can expect the Japanese to attempt their main thrust, either tonight or tomorrow night. Gordon Bennett assures me his boys will have the Japanese troops at the west end of the island mopped up in a day or two. When he’s finished, you’ll have no problem driving to Istana Mimpi to pick up Killigrew and al-Jawziyya in person.’

  Hamilton was not sure he shared Percival’s confidence in Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennett’s abilities, much less Gordon Bennett’s confidence in himself. ‘Given how much is at stake, sir, are you sure it wouldn’t be wiser to extract Killigrew and al-Jawziyya as a precautionary measure?’

  Percival reopened the door to his office and gestured for Hamilton to precede him out of it, indicating that the interview had come to an end. ‘No need to concern yourself, Colonel. Order Killigrew to sit tight. I’m sure it will all work out fine in the end.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  But Hamilton was concerned, deeply concerned. He headed back to his own office. Percival might have
told him not to worry about it, but he had not expressly forbidden him from drawing up a plan to extract Killigrew and al-Jawziyya.

  * * *

  Captain Yashiro pulled up his black Datsun Road Star in front of the red-and-white pole across the gate to Uchida Castle, a few miles outside Kyoto. One of the soldiers on sentry duty – immaculate in full dress uniform – saluted him and held out a hand. Yashiro handed him his identity card. The sentry glanced at the black-and-white photograph on the card, then at Yashiro’s face. He motioned for the captain to remove his dark glasses. Yashiro did, revealing blue eyes. Yashiro was from Hokkaido and his eyes were a reminder of his Ainu ancestry, which was why he preferred to keep them hidden behind the glasses. The sentry kept his face impassive, but Yashiro could sense the man’s disgust and loathing.

  But there was no question his face matched the photograph, so the sentry signalled his comrade to raise the pole, and Yashiro drove through, parking in the car park and following the main footpath through the Japanese garden, across the wooden bridge that arced picturesquely over a broad pool where koi swam. Built in the seventeenth century, Uchida Castle was a classic Japanese fortress with strongly buttressed masonry at ground level topped with several floors built of wood, each one slightly smaller in area than the one below, all of them with sweeping curved roofs of green tiles.

  Yashiro negotiated his way past the sentries at the main door, and one of Baron Uchida’s aides appeared to escort him through a series of rooms. In the first, two officers practised kendo with bamboo swords; in the second, dozens of technicians manned banks of consoles – telephone switchboards, telegraph keypads, pneumatic tubes, stock tickers, wireless transceivers and cipher machines – sending and receiving messages all around the world.

  There was no single, permanent department in the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for military intelligence. Instead, the Secret Section of the Second Bureau of the Imperial General Staff set up special service agencies called tokumu kikan to carry out specific tasks on an ad hoc basis. Commanded by Baron Uchida, and named after him, Uchida Kikan – U-Kikan for short – was one such unit, with responsibility for gathering intelligence about the mineral resources of the various countries Japan was set on invading. Indeed, Japan would not now be embarking on this war if U-Kikan had not provided the raw intelligence behind the projections that Japan would become entirely self-sufficient if it achieved all its war aims.