CHAPTER 12
The planned defence of Malaya and Singapore relied on 355 front-line aircraft and a strong fleet to defeat any invasion before it could establish itself on land. In December 1941 there were only 158 second-rate aircraft, as well as the new battleship, Prince of Wales, and the old battlecruiserRepulse, which sailed without air cover on 8 December and were sunk on the 10th. The Army totalled approximately 140,000 men but was a heterogeneous assembly of two Indian Army divisions and late-arriving reinforcements from Australia and the 18th Division from Britain, none of whom was trained or equipped for jungle fighting. With only 55,000 men Lieutenant General Yamashita repeatedly outflanked British positions the length of the Malayan peninsula and assaulted across the Johore Strait to land on Singapore Island on 9 February. Although he was desperately overextended he now controlled Singapore's water supply and the morale of the British troops had been eroded, as had the will to resist of their commander, Lieutenant General Percival, who surrendered unconditionally on 15 February. Along with a string of other defeats. the fall of Singapore struck an irreversible blow to European prestige in the Far Fast. Perhaps 25,000 Indian Army soldiers joined the Indian National Army and fought alongside the Japanese against their previous comrades-in-arms in Burma. Even before the capture of Singapore, Japanese forces attacked into Burma from Thailand and forced the Salween river line on 31 January. The 17th Indian Division was constantly outflanked and after the premature demolition of the bridge over the Sittang river on 22 February lost most of its equipment, organised defence of Burma was effectively over. The British destroyed the port and oil terminal in Rangoon but were harried out of the country and were only able to make a stand along the mountain ranges that mark the India–Burma border.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL ICHII SUGITA
Battalion Commander, Japanese Army
I did not know what the abilities of British soldiers in the jungle, but I believed from the history of the First World War that your officers and the men are tough enough to fight against enemies.
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN SMYTH, VC
Commander 17th Indian Division
The fundamental reason why we failed in Malaya was that we were stretched to the limit at that time in our war with Germany and Italy and there simply were not the trained men, air forces and ships that we should have supplied to meet the Japanese attack. The plan for the defence of Malaya was based entirely on the Air Force and there were to be some 355 first-class aircraft with the Army protecting their bases and their aerodromes. The idea was that they should attack the Japanese while they were at sea and destroy them or damage them before the campaign started. The priority of arms and equipment for Malaya, at that time, was very low. They were only number four after Great Britain, the Middle East and Russia. Also with regard to men, the first priority for India – and India supplied most of the men – was the Middle East and Malaya only came second, and that was the same with the Australians. Some of the Australians that arrived in Malaya had never even fired a rifle, so we did feel very much a second eleven against the very highly trained and strongly supported Japanese. The Chiefs of Staff at home thought that Singapore Island was quite indefensible against an enemy that had complete command of the air and the sea, and that is why the defence had to be well forward, on the mainland of Malaya. And from the start, of course, we were thrown on to the defensive. One of the reasons, of course, was that the Japanese employed three hundred tanks – we hadn't any tanks at all – but it was really the employment of the hook around our defensive positions, which was their main method of operating by sea or by land, which made it so difficult for our ill-equipped forces.
CAPTAIN TERUO OKADA
Intelligence Officer, Japanese Army
In Japanese infantry training most of the training, apart from riflemanship and digging trenches, is on bayonet fighting and night fighting, all the time. I think this night-fighting training was most useful in the jungle where conditions are fairly similar. We got this experience in China where the Chinese Army could press us during the day, but we knew that at night as soon as we withdrew all the bullets from the guns and went into the night fighting with cold steel we could drive them back, always. We had the confidence and I think this came from training, training, training on the night fighting and the bayonet fighting.
PRIVATE WILLIAM CRUICKSHANK
Prisoner of the Japanese
My particular lot, the 18th Division, we left England known as a crack division in the British Army at the time. We weren't actually meant for Singapore or that area at all; we were meant for the Middle East. We were trained for the Middle East, and when we were thrown into the jungle without the proper equipment, without the proper arms as well, that came as a shock. But when we found that we were absolutely cut off, there was no method of fighting back at the end, there was no method of evacuation; it was a terrible shock. I, personally, when we were told to lay our arms down, I just cried like a baby, I think more with temper than anything else, to think there was nothing we could do.
DAVID MARSHALL
Malayan member of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Corps
Somebody picked up this diary that had been thrown away. It turned out to be the diary of a young British soldier who had come from England by ship via Cape Town and it was peppered right through with remarks like, 'Had lecture today on dangers of snake bites in jungle. Browned off. Lecture this afternoon on drinking water from streams and rivers, danger to kidneys and liver. Had lectures on insects and mosquitoes and malaria in jungle, danger of jungle animals in tropics. Browned off I can't remember all of it but it was a fairly extensive diary kept up almost every day, and when I finished it I realised that poor boy must have been frozen stiff with fear and had really lost the battle psychologically before it began, because going into that jungle he was afraid of all the unseen terrors and only too glad to get away. It made me believe what may have been a completely false story that the Japanese commander would sneeringly tell us when we were in the camp, that they didn't have to fight the British troops with bullets. All they had to do was hang fire-crackers on the rubber trees and set them off at night, and you'd see the British troops scurrying like rabbits. Of course we told them we didn't believe it, but frankly after reading that diary I don't think it improbable.
CAPTAIN OKADA
We are always taught camouflage from early stages of training. There were many things we don't like in the jungle, leeches and all kinds of things, but I like the jungle and it did not have the fear that it seems to have had for some Allied soldiers. I would have thought that with the Allies being in such an area long before us they must have completed ways of training or manoeuvres in the jungle long before we did.
HARRY MILLER
British civilian in Singapore
Pearl Harbor was a bit of a shock, the fact that they were capable of launching such a massive operation and succeed beyond all dreams in sinking much of the American fleet. Nevertheless there still persisted the idea that this was a fluke, that they had taken the Americans by surprise, the Japanese airman was a short-sighted, rice-eating individual flying a deathtrap of an aircraft and certainly not a very fast one. All that was disproved, of course, very, very soon when they came into Malaya and started dominating the air and we realised that the Zero aircraft was a superb machine and that the men in them were superb fighters and that we in Singapore – in Malaya – didn't have anything in the way of aircraft to match up with the Zeros.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
The Japanese Air Force gained such a tremendous superiority over the whole of Malaya in the first forty-eight hours that movement was made extremely difficult. Percival's idea was to oppose the Japanese as they landed but that didn't come off – they were able to land in Thailand and we would not break Thai neutrality, so we were at a disadvantage from the start.*28
CAPTAIN OKADA
Our training would be the normal training, for instance we had no special training for desert fighting in north China – we did get sand glasses against sandstorms but that was about all. We got mosquito nets against mosquitoes but there was no special training for specific jungle conditions as such. The jungle is not such a terrible place. Our clothing and the food we carry, you see we can live on rice, salt and sesame seeds and salted fish, this can keep a soldier going a long time, also we can find many things in the jungle to eat. And especially when the enemy aircraft come the jungle can be very friendly to you.
HARRY MILLER
The bombing in Singapore started with a vengeance somewhere around four o'clock on the morning of 8th December when the bombers appeared.**3 Singapore was still lit up with street lamps and it was a fine moonlit morning so they had the whole city at their mercy. They dropped their bombs on an air base but also into the heart of the city, leaving their calling card, so's to speak, and that produced about thirty-three dead and about a hundred and twenty-five wounded. It hit Chinatown; it really hit the heart of the city. After that there was quite a lull because their targets were elsewhere, in northern Malaya, but as they moved closer the attacks became more frequent. It was after they crossed the causeway that the intensive air strikes on Singapore began and the last three days before it capitulated was a sheer hell of concentrated bombing and artillery and the Japanese aircraft were rarely out of the sky and there were none of our own aircraft. There were artillery duels between our fellows and theirs, but with the Japanese bombers overhead and the Japanese fighters our gun crews became their targets and they were knocked out one by one.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA
We took Singapore in sixty-five days; we made a surprise attack, so we made a great success. Your forces are not so aggressive as we expect them and, one other point, they had not fortified along the coast the northern part of the island, so we easily attacked and occupied the northern part of Singapore. We do not expect that British forces should be surrendered according to our demand, which I prepared beforehand. I was surprised but we respected them going to surrender.
DAVID MARSHALL
All the time we believed we were going to be rescued at the last minute. The British Empire had a tremendous psychological place in our lives: its strength, its massiveness and the need to protect Singapore not for the sake of the people of Singapore – we recognised that – but for the sake of maintaining the British Empire. It was important to maintain this pivotal military centre, which was the naval base for the Far East of the British Empire, for the protection of Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the financial and commercial interests of the Empire.
HARRY MILLER
The fighting soldier fully expected that in view of the situation that existed there would be another Dunkirk from Singapore. Fighting morale was very badly hit by the lack of any of our aircraft and it was one of the most serious aspects of the war at that particular time; it really contributed quite a lot to defeat. There came a time when there just weren't any more ships coming into Singapore to pick people up. So the Europeans, the great mass of civil servants and municipal and business people who were there, realised that they were in for a pretty sticky time. Morale was pretty high, nevertheless, perhaps higher among the civilian population – and I include the Asians in that – than among a certain element of the fighting forces. It wasn't just the Australians, it was anybody who came back from the fighting front, leaderless and completely giving up. They just threw their rifles into canals or drains along the side of the road and moved rapidly into the city, sheltering among the civilians, finding refuge in one of the big buildings and refusing to be moved out of it. It was a pretty oppressive spectacle considering the fact that Asian and European civilians were still fighting the war in their own way, in the sense of manning first-aid posts, casualty stations, fire brigades and all the other essential services.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA
We prepared the plan, but it was the first time for us to have such a meeting and when the news from the front that the ministers came to the headquarters of the 5th Division they did not know how to deal with them. I was asked by the headquarters of the brigade to meet your ministers and we talk about how to surrender but your ministers do not say 'surrender'; they want us to come to Singapore headquarters to talk with the High Commissioners. But according to our plan we want some pressures on our side. Then we departed and returned back to my headquarters to report our meeting and then we went to the front and I saw the place where we met later. So the conference was held at about 7pm and they had little idea how to deal with their own, I guess because they're not enough time to prepare for the meeting and they had little knowledge of surrenders, because the Staff Officers did not expect surrenders so soon. They believe the British Army stay and fights against us, so they had not enough knowledge about the detail concerning the meeting. General Yamashita wanted to get an answer from the British side. And there were possibles: General Percival wanted to keep some troops in Singapore to keep order and peace within the city, but we wanted the British Army disarmed all over.
HARRY MILLER
It was the morning after the surrender and I had gone back into the city just to see what was happening, and almost unostentatiously we were being taken over by long lines of Japanese troops, unkempt, bearded, squat and bandy-legged individuals who came shuffling and slouching in. Extremely tired men, grim-visaged. They set up barricades at strategic points and then stood beside them and one thought – Well, was the great British Army beaten by runts like these? And by golly we had been beaten by them.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA
We were so surprised because we expected your forces about fifty thousand and we found about one hundred thousand prisoners, so it was just over twice what we expected.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
I don't think any country could have been more unprepared for war than Burma was at this particular time. The government was unprepared, the civil organisation and the people were unprepared and the defence forces practically did not exist. And this was all the more remarkable when one realises that Burma was taken over by the War Office for defence purposes in 1935 and did nothing about it at all. The priority for arms and equipment for Burma was very low indeed and when the war started the War Office very callously handed the unwanted baby back to the Commander-in-Chief in India.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM JAMES
100th Indian Infantry Brigade, Burma
I went to Burma from India with an independent Indian brigade before there was any thought of a Jap invasion. At the time I went over, which was in 1941,1 personally was disappointed because I'd hoped to go to the desert and at that time one never thought the Japanese would be so foolish as to take on the Allies. It was merely an independent brigade going into a very peaceful country in which there were two British battalions, one was based just south of Rangoon and the other was up in the hills, and there were of course the Burma Rifles.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
Wavell of course had become a national hero when he defeated the Italians in the desert at the beginning of the war, but then of course he had a series of disasters against the Germans in Greece, Crete and against Rommel in the desert. Anthony Eden said that he'd aged ten years in one night when he was defeated by Rommel. So he was at that time a very tired man and he very much wanted a rest. Now Winston Churchill, who was a law unto himself over these military appointments, insisted on exchanging Auchinleck with Wavell. The Viceroy of India protested, the Secretary of State for India protested and most of all Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, protested very strongly. He went to Winston about this and he said that Wavell was essentially a Westerner and knew nothing about the Far East, and Auchinleck was essentially a man in the right place as Commander-in-Chief in India. He deprecated the exchange very much, but it took place. Wavell had one marked characteristic which was a very great disadvantage to him the whole way through the Malayan and Burma campaigns: he had utter contempt for the Japanese as soldiers and that led him into all sorts of difficulties. To start with he refused two Chinese divisions that had been offered to him by Chiang Kai-shek, which was a disastrous blunder – he spent the rest of the campaign trying to get them back. And then it was a great mistake him sending his Chief of Staff in Delhi, General Hutton, as Burma Army Commander. Now Hutton was an excellent Staff Officer – he was the man in the right place in India – but he was quite out of place as a battle commander and I'm sure he would be the first to admit that. The Chiefs of Staff were against this appointment and so was the Viceroy and eventually they persuaded Wavell to accept Alexander in place of Hutton, but that was not until the 19th of February and of course Alexander arrived really too late to make any marked effect.
MAJOR MIKE CALVERT
Pioneer British jungle-warfare expert
When Burma was attacked I was given the job of forming the Bush Warfare School out of all sorts of headquarters staff plus my own staff. And because the Japanese tactics were to do right or left hooks around the British, who rather stuck to the roads, we kept on finding ourselves used as the only force to oppose those hooks. Also we did a raid down the Irrawaddy in a paddle steamer: we were a hundred men and I had recently returned from Australia and brought back Australian bush hats, so we pretended we were the advance guard of an Australian brigade from the Middle East and we kept a Japanese regiment entertained with only a hundred men for two or three weeks.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
Wavell called me up to see him on the 28th of December 1941 at his house in Delhi and told me then that two brigades of my 17th Division, which I thought were on their way to Baghdad, had been diverted at sea and they had gone to Singapore, which came as a great shock to me, and then he said that he wanted me to go to Burma with the remaining brigade to form a new 17th Division. But in all our conversations that we had that afternoon it struck me that he didn't anticipate that Burma was in any immediate danger at all. And then during the operations when I asked him to speak to my brigadiers and staff, when we'd been hanging on by our eyelids for several days against two Japanese divisions, I expected him to say, 'Well done, stick to it,' that sort of thing. But the whole gist of his remarks were that he didn't think the Japanese were any good and therefore we, by implication, were worse.
MAJOR CALVERT
The main thing was the Japanese had experience. They had been fighting in China and the Chinese is a good foe. They were fanatical, they were tremendous patriots and once they were told to do a thing they got on with it and did it. They instilled the fear of God in everyone by the fact that in a rapid advance they were told not to take any prisoners, so any prisoners they did take, they shot. The Japanese were not equipped with a mass of trucks like the British Army so they did not have to use roads and they were trained to march and travel light. They were also taught to fire their weapons effectively and not to put down barrages of massed automatic weapons.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
The Sittang disaster undoubtedly was the cause for the loss of Rangoon and the loss of Burma. Quite briefly what had happened was that we had been withdrawing towards the broad Sittang river with one long and narrow railway bridge, and it was quite obvious that what we wanted to avoid at all costs was being caught by the Japanese in the act of crossing this river. Therefore on the 12th of February, which was crisis day, really, in this Burma campaign, I sent my Chief of Staff to see Hutton and I told him that if I was to get my division across the Sittang safely in time to prepare a proper position on the far side I must start immediately. But Hutton was under great pressure from Wavell that I was not to withdraw under any circumstances because Wavell and Winston Churchill were trying to persuade the Australian Prime Minister to allow two Australian divisions to land in Rangoon and they wanted to see the 17th Division stuck out on the map well in front. On the 19th, General Hutton came forward and allowed me to withdraw but faced with two Japanese divisions and a far superior Air Force it was by then going to be a desperate race to get anyone at all across the Sittang.
MAJOR W S BOLLER
British Army in Burma
When we made our last retreat from Rangoon we had travelled about twenty miles before we were held up by a small Japanese platoon. We had the 7th Brigade and other regiments trying to break through but it took several concerted attacks before we did. Anyway, we got through there and when we arrived at a hill station in Burma, we stayed there about ten or fifteen days, then we had to embark into various vehicles and make our way into India. Then we had to abandon the vehicles and we walked day after day for miles and miles and sometimes without food, water or anything of the sort.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
It was a crushing disadvantage to me in the 1942 campaign that I hadn't got a wireless set which could contact my air support in Rangoon and therefore, believe it or not, the only thing I could do was to tap into the railway telephone line, get the babu [clerk] in the post office in Rangoon and try to persuade him that it was vitally important for me to be put on to the Air Force headquarters. That was really the reason why, in our withdrawal to the Sittang, we were terribly bombed, badly bombed by the RAF as well as by the Japanese Air Force, simply because they had not been properly briefed as to exactly where we were.
MAJOR BOLLER
The overall impression I had of that horrible trek out of Burma was that it seemed to bring the best and the worst out of people. Some people who I'd looked up to and respected, I found I couldn't respect any more because they became entirely different on that march. In fact they felt – I felt – that it was a question of survival of the fittest and in actual fact it was. If you didn't look after number one you just didn't get out, you just didn't get anywhere. I found that many people wanted to fight and quarrel and look for the best thing they could find for themselves and they couldn't care less for anybody else, and this went on all through the march and it left a very bitter taste in my mouth.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
The great advantage the Japanese had over the British and Indian troops, in this campaign, was that they were trained and equipped for the job, whereas our forces had no pack rations, no pack wireless and no pack transport, and therefore we were entirely supplied by lorries and were very much road-bound. The Japanese were trained to get through the jungle, they were lightly equipped and lightly armed and they specialised in wide enveloping movement through the jungle where if necessary they could live on the villages, being rice eaters. Later on in the operations I was sent the Yorkshire Light Infantry, a very fine battalion, which I was very glad to have, but a note arrived with them that I was to use them in wide encircling movements in the jungle. I cable back to Army Headquarters: 'Presume Yorkshire Light Infantry can live on rice,' and a very indignant cable came back, 'On no account must the Yorkshire Light Infantry be given rice.' Well, there you have it in a nutshell – they could move through the jungle and live on the villages and we couldn't.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES
Coming out of Burma in 1942 we were falling back behind our retiring Army and there was nothing one could do with one's casualties except hold on to them and do what one could with them. It was tragic because we had severe burn cases, in excruciating pain and if we'd been able to evacuate those casualties by plane into India, in a matter of hours, the majority of those cases would have been saved. As it was the majority were lost. It was not until the Wingate operation that casualty evacuation by air came into its own thanks to the Americans. They had light planes, the [Stinson] L-l and L-5, and they were evacuated right from the very front lines to the larger airstrips where they were taken by larger planes, the [C-47] Dakotas, and flown back to hospitals in India. In a matter of two or three hours a chap who was badly wounded or extremely ill was lying between sheets in a base hospital and I don't think the British Army had ever known that kind of evacuation before that time and from then onward in the Fourteenth Army it became pretty well routine and it was life-saving. If it hadn't been for that, our mortality rate would have been much higher than it was.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
What is not generally known, and most people would be astonished if they knew, is that we hadn't any Mepacrin [malaria tablets] at all, and one of my battalions had four hundred cases of malaria and therefore they couldn't move at all because they'd not got sufficient men to carry the sick.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA
According to the Geneva Convention we treat prisoners of war fairly, but after the war is going on we faced very difficult conditions concerning the food, and the war itself became severe. I don't think so much about treatment of the prisoners of war as you told us. They said Japanese Army treat them badly but ask a soldier and he say no. There are a jungle zone and very short of food, which were not prepared beforehand, and lot of the soldiers very short of food and they had to face difficult fighting. At the end of the war they unable to fight as soldiers in peacetime. A lot of officers and men were dead not only because of Japanese treatment but also because short of food and hardworking. After war it is good propaganda that Japan made bad treatment of prisoners of war.
CAPTAIN LEWIS BUSH
Pre-war English teacher in Japan, captured at Hong Kong
You must remember that to the Japanese in those days a prisoner of war was regarded as worse than a criminal, because first of all no Japanese could conceive of being taken prisoner of war. If he were, he would be robbed of his civil rights for the rest of his life. Every Japanese soldier in Burma or any other theatre of war nearly always had a hand grenade or something to polish off his own life if he were in danger of being taken prisoner, or to bite off his tongue. They were even taught how to take their own lives by their superiors. And so this fact alone meant that we, who had surrendered honourably by order of the Governor of Hong Kong, we were completely at the mercy of people who had no conception of human rights, let alone the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Of course there were exceptions; after the war many of my comrades and I have said that if it hadn't been for the good ones we would not be alive.
CAPTAIN OKADA
The Chinese, we understand them because they're much more simple. It's hard to explain, but you see if they caught you they cut off your head and you caught them you cut off their heads. Also in the meantime we could exchange information through our scouts and there are cases when they sent us bags of peanuts saying, 'To the Imperial Japanese Army let us have good fighting next year as last year'. So there was a certain understanding. But fighting the Allies was a different matter – the ground rules you may say are not so simple. I never could understand why certain regiments would die for their beliefs or for their country under a foreign officer. You had Indian regiments with British officers and this we could not understand. We felt the British officer was a good fighter although the ones we captured they always said to me, 'We will win the war,' when I interrogated them. Now this I could not understand because here is a man who has surrendered and he still says, 'We will win the war'. We could not understand because if we are fighting to win the war we will fight until we die.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA
In the Western countries it is not shame to surrender their responsibilities; it is quite different from those in Japan. I don't know exactly but most of the soldiers that were told that we should not surrender, they despised surrenders of those officers and men.
PRIVATE RONALD FRY
Prisoner of the Japanese on the Death Railway, Burma
At one time we said to a Japanese officer what you could do with here is an elephant, you know to move the trees, and he said, 'I've got all the elephants I need – you are my little white elephants.'
PRIVATE H R OAKLEY
Prisoner of the Japanese on the Death Railway, Burma
They hated us for what we were, because we were white or British. They considered that they were above everybody, that they were the better people, and they would reduce you to lower than an animal if they could, any time. After we left Singapore we were transported to Siam – Thailand – and then we arrived at these sites where we had to put up bamboo huts and so forth, and then we were immediately put to work laying this railway line, which started at Kanchanburi and ran for three hundred miles. We was marshalled out every day on various working parties and we had to build a bridge at Tamarkan. We had to do pile driving, which consists of a huge weight with about fifty men pulling ropes and dropping this thing down on the pile, which drove it into the bed of the river, which you were doing from the time you started till the time you left off. That was one task – the other would be forming chains by passing baskets of soil from one man to another all day, shoring up embankments and so forth.*29
PRIVATE CRUICKSHANK
They'd pick on someone who'd done a stupid little thing, didn't bow to one of the guards for instance, and they'd stand him outside the guardroom in the blazing sun and take great delight in pricking him with a bayonet point to make him stand upright to attention if he started to droop, that type of thing. They'd always laugh about it – oh, they could laugh – and yet they couldn't understand when they found us laughing under the conditions we were in. That's one thing we beat them at: they just couldn't understand how an Englishman after, say, a year of hell with them could still laugh and joke, and this was where we always had them beat.
PRIVATE FRY
The latrines were concrete foundation and so everything that was in there turned to liquid. In no time the top was just an absolute sea of maggots, and when it rained they overflowed and everywhere you trod was maggots. One chap was in such a bad way, I think it was cerebral malaria, that they found him with his head down there – he'd committed suicide.
PRIVATE CRUICKSHANK
We did hit back in our own ways. The Japs would make us build their huts whenever we moved to another place and we were all covered with lice, bugs, everything under the sun. We'd spend maybe one hour of our three hours' rest picking these bugs and lice, put them in tin cans or anything we could find, and when we finished their huts we used to scatter the damned things in their huts. This is one of the ways that we could hit back at them and we used to love it. It used to give us some form of entertainment: we'd talk about it afterwards and this is what would make us laugh, this type of thing.
CAPTAIN BUSH
One of our men, I think he was a private in the Middlesex Regiment, he managed to make a tunnel from his hut in our camp to the Japanese Army canteen and over a period got away with thousands of cigarettes, chocolate bars and all kinds of luxuries in the way of soaps, which he was selling around the camp to fellow prisoners. Now he was caught and we expected of course that he would be beheaded in public, because if you blinked your eyes on morning parades you would get a bashing. But this chap was taken up before the Japanese military court and he was ordered to be kept in camp for six weeks – he wasn't allowed to go out on working parties with his comrades. And this chap appeared with a placard on his front and another on his back which simply said, 'I am a thief,' in English and Japanese. A Japanese guard came to me and said, 'Oh, Bush-san' – that means Bush captain – 'this is a terrible punishment for this poor man, how terribly humiliating.' This astonished me but the fellow stayed in camp for six weeks, the guards gave him portions of their own food, they gave him cigarettes. He'd never had such a wonderful time in all his life as a prisoner of war.
CAPTAIN OKADA
After the final surrender we were a working party and the British officer in charge of the guard caught some of our men peeing against a wall and he called us and said these men must be punished. The punishment was to put stones in their knapsacks and make them run around the courtyard many times. After this happened two or three times we complained to the British officer and said we would like to punish our men ourselves, so he said that would be all right on condition it was done in front of him. So next time we had our people to be punished we lined them up and the colonel in charge beat them up, in fact out of the five two fell down because they were beaten so badly. The British officer then said that our mode of punishment was very cruel, but we said, no, our men prefer this because it's much quicker, it does not waste time, the man does not miss his meals, he's back on duty right after he recovers and he'll recover quicker.
MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH
I feel, and I think my troops will always feel, bitter that all the blame was put on them. I think that the bad thing about both those campaigns is that – although defeat was inevitable in those circumstances – the blame should have been put in both Malaya and Burma on the unfortunate troops who had to carry the can.