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community and a few private efforts as well’. North of Kuala Lumpur, the mood changed. It was ‘more Arcs and rather fewer thumbs’. He had driven into the triumph of the MPAJA as it progressed from town to town through the Perak countryside.99 Europeans such as Woods showed steely resolve in reasserting the privileges and protocols of their former life. As the first internees departed from Singapore by sea, they complained that cabins were allocated alphabetically, and not by official precedence. A story did the rounds: ‘I used to pass a certain senior civil servant in the camp each morning’, reported an internee, ‘and he always greeted me with “Hullo, Tom, old man, how are things going?” One morning he changed his greeting to “Good-morning, Brown, how are you?” so I knew the war was over.’100

Military medicine was ill-equipped to deal with the physical and psychological toll of captivity. The depth of anguish was slow to emerge: at the liberation of the camps, army psychiatrists spoke of surprisingly high morale, but they were misled by the initial euphoria of release. If the number of overt cases of psychological illness was ‘remarkably low’, it was perhaps because the most vulnerable people, especially the loners, had perished. Among the survivors, it was noted that if someone left a group, temporarily, there was collective anxiety and exaggerated relief on his return. They meticulously hoarded and shared food, even when it was in abundance. Ragged and ill, they were desperately tongue-tied with women. When nurses responded by jesting that they had seen half-naked men before, their embarrassment deepened. As one woman relief worker noted: ‘It was we who had changed and become more frank, not they.’ This soon gave way to concern about detainees’ ‘elation’ and ‘over-activity’, and a worrying sign that ‘the thought of returning home was not greeted with as much enthusiasm as one might expect’. It was clear the normal means of demobilization would not meet the needs of men who had spent nearly four years in horrific conditions in prison camps, with the long-term health problems that such prolonged periods of deprivation had created. Army psychologists now warned that a delayed reaction could set in – even nine to twelve months after release. Of the first 1,000 repatriates from Malaya and Singapore, 600 showed ‘some degree of anxiety’; over 500 were suffering from ‘mild apathy and depression’.101 Above all, internees and POWs had to come to terms with a ‘Rip van Winkle effect’ of their lost years when confronted with unexpected bereavement, infidelity or estrangement, and public indifference. They had been allowed, at most, five messages in three and a half years. One of the few provisions for psychological support was a series of pep talks: ‘things – and people – have changed… It’s on the whole a good thing too – mostly they are wiser and bigger people’. But above all, the POWs were told, it was women who had changed. ‘She’ll be more independent, more used to managing on her own (which you may not like).’ They were also warned to expect disappointment on resuming their lives, but reassured: ‘The Forgotten Army is not forgotten now.’102

Many of the forgotten witnessed the formal end of Japanese rule at the Singapore Padang on 12 September. Still in scraps of uniform, they stood between the pillars or on the roof of the Municipal Building. It was here, just two years previously, that Premier Tojo and Subhas Chandra Bose had reviewed the Indian National Army. Now with sixty-one Allied warships moored in the harbour, Japanese commanders were made to walk with bowed heads to meet Mountbatten and over a hundred officers of the various components of South East Asia Command, and dignitaries ranging from the Sultan of Johore to Tom Driberg. It was Mountbatten’s finest moment as supremo. Yet, to his bitter regret, his great rival, Field Marshal Count Terauchi, had pleaded illness and was absent. Mountbatten sent his own doctor to verify this. Unlike MacArthur in Tokyo Bay, who let the Japanese keep their swords, Mountbatten wanted