Eyewitness (13 page)

There is no division of rank in this brotherhood. The dead brigadier lies there with his men. At the head of the west comer of the cemetery, the grave of Captain A.J. Hare from South Australia is next to that of Major G.F. Copeland from a New South Wales anti-tank regiment. Beside them lie NX21758 Private A. Murray, QX18421 Private H.V. Clarke and NX65448 Private E.A. Kelaher of the machine-gunners.

Nearer the centre are two battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel C.K.M. Magno from Queensland and Lieutenant Colonel R.W.N. Turner from New South Wales. VX54787 Sapper W.H. Waterhouse lies at the foot of Captain W.L. Ligertwood, near 23-yearold VX37802 Trooper A. Hay and not far from NX15397 Warrant- Officer A. Weinstein who has the Star of Judah over his grave.

Brigadier A.H.L. Godfrey is at the opposite end from his right-hand man, Captain Keith Bishop, the South Australian brigade major learner. Private R.C. Francis from Queensland is at Brigadier Godfrey’s head, and nearby are two other gallant Queenslanders, Captain W.W. Cobb and Captain F.L. Bode.

Five non-combatants are buried here, Major S.L. Seymour of the South Australian field ambulance, Driver J.W. Dickerson, and Private R. Mogg of the Queensland field ambulance, Captain J.H. Samuels, R.M.O. of the Queensland battalion, and Captain M.H. Colyer, from New South Wales but R.M.O. of the South Australian battalion. Each of these died while succouring the wounded under fire.

Today all is quiet at El Alamein. The vital coast road to Alexandria, which a few weeks ago ran black with trucks and transport and all the traffic of war, is now as peaceful as a country lane. The war has gone west with the 8
^th
Army. Towards noon, as the sun grows warmer, birds come singing to the purple desert gorse which fringes the cemetery, and butterflies blow across the sand. The war has gone far away but, it seems, Australia is closer now, to these men who had died for Australia, than it has ever been.

The guns have stopped, the air is quiet, and peace has come also to the fresh graves on the farther side of the cemetery where they had buried Hans. W. Reidel of the Afrika Korps and Ermino Cyrillo Feronza of the Italian Army.

Gilbert Mant

Gilbert Mant was 38 in 1940, working for Reuters, the wire service, in Sydney. Reuters was a reserved occupation and vital part of the British propaganda machine, he noted. He was being paid £1200 a year as Australian News Editor on a three-year contract. He’d joined in London on £156 a year in 1931, and worked on two England cricket tours to Australia, had a wife and two children, and was determined to join up. Which he did. The recruiting age had risen to 40 after the fall of France, so Mant could. Amazingly, Reuters agreed to employ Mrs Molly Mant as Australian News Editor, while Mant joined up on July 2nd, 1940. Twelve months later Private Mant was in the 2/9th Battalion. 22nd Brigade arrived in Singapore in February 1941.

This was the period of the phony war, and despite Molly having the world scoop on the fall of Tobruk (from Sydney), Reuters wanted Mant back. After much soul-searching he was back in Sydney at the end of 1941. Then came Pearl Harbor and Mant was back in Singapore, now as a war correspondent. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ his old comrades in the 2/19th said when he caught up with them just before their epic involvement in the battles at Muar and Gemas in Malaya. Mant escaped from Singapore on a British destroyer.

After the war he was a columnist and feature writer for the Sydney
Sunday Sun
and the
Bulletin
, and published six books including Ben Hackney’s survivor’s account in his
Massacre at Parit
Sulong
. Gilbert Mant died in 1997.

*

It was Christmas Eve, 1941. A sense of dreadful unreality hung over the Malayan countryside as we drove towards the main western fighting zone along the Perak River, near Kuala Kangsar. The countryside was deserted and silent in the heat as we passed through it and it seemed fantastic to think that not far north men were engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. It was a bitumen road, winding narrowly between forests of trees and rubber estates, and soon we kept a sharp lookout for enemy aircraft. For mile upon mile we passed through the deadly silence and saw European bungalows and clubs, desolate and empty.

As we pushed further north, past Tanjong Malim, we began to meet convoys of army transport taking back wounded and caught up with convoys taking up supplies and ammunition. And presently we came upon the head of a thin stream of Chinese refugees impassively moving back. There were wrinkled old women with babies slung over their backs, carrying heavy burdens in wicker baskets on long bamboo poles. They trudged along the road in the hot sunshine and did not even look around as we shot past. Others streamed down the road with their household belongings piled high on rickshaws and oxdrawn carts. Motor cars were lying upturned in ditches where they had gone off the narrow road. Every now and again we passed some of the unsung heroes of the Malayan campaign – the men who drove with stoical patience great lumbering steamrollers right down the Malayan Peninsula. Day after day the steamrollers trundled down the road at a couple of miles an hour until they reached Singapore. There were train crews, too, including many Australians, who worked the railways to the end and have never received their proper due.

That day we got as far north as Ipoh, important tin-mining centre, which was just about to fall to the Japanese. As we drove into the town I saw the first dead man I had ever seen in war. He was a Chinese and he lay spreadeagled near a bridge. Death was to become a common sight afterwards but never commonplace. There were still some Chinese and Indians in Ipoh. They were there to loot and gathered outside shops protected by big wooden barricades. Small parties of British soldiers were also in the town systematically breaking into shops and smashing thousands of bottles of liquor. It was the first sign of an organised scorched-earth policy. It was a study in human psychology to watch the natives preparing to break into a shop. Inherent timidity and fear of authority held them back until suddenly one man would move forward. Then chattering, shouting and gesticulating, the whole crowd would storm the shop, clawing and kicking at the wooden framework. They broke up again when a British soldier with a Tommy gun threatened them.

We drove to the railway station to meet a scene of utter devastation. Two days before, the Japanese had bombed an ammunition train standing there. The explosion shattered the countryside for miles. Billows of curdling black smoke and scarlet flames were still spilling out from two oil tanks which had also been hit. We walked into the shell of the Majestic Hotel to find that miraculously much of it had escaped damage. The main lobby was strewn with papers and debris, but the hotel register was still sitting on a counter. A Mr Jones was the last name in the book. Al Noderer, of the Chicago
Tribune
, pottering about amongst the wreckage near the station, picked up a perfectly good bottle of beer and an undamaged packet of Christmas crackers!

Somewhere along the road we came upon a British battery of 25- pounders getting into position near some trees. The men, stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat, were manhandling the fat rubber tyres of the gun carriages through the mud. There was a British major whom I shall never forget. He was tall and lanky and had buck teeth. He always seemed to be laughing and, for some reason or other, he reminded me of Edgar Wallace’s unforgettable character Bones. We seemed to come across that major all down the peninsula, and he was always laughing and always absolutely unperturbed. How that man loved his 25-pounders! He told us they were the greatest guns in the world, and when he put his hand on one of them you could see that he loved it almost like a woman. I never learnt his name, but, as Al Noderer said, he was ‘a great guy’.

We went back to Kampar for the night and took over a bungalow that had belonged to a Frenchman. It was beautifully furnished with a magnificent radio set. There was a cellar, too, but there was nothing in it. Near the Frenchman’s bungalow was a European Club. There wasn’t a soul in Kampar, but a Chinese ‘boy’ in a white suit still stayed behind because nobody had told him to get out. I’ll go back there some day and settle up for the bottle of Scotch whisky I signed for. The ‘boy’ insisted on somebody signing a chit for it. He had disappeared the next day.

On Christmas Day one of the war correspondents cooked a doubtful kind of bully-beef stew. We washed it down with liquor signed for at the club. Afterwards Al Noderer produced the packet of Christmas crackers he had picked up at Ipoh. We put on absurd paper caps and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and Norman Fisher, of Fox Movietone-News, took our photographs. It was the most peculiar Christmas I had ever spent and it got more peculiar afterwards.

As we were piling our belongings into the cars and trucks after lunch preparatory to moving off, there was a shout of ‘Aircraft!’ Two Japanese bombers came swooping over Kampar. Apparently they had seen our transport for they came straight towards us. I’ve never seen men scatter so quickly as we did. I raced with Al Noderer towards some shrubbery at the back of the bungalow, panting urgently as I ran, ‘I’ve never been bombed before. What do you do?’ ‘Get down on your stomach and stay there!’ said Al tersely, as he flung himself to the ground underneath a tree. I flung myself down near him; instinctively covered my head with my hands. I could feel my heart pounding against my chest. What will it feel like to have a few machine-gun bullets plugging into my back? I’m taking it better than I thought. I’m not in a panic but I’m horribly scared. I suppose there’ll be a hell of a noise when the bombs drop. Here it comes! I can hear the whistle so it must be close.

Down came a couple of bombs. I was scarcely conscious of the noise though there must have been plenty of it, because the concussion shook the tree above us. It was all over very quickly. Someone shouted out, ‘It’s all right, chaps! They’ve gone!’ The next thing I heard was Al roaring with rage, ‘We’ve been lying on a Gard-damned ants’ nest! The little so-and-sos are crawling all over me!’ We scrambled to our feet, and for the first time I was also aware that I had been bitten by ants. I was shaking at the knees when I stood up. It was the first time in my life that anybody had tried to kill me. I was glad I hadn’t panicked; but I was frightened. Anybody who says he isn’t frightened under bombing is either a freak of nature or a complete liar. Most people say that the more they are bombed the less frightened they are. It wasn’t so in my case. The more I saw of it the less I liked it … Throughout this little affair only one man had not taken refuge on the ground. He was Norman Fisher, who stood up with his movie camera and got some magnificent shots of a bomb actually falling from one of the Japanese planes and the subsequent explosion. Somebody ought to write a story about war cameramen some day.

We didn’t wait to see if the Japs came back; we got into the cars and got out of Kampar as quickly as we could.

*

From then on, as we moved back in the inexorable retreat towards Singapore Island, we spent our days dodging Japanese bombers. By now the Japanese had complete control of the air at the front, although once we saw a thrilling dogfight over Yong Peng. There were nearly always clouds in the Malayan skies and they made excellent and disconcerting cover for aircraft. As we drove along the narrow roads with a slit of sky above, every man in the cars became a ‘spotter’. Half a dozen times a day there would be a cry of ‘Aircraft!’; the Malay driver would bring the car to a paralysing halt; doors would be flung open; and we would bolt into the rubber trees beside the road. The Japanese planes came sliding out of the clouds when you least expected them and were on you almost at once. Bombs thudded down and machinegun bullets pinged through the trees. Cars passed us at times literally riddled with bullets and all glasswork shattered.

Henry Steel took us as close to the front as he dared without earning official disapproval. Once he, with Harry Standish, of the
Sydney
Morning Herald
, riding pillion behind the motorbike, almost ran into a Japanese advance guard at a bridge in Perak. They beat the quickest hasty in the unit’s history.

We interviewed Generals, Brigadiers and Colonels at their headquarters. They were all extraordinarily frank and gave us a true picture of the tactical situation. Much of it could not be printed for security reasons. It was only when we got back to Singapore that we met evasion and half-truths and such ingenious but pathetically transparent phrases as ‘a successful disengagement of our forces’.

Many times we came across the 2
^nd
Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and their lean-faced commander, Lieut-Colonel Stewart. There was something tremendously inspiring about these Scotsmen, and they fought from one end of the peninsula to the other almost to the last man. We met some magnificent Indian troops, including my old friends the Sikhs, who fought according to their tradition. I remember one young Indian officer who looked like a god; I have never seen before or since such an arrestingly aristocratic and beautiful face. And one day we nearly took to the rubber when a truckload of Mongol-eyed soldiers suddenly swung round a corner onto us as we sat by the roadside. They were Ghurkas with knots of black hair on their heads and they grinned at us as they passed.

We heard first-hand some unbelievable ‘escape stories’ until they became so frequent that we did not bother cabling them. One day on the west coast we came across four British officers with long, unkempt beards and ragged uniforms. They had just been landed by a naval patrol ship after twelve days of hair-raising adventures. The four had joined forces in an attempt to reach the coast after being separated from their units in confused jungle fighting near the border of Thailand. They had one compass and no maps and they spent days groping their way through dense jungle dodging enemy troops. The only food they had for five days was a few handfuls of rice, but finally they struck the coast and found an abandoned Chinese sampan. They managed to navigate the sampan towards Penang and reached it just in time for a big Japanese air raid. They hid in Penang for a day and then took to the open sea in the sampan again. Six days out from Penang they were sighted and picked up by a British naval vessel on Christmas Day. ‘They gave us a bottle of whisky and wished us a Merry Christmas,’ said one of the officers. ‘All we want to do now is to get some new kit and rejoin our units.’

One other escape story is worth recording. It concerned seven Ghurkas who were cut off in the severe fighting around the Slim River. Ten days later they reported back, grinning, to their battalion, after having covered 200 miles. During that time they had been captured no fewer than five times by the Japanese and each time they escaped. In the last break for liberty, they swam a wide river and then dressed themselves in sarongs and strolled calmly along a railway line in full view of the Japanese, who did not take the slightest notice of them. There were many other escape stories just as strange.

January saw ‘successful disengagements of our forces’ a nightly affair. The Japanese were infiltrating down the west coast, and apparently our Generals could devise no counter measures except a constant straightening of the line right across Malaya. The British and Indian troops were showing signs of physical exhaustion after weeks of unrespited battle. There were no reinforcements in sight and no chance of a rest. They were always on the move day and night. After a day of persistent air bombardments there was little chance of sleep after dark and the jungle and rubber country was nerve-racking at night. The Japanese would let off firecrackers in an attempt to draw counter-fire and so pinpoint our positions, and there was always a feeling that small parties of Japanese soldiers with Tommy guns and mortars were padding through the shadows of the trees in sandshoes. In the morning the Japanese might be behind you instead of in front of you. They were audacious and fanatical and flushed with success.

Indian drivers were falling asleep at the wheel with fatigue as the convoys wound like a fat snake along the roads. The roads were choked with convoys and the time came when the drivers were so tired that they didn’t care whether the regulation distance between trucks was observed or not. When a bomb straddled the road, the whole line of trucks had to come to a halt while the bomb crater was filled in. Japanese bombers did not neglect the opportunity. Red Cross trucks, ammunition trucks, water trucks, food trucks. Malaya was crammed with motor transport. The food problem was almost insoluble. The British ate one kind of food. The Indians all ate different kinds of food and had to get it. The Japanese carried a little bag of rice that lasted him for days; he lived off the country as he marched through it; therein lay the secret of his bewildering mobility and speed. Everything our soldiers ate had to be transported to them by road. There was nothing growing in the country that they could eat and there was dysentery and other diseases in the running streams. Back and back they went towards the sea, down a peninsula which has been described as hanging from the greater peninsula of Indo-China like the tail of a possum. Miles behind the line, squads of Indian sappers were systematically laying charges on every bridge on the road, ready to be blown up when the troops passed through. The Indians would step aside as we drove over, and there was something dreadfully dispiriting to see them take up their task again.