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The central battleground of the peninsular war was the frontier to the west of the densely forested central range. Here, Malay and Chinese peasants had been caught in a cycle of raids, reprisals and extortion. Mustapha Hussain was a witness to this. He was one of the most prominent Malay radicals who had marched in the baggage train of the Japanese army in 1941. However, he had been disillusioned by the betrayal of Malay hopes. As they marched into the capital, Kuala Lumpur, Mustapha told his young Malay followers: ‘This victory is not our victory.’ Deeply traumatized by the violence he had seen in the wake of the fall of Singapore, he withdrew from public life. Before the war, Mustapha had been a lecturer in a government agricultural college; now, like many educated townsfolk, he returned to the land, at a village in northern Perak. Life for him and his family became a hard struggle for survival. Yet Mustapha was persuaded to return to politics in mid 1945, when the Japanese began to lay plans for a declaration of independence for Malaya. Mustapha helped draft a constitution for a free republic. But again, he and his friends were cruelly disappointed. As nationalist leaders gathered in Kuala Lumpur to realize their dream, the news of the surrender broke: the collapse of Japan had forestalled the declaration of independence for Malaya by just forty-eight hours. Ibrahim Haji Yaacob fled with the Japanese to Indonesia, the lost leader of the greater Malay nation. Mustapha, disillusioned and ill, and fearing the wrath of the British and the resistance army, had returned to his village. But it was no longer a sanctuary. All around him were rumours of violence; Malay policemen had been attacked by Chinese guerrillas in a nearby town. ‘The heat closed in on us’, he wrote, ‘when we saw a Chinese banana seller emboldened into giving a speech. A normally timid Chinese buffalo herder was openly declaring: “All Malay heads must be shaven!”’29

The resistance army was dominated by young armed Chinese. It had mobilized out of the remnants of National Salvation movement in late 1941 when, at Singapore’s eleventh hour, it was armed by the British. It was given the name ‘Dalforce’ after John Dalley, the policeman who acted as its liaison officer, but in local memory it was the Singapore Overseas Chinese Volunteer Army. It was the first forgotten army of the Great Asian War. Some 2,000 townsfolk, men and women together, fought fiercely in their makeshift uniforms to resist Yamashita’s final assault on the island. The Malayan Communist Party also sent some of its most committed cadres to be initiated into the black arts of clandestine warfare at British ‘jungle training schools’ in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. As the Japanese advanced, they infiltrated the jungle to become the nucleus of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). In many places the mobilization of patriotic young men and women was already well advanced, having been accomplished by unlettered labourers and a sprinkling of graduates of the Chinese schools of the small country towns. The nominal leader of the British ‘stay-behind’ forces was the mountaineer and explorer Major Freddy Spencer Chapman, whose heroic but lonely war is portrayed in his memoir, The Jungle Is Neutral, a tropical Seven Pillars of Wisdom. More ‘left-behind’ than ‘stay-behind’, the few Europeans who made it into the forest were utterly dependent on the guerrillas. Chapman whiled away the months trying to contact other Europeans and providing basic military training to the MPAJA. The communists even exploited the expertise of a stranded civil servant and anthropologist, Pat Noone, who had gone native with one of the aboriginal communities of the forest, the Temiar, and began to win their trust. In these years, the jungle was red.

Little of this was known to Allied commanders in India. Special Operations Executive, the British secret warriors, only began to launch their own operations