Alms for Oblivion

Sunset on the Pacific War

Peter Kemp

• Publisher: Mystery Grove Publishing Company
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781087913421
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Asia, 1945. The War in Europe is over. Undeterred, the Japanese Empire fights on. With millions of loyal troops at its disposal and holdings that extend over thousands of miles, the Allies still have much intense fighting ahead.

Freed from a Soviet dungeon by diplomatic happenstance as the European theatre closes is Peter Kemp. Kemp was a young law student who volunteered to fight for the Nationalists against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Recruited by the elite British Special Operations Executive for his extensive irregular warfare experience and enormous bravery, Kemp was a commando raider then spy in the Balkans and Poland before being betrayed, along with his comrades, by the advancing Red Army. Recognizing him as one of their best operatives, the British redeploy Kemp to the South Pacific. Although initially tasked with mopping up the Japanese remnants, after the surrender Kemp finds himself struggling to bring order to the chaos as anti-colonial sentiment surges, first in French Indochina and then the Dutch East Indies. With the United States indifferent or hostile to its allies' extended empires, Kemp is forced to lead Japanese troops and a smattering of European holdouts against a phantom army of guerrillas.

Kemp published his story in 1961, one of only a few to offer a first-hand look at the little-explored aftermath of World War Two in the Pacific. The book has been out-of-print for decades, but joins Kemp's first two books, Mine Were of Trouble (recounting his Spanish Civil War experiences) and No Colours or Crest (following him through Europe in WW2) back in wide release again.

I

‘EVEN CARIBUS LIE AROUND AND SNOOZE’

My destination was Ceylon: to be exact Kandy, where S.O.E., under its Far Eastern disguise of Force 136, maintained its own headquarters staff among the many that contributed to the glory, and variety, of South-East Asia Command. But my aeroplane would take me no farther than Karachi, where I was consigned to a transit camp on the edge of the Sind Desert, along with a large number of other officers who were southward bound.

Before leaving London I had been well endowed with that sacred gift, Priority, and so it is unlikely that I should have lingered in Karachi had I not, with my faultless genius for putting spokes in my own wheel, developed an acute and laming attack of gout. In the cool and beautifully run R.A.F. hospital I soon recovered; I also learned some disturbing things about the habits of this new enemy I was going to meet.

Among the patients with whom I became friendly was a young subaltern of an Indian infantry regiment, who had been wounded and taken prisoner by the retreating Japanese in Burma; they had tied him to a tree and detailed one of their number to shoot him. Luckily the man detailed was a young soldier and nervous; the bullet struck my friend in the shoulder, the Japanese ran off to rejoin his fellows, and my friend was released later by his own men. He urged me most seriously not to let myself be taken by the Japanese at this stage of the war.

I reached Kandy on the ominous date of Friday, 13th July and spent the week-end in that delightful mountain capital. The morning after my arrival I had an interview with Brigadier John Anstey, the senior officer, who endorsed with enthusiasm my request to drop into Siam; he pointed out that the campaign in Burma was drawing to its close, and when the great attack was mounted against Singapore and Malaya S.O.E. would have a vital operational role to play in Siam, through which country ran all the Japanese lines of communication with French Indo-China. Although, under Japanese military pressure, Siam had declared war on Britain, there was strong anti-Japanese feeling in the country, and many high officials and officers of the three armed services were secretly working for the Allies. A guerrilla organization, known as the ‘Free Thais’, was already in existence and British officers were required to train and arm these irregulars and prepare airstrips and dropping grounds in the jungle.

The Siamese Country Section was in Calcutta, where I should probably find Smiley. He had been dropped into north-east Siam in the last days of May, but had been terribly burnt three weeks later by the premature explosion of one of S.O.E.’s new toys—an incendary brief-case designed to burst into flames and destroy the documents inside in the event of enemy ambush or surprise; Smiley was packing documents into it when there was a short-circuit and five pounds of blazing thermite spread all over him. For a week he lay in agony, unable to sleep, with first-, second- and third-degree burns and a hole in one arm full of maggots; he was, of course, without medical attention. At last he was picked up by an aircraft of the Siamese Air Force and taken to an airstrip, where a Dakota landed and flew him to Calcutta. By now he should be nearly well enough to return to the field.

Among the brigadier’s staff officers at dinner that evening I found an old friend, Major Alan Hare, who had distinguished himself in Albania during the terrible winter of 1943-4; he had emerged with severe injuries from frostbite and the immediate award of the M.C. for outstanding initiative and courage. Like myself he was part of the Drang nach Osten by S.O.E. officers that had followed hard upon the end of the war in Europe.

There was a curious incident before dinner. While we were having drinks on the palm-thatched veranda I was talking to Wing-Commander Redding, who used to run our Air Transport Section in Baker Street; suddenly I heard a faint plop and saw with horror that a gigantic black scorpion had fallen from the roof on to his head. With commendable presence of mind he jerked his neck smartly, so that it fell on to his shoulder, whence he brushed it to the floor. A young bull terrier and a small black puppy made a concerted dive at it, and were only just restrained in time from rushing to certain death when somebody inverted a half-pint tumbler over the creature; the glass was barely wide enough to contain it. The officer with whom I shared a hut at the training camp a few days later had an even greater shock when he found a Russell’s viper in his shirt.

In the holding and training camp on the plains near Colombo where I was sent to await an aircraft for Calcutta I found a wide variety of races, white, brown and yellow; there were British, French and Dutch officers; there were Javanese, Siamese, Burmans, Karens and Gurkhas, and there were Malayan Chinese and Annamites, all waiting or training for operations by parachute, submarine or canoe. I spent my time trying, unsuccessfully, to learn a little Siamese; listening to blood-curdling lectures by the Medical Officer on the treatment of malaria, cholera, typhus, smallpox, snake-bite and syphilis; and politely declining offers to send me on a jungle-training exercise, carrying a fifty-pound rucksack. A heavy rucksack, I told the training staff, was a white man’s burden that I was not prepared to tote; a small haversack such as had served me well in Albania and Poland was the most I would allow to aggravate my prickly heat; anything bulkier must be carried by mule, pony, bullock-cart or local labour—or abandoned. I never had cause to change this view.

It was almost the end of July when I reached Calcutta, arriving in that ugly fetid city on a sticky evening at the height of the monsoon. In the office of the Siamese Country Section—two stifling, noisy rooms in a dingy house on a dusty street full of pot-holes—I was received without enthusiasm by a sweaty, irritable and overworked staff officer; his appearance, like my own, was in squalid contrast to the cool serenity of the neat, pretty young secretaries who flitted in and out among the desks and the clattering typewriters. Smiley, it seemed, had gone to Simla to finish his convalescence at Viceregal Lodge as the guest of his friends the Wavells; I had better find myself a billet in the Transit Hotel until he returned—and now would I kindly get the hell out of the office and keep out of everyone’s way.

This discouraging welcome, not unusual in my experience of reporting for duty in a strange theatre of war, left me nettled but not unduly depressed; for in the same office I met another old friend from Albania, John Hibberdine, a young Captain of the Cameronians who had been my close companion during the gloomy and hazardous days of my reconnaissance of the marches of Kossovo. After my departure for Montenegro early in 1944, Hibberdine had suffered appalling hardship and danger, being chased across north Albania in a series of determined German drives aimed at clearing the country of British Liaison Officers; while lying up in the inhospitable forests of Mirdita he had contracted typhoid, which all but killed him; eventually his companions managed to carry him to the coast, where an M.T.B. took him to Italy. His experiences seemed to have made little impression either on his health or his resolution; for now he was waiting to drop into southern Siam, to the Isthmus of Kra on the Burmese and Malayan borders. In his urbanely cynical company I spent the next two days exploring the restaurants and clubs of Calcutta. The European business community, we noticed, while extending to us the privilege of membership of their clubs, viewed our uniforms with a mixture of resentment and contempt which, as newcomers, we found hard to understand; at times we wondered if they would have preferred the Japanese.

Forty-eight hours after my arrival I received an urgent summons from Smiley to go to Simla to discuss plans. It was accompanied by an invitation from Lady Wavell to stay at Viceregal Lodge. I flew to Delhi and reached Simla on the morning of 3rd August. The next five days were among the happiest of my life. Although the marks of his burns were terribly evident, Smiley had made an astonishing recovery; strolling among the dark green, fir-covered hills, with the gigantic Himalayan snows nacreous and opalescent on the distant skyline, we planned in eager detail the course of our future operations in the field.

We very nearly did not get into the field. The bomb on Hiroshima shattered our pleasant pipe-dream and sent us scurrying back to Calcutta as soon as Smiley had been passed fit by a medical board. We heard the news at luncheon from a very sweet old lady, the wife of a distinguished lawyer.

'Isn't it wonderful?’ she beamed. ‘They’ve dropped a bomb on Japan which has the force of ten thousand tons of high explosive! Isn’t science marvellous? Truly civilization progresses from day to day!’

I could only recall the bitter words of Colin Ellis’s epigram:

‘Science finds out ingenious ways to kill

Strong men, and keep alive the weak and ill,

That these asickly progeny may breed:

Too poor to tax, too numerous to feed.’

It is fair to add that five years later I was to owe to science my own recovery from tuberculosis.

We did not have to linger long in Calcutta. Because of the prevailing uncertainty the Siamese Country Section decided to send in its operational parties as fast as possible. Smiley, now a lieutenant-colonel, left immediately in a Dakota that was going to land on the Siamese airstrip from which he had been flown out the previous month; with him went Brigadier Victor Jaques, commanding all Force 136 Missions in Siam. Jaques was a lawyer who had practised in Bangkok before the war; he had continued to live there during the Japanese occupation, sheltered by the Regent in his palace, where, under the noses of the enemy, he had maintained wireless communication with Calcutta and built up a subversive organization inside the country.

I was delighted to learn that I was to drop in with an old friend, Major Rowland Winn, 8th Hussars, who was also joining Smiley. I had first met Winn when I was a Carlist officer and he a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in Spain. The outbreak of the Civil War found him in Madrid, but his dispatches on events there during the first few weeks were too candid for the liking of the Republican authorities, who clapped him into gaol and sentenced him to death; his life was saved by the intervention of the British Chargé d’Affaires, but he judged it prudent thereafter to report the war from the Nationalist side. In the winter of 1943 he parachuted into Albania, breaking a leg on landing; for a month, until a doctor could reach him, he lay in great pain in a shepherd’s hut among the wild mountains of Cermenikë.

He held the strongest convictions on most matters of importance, especially on the subject of bullfighting, and would defend his ideas with a pugnacity in argument that was only matched by his courage in the field; a generous and loyal friend, he possessed a keen wit that made him an excellent companion and a devastating critic.

Short and stocky, with a pronounced limp from his parachute accident, he showed in his personal appearance a remarkable blend of fastidiousness and neglect; thus he seldom brushed his hair, but neither in Albania nor in Siam was he ever without a bottle of Trumpet’s after-shaving lotion. His independence of dress and manner sometimes shocked more orthodox soldiers. Just before the end of the European War he was stationed at a holding camp near Virginia Water, waiting to be sent on an operation into western Germany: bored with the inactivity of the camp he went to London for a few days’ relaxation; he omitted the formality of asking permission, but left a note for the Brigadier:

As there is nothing for me to do here I am proceeding to London. If required for operations I can be found at the Cavalry Club.

I was taking no wireless, but Winn had a set and a first-class operator, the amiable Sergeant Lawson, usually known as ‘Spider’, a light-hearted young man who had served with S.O.E. in Greece; he was also taking an interpreter, a giggly little Siamese, friendly, intelligent and helpful, whose nom-de-guerre was Toy. We left just forty-eight hours after Smiley, in a Liberator christened Vernon the Villain; it was to be a daylight drop, and so we took off at 11.30 in the morning. I was in poor shape, suffering from a mild attack of bacillary dysentery and a slight recurrence of the malaria I had contracted in Albania. However, a kindly R.A.F. doctor on the airfield dosed me heavily with sulphonamides and mepacrine, and during the flight Winn generously poured down my throat the entire contents of a flask of Courvoisier which he had brought from Europe and had saved up to drink in celebration of his arrival in Siam; his Christian action not only mitigated the squalor and discomfort of dysentery in an aircraft that had no lavatory, but took my mind off the hazards of monsoon flying among cumulonimbus clouds that could—and sometimes did—tear an aircraft apart.¹

We flew over the Bay of Bengal, turned east near Akyab and crossed the jungle-covered hills that separate Burma from Siam.

Our dropping zone was in the north-east, near Sakon Nakorn, a town about fifty miles west of the Mekong river, which forms the frontier between Siam and French Indo-China; the area is covered in forest. At six in the evening we were over the target, and in the clear light we soon picked up the smoke signals on the dropping ground; we put on our parachutes and prepared to jump.

‘Jump’ is not really the right word, for since my last drop a new way of leaving the aircraft had been invented; this was a wooden chute, similar to those in swimming pools, which was lowered from the roof of the fuselage to the exit aperture. When the red light flashed ‘Action Stations’ the parachutist swung his legs into the trough and lay on his back with his hands gripping the sides; when he received the order to go he simply brought his hands together on his chest and, helped by a push from the dispatcher, slid down the chute and out of the hole.

We were dropping in pairs; first Winn and Lawson, and then, on the next run, Toy and myself. When we had dropped our load of containers and packages Winn took up his position on the slide. I noticed that his lips were moving as though in prayer; he caught my eye and, thinking that he might have some last message for me, I bent down to listen. He was in fact intoning Noël Coward’s refrain:

In the mangrove swamps where the python romps

There is peace from ten till two.

Even caribous lie around and snooze

—There’s nothing else to do

The light flashed green and he slid away, mumbling the next verse.

When it came to our turn, a few minutes later, I waited until Toy’s head had disappeared before releasing my hold and laying my hands on my chest; it was all I could do to keep them there during the next two or three seconds. Then I was clear of the exit and swinging gently in mid-air with an acute pain in my crotch, which had taken most of the strain as the parachute opened. Having satisfied myself that I was not irreparably damaged I turned my attention to the ground; for a nasty moment I thought I was going to hit the roof of a wooden hut, but I missed it and landed with a great splash in a paddy-field. Soaked to the skin and temporarily blinded by mud and water, I was helped to my feet and out of my harness by three Siamese. Looking around, I was rewarded by the spectacle of Major the Honourable Rowland Winn, spattered all over with mud and paddy stalk, standing erect while he adjusted with infinite care the green and gold forage cap of the 8th Hussars which he had pulled from inside his bush shirt.

He introduced me to the leader of the reception committee, a handsome young Siamese policeman who, under the pseudonym of Kong, held a captain’s commission in the British Army. Kong led us to the hut on whose roof I had so nearly landed, where the packages and containers were now assembled.

‘Please sort out your kit as quickly as possible,’ he asked us, speaking in quick, jerky sentences. ‘We ride from here ten kilometres through the forest. There are Japanese around; their patrols are very active still, and last night they burnt a village only a mile away.’

Mounted on small, sturdy ponies we rode across the paddy towards the forest; the four of us, accompanied by Kong and another Siamese, went ahead while the rest followed with our kit. These Siamese ponies—all of them were stallions because, so Smiley told us later, it was considered bad form to ride a mare—moved like Andalusian horses, with a curious gait that was a blend of walk, trot and gallop. They went at a surprisingly fast pace and, for a short person, were comfortable to ride; but my long legs reached almost to the ground and, when I forgot to keep them clear of the pony’s feet, received some painful kicks.

It was already dark when we entered the forest, but the half moon shining through the trees cast a pale, dappled light on the muddy track that wound through the tangled undergrowth. Our horses splashed, and sometimes swam, through deep pools and across swollen streams; once we crossed a creek on a wooden bridge whose posts and railings alone showed above the water, and once we swam a broad river. Twice only did we halt: when the unhappy Lawson was thrown from his pony into a dark and slimy puddle, and when Winn’s forage cap was swept off by an overhanging branch. Otherwise we rode in silence at a steady pace, inhaling the heavy, scented warmth of the sodden forest while glow-worms and fireflies flashed in the misty darkness; at intervals the rain showered upon us, cool and soothing.

It was nearly ten o’clock when we arrived at the village of Akat, where we were to spend the night. At the point where the path debouched into the clearing we found the headman awaiting us surrounded by a curious and whispering crowd of men and women carrying lighted brushwood torches; joining the palms of his hands before him he bowed us a graceful welcome. He led us to a long, narrow building raised on wooden piles to a height of twelve or fifteen feet above the ground and approached by a flight of steps leading to an open veranda. This was the school-house, where we were going to sleep.

In construction and design it resembled many other houses in north-eastern Siam. From the veranda we passed into a large room, bare of furniture except for a table and benches down the centre; the table was laid for a meal and mattresses were spread against one of the walls. The floor was spotlessly clean, the boards scrubbed almost to a polish. Food was set before us—cold boiled rice with pieces of chicken, meat balls, eggs and chilies; also a bottle of what Kong called ‘Siamese whisky’—a potent rice spirit with a sour, not unpleasing flavour. Already comatose from illness and fatigue I could not bring myself to eat or drink more than the mouthful t...