A defeated army is a strange thing. Our awesome killing-machine was obeying the orders of an enemy we couldn’t even see – there never seemed to be more than a couple of dozen Japanese guards at Changi. When we got there we were allocated living areas, our cooks set up their pots in tiny domestic kitchens in the bungalows of the vanished civilians, food and medicine was gathered in. Keeping the troops ‘occupied’ became an obsession, and soon grass-cutting, drain-clearance and gardening became the main activities of fighting men. Small craft workshops sprang up: I ordered a little wooden case for my spectacles, one of the best purchases I have ever made. Everyone knew to whom he was responsible; there was no-one who could say that he did not know who he belonged to. But the entire purpose of our mighty collective existence – the defence of the Naval Base and British power in the Far East – had been snuffed out.
What replaced our previous motive force was uncertainty, creeping in and growing stronger day by day, a negative force feeding on anxiety and fear. Before, we’d had the spring of aggression to keep us moving; now there was a kind of nervous elastic pulling us backwards. We still wanted to fight: but our bitter young energy had to be bottled up. We began to experience the overriding, dominant feature of POW life: constant anxiety, and utter powerlessness and frustration. There was no relief from these burdens, not even in sleep. So we filled the days organizing ourselves and our men, underemployed and angry.
An eerie peace prevailed for three weeks, during which I did not see a single further Japanese. There were still a few revolvers and rifles at Changi, we were still an army, but we shuffled around harmlessly waiting for our masters to dispose of us. Almost the first decree they made was to remove the sense of time by which we lived: they announced that Tokyo time was being introduced, which meant advancing clocks and watches by 1.5 hours. We therefore had to rise earlier, in the dark. I cared about time (and found a kind of beauty even in timetables); I needed to be precise about when things might be done. I hated them taking time away from us. Time was to become an issue between me and the Japanese.
I was living for the moment with other Fortress signals men in a little bungalow, with a splendid view out over the sea to the east, an enormous tantalizing space in which we were lost. Here were tens of thousands of Allied prisoners-of-war dumped on the seashore, with not a chance of sailing away.
Our odd kind of normality was shaken one morning on parade when we were addressed by Colonel Pope, the OC of Southern Area Signals. He said that many of us had never seen a Japanese yet, that they had left us entirely alone since the surrender and that this was beginning to give us a false sense of security.
He then said that he had taken statements from a batch of POWs who had just arrived at Changi about what had happened at Alexandra Hospital, the main military hospital at Singapore, when Japanese troops had overrun it just hours before the surrender time. They had massacred the doctors, nurses and patients, even on the tables in the operating theatres. Survivors were dragged outside and finished off with bayonets.
The Colonel had another story that he wanted us to reflect on, told by POWs sent from Sumatra and the islands. Some of the small ships that had left Singapore just before the fall had been loaded with medical staff and wounded men. One of these boats had been sunk near the shore of Banka Island. Among the survivors were a large number of Australian Army nurses, all women, who struggled ashore and were rounded up, ordered to walk back into the sea and machine-gunned in the surf. The Colonel said that his information was that dozens had been killed.
The report about the nurses took us across a threshold into a new area of foreboding. It was still hard for us – there was no reason why we should have been able – to grasp the fact that we might have to explore human brutality to its limits. But nurses are venerated in armies, with a romantic reverence, so the killing of the nurses seemed inconceivable. Colonel Pope’s conclusion did not need to be more than laconic. ‘We have not seen much of them. This does not mean they are not dangerous.’
Soon after that parade, the Japanese staged a ceremonial humiliation on a vast scale. Every able-bodied prisoner had to line a route which included all the main roads in the Changi area, 50,000 of us standing two deep, strung out for miles around the camp. A cortege of open cars drove past, preceded by a camera crew in the back of an open lorry. They were making their propaganda film for home consumption, and we were the extras. I’m sure it looked impressive, all those men in uniforms which were already becoming a bit ragged, and some men dressed just in grimy shorts and vests, forced to attend to a few Japanese generals as they cruised by in their requisitioned British cars.
It takes time to break an army. Each new tightening of the leash is experienced as a degrading restriction; it all seems slow and insidious, though in retrospect I can see that they reduced us very quickly. In late March, for example, they decreed that Allied officers must no longer wear badges of rank. Instead we were to wear a single star on our shirts, just above the left breast pocket. This was a way of saying to us that our hard-won distinctions were of no interest to them, that we were simply two classes of prisoner.
In fact, as the spring came on they made it plain that prisoners were of interest to them under only one category: labour. Having concentrated us, they now began to pick us off in useftil batches. They called for more and more working parties in Singapore, and in early April summoned over a thousand men ‘for duty overseas’. This first unwilling regiment of labourers was sent off to an unknown destination under the command of a British colonel.
As if to underline how little we could do about this, or any other insult, on 14th April I was standing outside our bungalow with some signals men when a great fleet of Japanese warships came over the horizon, sailing westwards. In line astern, their guns jutting proudly and their funnels raked, the grey ships passed us on their way through the Straits of Singapore. There seemed to be no end to the line – battleships, cruisers, destroyers and smaller gunboats; an entire battle fleet steaming past Fortress Singapore as though it owned the sea. I remembered how deeply struck I was by the sight of our own ships in the Clyde little more than a year before, how invincible we looked. It felt bitter to have to review this enemy armada from a patch of grass wearing a star sewn roughly on to my worn shirt.
When the Japanese called for a working party for ‘a Japanese project’ in Singapore at the end of that month, I volunteered. I would keep on breaking the golden rule of soldiering, but I was restless and the unknown was better than the oppressive routine at Changi.
They made us walk twenty miles to a former Royal Navy hutted camp at Kranji, to the north of the city. For the next two months we marched out of our camp every morning, up the Bukit Timah road, past the Ford Motor Company factory where Percival had made the formal surrender of his garrison, and up the side of Bukit Timah Hill.
One morning as we left our quarters we saw, off the side of the road, six severed heads set up on poles. They were Chinese heads. At a distance, they looked like Hallowe’en fright masks; every morning, we marched past them. It was known that the Japanese were carrying out purges of suspected Kuomintang plotters in Singapore, and it is hard to explain now how this display of medieval barbarity did not shock us more. We felt immune to it; these heads were trophies of an inter-Asian conflict, we were British soldiers – and could not imagine that cruelty does not discriminate once it is unleashed.
On the hill, which was covered with dense undergrowth and timber, we had to cut down the trees, clear the scrub and creeper and build a road up towards the summit; then slice the top off the cone of the hill and level it. This was to be their gargantuan war memorial in Singapore, visible from all over the island. I’m glad to say I never actually saw the finished pile, not even a photo of it. It was blown up in 1945. The work gave me eight weeks of relative freedom to move around when I was not showing working parties of men from Bradford how to dig a trench in such a way that they were not up to their ankles in mud. This was far from the worst experience of captivity: the Japanese used the British chain of command, we got things done and they left us to get on with it. But the labour was heavy: ripping up the long roots of tropical fruit trees which dug into the earth like hard matted hair took great bursts of concentrated energy. The edges of cut bamboo opened skin with the ease of razor blades and the wounds went septic very fast. You could damage a lot of men by making them do this kind of work for a long time; it never occurred to us that anyone would try.