大象传媒

This story has been collected and transcribed by Mark Jeffers with permission from the author. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
---

We arrived in Malaya and the facilities as far as Indian and Eurasian had a poor time during the Japanese occupation. The Chinese weren鈥檛 so bad. The role was to assist in the restructuring of the country. The Japanese had stolen all the rice from the villagers; they weren鈥檛 allowed to keep any for themselves. The Japanese had taken all the equipment out of the hospitals as well; the hospital we had gone into was full of TB. There were only about 30-40 survivors when we got there.

There were not many beds and no bedclothes. The children had potbellies like in famine areas of Africa due to eating tapioca, high in starch, which gave them potbellies. We restored electricity and then we had to arrange the distribution of rice around different villages.

The Malays, the native inhabitants, were badly off. The electricity was restored, as was the distribution of rice. The Malays had a dislike of Chinese and slaughtered many including women and children. I was in control of a Japanese surrendered personnel camp of about a thousand, 1500. I organised some of the Japanese surrendered personnel to go into the jungle and collect bodies, some of which had been thrown down wells, and bring them back to the main road, which was about a mile away. In the dark it was quite eerie and we had to light torches of rubber and carry them in front of us. We carried them on stretchers and got them to the main road and put the bodies in lorries to be taken away and lined up.

The Chinese Guerillas 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.

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