Singapore Swing (22 page)

‘I wonder if he would have given up so easily if he knew what would happen next: imprisonment, maltreatment, the Death Railway. Percival had it easy; he ended up in a jail in Manchuria. When the Japanese themselves surrendered on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he was sitting right behind General MacArthur who gave Percival one of the pens he used for signing the surrender documents – nice gesture. Here in Singapore the situation was different, ladies and gentlemen: the Japanese were advertising an Asian co-prosperity sphere, but they lost the “co” on the way. One in five of the military would die in prison, but the figure for civilians was one in four.'

Soon after surrender, the Japanese rounded up the Chinese and butchered those they suspected might rise against them. Like Herod slaughtering the new-born infants, the biblical horror of this act lies in that conditional ‘might'. The main aim of General Yamashita, the army commander, was to eliminate the surviving members of Dalforce, the volunteer regiment that fought bravely in the battle of Singapore and
might
become the focus of organised resistance to the occupation. On 21 February 1942, all Chinese males were ordered to gather at five assembly points where they were interrogated by the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police (headquartered in the YMCA building on Orchard Road). Men were singled out for execution for reasons such as that they had tattoos (members of secret societies), could sign their names in English (pro-British) and being a schoolteacher (they are always dangerous). Lee Kuan Yew was also rounded up, but, showing the sharpness of thought that would characterise him later, he surreptitiously jumped off the lorry before it left. He did well: the men who were selected were taken to the beaches of Punggol, Changi, Tanah Merah, the island of Sentosa and the docks of Tanjong Pagar to be machine-gunned to death. A few survived the massacre, pretending to be dead and lived to tell us about the atrocities. The total number of Chinese executed in Singapore may never be known. In 1945, the Japanese War Office claimed 5,000, but a figure of 50,000 was put forward in the 1947 War Crime trials and is being considered as reasonable by modern historians.

We leave the tranquillity of Labrador Park for the traffic-choked streets of Alexandra, driving by some of the most expensive real estate in Singapore. This was a military residential area; the old barracks have been renovated and turned into flats. Everything here is a reminder of the melting pot of the old Empire: next to street names like Bury, Canterbury and Berkshire, a sign shows the way to Hyderabad Road. In this web of streets, perched on top of landscaped lawns and half-hidden by palm trees, are Edith's Black and White houses. They were built in the 1920s by merchants and administrators who transported the traditional half-timbered cottage design to the lush greenery of Singapore. Some of them are two-storey, the upper floor balancing itself on the base via wooden beams like a Tudor mansion on stilts. The beams make space for verandas that open on all sides providing air and light to the ground floor living rooms. Only company CEOs can afford them now.

‘Only once did I enter one of those and saw how the other half lived,' comments Razeen wryly, as we drive away. ‘Then I realised I was born in the wrong half.'

Just before Alexandra Hospital, he passes around a picture taken in 1938 when the building opened as the principal military hospital for British forces in the Far East: a handsome, Mediterranean three-storey structure of austere elegance, looking more like a hotel than its function calls for.

‘It's exactly the same as it was then,' I say.

Razeen jumps. ‘Exactly! Ladies and gentlemen, look: the hospital has remained as it was in the war. Inside it has been modernised, but the exteriors are the same. And it is surrounded by tunnels and secret chambers. Now the government wants to close it and demolish it.'

No!

‘The services will be transported to a new hospital that will be built in the north. Historians, of course complained, but the government has already decided its fate. Civil servants are not keen on preserving history. They even tore down Changi prison in 2005 to build a new maximum security prison. Only an original wall remains.'

He shakes his head.

‘And now they are knocking down this hospital, despite what happened here on the fourteenth and fifteenth of February 1942.'

The Alexandra Hospital massacre started on the 14 February around 1 p.m. Japanese troops – having suffered many casualties in the battle of Opium Hill further up – stormed down in a rage and claimed they were being fired on from the hospital roof. Captain J. F. Bartlett came out, with red crosses sown on him and his hands held high, to make sure the soldiers respected the hospital. They fired at him at point-blank range. They then burst into the operating theatre, stabbed the medical officers who were performing an operation and bayoneted the patient who was under anaesthetic. We know this because Captain Smiley, the surgeon, survived despite suffering multiple stab wounds. The soldiers then rounded some 200 staff and walking wounded, tied them up together and squeezed them into three small huts where they left them overnight, having barricaded the doors and nailed the windows. Some of them collapsed and suffocated. The rest were marched off next day in twos and threes and bayoneted to death. The massacre sickened everyone including the Japanese, so much so that the division's commander, General Mutaguchi, conducted an enquiry and those responsible for the killings were executed.

‘And now,' Razeen says, ‘to Kranji.'

- 25 -

There are many soldiers in front of the Kranji cemetery steps. In full combat gear. With guns.

Razeen either ignores them or hasn't seen them yet as we park the minibus – their camouflage must have worked.

‘Although Changi was a bigger camp and its graveyard greater, it was Kranji that was developed into a permanent war cemetery by the Commonwealth Graves Commission,' says Razeen, ‘because the cemetery at Changi could not remain undisturbed. So the bodies were exhumed from all other places around the island and reburied here. Bodies also arrived from the cemetery in Saigon. Altogether about 4,500 people are buried here.'

Only now Razeen notices the soldiers. ‘Let's join them,' he says. ‘They are here for their graduation ceremony. You are lucky; this doesn't happen all the time.'

‘Is there conscription in Singapore?' asks the curious American.

Indeed there is. Like in Switzerland, every male goes through basic training and is then called up once a year for training exercises until the age of 50. The north-western tip of the island, beyond Sungei Buloh belongs to the military and is permanently out of bounds, its features appearing on no map. Given Singapore's history of conflict and its geographical position – being squeezed between two larger neighbours – this is understandable. Would Kuwait have been so easily invaded, if it could call up every man under arms?

The soldiers congregate around the memorial while we walk between the well-tended grid of landscaped graves. Every headstone bears a name, regimental arms and an inscription with some 850 bodies still unidentified. I look down. ‘Private J. C. Auton, 2/19 Infantry Battalion, 20
^th
January 1942. Age 27'. Next to him lies ‘Private R. Currey 2/20 Infantry Battalion, 10
^th
February 1942. Age 22'. Like many others, his inscription simply says: ‘His Duty Fearlessly And Nobly Done, Ever Remembered'. They were both Australian, from New South Wales. Among the crosses, there is the occasional Star of David: ‘Private H. Sanders, 2/20 Infantry Battalion, 30
^th
December 1942. Age 37'. No crescents, though; the Muslim soldiers are buried on the other side of the hill, forever facing Mecca. Most graves are of men, but there are also women: here is nurse Ruby Margaret Brooks, from Cambridge and next to her Diana Mary Cooper from Hitchin, both 23, both volunteers of the British Red Cross Society.

Razeen gathers us around a particular grave. It is that of Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Lyon who died on 16 October 1944, aged 29.

Ivan Lyon?

‘Is there a commemorative plaque for him in the Presbyterian church on Orchard Road?' I ask.

‘You've noticed it?'

In what now seems another lifetime.

‘There are many heroes buried here and their story deserves to be told,' says Razeen. ‘Major Ivan Lyon was a Scotsman who was attached to Z Unit – special operations – and who commandeered one of the most successful acts of sabotage during the war, Operation Jaywick, yes, named after the toilet cleaner. A group of eleven British and Australian commandos sailed from Australia in fishing boats and on 26 September 1943 they sneaked into Singapore harbour, paddling in small canoes. They attached magnetic limpet mines on several vessels that were moored there and sank seven Japanese transport ships. All returned successfully back to Australia.'

Razeen pauses. ‘So why is his grave here?'

At the main memorial on top of the hill, the soldiers gather to hear a pep-up speech by what looks like a very young major. I hear him use the common adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

‘One year after operation Jaywick, Lyon volunteered for a repeat performance: Operation Rimau, which is Malay for tiger – after one of Lyon's tattoos. But this time the Japanese had learned their lesson and his team was spotted. They escaped on Merapas Island where two of them, Sub Lieutenant Gregor Riggs, another Scot, and Sergeant Colin Cameron, an Australian, stayed back to engage the enemy while the others tried to escape. They both died heroically on the island, but in vain. The Japanese ran in hot pursuit and eventually ten of the group were captured and the rest killed, including Ivan Lyon. Just one month before the final Japanese surrender those ten were executed as spies.'

The last post sounds from the soldiers' ceremony further up.

Razeen points at two tombstones. ‘Look: here are those two who sacrificed themselves: Gregor Riggs and Colin Cameron. Their remains were found in 1994 on Merapas Island. They were the last two military burials here at Kranji War Cemetery, on 27 August 1994.'

I check. They were both 21 when they died.

‘And here, ladies and gentlemen, lies Rodney Breavington,' Razeen says. ‘He was a true blue ANZAC: born in New Zealand, settled in Melbourne. He, and three others, another Australian and two British, escaped from their POW camp but were caught by the Japanese 200 miles out on a small boat.'

I know the story. Because of them, the whole of their division was asked to sign an oath that they would not try to escape. They refused. So the camp commander dragged the four escapees to Selerang Beach to make an example out of them. Before they were killed, Breavington stepped forward and asked the firing squad to kill him but save his mates. It was him, he said who was the mastermind of the escape; they were only executing his orders. The incident was captured in a poem,
The Corporal and His Pal,
part of Australian military folklore. The firing squad was symbolically made up of four nervous Sikhs who had defected to the Japanese. After they fired, one of the condemned stood up and pleaded: ‘
You have shot me through the arm. Please shoot me through the heart
.' The second volley hit him on the leg. He cried ‘
For God's sake, shoot through the HEART!
'

When the war was over and the war crime trials began, the Japanese commander who ordered their execution was shot on the same spot on Selerang Beach. Razeen shows us a picture: a corpulent, middle-aged man is tied to a pole, his trousers inside his well-polished high boots, stooped forwards, a hood over his head. The caption identifies him as Major General Shinpei Fukuye.

The soldiers are dispersing, as we approach the Singapore Memorial. A large semi-circular stone inscription explains: On the walls of this memorial are recorded the names of twenty-four thousand soldiers and airmen of many races united in service to the British Crown who gave their lives in Malaya and neighbouring lands and seas and in the air over southern and eastern Asia and the Pacific but to whom the fortune of war denied the customary rites accorded to their comrades in death.

‘Here,' says Razeen, ‘are the names of the bodies that werenever found.'

‘Perished at sea?' asks the curious American.

‘Many of them. But there are some that stand out.'

He goes and points to a name: ‘Captain Patrick Heenan, the Singapore traitor.'

Let me take over once again. The fact that the Singapore Memorial wall bears the name of a court-martialled traitor is worth exploring if only for the Anglo-Saxon notions of innocence and guilt.

Captain Patrick Heenan was the illegitimate son of a Eurasian mining engineer and a girl from New Zealand where he was born in 1910. He grew up in Burma and, when his father died, his mother moved to London where she remarried. His stepfather was well-off and forked out the fees for Cheltenham College where Heenan joined the cadets. He became an officer in the Indian army's 2/16 Punjab Regiment and was posted in Malaya. His mixed parentage and dark skin colour appears to have been the target of overt racism in the British mess, so, disgruntled, he bought the Japanese pan-Asian propaganda directed against the British Empire; he seems to have turned into a double agent during a long holiday in Japan just before the war. Further unauthorised trips across the Thai border made his commanding officer suspicious, and he sought Heenan's removal from the Punjabi Regiment. So where was this suspected spy moved to? But of course, to intelligence – Air Liaison to be exact, where he was promoted to second in command in a border post. No one seriously believes that the initial Japanese successes in the air were simply the result of information by Heenan, for there must have been other spies, too, but the fact remains that he was caught hiding a wireless transmitter in a Catholic padre's communion set. More incriminating maps and reports were found when his locker was searched. He was jailed in Changi prison; two days before Singapore fell, he was secretly courtmartialled, taken out to the docks and shot in the head. His body has never been found.