Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  Prior to the war, the Volunteers had increased their numbers, training and equipment, notably additional Lewis guns. Overall, by 1938 numbers had increased from 733 to 833, and within this a ‘very satisfactory’ reduction in the average age of its officers. One problem, however, continued to beset the Volunteers - the colony’s leading commercial and social lights also tended to be appointed as senior officers. This happy coincidence of rank and social standing no doubt simplified life in the officers’ mess but was hardly meretricious or effective in identifying the best military leaders. Pre-war, another problem facing the Kuala Lumpur contingent of volunteers was a general reluctance to enlist. In his 1938 Annual Review, the Commander of the FMSVF, Lt. Col. Saville, lamented that ‘It is very noticeable that whereas in the country districts the bulk of Europeans join their volunteer units as a matter of course, this is far from the case in the larger towns. This is particularly noticeable in Kuala Lumpur where there is a comparatively small European population there of at least 200 young men of military age who cannot be persuaded to undertake any form of volunteer service. The most disquieting aspect of this unpatriotic attitude was revealed in the recent crisis when, although innumerable offers of help were received from ex-servicemen, only seven men of military age offered themselves up for service in the whole of the Federated Malay States.’

  In practice, in 1940 and 1941 there was little reluctance amongst British nationals in Kuala Lumpur to enlist but it took the threat of real war to shake them out of their complacency. There was also by then the added element of compulsion. In January 1940, Governor Shenton Thomas announced the promulgation of the ‘Compulsory Service [Volunteer Force] Ordnance’ for able-bodied British males aged 18-55 – in short the call-up for the local British community to serve in the Volunteer forces. Those above forty joined the Local Defence Force (a ‘Dad’s Army’) and those below joined the Volunteers, though a fair number of forty and fifty-year olds quietly enlisted in the latter. Perhaps the greatest failing of the Volunteers, and an indictment of colonial society, was that it was only late in the day that the British turned with serious intent to recruit from within the very much larger, and in many cases very willing, Asian communities. Indicative of the potential, the 1939 Kuala Lumpur Municipal Report reflected, with spectacular complacency, that there had been 165 applications for enlistment to the Malay Regiment of whom eighteen had been sent for interview and just two selected. As the Japanese menace increased, but too little too late to be effective, the British recognised their folly and appealed to the local communities to do their ‘patriotic bit’. In October 1941, just two months before the Japanese invasion, Brigadier Moir, Commander of the FMSVF, issued a desperate plea to the local Asian communities, ‘At the present time when the necessity for keeping Volunteer Forces up to establishment is so urgent, and all races of the F.M.S. must feel it their right and their duty to take part in the defence of the country, it is suggested that the ranks of Volunteer Forces should be thrown open to all Asiatic races in the peninsular.’ Far from blocking entry, by late 1941 it was suddenly a ‘right’ and ‘duty’ for Malaya’s ‘Asiatic races’ to fight alongside the British.

  Moir’s vituperative outburst was not only focused on the need to widen the recruitment net. He also acknowledged that the ‘training and equipment of the volunteers left much to be desired owing to the policy of the FMS Government, which, in spite of the strongest representations by the GOC Malaya, refused to mobilise the force’. Overall, 5,000-5,200 men enlisted in the FMSVF, and within that there were 778 recruits to the 2nd Selangor Battalion, which comprised 31 officers and 747 ‘other ranks’. The ethnic breakdown is not given, though this figure certainly included a good proportion of locals. But whatever the numbers, the British had left the widening of their recruitment net too late to have an appreciable impact on the military capabilities of those defence forces raised within Malaya.

  Map of South East Asia

  Building up Defences

  In selecting Kuala Lumpur to be the federal capital of the Federated Malay States, the Resident General, Frank Swettenham, had weighed transport and logistic considerations and the economic weight of Selangor, but not the need for defence. In the late 1890s, with the Royal Navy sitting proud and Pax Britannica a reality, there was no conceivable external threat to Britain’s position in Malaya. Military considerations therefore had no place in the selection of the site for the new capital; and, anyway, Singapore was the great naval base and anchor of Britain’s power and authority in the region. The city, based in the low-lying bowl of the Klang and Gombak river valleys, its flat terrain pock-marked by tin-mining ponds and intersected by plantation and jungle fringes, was a defensive impossibility. Kuala Lumpur was never perceived, in the same way as Singapore and Penang, to have ‘Fortress’ status. With good reason, there had been no expectation to fight to defend it – despite its status as the capital of the Federated Malay States and its considerable economic and commercial importance. But it was perfectly located to provide rear-echelon support and played a central role in Malaya’s defensive ‘outer layer’ as a command, logistics and communications hub and as a base for reserve formations.

  Though Kuala Lumpur was never fortified, it was certainly militarised. From 1939, new barracks and parade grounds were built along the main roads leading north out of the city, and Batu Caves became an important divisional command and communications centre. Within the great limestone caves themselves, an important ordnance and explosives munitions store was constructed. From September 1939, the Indian 12th Infantry Brigade, including elements of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, were sent to Malaya. In late 1939, to the south of the city Chinese squatters were evicted from the Sungei Besi ‘military manoeuvring ground’ which from February 1940 became a centre for live-fire training. From late 1940, as regular British and Indian Army units began to arrive in Malaya, Kuala Lumpur became accustomed to the sight and sound of a rapidly expanding military machine. It was an imperial force, drawn from widely different backgrounds. From the Indian Army, famous regiments such as the Dogras, Jats, Gurkhas, the Frontier Force and the Punjabis, each with their distinctive head-dresses, paraded through Kuala Lumpur before operational deployment further north. Australian troops in their famous slouched hats, English county regiments such as the East Surreys and the Leicesters, and from Scotland the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, all marched through the central padang. It was a diverse and colourful array of imperial might and from May 1941 III Indian Corps under Lt-Gen. Sir Lewis Heath was headquartered at Batu Caves, immediately to the north of Kuala Lumpur. His command - which comprised the 9th and 11th Indian Divisions and the various Volunteer forces - stretched the length of Malaya north of Johor and included the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca.

  Buoyed by optimistic propaganda, and the smart, efficient demeanour and sheer numbers of the British and imperial forces, with their attendant bren-gun carriers, artillery pieces and armoured vehicles, Kuala Lumpur citizens felt reassured that they were not forgotten but rather amply supported and defended by the British government. Observant witnesses, however, might have noted in the array of military equipment being paraded through the streets of Kuala Lumpur that the British lacked tanks on the ground and modern fighter aircraft in the sky. Antony Hill, a member of the Volunteers, later noted, ‘With the appearance of masses of regular troops in Malaya the old complacency born of ignorance and inertia was replaced by another more insidious form of the disease....flocks of armoured cars and Bren-carriers induced in us a false sense of security.’

  As part of the overall military build-up, in June 1941 ‘RAF Station Kuala Lumpur’ was opened at the civil aerodrome at Sungei Besi. It never became a front-line air base. It was under the ‘engine repair department’, its role being to service and maintain planes based at the main operational aerodromes further north and east and in July 1941, in its first month of operation, the station proudly boasted that six Mercury engines had been fully overhauled. It was neverthe
less a significant deployment. It was commanded by a Squadron Leader who was supported by 112 British technical and engineering staff and 61 local technicians – a grand total of 173 men. Perhaps with good reason RAF personnel were colloquially known as ‘the penguins’ - hundreds on the ground and none in the air - and RAF Station Kuala Lumpur certainly reinforced this stereotype.

  Chapter Three

  Malaya Attacked

  The deterioration in relations with Japan was matched at a senior level in the British military by an increasingly sombre sense that war could not be avoided. From August 1941, the British were aware that a large Japanese naval and military force was assembling in Hainan, while Japanese air assets were being deployed to aerodromes in and around Saigon and other places in French Indo-China. The British judged correctly that the most likely landings would be on the beaches of north-east Malaya and south-east Thailand. The position looked so bleak that on 1 December 1941, the Volunteers were called to active stations. That day the Malay Mail carried Japanese Prime Minister, General Tojo’s chilling assertion ‘we must purge east Asia’. The arrival in Singapore of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse was met by the headline a ‘New Power in Far East’. Their arrival lent substance, albeit unwarranted, to the belief that the British were well prepared to respond to Japanese aggression. Meanwhile, in any difficulty there is also opportunity – the Prudential began promoting ‘Life Assurance in War Time’.

  The Japanese attacked Malaya in the early hours of 8 December 1941. The landings at Kota Baru in Kelantan on the north-east coast coincided with the Japanese attacks on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and on British forces in Hong Kong. Due to the international date-line, the attack on Pearl Harbour was on 7 December, though the Japanese actually landed one hour earlier in Malaya but on 8 December. This quirk meant little to the stretched British defences in Kelantan, nor to the citizens of Singapore who were met that day by the defiant message of an air-raid over the city. After the wait, Britain was unequivocally at war with Japan and Japanese forces were pouring into north-east Malaya and south-east Thailand along the Kra Isthmus.

  The attack had been anticipated and the decision to mobilise the Volunteers the week before was fully vindicated. Adopting a line of quiet public confidence, through the newspapers British officials described the attacks as a form of ‘suicide’ for Japan and noted ‘We can, on a most conservative estimate, be quietly confident as to the future. If it had to come, it is as well that it came quickly, and it may very well be that it may have the effect of shortening the war against naked aggression.’ The Malay Mail noted that in Kuala Lumpur the ‘news [was] received calmly…. The public went about their daily tasks apparently unperturbed by what was happening’. Ominously for the British though, one early report noted, perhaps with an underlying sense of lack of ‘fair play’, that the Japanese had used tanks in their early assault on Kota Baru.

  Despite these momentous events, the newspapers continued to carry advertisements and promotions for whiskey, gin, anti-heat-rash powder and ‘recently arrived golf bags from the United States’; it all bespoke a society more familiar with peace and plenty than war. Dinner-dances continued in all the main hotels and the cinemas were open and showing a wide range of Hollywood and Indian movies. On 8 December, the Pavilion was featuring Target for Tonight, a film made in collaboration with the RAF about bombing raids on Germany – though whether the audience recognised that they too would soon become the targets of bombers was not clear. One cold blast of reality, however, was the notification that an Air Raid Precaution (ARP) demonstration would be held at the open ground next to Pudu Prison.

  One immediate consequence of the landings was that the police detained all Japanese citizens living in Selangor. The community had long been monitored and had to report to the police on a regular basis, but the authorities had held back from interning them, anxious to avoid giving the Japanese a casus belli, or pretext to start a war. That concern was now overtaken and in the early hours of 8 December, and completed before dawn, 111 Japanese male ‘civil prisoners of war’ were detained and sent to the quarantine station at Port Swettenham. Included amongst theme was Ayade Kuichiro, the Kuala Lumpur dentist. His wife and young child were rounded up and joined the other Japanese women and children being held in guarded hotels. Shortly thereafter, the detainees were sent under cover of night by boat to Singapore. Male internees went to Changi Prison and the women and children were corralled in a tented camp on Belakang Mati (today’s Sentosa) in Singapore port.

  On 9 December, the mood of cautious optimism was buoyed by up-beat messages from senior officers. The Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in South East Asia, General Brooke Popham, asserted that ‘Our Defences Strong and our Weapons Efficient’. Meanwhile the Sultan of Selangor announced that the ‘enemy has entered our house’ and promised the British his full support – though in so doing sealed his later fate with the Japanese. The machinery of war cranked into action, with Kuala Lumpur playing a critical role in the logistical support of front-line troops. That day, 16 civilian trucks were impressed and fuel, provisions and ‘cigarettes for all troops’ loaded and sent to support British forces in Kuantan. Traffic jams on major roads created delays and were holding back supplies, partly due to the panicked response from Europeans and Asians alike clogging the roads from the north and east heading towards Kuala Lumpur. In response the road to Pahang and Kuantan was declared one-way traffic at night, west to east, to ease the flow of trucks and vital provisions to the front-line.

  First Warnings for Kuala Lumpur

  Following early air raids on Singapore, there was much greater focus in Kuala Lumpur on air defence. The Malay Mail stated in a tone of jaunty self-belief that Kuala Lumpur’s ‘passive defence’ (air raid) precautions were ‘on tip-toe’. Nevertheless, the newspapers carried dark warnings that blackout precautions - house windows blackened and car-lights trimmed - must be fully implemented. On 9

  December, Kuala Lumpur gained its first taste of war in the form of two night-time air-raid warnings. The sirens sounded, on the first occasion for an hour, but both were false alarms. For the citizens of Kuala Lumpur this was the wake-up call (literally) that they really were at war.

  The Volunteers were already deployed; Lt. Thornton of the Selangor 2nd Battalion later noted that the ‘call up was prompt and eager’. He worked for the trading and plantation company Guthrie & Co., and joined the Volunteers in 1940 and described the ‘goings on of the Selangor Volunteers...as [being as] muddled as any volunteer show could be, not due to lack of keenness or intelligence on the part of the men but due to lack of leadership from the top’. Following their mobilisation, Thornton noted that for several days the Volunteers ‘chafed’ while being ‘virtually locked up’ at the barracks, but were then sent to help defend Port Swettenham aerodrome. This they found ‘little prepared, with the pill-boxes missing any form of communication and not even having rifle tables [on which] to mount the guns’. By 10 December, and two days after the Japanese had attacked, Thornton and his platoon were back in Kuala Lumpur, this time on sentry duty at a large arms depot. During this period there were a number of ‘paratroop scares’ and at one stage Thornton and his men rushed to help defend Sungei Besi aerodrome from an imaginary attack. Later his men were deployed on a full-time basis to defend the aerodrome but found that, despite months of work, the pill-boxes were not finished and many were in redundant positions ‘without line of fire’.

  Initially, despite an air of foreboding, life in Kuala Lumpur carried on much as it ever had. The city worked as normal and the main shops were firmly into the Christmas season and would not be distracted from their commercial imperative by the irritant of a Japanese invasion. Indeed some entrepreneurial businesses soon saw an opportunity in the conflict. Killoch & Co. advertised air-raid shelters which were ‘Specially erected [for] maximum protection from splinters and blast’ and Hardial & Singh Co. was promoting its finest blackout cloth. The air of strained normality was sustained by the ne
wspapers which continued to advertise for positions that would never be filled and upcoming sports events that would never happen.

  Refugees – In and Out of the City

  With increasing pace, refugees were moving into the city, cars laden high with personal belongings. Going south, trains to Singapore were fully booked. While entertainment outlets presented a ‘business as usual’ face, some shops began to board up their windows. Due to the ‘brown out’, from 9 December the popular food shop, Cold Storage, announced that it would henceforth be closing at 5pm. People also started hoarding food, and eggs - save ‘kampung eggs’ - were suddenly unavailable. This was partly due to the voracious buying power of the British and Indian Armies which required 2,000 lbs of meat per day and 200 lbs of bread. On 13 December, the military dispatched from Kuala Lumpur three tons of meat in a set of commandeered ice-vans, and 1,500lbs of bread and ‘sheep and potatoes’ which were intended to last five days. But the supply department also noted that onions and firewood were unobtainable and vegetables scarce. Not surprisingly, the price of goods in the markets was rising rapidly. Straining the logistics network and the crowded road network (most supplies went by truck), huge volumes of war materiel were heading out of the large supply bases in Kuala Lumpur to the battle front in the north and east. The munitions supply depot at Batu Caves was working flat out. On 11 December, six lorry loads of ammunition were dispatched to a holding station in Kedah and regular requests for explosives were received from Kuantan in the east. The British were also sending ambulances and medical supplies to the war fronts, and the newspapers appealed for trained nurses and blood donors.