This was one of the many reasons why I had always felt, no matter how grim the news for us at the beginning, that the war could only end in defeat of the Japanese because I was certain that, however glittering the promises of their military day appeared to be in the Pacific and South-East Asia, underneath in the night of their spirit, a secret unrealized self would be drawing the tide of all their unacknowledged longing produced by thousands of years of the secluded island history which had conditioned their national psychology, to find fulfilment only in utter defeat. It would do this, I felt certain, as irrevocably as the moon drew the waters of the Pacific to those phenomenal neap-tides which so often lapped at the brim of their vibrant land.
Their main inspiration as a people it seemed to me had always welled up from the depths of cataclysm and disaster of fire, water, earthquake, tidal wave and typhoon. I suspected that, unknown to themselves, this war was perhaps another and greater instinctive search for renewal by destroying a past they could not escape in any other way, through the disaster of utter collective defeat. Indeed the manner in which Japan has come out of the disaster of the war and made itself into one of the most formidable modern technological nations on earth, today seems to me to confirm that there was some truth in these conclusions reached in the isolation of prison.
It can be imagined how these and many other similar considerations sharpened my feelings of desperation over the breakdown of our radio contact with the outside world and made me, and the little group of gifted and gallant officers concerned, search desperately for a means of putting it right. I suspected that among the new groups of prisoners who had come into the camp on our re-concentration there was at least one if not two other secret radios at work. I was reasonably sure that I knew the group of young Dutch officers responsible for one radio. I was sure I had only to ask one of them and I would probably get all the information we needed. One of the officers had become rather a friend of mine, although I had not known him long.
He was in many ways one of the most colourful characters among the thousands in our midst, a born cavalier, good-looking, debonair, gay, reckless, without fear but also passionately loyal in his friendships. Due, perhaps, to the fact that he had a great deal of Arab blood in his veins, he also possessed a natural gift for intrigue against his enemies that amounted almost to genius, preferably intrigue of the more dangerous kinds. His name was Max al Kahdri. He was a professional officer in the Dutch army and one of the younger of the numerous sons of the polygamous Sultan of Pontianak, on the island of Borneo. As a younger son, considered far removed from any possibility of succession, his father had washed his hands of him, as it were, by sending him to Holland to train for a modest career in the Dutch colonial army. He and I did not know at the time that the Japanese had already massacred his father and his wives and concubines, as well as some two hundred members of his family in Pontianak, and that on liberation he would find himself the sole family survivor and the new Sultan of his people.
I was certain that I had only to ask al Kahdri and he would give me the information I wanted. But I was determined to do this only as a last resort, because I had what seemed to me at the time good reason to believe that he and his group were under suspicion and were being closely watched by the Japanese. I knew this from the things said to me by the two Eurasian spies whom I have mentioned, and who had for some weeks now, whenever we met, somehow brought al Kahdri into our conversation. Being unaware, as al Kahdri also was, that his family had been massacred because the Japanese had accused the Sultan of intriguing against them, I could not take that sinister fact into consideration as I would have done. The Japanese may well have thought that some rumours of the massacre could have reached al Kahdri, even in their closely guarded prison, and their guilty consciences accordingly prompted them to suspect him of plotting against them in a bitter spirit of revenge. However, knowing none of this at the time I thought he could only be being specially watched because of some suspicion that he was operating a secret radio. Under our physical conditions secrecy had become almost impossible, quite apart from the notorious incapacity of the people among whom his group operated to keep secrets even of the most vital kind.
So I put all thought of going to Max al Kahdri aside as the last possible resort. I limited my own association with him and his friends, all of whom I liked immensely, to such obvious and innocuous contacts that I was to discover later that they had been secretly hurt by my attitude. Thinking I did not trust them, they had cancelled the decision they had already unanimously taken to confide in me.
Much as I regretted this, I still believe my action was right and that if I had become involved with al Kahdri and his group I might well have brought disaster upon them and myself. Besides, there was what appeared to be at the time a possibility of putting our own secret radio right ourselves. One of what were in those days called ‘acorn’ valves and a small electrolytic condenser in the set had given out. We had no replacements for them. These acorn valves had been brought into our camp by an American air-force officer some two years before. They were the latest thing in radio and had enabled us to reduce the size of our set over the years to such minute proportions that we could conceal it in a pair of wooden clogs.
Most of us had been wearing clogs in prison because, over the years, shoes as well as the leather to repair them had progressively given out and we had been reduced to using wood and rubber to replace them. These special wireless clogs were slightly bigger and thicker than normal, but not so big as to attract notice. They were in any case a great and sophisticated improvement on our first set, which had been built into the seat of a wooden chair.
We had known from the start that the chair could only be a provisional home for a secret radio. In the first place, if we were moved suddenly we obviously could not take a large wooden chair with us. We had to have as soon as possible a mobile form of radio. Also we did not think a hiding place in a chair could long escape detection. The point was forcefully driven home to us one day early on when, during the course of one of their blitz searches of the camp, the Japanese sergeant-major in charge chose this very chair to sit upon while conducting the operation. Two of the officers responsible for the set, watching him bounding up and down in the chair, nearly had heart attacks because they were convinced that sooner or later the hollow sound that each bounce emitted would draw his attention to the real role of the chair in our camp!
I need not describe all the stages of evolution which followed until we arrived at the solution of housing the set in the clogs and henceforth, whenever we had a blitz search, one of us could wear the clogs and walk about in them throughout the search, feeling on the whole safe from detection.
The forms of detection that we really feared most were those that could come through loose talk from the small circle in the know, or being caught out during the hours of listening in at night, when of course we were most vulnerable as the set then had to be extracted and exposed. If only we could now replace the damaged parts, or find other equivalents of the same size, we could operate the radio once more. The gifted young New Zealand officer – a radio expert in civilian life – who had been responsible for reducing the set to its final minute form, and had proved himself capable of operating it for some eighteen months without any loss of nerve and with a real if strange enjoyment which I could not share – had impressed upon me how little he needed either to make the set operative again or to build a new one. But where and how were we to get even so little in the most difficult, bleak, isolated and impoverished prison we had ever encountered?