The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

CHAPTER THREE

THE TRAIN TRUNDLED on through Edinburgh Waverley and later that morning the southern outskirts of Glasgow, running past sidings and factories. That afternoon we slowed into Greenock, on the eastern end of the Clyde estuary.

Out on the water, in the chill wind of late winter, lay a great armada of ships. I felt part of a heroic expedition, seeing those vessels strung out down the estuary. There were four splendid P&O liners, a captured French passenger ship, the Louis Pasteur, several destroyers and two battleships. These looked immense, even at the distance I was standing from them on the dockside. I remembered going to see HMS Hood when it came to the Firth of Forth in 1938: the awesome power, decks as long as fields, the grey gun turrets the size of houses. It made you feel small and safe to have this weight of firepower on your side.

After the usual milling and shouting, and the unpacking of my goods wagons, we formed up on the quay in the deceptively casual disorder of armies on the move. But we knew we were highly organized; we felt our power. Tenders came to take us to the ships, we embarked quickly and soon we were slapping through the choppy water towards the long line of vessels. Our tender pointed through the spray to one of the nearer ships, a big P&O liner which we discovered was the Strathmore.

Most of us would never have imagined that we would ever step aboard this floating country house. It was an imposing environment, all polished wood and brass, but its spotless decks and its cabin windows seemed deserted, as though the diplomats, the administrators and the gilded travellers who normally used it had abandoned ship at the sight of these boyish invaders in rough khaki. Feeling like pirates, we were soon allocated to cabins or mess decks by our senior officers and by the crew.

Although this was a military adventure, we were still guests of the ship. The Captain was still very much the captain; we were passengers. All our activities had to fit in with his organization of the ship. So on this strange peacetime basis, we set about our warlike duties.

The following day, our convoy of about twenty ships drew up its anchors and with a minimum of noise, no ceremonial blasts on the sirens or crowds on the harbour walls, headed out into the open sea. We were not told where we were going, and after we had left the Firth of Clyde, running out into the north channel between Ireland and Scotland, we hadn’t much idea where we were – except that we were sailing roughly north west into the Atlantic. It was difficult to be sure even of the number of ships in our company, because the convoy occupied such a large area of the ocean. Nor were we told the names of the grey warships that occasionally glided up out of the fog.

In this state of official ignorance, our time was filled for us. Every morning hundreds of young men would be out doing PT exercises on deck. After the first few days the deck grew hot under the thin soles of our gym shoes, and the sun higher in the sky. We were no longer sailing north west, and had turned south. Somewhere off to the east lay the coast of Africa.

The Signals contingent went over to a training routine, keeping ourselves and our men busy by organizing courses and reminders about how to keep an army’s communications clear and efficient. In the evenings we tried to run entertainments, using whatever talent we had available: songs, revues, mild ribaldry, but all held in check by the total absence of alcohol. And of course there was not a single woman on board; even the nurses were male.

We were setting off to sail around the scarlet map of the Empire, and we talked endlessly about where we might end up. As it turned out, we were preparing ourselves to face the wrong enemy. Our assumption was that we would have to defend the north-west frontier of India against a German attack through Persia; no other enemy seriously crossed our minds.

I shared a cabin with a friendly young fellow signals officer, Alex Black, and got on well with him. We talked about the business of what we were doing, as all colleagues do, and gossiped about men and officers. Enforced companionship can be a hell for some people, but these years were made bearable for me partly because of the comrades that the war chose at random for me. I vividly remember eating green ginger for the first time in my life aboard that ship, and sharing it with my cabin mate.

The warmth of the weather was now tropical, damp and intense. The day came when it was announced that we were about to put in at Freetown, in Sierra Leone. This was a real event for us; young people from the backgrounds that most of us came from had never been ‘abroad’ before in our lives. We were now well and truly travelled, if sitting on board a liner in the bay at Freetown counts as abroad.

Unfortunately only very small ships could be accommodated at the Freetown quayside, so most of the convoy had to anchor a long way out. But not so far that I couldn’t see and even smell the land, the docks, the palm trees just back from the harbour, the damp jungly smell coming out on the breeze, like rotting vegetables in the dusty green heat. I saw a very distant train heading up-country on the far side of the city. I knew that this was the famous 2 foot 6 inch gauge main line railway, probably the only one of its kind in the entire British Commonwealth. The little white drift of smoke from the engine seemed to hang in the hot air.

It became oppressive on board ship, hotter and more humid each day. The exercises and routines became exhausting; the coast more tantalizing, the smell more disgusting because we could not move around the city that was generating it. We were not sorry when the entire convoy resumed its journey. Our immediate destination could now only be South Africa.

About five days later I was detailed as Paying Officer for the Signals draft as we sailed along the South African coast towards Cape Town. So when the spectacular docking of so many big ships was accomplished, I was below decks handing out cash to men eager to get ashore.

Cape Town was a festival of goodwill. Soldiers were taken to people’s houses, were celebrated and had drinks bought for them. After four weeks at sea it was quite an experience. But I wandered off one afternoon and headed, inevitably, for Cape Town railway station, an addict hoping for a surprise. As no other member of the ship’s company or the troops seemed to share my interest, I was on my own. I certainly got my surprise. On a plinth in the station was an ancient locomotive, a small tank engine built by Hawthorns & Co. in Leith in 1859. It was the first locomotive ever to work in the Cape Colony, and was probably the oldest surviving Scottish engine in the world.

If it seems odd to find solace in an old steam engine after a month at sea, on the way to God knew where and in the middle of a world war, all I can say is, well, you weren’t there and didn’t see it, and I had my passion to tend. It was a lovely old tank engine, a beautiful piece of machinery on fragile ungainly wheels with surprisingly delicate coupling rods. It looked almost too dangerous to drive, a mad inventor’s toy. I admired it in the middle of that hot African station for a long time.

Two weeks later we were in Bombay, and I felt for the first time the shock of the East. Six weeks before, I had been in cold grey Scarborough. The intense dry heat, bustle and colour of India were overwhelming. Within yards of the air-conditioned hotel where I was billeted there was utter poverty. I saw hundreds of sleeping bodies each night in the streets. I could barely absorb the sensations with which I was bombarded.

Before I could get settled into Bombay and get used to walking on the Malabar Hill, amid the splendour of official British India, I was despatched on an epic train journey of my own. The Frontier Mail, the flagship of the entire railway system, took me on a trip of almost 1400 miles up the subcontinent to Rawalpindi, near the foothills of the Himalayas at the angle made by the plain of the Punjab and the mountains of Afghanistan. The stops were a wonderful litany of the Raj: Ratlam, Nagda, Kotah, Bharatpur and Muttra; Delhi, Chandigarh, Amritsar, and Lahore; and from Lahore, the final 180 miles up and across the Punjab to Rawalpindi. My main concern was not losing my revolver, a precaution drummed into us as soon as we arrived in India, for there were revolutionaries on the loose. If you lost your gun you as good as lost yourself. Yet I never felt threatened, despite this fear of rebellious subjects, travelling on my own in a train full of hundreds of Indians. Our dominion seemed so secure.

I settled into a passable imitation of the Indian Army officer’s life in Rawalpindi, with its old buildings, its seemingly unchanging way of life. I had a bungalow normally occupied by a colonel, and they gave me a bearer and a dhobi. As the freshest graduate of the Officer Cadet Training Unit, I was up to date with the latest radio practice and became a lecturer in telecommunications to my brother officers and men.

I also had to learn to ride, for the Indian Army still travelled on horseback. Their old army radios, especially, were transported by troops of horses and mules, and we used the heliograph, a tripod with mirrored discs, anywhere you could get a visual line between two points in sunlight. I felt that I was slipping back gendy into an older way of military life.

One of the Indian Army’s most agreeable traditions was that it allowed a great deal of leave. When mine came, I decided to go to Kashmir. I sat beside the driver of a ‘bus’, which turned out to be a lorry with very unforgiving suspension – this was the ‘first class’ seat – for 200 miles as we ground up into the hills, up the great U-shaped bend of the Jhelum Valley and into Srinagar. I had come to the most beautiful place in the world.

The mountains were unbelievable masses of rock and snow merging with the sky, and the Vale of Kashmir seemed to this child of northern Europe like a fertile garden of Eden: the luxuriance and accessibility of fruit I had never even heard of, the abundance of trees and flowers. I booked a small house-boat at the southern end of the Dal Lake and for a week lived in an idyll, eating well, walking in the Shalimar Gardens and at night sitting out on my boat alone under the sky which was dense with layers of stars.

I rode as far up into the mountains as I could from Pahlgam, which is itself 7500 feet above sea level, with a party of English missionaries. We were mounted on horses with mules carrying our baggage. Beyond us were the Karakorams and Tibet. For two days we pressed on up the Lidar Valley until on the second evening we reached Shisha Nag, a magnificent isolated sheet of water more than two miles above the sea. The valley above us was blocked by a glacier. I remember the sun, the cold, the enormous river of ice in the air above me glittering as I ate hard-boiled eggs and boiled ice for water.

In the early morning, the snow on the mountain peaks was caught by the sun, turning pink before the light penetrated to the valley floor. Then there was the silence. I do not think I have ever before or since heard such peace and deep silence. There were other kinds of silence later, but they were tense and sick with anxiety and violence.

Kashmir filled my mind. Later, it went some way to keeping me whole. If I had had no idea of perfection, I don’t know if I would have come through.

My orders, when they came, were to take charge of the signal section of the 5th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, then stationed at Nowshera, eighty miles away on the north-west frontier. The regiment was being built up for ‘tropical service’. There was one Scot for whom India seemed quite tropical enough, but I was now a loyal cog in His Majesty’s machine.

The regiment was an old-established one, and had expected to stay on guard at the Empire’s most romantic outpost for a while yet. Instead it was hastily mobilizing, under strength with its sixteen 4.5 inch howitzers, and deficient in all kinds of equipment. Soon after I got to Nowshera, the regiment took delivery of brand new tractors for its guns, Karrier KT4 ‘Spiders’, which were ordered to be painted green. Knowing officers predicted that we were headed for Malaya.

On 11th October the guns and vehicles left Nowshera for Bombay in three special trains. Mobilization took a lot of trains, and the innocence of railways, if not of the machines themselves, was complicated for me by realizing more and more how essential they were to the conduct of war. Then, on 17th October, General Wakeley, the commanding officer of the 7th Indian Division, took the salute at a farewell parade on the huge square in front of the barracks.

In the course of the parade Wakeley announced that we might have to fight the Japanese. No senior officer had ever suggested this in public to his men before, in my experience, and it gave a frisson of excitement and aggression to the occasion.

General Wakeley went on to say that we should try to fight the Japanese at night, as they suffered from night blindness.

When the band of the Lincolnshire Regiment played us out of the siding at Nowshera the following day on our special military train, we did not know that we were very nearly blind ourselves, being led by the blind.

At Bombay harbour a few days later we saw an imposing liner approaching the quay. It was the Orient Line flagship Orion, another wonderful example of the democracy of war: our travels were now all on special trains and requisitioned luxury cruisers.

I was the last to board the ship, after midnight, and the captain didn’t want me even then. I had in my charge several crates of carboys of neat, undiluted, full-strength sulphuric acid which we needed to keep our radio batteries topped up, for if they were less than ftilly supplied they gave less than full power. The captain needed this particular Jonah in the way that he needed a Japanese torpedo. But our regimental commander somehow persuaded him that the security of the entire British Empire in the Far East depended on me and my acid, and eventually, watched by the entire cheering regiment, my crates were swung inboard in a net by the ship’s derrick.

After a brief stop at Colombo, the main port of Ceylon, we sailed eastwards, suspecting that we knew what our mysterious ‘tropical’ destination was but in fact kept properly in the dark. On 6th November, green hills, jungle-clad from their summits to the sea, appeared to starboard, our southern side, and we could make out a similar coast to the north. We were clearly sailing through a bight between substantial masses of land: the Straits of Malacca. Singapore it had to be.

The Orion docked at Keppel Harbour, in the south of Singapore Island. If our journey had been a secret, our arrival certainly was not. A band of the Manchester Regiment was waiting on the quayside playing ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ and other tunes with gusto, the trumpets and tubas and cymbals making their huge summery brass noise. It was triumphant and joyful. A crowd of dignitaries was there: port officers, civil servants, officers. Someone pointed out Lieutenant-General A.E. Percival, the General Officer Commanding Malaya. He was the man in charge of The Fortress, and we had come to help him defend it.

A month later I was living in a khaki canvas tent in a camp by the edge of a road on the east coast of Malaya. It was a pleasant sandy area full of coconut palms, half a mile from the beach. Behind the camp stretched endless regular acres of rubber trees with their thick glossy leaves.

The fine rain was constant in the warm heat, and almost soothing. This cluster of guarded tents was our Regimental HQ, and the thirty signalmen were the heart of the camp. We had our radios set up, their low hum a constant background noise. A man was always sitting in front of each set, headphones to hand, ready to receive or transmit. We were at work. The place was called Kuantan.

We were waiting for an assault by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, which we knew were out there on the sea over the horizon, for we were now formally at war with them.

Early on the morning of 8th December I was sleeping in a trench when a messenger woke me to show me a message with the ominous priority ‘O & U’. This was the code for the highest possible priority signal. The Japanese had attacked all over the Far East; a dreadful attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, all the US battleships destroyed, an air raid on Singapore, and at Kota Bharu two hundred miles to our north, near the border of Malaya and Siam, they had stormed ashore from small boats and landing craft.

The scramble was immediate. Messengers and radio signals went out to all the gun positions, extra men were sent to the observation and guard posts. The urgency and tension were extraordinary, and yet the war still seemed a long way away from this deceptively peaceful tropical camp. It was as though it was taking one last breather before finally pouncing, after all those false starts and premonitions.

I could not see any guns from the camp. They were scattered around the area, among the paw-paws with their heavy yellow gourds and the flame-of-the-forest trees, a mile between each gun so as not to be vulnerable to a massed Japanese naval barrage. I could go out of my tent and walk for a mile, or ride a motorbike even further, and almost forget our deadly business, enjoying the illusion that I was alone in this beautiful place, surrounded by the splendour of its plant life. Then you would come on a single howitzer with sandbags around it standing silently in the forest, the men edgily fingering their rifles.

We kept in touch with them as best we could. Like much else in warfare, signals theory was one thing, jungle practice another. Those cumbersome radios didn’t generate a lot of wattage, when it came to it, and a lot of energy was lost in the surrounding trees, electromagnetic waves soaking into the trunks and leaves, distorting voices, drowning messages in static. We resorted to sending wireless signals down the phone lines, an ingenious improvisation which we christened Line Assisted Wireless, by setting up our aerials a few feet below the overhead wires: the outgoing signals were attracted to the wires and another radio further down the line of wire could capture the signals. We were discovering that our army was part of a connected system, that machines had only limited power. They still needed our voices and our eyes to give them intelligence.

We were forced to rely more and more on our land lines.

There were telephone wires strung around the area, to talk clearly to each other. Our old-fashioned switchboard lent a touch of civilian absurdity to a command centre from which a terrible artillery bombardment could be called down on an enemy; with its plugs and jacks it looked as though it should be in some provincial hotel.

Our troops were mostly Indian: Sikhs to the west of us, Garhwalis to the east. We were halfway up the peninsula of Malaya, which dangles the island of Singapore from its foot, and Singapore was the only reason for our presence on this coast. The island was the ‘Fortress’, the ‘impregnable fortress’ as it was always called in official descriptions, on which the defence of the Empire in Asia depended. The citadel of the fortress was the celebrated naval base in the north of the island, from where the great ships of the Royal Navy could sail out to dominate the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam. Huge 15-inch guns looked out from the southern shore, for that was the way the enemy would come: from the sea. We hoped that our battleships would now be moving out from their base to search for and destroy a Japanese invasion fleet. We were merely guarding an airfield a few miles inland which was part of a chain of defences on the landward side of the island. It had finally dawned on our leaders that the Japanese might attack Singapore from the rear, and perhaps not at night, and from the rear it was anything but impregnable.

I remember precisely, only hours after I arrived in Singapore, a Signals staff officer, some hopeless decent man, telling me that the Japanese could not attack through Malaya. He said ‘there is nothing there. It’s just solid jungle, all the way up. They will not come that way.’

Now it must have been obvious to the staff in Singapore and certainly to my colonel and to every private soldier, that we were, despite the tranquility of our surroundings, trapped and desperate. We had seen a lot of Malaya since we disembarked in Singapore, from Ipoh in the west and right across the waist of the country to where we now were, and it was not solid jungle. It was intensively cultivated, rich land, with good and plentiful roads for traders – or for soldiers.

The one place in the country that lacked roads was Kuantan. If the Japanese drove down on us from the north, there was only one road out for us, to Jerantut, which was about sixty miles inland behind us. East of that town was the river Pahang, a wide fast stream crossed by a ferry. This obstacle course was bad enough, but Kuantan too had its river, a mile west of the town, and it was a horrible sight to military eyes. The river was wide and brown and sluggish, its ferry made up of two rusty barges fastened together, which were moved by winching a cable that stretched from shore to shore: a primitive watery version of the system that worked the old Edinburgh trams would have to rescue us if things went wrong. It spelled massacre and disaster; bad ground and bad water. It was hard for us to imagine who had chosen this spot for us to make a stand, and what good we could do except to die at our posts. Our orders were, indeed, more or less to do just that: to defend the airfield to the last man. The Garhwali troops had to defend eleven miles of beaches and the little town of Kuantan with a pitiful total of four companies. The Sikhs had equally few men. There were no troops at all to defend the coast to our south; and none for the main road out of the trap.

But we were soldiers, part of a great tradition, so we tried not to think about our leaders’ vision and prepared to fight. Besides, the Japanese did not seem a formidable enemy. They had surprised the Americans, we thought, but we were forewarned.

The Japanese first came the day after I had been rousted from sleep by that sensational signal. Early that morning we heard a new engine note in the sky, different from the Hudson and Blenheim bombers which we had grown accustomed to hearing take off from the airfield. In a clear sky, I saw waves of twin-engined planes with rising sun emblems on their wings, three neat waves of nine each, like migrating geese. They passed and repassed over the area where we knew the airfield to be, and dropped bombs that looked so small and black in the distance. The explosions were mingled with the crack and rattle of light machine-guns and cannon as the Sikh company shot up at them, but the bombers calmly and methodically went to and fro over the earth, walking their bombs around in it, then turned and flew away.

In the afternoon we heard our own planes take off one by one, wheel around and head south. In the sunlit silence that followed we thought we heard the sounds of road vehicles through the trees, lorries moving away from us. Major Fennell, our second-in-command, took me and a small group out to the airfield to investigate.

We drove on to the long spacious runway that had been dug and levelled out of the forest. It was empty apart from a few wrecked planes, and so silent that you could hear the birds and the insect sounds from the forest. I walked towards the trees. The huts for accommodation were in there, the radio shacks hidden further back. It was spooky, as though there were rifles pointing at us from the dark under the trees. But the huts were empty, scattered clothes all over the floors, photos of women and children strewn among the vests and jackets. In the radio rooms, the equipment had been wrecked, wires trailing out of smashed panels, the glass of valves crunching under my boots. Out on the runway, there were cold mugs of tea half-full by the aircraft on which mechanics had been working. I picked up a blue flimsy envelope with an Australian postmark. It was unopened.

The place for which we were supposed to sacrifice our lives had simply been abandoned, without explanation. Our headquarters had told us nothing; the local air force commanders had not consulted us before fleeing. We were left on this awful ground with no air cover.

From then on, the probabilities began to look harsh and unfavourable to us. Very late that same evening, an observer on one of the beaches reported that he had seen Japanese landing craft moving towards a village further up the coast. As darkness fell, I transmitted an order from Colonel Jephson to the guns. Within seconds of speaking into the mouthpiece and hearing the squawked acknowledgments from the batteries, I heard the deep flat blast of a howitzer firing, immediately followed by several more. All that night the guns slammed like bolts on a massive door being pushed heavily back and forth. We could see quick flashes occasionally, a patch of rubber trees reversing out of the darkness for a second, but nothing more. I knew the shells would form a shifting pattern, moving across a square of sea and beach like a flail, and that landing craft and soldiers would burst and drown in the geometrical figure drawn on the gunnery officer’s map.

Dawn broke. We had fired over a thousand shells. There had been no response to the night long barrage, and when observers went out they reported that Colonel Jephson had been scourging the empty sea. There were no landing craft.

Later that morning I walked down to the beach. I had been up most of the night, on duty with my signalmen. These beaches were incredibly beautiful; they had coconut and nipah palms, fine clean sand and the warm green of the sea. I stood beneath the trees admiring the way the waves came in. It was so peaceful, standing on a mile of deserted sand with a long line of palms at my back. I felt I was waiting for the Japanese, at that moment, completely alone. Then the loud rumbling started again, a deeper and more distant version of the night’s barrage, like thunder but obviously not thunder, drifting in from the sea. It went on for about an hour.

I had heard the British Empire begin to fall, if I had but known it. Out at sea, just over the horizon from where I stood, the two mightiest, most invincible battleships in the world, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, and their escort destroyers, were being attacked by swarms of Japanese torpedo bombers. They had no air protection; like the land dreadnought of Singapore, like us, they were playing tragic roles in an outdated military drama. Their day was done. I remember myself as I was then, hearing the huge cracks of the explosions as my comrades, the radio men, were trapped at their posts under the bridges of the great ships.

We had seen these ships as our salvation. We lost hope when it was confirmed over the radio that they had both been sunk within a couple of hours off Kuantan. Admiral Phillips had turned his titanic weapons towards us because he also believed that we were being invaded; he too had heard that Japanese troops were storming ashore in our sector: our own panicky observer had helped unwittingly to bring a strategic and historical era to an end. It was absurd. The weak, shortsighted, nightblind Japanese had destroyed our ultimate deterrent. For the first time, we began seriously to consider defeat.

On 10th December we received reinforcements: some armoured cars and the remnants of a Frontier Force Regiment battalion arrived, tough Sikhs who had withdrawn from the north of Malaya; and although we no longer had an airfield at Kuantan, we at least acquired a chaplain, a nice man called Pugh. Percival’s orders to the Frontier Force soldiers and to all the others in the north had been to fight, to ‘impose delay’ on the Japanese, retreat and fight again all the way down the peninsula. We were about to discover that a leapfirogging, fighting retreat is easier to imagine than to carry out.

We had watchers out on the tracks to the north, organized by a civilian from the Malayan Forestry Service who knew the area well. We got reports of mysterious parties coming through the jungle; every day, we expected a fight. There were false alarms, and a permanent screwing up of tension. Two weeks passed like this. We celebrated Christmas, Padre Pugh conducting impressive and well-attended services at our camp and out among the batteries in the forest. We killed a lot of local ducks and ate well.

Our unit’s particular orders were still to stand and fight in defence of the now derelict airfield. We accepted this task stoically, wondering what Percival would say if he could see the jungle reclaiming the landing strip. But two days after Christmas, we were ordered to withdraw immediately and regroup west of the river. A sudden retreat on this scale would cause chaos, our commanders felt, and Brigadier Painter, who was in overall charge of our immediate area, protested vigorously to the major-general above him. The previous orders were reinstated. I dutifully relayed these contradictory messages between my superiors.

While their debate was going on, one of our forward posts phoned in to say that it had been attacked by Japanese troops, and some of our vehicles had been destroyed. We were now in a battle zone without doubt, and the Japanese wished to keep us there. They tried to destroy our ancient ferry by bombing it, but it survived.

The first of my friends to die was Lieutenant Tafify Davies, an artillery officer, a friend since Nowshera. He and two signalmen called Cartwright and Howe drove off on their motorbikes alongside a truck that was delivering some ammunition to a battery. I discovered later that he and Cartwright set off to return on their own. We found Taffy’s body a few hours later on the road beside his wrecked machine, machine-gunned and bayoneted, and stripped of his boots, puttees and equipment. Cartwright’s bike was there, but he had disappeared. Further along the same road, thirty Garhwali troopers lay dead among their burnt out lorries.

Our orders were changed again, for the third time in three days. All guns and vehicles were to be withdrawn across the river.

The ferry was a nightmare. The bottleneck was even worse than we had predicted: a line of vehicles a mile long waited to cross it. Relays of men tugged and strained on the old cables, floating artillery pieces two by two across the turgid brown stream. I sat on a motorbike at the back of this line, hoping the truck in front would move; I remember the mortal fear that a passing Japanese bomber would sight this dense column of targets.

At three in the morning, on the first day of 1942, in a darkness lit by oil lamps and electric lights run from truck batteries, the last of the Kuantan garrison crossed the river.

We had a roll call as soon as we had completed the crossing; I was horrified to find that one of my sections of three men in a radio truck was missing. We searched for the men, hoping that they had come over in another truck, but they were not to be found on our side of the river. A sergeant called Watson and I went back across the ferry on motorbikes to look for them. Once on the far side, we started the motors. Without lights we drove back towards Kuantan, Watson keeping 200 yards behind me, the growling engines sounding shatteringly loud in the moonlight. I hoped that Japanese hearing didn’t compensate for their poor night vision. In the clearings to the side of the road, in the huge rubber plantations beyond them, there wasn’t a sound, no sign that we had ever been there except for the odd wrecked vehicle and the tracks of our tyres in the dark clay beside the tarmac. I could sense rather than hear the sea as we roared through this abandoned landscape. I knew that just ahead of us the enemy was moving with his tanks and bicycles. I had still not seen a Japanese soldier, alive or dead. That night I was lucky, and although I failed to find a truck in working order or my missing men, I also failed to meet the Japanese.

We went back and were pulled across the ferry for the last time. Some hours later the missing section appeared, having assembled in the wrong place; they expected the worst, but words failed me. We withdrew to the airfield, about six miles away, after blowing up the winches and pontoons. Two hours later the Japanese were at the ferry, and two days later the airfield was under fierce attack from all sides. By then I was on the road to Jerantut, part of a slow-moving column of tractors, guns and trucks. Behind us we could hear relentless firing and shelling. The outnumbered Frontier Force Regiment, under their commander Lieutenant-Colonel A.E. Gumming, was fighting a heroic rearguard action to allow us to get away.

The retreat was confused, three-or four-day marches followed by a sudden halt, an order to emplace the guns, to fire in support of an infantry counter-attack somewhere off behind us, and then the regiment would move on again. We knew that we were heading out of one trap into another, a gigantic plug-hole, and we knew that the big guns, where we were going, pointed out to sea, away from our enemy.

Once I was in a truck, driving down a long straight road through a rubber plantation, reflecting that when you have seen one rubber tree you have seen them all, and feeling how depressing acres of them looked to a retreating soldier. Ahead of us there appeared a plane, coming in our direction, flying very low. It looked silver against the sun. We pulled over and jumped down into a gouge in the stiff black mud beside the rubber trees. He dropped a few bombs, one nearly on top of us. Again I felt the violent invisible blast of the shock. This was my second infinitesimally close shave, and I was saved this time by geology: the nearest bomb sank deep into the mud before exploding. Harder soil would have killed us.

We reached Singapore a week before the causeway linking it to Malaya was blown up. We had to press through crowds of frightened Malay and Chinese villagers who the Japanese had driven in front of them, and on the island the streets and roads were full of these refugees. They lived in tents, under trees, in the fields. No-one knew how many of them there were: someone told me half a million. Soldiers lived in the vehicles they had driven down the peninsula. There was a pervasive smell of decay, ordure, anxiety: the smell of defeat.

Yet there were nearly a hundred thousand of us, well-armed and ready to fight. For my part I was sent to Fort Canning, General Percival’s headquarters in Singapore City, in the south of the island, where they needed signals officers. This was the ‘Battlebox’. I went in and didn’t come out for three weeks. The siege of Singapore for me was a series of clipped shouts for help over the radio and terse bulletins of disaster.

I spent most of my time underground in the Battlebox, hearing and relaying orders, passing on information, sending out instructions for desperate recombinations of units to try to stop the collapse. On 8th February the Japanese guns opened up all along the Straits of Johore; at dawn on the 9th I heard that they were ashore in the north west. Most of our troops were in the east. Within three days the Japanese had pushed down through the island and taken the village around the big hill of Bukit Timah, ten miles to the north west of us. Up around the naval base on the north coast there were huge supplies of oil, and for the last couple of days of the battle the hill, which dominated the island, was overhung by black clouds of smoke. It looked as though it had erupted.

Not that I saw daylight much: we worked eighteen hours a day, and slept on the floor of the command centre among the radios and phones. Our offices were a series of connecting rooms, so that runners and despatch riders were always coming through and stepping over tired bodies. We saw nothing until the very end, and what we heard was confused. We knew that the Japanese had taken the reservoirs and turned off the taps; we could hear their unchallenged planes bombing and strafing every day. The big ships were leaving Keppel Harbour with civilians; troops were deserting and wandering around the city. Towards the end the commanders couldn’t even give sensible orders because there was so little information coming in. I saw General Percival a few times, walking in a corridor of the Fort or through our signals centre, a gaunt, tall figure looking utterly dejected and crushed; he was already a broken man. He was about to have his name attached to the worst defeat in the British Army’s history.

On Sunday 15th February 1942 I was told by another officer that he had heard we were about to surrender. Early that evening a dead silence enveloped the old fort. In the signals rooms everybody went to sleep, depression and exhaustion flooding in, as we collapsed on mattresses laid on top of cables and land lines. The spring of tension that had kept us going for weeks had been broken.

I slept for ten hours. The following morning I stepped outside and saw four cars moving slowly up the hill, small rising sun pennants fluttering on their wings. Their occupants sat bolt upright, arms stiff by their sides. They drew up outside the main entrance and a group of Japanese officers got out, long swords in black scabbards hanging from their dark green uniforms. They were the first Japanese troops I had ever seen. They strode confidently into the Fort.

These people now ruled Malaya, dominated the seas from India to Polynesia and had broken the power of at least three European empires in Asia. I was their prisoner.