On 1 September 1945 a large Royal Navy flotilla appeared off the northwest coast of Malaya. As the island of Penang, Britain’s oldest possession in Southeast Asia, came into view, a ‘Singapore curry’ was served to the officers and men on the command ship, HMS Derbyshire. Its taste was unrecognizable to many of the old Malaya hands present, who remembered the real thing. The landings had been delayed, by order of General MacArthur, until after 9 a.m. on 2 September: the moment when he was to receive the surrender of the Japanese High Command on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At this ceremony, positioned directly behind him, was Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the man who had commanded British forces in Malaya in 1942. He had been released from Japanese internment on Taiwan and was shortly afterwards to witness the capitulation in the Philippines of his arch-nemesis, General Yamashita. Like many Japanese senior commanders, Yamashita would be tried and executed as a war criminal. Percival would return to London finally to write his despatch on the fall of Singapore. The whole series of events was carefully choreographed to impress on the peoples of Asia that Japan had been defeated by force of arms, and to erase the memory of the earlier Allied capitulations.
The original battle plan had called for a series of co-ordinated landings: first, a strike at the Thai island of Phuket to capture forward airbases, and then an assault in larger force on two main landing grounds in Malaya, at Morib beach in Selangor and the resort of Port Dickson, some miles to the south. The original codenames signalled martial resolve: Mailfist – the push to the south to Singapore, a replica of the Japanese blitzkrieg of 1941–2 – and Broadsword – a sweep northwards from Kuala Lumpur to secure the rest of the peninsula. Mountbatten had estimated it would take him until the end of the year to fight his way to Singapore, and likely longer if a large garrison was mustered to hold it. However, the operation was now Tiderace: a dash to occupy Singapore. The first landings at Penang were designed to probe the intentions of the Japanese, but no resistance was encountered. After some delay, and a failure to attend an earlier meeting, the Japanese local commander, Rear Admiral Jisaku Uzumi, came aboard HMS Nelson on the evening of 2 September, wearing the DSC he had earned as Britain’s ally in the 1914–18 war, and surrendered the garrison. He fainted and was rushed to hospital; the military policemen who carried him there took his sword as a souvenir.77 The next morning, led by the town band, a detachment of Royal Marines marched to the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. The E&O had been the hub of the pre-war colonial elite, the place where the entire British community had gathered secretly on the night of 16 December 1941 to abandon the island. It had been left to the Ceylonese editor of the local Straits Echo, M. Saravanamuttu, to lower the Union Flag at Fort Cornwallis and surrender Penang to the Japanese. In September 1945, Saravanamuttu once again gathered together the representatives of the Asian communities, this time to pass the administration of their home back to Britain. As the Royal Marines marched they threw Senior Service cigarettes into the crowds. Those who managed to grab them sold them at exorbitant prices to buy food. Across the island, hunger riots were breaking out.78
On the morning of 4 September the armada passed the old Raffles Lighthouse, at the southern entrance to the Straits of Malacca. After 1,297 days as a Japanese city, ‘Syonan’ was to fall to the British without a shot. As they approached the island the soldiers noted that the Japanese defensive dispositions were remarkably similar to those adopted by Percival in 1941. The first, tense encounter between British and Japanese officers was aboard HMS Sussex. There were still rumours that General Itagaki had defied Hirohito’s orders and ordered a die-hard defence of Malaya. The navy feared Japanese attack boats. Itagaki was furious that the humiliating task of surrender had fallen to him. (His superior, Count Terauchi, had suffered a stroke in Vietnam.) Accompanying Itagaki was one of the architects of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Vice Admiral Shigeu Fukudome. Itagaki was received aboard by the senior British officers, Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison and Major General E. C. R. Mansergh. The contrast between the two delegations was striking. The Japanese were in immaculately starched ceremonial rig, with their swords at their side. The British officers wore crumpled battledress. They had left India at short notice, with no change of clothes; there was no water to wash with on ship, and their skin was stained by the malaria preventative Mepachrin. A Japanese officer was reported to have remarked: ‘You are two hours late,’ only to be met with the reply, ‘We don’t keep Tokyo time here.’ The main issue at the meeting was responsibility for law and order on the island. Then Itagaki was given an agreement to sign. He shut himself with his aides in an anteroom for four hours to translate it. The only concession Itagaki secured, and that only temporary, was the right of his officers to keep their swords. He left the meeting in tears.79
The next morning advance parties of British and Indian troops landed on the southern islands, and at 11 a.m. reached the docks at Tanjong Pagar. One of the first men ashore was O. W. Gilmour, a civil engineer who had been one of the last to leave in February 1942. ‘Two Indians and a Chinese boy, looking very dazed, appeared from a near-by shed. They were the only people in sight and I addressed them in Malay, getting no response but a stupefied stare. Walking to the Station Buildings, we passed two more Chinese, and exchanged a subdued “Tabek” (good-day), which, in the circumstances, seemed an inadequate greeting.’ The mood was one of ‘overwhelming desolation’. Two hours later Gilmour joined a small convoy of three jeeps that sped through the residential areas of Chinatown, along New Bridge Road. Crowds lined the route, Union Jacks appeared at windows, but as the British crossed Singapore river the ceremonial and municipal heart of the city around the Padang was empty of people. There were no more than a dozen spectators to the hoisting of the Union Flag above the Municipal Building at around 13.45 hours. The Japanese officers assigned to witness the event were nowhere to be found. They were indeed still on Tokyo time, as the whole of Singapore had been for three and a half years. They had come and gone two hours earlier. One of Gilmour’s first tasks was to put the public clocks back two hours.80 On Saturday 8 September the first British libertymen came ashore, including seventy sailors from HMS Cleopatra who marched through the streets to Jalan Besar stadium for a game of football.81
If the main British landings on the Malay peninsula had been opposed, there is a strong possibility that they would have been swept into the sea by the Japanese. Despite the intimate knowledge of the terrain professed by many British officers, the sites chosen were entirely unsuitable. The first landings at Morib on 9 September were a disaster. On the first day, fifty trucks and tanks sunk or were mired in the sand and very few made it to the beach without being winched out. There was hardly any room on the beachhead and only one good road leading away from it. Vehicles were hemmed in by drainage ditches and a raised water pipe; this meant that the off-road area required to de-waterproof tanks and lorries was not available and the beach road flooded. ‘“Zipper”’, according to 17 Squadron’s war diary, ‘seemed to come slightly “Unzipped”.’ If the 6,000 Japanese at Kuala Lumpur had attacked in concentrated force, British commanders would have had little option but to withdraw their forces.82 Chin Peng stood beside John Davis and watched from the Japanese lines: it was ‘an anticlimax – a dramatic scene – but an anticlimax nonetheless’. He recalled his feelings many years later: ‘We are letting them back unimpeded to reclaim a territory they have plundered for so long.’ Then, in a final humiliation, Force 136 was ordered to break cover and ask the Japanese for transport to allow British troops to move inland.83 The other landing zone at Port Dickson was choked by sightseers. ‘It was’, according to another Force 136 witness, ‘a circus atmosphere. A carnival with roadside stalls, puppet shows and entertainers.’84
For the next few days the British grip on events was uncertain. Detachments did not reach Malaya’s largest state of Pahang for a further three weeks: along the entire east coast the colonial government was represented by a handful of Force 136 officers. The first British troops reached Kuala Lumpur on 12 September to find the streets deserted. ‘If the populace were happy to see us,’ remarked one officer of the Royal Devon Yeomanry, ‘they proved adept at concealing their emotions.’85 The jungle fighters of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army were already established in the capital. Chin Peng, together with the military commander, Liew Yao, moved into a commandeered bungalow in the elite white suburb of Kenny Hill. Chin had been travelling widely, enforcing the peace between the British and the MPAJA. His mood was bleak. ‘I had been required to calm and pacify, restrain and arrest. I was mentally and emotionally drained.’86 There were confrontations between the MPAJA and the north-Indian troops of 5 Division, who took them to be Japanese. The Indians did not received a warm welcome; they had no linguistic common ground with the people of Malaya, and after nearly four years of war, all men in uniform were viewed with suspicion. Recognizing this, the local British commander staged a ceremony in front of the Royal Selangor Club, the ‘Spotted Dog’ of pre-war days, at which the MPAJA were allowed to take centre stage.87
Over 70,000 Japanese remained on Singapore island, another reminder of the fragility of the British position. Many of them were still armed, and the people of Singapore watched in furious incomprehension as the officers continued to wear their swords. But over the next few days the Japanese were paraded and stripped of their valuables. British forces took these piles of ‘souvenirs’ as the legitimate spoils of war. There were few reprisals, however. Many of the troops were newly arrived to Asia, and had not been a part of the bitter fighting in Burma. Those who had were less charitable to the Japanese rank and file. In a public spectacle designed to repay the humiliations of 1942, the captives were put to work levelling the turf of the ceremonial ground of the Padang in preparation for Mountbatten’s arrival. Some turned up to work in white gloves and refused to take them off. A crowd gathered to watch. People jeered and cheered when a European ex-prisoner of war stepped forward, and in mockery of the martial style of Nippon, slapped the face of a Japanese officer.88 Across Malaya most of the Japanese were put to task in grim conditions. In Perak three Japanese died after they had been given the job of dredging a dry dock using empty seven-pound jam tins.89 One Japanese prisoner in Singapore, Shikimachi Gentarō, described how 2,000 of them were cooped up in warehouses near the piers and made to work twelve hours a day. ‘The worst indignity was cleaning out the sewers of the town where Chinese, Indians and Malays lived together. We were told to dredge by hand the dead rats and human excrement that flowed down… if we disobeyed our captors at all we were beaten with rifles and kicked. There were those who went crazy and those who died from malnutrition.’ It was two years before he was sent home. ‘I am not excusing the conduct of the Japanese,’ he said in recounting this years later. ‘War makes all of us lose our humanity.’90
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.91Hitherto, 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’.93They 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 – mostly 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.