A CRICKETER UNDER THE JAPS

E.W. Swanton remembers the Allied

surrender in Singapore, exactly a half century ago, and the captivity that followed

THIS WEEKEND sees a sombre jubilee. I suppose that the picture of the last days of the Battle of Singapore will stand out equally clearly in the recollection of most of my fellow survivors. We had ample time to relive the chaotic scene in the three and a half years from the Allied surrender on 15 February 1942 to that of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay on 15 August 1945.

On Thursday 29 January, 17 days before the largest capitulation in the history of British arms, we slid into Singa- pore harbour, the only

significant reinforce- ments to have arrived there since the Japanese invasion of Malaya seven weeks before. As the American troop-ship SS Wakefield, carrying 54 Brigade of the 18th Divi- sion, was being berthed, the decks thick with men in full order, a flight of 27 Jap bombers flew straight at us. If ever there was a sitting duck we were it. Almost over- head they came, then veered off and dropped their bombs on the pre- selected prey, a gasworks perhaps. The leader ignored the target of his dreams, for in the Jap code obedience came before initiative. It was my first glimpse of his mentality.

The Australian truck drivers who took us to a staging camp in a rubber plantation told us we had arrived too late. By contrast, an official communication from Army HQ at Fort Canning suggested things were nor- mal enough. A letter from the Deputy Provost Marshal requested a photograph in duplicate for the issue of an identity card — this when by the weekend or there- abouts the advancing Japs would have arrived at the Johore Strait dividing the island from the Malayan mainland. It was incidental in my case that the signatory of the letter, Lt Colonel Brian K. Castor, the pre-war secretary of Essex County Cricket Club, would have had no difficulty in recognising his cricket partner in a pre-war opening stand or two.

The shape of Singapore Island is much like a full-blown rose, twice as wide as it is deep, with the city on its southern coast. The naval base and the causeway connect- ing with the mainland lie centrally, with the military area of Changi to the north-east.

This was the area assigned to our 18th Division, which was composed of Territori- als from the eastern counties. With what remained of the Indian 1 1 th Division, we took up positions on the 31st, the battle- weary Australians and the other Indian and British troops who had been fighting a gal- lant, hopeless retreat on the mainland being deployed on the left flank. Churchill, in Book IV of The Second World War, notes that there were no permanent fortifi-

cations on the landward side and, what was `even more astounding', no field defences had been attempted after the war in the East had begun. This is the exact truth. Not a coil of wire did we find, and when we sent to the RAOC depot on the afternoon of Saturday the 31st to get some, we found they had closed down for the weekend.

We made what defensive provisions we could in that first week of February, and provided some custom to an Officers' Club bar with well-laundered staff down by the shore. I signed my last chits there (thinking a bottle or two of whisky would come in handy) on 8 February, the very night that the Japs (after a strong bombardment, in small craft and with blood-curdling cries) penetrated the north- west coast.

The 18th Division, wrote the Prime Minis- ter to General Wavell, the Supreme Comman- der, on 10 February, `has a chance to make its name in history'. Vain hope! After two years of hard home training, commanded by General 'Becky' Beckwith-Smith, in whom we had confi- dence and who held the affection of all, we were denied any such glory. Leaving us unscathed, apart from spasmodic bombardment from the air and artillery on the mainland, the Japs made such inroads in the north-west that by 11 February (my 35th birthday) all troops east of the causeway were withdrawn to a circu- lar perimeter in defence of the city. Units were thrown in piecemeal to plug the gaps. Beckwith-Smith saw his beloved division dismembered bit by bit.

Once the Jap had gained a foothold on the island, surrender was inevitable. In 17 days 1 never recognised a single Allied air- craft, only Japs either bombing from high altitude or, in the final days, spotting dis- dainfully for their guns almost at tree-top height. They even had balloons doing the same job. Denied any vestige of air sup- port, even the finest fighting troops would have been pressed to maintain morale.

On 12 and 13 February, the 25-pounder guns of 148 Field Regiment supported the centre-right of the perimeter defence of the city facing the MacRitchie, the south- ernmost of the three island reservoirs, with the Bukit Timah golf course just west of it. From a convenient observation post, I had the satisfaction of directing heavy concen- trations of fire from the 12 guns of 419 Bat- tery at and in the area of the clubhouse and down the Sime Road.

The left of the line came under the heav- iest enemy pressure, and on 14 February we received orders to conform to a further withdrawal. It was in establishing a new OP that I came to grief. Wireless communica- tion between OPs and guns was extremely unreliable, making archaic telephone lines essential. While my OP Ack was away directing the signallers laying the wire, I saw up an adjacent tree a pair of spectacles glinting in the sun. Using my Ack's rifle I aimed a few shots into the foliage, but was rewarded by no falling body. A while later, rather forgetting the fellow, I got up to investigate the wire-laying situation. In a burst from, I suppose, his sub-machine-gun was hit by a single bullet at the right elbow. I was taken to an advanced dress- ing-station, being succeeded at the OP by my battery commander, Major Bill Merry. During the night of the 14/15th the situa- tion on our front rapidly deteriorated and in the early morning of the day of surren- der poor Merry, in the act of rallying some straggling infantry, was killed.

I, by contrast, had been wonderfully lucky. The bullet had passed through my arm an inch below the funny bone. Sent back to Singapore General Hospital, I passed through corridors lined with civilian stretcher cases, and was directed to the last but one vacant bed.

I found there a medley of emotions: frus- tration ('We were thrown away,' says a staunch bombardier, recalling the moment), indignation in some, indifference in a few, and in many — for those at the guns' end had had no direct contact with the enemy — sheer surprise. For our losses were negligible, four killed out of 202, one of them our battery commander.

In his summary of the immediate reasons behind the surrender, General Percival mentioned dwindled food reserves, short- ages of ammunition, petrol and water. I can vouch for the water shortage, for in 24 hours at the General Hospital I received one cup, which was the ration. (It was ten days before the water supply was restored to this teeming hospital.) Once the Japs took the MacRitchie reservoir, the struggle was over. Could the General have exposed the civilian population of nearly a million to the threat of death by thirst? His only alternative to surrender on the morning of 15 February was a counter-attack to regain possession of the reservoirs and the food depots. His commanders ruled out this option as impracticable. They doubted with ample reason — whether their forces could resist another determined attack which would have meant Jap troops run- ning loose in the city.

So the white flag was hoisted and, shortly after dusk in the Ford factory at Bukit Timah, General Percival acceded to the demand of unconditional surrender made by his opposite number, Lieutenant Gener- al Yamashita. The Jap army had shown all the military virtues, as well as a capacity to inflict acts of unbridled savagery that boded ill for their captives. After the action at Muar, non-walking wounded were mas- sacred in cold blood. At the Alexandra Mil- itary Hospital at Singapore two days before the surrender, 150 patients and staff, hav- ing been confined all night to a space allowing standing-room only, were execut- ed the next morning.

The feeling that we were implicated, however helplessly, in the humiliation of Singapore, coupled with the sudden change from normal food to a diet exclusively of rice and jungle vegetables, did nothing for morale in the early days of captivity. I recall a dark moment in March or April when a string of heavy Jap cruisers — we counted 11 in line ahead — steamed past Changi to the naval base. Our release at that moment seemed a very long way off. There was no means of knowing that the spring of 1942 marked the limit of Jap expansion, that in early June the Ameri- cans shifted the balance of naval strength by destroying four of their carrier fleet in It) minutes in the Battle of Midway. This astonishing victory, John Keegan has writ- ten. 'turned the tide of the war at a stroke'.

For most of us, I think, depression lifted when there was work to be done. In River Valley Road camp in Singapore city, as the so-called camp Welfare Officer, I formed a library of several thousand hooks brought hack by working parties employed by the Japs to clean up the European quarter. They were the sort to be expected on the shelves of expatriate Englishmen: Priestley, Waugh, Galsworthy, Bryant, H.V. Morton, Gunther. When we were sent away to make the Burma-Siam railway, two books a man were doled out. The result was that in the next three years modest libraries were set up all along the railway, once the line had been laid and work pressure eased. The tattered contents were kept in reasonable shape by book-binders using paste and remnants of gas-cape for cover. At one point my 1939 Wisden was in such demand that it could be lent out only for periods of six hours.

In September 1942, I found myself trans- ported up through Malaya by rail. There were, luckily, only 22 to our officers' cattle- truck and not the usual 40, so that, over the several days of a journey punctuated by sta- tion stops to consume pails of rice and water, we were just able to lie sardine-fash- ion head to tail. From the rail-head at Ban- pong, we marched 25 miles (with all the belongings we possessed or could carry on a tarmac road in much heat) past amiably curious Siamese to Kanchanaburi, and thence by jungle track to the headquarters camp at Tarsao. This was the route trav- elled by all the Allied POWs engaged on building the railway: there were 66,000 of us, of whom 16,000 failed to return. These were military casualties exclusive of Tamils, Malays, Chinese and other sources of impressed labour who died like flies.

Soon after we started up the track, a tropical storm descended on us. Heavily laden and soaked to the skin, we were slip- ping and slithering on when an extraordi- nary thing happened. The troops, who had cursed terribly in the heat, suddenly began to sing and went on doing so, louder and louder. I will never forget the look of utter incredulity on the face of the Nip (in cap- tivity, Japs were known invariably as Nips) plugging on beside me. I suppose the rain reminded us of home.

The most devilish time was the `speedo' period from March to 17 October 1943, by which date the Emperor had decreed that the line must be completed. It was — at the cost of prisoners, weak as they were, rav- aged by dysentery, malaria and beri-beri, working 12 hours a day on a diet of rice and vegetables, plus an occasional egg and still rarer vestiges of meat, driven on by the Nips and in many cases dying on the job. When the south-west monsoon broke in May, one was never dry.

I was first at Wampo, then Tonchan and Kinsayok, in camps bordering both the Kwai-Noi river and the railway track, as it was hewn yard by yard out of the jungle. My duties were mostly in camp, building huts and digging latrines, and, in a laugh- ably so-called Welfare capacity, organising a talks programme, quiz sessions and sing- songs in the evenings. I recall, however, some timber-carrying days when British and Dutch officers and other ranks, Tamils, Malays, Chinese, Jap engineers and several elephants were all engaged on building a bridge. Speedo was the word.

1 owe it to the memory of Colonel Sir Philip Toosey and to my fellow Far Eastern POWs to object to the portrayal by Alec Guinness of the British colonel in the film Bridge Over the River Kwai, which, though purporting to be a version of the fictional book of that name by Pierre Boulle, was assumed by the public to be fact.

The building of the bridge at the junction between the Kwai Yai and Kwai Noi was the essential first step in the construction of the railway that was to follow the line of the Kwai Noi up to the Burmese border at the Three Pagodas pass. As the senior British officer in a group of prisoners that swelled ultimately to 2,600, including many Dutch, Toosey was ordered to command the camp at the site and provide all fit men for the work, which was supervised by the Jap railway regiment.

He protested without avail that under the Hague and Geneva Conventions pris- oners must not be used for tasks helpful to the war effort as, of course, did other senior POW officers elsewhere, but equally to no avail. He therefore pursued a policy of limited co-operation, which he consid- ered the best way of ensuring that as many of his men as possible should survive cap- tivity. By insisting on strict discipline — no beards, by the way, for fear of lice — keep- ing constant pressure on the Nips to improve food and conditions, and protest- ing against every instance of brutality, he succeeded marvellously. In many ways the film gave a graphic, realistic picture of the scene apart from the character of the Jap- happy, half-crazed 'Colonel Nicholson'.

Sir Alec Guinness won an Oscar for a virtuoso performance that was nevertheless seen by Toosey's fellow-prisoners as a gross calumny against one of the heroes both of the war in Malaya and of the captivity.

If circumstances thrust Philip Toosey most prominently into the spotlight, other senior officers of the 18th Division shoul- dered with outstanding success throughout our captivity the utterly wearing, frustrat- ing, dangerous duty of representing their fellow-POWs in negotiations with the Nips. They lived with the knowledge of secret wireless-sets, illicit traffic in money and medicines, and other matters which, if the Nips had known of them, would have resulted in torture, if not death. Two lieu- tenant-colonels, H.H. Lilly of the 1/5 Sher- wood Foresters and A.E. Knights of the 4th Norfolk Regiment, known as 'Knocker', small men both but tough as old boots, were respected up and down the river.

I eventually got down to the 'hospital' camp beside the golden temple at Nakom Patom. The 'hospital', by the way, was so only in name. We still slept all together on bamboo platforms, though perhaps there was a little more head-room, say 30 inches each, rather than the uniform 18 inches.

The railway layers passed us at Kinsayok on 30 July 1943, after which the work pres- sure eased and the camp death-rate decreased, perhaps from five or six a day to one or two — or even none. In a clearing we made a sort of open-air chapel, with a wooden altar and cross in case a padre came our way. A Harvest Festival was planned, and one of the Korean guards, who was a Christian, contributed to our meagre display a hand of bananas. This was noticed. The guard was beaten up and I, the Welfare Officer, apparently a subver- sive influence, was slapped a time or two and sent down to headquarters at Tarsao.

The journey down river in a pom-pom would have been agreeable but for the prospect of being handed over to the ten- der care of the Kempe-Tai, the secret police. Luckily, the camp commandant dis- missed the frivolous charge and I was passed on down to the new hospital at Nakom-Patom. At Tonchan I recall the cli- max of a much more serious case. At a transit point on the march up through the jungle, Major I.J. Mackinlay of the Scotch whisky firm was so provoked by the Nip NCO in charge that, with a blow to the jaw, he knocked him senseless. The Nip was dragged off by other guards, feet first. Astonishingly, next morning Mackinlay and his party, under another Nip, were moved on with no word said or action taken. Now, weeks later, the boss of the Tonchan camp, Sergeant-Major Hiramatsu, known as the Tiger, called for Mackinlay Chosa and con- fronted him with the NCO he had KO'd.

Mackinlay for a while protested he had never seen the fellow before, but finally gave in. Thereupon there was laughter and back-slapping and the three sat down to sake and food.

The normal penalty for striking a guard was death. There was a jovial side to the Tiger, but he did not come by his sinister nickname for nothing. At the War Crimes Trials at Singapore in 1946, he was sen- tenced to be hanged, as were others of our tormentors such as Noguchi, commander of the Kanchanaburi camp for officers, set up in January 1945 when the Nips, antici- pating an Allied invasion, separated offi- cers from other ranks. It was Noguchi who, for some imagined insult to Japan while 'It must be a year in the life of the Duchess of York.' Captain Bill Drower was doing his job as an interpreter, gave him a savage beating and kept him for 77 days in solitary con- finement in an underground shelter, with no washing facilities or change of clothing, on a subsistence of one meal a day of rice and water. Only the surrender saved Drow- er's life.

The trials, which took place under the authority of the Judge Advocate-General, imposed the death sentence on many; oth- ers were committed to various terms of imprisonment; a few more acquitted. Noto- rious sadists like Donald Duck, the Frog and the Undertaker — the worst of them all had their labels — were strung up on evidence given by senior Allied officers.

These included some of those who administered 300 lashes and worse tortures to Leonard Wilson, Bishop of Singapore (accused of spying), as told so dreadfully by his chaplain, John Hayter, in his book Priest in Prison.

To the natural comment 'you must have had a terrible time', when the subject of our POW life has since come up, my answer is equivocal. On the face of it, con- ditions were appalling. Yet the body can be extraordinarily adjustable to conditions, however horrific, while the spirit takes courage from friendship, the feeling of bur- den shared, and the sense of humour it nourishes, macabre though it often was. The American wife of an RAMC officer incarcerated in Changi Prison put it this way: 'It wasn't unrelieved gloom. I wouldn't have missed it in terms of human experi- ence. It made me grow up. I became a little less self-concerned.' I would go along with that.

Many have found it difficult to live with the stigma that attached to the Malayan campaign and capitulation. Yet the odds facing the Australian, Indian and British forces were enormous. The aerodromes, foolishly sited pre-war in northern Malaya and manned mostly by obsolete or obsoles- cent aircraft, were overrun within the first few days. The truth was that British Far Eastern strategy was based from pre-war days wholly on sea power: hence Singa- pore's big guns and static defences all faced seawards, on the assumption that it would be necessary only to protect the fortress from an attack by sea until the Allied navies arrived within a matter of days. From the moment that the Prince of Wales and Repulse failed to survive their first encounter, our fate was sealed.

When, in 1945, my father met me off the boat-train at Waterloo station, he walked straight past me on the platform. He hadn't expected such a slim-line version. My weight was ten and a half stone, five stone lighter than when we'd said goodbye four years earlier. I had lost something physical- ly which was soon put right. But I had gained much that would always remain.

E.W. Swanton was cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph from 1946 to 1975