大象传媒

(This chapter is part of Len Baynes' book '
The Will to Live
', an account of his wartime experiences with the Cambridgeshire Regiment, his capture in Singapore, and the four years he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese.)

That first day was spent in manoeuvres among the trees of local rubber plantations. Next day we marched off along the North-bound highway, to go into action for the first time. We were dive-bombed by Japanese Stuka planes as we went, and were glad of the drainage ditches that ran most of the way beside the road. After each of the Stukas dropped its one big bomb, it would return again and again to machine-gun us.

Private Gates was one of those scruffy types that no-one wanted in their platoon. The first time we experienced the terrifying sight and scream of a diving Stuka, it caused us all to dive into the nearest ditch. But no, not all; the rat-tat-tat of our Bren gun caused me to lift up my head in shame, as Private Gates stood out there alone firing his automatic weapon from the hip in the approved anti-aircraft fashion.

We crammed so much into those first few days, that my first impressions of Singapore remain very hazy, but it is the smell of that oriental city that first comes into my mind. It is made up, as I later discovered, from a mixture of garlic, fish, joss-sticks, frying oil, charcoal and probably much more; I came to like the smell, and now think of it with some nostalgia.

Next I recall bamboo poles poking out of windows, hung with beautifully clean washing. The Chinese women seemed to carry on with their daily chores right through the battle for Singapore, philosophically drawing their water from the wells, cooking outside their houses over their little buckets of charcoal even when there were bullets flying.

I think also of the wealthy Chinese gentlemen who passed by. We were told one could tell their wealth by the number of their wives. These preceded their husbands, each one with a springy bamboo pole over her shoulder, baskets suspended at each end of the pole carrying various kinds of merchandise. The women moved with strange bouncy steps which made them appear to move forward in a series of jerks, but this no doubt saved energy, as the upward bounce helped to carry them forward. There were on average five or six wives per husband. I was told that once a man acquired enough cash to purchase a couple of wives he need work no more, only supervise. From then on the profit on their labour would enable him to go on purchasing wives at an ever increasing rate! If true, no wonder the young men in China turned to Communism - probably more to establish an equal distribution of wives than cash!

Old Chinese ladies passed us, with minute feet only three or four inches long. Their big toes had been tightly bound under their feet in childhood until they became dislocated and were forced into the soles. Their tiny shoes had the heel in the centre so that the old dears had to balance on two points, and were consequently only able to take six-inch steps, travelling at a snail's pace.

Four days of digging trenches, moving on, being machine-gunned and dive-bombed, more moves - trenches - bombs, and all the time without a clue as to what was happening. We knew not whether the enemy were a thousand, a hundred, or maybe only ten miles distant.

Our platoon officer had told us we were not to fire at the enemy aircraft that were constantly bombing us, in order not to give our position away. However, I saw him open fire on a Stuka with his Tommy Gun, which has an effective range of only about twenty yards, while our effective Bren gun had to remain silent.

On the fifth of February we came under direct shellfire for the first time, and knew that the Japs were indeed close at hand. (We had just dug in under rubber trees, near the Straits of Johore.)

As we heard later, the enemy had moved down the mainland so rapidly by leapfrogging sea-borne landings continually behind our front line, so that there was never a front to hold. Now all that separated us from them was a narrow strip of water. Our sappers had blown the causeway up, but how long would that delay the enemy?

During the night, without our knowledge our own 55th Brigade artillery unit dug their twenty-five pounders in not far behind us. With first light they fired their opening salvo, and I thought for a moment that our end had come, as the ground rocked and the shells whistled low over our heads; but once I realized that it was our own battery firing, it seemed an auspicious beginning to my twenty-third birthday.

The guns across the water were soon silenced; what a pity our boys had so few targets; with our camouflaged enemy dispersed among the heavily wooded landscape, we had very little to fire at.

Our division had been trained for open desert warfare, and knew nothing of the right tactics for these circumstances. Our well-trained gun teams were knocked out one after the other by Stukas over the coming days.

We were moved around many more times during the next two days, each time digging fresh trenches, and always under air attack, At dawn the next morning we vacated our newly dug trenches yet again, and dug in near an evacuated R.A.F. camp, around the foot of a wooded hill, in the district known as Bukit Timor. This was the neighbourhood we were to hold, under constant attack, for the next four days; although the Japs tried their best to dislodge us, we never retreated. Our C.O. was decorated, he later told us, for our stand.

During that day we were constantly moved around as the situation developed, and the Japs probed on different fronts; by the time four o'clock came, having already dug ourselves in three times, we were too tired to do much more than scratch the surface of the sun-baked ground in the place where we were to need to be dug in most of all.

Our latest position was close to the R.A.F. hutments, and there was only barbed wire separating us. Looking across I saw the interesting initials N.A.A.F.I. (military canteen) over one of the buildings, and it was a long time since we had eaten.

I made my way over and entered the building through the unlocked door. It appeared that our airmen did not use their canteen for eating, as not a single comestible could I find, but literally thousands of bottles of everything from exotic Cherry Brandy and Creme de Menthe, to whisky and beer.

As I left, a machine gun opened fire on me from a position a couple of hundred yards away. I moved much faster on the way back than I had done when I came, and knew for certain now that the Japs had crossed the water. That evening we all came under small-arms fire; the enemy was now infiltrating the woods all round us.

It was at this time that our officer and his batman disappeared, and we didn't see him again until just before the capitulation. So I was from then on responsible for the platoon.

Looking back on the day's events as I peered out that night, I thought with shame of my actions earlier on. I professed to be a Christian, yet when a small half-naked Malayan boy had approached me, holding out a little hand smashed by shrapnel, I sent him off unaided. As he wandered slowly away, Lance Corporal Berry, one of our stretcher-bearers saw him and dressed his wound.

The sun rose on Friday the thirteenth of February; I am not superstitious, but this was to prove a very unlucky day for us all, even though it started off well with some breakfast arriving for the first time, from our base camp, and before eight o'clock.

I decided to take the food round to each section position myself, finally sitting on the edge of Cpl. Malin's trench to eat my own. As Malin had cracked up under fire, I had to spend most of my time with his section as they would otherwise have been leaderless.

Growing out of the trench side, a few inches from my head, was a sapling about two inches thick. As I was about to bite my first sandwich, a volley of machine-gun fire came from the direction of the R.A.F. campsite, and before I could dive into the trench the sapling disappeared, leaving a shaving-brush-like stump sticking a few inches out of the ground.

That first volley caught many of our company out of their trenches, and many were killed and wounded.

The small-arms fire continued for some time, keeping our heads down; then we heard the deeper sounds of mortars as they were brought to bear, and the bombs began to fall closer and closer to our trench as they bracketed us. We soon realized that it was only a matter of time before we received a direct hit.

Suddenly there was an extra loud whine, and a thud followed by a small bang right beside me. Looking round I saw the tail of a mortar bomb sticking out of the trench wall, a wisp of smoke was percolating through the earth. We had had our bomb, and it was a dud.

We knew of course that bombs never fall twice in the same place! In fact the Japs now cut down their rate of firing, the furious bombardment having probably used up their ammunition supply. As we were to discover, their troops had no headquarter support as had we. They carried their food (mainly rice) and ammunition round with them on handcarts.

Chapter 6

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