Forgotten Wars (46 page)

It was a dismal experience for the soldiers. They were left under their own officers, often in remote areas, and set to task building roads and repairing docks and military installations like ordinary labourers. Some units were exposed to much greater danger, being used in Burma to fight dacoits, or bandits, and in Indo-China in the front line in British action against the Viet Minh. The British established a working relationship with the prisoners of war, giving orders through Japanese commanders and holding them responsible for infractions of discipline. Japanese officers were taken time and time again for interrogation by panels investigating war crimes. There was no fraternization and British officers and men regarded the Japanese with cold racial contempt and hatred. Many Japanese testimonies exist to their physical humiliation and moral demeaning by British troops. Japanese soldiers were made to kneel in front of their captors, to beg for food and to carry out filthy jobs on under 1,600 calories a day, half the amount that should have been fed to POWs. They were given a token wage, initially no days off, and no clothing ration. On occasion sand was thrown in their rice as punishment. By the end of 1946, Red Cross reports on Japanese in central Malaya spoke of rapidly deteriorating morale. The men still had no date for repatriation in sight, they had little mail, insufficient rations, and after fifteen months of hard labour were very vulnerable to disease; routinely, only 85 per cent of the men were fit to be sent out to work.
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On one estimate, the incidence of diseases such as amoebic dysentery and malaria was 21 per cent. A recent study gives a total death toll of JSP from various causes of 8,931; more than those who died on combat duty.
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One account from the 9th Railway Regiment, based in Johore in Malaya, spoke of the charity of rural Chinese with whom they worked for rice and cash on their rest days. Like the British POWs before them, they boosted their morale with theatre and literary magazines. They finally embarked for Japan in September 1947. Tatsuo
Moroshoshi was a sergeant who had fought in Singapore and Burma, then served along the Burma–Thailand and trans-Sumatran railways. As he finally left for home, his officer gave a final speech: ‘All of Japan, including Tokyo and all the big cities is a wide expanse of burnt ruins… You are the warriors for the reconstruction of our fatherland.’
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Japanese civilians also lingered in the region, principally at the transit camp in Jurong in Singapore. In all some 6,000 civilians passed through Singapore. Mamoru Shinozaki, the former Syonan welfare officer, found new work as an interpreter. He spent a strange period dealing with the flotsam and jetsam of the war, such as local women with children who were married to Japanese and struggled for the right to travel with their husbands. They were quietly allowed to join the camp. At Jurong, Chinese came to visit their old employers, so much so that the British laid on a bus service to the camp.
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The British were even petitioned by Chinese men wanting Japanese wives. One offered the successful lady $59 and a bag of rice. He said he was making the application ‘as it is cheaper for me to marry a Japanese wife than a Chinese one’.
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Then there were the Japanese who were long-term residents of Malaya and who wanted to resume their life in a land which they saw as home. One case, in Malacca, involved a Japanese woman who, before the war, had been the companion of a European rubber planter. Local residents remembered her intercessions for them during the occupation, and with their help she was saved from internment. She was allowed to await the return of her lover, only to find that he had brought with him an Australian wife.
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The prospect of the war-crimes trials hung over all Japanese who had worked for the military regime. The hearings in Singapore began in the middle of 1946 and continued until April 1947: 135 men were executed at Changi and 79 more in Malaya. Their remains were interred in a corner of the Japanese civilian cemetery, with a memorial to ‘sacrificed men of valour’.
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There was a brutal coda to this story. At the end of the war, many Japanese soldiers joined resistance armies. In Indonesia perhaps 780 fought, and many died, in the revolution; but over half of them survived and created a small ‘Japindo’ community.
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In Malaya estimates of the numbers of Japanese who crossed over to the MPAJA vary from 200 to 400. Many drifted away when it became clear that
the guerrillas would not fight the British, but the hardcore remained, scattered in squatter villages, where it was comparatively easy to disguise them. The largest concentration, at least twenty or thirty of them, were in the Kuala Kangsar area of Perak, the remnants of a larger group of a hundred or so. After the demobilization of the MPAJA they were suddenly conspicuous and a burden on the Chinese families who sheltered them. The problem was referred to Lai Teck. The reply came back: ‘eliminate the Kuala Kangsar Japanese’. On the pretext of a training exercise they were moved from the squatter villages in twos and threes, taken into the jungle and executed. Chin Peng would later claim that Lai Teck needed to hide their existence from the British, but he also found it hard to believe that, even in the unsettled conditions in Malaya in late 1945 and early 1946, the British could not have known about the Japanese, or been told of them by Lai Teck.
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This incident, like so many others surrounding Lai Teck, remains obscured by shadows. But a handful of Japanese remained with the Communists, and in the years to come they would be remembered for their usefulness with machinery; one of them worked in the Party’s arms factory. In 1990 two Japanese members of the MCP – Shigeyuki Hashimoto, aged seventy-one and Kiyoaki Tanaka, aged seventy-seven – were finally repatriated to Japan – the last of the Japan’s wartime stragglers. The ashes of one of them were returned, at his request, to be scattered in one of the Party’s final encampments in southern Thailand.

In Malaya, at last, the war seemed to be receding slightly, if only for a time. On April Fool’s Day 1946 the British Military Administration officially came to at an end, although at the handover most men merely removed the insignia from their uniforms and carried on working in the same jobs. British troops remained in Indonesia. Singapore was still a massive military base, and gripes about army requisitioning rumbled on. Mountbatten left Singapore and SEAC on 30 May 1946. At a final parade he presented the people of Singapore with a Japanese gun and a Union Jack. The city fathers named a road after him. On
1 July the Singapore Cricket Club reverted to civilian use, and business began to resume as usual. British civil servants began to return from their recuperation leave, some of them prematurely perhaps. But, as O. W. Gilmour reflected after the fall of Singapore, ‘Malaya seemed to have instilled an extraordinary loyalty among those who had lived and worked there and looked on it as their country.’ He saw this, as many others did, as something quite unique about the colony. For these exiles, the lurid press reports after the fall of Singapore of ‘whisky-swilling planters’ and ‘Blimp civil servants’ with no roots in the country had been hard to bear.
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The source of this special attachment to Malaya was hard to define. There were a number of families who could trace their ancestry back over several generations. Roland Braddell, who acted as private adviser to Sultan Ibrahim and later as legal adviser to UMNO itself, was one such. A succession of scholar-administrators invested their lives in the study of the customs, language and history of Malays. For many of them, Malaya was a picturesque refuge from the industrial world. Then there was the landscape itself; luxuriant tropical tones infuse colonial
belles lettres
and memoirs. But perhaps more than this, for those who knew Malaya before the war, what bound them to it was its wealth and ease: a sense of electness, of the sharing of a unique, irrecoverable idyll. ‘All golden ages are legendary’, wrote Victor Purcell, ‘and some are entirely mythical, but all the same I feel that Malaya’s “Golden Age” of between the wars had a firm foundation in fact.’
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But Malaya had entered a new era. ‘It is very different from the “good old days”,’ remarked one new arrival, ‘and people who suffered internment who have returned are finding it difficult to adjust themselves… it is not easy for us, who are used to the country in its present state, to get on with them.’
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People who first arrived in Malaya after 1945 usually made their encounters with it on very different terms.

Before the war, the British had tended to see Malaya as ‘a Tory Eden in which each man is contented with his station, and does not wish for a change’.
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Now planters had to come to terms with the fact that their coolies would not dismount from their bicycles when a European passed by. As the
mems
began to return they were given detailed advice by the Colonial Office on the changed manner of life.

They were warned that they would have to make do with army-style camp beds, ‘whilst your Kebun [gardener] or the Boy’s Wife rejoice in almeirahs and other items of household equipment’. They were advised to bring out their own car; otherwise they would have to use tricycle rickshaws, ‘a widely used Japanese innovation, or walk’. But there was worse. ‘If you are lucky enough to have the ruins of a tennis court (most were dug up for vegetables) you are unlikely to get the labour to restore it, or even keep your garden tidy.’ They were, above all, warned that they will be seen as ‘useless appendages of a decadent civilisation’, and would have to face criticism ‘in a way that has no pre-war parallel’. The Colonial Office, faced with the problem of recruiting staff, was appalled at the frank tone of this memorandum: ‘Is all the horror strictly necessary?’
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But returning British residents discovered that they had indeed lost almost everything in the wreck of 1942. Visiting journalists, attending a cocktail party in their honour in Singapore, were shocked when one of the first guests walked across the room and claimed two of the pictures on the wall.
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Even before the war the British community in Malaya was becoming increasingly divided by class and income, and old Malaya families were contemptuous of birds of passage. Now these divisions became more sharply defined and instrumental. Most returning civil servants abhorred the Malayan Union and the superficial democratization of colonial life. They never forgave the governor, Sir Edward Gent, for his role in the debacle. Gent became an aloof figure: ‘a slight, tense little man’, wrote John Gullick, who arrived in Malaya with the BMA and was to become one of Britain’s most notable scholar-administrators, ‘concentrating on what he had to do and giving little attention to anything or anybody else’.
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For his part, Gent was very open about his desire to bring the ‘Heaven born’ of the Malayan Civil Service back down to earth. He treated them as bureaucratic subordinates; no more, no less. The war itself was another bitter divide. An ex-POW and internees’ association was soon formed. But even within it there were subtle, vicious distinctions. As the journalist Vernon Bartlett reported:

You will be told, for example, that Smith is a very decent chap, but that he was one of the ones who got away… You will also be told that Jones is
a very decent chap, but that he was one of those who stayed on, spent his time in internment and won’t let you forget it… Brown, you are told, is a very decent chap, but his attitude at camp was so provocative that it led to Japanese reprisals… Robinson you will be told, is a very decent chap, but his efforts to get milder conditions for people in the camp came very near to collaboration…
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The police force in particular was crippled by resentments. Some officers had, in the confusion of the fall of Singapore, escaped. Two of the senior men involved had served with distinction in Special Operations Executive, and one had died in an aircraft crash at the end of the war. The Colonial Office viewed the matter as closed. But internees had had a long time to brood on their resentments in the camps, and demanded that those who had escaped be called to account.
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When some of the offenders – ‘the seventeen’, as they were numbered – returned, in many cases promoted, the sufferings of Changi and Sime Road seemed to have been in vain.

Men might refuse to speak to each other for years on end, but the overarching exclusivity of European life in the colony returned. The clubs reopened, and restored their old rules of membership. From 1946, the roll at Kuala Lumpur’s Lake Club still comprised 40 per cent company directors, 30 per cent Malayan Civil Service and only 20 per cent planters and miners.
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In the hotels and dance halls a more egalitarian mood reigned; ballroom dancing was a great a social leveller in places such as the Atomic in Singapore. Malcolm MacDonald and his new Canadian wife embraced this new democratic style. MacDonald challenged the committee of the Tanglin Club by bringing the Chinese banking tycoon Tan Chin Tuan to dine. They wrote to him to complain. He later lent his patronage to the new Island golf club to develop it as a multiracial enclave for the great and good. Golf became the defining pastime of the new elite. The agent of the government of India, S. K. Chettur, adored the MacDonalds. They had, he reported, ‘no side’. But even the energetic and democratic Chettur found Singapore’s informality a little
de trop
. He complained of the long queues of soldiers and their girlfriends at the cinema – ‘too plebian and fatiguing’ – and was most perturbed that the Indian community in Singapore after the war did not observe the niceties of
‘calling’, where new arrivals left their cards at the houses of leading families as a genuflection to the hierarchy: ‘Social life as we understood it in Madras’, he wrote, ‘was unknown in Malaya.’
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This quaint colonial ritual did not revive in post-war Malaya, but other social norms did. Ralph Hone, ex-grammar-school boy and now a rising star of the colonial service, found that his progress to a governorship of the Malayan Union, or even the governor generalship itself, was barred because, in 1945, he had divorced and remarried. Despite their disagreements, Mountbatten took up the issue with his cousin George VI, who then abolished the bar on divorcees. Hone served as Secretary General to Malcolm MacDonald, and later was awarded his governorship in North Borneo. But in his letter of appointment Hone was told that under no circumstances would he be invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
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