Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  The Fate of the Selangor Volunteers

  With Kuala Lumpur and Selangor abandoned, the Selangor 2nd Battalion FMSVF fell in with British and Indian Army units in their disorderly retreat to Johor and Singapore. Lt. Thornton and his group of Volunteers were sent to defend the island of Belakang Mati [today’s Sentosa] off Singapore. They missed the fighting but surrendered with others of the FSMVF to be sent as POWs to Changi. Thornton later worked on the Thai-Burma railway, which he survived thanks, he thought, to his youth and strength and by managing to avoid any of the main killing diseases such as cholera and dysentery. At the end of the war, he was strong enough to help set up welfare operations in the various camps to process POWs and Asian workers.

  Lt. Littledyke’s fate, however, proved to be very different. He was also on Belakang Mati but on 17 February - two days after the official surrender - along with another resourceful Malayan Volunteer, Walter Drinnan (who had swum over to Belakang Mati from Singapore dressed in a dinner-jacket), he found a small native canoe (prahu) in which they paddled off to Sumatra. They were buzzed by Japanese fighters but never attacked, their guise as local fishermen working. Eventually Littledyke and Drinnan arrived in the Dutch East Indies and from there joined the Australian vessel, HMAS Hobart, which took them to Colombo and safety. Another fortunate escapee from the Selangor Volunteers was Lt. Ross, a junior official in the Malayan Civil Service. In late January 1942, Ross got a letter home from Singapore in which, in stoical manner, he told his parents that ‘We have seen some small amount of war at first hand and I am glad that we are working to some purpose.’ But he was at pains to reassure his anxious mother that ‘we have been let off very lightly in every way so far’. Following the British surrender, news of the fate of loved ones was at a premium. Ross’ parents must have literally wept tears of joy when they received a letter dated 14 March 1942, post-marked Bombay, letting them know that he had escaped by small boat to Sumatra and then by steamer to India. But men like Ross and Littledyke were very much a minority and most families had to contend with the letter of notification that their son was either a casualty or a POW or, as often as not, the possibly more traumatic ‘missing, fate unknown’.

  The individual European members of the Selangor Volunteers experienced the whole gamut of war-time outcomes, but how did the force fare overall? In 1941, 242 Europeans served in the Selangor 2nd Battalion. Of these, 19 were killed or died of wounds, 23 got away from Singapore successfully, 36 died as POWs and 174 survived captivity. In short, 55 men, or about twenty per cent of the Battalion’s strength, died due to fighting or from their subsequent treatment as POWs. This is an appalling attrition rate and while the British performance in the Malaya campaign was not militarily impressive this should not impugn the bravery and conduct of individual soldiers, who suffered disproportionately. By way of comparison, Max Hastings notes in his grand survey of the 1939-1945 war that on average one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants were to die during the war - the European members of the Selangor Volunteers had a mortality rate that was four times greater than this.

  The experience of the local Asian recruits to the Volunteers has been more difficult to establish. Once the Japanese blitzkrieg had passed Selangor, the locally-recruited volunteers were allowed to remain with their families and communities, hiding or veiling their engagement with the British as best they could. But many chose to fight on and joined the retreat to Singapore before being released by their British officers in the last days of fighting. There were accusations after the war that some local members had ‘deserted’ from the ranks and simply abandoned the fight. There may have been such cases, but there are also well-cited cases of local volunteers being ordered by their British officers, when the game was clearly up, to remove their uniforms, don civilian clothing and try to make their way home. For some, this involved arduous and lengthy walks back to their home states. One such local volunteer from Kuala Lumpur was George Hess’e, a Eurasian gunner in the light artillery battery. He later noted that his motivation for joining the military was ‘because we loved the country and were proud of the country – Malaya’. He withdrew alongside his volunteer colleagues to Singapore, and was then captured and interned by the Japanese at Changi Prison. Being dark-skinned amongst predominantly white POWs, he was able to escape after just four days by passing himself off as one of a group of Tamil labourers who had been called into the camp (he later joked that he had left Changi because the food did not suit him). Though free, this was just the beginning of his troubles, as he had no money and his home was far away in Kuala Lumpur. He was forced to endure an epic and lonely journey on foot through a Malaya wasted by war, but one that eventually ended with Hess’e back in Kuala Lumpur with his family.

  The Fate of Evacuees

  For the British and most European and Eurasian civilian evacuees, though they were not to know this when they left Kuala Lumpur, their exodus led remorselessly to one of three outcomes; escape, death or incarceration. Some, like Ellen Parton and her children, were able to make good their escape and eventually made their way back home to Australia. Similarly the Thompson family, wife and children of a Kuala Selangor rubber planter, were able to secure a berth on a late-departing boat – the inappropriately named Empress of Japan (it was renamed the Empress of Scotland on its final journey). Michael Thompson still recalls the excitement of a young boy watching the Japanese planes over the harbour, and the smoke and noise of war, as the vessel made a desperate, and in this case successful, dash for safety. The Thompson family made its way to South Africa and finally to Britain. Michael’s father, however, was serving with the 2nd Battalion Selangor Volunteers and was later to die from cholera while a POW on the Thai-Burma railway; such was her grief that after the war Michael’s mother never spoke of her husband nor his fate.

  The Parton and Thompson families were at least successful in escaping Singapore but not all families were so lucky and a considerable number died while trying to escape. In the later stages of the campaign, with the RAF shot from the skies, the Japanese had a free rein against allied shipping in the sea-lanes and islands in and around Singapore, and further south towards Riau and Lingga in the waters of the Dutch East Indies. Fleeing vessels became death-traps, sunk without chance of a fight by Japanese planes or submarines. Victims came from across Malaya and included civilians and servicemen alike. Included in the carnage was Dorothy Mather, the 25-year old wife of the Pudu Prison warden, and their three year old son. They died on 17 February 1942 while trying to escape on HMS Tandjong Pinang; a small, hugely over-crowded vessel carrying some 200 women, children and wounded men that was shelled at point blank range by a Japanese warship in the waters off Bangka, some eighty miles south of Singapore. Some of the crew and a few nurses on board managed to cling to debris and survive but most - including Dorothy Mather and her baby - were never seen again. Another victim from Kuala Lumpur was Mrs. Collett, whose husband was a partner in the prominent accountancy firm of Collet & Whittal Co.

  The third outcome for European evacuees was incarceration at Changi and Sime Road detention camps in Singapore. This in itself was not necessarily a final outcome because conditions in the camps were poor, with bad sanitation and insufficient food, and mortality rates were high. One Kuala Lumpur detainee who survived the war was James Mather. While his family sought to flee by boat, in the last days of British Singapore he stayed and helped out at Changi Prison, which at this period was largely full of Malay nationalists. Amongst those under his watchful gaze was Samad Ahmad, the Kuala Lumpur journalist. Following the Japanese victory, Samad Ahmad walked from the prison and into freedom and a few days later James Mather replaced him within Changi’s grim walls. Such is the razor-blade of life. Unlike his wife and child, James Mather survived the war and, after a period of convalescence in Britain, returned to Malaya where he re-married and started a second family.

  As the war progressed there were heart-rending attempts by families outside to assemble news of loved ones caught in the mayhem o
f the last weeks of British Malaya. Confusion was rife, but snippets and anecdotes such as ‘seen drifting from the Kuala, but a good swimmer’ or ‘reported murdered by Japanese on the beach at Pompong Island’ was often the only piece of news a relative would receive. Sometimes those reported ‘presumed dead’ would be found alive, and equally those believed to have survived were later found to have perished. Organisations in the UK, Australia and India sought to establish the fate of military and civilians alike, and roster lists were regularly assembled and published. The Japanese provided some news to the Red Cross and periodically, sometimes as a Christmas ‘gesture’, offered news of detainees on Domei [Japanese government] short-wave radio broadcasts. But it was not really until after the war that many relatives could with any confidence establish the facts surrounding the fate of their family members.

  Eurasians

  Many Eurasian families also boarded departing boats from Singapore, and suffered the same range of fates as the British and European refugees. Amongst these there were one or two miraculous escapes, including that of Wilhemina Eames (née van der Straaten) and her daughter Shirley, who were part of the prominent Ceylonese Burgher family. Mother and daughter survived the sinking of the SS Kuala and a long period floating at sea before being saved by local fisherman. They endured a brutal war, incarcerated in detention camps in Sumatra. They survived physically sound but each with their wartime demons to contend with in later years.

  The Sime Road civilian camp in Singapore held a large number of Eurasian detainees; camp records suggest upwards of five thousand. Overall, the Eurasians confused the Japanese. Though Christian and largely English-speaking, they were a mixed and varied group and in their initial trawl, the Japanese had largely rounded up ‘first generation’ Eurasians, or those who had one European parent (usually the father). Later in the war, from 1943, the Japanese began to release many of them as part of an attempt to win over local communities to the ‘New Order’. Most Eurasians felt an instinctive affinity towards Britain but were also deeply embittered by racist distinctions, not least the defining ‘white-only’ evacuation from Penang. Nothing similar occurred in the evacuation of Kuala Lumpur, and Eurasians were on board vessels fleeing Singapore, but they occupied a difficult and at times ambiguous position in the colonial construction. Shirley Eames of the van der Straaten clan would later note that some British subjects were not as ‘explicitly Aryan as they would like’.

  The relationship between European and Eurasian civilian detainees at Changi and Sime Road was fraught. For one, more local and Eurasian wives of European men emerged in the stress of war than had been acknowledged in the pre-war era. There was therefore an awkward co-existence between the two communities, thrown together in close personal proximity and subject to all the tensions that had been avoided or suppressed in ‘normal’ life. The subtle racial gradations of colonial life did not disappear and, according to Eurasian detainees, there was a continued sense of superiority and aloofness from the British memsahibs, despite the fundamental equalities of life as prisoners. In general, however, the Eurasians proved more adept at survival in the camps, partly because they were more used to the food on offer. While a European might baulk at fish-head soup and an endless diet of rice, for the Eurasians this was much more familiar fare.

  Kuala Lumpur’s Asian Communities

  In the immediate aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Kuala Lumpur, most locals simply bunkered down and sought to protect their families and possessions as best they could, though many also moved to rural areas and the small towns of Selangor. A minority, however, joined the panicked exodus south to Singapore. Amongst these was the rich Chinese towkay, Chan Wing, and his family. His very public support for the Kuomintang, as well as his prominent position in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinese community (he was the wealthiest man in Kuala Lumpur and appropriately lived in ‘The Big House’) meant that he would have been high on any Japanese ‘blacklist’. Chan Wing managed to escape from Singapore with his two sons to Java by plane, and then boarded a merchantman that was sunk by a Japanese submarine. He survived on a lifeboat and eventually landed in Australia, where he spent the remainder of the war. The rest of his family also escaped Singapore, though in their case ‘sat out the war’ in India. But few of Kuala Lumpur’s terrified citizens fleeing ahead of the Japanese onslaught had Chan Wing’s wealth and resources – he and his family were very much in a minority.

  In the days and weeks that followed the Japanese arrival, a period of chaos and confusion, families tried to locate lost members, or at least to establish news of their fate. One elderly Chinese lady recalls, with tears, the day her father left home on a routine errand and simply disappeared – never to be seen or heard of again. The local newspapers in the weeks after the Japanese occupation are peppered with requests for news about lost family. On 14 March 1942, for example, the classified section of the Malay Mail carried the message that ‘Mr Chew Chye Huat and family’ were ‘O.K.’ but sought news of the ‘welfare of Messers Chew Kiam Siong, Soh Eddie and families in Syonan’ [Singapore]. A few days later, Mr. P.K. Raghaven and family of the Changkat Estate sought news of his two brothers and their families at the ‘Syonanese Naval Base’. Later in the month, ‘Mohammed Salleh bin Wan Chik and family [were] anxious to know the whereabouts of Bachik wan Chik’ - his older brother. The confusion of the fighting and war had therefore scattered families from all communities far and wide and establishing the fate of loved ones proved a difficult task. Months later, the classified advertisements still carried sad requests for information about family and friends. In late June 1942, for example, the family of E. Kathiresu was still seeking news of his whereabouts.

  Japanese Internees

  There was a final group of evacuees from Kuala Lumpur - the Japanese civilians detained by the British at the outbreak of fighting. Their wartime experience also proved bleak. The 111 men rounded up in Selangor had initially been sent to Changi Prison and the women and children to a camp on Belakang Mati. By early January 1942, Japanese internees in Singapore numbered around three thousand and later that month the British sent them by ship to Calcutta. There they waited for three days before embarking on a 70 hour journey by train, and a final two hour march to Purana Qila, a detention camp on the outskirts of New Delhi. The camp was located in an old Moghul fort and accommodation was military style in rows of canvas tents surrounded by wire. Amongst those sent to Purana Qila was Ayabe Kuichiro, the Kuala Lumpur dentist, and his wife and daughter. In February 1942, when news of the fall of Singapore reached Purana Qila, one report noted that ‘fishermen from the Andamans, the shopkeeper from Singapore and the dentist from Kuala Lumpur all joined the festivities’. Ayabe Kuichiro, therefore, appears not only to have survived the journey but also to have retained his sense of patriotism, which was possibly enhanced by the appalling conditions that he and his family endured at Purana Qila.

  Because the records for male prisoners are incomplete, it is impossible to account precisely for the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor contingent at Purana Qila. But assuming the figure of 111 male internees rounded up by the British at the outset of war is full and accurate, when added to the complete records for women (65) and children (38) from Selangor, an overall figure of 214 is reached. By the end of 1942, however, seven of this group were dead, ranging from the 50 year old Jiroza Miyazaki, who died of tuberculosis, to Yoko Kobayashi, who failed to make her first birthday. Overall, 106 internees, from a total of 2856 Malayan and Singaporean detainees, had died by the end of the year. The internees only had their light tropical clothes and at night, in winter, temperatures could drop to near freezing, with a bitter, cutting wind. During the summer, by contrast, the temperatures rose to over 120 degrees. The men were separated from the women and children and all were subjected to the same conditions and rations as an Indian army sepoy. But most were not hardened to a life of sleeping on floors or living on a diet of simple rice and dhal, and they struggled. Sanitation was poor and disease commonplace, leading to disgra
cefully high mortality rates.

  When the high mortality figures began to leak, the initial British response was defensive, claiming that the ‘complaints of internees are highly exaggerated’. But by November 1942 one senior official was sufficiently concerned to note ‘that the Japanese should lodge protests against the Allied treatment of Japanese nationals seems the strangest inversion possible, but I am not certain that our own house is in as good order as it should be’. Against the recorded death statistics another official had inked ‘A very high figure!’ The death rate at Purana Qila was indeed considerably greater than that in Changi civilian detention camp for the corresponding period, and this was used by the Japanese as a pretext for the harsher treatment they later introduced.

  Some of those detained, however, were fortunate to be included in a swap of civilian internees. In August 1942, the British and Japanese - working through the neutral Portuguese - negotiated an exchange of prisoners. The primary aim was to exchange consular staff caught up on the wrong side of the line but it was extended to include other non-official civilians. This resulted in 720 Japanese civil internees and 64 consular staff from Purana Qila being repatriated via Mozambique and a Portuguese vessel to Singapore. The Japanese vetted lists of civilians and priority amongst the civil internees was given to employees of the major Japanese companies and institutions, but there was also an element of lottery for those selected. From Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, the Principal of the Japanese School, Norito Arimoto, and his extended family of nine relatives were included, as was Koozoo Yamamoto of the Japanese Association of Kuala Lumpur. Thereafter, Arimoto returned to Kuala Lumpur where he resumed his position as a school principal. One of his students later recalled that ‘he was angry but did not punish’ his students for cheering the downing of Japanese fighters during an aerial duel with US bombers over Kuala Lumpur in January 1945.