THREE WEEKS IN MALAYA

For so many people, the fortunes of war would be decided in the interregnum that followed the Japanese surrender. Many of the definitive political events of the war occurred in the power vacuum between two empires. In these few short weeks bids for freedom were made in Burma, Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia. This was also a time of some of the most horrific internal violence within these societies, the memory of which continues to scar the collective consciousness of the nation-states that emerged. Nowhere, perhaps, was the political future so open as in Malaya. It was here that the Japanese had devolved the least power to their Asian subjects. It was here too that imperial power was about to be reasserted with the greatest resolve. But on 15 August 1945 Mountbatten’s army of re-occupation was still in India. Its vanguard reached Malaya only three weeks later. In this hiatus of anxiety and anticipation, most of the people there did not know who or what to expect. In the towns of the Malay peninsula the flags that flew most prominently were those of China, bearing the name of the communist-led Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army as they fluttered from triumphal arches erected across the streets. As its fighters came down from the mountains, a struggle began for control of Malaya.

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 recognize ‘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 Blantan, 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’.³⁹As 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.

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

The distinction between patriotism and criminality was merely one of perspective. The end of the war also saw a resurgence of the triads, the Chinese secret societies that combined protection rackets with popular sanction as defenders of their communities. At the beginning of the occupation the Japanese had executed any man they found with triad tattoos. Triad members from Penang took refuge in the Chinese fishing villages of the mangrove swamps on the west coast; they too profited from smuggling and low-level piracy, and used their gains to propitiate both corrupt Japanese officials and the guerrillas in the hills. But in August, under the shadow of the revolutionary wrath of the MPAJA, a new brotherhood was formed to unite the secret societies. It was known as the Ang Bin Hoay – the Brotherhood of the Ang [or Hung] People – a name which denoted kinship with a long lineage of societies in China that claimed to uphold the true ethos of the Chinese people. One fishermen described his initiation rite: ‘We were gathered together and invited to save ourselves against the invasion of communists. There were no prayers. There were joss sticks, and we took our oaths that we would be punished by Heaven if we did wrong.’ They fought to keep the MPAJA out of their villages, and made common cause with the Banjarese Malays in the Lower Perak disturbances. In Singapore and elsewhere, similar gangs claimed to act in the name of the MPAJA, and terrorized locals under names such as the Exterminate Traitor Corps, Blood and Iron Corps and Dare to Die Corps.⁷⁰

South East Asia Command’s search for allies, and its bonanza of arms, extended to the Malays as well. There were anti-Japanese groups in Perak and Kedah that called themselves Askar Melayu Setia – the Loyal Malay Soldier – and in the wild west of Pahang, Wataniah – For the Homeland. They had their own Force 136 liaison officers, and the British parachuted in to them some Malay agents: mostly former civil servants or pilgrims to Mecca who had become stranded by the war in the bazaars of Cairo and Bombay. As the tide of war turned, these movements obtained covert support from Malay courts and district officers, not least to counter-balance the influence of the MPAJA. For the British their importance was not so much military as political: they were vital to dispel the idea that the Malay majority were disloyal to the Empire.

American agents of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, were also becoming increasingly interested in Malaya, and had parachuted in at a late stage. On direct orders from Colombo, and working with Wataniah, a small party captured the Sultan of Pahang en route to Kuala Lumpur, and placed him under armed guard. The sultan was kept in a squalid jungle camp together with a huddle of fractious Chinese refugees for over three weeks. This was ostensibly to prevent him falling into the hands of the communists; it was also to stop him acting as titular head of the independent Malay government that was about to be formed in the capital. But the rumour was put about that the communists had taken him, and this raised ethnic tensions in the state.⁷¹ In the event, few of the royal houses were molested. In Kedah, the defence of the Sultan of Kedah’s palace and of Malay villages was orchestrated by a youth organization, known as Saberkas, a co-operative society formed in the state capital in 1944. Among its patrons was a middle-aged prince from the ruling house of the state, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who had before the war enjoyed a reputation as something of a playboy. Like many Malay aristocrats he had lain low in the occupation, working as a district officer and, with quiet acumen, tried to deflect some of the worst excesses of Japanese rule away from the population. In the interregnum he managed to use his influence with Malay young men to recruit four lorry-loads of Malays for Force 136 and to keep racial violence at bay.⁷² These acts would give him good credentials for the defence of Malay interests when, some six years later, as a somewhat unlikely contender, he would emerge as a major political force.

The Malay elite had lost ground in the war, and now struggled to reclaim their position. At the height of the violence in Batu Pahat in Johore, Sultan Ibrahim appointed a fifty-year-old local notable, Onn bin Jaafar, as district officer, after the incumbent was assassinated by the MPAJA. Over the years Onn had enjoyed a stormy relationship with his royal patron; he had been raised at court, and his father had been the sultan’s chief minister, but his family had fallen from grace and Onn had made his own way in Singapore as one of the first full-time Malay journalists. In 1928 he was accused of lèse majesté and treason after he wrote a series of articles called ‘Tyranny in Johore’ for an English-language newspaper, attacking the sultan for abuse of power, extravagance and corruption (‘His motor car deals would excite the envy of a Lombardy Jew’).⁷³ However, a talented man of letters was too influential to overlook, and Onn was rehabilitated by Sultan Ibrahim shortly before the war. Onn had stood quietly to one side as the Japanese conquered Malaya; his son, Hussain – a later prime minister of Malaysia – served in the Indian Army. But like other prominent Malays, he had been implicated in Ibrahim Yaacob’s movement for independence in 1945. As the violence in his district reached a head, and Kyai Salleh’s supporters massed to attack the Chinese town of Batu Pahat, Onn made a decisive intervention by opening negotiations with the MPAJA and the Sabilillah fighters. When the talks hung in the balance, Onn is said to have confronted Kyai Salleh in front of some 1,600 of his armed supporters. In a melodramatic account of the incident by an early biographer, Onn bared his chest to the holy warrior, saying: ‘Plunge your dagger into it if you do not wish to obey me.’ Kyai Salleh was overcome by the power of his words.⁷⁴ In other versions, Onn is said to have flattered Kyai Salleh, warning him that the British were about to arrive in force, and so perhaps offered him an honourable way out by bringing him some local Chinese to sue for peace. But from any telling of this, Onn bin Jaafar’s reputation grew, and Kyai Salleh became one of his most devoted political supporters.⁷⁵

During the war communities had learned to defend themselves, and after the surrender of Japan they did not give up this prerogative lightly. All local pretenders to power along the crescent would need to come to terms with these forces of violence, and even cultivate them for a time. For the returning British, however, the central task was to contain and neutralize them. This set in motion a central dilemma of Britain’s Asian crisis as it now began to unfold. Throughout the history of British imperialism, conquest had been legitimated by the argument that without colonial rule, territories would be in a state of perpetual civil war. After the Second World War, British statesmen would argue that Asia could not be free until it was at peace. To this the nationalists would reply that peace was all well and good, but not better than life itself, and that there would be no peace until Asia was free. In national memory, the communal violence of this period remains a dark and eternal point of reference; a time when the bonds of the region’s plural societies were tested to the absolute limit. Although the tragedy in Johore was only one small incident among so many others, it was not untypical, and still hundreds had perished while thousands more were forced to flee their burning villages. It was a prelude to other communal bloodlettings that would play out across the crescent on an even larger scale. Significantly, in Batu Pahat local leaders had restored social peace before the British soldiers arrived. By 2 September, the end of Ramadan, traditionally a time of reconciliation, an uneasy calm prevailed in the area. A short distance up the coast lay the beachheads for Operation Zipper, and the second colonial conquest of Malaya was heralded by the dropping of leaflets announcing the abolition of the Japanese ‘banana’ currency and by the spraying of insecticide from the air.⁷⁶