History - Page 11

When it comes to the Pacific War, most people believe that the first shots that began it all was Pearl Harbour.

Little do most people know that the first attack actually took place in Kota Bharu, the capital of Malaysian state of Kelantan, as part of the Japanese invasion of Malaya.

The Japanese landed at Kota Bahru at 12.25 am on Monday, Dec 8, 1941 and first attacked Pearl Harbour at 8am on Dec 7, 1941 (local times).

Are you sure Kota Bahru was the first to be attacked? You ask, as you read the dates.

Due to Malaya and Hawaii being on the opposite sides of the International Date Line, the Japanese actually launched its assault on Kota Bharu about 1 hour and 35 minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbour.

The Japanese attack on Kota Bharu and the whole of Malaya

Now the next question is why Malaya?

According to Australian War Memorial, Malaya was a key British colony prior to Second World War (WWII).

It was the source of large quantities of natural resources, particularly tin and rubber. Furthermore, it strategically provided a large defensive barrier to any landward advance on Singapore and its naval base.

The island was the cornerstone of British power in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Knowing the importance of Malaya, the Japanese began planning for an invasion as early as October 1940.

One local survivor told the Japan Times in 2009 that he remembered one particular high-ranking officer widely known as Kawasaki.

Before the war, the locals used to see him riding a bicycle around the villagers selling shrimp rice crackers and speaking fluent Malay. As it turned out, ‘Kawasaki’ was a high-ranking officer who was in-charge of the troops in Kota Bahru.

The first troop against the Japanese was the British Indian Army

When the Imperial Japanese Army first landed at Padang Pak Amat beach, they were ‘greeted’ by the British Indian Army.

Local survivors heard the Indian soldiers were singing Hindi film songs on the beachfront when they saw Japanese landing craft approaching.

Before the Japanese landing, the British had fortified the narrow beaches and islands with land mines, barbed wire and pillboxes.

Colonel Masanobu Tsuji in his book wrote, “The enemy pillboxes, which were well prepared, reacted violently with such heavy force that our men lying on the beach, half in and half out of the water could not raise their heads.”

True enough, the defence was working well, at least in the beginning. The Japanese casualties in the first and second waves were heavy.

While there were some progress, the British forces were not able to completely wipe out the landings on the beach.

Air attacks

The moment it was confirmed that the Japanese had attacked, the British air force at Kota Bharu received permission to launch an attack.

The first wave of seven aircraft made the initial attack at 2.10am. These aircraft continued to drop bombs on the Japanese until 5am.

All the Japanese transports were repeatedly hit at this time. Colonel Tsuji wrote, “Before long enemy planes in formations of two and three began to attack our transports, which soon became enveloped in flame and smoke.”

Despite the strong defense, the Japanese had three full battalions ashore at Kota Bharu by 10.30 that morning.

The British forces who were forced to retreat, fled the Kota Bharu airfield without destroying anything. This action left the Japanese invaders a fully working airfield along with fuel and ammunition.

At the same time, the Japanese troops also landed at Patani and Singora on the south-eastern coast of Thailand.

With this, the landings at Kota Bharu allowed the troops to proceed to the eastern side of the Malay peninsula. Meanwhile, the troops in Thailand advanced down the western side.

The local villagers’ experience

A group of 30 local villagers came across the Japanese forces during the invasion.

They tried to escape but the Japanese ordered them to dig trenches and stay inside to avoid getting shot in the gunfire exchange.

The locals had to dig the holes in the sand with their hands. Overwhelmed with fear, they stayed in the trench for three days.

When they finally came out from it, they found about 380 dead Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese then cremated their dead comrades.

They stayed in the areas for about two weeks before moving to other locations. The Japanese reportedly did not cause any problems for the locals taking away their livestock.

Only three villagers reportedly died during the attack at Kota Bharu.

The aftermath

As for the British and Japanese troops, there is no official death toll. For the Japanese, they suffered an estimated 300 deaths and 500 wounded. The British casualties and losses were estimated at 68 fatalities, 360 wounded and 37 missing.

Regardless, the attacks on Kota Bharu were one of the most violent battles of the whole Malayan Campaign.

The Burma Railway is infamously known as the Death Railway. It is because thousands of people died building it during World War II (WWII).

The Empire of Japan built it from 1940-1944 to supply troops and weapons in the Burma campaign.

The railway is 415-kilometres long connecting Ban Pong, Thailand and Thanbuzayat, Burma.

It is understood that between 180,000 and 250,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) were forced to build the railway.

However, not many remember that there were civilians working along the railway sacrificing their lives along the way.

It is estimated that there must have been more than 180,000 civilian labourers working on the railway.

They were mostly Javanese from Indonesia, Thai, Burmese as well as Chinese, Malay and Tamil from Malaya.

Sometimes referred to as romusha (the Japanese language word for labourer) in writing, they were also known as ‘the coolies’ by the Allied POWs.

The recruitment of Malayan labourers

Speaking of Allied POWs, Australian POW Hugh Clarke described on how these civilian labourers were recruited in his work “A Life For Every Sleeper, A Pictorial Record of the Burma-Thailand Railway.”

He wrote, “The Japanese at the end of 1942 resorted to many ruses to recruit an additional labour pool of over 270,000 civilian labourers. They included Chinese, Burmese, Thais, Indians, Malays and Eurasians. As POWs began moving north the Japanese placed advertisements in Malayan newspapers seeking labourers for work periods of up to three months in Thailand. Free rail travel, housing, food and medical services were offered together with pay at a rate of one dollar a day. The response was negligible so the Japanese resorted to press-gang methods. Free pictures shows were advertised at various theatre around Malaya and when full, the doors were locked and all males in the audiences put abroad trains and railed to Thailand.”

However, could the civilians escape from being recruited? There were reports of locals agreed to become spies for the military police or Kenpeitai in order to avoid being sent to work on Burma Railway.

Dr Robert Hardie’s accounts on Malayan labourers on Burma Railway

Dr Robert was a British medical officer serving with the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force and a plantation manager in Malaya.

After the fall of Singapore, he became one of thousands of POWs forced to work on the railway.

Throughout this period, he managed to keep a diary despite the numerous searches. His diary entries were later published in a book entitled The Burma-Siam Railway: The Secret Diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942-45.

He was reportedly an admirer of Malay culture.

On Aug 4, 1943, he wrote,

“When one hears of these widespread barbarities, one can only feel that we prisoners of war, in spite of all the deaths and permanent disabilities which result, are being treated with comparative consideration.”

Then on July 6, 1943, Hardie stated,

“A lot of Tamil, Chinese and Malay labourers from Malaya have been brought up forcibly to work on the railway. They were told that they were going to Alor Setar in northern Malaya; that conditions would be good – light work, good food and good quarters. Once on the train, however, they were kept under guard and brought right up to Siam and marched in droves up to the camps on the river. There must be many thousands of these unfortunates all along the railway course. We hear of the frightful casualties from cholera and other diseases among these people and of the brutality with which they are treated by the Japanese. People who have been near the camps speak with bated breath of the state of affairs-corpses rotting unburied in the jungle, almost complete lack of sanitation, frightful stench, overcrowding, swarms of flies. There is no medical attention in these camps, and the wretched natives are of course unable to organise any communal sanitation.”

Again on July 21, 1943, Dr Hardie wrote,

“The conditions in the coolie camps down river are terrible, Basil says. They are kept isolated from Japanese and British camps. They have no latrines. Special British prisoners parties at Kinsaiyok bury about 20 coolies a day. These coolies have been brought from Malaya under false pretence – ‘easy work, good pay, good houses!’ Some have even brought wives and children. Now they find themselves dumped in these charnel houses, driven and brutally knocked about by the Jap and Korean guards, unable to buy extra food, bewildered, sick, frightened. Yet many of them have shown extraordinary kindness to sick British prisoners passing down the river, giving them sugar and helping them into the railway trucks at Tarsao.”

What happened to the Malayan labourers when the war ended?

If you think that the suffering of Malayan labourers would end when the Japanese surrendered and the war finally ended, well, it’s usually not that clean-cut.

According to Anzac Portal, these civilians had no expectation of being rescued by military authorities when the war ended.

In other Japanese-occupied territories romusha were given supplies of food and medical attention by American troops arriving from August-September 1945 on.

Unfortunately, Allied authorities in Thailand and Burma prioritised their own military personnel leaving the romushas including the Malayan forced labourers perhaps last in line for help and supplies.

As for the repatriation of Romusha, it was managed by different authorities. The British Military Administration in Malaya sent missions to Thailand in November 1945 to aid the repatriation of Malayan laborers.

Overall for those who returned alive to their homes, no compensation were given to them. In Malaya, nonetheless, some received some clothing and a small amount of money… but many received nothing.

The unmarked and unknown graves of civilians of Burma-Thai Railway

After the war, the remains of the dead were relocated from former POW camps, burial graves along the railroad to official war cemeteries.

Overall, there were three war cemeteries which are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

According to Paul H. Kratoska in Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories, there are 12,043 Allied soldiers are buried in cemeteries in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Their gravestones seem to stretch on forever.

He further stated, “However, there are no cemeteries, and no individual gravestones, for the Asian labourers who died building the railway. They were buried if they were fortunate, or else abandoned in the jungle, or thrown into the river or into a common grave. In 1988, the site of a mass grave was found in Kanchanaburi by accident, and the bones of more than 700 bones were excavated. Villagers said it was a burial site used for the Asian railway construction labourers.”

According to Anzac portal, since they were not military personal they were not interred in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Furthermore, the identification of their bodies would be extremely difficult given the lack of records of where they buried.

To this day, there is no official record of how many civilian labourers died building the Burma railway.

Why were the Asian workers of Burma Railway, including the Malayan labourers, forgotten?

According to David Boggett in his paper Notes on the Thai-Burma Railway, while dead men can tell no tales, so the illiterate can write no diaries.

He stated, “Many of the Asian romusha were illiterate; poor, helpless peasants most forcibly conscripted or callously lured by false promises of riches and unaware of their ultimate destinations. While it is a matter of dispute as to whether Japan ever made any efforts to observe the Geneva convention (certainly the experiences of the POWs led them to believe that the Conventions were being deliberately ignored), the records kept of POWs movements for example from Singapore’s Changi prison to Thailand or from Thailand to Japan proper – suggest that at some perhaps higher levels, the intention of Japanese bureaucrats (as opposed to military staff on the ground) was, indeed accurate records of the POWs’ fate as obligated under the conventions.”

Boggett also added, “However, no such Geneva Conventions existed to govern the impressing or treatment of civilian labour; few official attempts were made to record the fate of Asian romusha. This lack of official Japanese documentation, coupled with the absence of almost any written records by the survivors themselves, has allowed the situation of Asian romusha to be minimise or even ignored.”

With no marked graves and no official records of their existence, it is no surprise why the civilian labourers of the Burma Railway including those from Malaya had been forgotten, even if their number could be way higher than of Allied POWs.