Forgotten Wars (7 page)

Then there were national visions that transcended territory. Just as the INA had placed a new responsibility for the freedom of India upon the Indian communities of Southeast Asia, so too, after 1937, did the National Salvation movement bring together the Overseas Chinese, as never before and as never since. Led by the ‘Henry Ford of Malaya’, Tan Kah Kee, a self-made millionaire philanthropist, it drew on the wealth of the Nanyang capitalists to provide as much as one third of the war expenditure of Chiang Kai Shek’s government. But it was also unprecedented in the way it mobilized labourers, food hawkers, rickshaw men, school students and prostitutes into Anti-Enemy Backing-Up Societies to collect subscriptions and boycott Japanese goods and shops. It united for a time the Kuomintang in Southeast Asia with the Malayan Communist Party, whose support was overwhelmingly Chinese, and allowed them to extend their organizations in a way that had not been possible before. Of all the communities of the crescent, it was perhaps the Chinese who paid the highest price for their resistance to Japan. Yamashita’s soldiers saw the Malayan campaign as a theatre of the China war, and after the fall of Singapore began the systematic screening and execution of Malayan Chinese. The
sook ching
, or ‘purification by elimination’,
claimed perhaps 50,000 lives. It was the biggest single atrocity of the war in Southeast Asia: in the words of the Japanese administrator in Singapore, Mamoru Shinozaki, who had tried and failed to stop it, it was ‘a crime that sullied the honour of the Japanese army’.
²¹

These sufferings, and the sense of place fostered by these new sites of memory and mourning, contributed to a stronger Southeast Asian identity for those of Indian or Chinese origin. This had begun long before the war. In Malaya and Singapore, locally born Chinese had taken on a distinctive Peranakan (Straits) identity, and adopted the Malay language whilst also taking advantage of English mission schools. Their graduates formed the core of the growing professional classes of the towns. The response by more recent settlers to cultural and intellectual change in China had, by the late 1920s, brought with it a growing awareness that there was a distinctive ‘Nanyang’ style of politics.
²²
Many writers and artists who fled China in 1937 came to Malaya; a community that had been built by traders and labourers now possessed a growing intelligentsia. They saw the region as an artistic utopia and argued that their work needed to take in ‘local colour’ and adopt a proletarian bias. After 1945 the old links to distant homelands were difficult to re-establish. The urgency of the local political situation in Burma, Malaya and elsewhere, catalysed far-reaching debates: where did the Overseas Chinese or Indians call ‘home’? What stake might they be allowed in their places of abode? Was Burma to be for the Burmans, Malaya for the Malays? And who precisely were the ‘Burmese’ or the ‘Malays’? The British had tended to see the ethnic divisions of these ‘segmented societies’ in stark terms, and see racial groups in eternal conflict with each other: never more so than in what British writers termed the ‘plural society’ of Malaya. But this was not a true reflection of the ethnic diversity that existed within ‘Malay’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’ communities. Nor did it recognize their increasingly complex interconnections, or address the new solidarities of class that were being preached by the communists. This raised further questions: to what extent was a composite, multiracial ‘Malayan’ identity emerging? And what was to be its foundation? In the years to come these debates would engage the minds of nationalists, communists and colonialists alike.

So the British faced newly energized nationalist movements, both
great and small, which limited their room for manoeuvre in the longer term. But it was not only Asian thinking about empire that had changed. Many young Britons, though not yet the Tory and Labour leadership, had come to see empire as an anachronism during the war. Not only did it divert valuable manpower and resources from where they were needed at home, it also threatened domestic liberties and seemed likely to blow Britain’s new socialist government off course. At an almost unconscious level, the complaints of the ‘forgotten army’ in the East and its even more radical RAF comrade, the ‘forgotten air force’, represented a deep desire for change in the British social order as a whole. Before the election Churchill had been disgusted to hear from Sir William Slim that 90 per cent of the troops in the East were going to vote Labour and the other 10 per cent would not vote at all. Now those Labour supporters, heartily tired of dysentery, malaria, ENSA humour and poor pay, wanted to see the brave new world that their left-leaning tutors in the army education corps had promised them. Morale slumped and would soon lead to small-scale mutinies among British forces from Karachi to Singapore. Months after the surrender of Japan, British troops were incensed to find themselves fighting and suffering casualties in what seemed like completely unnecessary wars against nationalists in Indonesia and French Indo-China.

This mood was picked up and articulated by radical newspapers in Britain and political discussion groups at army and air-force bases. A newspaper such as the old Labour broadsheet,
Reynolds News
, was typical. It was written for working people, but most of its correspondents and columnists were British middle- or upper-class communists and socialists, free to inveigh against the country’s archaic society and the dominance of ‘monopoly capital’ now that wartime censorship had been lifted. Major Woodrow Wyatt, a socialist with an interest in the ‘Indian problem’, demanded a pro-Congress policy and the abolition of the India Office in London.
²³
Harold Laski, Labour’s most prominent left-wing intellectual, urged that the viceroy’s executive council be turned into a ‘national government’.
²⁴
These radicals made common cause with Asian nationalists. Indonesian nationalists argued in
Reynolds
against any attempt by the British government to reinstate the Dutch capitalists who were accused of exploiting and
impoverishing the Indonesian peasantry.
²⁵
All the while, the paper’s editorials demanded the swift demobilization of the eastern army and justice for Britain’s miners, steelworkers and textile workers, many of whom were now on strike. The Labour government and the political establishment at home found itself fighting on three fronts, in Asia and the new United Nations and among its own supporters at home. The news was full of reports of the trial and execution of French collaborators, concentration-camp guards and Japanese militarists. Repression was harder and harder to justify.

One of
Reynolds
columnists was Tom Driberg MP, a colourful and maverick British politician who came to play a small but representative role in the history of the crescent. His
Times
obituary thirty years later stated with surprising candour that he was ‘a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist and a homosexual’,
²⁶
while many at the time also hinted that he had worked for the KGB. Before the war Driberg gloried in the sort of circles portrayed in Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
, but at the same time he rejected the British establishment represented by his late father, a former Indian civil servant in Assam. Frank Owen, the journalist who ran Lord Louis Mountbatten’s propaganda sheets for South East Asia Command, told Driberg that the men in the East thought of themselves as the ‘forgotten army’ and thirsted for coverage of their exploits and demands to be demobilized. Driberg wrote to Mountbatten at the end of July 1945 asking to visit South East Asia Command. At first, suspicious of his position as an MP, Mountbatten hesitated. Then, under the influence of Owen, Mountbatten changed his mind and agreed to meet him. Driberg’s biographer Francis Wheen writes: ‘he and Tom hit it off at once and discovered they had much in common, including a sexual preference for men’, although it has to be admitted that the jury is still out on this last point. Mountbatten, Wheen goes on, was ‘a royalist and a snob who nevertheless held left-wing views; Tom was a left-winger, who nevertheless loved the monarchy.’
²⁷
By early September Driberg was embarked upon a grand tour of South East Asia Command which would take him to Kandy, Singapore, Rangoon and Saigon. In all these locations he wrote despatches to
Reynolds News
which subtly influenced Labour opinion in favour of the conciliatory policy towards the Asian nationalists preferred by
Mountbatten. He met many of the region’s nationalist leaders, notably Aung San, and reckoned later that he played a minor role in the early independence of Burma.

So the leaders of nations and would-be nations continued their pirouettes of bargains, threats and violence. Meanwhile, across the whole vast crescent that stretched from the plains of India to Singapore and beyond, to Sumatra and the northern shores of Australia, millions of people dislocated by war, famine and disease tried to rebuild their lives. There were many tragic stories of loss, brutality and dispossession and these grew in strength as the interrogation of Japanese personnel for war crimes uncovered more horrors. Sometimes, however, fate was charitable. Take the case of the appropriately named Sweeper Pissoo, a low-caste Indian sanitation orderly, once attached to the British forces in Burma. As a non-combatant enrolled in the Indian Army, he had been left behind during the scuttle from Rangoon in 1942. He had gone to ground and survived the war as a humble sweeper. After the war he began to parade his military credentials again and turned up at a number of British military camps in Burma. Burma Command eventually signalled GHQ (India) and it was discovered that he had been formally reported missing. Burma Command began to make arrangements for his repatriation to Aurangabad, India. ‘This,’ said a British officer, ‘we did with a happy smile, wondering just how much pay Sweeper Pissoo would get before his demobilization.’
²⁸
With four years’ back wages due, he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

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.