Thirty-one years ago today, the long years of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore came to an end with the return of the victorious Allied Forces to the island. The official surrender ceremony at City Hall was held a week later, on Sept 12, 1945, before Lord Mountbatten.
Today, CHAN KWEE SUNG describes the last days of the Japanese rule and the triumphant reoccupation of Singapore by the British.
THE Japanese Domei News Agency was the only source of war news for the local media, but one could read between lines of Allied successes on all fronts.
I remember reading about the Battle of the Coral Sea in the Syonan Times, before it was renamed the Shonan Shinbun, which claimed unqualified successes for the Imperial Navy climaxed with the sinking of the US aircraft carrier, Saratoga.
This battle, in fact, marked the turning point in the war which put the Allies back on the offensive -- starting with the Solomon Islands in the south-west Pacific.
As the campaign in the Pacific gathered momentum, the Japanese dubbed this relentless effort as the "island hopping farce" of the US.
No music
When Admiral Yamamoto was killed on active service -- it was never reported how -- the whole of Japanese Singapore was made to mourn for one day. Theatres and all places of amusement were closed and no music was to be heard, even from private homes.
There was one momentous occasion when the Japanese Supremo and Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, paid a visit to Shonanto as part of his fact-finding itinerary in South-east Asia.
I was one of the many school-children who were organised to line Victoria Street, one of the routes of his motorcade after his arrival at Kallang airfield.
Residents along the routes were ordered to close all windows facing the motorcade until after it went past -- an assassination preventive measure, no doubt.
Armed soldiers, guarded the routes as well, spaced out at close and regular intervals but facing the crowds.
When the motorcade appeared, all of us had to wave paper flags, making two facing lines of rippling, fluttering scarlet orbs, and made ourselves hoarse yelling "Banzai" while Tojo smiled benignly and waved back at us from his open-hood limousine. The same ritual was conducted, and under similar security conditions, as the Supremo passed the same route the next day on his way to the airport for his return trip to Japan.
As the months passed, petrol fuel became no longer available for private use. Except for trolley buses, very few petrol-driven buses ran on the roads.
However, private transport operators were able to convert their vehicles into steam-driven cabs which had huge charcoal boilers attached to their rear.
Before each operation, the boilers were stocked with fine charcoal and the driver or an attendant wound a crank briskly until enough steam was generated to run the cab. It was crude but effective.
The cab’s interior was bare of all but planked seats to accommodate a maximum of eight passengers, two in front, three behind facing the rear and three facing the front.
The attendant or fare collector would stand on the running-board and all would be set to go. On long journeys, the poor passengers behind closest to the boiler would have to bear its heat is utmost discomfort while soot fell on everybody.
The commercial district with Raffles Place as its core was as ever although many firms were Japanese run. Robinson’s was taken over by Matsuzakaya and John Little’s by Diamaru. Telecommunications were handled by the Nippon Denkitsushin Kaisha.
I left school and started work in a Japanese firm called Nippon Genpi which dealt in leather and animal hides. The pay was low but the perquisites more than made up for this. The staff had a free issue of leather shoes -- a luxury then -- and allowances in kind like foodstuffs and firewood. This was the office where I witnessed a girl clerk being assaulted by a berserk Japanese executive.
Air raids
However, another executive was an unusually kind man, and the only Japanese there who spoke fluent English and read English novels. Once I found him engrossed in a Zane Grey western, The Drift Fence.
By then, air-raids resumed in Singapore; this time with the Allies at the giving end. The Japanese adopted a different alarm system from the orthodox one of the British who sounded the siren only once -- a consecutive rise and fall in pitch -- when enemy aircraft were sighted, and the all-clear in a continuous steady wail before a gradual drop in pitch.
Instead, the alarm was to be sounded twice: Once when enemy were sighted but when an air-raid was not imminent, the second when it was and after that the all-clear. The first was conveyed by a similar rise and fall of the siren’s pitch, but with a longer steady tone in between; the tone in between; the second with a regular rise and fall in pitch; and then the steady monotone the all-clear.
When the siren sounded for the first sighting, all shops and houses had to put up blue pennants which were removed once the all-clear sounded. Red ones were raised for the emergency signal -- air raid imminent -- when streets were cleared and everyone had to take cover.
Initially, there were some tests or false alarms, perhaps to test the alertness of the public in displaying the appropriate flags. After that, it was the real thing.
Some American B-29s flew over and dropped a few bombs. Some houses were destroyed in the North Bridge road area near the Sultan Mosque, and there were casualties.
Subsequent raids became bigger. In one instance, I personally counted a single flight of 90 B-29s flying sedately over the in effective flak. The Japanese claimed to have shot down some and pieces of wreckage of one were exhibited at the Adelphi Hotel.
Up till now, no authoritative source has offered any information on the take-off point for the raids on Singapore. Was it China, India, Sri Lanka or one of the Pacific island?
In any case, the B-29 must have possessed remarkable range since a flight to Singapore and back to any of these bases would cover no less than 6,400 km.
Anti-Japanese activities were extended to the island. Active elements exploded several bombs in various parts of the city. One such explosion made a shambles of the Kyoei (Capitol) Theatre which never resumed operation till after the liberation.
New Year’s Day 1945. This is one of the official holidays with the Japanese, and my employers organized a lavish luncheon for the staff and management that day. But before that, early in the morning, all of us had to go along to observe Shinto rites at the Shonan Jinja, a Japanese temple garden in Adam road; and then to the Chureito, a shrine to war-dead at the peak of Bukit Batok, to pay our respects.
In the mean time, the Japanese stepped up the registration of all young men from 14 years onwards for the service with their armed forces.
There were three such detachments of locally enlisted personnel -- the Heiho, the Giyugun and unusual at the time to find strategic installations being guarded by a local serviceman in his early teens, holding a riffle with fixed bayonet taller than himself.
To escape military service, many like myself sought jobs in sectors of employment considered as essential to qualify for exemption.
I did so by getting employed as a fitter at the navel dockyard at Keppel Harbour.
Allied air-raids were gaining in intensity and there was hardly a week without the usual sight of B-29s flying over, and at lower altitudes with greater impudence.
Once they came over and really plastered the docks while every worker in our sector took cover in readily built shelters on an open ground across Telok Blangah Road. I peeped up through an open vent and saw the white bottomed B-29s passing majestically overhead while glistening clusters of incendiary bombs fluttered down from their open bomb-bays.
After the all-clear sounded, there was no work for us that day as everything was in a turmoil.
Most areas of the dock-yard were hit, including nearby shophouses which were burning furiously despite fire fighting attempts by firemen and civilians alike. Thick black columns of smoke darkened the sky as they rose from the inferno below.
There was another instance when a Japanese cruiser took refuge in what is now the King's Dock and mf war is going against them and the Germans.
The loss of Saipan, General McArthur's return to Philippines, the bitter battle of Iwojima, the British advancements on Rangoon and ultimately the surrender of their great ally, the Nazi Germany, were duly reported in the Shonan Shinbu which had been then a single sheet affair.
After the Germans' surrender, all German nationals were interned and sadly missed those kind crew men of that grey little ship which seemed desecrated now by the Japanese presence on board.
Soon, rumours were around the end of the war was in sight, and these slowly became substantiated when a change of heart was apparent in every Japanese heretofore known by his domineering aggressive attitude towards the locals.
Work came almost a standstill at the dockyard and the Japanese made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Rations of rice and other necessities were enhanced from stockpiles of which obviously the Japanese had no further need.
All doubts of the end of the war were removed when a British Liberator made low level flights over Singapore near the end of August 1945 and dropped thousands of leaflets announcing the unconditional surrender of Dai Nippon.
The aircraft made rooftop passes over the city for some hours, even in a heavy squall that started before it completed its mission and flew back to Ceylon -- HQ of the Allied South-east Asia Command.
Blackout
At nights, all lights were on again, free of blackout shades. Singapore was its old self once more and spirits soared sky-high with the populace who expected the return of the British any day now.
Among us at the time, were hundreds of Indonesians -- cheap labour forcibly emigrated from the Japanese from their homes in Java. Many died and a large number -- dirty, homeless and starved -- roamed the streets in search of food and shelter.
At last, those who survived were able to look forward to early repatriation home and medical care for their ugly, festering sores.
But the Japanese were still charged with the duty of maintaining law and order in the interim, and they did their job very well considering the volatile conditions existing then among the local citizenry. Their armed soldiers patrol the streets and their grim visages still commanded respect.
But that did not stop anti-Japanese elements from meting out summary justice on known collaborators. The body of one, a noted fifth-columnist of the Japanese, was displayed with stabbed wounds on his chest and tied with a knotted cord round his neck to a tree on Banda Hill, the site of the present Kreta Ayer People's Theatre.
Sept 5, 1945. The British landed. People lined the streets leading from the docks to cheer their return with was heralded by a jeep flying a large Union Jack and manned by army personnel jubilantly waving their bush hats. This was followed by truck -- loads of close-packed, armed and serious looking Indian soldiers -- helmeted and in full battle dress. Surrender
The procession military vehicles -- jeeps, trucks, armoured carriers and staff cars -- continued at staggered intervals throughout the rest of the day. One jeep with a couple of Australians even stopped to ask for directions, to the delight of happy onlookers.
' SINGAPORE IS BRITISH AGAIN ' ran the headline of the first issue of Straits Times the next day after an absence of 3½ years. Still a single sheet, but it carried the most welcome news to those who had been living in the shadow of death during the period.
One week later on Sept 12, 1945, crowds thronged the Padang in front of City Hall to witness the official surrender of the Japanese in South-east Asia to the Allied Supremo of the region, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the ceremony of which was commenced with the playing of the national anthems of the Allied powers -- Britain, America, Nationalist China and the USSR. So was the first step taken towards the eventual emancipation of Malaya and Singapore.
First published in The Sunday Times, Sept 5, 1976
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