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the extravagant public entertainments ‘nothing short of criminal’, and Mountbatten was compelled to issue draconian standing orders for a curfew on other ranks, the closure of service bars and clubs by midnight, a ban on meals or drinks in civilian-run establishments and detailed checks on bad traffic discipline.54 This was mostly on the part of Indian drivers who had learned to drive in the desert of North Africa or the dirt-tracks of Burma, but it seemed to symbolize the arrogance of the new regime. In the words of one Chinese newspaper, people saw military vehicles ‘as snakes and scorpions, and streets and thoroughfares as hells’.55

Attlee took a personal interest in the morale of army personnel. The BBC Home Service was urged to broadcast encouragement to people to keep a constant flow of letters posted to serving men who now had time on their hands, time to brood. One of the first units into liberated Malaya was an advance party of ENSA, the armed forces’ entertainments association. By the fourth day of reoccupation they were giving an impromptu performance to the POWs in Changi: Gracie Fields appeared there on 1 October. They reclaimed the Victoria Theatre on Singapore’s Esplanade – killing around 5,000 swallows who had roosted there throughout the Japanese occupation – for John Gielgud to perform his Hamlet.56 But what was on offer fell far short of what was desired by weary, frustrated men. Malaya’s allocation of 15–16,000 barrels of beer a month was well below the target of 25,200 for the NAAFI canteens.57 Soldiers turned to other diversions. One unit in Ipoh discovered an antiquated provision in the King’s Regulations for fodder for horses, and they used this to resurrect the Perak Turf Club. The first race meeting was on Boxing Day 1945. It drew a bigger crowd than the victory parades, and made a considerable profit for the British ‘owners’ of the horses.58 But such events made a mockery of the BMA’s calls for people to be patient in the face of scarcity. ‘We ask for bread’, the Malaya Tribune remarked, ‘and we are given… horse-racing!’59

Men gravitated to the dance halls and to the kupu-kupu malam, the ‘night butterflies’, who were everywhere to be seen in Malayan towns. The dramatic post-war increase in prostitution was rooted in coercion, trafficking and poverty. It was perpetuated by a lack of education and alternatives, and aggravated, particularly within the Malay community, by chronically high levels of divorce.60 It was now seen by military commanders as ‘a real danger to the health of troops’. In 1943, casualties from VD within SEAC were sixteen times greater than those in battle. By early 1946 the rate of infection in the military peaked at 7.2 per cent. Some service chiefs wanted to revive the nineteenth-century Indian Army remedy of regulating the trade in controlled lal, or ‘red’ bazaars, but welfare workers argued that the only course was to raid the brothels and bring more women to treatment.61 There was some success in this, but in the long term, police officers were unwilling to take responsibility for it because ‘there was too much money to be made by junior police officers’.62 Women were often the first victims of war, and now among the first casualties of peace. People noticed that there was a discomforting continuity between the sexual violence of Japanese occupation and the new red-light economy and air of sexual predation in the garrison towns. From October the Chinese press published a catalogue of reports of robberies and rapes around Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Klang. Stalls were attacked and taxi drivers beaten up by drunken soldiers. Many of these incidents involved British servicemen, but the worst of the accusations fell on common outsiders: Indian soldiers. They were increasingly unpopular, especially when the British used them to break strikes. Indians called in to maintain the coal mine at Batu Arang were accused by the communists of molesting women as they tended to their food crops.63 There were other reports: for example, of a man shot trying to stop a rape in Morib; women attacked