When the Japanese took a town in Malaya, they troubled less to humiliate and degrade the white administrators by the methods used in the Netherlands East Indies than to draw the Malays close by degrading the Chinese. The Chinese were forced to clean out cesspools. A Malayan woman was safe, but no Chinese woman could be protected against the whim of the Japanese soldier. There was a simple rule in all the towns that the Japanese had taken—no door was to be locked.
The Japanese do not disdain marriage with Malays. Their blood dominates such matings. Their plan is that the 120,000,000 Malays assume a junior partnership in Japanese hegemony as a labor race, kept integrated by flattering references to their racial unity while being kept divided by political decentralization.
The attitude of Malays toward the British is of cooperation without affection, obedience with indifference. In the Netherlands East Indies the Malays were never as antagonistic to their Dutch masters as to their potential Japanese conquerors. Intermarriage is, as always, the answer. The Dutch believe that if a Malayan woman is good enough for a white man to sleep with, there is no reason to exclude her from becoming a wife. There were thousands of mixed marriages in the Netherlands East Indies and aside from country-club intrigue, nearly all seemed happy and successful. In Malaya there was a British master class far more tolerant, hardworking, and well-meaning than it was given credit for being. But a land, like a woman, needs to be loved to be possessed, and for Malaya the sweetness of first love was over.
The Dutch are close-fisted and stubborn and can do any American and most Englishmen out of their eyeteeth in a business bargain, but they happen to be the only nationality of the white race except the Russians who have put into practice the Christian principle of the spiritual equality of races. They do it imperfectly, and race pride exists in Indonesia, but the legal premise of equality is there.
The Chinese of Malaya were sharply different, according to what part of China they came from. The bottom of the laboring class worked in the mines but considered themselves a cut above the Tamils from southern India, who worked for a plodding wage. Other Chinese, however—shopkeepers, servants, houseboys—had different ideas. The cream of the Chinese were the babas, educated and particularly prominent in Malacca. They were good lawyers and excellent physicians; many an Englishman went by preference to a Chinese doctor for natural remedies.
These Chinese, knowing that Malay was an easy language, took the trouble to learn it. (Malay sometimes has a peculiar quaintness when spoken by a foreigner. A houseboy unable to get along with the cook complained to his master: “He has a sweet mouth, but his heart is bitter”) British merchants learned a few words, but the military was singularly un-energetic, given that they expected to fight in the jungles.
Pushing centralization, the British drew four states into a group known as the Federated Malay States, with their capital at Kuala Lumpur. In 1927 legislation was taken from the native sultans into British hands.
The Straits Settlements comprised the vital seaport areas: Singapore; Penang; and the old Portuguese port of Malacca. By 1927 not only their sultans but also the British Residents consulting with them were deprived of their powers.
Besides the four Federated Malay States and the four small but vital Straits Settlements, whose strings came tightly together at the top in Sir Shenton Thomas, there were five independent, “unfederated” states. Johore, whose skyscraper capital was visible across the causeway from Singapore, was the best known. Then came Kedah, lost early to the Japanese, outflanked by Thailand to its east; Kelantan, in the wild center; Trengganu, the big state on the China Sea; and lonely little Perlis which the Japs, when they jumped the Thai border, inhaled before they began to gobble.
This scattered galaxy was also firmly in the hands of Sir Shenton Thomas, their affairs being referred to his desk in Singapore by the English officers at each native court. It was a system based chiefly upon the English capacity to know in a complicated and violent world what the Malays, Chinese, Singalese, and Tamils needed, more coherently than they knew themselves, and to give it to them. Outside the tragic error of misjudging Japan, it was an honest, stodgy administrative system.
Our party dropped in at the Ipoh airdrome, a few miles off the road. The two hangars were still burning, their roofs smashed in. A demolition party had finished the job of the Japanese bombers. The sun was going down, and the jungle's profile was turning dark upon the western horizon. It was a scene of industrial desolation amid Malaya's never-dying luxuriance. Showers and sun had made the grass more green, and there were a few well-meant, amateurish craters caused by demolition engineers. The Japs had dropped nothing on the runway itself, so the engineers had attempted to blow it up. It was like trying to blow up twenty football fields at once.
In the ruins of the little aviation clubhouse, papers were scattered all over the floor; the furniture had been hacked to pieces and windows smashed so the rain beat in. On a wall was a picture of the first Imperial Airways plane from London, a four-motor cabin job, which had landed on the inaugural flight over a decade before. Since then the runway had been broadened and lengthened. One learned that it was impossible for Japanese bombers to use the Ipoh airdrome. They did, nevertheless.
As a precaution against being surrounded in burning Ipoh, the party fell back for the night to Kampar, a crossroads marked by a club with little more than a lounge to hold dances, two billiard tables, a bar. Dues notices were thumbtacked on a board, and the draw for a forgotten tennis tournament. It might have been a small country club anywhere, with committees for this and that. Here was the usual gathering of Home Defence Corps men in their fifties, who had sent their families down to Singapore weeks before and put themselves at the call of any general who wanted their services. “Hello, boys, come in!” they cried. “How about a drink?”
Whatever one might say of others, the hearts of these men were in their fighting. Most were small-scale rubber planters and tin-miners. A few had been in the last war. Their companies were composed of one European platoon and three Asiatic. Braver than Penang's civil servants, they wanted to fight the Japanese. Indeed, they had stopped a dangerous movement through back roads by the enemy.
The next morning the bombers were at work early. The sky was blue and clear. The air, except when a convoy truck came hammering down the highway, was quiet with the soft country stillness. On such a day there are only a few hesitant breezes across the rice paddies and the treetops; the leaves are silent. The voice of Malaya is a trickling of water purling down from one rice-paddy outlet into the next, the voice of the brown water that feeds the rice and, feeding it, feeds men.
It happened that Chicagonews heard the bombers first, a murmurous buzzing. As it grew louder, it was evident the flight was large. Finally one could see them, purposeful and remorseless in their ordered flight. People were running off the road. Drivers of trucks, seeing terror in the faces, slewed onto the soft green shoulders, jumped down, and headed running into the rubber. Everything stopped. It was like Greece again. Again the long convoy-filled road of the retreat, again the imperious airplane overhead. The airplane creates a cone of immobility beneath it in every direction. The human beings lie flat, submitting. Whom will the plane kill? That is the question to be decided. The trucks and cars try to hide in the trees. The men go far back from the telltale strip of the road. Everybody stares up, death wrinkles in the brow, fear in the shifting eyes, forgetting the cares of the earth. Everything stops until the airplanes attack. Everything stops. “Don't fire a rifle, anybody,” said Steel.
These bombers did not attack. Through the binoculars one could count 26 pairs of silver wings. They were very busy and certain of formation; their goal was somewhere south. It was probably not Singapore; the Japanese were not attempting that yet, because there were one or two Brewsters still at Kuala Lumpur, which was their objective. In hours Ipoh would be in their hands.
The planes were about 12,000 feet high and not escorted by fighters. They kept west of the parallel lines of ra
ilway and highway. In this way they ensured that if there were any Bofors anti-aircraft guns, the planes could not be taken by surprise, since the guns could be only moved by two methods. The Japs were still suspecting greater force than was there. The planes passed, glinting like symmetrical silver confetti, the rhythm of their motors playing strange tricks among the headlands of the forest, loud when they were approaching, almost dying as they came overhead, then growing loud again as they moved down the road. No one had given an air-raid signal, but after they passed, a whistle shrilled out. All-clear or tardy warning?
What should the party do? Once more the correspondents had discovered, as they were to discover over and over in the succeeding days, that you cannot go to the front in a jungle war unless you are winning. The next best thing was to find out what places had been struck by the bombers. “What do you think, boys?” said Steel. “George here suggests we go back to the first place that was hit. What do you say?”
“Here they come again!” yelled a voice from the road. There was a clatter of hobnailed boots running fast, then shouts in Malay. The trucks, burring for the getaway, stopped again. Everyone ran across the road toward the Frenchman's villa and the river gulch behind it. This time the noise was different, low and nearby and increasing fast. Far away the bombers had seemed almost too high to discern. This noise, one could tell before it arrived, was too low for them to be seen.
Then it came, looping around the bend in the road, a single-motored two-seat plane, dull grey. It was hunting for something, and it looked as though it knew what it wanted. Was it that little railroad station? It went over to the station, slid down upon it and pump, pump, pump, pump, pump. But no bombs. Did it have any bombs?
Another motor's drone began murmuring in the north: another hunter coming to help the first. He came into sight, watching us out of his left slant eye. He went a little farther down the railroad, disappeared for a while from sight while he pump-pump-pumped something, then pump-pumped it again.
Meantime the other plane had tired of the little station and was coming straight for the Frenchman's villa on the edge of the river gulch, a cleft about 300 yards wide and 40 feet deep. The Jap was cautiously high again, 1500 feet, but something about the villa made him think this the brigade headquarters he was looking for. He had received a tip from below, probably, perhaps some flour in arrowhead shape on the road, a favorite device of his agents.
The party was not together; they were scattered like pheasant's chicks under every leaf and tree or hugged close to the walls of the coolies' outhouses. He looked them over and decided that they were worth the trouble.
The Jap's dive was not a dive at all; it was a long toboggan slide, leisurely slanted. The whistle of the wings for once outdid the motor. The most ominous thing of all was that there was no sound of a machine gun. He was taking aim.
Faces went down against the mud. There were only two or three helmets in the party. Chicagonews put his doubled fists over his head. You could hear the bomb singing as it came down, singing like a bomb that loved its work. In the last moment one pressed altogether hard against the earth. Then it hit.
There always seem to be two voices to a bomb's landing in earth: the bomb's voice and the answer of the earth. The bomb's voice is a sharp call, but the answer of the earth is as different as the earth itself. The note is almost one, and yet the second stroke is audible. And it is the second voice, the voice of earth, that man feels as well as hears. In Greece the whole desiccated length of the Valley of Parnassus had shuddered as from a blow delivered upon the body of a hard-muscled athlete, resistant and rejective. In the Malayan earth the blow was received as though it had been struck against a woman, soft, muffled, and yielding.
The clods fell, pattering here and there through the leaves.
The bomb had landed on the other side of the house; the Jap had overshot. The rear gunner flayed away nastily again with his machine guns as the plane climbed for height.
Several other things were happening. The second plane had come back. And there was a third somewhere, its nasal voice ruminating about what it intended to do.
The Jap in the second plane had seen the first miss, and he intended to better the marksmanship. He came over the red New England barn of a rubber godown and turned his head down upon his work. At the top of his dive he pumped briefly from his machine guns as though announcing it was his intention to kill. Then his guns chopped off, and there was no sound but the all-pervading whistle of his dive.
It was very silent, there among the green leaves. One could almost hear the beating of hearts all around.
Chicagonews slipped to the wet edge of the gulch, a brown wall of mud as high as a three-story building. There was no foothold on its slippery wet side, but there were a few weak bushes loosely attached on its upper rim. The American clung to these, his body hanging down over the gulch, his fingers interlaced with the stems of the bushes.
The squeal of the wings had stopped; the plane must have turned upward. That meant the bomb was falling. Now you could hear it—that intense little song. The correspondent let loose one hand and with his other tried to cover the top of his head. Why does a man who in other days would have covered other parts of his body want first today to cover his brain?
When bombs are falling, water is as handy to have nearby as a mirror is for a suicide. The face of the water, if it is smooth, will tell you what is happening, even though the pliant earth and the deep grass try to conceal the story. Only a curling thread of smoke out of the grasses will inform you that the plane is using tracer bullets. But the water, if it is smooth, tells all. There may be a great splash, silence, and then a watery pillar thrown straight upward. Or if the bomb lands on the earth instead of in the water, there may be spurts and shoots and cones of water all over the surface jumping up violently and irregularly as the shrapnel violates the water. Or there may be nothing but merry little skips and scars and ripples, as though boys were scaling stones across the surface. This time there were several little fountains that jumped a foot or 18 inches high, and also a number of little thuds in the bank.
The machine gun was pumping away, and there began to be ticking sounds in the leaves. This gunner was better.
Chicagonews prepared to scramble up, but the third plane was coming. There was a stinging sensation in his right arm. The arm was covered with red ants. The ants had been living in the bush and were angry. They crawled up the arm, bare in bush jacket to the elbow, and ran inside the sleeve biting furiously. There was nothing to do; to be bitten or to fall 30 feet into the ravine, that was the choice.
The other plane was attacking, and one could not scramble up the bank. Pump-pump-pump. As the plane dived, Chicagonews changed hands, putting the ant-covered hand on his head and grasping a bush with the other. The bush hand was covered with red ants too, and they began stinging scalp and hand simultaneously as the bomb began dropping, monotonously calling—in Japanese—the undecipherable name of its enemy.
Not the bomb, the bombs.
There were two, and they fell in two double beats beyond the battalion's villa, too far away even for jumps in the river.
The Japs saw that they had missed; probably there was a curse exchanged in the cockpit. The rear gunner pumped his gun steadily as long as he was in range. The other two planes, ahead, were already coming down the railroad line, turning this way and that to see what they could find, coming to peer at the rubber godowns and send shells into the freight cars. They ignored the bridge over the ravine. The Japanese never bombed railroad bridges; they envisaged them as being of greater importance all the way to the causeway at Singapore, the most important of all.
Nobody was hurt. The bombs were wasted and the cannonfire was wasted and the machine-gun fire was wasted. But in hurting through delay, the raid was successful. Such patrols held up convoys. This the Japanese could have done almost as well by being close overhead without shooting, breathing down everyone's necks. Later they spared their ammunition.
Th
is raid, extended infinitely in time and space and intensified in both, might be taken as a symbol of what was happening to thousands of men all over the Malayan front. Wherever the British made a fixed position, they were photographed from the air and quickly thereafter machine-gunned and bombed. There were no aircraft available. Many men fought for six weeks without seeing a single Allied plane, just as they fought for days without seeing a Japanese afoot.
Calculating by speed and time of flight, it seemed as though the 26 bombers would be over Kuala Lumpur in about an hour's flying time. Thus they could be expected back in about two hours. The party started south to overtake the trouble.
The first badly smashed place was Tanjong Malim. Seeing a supply train in the station, the Japanese broke their rule about leaving railroads unharmed. Smashed by a direct hit, the train had buckled back like a murdered snake dead in mid-coil. The locomotive and end cars were on the rails; those in between had twisted away.
The bombs had been heavy. There were holes through all the station's windows. The sign hung from the iron girders of the pedestrians' overpass from one side of the station to the other was sagging on one hook. It read: Persons are warned to look both ways at the approach of a train. There were three or four dead and some wounded. “Come on, let's get cracking,” said Steel. The party climbed back into its vehicles, placed its spotters with binoculars on the roofs, and started off again.
It grew cloudy, and there were a few showers. The roads were not crowded as at Ipoh. The Malays seemed to be intelligent enough to push into the rubber rather than flee south to the catchpot of Singapore. Rural populations are more self-reliant than urban ones, who flee from town to city to metropolis, hoping to hide where the swarm is greatest. The country's empty ceiling is broader and safer.
Weller's War Page 21
