Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [133]
At the end of January there was a series of protests at Royal Air Force bases across the crescent. They involved perhaps fourteen stations and 50,000 men. It seems to have begun at Drigh Road, Karachi. The immediate case was poor food and living conditions, and a return to peacetime discipline, with all the kit inspections and parade in ‘best blue’ uniforms. But the underlying tension was the delay in demobilization. Men of the ‘forgotten armies’ were deeply worried about being disadvantaged in jobs or being denied places in higher education. In the petitions of the men, the use of the army in India and Indonesia was deplored, as it was seen as a central obstacle to demobilization. Men with a Labour or Communist Party background founded their own discussion groups and made contacts with the Indian Communist Party. When protests began, the ‘strike committees’ were run by men with trade-union experience; their news-sheets were run by conscripted journalists who had links with the local press. The incidents stretched across the widest arc of the British Middle East and Asia: from Gibraltar, Cairo and North Africa, to India, and through to Seletar, in Singapore, where more than 4,000 men were involved in the strike. It began with a meeting in the canteen, which was filled to capacity, on the evening of 26 January and the next day spread to Kallang aerodrome. The press reports and the incessant movement across the theatre through airbases created the sense of a connected protest across Asia. There was even some condoning of it by officers, who obstructed the enquiries into the events. Those at the forefront of the protests maintained that they were spontaneous, that their own leadership was unpremeditated and moderating.78 But the main figures, such as Arthur Attwood in Karachi and D. C. Brayford at Manipur, became the subject of high-profile trials. They were in correspondence with Tom Driberg, who engaged D. N. Pritt – then riding high as an independent MP – to defend them. But investigating officers felt the strikes were a communist conspiracy, ‘the work of an organisation which remained in the background and controlled both the Indian and the Middle East to suit its own ends’.79 This was the kind of charge the British were applying to Asian trade unionism in Malaya and Singapore.
By May 1946 the incidents spread to frontline troops. Men of the Parachute Regiment stationed at Muar in Malaya, recently returned from Java, protested at their living conditions. After a meeting in a canteen on 13 May, with the lights out, there was an assembly by the sea wall the next morning at which they refused to attend parade. They had been instructed to turn out clean, but it was impossible in the tropical mud, and there was insufficient water for washing. The men gathered in an angry mood and twice refused to obey the commanding officer’s orders to return to their companies: 258 men were taken into custody and brought to trial en masse at Kluang airfield on 12 August, where they had been detained. Some were brought in handcuffs, having slipped over the wire to buy cigarettes and necessities in the town. They termed it a strike, but were rebuked by the judge advocate: ‘The word “strike” is not in Army vocabulary,’ he said. ‘It is Mutiny or nothing else.’80 Of the 258, 243 were sentenced to three or five years’ penal servitude (later commuted to two years’ hard labour), and discharged with ignominy. Their defence was that men had protested similarly elsewhere and had not been punished. There were questions in Parliament