War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore

Chapter 2: Personal Narratives of British Defeat and Japanese Occupation

14 War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore Chapter 2 Personal Narratives of British Defeat and Japanese Occupation In this chapter, the main focus is on five members of the wartime generation. The five include an Australian (Don Lee), and two Indian National Army veterans (Mr Kalyan Ram Das and Mrs Rasammah Bhupalan). There is also a Chinese volunteer who served in Dalforce (Choi Siew Hong), and Mohd Anis bin Tairan. The latter was a tenyear -old Malay boy in 1942, who subsequently joined a school for the Japanese Heiho (auxiliary force). Between them, they provide examples of Western, Indian, Chinese and Malay experience. All five spoke at a Forum with the Wartime Generation, held at the Singapore History Museum* in September 2005, and were also interviewed individually. Some of them have written and published accounts of their experiences, and one (Mrs Bhupalan, subsequently taking the title “Datuk”) is the subject of a book published by Malaysia’s Arkib Negara (National Archives).1 This rich vein of material means that we can construct a fairly coherent account of their wartime experiences. By focussing on just a few case studies, we can in addition follow each individual from their youth, through the Occupation, to their 21st-century memories. This individual life story approach will allow us to demonstrate the way in which personal war memories were constituted and reshaped by a complex cocktail of their respective pasts (including myths they subscribed to about previous conflicts), their personalities, their unique wartime experiences, and the postwar communities and countries they lived in. 14 * This has since relaunched as today’s National Museum of Singapore. Personal Narratives of British Defeat and Japanese Occupation 15 Taken together, our five main characters also encompass a broad range of wartime experiences, including the fighting; captivity as POWs and as labourers on the Burma-Thailand Railway; the Japanese massacres of 1942; civilian collaboration; and the war’s impact on Malay nationalism. Working around the personal stories, we will be able to outline the most important wartime events and experiences that future chapters will keep referring back to. None of our five, however, could claim to have participated in the anti-Japanese resistance in Malaya’s jungles. In order to give a flavour of that, we will briefly introduce Ong Boon Hua, who under the alias “Chin Peng” led Malaya’s postwar communists. Even more briefly, Private Miyake Genjiro flits on and offstage to give a Japanese eye view of the massacres of Chinese of February to March 1942; and Eurasians Eric Paglar and Victor Grosse make fleeting appearances. The main focus, however, will remain firmly on our five principal characters. As we shall see, these had very varied experiences not just of the war, but also of war memory afterwards, ranging from feeling Plate 2.1 Three war veterans at the September 2005 “Forum with the Wartime Generation”: Kalyan Ram Das (left); Don Lee (centre); and Choi Siew Hong (right). Together with Mrs Bhupalan and Mohd Anis bin Tairan, their stories shape this chapter. 16 War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore marginalised by the nations and communities they lived in, to having their stories feted as exemplars of national character. We start with Don Lee, who at 93 was the oldest of the wartime generation to address the Forum at the Singapore History Museum in 2005.2 He was also the most confident that his personal story fitted into an honoured, national tradition: one which motivated his entry into the war, shaped his experience of it, and then his memory of it afterwards. This sense of participating in a wider national story had been passed down through his family. His father had fought alongside the British in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, and owned a farm in the Manjimup District, near Perth. Don Lee was born in Western Australia in 1912, and always wanted to follow his father’s example, and own a farm of his own. He worked as a jackeroo (stockman) on a sheep station , and hunted kangaroos on the rugged landscape around the ranch, selling their skins to boost his meagre savings. Then the Great Depression struck. With work now hard to find, he became a “roustabout” (general worker), then a wool classifier, travelling the length and breadth of sheep country with a team of shearers. The Depression...