Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  By mid-December 1941, following military disasters in the north, the British reversed their policy towards the communists, whom they had previously viewed as implacable opponents. The British were now willing, in extremis, to equip and train the communists and integrate them within the overall war effort. For its part, war between Russia and Germany had sparked a reappraisal by the MCP, such that it could now countenance pragmatic cooperation with the imperialists as part of the broader anti-fascist, anti-Axis struggle. This was a relationship born of necessity and for the British required them releasing from prison in Ipoh a number of prominent communists, including the Secretary of the Selangor Committee of the MCP, Xue Feng. The Secretary General of the MCP, Lai Teck, was, as previously noted, a British intelligence source and they therefore received full support from the communist leadership once this shot-gun wedding had been agreed. On 19 December, Lai Teck’s British police handlers, Inspector Innes Tremlett and Detective D.S. Devonshire, arranged for a meeting in Singapore between Lai Teck and Spencer Chapman of the British No 1 Special Training School (STS). This modest gathering had profound long-term implications, though its short-term impact was limited. It was agreed that the MCP would provide men to train and work with the British as ‘stay behind’ units. The next day, Spencer Chapman loaded his red Ford V8 coupé with fuses, time-switches, explosives and Tommy guns and headed to Kuala Lumpur where he spent two weeks training his first group of MCP volunteers. He found his new recruits ‘young, fit and probably the best material we had to work with’. The aim was for 101 School to arm and train MCP units which were then to be placed just in advance of the Japanese forces, to cause confusion and thereafter to create mayhem behind the lines, attacking supply routes and reinforcements.

  In all, one hundred recruits were rapidly processed through the Chunjin Chinese School in Kuala Lumpur, which had been commandeered for training. There they learned sabotage skills and explosives handling. On completion, each graduate was supplied with a Tommy gun, a pistol and ‘lots of explosives’. Anticipating the rapid Japanese advance, Spencer Chapman also enlisted a small group of local planters and volunteers to work as part of his stay-behind force. On New Year’s Day 1942, Chapman left Kuala Lumpur and dodging Japanese fighters made his way to Fraser’s Hill, the nearest hill-station to Kuala Lumpur. In nearby Pahang he identified a perfect location for a covert arms cache, in jungle close to an old tin mine, to be revisited after the Japanese had swept through and to be drawn upon by his stay-behind guerrillas.

  Map of Japanese Offensive at Slim River and Kuala Lumpur

  Air Raids

  While Kuala Lumpur had entered something of a phoney war, the speed of the Japanese offensive down the Malayan peninsula meant it was short-lived. Though in the early days the city was spared air raids, it was not spared false alarms. With sirens frequently wailing across the city, the constant news of military set-backs created a febrile, electric atmosphere. Many local inhabitants chose to flee to outlying districts, with buses and taxis crammed with people and their belongings abandoning the city. But as the Asian community fled, in its place European and other refugees from the north and east arrived seeking sanctuary and a temporary base. Many then moved on smartly to Singapore, but others rested and took stock in Kuala Lumpur. To cope, the municipality established a bureau to help and support refugees and was forced to request that visitors did not idle in the city centre while Christmas shopping due to the risk of air attack.

  In the face of military reversals in northern Malaya, the early public tone of ‘a job needs to be done, and better we get this over with quickly’ was soon replaced by a much more brittle sense of confidence. On 11 December, just four days after the Japanese assault on Kelantan, the press reported heavy fighting in Kedah and highlighted the use of tanks by the Japanese. Though not stated, the underlying message was that the British did not have any of their own with which to respond. More damaging still, the paper then reported the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Under the sub-heading ‘Facing Realities’, the British Cabinet’s ‘representative’ in south east Asia, Duff Cooper, vacuously extolled ‘Battleships are precious but far more precious is the heart of a great people.’ Such rhetoric in the face of huge set-backs did little or nothing to reassure a rapidly demoralised population. On 13 December, the Selangor Club cancelled its Christmas cabaret show and children’s party, the Empire Hotel stopped serving dinner at 9.30pm and Cold Storage stopped selling cakes and closed at 4pm to give its staff time to get home before the blackout. The fabric of colonial society was slowly unraveling.

  Propaganda, Lies and Panic

  One of the problems faced by the civil population was that heavy censorship meant bad news was often delayed or cut out altogether. The authorities were fixated with the goal of maintaining public morale and tried to manage the flow of information. But the public were not fools, and the arrival in Kuala Lumpur of droves of refugees, each with their own story of mishap and disaster, meant that the newspapers and media were simply mistrusted. In this environment, dark rumours and stories spread far and fast. On 14 December, a special train holding six hundred women and children arrived in Kuala Lumpur from Penang with tales of air raids and the brave but one-sided battles between the RAF’s poorly performing Brewster Buffaloes and the more capable Japanese Mitsubishi Zeros. The train was met by members of the Kuala Lumpur Salvation Army. The tired and dispirited passengers were offered a chance to refresh and clean up before moving on to Singapore, but the impression on Kuala Lumpur of this grim evacuee train was marked. Penang, Britain’s oldest settlement in the region and a city of greater size and importance than Kuala Lumpur, was being evacuated at a time when the newspapers and radio were speaking of a dogged defence. Not only that, the evacuees were exclusively white and the impact of this on Britain’s standing was immediate and marked. All the old colonial conceits were stripped bare and the harsh reality of racist colonial rule was clear to all. Despite frantic efforts to recover the initiative, thanks to the ‘white-only’ evacuation of Penang, Britain’s ‘moral authority’ took a nose-dive.

  In the face of growing panic the authorities were reduced to palliatives. On 16 December, the Malay Mail carried the headline ‘Stand Fast and Stay Calm’ while the British Resident of Selangor issued a communiqué stating that ‘Rumours are current that the Government is contemplating the evacuation of women and children from Selangor, particularly from Kuala Lumpur. Such rumours are entirely false and indeed are contrary to the policy of Government. Everybody is asked to stand fast and keep calm.’ This was in fact true, and the British had yet to make the decision to withdraw their forces south to a line in northern Johor. It would take set-backs in Perak and at the Slim River later in the month before this was the case. But the public were certainly now aware that the abandonment of their capital city was a distinct possibility; government departments began to burn documents and there was a steady leaching of officials and staff to the presumed safety of Singapore. That same day the Legislative Council rushed through a bill imposing the death penalty for looting, though there is no evidence that it was ever imposed.

  On 20 December, Duff Cooper announced that Penang was ‘isolated now evacuated’. In fact, and widely known, the island had been evacuated on 16 December and had been an ‘open city’ for four days until the Japanese were invited in to take control by local citizens. By the time of Duff Cooper’s announcement, far from fighting to save Penang, the British were being pushed back deep into Perak. By late December, only one significant defensive obstacle lay between the Japanese and Kuala Lumpur, the Slim River, just twenty miles north of the border between Perak and Selangor. Broad and wide with high embankments, it could and should have been a formidable line of defence. The British, however, had failed to invest sufficient effort into building fixed fortifications and were reliant solely on the natural defensive features of the river. The focus was, necessarily, on the two bridges – one road and one rail. Meanwhile, as the British were rolled down the M
alayan peninsula, and front-line airfields were denied the RAF, the airfield at Kuala Lumpur assumed short-lived prominence as an ‘advanced landing ground’.

  Chapter Four

  Kuala Lumpur under Attack

  On 21 December 1941, the Japanese launched their first air attack on Kuala Lumpur. In almost comic book terms the press reported a ‘…thrilling dog fight between British fighter aircraft and the enemy machine [that] developed over the town area. No bombs believed to have been dropped in the attack but a few were dropped in a hit-and-run raid later’. There were no casualties but this was the precursor of more raids to come. The next day a similar air duel ensued. This time, bombs were dropped and the press reported that ‘The enemy air force has now turned its attention to Kuala Lumpur and the first actual air raid on the area occurred yesterday morning. One enemy aircraft was destroyed and another was believed to have been brought down.’ The city, it claimed, was ‘barely scathed’. On 23 December, the headlines noted ‘Three raiders down over city yesterday’. These accounts released by the censors, however, were highly coloured and failed accurately to portray the reality of Japanese air dominance.

  The daily military sitrep (situation report) issued to General Percival and his senior commanders in Singapore gave the honest account. In contrast to the press coverage, it recorded that in the air duel of 22 December ‘Kuala Lumpur [was] raided twice by total eighteen Navy O fighters. One enemy aircraft destroyed. Our casualties two shot down, two crashed, one destroyed landing. One pilot killed, two wounded.’ Following this bleak day of aerial conflict, Pte Littledyke of the Selangor Volunteers, on defence duty at the aerodrome, met ‘an Australian pilot in black overalls, he was gaunt, grey complexioned and hollow eyed. I asked him how he was getting on and he said “awful”, it’s suicide up there. Our Brewster Buffalo fighters are useless’. This was the more honest assessment of the air-battle.

  The Blame Game Starts

  Around this time there was a distinct change in the tone of the press treatment of the war. While the newspapers continued to carry positive stories of bravery the headlines now noted ‘British caught napping in Malaya’ and ‘Too much complacency in High Command’. The blame game had begun. For the British civilians it was traumatic. Two weeks previously, dark stories of the Blitz, German offensives deep into Russia and set-backs at Benghazi and Tobruk had been disturbing but distant. In Kuala Lumpur a ‘normal’, and for the British in many ways a privileged, lifestyle remained possible almost to the last - the dark clouds of war were there but had not impacted directly. But now, in remarkably short order, the barbarians were at the gate.

  Despite being long anticipated, the speed and ferocity of the Japanese assault surprised the British military and civilians alike. On 4 December, Ellen Parton, the wife of a Kuantan-based Australian tin mining engineer, set off on a long planned pre-Christmas break to stay with her friend Peggy in Kuala Lumpur. Ellen was planning to meet her children after they had finished term at boarding school in Sumatra and to fit in a little shopping in the city’s big department stores. But before she set off, and a sign that not all might be ‘normal’, she had been advised to take her family silver with her. As she left Kuantan on the east coast, the British military were already mining parts of the main road to the capital. Ellen noted that ‘It was not a very happy journey as there was a horrible feeling of something evil in the air.’ Four days later, with the news that the Japanese had launched their attack on Malaya, she cabled her children to meet her in Singapore. She then joined the flood of women and children heading there by car, bus and train and what they hoped would be a successful evacuation. Ellen Parton and her children were amongst the lucky ones; the family managed to find a berth on one of the last boats out of Singapore and by March she was back at her home in Geelong in Victoria. An unexceptional pre-Christmas shopping trip to Kuala Lumpur was transformed into a traumatic and dangerous bid for safety and freedom. Quiet, undramatic lives had been changed by circumstance into epic and terrifying adventures.

  Christmas 1941 was a subdued affair in Kuala Lumpur. Amongst the British, many men were away fighting with the Volunteers and news from them was limited and sporadic. Wives were often compelled to make hard decisions about whether stay or leave. At the same time, the influx of evacuees into the city increased daily, stretching hotel accommodation. The Evacuee Bureau sought to place these bewildered people and many locals offered rooms and help, but increasingly the tendency was to move south to the perceived safety of Singapore. Trains and roads were full of departing Europeans whose confidence in the ability of the British to hold the Japanese had evaporated. Meanwhile, the city’s Asian community was voting with its feet and was leaving the city for the safety of friends and family in rural areas. Kuala Lumpur was a city of fear, and in a state of flux.

  Catching the city’s schizophrenic mood, the ARP (Air Raid Precaution) issued a communiqué that ‘After many alerts and a few actual raids you are no doubt gradually growing used to war conditions. That is a good thing. But it would be dangerous to feel secure and become careless because Kuala Lumpur has so far not suffered much.’ On Christmas Day, and following warnings and threats relayed by Penang Radio (which they had, by this stage, captured) the Japanese raided Kuala Lumpur once more. According to Lt. Thornton little physical damage was done but it brought the first casualties to the city and there was an ‘astonishing degree of demoralisation’ as a consequence. The aerodrome was raided - ‘About 13 or 14 planes came sailing over from the west out of the sun regardless of A.A. fire and dropped about 20 small bombs.’ Thornton noted dryly that ‘every day we expected clouds of [RAF] planes our bluffing leaders led us to expect but the greatest numbers ever on the aerodrome were 13 of which 7 were shot down or destroyed in combat in one day... They were all Brewster Buffalos which we had been told were incredibly fast and with great fire-power but they were no match for the Japanese Navy O... But these pilots did not lack in bravery and skills and on one occasion bagged five Japs’. Thornton recalled one Japanese fighter brought down over Kuala Lumpur aerodrome, with the plane crashing into the Chinese cemetery behind. After Christmas, however, Thornton noted that Kuala Lumpur aerodrome had been ‘virtually abandoned by the RAF... we never saw a further plane’. The RAF ground staff had already started ‘a further southward movement’, though not without creating animosity by ‘piling up valuable lorries with such junk as mess tables and chairs’ while other units were struggling to find transport for themselves.

  Subversion

  As a consequence of these set-backs, the British were no longer viewed by the local population as the aloof, all-powerful masters; instead they were seen to have ‘feet of clay’. The Japanese were adept at exploiting British vulnerabilities, using the newly-seized radio transmitter in Penang to devastating advantage and by dropping leaflets highlighting British racist and colonialist attitudes and policies. In late December, the Selangor Government was forced to publish a communiqué advising ‘The Public… against believing the lying statements contained in leaflets being dropped from the air by the Japanese.’ Such admonitions had little impact on either British civilians or locals.

  In early December, thanks largely to intelligence passed to them by the Dutch security authorities, the British rounded up around one hundred members of the KMM. The presence of a putative Malay fifth-column, however modest, came as a shock to the British security authorities which had devoted so much of their energies to monitoring the Communists. On the night of 15 December the police in Kuala Lumpur arrested known Malay political activists, including ‘many subordinate Government servants’. Amongst those detained was Samad Ahmad, the Majlis journalist, who later claimed - somewhat incongruously - that the British had also incarcerated street beggars and prostitutes. The British response certainly smacked of a knee-jerk reaction to a hitherto hidden problem, about which they had little serious intelligence or understanding. Samad Ahmad and other identified radicals were initially sent to Pudu Prison and were then dispatched to Ch
angi Prison in Singapore. Here they languished until 16 February 1942, when they walked free after the Japanese took Singapore.

  A greater problem for the British than the presence of a small group of Malay fifth-columnists was the collapse of faith in them by great swathes of the general public. Prior to the war, the British had seemed largely invincible. Buoyed by an active propaganda campaign and by the sight of large numbers of uniformed allied servicemen of different services and from different nations, there had been little real concern that the British could lose. But the speed and success of the Japanese assault, the loss of Penang and the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, and the abject failure of the RAF to protect the skies, soon deflated this false optimism. As refugees headed south to Singapore, ‘confidence punctured like a balloon’. The radio and press were no longer believed and rumours spread with incredible speed. Indicative of the problems facing the British, in late December in Port Swettenham a Chinese man was arrested for spreading ‘false rumours’. He was later released and sent to hospital for a week for ‘assessment’.

  Chapter Five

  Kuala Lumpur Abandoned

  ‘Hang on appears to be the motto….’

  As the military position deteriorated, and the front line moved ever closer, a mood of resignation took over. On 2 January 1942, the Malay Mail carried the bitter-sweet headline ‘Hang on appears to be the motto’. This scarcely heroic injunction contrasted with the bizarre content of the day’s editorial, which focused on the annual New Year Honours awards. Correctly noting that ‘It may seem decidedly incongruous at a time like this…’ the newspaper dedicated precious space to the award of a C.M.G (Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George) to Mr. D.H. Hampshire, a Kuala Lumpur luminary, noting that it ‘believes [it was] the first time this award has been given to anyone outside the civil service… there will be general approval of this break with tradition’. While the Japanese blitzkrieg worked its way down the Malayan peninsula, Kuala Lumpur’s main English language newspaper was reflecting on the nuances of the British honours’ system. This decision is only explicable when it is revealed that D.H. Hampshire C.M.G. was not just a prominent tin-mine owner but was also a Director of the Malay Mail. Rooted more firmly in reality, the paper reported, albeit briefly (almost certainly due to the constraints of the censor), Japanese air raids on Port Swettenham, where damage was reportedly made to the port but not to the aerodrome.