大象传媒

This story has been collected and transcribed by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author

The Chinese Gorillas were called the three star army, these were the fellows who caused all the trouble after the war. The British troops had to go out to Malaya after the war and try to halt the uprising by the Chinese Communist Army.

Then we had to go to Java because there was an uprising there. The Indonesians had been promised independence by the Japanese after the war. Java was then part of what was called the Netherlands East Indies that also included Borneo. The Dutch weren鈥檛 sufficiently organised to land so that鈥檚 why they sent in Indian troops. I was solely with Indian Troops and we landed there. They didn鈥檛 oppose us when we landed. The Indonesians were able to get their hands on weapons, which had been dumped by the Japanese along with mines, machine guns and vehicles. From September 1945 right up to the end of 1946 when we pulled out we had opposition the whole time. There was a water point a few miles from what is now called Jakarta. They fired at us every night and every morning we had to go out on road opening operations because every night they would mine the roads. There were civilian convoys bringing food and aid along the roads.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.