Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945 Read online

  Kempetei Training

  The Kuala Lumpur army garrison hosted a regional Kempetei training centre, under the command of Lt. Col. Tadanori Nakayamu and comprising 22 training officers. Individual Kempeis, as the officers and men were known, joined courses spanning from three months to one year and from here were posted throughout South East Asia. The curriculum covered core subjects such as investigations into political, black-market and criminal issues, map reading, ‘peace maintenance’, but also extended to fencing, judo and ‘spiritual training’. In post-war interrogations, Nakayamu denied that the school taught torture methods, and claimed that such activity was deeply frowned upon. This line was also advanced by General Masanori Kojima, who was the commander of the Kempetei in Malaya. He asserted under interrogation that ‘each kempei understands that employment of torture would constitute an abuse of authority’. But torture and abuse was used on such a scale by the Kempetei as to be nothing less than systemic.

  Lai Teck and a Counter-Intelligence Triumph

  The Kempetei’s work, however, was not all terror. They were to exhibit great deftness of touch in their handling of a significant agent penetration of the Communist Party. In March 1942, shortly after the Japanese arrived in Singapore, the Secretary-General of the MCP, Lai Teck, was arrested by the Kempetei and brought in for questioning. Given his earlier track record as a spy for the British there should be no surprise that in order to save his skin (and he would have surely been executed had he not collaborated) he offered to work for the Kempetei. Like all communist organisations, the MCP prided itself on its discipline and its strict hierarchy. The Secretary-General (who occupied a similar status to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Mao Tse Tung in China) could both provide the Japanese with intelligence of huge value and influence party decisions in a way that favoured the Japanese. Thus controversially, but no doubt under Japanese pressure, in mid-1942 Lai Teck ordered the various MCP cadres that, rather than initiating attacks on the Japanese, they should instead focus on a ‘broad based restructuring on the industrial front’. This was diversionary activity and most local committees ignored the instruction. But with Lai Teck as Secretary-General, at least in the early years, the Japanese had a compliant asset willing to report to them and to do their bidding.

  Early evidence of Lai Teck’s treachery came in April 1942, when the Secretary of the Selangor State Committee, Xue Feng, was picked up by the Kempetei, almost certainly having been betrayed by Lai Teck, and then died in their hands after extensive torture. Lai Teck’s most spectacular act of betrayal, however, came in September 1942, when over forty senior party leaders were summoned to a top-level meeting at a secret location in the village of Sungei Dua near Batu Caves on the edge of Kuala Lumpur. According to Chin Peng, who later became the Secretary-General of the MCP, the Selangor cadre provided a ten-man protection unit for the meeting and four women to cook. Makeshift accommodation in the form a traditional atap (grass roof) hut was prepared in an area of light jungle and grassland. The main meeting was due to start on 1 September but most delegates (though not the Secretary-General) were instructed to arrive a day early to set the agenda.

  Knowing in advance through Lai Teck, the Kempetei, disguised as regular soldiers, had moved into the area and at midnight on 31 August surrounded the camp and attacked. In the ensuing fire-fight, all ten members of the Selangor security detachment were killed, as were over half the delegates. A number of Japanese soldiers, including a senior Kempetei officer, died in the fire-fight. Despite losses it was a huge victory for the Kempetei and a major set-back for the Malayan communists, who lost many good men and whose confidence was knocked; thereafter they were paranoid about agents and spies in their midst. Either through luck or skill, the blame for the security lapse was placed on the Negri Sembilan delegate, who had been arrested en-route to the meeting and was presumed to have revealed its details. This fortunate twist deflected attention from Lai Teck.

  Thereafter the Selangor communists had a mixed war. In April 1943, a senior party figure, Siao Peng, was arrested while on a train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore. He was taken to the Kempetei headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and immediately agreed to cooperate. Sia Peng identified the location of the Selangor State committee headquarters, which was then based in an atap hut on edge of the city. The Kempetei raided but the base was surrounded by lalang (long, sharp grass that grows prolifically in open and de-forested areas) and the three cadre members present managed to escape. As a consequence of this raid, the Selangor MCP moved to a new headquarters, described by Chin Peng as ‘the most secure headquarters we were ever able to establish in occupied Malaya’. It was a small staff house at the leper colony at Sungei Buloh. The MCP had previously infiltrated their people as medical staff into the colony and ‘For the remaining period of the Japanese occupation period, the Selangor state committee operated uninterrupted from within a colony of a few hundred lepers. All rank-and-file Japanese feared going near the settlement.’

  The Kempetei may have missed a trick through the MCP’s clever use of the leper colony to hide its Selangor headquarters but overall its system of terror was not casual or without a hard-nosed rationale; it had first been developed and refined during the occupation of Manchuria. With military forces stretched and with Kuala Lumpur a largely Chinese – and therefore inherently hostile – environment, they clearly calculated that a regime of fear and disproportionate violence would result in a pliant and cowed populace. And in many ways, though decreasingly so as Japan’s strategic position worsened from late 1943, they achieved their aim. There is no evidence, from the day they entered Kuala Lumpur until the time the British arrived, that Japanese troops were attacked or seriously threatened in the urban areas of Kuala Lumpur or in the immediately surrounding rural areas of Selangor. Repression, though reprehensible, proved a powerful and effective weapon of war and domination.

  Chapter Nine

  Pudu Prison

  Prisoners of War

  Though the British withdrew from Kuala Lumpur and Selangor without a sustained fight, the collapse of the 11th Indian Division at Slim River and the rearguard action by Indian Army units in and around Kuala Lumpur resulted in large numbers of Indian troops falling into Japanese hands. The Japanese attitude towards these dispirited and demoralised men was largely passive. They posed little threat and having disarmed them, most were left to their own devices. In Kuala Lumpur, some were initially housed in the central police barracks and on 22 January were moved to Pudu Prison. But this was only a temporary solution and by the end of the month the prison was cleared for European POWs. A British intelligence source reported that in May 1942 Indian POWs in Kuala Lumpur were housed in a set of former British barracks and some were in sequestered Chinese schools. He noted that there was ‘no barbed wire around camps and prisoners allowed to wander freely around town. Except when taken out on fatigues the Japanese did not interfere directly with the prisoners and no guards were mounted on the camps’. During the war, none of these Indian Army POW camps was visited by the International Red Cross but the regime imposed remained relaxed and non-coercive. A 1945 British assessment estimated that there were about 4,000 Indian POWs in camps in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, though this proved to be an exaggeration. When the British returned, numbers proved to be about half of that. The benign treatment of the Indian POWs certainly helped the Japanese in their efforts to draw many of them into the anti-British Indian National Army; a lesson in motivation that they would have been wise to adopt in their handling of the local communities.

  The treatment meted out to the British and Australian POWs proved far harsher. From late January 1942, Pudu Prison became a camp for British and Australian troops and some European civilian detainees. Initially the arriving POWs were crammed into the women’s wing. From April, the main wings of the prison were made available and troops were housed on a regimental basis. Thus soldiers from the Norfolk, Cambridge, Leicester and East Surrey Regiments, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and Australian ‘diggers’
each had their own wings, while officers (many of whom were from Indian Army regiments) and civilian internees were in separate accommodation. At the back of the prison, in its own compound, was Block B – used by the Kempetei. In mid-February, there were 550 POWs in Pudu and by April this number had grown to 740 as stragglers emerged from their jungle hide-outs, often semi-starved and many suffering from wounds and illness. In mid-June the last soldiers to emerge from the jungle were two Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Privates James MacFarland and Thomas Hunter, who after five months surviving as best they could gave themselves up at a police station at Salak, south of Kuala Lumpur.

  In Pudu, the Japanese maintained a regime of malign neglect. The prisoners were rarely physically mistreated and security was not onerous, but the sanitary and medical conditions were atrocious. In April, the original women’s wing was turned into a hospital ward. By June it housed 110 prisoners of whom 48 would die. In early July, conditions in the prison only got worse when 323 European POWs and internees were transferred from Taiping Prison. By October, when the British and Australian troops finally left, 94 prisoners had died, mostly of disease; the main killers were dysentery and pellagra. Even for those who survived, the majority were run down and suffering from scabies, ringworm and septic sores.

  The senior ranking prisoner was Brigadier Bernard Challen, Commander of the 6/15th Brigade of the 11th Indian Division, who was captured on 29 January 1942 following fighting near Benut in Johor. He was lucky enough to be given his own room in the gaol superintendent’s office. Despite his relatively privileged existence, Challen described the food as ‘poor’ and the sanitation as ‘appalling’ though he noted that the prisoners were able to earn a little money through work and could buy ‘the occasional piece of beef, pork and duck eggs’ to supplement their regular fare. A major problem were the flies and mosquitoes, particularly as there were no nets or ceiling fans. Sleeping in the hot fetid conditions of the gaol was difficult and mosquito-born diseases spread quickly. Challen noted that visiting Japanese officers were ‘very shy and never spoke to us’ save ‘one youngster who came twice and regaled us with Japanese cigarettes’. He noted that ‘Lots of Chinese were brought into the prison from time to time. Jap Gestapo always on to them. Little fellow with a cat-o-nine-tails and pregnant Chinese woman as interpreter. Much flogging and beating went on and occasionally a dead body was carried out.’ But this was someone else’s problem and Challen reflected that ‘on the whole Kuala Lumpur was not too bad. We were left much to ourselves. A good library was formed from looted books brought in by working parties. We read a lot and played chess and every night at 8.30pm I played bridge’. By March, and with much secrecy, a radio-set ‘donated’ by a Chinese man was smuggled into the prison in a box of duck eggs. In the absence of regular and reliable news, Challen noted that wild rumours would spread quickly throughout the prison, which his secret source of outside intelligence could only occasionally be used to counter and dispel.

  In mid-June, Challen and another senior officer were allowed out of the prison under escort to buy some food and other basic items for the POWs. He found the market ‘full and busy’ but expensive. There were very few cars on the streets and he noted that the Federal Dispensary and Little’s Department Store had both been burned to the ground. The population of Kuala Lumpur appeared ‘reticent and frightened looking’ and Challen saw a number ‘of what we thought were renegade sepoys [Indian Army troops] in mufti (civilian dress)’. Challen, who before the war had been stationed in Kuala Lumpur, revisited his old house in Ampang which he found dilapidated and ransacked. His next door neighbour, an elderly Eurasian, came to greet him with ‘tears in his eyes’. On his way back to Pudu Prison, Challen dropped into the Selangor Golf Club. A few caddies and the caddie-master were hanging around rather listlessly. Two of the ‘nines’ were maintained and playable though ‘3&4 courses’ were over-grown and the ‘greens gone’. Inside the old club house, a symbol if ever there was of the colonial British, the bar was ‘destroyed’. It must have been a distinctly strange outing, but Challen described himself as ‘quite exhilarated by fresh air and scenes and looking into middle distance’.

  Another account of Pudu as a POW camp is offered by Geoffrey Scott Mowat, who was a member of the Straits Settlements Colonial Service and a Volunteer. Mowat entered Pudu in late March 1942. Initially at least there was the opportunity for work outside the prison, with gangs being sent to clean properties, move ammunition and work as labourers. Some of this was back-breaking activity but other tasks proved less onerous and, in the early months at least, Mowat noted that it was often possible to scavenge food to supplement the prison rations. Books were also smuggled in and Mowat noted that work at the mansion of the Chinese towkay Loke Wan To meant they never wanted for reading material, as he had a large library an ‘excellent taste in literature’.

  According to Mowat, relations with the Japanese gaolers varied; some proved predictably brutal but others exhibited much more human qualities. In one area, the Japanese could not be faulted – religious services were permitted and facilitated. A small room by the main gate was turned into a chapel - ‘The plain whitewashed walls were decorated with the badges of the various units of the camp, beautifully executed in black and white…. There was a simple altar and lectern, both made in the gaol workshops.’ Entertainments also flourished and variety shows proved popular fare, including with the Japanese. In September 1942, a group of prisoners were drafted in as extras for a Japanese propaganda film, playing the part of the defeated British army. At a disused tin-working at Ampang, the Japanese reconstructed a Japanese assault on an entrenched British position, which the ‘glorious soldiers of Nippon’ finally overcame in heroic fashion. Unfortunately for one of them, the climax of the film culminated in a mighty explosion, accidentally killing one of the attacking Japanese force and a Malayan ‘coolie’. Mowat’s account also notes the disease and sickness that stalked the prison, and the tragedy that befell the escapees, though his abiding memory was of the ‘wonderful comradeship which can flourish in adversity’. He later noted that ‘Surprising as it might seem, I have, on the whole, very happy memories of my first year in prison’.

  Break Out

  The relaxed security conditions in the prison inspired a group of prisoners to escape. The senior serving officer was Captain D.R. Nugent of the Indian Army’s 18th Royal Garhwal Rifles and he was accompanied in the group by two British soldiers, an Australian sergeant, a Dutch pilot, and three members of the FMSVF. The key instigators appear to have been the three buccaneering members of the Volunteers and members of Spencer Chapman’s 101 STS: Lieutenants Vanrenen, Harvey and Graham. They clearly believed that knowledge of local languages and conditions outside the prison would help, but this proved to be a tragic miscalculation. There was much scepticism amongst the other detainees. L.S. Jones, one of the civilians transferred from Taiping Prison, tried to dissuade them but was ignored. Even one of their own from the FMSVF, Lt. Wilson (of the Selangor Drainage and Irrigation Department and 101 STS) counselled against, but his advice was also rejected.

  On 13 August, after morning roll-call and having obtained a duplicate key, the eight men escaped through a side door of the prison. The other prisoners managed to mask their absence for a day by covering up for them at the next morning roll-call but they did not get far. Europeans were no longer a common sight and moving quietly and unobserved proved an impossible task. In the following days all but one were picked up in and around Kuala Lumpur and returned to Pudu Prison. They were kept as a group in an isolation cell and regularly taken to the Kempetei headquarters for interrogation and torture; according to one account two of them were held in a coffin-like chamber for days on end. The only exception was Captain Nugent who escaped from Kuala Lumpur but was apprehended near Betong in Perak. He was shot in the leg during his capture and then spent time in a Japanese hospital. According to one source, Nugent was held there until his leg healed after which he was led away and beheaded. His headst
one at the Taiping Commonwealth War Graves cemetery records that he died on 11 September 1942. L.S. Jones later noted that though ‘I took a great deal of exception to his [Nugent] questioning of my lack of courage and left him in no doubt as to what I thought of that. I took no joy out of being proved correct.’

  The remaining escapees were held at Pudu Prison until 1 September. That day the prison commander, Captain Mizarki, ordered that no one should approach the administration office. Just before sunset the escapees were taken out of the main gates and loaded into the back of a military truck. Ominously for them, they were told to leave their mess tins behind. The truck drew away, followed by a second containing the prison’s Japanese interpreter, Fujibayashi, and a detachment of troops. The escapees were never seen again and it was commonly believed that they were taken to the European cemetery at Cheras Road, shot and buried there; though another source, citing an authoritative POW account, states that they were taken to the old Protestant cemetery near Edinburgh circus (near the Chinese Assembly Hall), lined up and executed. After the escape the Japanese demanded that the remaining British officers sign a ‘no escape certificate’. Initially they refused and as a consequence were incarcerated ‘in vermin infested cells with no sanitary or ablution arrangements, inadequate food’. Eventually, after suffering ten days of hell, the officers agreed to sign the certificate but only after quietly rationalising that this was not a binding agreement, as the Japanese had compelled them to sign under duress.

  From July 1942 the Japanese began to transfer European internees and POWs out of Pudu. Most were sent to Changi in Singapore, though on 14 October a final group of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was sent directly to Thailand to work on the ‘death railway’. With this, Pudu was cleared of POWs and European civilian internees. The Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Cheras Road in Kuala Lumpur carries the graves of British and Australian forces who died in central Malaya and Kuala Lumpur. Of the 69 headstones from this period, just twelve are from the period of active fighting. The remaining 57 graves date from beyond mid-February 1942 and reflect either the delayed consequence of wartime wounds, or disease and maltreatment as POWs. The last burial from this period is Pte. Robert McGhee of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who died on 13 October 1942. He must have been one of the last POWs held at Pudu before the move to Thailand.