The Coolie Generals
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The Coolie Generals

Britain's Far Eastern Military Leaders in Japanese Captivity

Mark Felton

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eBook - ePub

The Coolie Generals

Britain's Far Eastern Military Leaders in Japanese Captivity

Mark Felton

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About This Book

Dozens of British and Commonwealth officers of the rank of colonel and above were captured by the Japanese at the fall of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Burma. These senior officers, many of whom were decorated war heroes, were separated from the men and formations, and shipped around the Japanese Empire in one group, kept alive so that the Japanese could ritually humiliate them at every opportunity. In direct contrast to how the Germans treated captured Allied senior officers, the Japanese inflicted the same appalling regime of starvation, beatings and hard labor on these senior prisoners, and several died through such abuse. Prominent personages treated in this way included General Percival (G.O.C. Malaya) and a host of major-generals, brigadiers, colonels and senior colonial officials. The detailed post-war testimonies given by these prominent prisoners greatly aided the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal in exposing the nature of Japanese treatment of Allied P.O.W.. It was an extraordinary story of middle-aged military professionals living a day-to-day existence at the behest of cruel and capricious gaolers. All previous P.O.W. books on the Far East have concentrated upon the well-known sufferings of the thousands of more junior officers and other ranks taken prisoner, and largely ignoring the fates of the men whose command decisions actually led to captivity.

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Information

Publisher
Pen and Sword
Year
2008
ISBN
9781781598245
Topic
History
Subtopic
World War II

Chapter One

Far Eastern Stronghold

There must be at this stage no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end and at all costs ... Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.1
Winston Churchill to General Sir Archibald Wavell,
Allied Supreme Commander Asia, regarding Singapore,
10 February 1942
On 8 December 1941, as well as attacking the US Pacific Fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor (across the International Date Line where it was still the 7th) and effecting amphibious landings in southern Thailand and in northern Malaya, Japanese troops had moved quickly to seize Britain’s widely dispersed enclaves in China. They had marched into the International Settlement in Shanghai and the British Concession in Tientsin (now Tianjin) that same day. Only in Hong Kong, a Crown colony as distinct from a trading enclave did the Japanese encounter armed resistance.
The British were surprised by the ferocity of the Japanese attack on their possessions, but they had for too long appeased Japanese militarism and ignored the gathering storm clouds of war. The signs had been plain for all to see, beginning with Japan’s undeclared war against China. Little regard was given at the time to the barbarous Japanese invasion and occupation of eastern China by the Western powers, even though a mighty chorus of mainly American reportage emanating from Shanghai and Nanjing clearly warned the comfortable colonists and their armies of what they could expect in due course from the hungry Japanese war machine. In the peace of Asia, a world away from the blackout, rationing, Blitz and U-boat campaign in Britain, the British living and working in Asia fooled themselves into believing two common myths regarding the Japanese military. It was widely held that the Japanese were individually inferior in every way to the white soldier, sailor or airman. They were short, with bandy legs and poor eyesight and although they had certainly trounced the Chinese, when faced with ‘real’, i.e. Anglo-Saxon, armed forces they would soon be put in their place. Of course, this cozy view of their own superiority led many British and European colonists to forget recent history, for it was the Japanese who had trounced the Russians back in 1905. Many of the whites in Asia also believed that their lives were ultimately worth more than those of their Asian subjects, so when many of them were captured by the Japanese they were genuinely surprised that their captors treated them the same as other Asian captives and in some cases far worse. Although the mother nations of the region’s other great colonial powers, France and the Netherlands, were cloaked under German occupation, their eastern colonists ruled comfortably in territories far from the reach of Nazi tyranny. Frenchmen still governed in Indo-China (though with the approval of the collaborationist Vichy Government), and Dutchmen controlled the vast oil reserves of the Netherlands East Indies. Alongside the slumbering British, concerns about the Japanese mistreating them should they have pierced Anglo-Saxon military defences were firmly in the backs of minds rather than at the forefront until it was virtually too late.
Although Hong Kong was a British colony, its defenders throughout January 1941 were not only British, but Chinese, Indian and Canadian as well, and all were under the command of the competent and brave Christopher Maltby, who knew more than most the ultimate futility of the resistance he was being asked by Churchill to undertake. Major General Maltby was fifty years old when he faced his greatest battle, a veteran of the Indian Army whose career stretched all the way back to 1911. After a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf in 1913 – 14, Maltby had served through the whole of the First World War and was soon marked out as a future senior commander. Throughout the 1920s Maltby was fast-tracked through several staff colleges, including the Indian Army Staff College at Quetta and the RAF Staff College at Andover, interspersing these postings with a tough assignment commanding troops in the field along the wild and dangerous North-West Frontier of India in 1923 – 4. He was back on the Frontier again in 1937, and by 1939 was a brigadier commanding 3 Jhelum Brigade before moving on to head the Calcutta Brigade. Before being posted to China in 1940 Maltby commanded 19 Indian Infantry Brigade in the Deccan. Assuming command of all British troops in China, this new posting was quickly wound up with the British Government’s decision to withdraw the last two remaining infantry battalions from Shanghai that formed North China Command, as it was clear that defending Shanghai from a predicted Japanese attack was militarily impossible with the forces available. Thereafter, Maltby, newly promoted to major general, arrived in Hong Kong to become Garrison Commander, and with the unenviable task of trying to plan a defence against a likely Japanese attack on the colony in the near future. Press reports noted that Maltby was known to be ‘always cool and completely unruffled, and has a quiet sense of humor and tremendous powers of endurance’.2 These qualities would be extremely useful over the coming weeks. Unlike in Shanghai, the British were determined to at least make a stand against the Japanese when they came as British prestige in Asia had to be maintained. Hong Kong was, after all, a British colony; whereas Shanghai was a treaty port open to many nations of the world, and although the British actually ran most of the city’s institutions, it was governed by a municipal council owing allegiance to business interests rather than to any one nation. Maltby, however, faced very serious difficulties in Hong Kong that threatened to scupper any attempt at fighting off a Japanese attack. He was chronically short of experienced soldiers and equipment to make such a stand militarily sustainable; those in London were fully aware of his predicament and were undecided as yet on how to help him.
The fact that Maltby had any forces at all with which to defend Hong Kong was only because of a dramatic government u-turn in Whitehall that occurred after much wrangling and argument. With the disbandment of Britain’s North China Command in late 1940, the government decided to concurrently reduce the troop levels that made up the Hong Kong Garrison to only a symbolic pair of British infantry battalions whose roles were guarding the border with China and working with the Hong Kong Police in the maintenance of internal order. If the Japanese had attacked they could simply have walked straight through such a thin cordon of men and the battalions would have been sacrificed for nothing. It was the direct intervention of Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of British Far Eastern Command, that caused the policy u-turn in London. Brooke-Popham argued that a limited reinforcement of Hong Kong would allow Maltby and the garrison to delay any Japanese attack, gaining time for the Empire elsewhere in Asia, instead of simply being overwhelmed by a Japanese attack and forced into an early and humiliating capitulation that would damage British prestige at home and abroad. Although the colony would definitely fall to the Japanese in the long term should they attack, because the British could not spare the massive forces that would have been required for any real chance of a prolonged defence (at least six full infantry brigades would have been required, equating to eighteen infantry battalions or exactly half the infantry strength of the modern British Army in 2008), Brooke-Popham believed that two brigades totaling six battalions could impose a sufficient delay on Japanese plans to buy the British time in Malaya and Singapore, which remained Churchill’s primary strategic focus in the Far East. Maltby would have to fight a battle he had no chance of winning, and sacrifice the garrison for the sake of the Empire. Maltby was told in no uncertain terms by London to fight on for as long as possible before surrendering, and to expect no relief. Not in the least depressed by his orders, Maltby was instead determined to give the enemy a bloody nose, make the Japanese pay for every inch of the colony and only to surrender when his units had run out of ammunition and supplies, or when most of them were dead. It was to prove to be a hopeless task that Maltby had been set by Churchill and Brooke-Popham, one that ultimately led to the deaths of a lot of young men, many of whom, such as the Canadians, were ill-trained and ill-prepared for such a battle.
Maltby had two regular, though understrength, British battalions available to assist in the defence of the colony – the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots and 1st Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment. Canada had recently rushed two infantry battalions to the colony to support the British – the 1st Battalion, Winnipeg Grenadiers and the 1st Battalion, Royal Rifles of Canada – but neither unit had seen any action before nor had the men had sufficient time to acclimatize to conditions in Hong Kong before the Japanese attacked. There were also two Indian Army battalions stationed in the city (mainly composed of reservists) – the 5/7th Rajput Regiment and the 2/14th Punjab Regiment. The British had several artillery and engineer units present as well, along with the usual supporting and ancillary services. Aiding the regulars were other colonial and volunteer formations consisting of the locally raised, one-battalion strong, Hong Kong Chinese Regiment, two mountain batteries and three medium batteries of the mostly Indian-manned Hong Kong & Singapore Royal Artillery (HK&SRA) and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (HKVDC), an infantry unit made up of bankers, merchants and businessmen of British origin living in the colony. It was a part-time reserve force used to bolster regular imperial forces in times of emergencies that had originally been formed in 1854 during the Crimean War.3 All of this meant that a total of 35 per cent of ‘British’ forces involved in the Battle of Hong Kong were actually of Indian or Chinese origin.
The fight Maltby was being asked to undertake against the Japanese with barely two full brigades was a tall order, but it would, if managed properly, buy time for the defenders of Malaya to stop the Japanese in their tracks. Such at least was the plan. Maltby had a total force of about 10,000 front-line fighting troops (excluding ancillary personnel) to pit against the 50,000 battle-hardened Japanese, the main Japanese assaulting force consisting of three regiments (a Japanese regiment being roughly equivalent to a British brigade) of Major General Takashi Sakai’s 38th Division poised along the Sham Chun River, the border between mainland China and Hong Kong.
Much to Maltby’s chagrin, he soon discovered that even his best troops would not be on top form in the coming tussle with Sakai’s men. Illustrious British battalions like the 2nd Royal Scots had deteriorated after a long period of inaction stationed in the Far East. Many of its best and most experienced NCOs, the backbone of the Battalion, had been recalled to Britain in 1939 to provide cadres for new emergency battalions; by December 1941 the unit was below strength and experiencing some discipline problems. Of all his battalions, only Maltby’s 1st Middlesex Regiment was considered to be in top fighting condition, and this unit was a machine-gun battalion rather than conventional infantry.
Maltby’s defensive plan was simple. He would slow down the Japanese advance by staging a series of holding actions behind Kowloon in the mountainous New Territories. In order to achieve this he divided his forces into two brigades and had already constructed a series of fortifications from which to mount a static defence. Realizing that the border line that ran along the Sham Chun River in the New Territories was far too long to defend with the small force at his disposal, Maltby instead withdrew towards Kowloon and stationed his Mainland Brigade along the 11-mile ‘Gin Drinker’s Line’, named after a bay where one end of the position was anchored. The defensive position was composed of a series of trench lines, bunkers and redoubts, and if skillfully defended should have seriously impeded the Japanese advance for up to a week. The press were led to believe that Hong Kong could be held, a Canadian reporter calling the colony ‘the rocky Far Eastern stronghold ... [that] may develop into a Tobruk of the Pacific’,4 referring to the stand of the 14,000 men of the 9th Division under Australian Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead in holding the port fortress city of Tobruk in Libya, a battle that was still ongoing when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. Morshead was ordered by Wavell (then GOC North Africa) to hold Tobruk for eight weeks, but in the end he held it for over five months against powerful Italian and German attacks. Tobruk was the longest siege in British military history and an inspiring example to the nation and an Empire with its back against the wall. Hoping that a similar feat could be performed in Hong Kong was unrealistic, owing to the number of troops, the nature of the defences and the inability of the British to supply or reinforce Maltby once the shooting began. The Mainland Brigade under Brigadier Wallis was composed of 2nd Royal Scots, 2/14th Punjabis and 5/7th Rajputs supported by three batteries of the HK&SRA. Cedric Wallis looked like a tough old imperial campaigner. He had lost his left eye in the First World War and wore a black eye patch over the empty socket, or a dark monocle, depending on the occasion. In 1914 Wallis had enlisted as a private into the Royal Horse Guards, part of today’s Blues and Royals, before being commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters. He had served in France as a subaltern in the Lancashire Regiment before joining the Indian Army in 1917. Wallis had spent the remainder of the war in Iraq, latterly as chief political officer in the city of Mosul before being posted to south-west Iran. Wallis was a slim, physically tough man, known as a very determined and ambitious soldier. Inter-war service had found Wallis stationed in southern India and Burma, and by 1939 he was commanding an internal security force in Bombay. Wallis arrived in Hong Kong as Commanding Officer of the 5/7th Rajputs in 1940, but he was promoted to brigadier shortly before the arrival of the Canadians in 1941 and made one of Maltby’s two brigade commanders.
The most important position was the impressive Shing Mun Redoubt garrisoned by the understrength Royal Scots. For the defence of Hong Kong Island Maltby had created the three-battalion Island Brigade consisting of the 1st Winnipeg Grenadiers and the 1st Royal Rifles of Canada, plus the 1st Middlesex Regiment with the HKVDC and HK&SRA in support, all under the command of another experienced British officer, newly promoted Brigadier John Lawson. Although commanding Canadian troops, Lawson had been born in Yorkshire, and educated at Worcester School and London University before joining the Hudson’s Bay Company in Edmonton in 1912. When the First World War broke out Lawson immediately joined the Canadian Army and went as a subaltern to France in the 9th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914. He ended the war as a captain in the Permanent Force, Canada’s small professional peacetime military, serving in the Royal Canadian Regiment. Lawson was ideally suited to cobbling together an efficient brigade from the raw troops under his command in Hong Kong, having previously been the Director of Military Training in Ottawa when he was a colonel. Mainland Brigade’s task was to hold a series of hastily constructed pillboxes and gun batteries situated around the perimeter of the island.
Between the wars, the British had woefully neglected their Far Eastern military and naval forces, none more so than Britain’s most important East Asian colony, Malaya. With a militarist, expansionist Japan hungry for territory, and particularly the rich natural resources of Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), the importance of a strong British military presence in the region was paramount. Government penny-pinching, especially over the construction of a modern naval base at Singapore, a policy of appeasement towards the Japanese, and the problems of fighting a war in Europe and the Middle East severely tested British resolve east of Suez. The Singapore issue was disgraceful, and flew in the face of everything the Admiralty had stridently told successive Labour and Conservative governments in London. The giant new Singapore Naval Base and fortifications were supposed to have been completed by 1922; the year after Britain had foolishly cancelled a naval cooperation treaty with Japan at the insistence of the Americans and Canadians, which was to set the Japanese on the course of empire building, for the first time unrestrained by British influence. Singapore came to be seen as an expense governments could do without, and all were happy to keep putting off its completion, ignorant of Japan’s increasingly aggressive stance in Asia. As Arthur Herman in To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World points out:
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ... considered it [the Singapore Naval Base] expensive and unnecessary, and said no. In 1924 the Labor [sic] prime minister, Ramsey MacDonald, cancelled work altogether. In November, Baldwin’s new Tory government reopened the case for Singapore, but wanted nothing done until 1926 ... In 1928 the naval chiefs of staff, worried about other budget priorities, recommended more delays. In 1929 a Labor government stopped work on Singapore’s fortifications again ... the Tories did the same for all of 1929 and 1930.5
It was not until 1933 that ‘the concrete foundations for Singapore’s defensive shore batteries were laid ... The batteries were budgeted to be finished by 1935, ten years after [Admiral John] Beatty’s original deadline.’6 The British government’s war plans resided chiefly upon stationing a strong fleet at Singapore, which should have deterred the Japanese from enacting the designs they had on Malaya. With the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the British in fact drained away much of their naval resources from the Far East, diverting ships and submarines to home waters or into the Mediterranean where they were desperately needed to fight the Germans and Italians. The great new naval base at Singapore was decidedly empty of capital ships when the war in Asia began, a fact noted with relish by Japanese spies. The British also believed that air power was the way of the future, and that a strong RAF presence in Malaya would prevent a Japanese attack. Projections for up to 500 modern fighter a...

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