Forgotten Wars (23 page)

The reference to ‘Chan Hoon’ (i.e. ‘Chang Hong’) is telling. Purcell had met ‘Chang Hong’ and other senior British officers in Singapore on 24 and 25 September; they had discussed co-operation with the BMA and ‘Chang’ had then introduced Wu Tian Wang and other Singapore Party leaders. But it seems that the British did not discern Chang’s true identity, and he then disappeared from view. Of the man the British knew as Lai Teck there was now no sign. Rumours about him continued to circulate, and they broke into print in the Penang newspaper,
Modern Daily News
, in October. An anonymous article accused an unnamed official of the MCP of betraying comrades to the Japanese. It called for a public investigation at which the author would appear and give evidence. It was written by Ng Yeh Lu, who had been perhaps the most prominent public spokesman of the MCP before the war. It was he who had represented the Party in discussions that led to the British arming the Chinese for a last-ditch defence of Singapore. Although he was never a Central Committee member, he was English speaking and a formidable polemicist. After the fall of Singapore, Ng Yeh Lu was arrested by the Kempeitai; he was detained and then worked for the Japanese as a court translator. It was at this point that he became aware of Lai Teck’s treachery, but Ng Yeh Lu’s own record discredited his testimony in the eyes of most Party members. It seems that he had been kept alive by the Japanese for this very purpose. Yet it was Lai Teck who had remained at large and in a position to expose his comrades. Ng Yeh Lu – or ‘Yellow Wong,’ as he was now known – never regained standing in the MCP. There
was a report that Lai Teck attempted to have him assassinated by the Singapore Party, but the local leaders stayed their hand.
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There were signs of dissent within the Party. A flurry of statements by various MCP organs appeared in the press enquiring after the health of ‘Mr Light’ or ‘Mr Wright’ and paying glowing tributes to his leadership. Eng Ming Chin, at a tea party in Ipoh in late November, made a speech in which she ‘exposed the conspirators against Lai Teck’.
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But other leading Party figures began to act on their suspicions. Yeung Kuo, the Party leader in Selangor, disenchanted with the moderate policy followed in August, managed to orchestrate the exclusion of Lai Teck from the MCP’s key organizing committee. But Lai Teck still possessed an aura of invulnerability, and fought back. It is unclear how much the British knew about all this. The first hard evidence seems to have come to H. T. Pagden, an etymologist by training, who was working as a Chinese-affairs officer in Singapore. He was given a detailed report, written by Ng Yeh Lu, which itemized Lai Teck’s treacheries including the massacre of the MPAJA high command at Batu Caves in 1942 and the betrayal of Force 136 officers. Among the latter was the Chinese Kuomintang agent Lim Bo Seng. In December Lim’s remains were exhumed from the grounds of Batu Gajah prison in Perak, where he had died at the hands of the Kempeitai. There was a public funeral in Ipoh, from where the cortège proceeded to Kuala Lumpur and then Singapore for a moving commemoration ceremony. He was, observed Victor Purcell, ‘already a legend’.
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Around this time Pagden was visited by a senior Kuomintang leader, a close friend of Lim Bo Seng, who threatened that, if the British did not bring Lai Teck to trial, ‘certain people would probably make it their business to put the matter in the limelight’. Pagden took the matter to the head of the Malayan Security Service, A. G. Blades, a pre-war policeman who had known Lai Teck. Pagden suggested that Lai Teck’s Kempeitai controller, Satoru Onishi, now imprisoned in Changi, be interrogated. ‘As an etymologist, however,’ he wrote some three years later, ‘I was not in a very strong position.’ Pagden was told in no uncertain terms to drop the matter and the Kuomintang, he believed, were pressured into silence and told to leave matters to the police. But Pagden sowed seeds of doubt: ‘The Malayan Security Service’, he told the Colonial Office, believed they knew ‘more about
[Lai Teck] than anyone, but I am not sure that they do. They probably find him useful, but one wonders how useful this association with him may be to the other side.’
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By December 1945 the British were aware that Lai Teck was still alive. Once again, his story becomes obscured by a lack of sources, and by misinformation at every turn. But, from scraps of evidence in the official papers, it appears that knowledge of Lai Teck was confined to a small circle of initiates within the Malayan Security Service. A field security officer, Major R. J. Isaacs, opened a file on ‘The Wright Case’ and began to interview MCP members to discover what had happened to him, and to investigate his wartime activities. Members of the Kempeitai in British custody were asked to write down all they knew about the Malayan Communist Party. According to Onishi, Issacs visited him to seek his opinion.
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Then a key witness committed suicide at Isaacs’s house. With an impending inquest there was a danger that Isaacs and other witnesses might be put on the stand, and that information might come to light that would compromise the Security Service. It would also embarrass the British officers of Force 136 who, although they had known nothing of Lai Teck’s relationship with the Japanese, now had to confront the probability that they had inadvertently passed on military information to the Japanese. Force 136, too, was now a legend. At this point, the ‘Wright Case’ quietly dropped from view. It appears that it was not until early 1946 that Lai Teck was once more in contact with the British.
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The ‘secret’ army that Lai Teck had promised the Party in August did not exist. Everything was now staked on the ‘Eight Principles’. A further statement on the 7 November anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution extended these to nine, with a demand for ‘self-government’. But the underlying article of faith remained the same: ‘We still believe in the good things which the British government has promised us.’
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Notwithstanding any machinations on the part of Lai Teck, this credo still held good for many in the Party. Secret conversations between agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services and Party leaders in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur revealed that the MCP leadership believed that the moral authority of the San Francisco Declaration, the UN’s founding charter, together with world opinion ‘would force [the British] to change their policy’.
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But at this point, and not
for the last time, frustrated rank-and-file took the responsibility of revolution into their own hands and went on the offensive. The catalyst was the closure of two leftist newspapers in Perak. The local military were so antagonized by hostile press reports of corruption and rape by troops that they argued it constituted a threat to the safety of its men, as defined in the proclamation of the BMA. On these grounds newspaper staff were arrested, tried in a military court and given sentences of up to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment; even the compositors were held guilty.

In the wake of this, on 21 October there were hunger marches in the main towns of Perak. One of the largest was in the small town of Sungei Siput, where a crowd of 5,000 assembled in the New World amusement park and marched to keep a midnight vigil outside the government offices. The British commanders, rough-handled by the crowd, feared for their own safety and ordered it to disperse within five minutes. The order was ignored and, for the first time in postwar Malaya, troops were told to fire on civilians: one person was killed and three others were wounded. The following day there was a general strike throughout the state, and again troops fired on demonstrators: three more were killed in Ipoh and four in Taiping.
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Chin Peng would later claim these casualties as first blood in the Malayan Emergency.

Victor Purcell travelled to the scene of the Perak disturbances in early December to meet the local MCP leadership. He spoke with Eng Ming Chin, whose propaganda troupe and speeches at Ipoh had roused the crowd into an uncompromising mood. With Lee Kiu in Singapore in mind, he recorded in his journal that Miss Eng ‘has decidedly more sex appeal… Her most remarkable features are her eyes. At one moment they are flat, brown and dull, at the next revealing in baleful flashes the smouldering fires of fanaticism if not of actual insanity, at another melting into a smile of something suspiciously like coquetrie.’
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But such contacts were becoming less common. Although the MCP had allowed women leaders such as Eng Ming Chin to take centre stage, it was less willing to expose its leading men. Although Chin Peng now worked from a well-appointed party office in Kuala Lumpur, living with his wife on the affluent Ampang Road, he had adopted the cover of a businessman. The lesser-ranking
‘open’ leaders in the public eye allowed much of the rest of the Party to slip back into the shadows.

On 1 December the MPAJA formally disbanded. It did so in an acrimonious mood, its commanders outraged at the humiliations they had received at the hands of Allied military leaders. ‘The British treated us like coolies,’ Wu Tian Wang told the Americans.
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Lai Teck organized the men into ex-servicemen’s associations. ‘We might not have an army now’, Chin Peng reflected bitterly, ‘but at least we had a club.’ Many ex-comrades found it hard to settle back to peace and to work or study. Many found that, on presentation of their demobilization certificates, managers were unwilling to take them on. A year after the war’s end, the MPAJA commander Liew Yao estimated that over half of his men were unemployed. He even asked the Office of Strategic Services for help in setting up an import–export business to bring in US goods.
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The Chinese veterans of Dalforce, who had defended Singapore to the last, were ignored. They had been given only $10 each when the British disbanded them in February 1942, and many were later slaughtered by the Japanese.
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Their commander, John Dalley, freshly released from internment, campaigned in London for benefit payments for them. The dispute dragged on until 1950, when the government buried the issue by pointing out that many of the veterans were untraceable as they were back in the jungle.
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Passing-out parades were held across Malaya. They were carefully stage-managed. In Alor Star, in Kedah, Ho Thean Fook, a noncommunist who had fought with the guerrillas, stood proudly on the podium as the interpreter for the occasion. The representatives of the other resistance organizations were there, even of the Kuomintang fighters whom, Ho recalled, ‘we used to call “bandits”’. The proceedings began with ‘God Save the King’, and a message from the British commander, General Messervy, was read out promising the guerrillas training as motor mechanics or licences as hawkers. The MPAJA men did not surrender their weapons publicly but later, in the barracks, ‘throwing them into a heap as if they were old brooms’. The guerrillas were each given $350 – in Messervy’s words, to ‘tide [them] over’ – of which $200 was taken by the MPAJA for political funds. With his share Ho Thean Fook bought some waxed duck, a local delicacy for
which Kedah was famous, to take back to his home town in Perak. ‘The copy of General Messervy’s speech, campaign ribbons, medals and flashes, we burnt… We could not buy a cup of coffee or exchange them for a plate of
mee rebus
[spicy noodle soup], could we?’ Ho had been promised a scholarship to study in England; it never materialized. He was shocked to discover in the weeks that followed that most of the European officers of Force 136 had reappeared in police uniforms; they had, he believed, been planted deliberately to make use of their knowledge in peacetime. Ho retired from politics, deeply disillusioned. He believed that most of his comrades, even the most fanatical communists, now wanted above all to get a job, take a wife and raise a family. Ho had lost some of the best years of his life. For him, the demob parade ‘represented the culmination of over three years of wasted struggle, the risks we had taken and the suffering we had undergone.’
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The MPAJA, Purcell believed, ‘had been treated like interlopers… without regard to their rights or dignity’. The British deliberately played down the communists’ role in the jungle war. Purcell had argued unsuccessfully for a bigger bounty for them; if it would have prevented what was to follow, he later observed, it would have been ‘cheap at the price’.
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As wartime alliances disintegrated in Malaya, on 10 October the Labour colonial secretary, George Hall, rose to his feet in the House of Commons to announce the grand plan for a Malayan Union. Mountbatten had urged the government to release its plans long before this, to give an unequivocal signal that the British intended to reward the Malayan Chinese for their loyalty. But by the time Hall’s statement came, if the British still expected plaudits from the Chinese they were bound to be disappointed. Reaction was at best lukewarm or indifferent, at worst hostile. The news that Singapore was excluded from the Union astonished most non-Malay observers: it was Malaya’s natural capital, and the heartland of ‘Malayan’ sentiment. But the British were anxious not to jeopardize Malay opinion too far, and
wanted to keep a tight grip on their ‘fortress’. Singapore’s precise constitutional status was entirely undecided. In the longer term, this separation was to be the most enduring legacy of the grand design.
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Suspicion mounted when it became known that the next step towards the implementation of the Malayan Union would be consultations in private with the Malay rulers. Homer Cheng, a Chinese civil servant working under Victor Purcell, summarized the problem: the local-born Chinese, he wrote, ‘claim to have as much right as the Malays to be regarded as the sons of the soil. They contend that the Malays are technically and anthropologically as much immigrants and intruders as the Chinese.’ The indigenous people of Malaya were the aboriginal Orang Asli. The Malays had forfeited their claim to preference in the war. ‘Malayan nationality was an insult’, Cheng concluded. ‘Few would feel proud of being the subjects of Sultans.’
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The terms of the debate had moved on a long way from the question of citizenship. ‘The Union will go through without opposition or enthusiasm from the Left,’ Victor Purcell wrote. ‘Their interest is solely one of representation.’
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