Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [37]
Over 70,000 Japanese remained on Singapore island, another reminder of the fragility of the British position. Many of them were still armed, and the people of Singapore watched in furious incomprehension as the officers continued to wear their swords. But over the next few days the Japanese were paraded and stripped of their valuables. British forces took these piles of ‘souvenirs’ as the legitimate spoils of war. There were few reprisals, however. Many of the troops were newly arrived to Asia, and had not been a part of the bitter fighting in Burma. Those who had were less charitable to the Japanese rank and file. In a public spectacle designed to repay the humiliations of 1942, the captives were put to work levelling the turf of the ceremonial ground of the Padang in preparation for Mountbatten’s arrival. Some turned up to work in white gloves and refused to take them off. A crowd gathered to watch. People jeered and cheered when a European ex-prisoner of war stepped forward, and in mockery of the martial style of Nippon, slapped the face of a Japanese officer.88 Across Malaya most of the Japanese were put to task in grim conditions. In Perak three Japanese died after they had been given the job of dredging a dry dock using empty seven-pound jam tins.89 One Japanese prisoner in Singapore, Shikimachi Gentarō, described how 2,000 of them were cooped up in warehouses near the piers and made to work twelve hours a day. ‘The worst indignity was cleaning out the sewers of the town where Chinese, Indians and Malays lived together. We were told to dredge by hand the dead rats and human excrement that flowed down… if we disobeyed our captors at all we were beaten with rifles and kicked. There were those who went crazy and those who died from malnutrition.’ It was two years before he was sent home. ‘I am not excusing the conduct of the Japanese,’ he said in recounting this years later. ‘War makes all of us lose our humanity.’90
The anger of British troops deepened as they began to liberate POWs from the camps on the island. They were appalled by evidence of starvation, and worse horrors were soon to be exposed along the Death Railway in Thailand: it was estimated that there were 100,000 POWs to be recovered.91 Hitherto, their condition had been kept secret, so as not to distress their kin. For the prisoners, the last days had been an agony. In Changi Mountbatten was known as ‘Longer Linger Louis’, or invoked in ironic prayer: ‘How much longer, O Lord?’ For five days after the surrender the Japanese continued to transport labourers to the construction sites of the great tunnels they were boring in the central heights of the island, but did not put these men to work. In the words of one POW, an Armenian from Singapore’s volunteer force: ‘we just hung around staring at them and they staring at us’. But the men were in better shape than they had been for months. As the news of surrender began to filter through the wire, so too did food from former Asian employees and friends. Some men succumbed to sudden plenty, or to illicit liquor: a tale did the rounds that two Australians had died gorging on bully beef and butter.92 In addition, there were 16,109 Indians in Singapore and 2,664 on the peninsula who had not joined the INA. They had, wrote one witness to their liberation, ‘a cowed look on their faces as if they were ashamed to be alive and were unsure of their reception’.93 They were not a priority. By 11 October, at Neesoon camp in Singapore, forty-five men had died in the space of three weeks.94 In Thailand it was left to the individual efforts of a former rubber planter from Kelantan, freshly released from a POW camp, to stay on to provide relief for