Copper, Soldier, Doctor, Spy

  

Early this year, I was at a book launch in Ooty by an alumnus of Breeks School. The book, The Swaraj Spy, written by Vijay Balan was about events long forgotten. The book made me think about men who had lived in Singapore in 1941 when the Japanese bombarded the island city.

The first one who came to mind was Jacob Mathew Wattacheril, who in his short autobiography called Waves of Memory talks about Japanese-occupied Singapore. He arrived in Singapore from Kerala, India, a 21-year-old filled with the hope of making a life for himself. After a few setbacks, he fulfilled his life’s ambition and joined the police force.

He recalls that on the night of December 7 1941, he and his batch mates were preparing for their law exams,  the Commandant came to their room and to tell them that the exams are cancelled as there was a possibility of a Japanese attack. Jacob Mathew and his colleagues went to bed and were  woken up almost immediately. In the early hours of December 8, the Commandant asked them to round up all Japanese people living in the city. While they were in the process of doing so, the first bombs fell.

Web sites quoting newspapers, military journals and personal anecdotes say that the bombing of Singapore was carried out by 17 Mitsubishi G3M aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service.  The radar station at Mersing Johor in Malaya detected the Japanese aircraft an hour before they reached Singapore.

Three fighter aircraft were on standby at the RAF station in Sembawang. An interesting tidbit found in Wikipedia says Flight Lieutenant Tim Vigors, a veteran of the Battle of Britain, requested permission to scramble (order to take off immediately for an emergency or or action) to intercept the bombers. But, permission was denied for various reasons.

Jacob Mathew, a trainee police officer, recalled that the street lights were on, despite the air raid sirens. There was no blackout as the police and power station officials could not find the employee who had the keys to the switches. Some accounts say that this man was at the cinema at that time!

The bombing of Pearl Harbour was also carried out at about the same time. According to the website Britannica, Japanese bombers appeared over Pearl Harbour at 7.55 A.M. (local time) on December 7 destroying 80 aircraft, damaging more than a dozen ships and killing more than 2000 US military personnel as well as civilians, thus completely crippling the Allied forces in this region. America entered the war.

Jacob Mathew says that Japanese propaganda, that Asia should belong to Asians, was rife in Singapore. This idea appealed to the Malays in Malaysia and Singapore, to many Indians and even a few Chinese, who had been under colonial powers for a long time. However, the majority of the Chinese were against the Japanese as they (Chinese) felt that Japan just wanted to extend its empire. Most of the people in Singapore, he said, were willing to welcome the Japanese and see an end to British colonialism.

The Japanese occupation of Singapore was swift. The British expected the attack to come from the sea, but it came from the air and over land. Instead of warships landing soldiers, the Japanese soldiers arrived on bicycles. 

A few days after the surrender of the Allied Forces and the fall of Singapore, Kumar, the protagonist in The Swaraj Spy, walks to Farrer Park, successfully passing Japanese sentries shouting, “Indo! Indo! Buddha! Gandhi!” As he walks past, he sees Japanese soldiers tossing dead bodies onto a truck as if loading vegetables. 

Passing a sentry was particularly dangerous. In his memoirs, Jacob Mathew recalls hiding in a trench watching a Chinese man being beheaded for not alighting from his cycle when he approached the sentry.

At Farrer Park, Kumar wearing a mundu, to reiterate his Indian identity, listens to Japanese officers exhorting Indians in the British Indian army to join the Indian National Army and that they would not be treated as prisoners of war (PoWs).

Ration book given to Singaporeans during the Japanese occupation- Photo fromWikimedia Commons

Much has been written about the Indian National Army (INA) so I won’t go into it. However, I would like to mention two young men who didn’t join the INA but opted to be treated as PoWs and were interned in the camps.  One was a jawan and the other a doctor. Both survived the rigours and cruelties of the PoW camps to return home.  The jawan became a priest and brooked no nonsense from his parishioners. He often warned dragons in the Women’s Fellowship that having survived the rigours of the Japanese PoW camp their vicious gossip, which had so terrified previous incumbents, didn’t scare him.

The doctor, however, never spoke of the camp again, such were the horrors he had faced. The doctor was once asked by a curious youngster why he didn’t join the INA, he replied that he had taken an oath when he joined the army and he was not going to break that oath on some dubious promises made by even more dubious persons.

Coming back to Jacob Mathew, he felt he could not continue to work in the police force after the Japanese took over. He began work in a private company.  Moved by the pathetic state of the prisoners in the camps, sometimes he would lob bread (which was hard to get) into the prison compound. Needless to say that it was a great risk to himself.

Kumar, meanwhile, was very taken up with the idea of India freeing itself from the British yolk and was recruited into the INA to be a spy. He was then sent to a spy school in Penang to learn the tricks of the trade.

Indians living in Singapore at that time underwent many privations. News from India was scarce and all of them were homesick.  Many of them tuned their radios to listen to the broadcasts by All India Radio; with Hindi film music being particularly popular with young Indians.  Songs from popular movies of that time would be aired by All India Radio. For the homesick young men crowding around the small radio it brought back memories of happier times back home with their loved ones.

The war in South Asia progressed. The Japanese retreated and without their backing, the INA crumbled. Though the military participation of the INA was not significant, as they had engaged in one major battle (Battle of Imphal-Kohima), their contribution to Indian nationalism was huge.

When the war ended, the British rounded up 23,000 INA soldiers and tried them for treason.  This didn’t sit well with the Indian populace. The INA trials, also called the Red Fort trials (as they were held at Red Fort) were not popular,  the sentiment of the Indian people had changed; these men were perceived as patriots fighting for their country’s freedom. 

Jacob Mathew rejoined the police force and eventually became Superintendent of Police after specialised training at Scotland Yard. After a meritorious service fighting crime, he returned to India having refused the offer of Singaporean citizenship.

 

Jacob Mathew Wattacheril - Photo courtesy Reeba Cherian

 

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