Towards the end of 1944 the whole tone as well as the content of Kim’s communications with me began to show a new trend. He spoke of a great increase of tension at Japanese headquarters and a grimmer mood, as if secretly they were at last beginning to admit to themselves the possibility of a disastrous defeat. There was also, he said, a feeling of acute unease over the consequences of the growing spirit of nationalism among the indigenous peoples of the island, which they had done so much at one stage to encourage, and a marked coolness in their attitude to their chosen nationalist leaders like Sukarno and Hatta. Far from still regarding nationalism in Java as the powerful ally they had originally envisaged, they seemed to be thinking of it more and more as a force which might well turn against them and stab them in the back when the Allied attack on South-East Asia began.
This suspicion had been sparked off by the mutiny in 1944 of a group of young Javanese officers who were being trained for military service by the Japanese at Blitar, in East Java, and the escape of the ring-leaders of the revolt to the great hills on the south coast of the island where they were still at large.
I could not of course commit any of this information to paper, but much of what I learned from Kim at the time was contained in a long dispatch I wrote for Lord Mountbatten immediately after the Japanese capitulation, when my memory of these events was fresh and clear. With the help of the notes I made for this dispatch, I recall vividly not only the change in the Japanese mood which he reported to me but also a sombre transformation in Kim himself.
He no longer mentioned any impending moves of working parties from our depleted though still crowded prison camps in Java to the outer islands, or of movements from one camp to another within the islands, as he had done before. He spoke as if communications by sea between Indonesia and other parts of South-East Asia had ceased to exist, and as if the command in Indonesia was more and more thinking of itself as condemned to fight on, completely isolated and alone, against the Allied invasion when it came; to the usual Japanese end, without surrender, of course, and to the death of every man. Although he could give me no complete details as yet, he made it clear that, for all of us, he viewed the consequences of this change of mood with a growing fatalistic alarm.
Kim’s own change of mood, which appeared to be based at first on some as yet unacknowledged intuitive appraisal of the change in the Japanese attitude to the war, was for me the gravest portent of all. Up to now his communications, even in the second or third-hand form in which they reached me, had an underlying tone of optimism about the future, as if he believed that the Japanese defeat was inevitable but also, unlike me, that it would be a straightforward military matter which would be automatically followed by our and his own liberation.
For some months now there had been no cheerfulness, no optimism and no information of any tangible content except talk of these signs of growing Japanese desperation, and an atmosphere of fear of what might come out of this desperation. The fear at the back of Kim’s mind did not emerge into the open and achieve an articulate form until a week or two after the final German surrender in May 1945.
It assumed then a definite warning that a new series of orders, which might have a fatal bearing on our survival, had arrived from the Japanese Commander-in-chief in South-East Asia, He did not know as yet what precisely the orders were, but, judging by the reactions all around him, they appeared to be orders of a grave and irrevocable import.
This Commander-in-chief was a veteran Japanese soldier who had seen a great deal of active service, from the earliest days of the invasion of Manchuria and the subsequent wars in China proper. He was Field-Marshal Terauchi, a Japanese aristocrat of the oldest Japanese military school, a fanatical Imperialist of great independence of mind, imperious character, and with complete confidence in himself and in his own Tightness of decision and behaviour.
However grave the defeat of the Japanese navy and air force in the Pacific, however rapid the penetration of the American forces into the islands of the Sea of Japan, despite the landing of the American armies in the Philippines, the surrender of the Germans, the collapse of the armies in Burma and the advance on Rangoon of the British forces under Lord Mountbatten, he utterly rejected, Kim said, any thought of defeat or even peace by negotiation. He had made it quite clear to all his subordinate commanders, in the various theatres of the vast strategic area under his command, that they would be expected to resist the enemy in the classical Samurai manner, if necessary committing hara-kiri in the event of defeat rather than falling alive into Allied hands.
This obviously sounded, to Kim as well as to myself, like a prescription also for the death of all in the power of the Japanese, because I myself could not see how the Japanese would have any regard for the lives of their prisoners at a moment when they had none for their own.
If this were to be the way they were going to end the war, then the process that I have called ‘the vengeance of history’, at work like some volcano stirring in the subterranean levels of their uncompromising spirit, would logically demand the sacrifice of all the thousands of the enemy races in their power.
My worst apprehensions were indeed quickened by the first piece of concrete news from Kim to reach me in June 1945. It was brief and to the point: the Japanese had decided to liquidate all their prisoner-of-war camps on the coast of Java and to concentrate them in the central plateau of the island at Bandoeng, where we were originally held. Similar concentrations of civilian male prisoners were to be carried out simultaneously. Although Kim did not say so, I gathered from my Chinese friends that he thought this re-concentration an ominous sign.
The re-concentration was quickly and heartlessly carried out, and soon we were enclosed in what had been our first prisoner-of-war camp in Bandoeng, in such numbers that we could hardly move. In another old disused Dutch army barracks nearby, Dutch and Javanese civilian prisoners were held in even greater numbers than our own. We had never had much room in Japanese prisons, but the congestion that followed this re-concentration surpassed anything that even we, with our experience of the Japanese capacity for demanding the well-nigh impossible of us, could have conceived in a nightmare moment of imagination. In comparison with what was to happen, this was not congestion but life in wide open spaces – Lebensraum in the most expansive of Teutonic senses.
We had not been in this terrible over-congested state a fortnight when Kim’s considered interpretation of the move reached me. It was what I had feared. He had had a glimpse of Field-Marshal Terauchi’s secret order to his commanders. They laid down clearly that, when the Allies began their final assault in South-East Asia, they were to kill all their prisoners in their camps, military as well as civilian, and fight to the classical Samurai end. I had barely come to terms with Kim’s news when another warning from him came to tell me that we were to be forced into even greater concentration, for what could well be the preliminary to final extinction.
Within a week we were marched out of our camp, somehow managing to keep in step and proper military formation. As always, when faced with the worst, our men somehow seemed to have some reserve of spirit left which made these miserable occasions a kind of carnival of self-respect and pride; something that I have always found far more moving than any surrender to despair could possibly have been. But so near the end of our physical resources were we all, that I still see the long file of emaciated men walk the road of my memory in conditions that made the famous march at the beginning of the film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ seem by comparison a parade at the trooping of some royal colours.