Massacre in Malaya E-Book

Christopher Hale

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 1013

Beschreibung

The Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was the longest war waged by British and Commonwealth forces in the twentieth century. Fought against communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, this undeclared 'war without a name' had a powerful and covert influence on American strategy in Vietnam. Many military historians still consider the Emergency an exemplary, even inspiring, counterinsurgency conflict. Massacre in Malaya draws on recently released files from British archives, as well as eyewitness accounts from both the government forces and communist fighters, to challenge this view. It focuses on the notorious 'Batang Kali Massacre' – known as 'Britain's My Lai' – that took place in December, 1948, and reveals that British tactics in Malaya were more ruthless than many historians concede. Counterinsurgency in Malaya, as in Kenya during the same period, depended on massive resettlement programmes and ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate aerial bombing and ruthless exploitation of aboriginal peoples, the Orang Asli. The Emergency was a discriminatory war. In Malaya, the British built a brutal and pervasive security state – and bequeathed it to modern Malaysia. The 'Malayan Emergency' was a bitterly fought war that still haunts the present.

Leseprobe

‘The truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera.’

Ernst Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882)

‘A nation is like a fish. If we are merdeka [independent] we can enjoy the whole fish head, body and tail. At the moment, we are only getting its head and bones.’

Sutan Jenain, Indonesian nationalist

‘This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’

Walter Benjamin, ‘Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History’

‘I am hampered by ignorance of conditions of the past.’

Sir Harold MacMichael, King’s Special Representative to Malaya, 1945

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgements and Sources

A Brief Note on Terms

Preface: ‘Grossly Unreasonable Force’

Part One: The Four C’s of Colonialism

1 The Battlefield

2 The Making of British Malaya

3 The Racial State

Part Two: The Japanese Crucible

1 A Nation Is Like a Fish

2 The Other Side of History

3 Tennouheika Banzai!

4 Fighting Back

Part Three: Malaya Ablaze

1 On the Brink

2 Infernos

3 The Empire Reborn

4 The Communist Dilemma

5 The Road to Revolt

6 The Meaning of Emergency

7 The War Without a Name

8 Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns

9 A Very British Massacre

10 Advantage Chin Peng

11 The War on the Squatters

12 The Lowest Ebb

Part Four: Remaking Malaya

1 War on Hearts and Minds

2 A Terrifying Combination of Crassness and Voodoo

3 Malaya’s Secret Wars

4 A War Without End?

Select Bibliography

Notes

Plate Section

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SOURCES

A Guide to Further Reading

I first visited Malaysia at the end of the last century when I climbed Mount Kinabalu in Sabah on the island of Borneo to make a documentary film for Channel 4 television about Low’s Gully, The Abyss. I returned in 2007 to make a documentary for National Geographic (Asia) about the coronation of the new Yang di-Pertuan Agong that would be broadcast as Becoming a King. I wanted to understand this fascinating and in many ways deceptive Southeast Asian nation that our colonial forebears did so much to shape. This book should be regarded as an extended essay rather than a textbook or academic historical study. For that reason I have not encumbered the text with a blizzard of reference numbers and have made minimal use of footnotes. I thank Peter Robinson for encouraging and refining the project at an early stage. I must acknowledge a number of books that profoundly influenced and informed my account of Southeast Asian history and the Malayan Emergency. Benedict Anderson’s classic study of nationalism Imagined Communities (first published in 1983) opened up the vista of political thinking in Southeast Asia. Anderson’s brilliant essays on Southeast Asian history and culture in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (1998) and Under Three Flags (2005) offer dazzling insights into the nature of Asian political thought. Anyone writing about the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and its aftermaths must acknowledge a huge debt to Forgotten Armies (2004) and Forgotten Wars (2007) by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper. Harper’s earlier academic study The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (1999) is rich with ideas. Anthony Stockwell’s edited collections of British Documents on the End of Empire: Malaya (3 volumes, 1995) and Malaysia: British Documents on End of Empire series (2004) proved invaluable. Cheah Boon Kheng’s Red Star over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict, During and After the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (1983), The Masked Comrades: A Study of the Communist United Front in Malaya, 1945–48 (1983) and Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (2002) are classic accounts by an important Malaysian historian. A groundbreaking study of the Emergency period is Kumar Ramakrishna’s Emergency Propaganda: the Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds (2002). Dr Ramakrishna’s penetrating and subtle unpicking of how the British waged a war of ideas is an essential study. Ronald Spector’s In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (2007) provides a gripping account of the volcanic struggles that erupted across Southeast Asia in 1945. The work of Karl Hack, listed in the bibliography, had a profound influence on the development of the historical narrative in this book. Dr Hack’s generous email correspondence, as well as snatched conversations at the National Archives in Kew and at the Royal Courts of Justice in May 2011, clarified many issues and opened intriguing new research pathways. I am grateful to Dr Andrew Mumford for sending me the manuscript of his important study The Counter-Insurgency Myth: The British Experience of Irregular Warfare. Mark Ravinder Frost was generous with his time and comments. I have tried to build on the pioneering research of Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor exposing the bloody events that took place at Batang Kali in December 1948, and published in Slaughter and Deception at Batang Kali. I am grateful to John Halford of the legal firm Bindmans and Quek Ngee Meng for responding to my many questions before and after the 2012 ‘Batang Kali trial’ in London.

I thank Dr Yin Shao Loong, a brilliant young social historian and environmentalist and the esteemed Professor Farish Noor for endeavouring at least to put me right on the many aspects of Asian culture and history. I had many enlightening conversations with Gus and Enyd Fletcher. Tim Hatton corresponded with me about his visit to Batang Kali in December 1948.

I would like to thank Christopher Humphrey and Michele Schofield at AETN All Asia Networks, Singapore for permission to use extracts from interviews conducted for two History Channel (Asia) documentaries about the Emergency and the Japanese occupation of Malaya produced by Novista TV in Kuala Lumpur. I am especially grateful to Lara Ariffin, Harun Rahman and Tan Sri Kamarul Ariffin for such stimulating conversations and unstinting generosity over the last few years. It goes without saying that none of the authors or individuals mentioned here or in the bibliography bears any responsibility for factual mistakes in the text or advocates any of the views and opinions expressed herein. I am enormously grateful to David Robson for reading the manuscript and eliminating many infelicities of style and expression.

At the History Press I would like to thank Mark Beynon for his unstinting support, Lindsey Davis, Lauren Newby and our meticulous copy editor Richard Sheehan, who eliminated a number of howlers.

Readers are referred to my blog for more information and a selection of maps: http://malayanwars.blogspot.de

A BRIEF NOTE ON TERMS

The ‘Batang Kali Massacre’ of December 1948 took place not in the predominantly Malay town of that name but on on the Sungai Remok Estate, which is about 5 miles (8.29km) distant. Before 1957, Malaya was part of the British Empire but was never a unitary colony. ‘British Malaya’, the term used in this book, was a composite colonial territory that encompassed the ‘Straits Settlements’ of Singapore, Penang and Malacca and a number of Malay sultanates in both the peninsula and northern Borneo. These were subdivided into federated and unfederated states. These Malay states were nominally ruled by sultans (or rulers) but governed as protectorates by the British through the appointment of ‘Residents’. The British imposed semi-centralised federal rule across Malaya after 1945 though Singapore remained administratively separate. In 1957, the British granted independence, or merdeka, to the Federation of Malaya. The British retained control of Singapore and Crown Colonies in northern Borneo – Sabah and Sarawak. Kalimantan, the southern region of Borneo, was part of Indonesia. In 1963, Malaya was enlarged to include Singapore, for a short period, and the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak as the Federation of Malaysia. Singapore left or was ousted from the federation (depending on your point of view) in 1965. It is now an independent city republic. I have used ‘Malayan’ to refer to all the non-European peoples (Malays, Indians and Chinese) of both colonial and independent Malaya who became ‘Malaysians’ after 1963. It has been necessary, for reasons that will become clear to the reader, to refer to ‘the Chinese’, ‘the Indians’ and ‘the Malays’. It would be wearisome to insert inverted commas for these catch-all terms throughout the text of this book – but they are implied. ‘Race’ was a pseudo-scientific idea imported to Asia by the European colonial powers and imposed through census operations and other administrative devices across a diverse ethnic landscape. Modern biology has shown that, in scientific terms, these old ideas of immutable racial differences can no longer be regarded as useful. There is some controversy about terminology used to refer to the indigenous people of the Malayan Peninsula. ‘Aboriginal’ is a common term in anthropological publications and was used by the British during the colonial period but ‘Orang Asli’ (meaning original people) is now preferred. Some regard the term ‘aboriginal’ as confusing and derogatory. In the past, Malays referred to ‘Sakai’, which definitely is pejorative since it means ‘slave’. Throughout the book I have used the most accessible or familiar spellings of Chinese and Malay family and place names consistent with documentary sources. The history of currency in colonial Malaya is complex, as explained at http://moneymuseum.bnm.gov.my. In the text that follows ‘dollars’ generally refers to Straits or Malayan dollars unless otherwise stated.

PREFACE

‘GROSSLY UNREASONABLE FORCE’

‘Once we started firing, we seemed to go mad […] I remember the water turned red with their blood.’

William Cootes, Scots Guards

LONDON, MAY 2012

For two days in May 2012 the restless spirits of twenty-four men shot dead more than half a century ago by British soldiers near a tiny Malayan village called Batang Kali haunted court number three inside the Royal Courts of Justice in London. On a bright spring morning, British and Malaysian lawyers gathered with their frail and elderly clients in front of the cathedral-like main entrance. They held up banners demanding justice. They had waited a very long time. It was not difficult to be reminded of the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce dragging its way through the Court of Chancery in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which began serialisation in 1852, bang in the middle of the imperial century:

hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor […] Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

The claimants in the Batang Kali massacre case are only too familiar with the thick fog of cover-up.

The Royal Courts of Justice heralded a new era in British justice, or so it was hoped, when they were commissioned and designed in the 1870s. The old Court of Chancery that Dickens had so savagely pilloried had been demolished. This was an era of boundless national confidence: the high tide of empire. Factories churned out the tools that changed the world: steamships, railways and Gatling guns. At the time the new courts were under construction, work undertaken by German strike breakers in the late 1870s, a good number of the curious Englishmen and women who paused briefly in the Strand to watch the slow upward progress of its spires, vaults and transepts, constructed from millions of blocks of Portland stone, saw their race as new Romans. They, like their toga-clad forebears, held sway over a global empire through force of character and an innate genius for leadership. For the many devout readers of Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, arrogance was shaded by uncertainty, even fear. Might Britain’s imperial majesty suffer the same precipitous decline and fall that Gibbon’s had unfolded in such matchless English prose? The first volume of his great history was published in 1776 when Britain’s thirteen American colonies were under attack from a motley guerrilla army commanded by George Washington. No wonder, after this traumatic loss, Gibbon saw the future written in the ruined monuments of the Roman Forum. But having lost an empire in the West, Britain rebuilt another in the East. India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ and the crescent of imperial territories that stretched from Rangoon to Sydney, seemed more than ample recompense for the traumatic loss of the American colonies.

By the end of the next century, that once-resurgent empire had, as Rudyard Kipling prophesied, suffered the same fate as every other world empire: ‘Far-called our navies melt away–/On dune and headland sinks the fire–/Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!’ In the wreckage of empire, the successors of Edward Gibbon would examine afresh how and why the British had held sway over a quarter of the earth’s surface. The modern history of empire has become a polarised enterprise. In their classic 1066 and All That, published in 1930 and comprising ‘103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates’, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman had concluded that the Roman invasion of Britain was a ‘good thing’ because Britons were ‘only natives at the time’. The American Revolution, however, was a ‘bad thing’. How should the British Empire be judged – was it a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’? Did high-minded British imperialists act as the standard-bearers of civilisation to ‘make the modern world’, as many conservative historians still affirm? Or was the empire a global business racket founded on profiteering, violence and tyranny?

The imperial imagination certainly brought forth monsters. Many colonial administrators with long experience of serving overseas returned to Britain with the racist and xenophobic views that were commonly held about native peoples in the colonies. They were appalled to discover that their homeland had become, in their absence, a more liberal, open and democratic society. (Or so they imagined.) Such men felt betrayed and many, such as the fascist A.K. Chesterton, embraced conspiratorial theories that blamed national moral decay on the Jews or the Irish, the Germans or the Bolsheviks. The notorious traitor ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, whose real name was William Joyce, had developed his political vision in the loyalist community in Northern Ireland. He saw the partitioning of Ireland as the first step towards the disintegration of the Empire. Joyce was an imperialist traitor. The British fascist movements of the 1930s feared above all the end of empire.

The long afterglow of imperialism finally guttered in Hong Kong in 1997, but the British, as a people, often appear to be unreconciled to decline. In 1981, the British government belatedly rallied to the cause of the Falkland islanders, the long-forgotten inhabitants of a relic micro colony in the southern Atlantic. Britain, with grudging American support, stumbled into a war with Argentina, a faraway nation conveniently ruled by a tinpot dictator who was easy to demonise. The British wallowed in an orgy of ‘Hope and Glory’ patriotism that E.P Thompson called ‘imperial atavism, drenched in nostalgia’. The ‘Falkland Factor’ and a blizzard of tabloid posturing prolonged the reign of Margaret Thatcher and revived a kind of warmed-up nostalgia for all our pomp of yesterday. All British political leaders have subsequently longed for their own ‘Falklands moment’. Gibbon warned that ‘to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest’ was ‘adverse to nature’. At the time he was writing his long history, this caution went unheeded. Gibbon’s prescience now seems all too evident. In the spring of 2012, British dominion in a ‘remote country’ and its methods of rule would be held to account inside the Royal Courts of Justice.

The Batang Kali incident has been called ‘Britain’s My Lai’. In March 1968 American troops of ‘Charlie Company’ of the 20th Infantry Regiment attacked the village of Son My, in Quang Ngai province in South Vietnam, which comprised a number of hamlets: My Lai 1, 2, 3, and 4. It was believed that the 48th Battalion of the communist National Liberation Front, the NLF, known as the Viet Cong or ‘Victor Charlie’ by the Americans, had taken shelter in Son My. The Americans referred to the village as ‘Pinkville’. It was supposedly a guerrilla stronghold. Two months earlier on 30 January, the NLF had launched the ‘Tet offensive’, striking for the first time at cities in South Vietnam including the capital Saigon. Although the Viet Cong attack was repelled, the Tet offensive changed the course of the war in Vietnam. According to Michael Walzer’s classic Just and Unjust Wars (1977), on the evening before the attack Captain Ernest Medina briefed ‘Charlie Company’: ‘They’re all V.C. [Viet Cong guerrillas], now go and get them …’. One of the soldiers asked: ‘Who is my enemy?’ Medina replied: ‘Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her.’ During the course of the attack the Americans killed at least 300 villagers, mainly women, children and elderly men. Many women were raped; bodies were mutilated. At the time General William Westmoreland congratulated ‘Charlie Company’ for a job well done. The truth emerged slowly. On the evening of the attack, a helicopter pilot called Hugh Thompson, who had rescued a number of children from Son My, protested to his superior officers about the indiscriminate killing of women and children he had witnessed. Soon afterwards, an investigation carried out by a 31-year-old major called Colin Powell into the My Lai attack exonerated ‘Charlie Company’ of any wrongdoing. In the meantime, another American officer, Ronald Ridenhour, had talked to members of ‘Charlie Company’ and become convinced that something ‘dark and bloody’ had taken place in Son My. He wrote to thirty members of Congress urging them to investigate the ‘Pinkville incident’. His campaign led to the secret military prosecution of platoon leader Lt William Calley and twenty-five other officers who had taken part in the attack. It was not until November 1969 that journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in thirty American newspapers, including The New York Times. His report had a traumatising impact on a public that was already weary of the war and the way it was being fought. At his trial in 1970, Calley claimed:

I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that’s the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.

In other words, Calley was ‘just following orders’ – and many believe that he was. In Vietnam the murder of unarmed civilians was normal procedure.

The ‘Malayan Emergency’ – the British war against communist insurgents in Malaya – had ended nearly ten years before ‘Charlie Company’ rampaged through the Vietnamese village of Son My. The revelations of the Calley trial had unintended consequences in Britain. The veteran BBC journalist William Hardcastle quizzed the notoriously bibulous politician George Brown, who had been foreign secretary and deputy leader of the Labour Party, on World at One. Brown’s response was oddly equivocal: ‘… William, could you put your hand on your heart, and say in all the time Britain has been playing a similar role […] whether we could have turned up a Pinkville [My Lai] on the way […] I hope not but I just don’t know.’ Pressed by Hardcastle, Brown went further: ‘People when they are fighting, when they are frightened do terrible things […] I suspect there are an awful lot of spectres in our cupboard too.’ Brown seemed to have no doubt that British soldiers might have been capable of killing unarmed civilians as Calley and ‘Charlie Company’ had in Vietnam. Since 1945, British soldiers had fought many ‘small wars’ across the territories of the waning empire. But even at the end of the liberal 1960s, Brown’s remarks sounded like an outrageous slur on ‘our boys’, especially those who had fought to defend Malaya from communism. Robert Edwards, the truculent editor of the Sunday newspaper The People, decided to challenge the former foreign secretary in an editorial headlined ‘Where’s the evidence, George?’ What troubled Edwards was the implication that ‘since all war is horror, since we bombed Dresden and the Americans Hiroshima, what’s the difference?’ Brown seemed to be saying that the war hero who lived next door might have shot women and children in cold blood. Edwards insisted: ‘Withdraw this slur, Mr Brown!’ It was Sunday 30 November 1969.

On that freezing morning in Stretford, Greater Manchester, where a 40-year-old former Scots Guardsman called William Cootes lived with his new girlfriend, the couple were starting breakfast when their copy of The People was pushed noisily through the letterbox. The ‘Voice of the People’ editorial was on page two. As Cootes absorbed Edwards’ ringing words, he struggled with the chilling realisation that he could answer the headline question, ‘Where’s the evidence, George?’ Cootes had done his national service in Malaya. He had served with the Scots Guards. He had been a member of the patrol that had marched into Batang Kali twenty-one years earlier. Cootes knew what had happened. Two days later, on Tuesday 2 December, Cootes walked into the Manchester offices of The People and asked to talk to a journalist. He had a story to tell. The first journalist to hear the story of Britain’s My Lai was William Dorran, the northern news editor. By the following weekend, Cootes was in London at the newspaper’s head office near Covent Garden talking to Bob Edwards, described in his obituary as ‘a champagne socialist with Savile Row suits, hand-rolled cigars and a castle in Oxfordshire’, who had once been the editor of the Labour Party weekly magazine Tribune but had defected to the Daily Express for ten times the salary. Edwards was, however, a hard-nosed journalist in the classic mould. He had published the memoirs of Christine Keeler and led investigations of corruption and protection rackets in London’s Soho. He was shocked by the story the former national serviceman had to tell.

Cootes had joined the Scots Guards and been sent to Malaya at the beginning of the ‘Emergency’. At the beginning of December 1948, the Guards were based about 40 miles north of the colonial capital of Kuala Lumpur in Kuala Kubu Bharu. On the morning of 11 December, Cootes joined a platoon that had been ordered to a small settlement of Chinese rubber tappers on the Sungai Remok Estate close to the village of Batang Kali. According to Cootes, a guards officer called George Ramsay had given explicit orders to ‘wipe out anybody they found there’. He described the way platoon leaders had dealt with a young villager who was ‘grinning in an insolent way’:

[Sergeant] Douglas dropped to one knee, aimed his rifle and shot the youth in the back […] I could see the youth on the path on his back and his stomach was ripped open by the shot. I was amazed to see him suddenly raise his head from the ground and I shouted to Sergeant Hughes, nearby, that the boy was still alive. He walked over with his Sten gun and put a bullet through his head where he lay …

The following day, Cootes alleged, the Scots Guards divided the male villagers into groups, led them to the bank of the nearby river and shot them all in cold blood. One man had managed to escape but this was not known until some time later. When the patrol returned to the camp at Kuala Kubu Bharu, Ramsay and other officers called the men together. Another former Scots Guards private told a BBC reporter years later:

Remedios: We were told by the sergeant after the incident that if anyone said anything we could get fourteen or fifteen years in prison. We were more or less threatened by the sergeant.

BBC: So you got together and conspired to fabricate a story?

Remedios: Yes, more or less.

BBC: All the platoon?

BBC: More or less, yes.

Edwards was under no illusion that the story Cootes had told him was incendiary. George Brown had been right to suspect that Britain’s military establishment had ‘closeted spectres’ lurking in its historical cupboard. How many more might now spill out? The Scots Guards was an elite division, with a proud history. The British establishment would no doubt defend its record fiercely. Edwards could not publish without corroboration. But he was prepared to commit resources to proper investigation. Bill Dorran persuaded other former Scots Guards who had been present in Batang Kali that day in December 1948 to come forward. Most corroborated Cootes’ version of events. The villagers had not been running away: British troops had perpetrated a massacre in cold blood.

The investigation took two months to complete. It was an impressively thorough job. On 1 February 1970, Edwards was confident enough to run the story: ‘Horror in a Nameless Village’ was headlined on the front page. Edwards contributed an editorial statement:

A newspaper has a simple duty to its readers which is best summed up by the biblical phrase, ‘Ye shall know the truth’. The truth in this case illustrates the corrupting and fearful effect of war on otherwise decent men, and what can happen when the highest standards of discipline are allowed to fall. That is the lesson, and it can never be taught too often.

Edwards pointed out that this was not ‘another Pinkville’. The British soldiers had spared women and children. But what had happened in that Malayan village was, he insisted, ‘appalling enough’.

When Hersh had published his celebrated account of the My Lai massacre in The New York Times, American soldiers were still fighting and dying in Vietnam and a clamorous anti-war movement ensured that the story would not be ignored. The exposure of the My Lai massacre contributed to ending the war. In 1970, when The People published the Batang Kali story, Malaysia had been an independent nation for more than a decade. The last British troops had left years before. Britain was racked by economic calamity and dissent. Edwards recalled ruefully that ‘The country was shocked, I felt, but wanted the matter quietly dropped, and that is what happened.’ What Edwards meant of course was that circulation figures had dropped after he had published the story. Few, it seemed, wanted to hear about a ‘British My Lai’. On the threshold of the 1970s, public opinion was still in the grip of a long drawn-out victory party that had begun on VJ Day in 1945. We had won the war. We were a good people defended by morally righteous men and women in uniform who didn’t shoot people in cold blood. It was not difficult for the government to launch a cover-up that has lasted to this day.

To begin with, Minister of Defence Denis Healey ordered Scotland Yard to set up a task force to investigate the allegations, and Cootes and the other Scots Guards were reinterviewed under oath. But in June, 1970, the Conservative Party led by Edward Heath won a surprise general election victory. The new attorney general, Sir Peter Rawlinson, quietly cancelled the new investigation for ‘lack of evidence’. In the four decades that have passed since William Cootes walked into the offices of The People, successive British governments have resisted calls for a public enquiry to discover what happened at Batang Kali. Official statements have reiterated that the villagers were ‘shot trying to escape’ and that no evidence has been produced to justify an enquiry. By the end of 2011, this long, ‘very British cover-up’ seemed to be close to collapse – thanks to a long campaign fought by British and Malaysian lawyers and the journalists Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor. Lawyer Quek Ngee Meng recalls:

Back in 2004 my father, the late Quek Cheng Taik, used to visit the hot springs in Ulu Yam near Batang Kali to treat an illness. He used to go from Serdang to that area and eventually bought a house in Ulu Yam. He listened to the stories of villagers. It is still a talked-about topic there more than sixty years on. Those killed were from Ulu Yam. If you go there you won’t miss the cemetery. Every Qing Ming (a day to pay respect to one’s ancestors) they go back. They still feel it. It is still a stigma. The official account says they were suspected of being bandits. When we followed the case, we found a lot of cover-ups.

At the beginning of May 2012 Quek Ngee Meng and his legal team flew from Kuala Lumpur to London where lawyers John Halford and Danny Friedman had been masterminding the campaign. The most important members of Quek’s party were the ‘claimants’: the surviving relatives of the men killed at Batang Kali. Their principal demand was for a public enquiry. In dry legalese:

The Claimants challenge decisions of the Defendants (or ‘the Secretaries of State’) of 29 November 2010 and 4 November 2011 (a) not to pay ‘reparations’ or financial compensation in respect of killings at Batang Kali, Selangor, Malaya on 11–12 December 1948 (‘the killings’) and (b) not to establish a public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 (‘the 2005 Act’) or any other inquiry or investigation into the killings.

The purpose of the trial, in other words, was to contest decisions made by the British government, the defendants, not to hold an enquiry into the Batang Kali killings. The trial in May was not an enquiry – though, as it would turn out, the two-day proceedings yielded a great deal of new information about British counter-insurgency operations in Malaya. The claimants were asking the High Court to overturn the government’s refusal to investigate. At previous hearings the Secretaries of State for Defence and Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs insisted that they were unwilling to do anything to make public the truth of what happened. No apology has ever been offered. This means that the government continues to maintain that the killings at Batang Kali were ‘necessary and justified’.1 What was at issue was whether the defendants had acted lawfully when they refused the claimants’ application for a public enquiry. The claimants’ lawyers argued that ‘This case is about truth and reconciliation. It concerns a continuing injustice of deeply troubling proportions.’ This became very clear at a press conference when the four elderly Malaysians spoke of their experiences.

Loh Ah Choy recalled: ‘It was about 5 in the evening when the soldiers came to our Kongsi [hut]. Women and children were herded to one place. At 7, my uncle walked to the vegetable garden, followed by a soldier. I heard three shots. My uncle didn’t come back, but the soldier came back …’. Madam Lim had just turned 11 at the end of 1948. She remembered the way the British soldiers treated her mother: ‘They pulled her by the arm and we clung on to the other arm, and when she was led away, we heard shots and thought that they had shot her. But she was spared.’ Madam Lim’s father was not so fortunate. He was shot: ‘We were asked to get on to a lorry and then we heard several shots fired and then saw flames.’ A week later, the women and their children returned to Batang Kali to fetch the bodies for burial: ‘The stench was really bad. There were worms coming out of the eyes and mouths …’. Even in death, there was no dignity for the men who were killed that day in December at Batang Kali.

The first report of the killings in The Straits Times sounded a shrill note of triumph: ‘Police, Bandits kill 28 [sic] bandits in day […] Biggest Success for Forces since Emergency Started’. It would not take long for the official story to unravel. The Chinese Consul in Kuala Lumpur complained to the colonial government. The dead villagers had not been communists, he asserted. The journalists at The Straits Times who had been so gung-ho when news of the Scots Guards’ action was first released now demanded a public enquiry. The colonial government was forced on the defensive. Now, they insisted, the dead men had been ‘shot while trying to escape’. The killings, in short, were justified. Since 1948, successive British governments have stubbornly pedalled the same story. The massacre that took place at Batang Kali is not of course the only ‘closeted spectre’ of British imperial history. In May 2013, the British government began negotiating payments to thousands of Kenyans who were detained and tortured during the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency in Kenya. Long-concealed documents released by the National Archives in 2012 revealed incriminating new evidence. Eric Griffiths-Jones, the attorney general in colonial Kenya, had once described the treatment of detainees as ‘distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia’ but nevertheless sanctioned beatings of suspects as long as it was done in secret: ‘If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.’ One of the victims was Hussein Onyango Obama, Barack Obama’s grandfather. British soldiers rammed pins into his fingernails and squeezed his testicles between metal rods. Other prisoners were ‘roasted alive’.2 Historian Caroline Elkins revealed that, in 1957, the colonial government in Kenya decided to subject the detainees who still refused to co-operate and comply with orders to a torture technique known as ‘the dilution technique’. This was a grotesque euphemism. Dilution meant the systematic use of brute force to overpower alleged ‘Mau Mau’ adherents, using fists, clubs, truncheons and whips. This treatment would continue until the detainees co-operated with orders, confessed and repented. Martyn Day, the lawyer who acted on behalf of the Kenyan claimants, has written that the British government hid for years ‘behind technical legal defences to avoid any legal responsibility. This was always morally repugnant …’.

We will come back to what The People newspaper called ‘Horror in a Nameless Village’ in due course. For historians of the British Empire and its long decline and fall, the ‘Batang Kali trial’ has already shed new light on the longest overseas war fought by British troops in the twentieth century – the ‘Malayan Emergency’. The counter-insurgency tactics developed by British forces in Malaya have long been regarded as exemplary. The communists were defeated; Malaya became happily independent. This book will seek to demonstrate that this comforting historical narrative is a myth, and a dangerous one. For the ‘lessons’ of the Malayan counter-insurgency campaign influenced American strategy in Vietnam and even today are invoked to rationalise military tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Viewed through the lens of that tragedy, the entire history of British rule in Malaya, both direct and indirect, is thrown into sharp relief as a long and troubling chronicle of slaughter and deception. We seem to cherish a rosy view of the long ago and far away world of ‘British Malaya’. In Eastern Journey, published in 1939, J.H. MacCallum Scott eulogised on the eve of the Second World War: ‘Malaya is as happy a land as one could ever hope to find – a Tory Eden in which each man is contented with his station, and does not wish for change.’ This nostalgic folk memory is infused with a congratulatory sense that we ‘got Malaya right’: we had learnt hard lessons from the bloody catastrophe of Indian partition and the ignominious flight from Palestine and so made decent exit from Malaya. Look, too, at modern Malaysia, with its booming economy, multiracial society, stable government and teeming shopping malls. Malaysians surely owe a tremendous debt to the old empire builders whose roll call of honour is still evoked by place names like Port Swettenham, the Cameron Highlands and Jalan Gurney. We surely bequeathed to Southeast Asia a decent prosperous nation. This is the fundamental reason why the British government has resisted an enquiry into the slaughter at Batang Kali. What happened by the banks of the Sungai Remok contradicts a treasured national mythology. The secret history of British Malaya and the making of modern Malaysia was, from the very beginning, founded on chicanery and violence, on skulduggery and conquest. That true history is the one that must now be told .

1

THE BATTLEFIELD

The Least Known Part of the Globe

‘Public opinion,’ lamented Isabella Bird in 1879 ‘never reaches these equatorial jungles; we are grossly ignorant of their inhabitants and of their rights […] unless some fresh disturbance and another “little war” should concentrate our attention for a moment on these distant states, we are likely to remain so, to their great detriment […] I felt humiliated by my ignorance.’

For much of the nineteenth century Malaya lay in the shadow of British India. A position in the Malayan Civil Service, the MCS, was for second-raters: the elite served the Raj. It was not until Britain lost Malaya and Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 that its value was fully appreciated. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the near-bankrupted new Labour government in London would do everything in its power to hold onto ‘these equatorial jungles’ and their wealth. The Malayan Peninsula divides the Bay of Bengal from the South China Sea and resembles a misshapen limb bent towards the vast Indonesian Archipelago and the Philippine Islands. Once called ‘Further India’ or the ‘Far Eastern Tropics’, this arc of islands and peninsulas was demeaned as an extension of India or a tropical appendage of the Far East. With the exception of Thailand, Europeans who came here encountered not a single polity that resembled a nation state. Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei are all creations of imperialism – French, British, Dutch and American. It was the Japanese armies that rampaged through the Malayan Peninsula and into the Philippines and Indonesia in 1942 that definitively stamped out a grander regional identity, a fact of conquest recognised by British military commanders when they established ‘South East Asia Command’, or SEAC, to oust these impertinent Asian imperialists. For Alfred Russell Wallace (with Charles Darwin, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) Southeast Asia was the ‘Malay Archipelago’. This plucky naturalist spent little time in the peninsula: it was the archipelago that fascinated him most. He began his engrossing account:

To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travellers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored, being divided between Asia and the Pacific Islands […] Situated upon the Equator, and bathed by the tepid water of the great tropical oceans, this region enjoys a climate more uniformly hot and moist than almost any other part of the globe, and teems with natural productions which are elsewhere unknown. The richest of fruits and the most precious of spices are indigenous here …

Wallace published The Malay Archipelago in 1869. Three decades later, this hot, wet and teeming world was transformed utterly by Portuguese, Dutch, French and English colonisers. Territorial borders that were once contested between European powers now demarcate the political boundaries of the brand new nations like Malaysia and Indonesia, which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. From the point of view of Asian nationalists, the colonial powers violently dismembered a unified ethnic and cultural domain. There is no territorial logic that can rationalise severing modern Malaysia from the rest of the Indonesian Archipelago. When Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque sailed into Malacca harbour with guns blazing on 2 May 1511, he inaugurated the destruction of a distinct ‘Malay World’ encompassing much of modern Southeast Asia, whose legendary splendour rivalled that of Mogul India. Nations depend on such assertions of antiquity and unity. According to Gandhi, ‘India was one undivided land […] made by nature.’ Nehru spoke of an ‘impress of oneness’ going back 6,000 years. ‘Mother India’ is a myth. In pre-modern times, the Indian subcontinent was never a single political or cultural entity. It was in fact a mutable hotchpotch of petty and middle-sized kingdoms that had little in common. Arguably, ‘India’ was a European invention: there is no equivalent term in any indigenous language. Likewise, ‘Indonesia’, which yokes together the Greek ‘Indus’ and ‘nèsos’, meaning islands, was first used by English ethnologists and popularised by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian. Nations, in short, demand a prestigious genealogy. Today, the legend of a once glorious ‘Malay World’ inhabited by a unitary indigenous people nourishes chauvinist racial politics that enshrines Muslim Malays as indigenous ‘Bumiputera’ or ‘Princes/sons of the Soil’. The idea is profoundly atavistic. It is a truism to say that we are all the children of migrants. Modern genetics has sketched a global cartography of human interconnectedness, the consequence of a history of incessant wandering, settlement and emigration.

This axiom is especially pertinent to Southeast Asia where successive waves of migrants have churned back and forth to forge unique regional cultures. These are the ‘Lands of the Monsoon’ straddling the equator, much warmer than China and wetter than the greater part of the Indian subcontinent. For millennia, Southeast Asia has been a maritime crossroads. Its rugged and intricate topography is deeply incised by oceanic waters, and copious rainfall has generated an intricate network of interlaced waterways. The first classical geographers, such as Ptolemy, recorded jewel-like clusters of ports in the region they called the Chersonesus Aurea, the Golden Chersonese. Though on its northern borders Southeast Asia was cut off from the continental interior and its ancient centres of human dispersal by the icy ramparts of the Tibetan plateau, the entire region to the south has been exposed to seaborne settlement and incursion of peoples and cultures as well as ceaseless internal migration from island to island. These convergences and dispersals have over tens of thousands of years created a human topography of remarkable diversity that in many ways evokes the civilisations of the ancient Aegean, which Plato compared to ‘ants and frogs around a pond’. Thousands of years before Europeans came here, Southeast Asia was globally interconnected. Archaeologists have excavated the bones of Stone Age humans in Perak whose ancestors evolved in Africa. Modern humans, with their big, inquisitive brains, were wanderers and explorers who seem to have loped across the ancient land bridge connecting Asia with the far reaches of the archipelago before the end of the last Ice Age. These long-vanished people may well be the distant forebears of the Malayan aboriginals, called in Malay ‘Orang Asli’, the ‘original people’. The Malays, too, were intruders once. They probably migrated southward from the Asian interior and then spread across the entire archipelago. Later, the great pump of the monsoon brought Greeks, Arabs, Persians and Indians from the west and Chinese from the east. Here, for 1,000 years, was one of the great centres of Hindu culture centuries before the coming of Islam. This astonishing human and cultural liquescence renders meaningless the idea of a single race of indigenes. Before the first Europeans sailed tentatively into the Straits of Malacca, fleets from India and China sailed to Southeast Asia with one monsoon and returned home with another. For millennia, the great migrational pump of the monsoon churned and shuffled the gene pool.

In the vast water world of Southeast Asia, the Malayan Peninsula is in some ways anomalous. Unlike the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines, this slender rocky limb is attached to the Eurasian landmass and forms its south-eastern extremity. Modern Malaysia, of course, shares the peninsula with Burma and Thailand. Many borderland regions become battlegrounds and this one is no exception. Thai rulers once claimed sovereignty over the northern Malay states of Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan, and Terengganu; it was here that Japanese armies landed in December 1941 and it was to the Thai border that Malayan communist guerrillas retreated in the mid-1950s. Many retired communist freedom fighters still live in ‘Peace Villages’ close to the Malaysian border in Thailand. For some years radical Muslim insurgents linked to ‘Jemaah Islamijah’ have been engaged in a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the southern Thai state of Patani. The colonial administrator, Sir Hugh Clifford, in his book In Court and Kampong, left us a wonderful account of the pristine peninsula rain forests as they were in the late nineteenth century:

These forests are among the wonderful things of the Earth. They are immense in extent, and the trees which form them grow so close together that they tread on one another’s toes. All are lashed, and bound, and relashed, into one huge magnificent tangled net, by the thickest underwood, and the most marvellous parasitic growths that nature has ever devised. No human being can force his way through this maze of trees, and shrubs, and thorns, and plants, and creepers; and even the great beasts which dwell in the jungle find their strength unequal to the task, and have to follow game paths, beaten out by the passage of innumerable animals, through the thickest and deepest parts of the forest. The branches cross and recross, and are bound together by countless parasitic creepers, forming a green canopy overhead, through which the fierce sunlight only forces a partial passage, the struggling rays flecking the trees on which they fall with little splashes of light and colour. The air ‘hangs heavy as remembered sin’, and the gloom of a great cathedral is on every side. Everything is damp, and moist, and oppressive.

Mountain, river and jungle. These are the physical protagonists that have channelled and sculpted the incessant flow of migrations and settlements, the drama of encounters, skirmishes and wars. It is a topography that can be both a barrier and a refuge. Some seven or eight major mountain ranges ripple down the peninsula separated by deep furrows. The most impressive is the prosaically named Main Range, which extends uninterrupted from the Thai border to Negeri Sembilan before tapering into the flat lands of Johor. The granite cores of the Main Range are encrusted with a patina of sedimentary limestone that has been eroded to a distinctive topography of towering bluffs and spires riddled with caves and fissures. This rocky landscape is itself sheathed up to a level of about 2,000ft by immense evergreen rainforests that once covered four-fifths of the peninsula. This ancient jungle is now being steadily eroded by desolate plantations of oil palms.

To east and west, the long green spine of the central ranges descends to rolling foothills and coastal plains. The west coast facing across the narrow Straits of Malacca towards the great island of Sumatra is edged along its entire length by tangled mangrove swamps and shimmering expanses of mud. These mud flats can deceive the unwary. When British troops landed on Morib Beach near Port Swettenham in September 1945, what in aerial photographs appeared to be solid ground turned out to be a deceptive crust concealing layers of silt that ensnared tanks and trucks. On the other side of the Main Range, the east coast possesses an entirely different character. The north-east monsoon that batters its shores between November and February checks the spread of mangroves. Long sandy beaches stretch for mile upon mile broken by shingle spits and rocky headlands. The east coast is notoriously treacherous, as thousands of Japanese soldiers discovered when they struggled through pounding waves towards the beaches at Kota Bahru in December 1941. On the west side of the peninsula, the Straits of Malacca are sheltered by the island of Sumatra and the Malayan highlands and are for much of the year as placid as an inland sea. For merchants and travellers propelled across the Bay of Bengal by the monsoon, the straits are the maritime gateway to Southeast Asia. Sir Hugh Clifford called the straits the ‘front door’ of the peninsula – the east, across the Main Range, was ‘the other side of silence’.

The peninsula can boast no grand relics of ancient civilisations like the pyramidal Buddhist temple of Borobudur on Java or the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Excavations at Sungai Batu in the Bujang Valley in Kedah have uncovered evidence that the Chola (or Chozhan) kingdom in southern India established some kind of settlement here on the banks of the Muda River to mine and export local deposits of iron ore. Malaysian archaeologists have claimed the Bujang Valley as early evidence of Malay civilisation. Although Chinese records from the first century seem to refer to a kingdom called ‘Lang-ya-xiu’ or ‘Langkasuka’, excavations have so far uncovered not a shred of evidence of an indigenous culture. Malays were thoroughly Indianised before their conversion to Islam. ‘Singapura’ is believed to derive from a Sanskrit term meaning ‘Lion City’. In the north-east, the Malay states of Kelantan, Terengganu and northern Pahang may have developed similarly derivative ties with the Mon-Khmer lands to the north. The simple fact is that the peninsula was hard to settle. Granite, the bedrock of the peninsula, does not yield fertile soils – and from whatever direction the peninsula was approached early settlers found their way to the interior blocked by jungle. Settlement was localised in a few relatively favoured lowland areas and in clusters scattered along the coastal edges of the peninsula, where rivers met the sea. It was not that the Malays and the other peoples passing through the peninsula were in some way deficient. The ancient civilisations of Burma, Thailand and Cambodia all flourished in great fertile river basins. Well-fed rice growers built the great monuments of central Java. The main factor shaping the history of the Malayan Peninsula is a severely limited capacity to grow food crops, which over time has handicapped the development of political power. Malaya has been described as a ‘causeway and breakwater of massive proportions’, but as English political geographer Halford Mackinder always insisted, even a sea power has to be ‘nourished by land-fertility somewhere’. Even Malacca, the great west coast emporium of the spice trade, which dominated all the small river-basin sultanates of the peninsula as far north as Kedah and Patani, was held back by the limited food production capacity of its hinterland. According to a Chinese observer, the soil of Malacca was barren and saline; rice had to be imported from Java. For much of its history, the peninsula was a backwater.

As the classical geographers suspected, the ‘Golden Chersonese’ were endowed with riches. But the most valuable were secretive – and inedible. Iron, as we have already noted, was mined in the Bujang Valley in Kedah and exported to southern India more than 1,000 years ago. It was only much later in the nineteenth century that Malaya’s mineral resources became unique assets – tin above all was the making of Malaya. In wet tropical climates, granite weathers swiftly. As the core rock crumbles, quartz, feldspars and other silicate minerals break down to form clays which are carried away by streams. The toughest crystals coalesce as gravels. Concentrated inside these alluvial gravels is a heavy mineral called cassiterite that accumulates in what geologists call lenses that are distributed along a horizon in the gravel. This, in brief, is the creation story of tin. So it was that the lodes, veins and scattered crystals released from the granitic cores of the peninsula ranges were washed into the foothills of western Malaya to form a band of alluvial fans impregnated with this dull silvery ore. Tin in this form is not difficult to extract – and Malays had extracted small amounts for centuries. It was Chinese immigrants who first saw the immense potential of Malaya’s alluvial tin deposits. The tin rush that began in the Larut field in 1848 would transform Malaya from a backwater into an economic powerhouse controlled by people feared as outsiders. The Malayan wars had begun.

The Sudden Rampage, 8 December 1941

Early morning, 4 December 1941: Samah harbour on the Japanese occupied island of Hainan in the Gulf of Tongkin. As a sheet white moon set in the western sky, the sun burst above the horizon making the still ocean surface shimmer gold and silver. This picture-postcard vista delighted Colonel Masanobo Tsuji as he stood on the bridge of the amphibious assault ship Ryujo Maru, ‘The Dragon and the Castle’. Designed as an aircraft carrier, this odd flat-topped vessel was the temporary headquarters of the Japanese 25th Army, commanded by Lt General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Colonel Tsuji owed nothing to privilege and everything to intelligence and grit. He loved kendo fencing – but spurned most other time-wasting sports, as well as alcohol and women. He had vowed to abstain from any sexual activity until after Singapore had fallen. Tsuji was notoriously short-tempered and regarded as a killjoy by many of his fellow officers. But that morning the lurid splendour of the rising sun perfectly matched his exultant mood.

If the diminutive colonel was a prig, he was one with clout. He was the strategic mastermind behind a plan of conquest that would, in less than two months, bring more than a century of colonial rule in Malaya to an inglorious end. As the moon dipped out of sight, and the hot-red sun rose ever higher above the horizon, the Ryujo Maru and an armada of Japanese troopships, led by the flagship Chokai and flanked by two lines of destroyers and minesweepers, began steaming south-west towards the coast of Thailand. The die, as Tsuji reflected, had been cast. As the lush tropical coast of Hainan Island receded slowly astern, he conjured up the faces of his mother, his wife and children waiting at home in Japan. The fate of the nation hinged on the success of his plan.

Crammed inside the Ryujo Maru and the other transport ships were 83,000 soldiers, squatting or sprawling just a few inches apart. Most of the men were horribly seasick. Tsuji was one of the few onboard who seemed immune. This was the Japanese 25th Army – their mission: the invasion of British Malaya and the capture of Singapore. Tsuji had begun detailed planning at the Taiwan Army Research Centre at the beginning of 1941 for the conquest of Southeast Asia. The Chinese had ceded Taiwan (called Formosa by the Portuguese) to the Japanese in 1895 and the island had become a fortress with a large garrison. Japanese soldiers had very little experience of fighting in the tropics. At the research centre, Tsuji and just ten staff officers struggled to gather every scrap of information they could lay their hands on about tropical warfare. They staged exercises on the sandy beaches of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu to simulate the rigours of disembarkation. Tsuji and his team investigated ways to cope with heat, mosquitoes and snakes; they advocated hygiene and recommended swallowing the raw livers of tropical snakes for stamina. As the Japanese armada turned into the Gulf of Thailand, the emperor’s soldiers in their cramped and uncomfortable quarters below deck longed desperately for the voyage to be over. They were confident of victory. A lucky few had the stomach to wolf down meagre rations of rice, miso and pickled radish. Some pored over Colonel Tsuji’s pamphlet Read this Alone and the War can be Won. This was both a practical guidebook and propagandist exhortation:

… at stake in the present war, without a doubt, is the future prosperity or decline of the [Japanese] Empire […] Regard yourself as an avenger come face to face at last with his father’s murderer. Here before you is the [Westerner] whose death will lighten your heart …

Although Tsuji stressed that the task of the Imperial Army was to build a new ‘Asia for Asians’, they should not ‘expect too much of the natives’. Malays, many Japanese believed, were backward peasants. The Chinese, on the other hand, Tsuji warned, were mere ‘extortionists’ – not fit to join the ‘Asian Brotherhood’.

The Japanese convoy closing in on the Malayan Peninsula was one part of an audacious master plan intended to oust the European powers that had for centuries abused and exploited the peoples and treasure of Asia. This imperial crusade was a desperate gamble. Japanese armies were still at war with Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist forces in China; in Europe, the German onslaught against Stalin’s Red Army was foundering in the ice and snow of the Russian winter.

Although Japanese and American diplomats continued to wrangle in Washington, General Hideki Tojo and his planners were convinced that speed, deceit and surprise would win the day. The strategic blueprint hatched in Tokyo was to smash British forces in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Borneo; oust the Americans from the Philippines; seize flanking positions in southern Burma and the Bismarck Archipelago; and set up a kind of perimeter line of defence in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Once this immense region had been secured, the victors could feast on the oil riches of Borneo and Sumatra. That was the plan and it very nearly succeeded.

The supreme commander of the Japanese ‘Southern Expeditionary Army’ who would lead the assault on Southeast Asia was Count Hisaichi Terauchi. The capture of Malaya, Singapore, southern Sumatra and British Borneo fell to Lt General Tomoyuki Yamashita. He defied every colonial stereotype of a Japanese warrior. In stark contrast to the frugal and ascetic Colonel Tsuji, the tall bulky Yamashita was once described as an ‘Oriental Falstaff’. His father was a rural doctor on the smallest Japanese island of Shikoku, celebrated for its arduous eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage route and magnificent cedar trees. His mother descended from a samurai clan whose fortress was still a local monument. For much of his career, Yamashita, who was married to a willowy general’s daughter, had been a punctilious, hard-working bureaucrat, who had done well enough to serve as military attaché in Germany and Austria. In Vienna, he had acquired girth, a passion for literature, and a mistress called ‘Kitty’. By the time he returned to Japan, Yamashita had an enviable reputation as a diplomat but very little experience of combat.

By the mid-1930s, Japan had become, as historian Rikki Kersten has shown, an ultranationalist quasi-fascist society, imbued with an aggressive imperialist foreign policy, and a national creed of spiritual superiority towards the West and racial superiority to other Asians.3 The dominance of the ‘Emperor System’ led to an all pervasive psychological coercion. The Japanese state was authoritarian; its society was rigidly conformist. In February 1936, a group of radical young army officers, known as the ‘National Principle’ faction, staged a coup d’état