Although 1st Airborne Division was too much depleted to take part in the crossing of the Rhine, which began on 24 March, nevertheless it did come within half a plank of once more going into action against the Germans. As the ultimate catastrophe fell upon the Third Reich and the Russians poured across Poland and into Prussia, the German armies, forced almost literally back to back, retained one last aim; to hold the line of the Elbe facing east, in order to enable the streams of west-bound refugees to cross it and thus to come under British and American rather than Russian domination. Far more than any other enemy, the Germans feared the Russians. This was why they fought on for eight days after the death of Hitler on 30 April 1945.
During March and April a certain anxiety was felt among the Allies that some of the hard-core Nazi forces might make a kind of fortress out of Denmark and, as part of the process, set up a defence line along the Kiel Canal. 1st Airborne were at one time put into preparation to fly from England and drop to prevent this. None of the men was told: they could hardly have been expected to take to the idea, just as the war was ending. I myself never learned any details - they were too secret to get down as far as a mere Brasco - but I do very well recall waiting among others on the tarmac at Barkston Heath airfield, parachutes on, all ready to emplane. As a stick commander I had been given an envelope of sealed orders ‘not to be opened until airborne’. (We had been told that it was ‘an airborne exercise’.) In the event these sealed orders were re-collected by Captain ‘Shirley’ Temple, our G.3 Ops., before take-off. Whatever grisly task they had enjoined (for all I know, it may have been nothing to do with the Kiel Canal at all) there was now no more need for it. Nazi Denmark, like everywhere else in Europe, had capitulated. Copenhagen, therefore, needed to be occupied forthwith.
Since 1st Parachute Brigade were now all set for take-off, they were obviously the most convenient lot to send. We flew in to Kastrop airport and landed among scenes of rejoicing no less wild than those which had taken place in Brussels eight months earlier. This time, however, the triumph and jubilation were, if anything, even nearer to Cloud Nine, since this was - for the Danish people at all events — the end of the entire war. And there were, perhaps, two or three subsidiary reasons. First, during the Nazi occupation the Danes had suffered relatively little in the way of shortages. In fact, they themselves told us that the only thing they had really missed had been chocolate. So there were plenty of bottles of Schnapps, plenty of caviare, beef steaks and smoked salmon for the brave English (who had done nothing to save Denmark except to fly from England). Secondly, the Danes have a close ethnic affinity with English people. About fifty per cent. of us are Danish, by descent: it wasn’t hard to make sincere friends. Thirdly, however, most Danes are, by contrast with the English, light-hearted and pleasure-loving, good at merriment and without the self-consciousness and rather chilly disposition of so many English people. To most of British Airborne, this encounter with Copenhagen was the most delightful surprise of their lives. I have myself remained in love with the place ever since, and go there often.
One marked aspect of the surprise was the drinking capacity of the Danish girls. They didn’t at first glance strike one as seasoned drinkers. Danish girls are most of them very pretty, and the ubiquity of bicycles and long, woolly socks (no petrol, see) enhanced not only their charm but also the engaging impression of adolescence. My general experience of British soldiers during the war was that for all their talk of what they would do once they got to Belfast/Tel Aviv/Brussels et al., when it actually came down to brass tacks, a pint or two was usually enough to throw them off balance. Here and there you came across a Corporal Bater, but not very often. The Danish girls, even those no more than nineteen or twenty years old, were quite accustomed to ‘one lager, one schnapps; one lager, one schnapps’ in almost indefinite succession. This rattled our men, who found they simply could not do it. All the same, the girls were co-operative, sympathetic and understanding: indeed, they were all those things.
Another surprise I recall was the Wonder Bar. Brigade Headquarters was set up in the Dagmarhoos, one of the big public buildings in the centre of Copenhagen, situated on a square. Not far away, on the other side of the square, was a well-known fun haunt — to whit, the Wonder Bar. In appearance and decor the Wonder Bar was similar to many such places all over the Euro-American world. It was luxuriously appointed, thick-carpeted, white-coat-attendanted, discreetly piano-ghosted. In the centre was a free-standing, oval bar, perhaps thirty-five to forty feet long, surrounded by high stools. Upon these stools, if you dropped in of an evening, would be sitting unaccompanied girls. These girls were young and nearly all strikingly pretty. They were stylishly and quietly dressed, beautifully behaved and spoke fluent English (German, too, I dare say). They knew how to converse and were not ill-educated. You could, without the least embarrassment, have taken any one of them home to meet your mother. They were courtesans. We had never before encountered ladies of the town in the least resembling these. They were not ill-regarded or treated contemptuously, like their counterparts in England: and neither was the Wonder Bar regarded as anything but a sort of joke. ‘You don’t take your wife there,’ one of my Resistance friends said with a chuckle, ‘in case all the bad girls say “Hullo! Hullo!’”
I never, I may say, patronized any of these ladies. In liberated Copenhagen it was not merely unnecessary: if you were a British soldier you had virtually to ward off the girls with both hands. Otherwise it was hard to get any work done.
The reaction of the Danes to the departing Germans was noteworthy. The Germans had been ordered to lay down their arms, surrender their transport and then to proceed home on foot. As they marched along the streets, the Danes on the pavements stood still, fell silent, turned towards them and stared. Mile by mile, as they went on, the silence continued. The ‘buses and taxis switched off their engines, the cyclists dismounted and stood waiting while they passed. This the Germans found demoralizing. Here and there a group might try to sing, but it soon petered out and all that could be heard was the clump of boots - those boots which had stamped all over the faces of Europe. I hope they wore out well before the German frontier.
Lilac time along the western shore of Øresund, the blue sea stretching away to Sweden. Not too much work to do and friends everywhere. For the first time for more than five years, there was no need to take thought for the enemy. Walking on the battlements at Helsingør (Elsinore); looking across to Helsingborg and watching, midway, the German ships at their appointed task of clearing the narrow strait of mines. Every now and then would come a satisfying explosion, suggesting that a mine had gone up before being swept.
At the Royal Opera House there was a production of Porgy and Bess, and most of us went to see it. It was, of course, unavoidably under-rehearsed, but since it was so opportune — an opera by a Jew about negroes - nobody was concerned to find fault. Indeed, no one was concerned to find fault with anything much.
One night, coming out of a theatre, I found myself dancing arm-in-arm with a tubby, middle-aged Danish gentleman in a straw boater. Round and round: we grew very merry. I took off his hat, wrote ‘FRIJ DANMARK’ all round it and put it on. We attracted quite a little crowd. In the end I became a shade nervous in case some senior officer might pass by (we had all been adjured to maintain soldierly behaviour and remain correctly dressed at all times) so I bowed out, shaking his hand; but not before he had given me the hat. I’m afraid I didn’t offer him my red beret in exchange, though. It was much too precious to me: and of that more anon.
Despite the jollification we all knew very well - all save the older veterans - that for us this was nothing but a respite, a breathing-space. Hitler had ceased from troubling, Europe lay in ruins and someone was no doubt going to be detailed to pick them up. It wouldn’t be us, though. Far away, east of India, stood the still-unconquered Mikado. He might be groggy, he might be on the ropes, but he was still undefeated and he had an appalling reputation for fighting to the last man and taking no prisoners if he could possibly help it. The Americans, as well as our own poor men in Burma, had suffered untold horrors at the hands of the Japanese. And this enemy still remained against us in the field. If the experience of the Australians in New Guinea and of the Americans in Okinawa and Iwojima was anything to go by, there seemed likely to be a very bad time ahead.
The Japanese had no airborne forces. We had been told that they had said that they did not recognize airborne troops as soldiers and that their stated policy was to kill all whom they might encounter. I myself felt deeply, horribly afraid of the coming campaign and it was only pressure of group morale which prevented me from showing it.
I already knew that I didn’t qualify for demobilization. The criteria were simple and fair. Only two things counted; your age and the length of time you had been in the service. These, coinciding on a sliding scale, produced your ‘demob.’ number. The lower it was, the quicker you were due for release. Mine turned out to be 32. To be demobbed forthwith, I would have to have rated a number of 26 or lower: I’d only done five years.
So in due course I found myself again on Kastrop airfield, technically in command of ‘a hundred men’ - some due for demobilization, some in the same boat as myself. We were just a scratch lot: most were strangers to me. When we reached England an amusing incident occurred. The R.A.F. immigration control officer, armed in the usual way with a load of papers, came up to me where I stood at the head of my ‘hundred men’ and said ‘These chaps of yours aren’t carrying any goods liable to import duty, are they?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, slow in the uptake as usual, ‘I really don’t know: you see, I was only put in charge of them -’ ‘But they’re not carrying any imported tobacco, spirits, dutiable porcelain goods, jewels or similar precious articles’ - he thrust the papers, on a clipboard, under my nose - ‘ are they, are they? You sign here, by the way. There!’ It said ‘Captain Adams and a hundred men.’
I signed, and the hundred men, staggering slightly under the contraband loads, hoisted their bulging kit-bags, right-turned and marched into the adjacent hangar for a cup of tea.
I had a fortnight’s leave before reporting to - yes - to Bulford. I spent it at home, fishing on the Kennet, for it was the mayfly season. I fished wherever I would, for the riparian owners were mostly themselves away at the war, and the keepers, if not also away, were either in the local or readily amenable to a five-pound note. I kept thinking ‘What does it matter, anyway? I doubt whether all that many of us will be coming back.’ The state of mind of most people during the months between the defeat of Germany and the capitulation of Japan must, for those who did not experience it, be hard to imagine. The whole country was sick, sick to death of the war. Apart from our casualties and our orphaned children, our cities were all dismally dilapidated. There were shortages of everything - meat, eggs, milk, coal, clothes, sweets, petrol, even bread. Apart from these deprivations, everywhere marriages lay in ruins; and friends, sweethearts, sons, daughters, business partners - all those archetypal companions who make life worth living - were separated far, far apart. For most people, life had grown increasingly wearisome and had few or no pleasures. And this state of affairs was believed likely to continue, possibly even to get worse; no one knew for how long. In the Far East, thousands of our soldiers were dying of starvation and ill-treatment at the hands of a cruel enemy who did not recognize the Red Cross and who allowed his prisoners no medicines and no letters to or from home. Many of us were convinced that these evil men would probably take a long time to defeat, for each one of them was readier to die than to surrender. For example, when forced by the Australians to retreat to the northern beaches of New Guinea, they had constructed defence trench walls from the rotting bodies of their own dead before being literally driven into the water. Their air force had no lack of volunteer kamikaze pilots, and these, we reckoned, could not but cost us very dear.
One fine evening in mid-June I caught, downstream of the little plank bridge which crosses the Kennet at Halfway, the best trout I had ever yet taken from that happy river. I had no business there, of course: that made it all the more delightful. It was early dusk: I was using a Coachman and was standing on the gravel in the water and my gumboots. I had let my fly drift down to right angles of me, under the overhanging boughs of, I think, a weeping willow, though it may have been a horse chestnut, and was about to recover it when the trout rose. He ran upstream like blazes. When he leapt I did not for a few moments realize that it was my fish, for he seemed so far away. When I did realize it, I became excited by the size. He leapt two or three times, falling back each time into a bed of reeds. I fully expected to lose him, but at length he came out. Then he ran downstream, gaining any amount of slack line which I couldn’t take in fast enough and finally swimming between the legs of my boots before turning upstream yet again. I pulled one boot off, put my foot back in the water and freed my leader. The trout was still there and a minute or two later I had him on the bank. I remember thinking that while this would probably be the last trout I’d ever be likely to catch, nevertheless that evening couldn’t, now, be taken away. Like all the best things - the begonias, for example, or Jennifer - the adventure was illicit; but it couldn’t very well catch up with me. I was bound for the Far East. This was the best parenthesis I have ever known.
Then off to Bulford. So I’ve soldiered at Aldershot and at Bulford, though never at Catterick. John Smith and I reported together to H.Q. 5th Independent Parachute Brigade; he still Brigade Signals officer, I still a Brasco.
5th Para. Brigade, paradoxically, turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than 1st. This, to me, was unexpected, for the brigade were part of 6th Airborne Division and veterans of Normandy and the Rhine crossing (where they had had a lot of casualties). Yet no one treated us as anything but friends. The brigadier was Nigel Poett (now General Sir Nigel). Poett was, of course, a regular, and had commanded the newly formed 5th Brigade in the Normandy landings. He was a very courageous commander, who liked to show a lot of dash and personal example. For instance, he had been firm that on the night of 5-6 June 1944 he himself was going to be the first member of his brigade to land on Norman soil. During the brigade’s subsequent action east of the Orne, he had shown most gallant leadership; and had done so again in the so-called ‘Operation Varsity’ - the Rhine crossing operation - which began on 24 March 1945. (The casualties there were awful.) He was now taking 5th Brigade to India as the spearhead of the larger airborne force which was to follow. We were going to attack the Japanese as part of an amphibious invasion of the Malay peninsula.
Poett and I were, of course, not at all compatible types. (Later, after I’d been demobilized from the brigade, I learned from my friend Denis Rendell that one day Poett had recollected me, in the mess, as ‘that quite awful ass’.) Yet you couldn’t dislike him. He was polite to you. He wasn’t frigid, like Lathbury. Nor was his entourage made up of people from the Tatler. He may not have liked me personally, but he was always friendly, pleasant and what Roy Emberson used to call ‘genuine’. When I was in hospital in Poona, having had a minor operation, he came to see me. I didn’t forget that. I found his mess much jollier and fuller of likeable people than 1st Brigade’s: but then, of course, they weren’t brooding on the after-effects of Arnhem.
Names mean little or nothing except to the memoirist himself: but all the same I’d like to put down a few. Jim Webber, M.C., commanding the H.Q. Defence Platoon; an exceptionally kindly, gentle man; Denis Rendell, his second-in-command, one of Colonel Frost’s original officers in Tunisia. Denis, a true Mercutio, came of a military family. He had been awarded the M.C. after having escaped in Italy and proceeded to organize and maintain an Allied escape route through the Italian lines. He told me that he had stayed to do this on account of an Italian girl whom he didn’t want to part from. His M.C. cut little ice at home, for his father was a V.C. and his brother a D.S.O. John Reidy, Denis’s subaltern, was perhaps the most amusing person I have ever known; he made you howl and roll about. (‘Twarn’t what he said, ‘twas the way that he said it.) Tommy Farr, the G.3 Ops., (who had been wounded in Normandy), became a good friend; an even closer friend was Tommy Hanley, the Brigade H.Q. medical officer, with whom I was to share a billet in Singapore. I also, of course, made various friends among the officers (my ‘customers’) in the battalions, and of these I recall with particular warmth a certain John Awdry. Thirty years later I put him into The Plague Dogs as the parachute officer who refuses to shoot Snitter and Rowf on the orders of the time-serving Secretary of State. We met again recently and he was much the same.
The Brigade flew out to Karachi via Corsica and Alam Haifa: and it was at Alam Haifa that an incident occurred which still hurts in memory after more than forty years. The ‘plane had landed at mid-day and I was one of a group of officers invited to lunch in the R.A.F. officers’ mess. Of course, like all ‘ports of passage’ messes, it was accustomed to entertaining heterogeneous bunches of people - anything from royalty to civilian journalists.
Naturally, I had become very fond of my red beret. It was the one which I had been dished out with on my first night with 250 Company at Lincoln; the one Paddy Kavanagh had told me that we ‘didn’t quite’ tuck under our shoulder epaulettes. By now it and I had seen a lot together, and I had done it proud. There was a place in London where you could buy hand-embroidered regimental cap badges and have them stitched on. They cost a bit, of course, but they were worth it. John Gifford had encouraged his officers to wear them. Nearly all of us did, including myself. I had hung that beret up in innumerable messes, pubs., estaminets and hospitable homes in France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark. It had never occurred to me that it might be stolen. Before going in to lunch at Alam Haifa, I left it on a table in the ante-room in the usual way. When I came out it had been stolen. It was irreplaceable, of course: no embroidered cap badges in India. For my remaining six months in the Army I wore a plain brass cap badge, and felt the loss every day. I feel it still.
At Bahrein it was so hot that you couldn’t sleep and had no need to dry yourself when you stepped out of the shower. European camp personnel rose at first light, worked until about eight or nine a.m. and then went under cover. Work resumed at about five p.m. and continued until early dark. Only the natives could bear middle-of-the-day conditions. I have to say that from what I saw they seemed to work well enough.
Having reached Karachi from England in three days, we then took a week to travel by train to Bombay via Delhi. It was during this journey that Tommy Hanley taught me to play ‘Five Letter Words’, while I taught him to play piquet. These pastimes whiled away many wearisome, clanking hours.
It was during this trip that an incident took place which I wish with all my heart that I could lose from mind. In those days the railway carriages in India were huge and solid and stood very high off the ground. (For all I know they still do.) In my recollection, the distance from the sill of a carriage door down to the ground was a good seven feet. On this account, during halts, when doors were opened, iron ladders used to be placed against the doorway openings into the train’s corridors. They were not steep, and most people - most Europeans, anyway - used to descend facing forwards. This was mainly because one usually found oneself descending into a jabbering crowd of beggars, hawkers, porters and the like. If you had your back to them, your pocket could be picked before you knew what had happened. Coming down face forwards, you had to shove your way to the ground, firmly refusing to dispense alms and cigarettes or to buy fruit, eggs, chapatis and the like.
One evening during our week-long journey, we had stopped at some station or other between Karachi and Delhi, and I had decided to stretch my legs on the platform for five or ten minutes. As I was descending the ladder, a boy aged about twelve or fourteen, with an open cotton bag slung round his neck, pushed his way through the throng on the ground, made his way a rung or two upwards and flung his two arms up into my face. He had no hands. What he thrust into my face were the stumps of his wrists.
I recoiled in sickened shock and went back into the corridor. Some little way along it I met our Indian liaison officer, Captain Gokral. I asked him what possible explanation there could be of this horrible experience. ‘The boy’s too young to have been a soldier and too young, I’d have thought, to have been involved in any sort of industrial accident or -’
‘Oh, Captain Adams,’ he interjected, ‘when you’ve been in this country a little longer you’ll come to realize the kind of things that happen here. The boy will have been deliberately mutilated to excite pity. Somewhere in the town there will be a man like Mr Fagin making use of ten or more such boys. If they don’t bring back enough money each evening, they don’t eat.’
Does God know about this? I thought. During the last forty and more years it has never taken much to recall it to my mind. Captain Gokral was right: on that day I learnt a heavy matter about the world.
Arrived at Bombay, we went into camp at Kalyan, as very many have done before us. So it was here that we experienced our first monsoon. The monsoon was actually coming towards its end when we moved into Kalyan camp, but what we had of it was quite enough. And there was little or nothing to do, except to wonder what form our attack on the Malay peninsula was likely to take. I whiled away some of the time by going into hospital at Poona with an abscess of the nipple. When I came round from the anaesthetic, the Indian surgeon who had done the job was sitting beside my bed. ‘Well,’ he said genially, “didn’t know much about that, did you?’ I never learned his name, but I’ve always remembered what a nice chap he was, and how solicitous and kind. That was the time when Brigadier Poett took the trouble to come and see me.
Back in camp, one evening in early August, I was having a casual drink with Tommy Farr when I happened to say something about the Mikado and our forthcoming activities.
“Doesn’t look as though we’ll be making his acquaintance now, after all, does it?’ said Tommy. ‘However d’you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, haven’t you heard about this new bomb they’ve dropped?’
I hadn’t. Tommy told me. He himself felt sure that it could only push Japan into surrender. Myself, I didn’t know what to think. During the next two or three days we were told very little, but sitting in our muddy, sodden camp, we wondered and speculated. On 9 August the Allies dropped the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki. The war was over. We weren’t going to have to fight the Japanese now. How could any reasonable person in our position not feel glad and thankful for the bomb?
Quite soon afterwards the brigade boarded a ship called the Chitral and sailed for Malaya. It had been decided that, since the Allied attack had already been worked out and organized, the simplest way to carry out the reoccupation of Malaya would be for all units to do what they would have been going to do anyway, but without, of course, any contribution from the Japanese.
5th Brigade duly landed on the shores of the Malay peninsula, and I recall how, while clambering down from the Chitral, I hurt my left thumb rather painfully on the metal gunwale of the landing craft. (The landing craft was bouncing up and down in a choppy sea and the gunwale came up and hit my open hand, hard.) We marched about ten miles inland and passed the night in torrential rain and a rubber plantation. No one slept: you couldn’t. I came to realize that prolonged exposure to this sort of rain would be bound to make anyone, however fit, unserviceable. Jungle warfare was something to feel grateful to have been spared. No wonder 14th Army veterans tended to be touchy on the subject.
Next morning we found ourselves the centre of a crisis. We were white! It was imperative, for political reasons, that the first Allied troops to enter Singapore should be white and not Indian. Apparently this vital matter had hitherto been overlooked. We, at the moment, were the nearest white troops to Singapore; so we must re-embark and sail there forthwith.
And so we did; and a foul march back to the ship it was, on foot, through the sweltering humidity and the rubber groves. The salt tablets with which we had been issued were palatable and refreshing, but even so a lot of people dropped out along the roadside. We simply weren’t used to these conditions, we husky European parachutists.
I rather think it was on 3 September that we landed at Singapore. We weren’t the only white troops to arrive. There were other units — as many as could be rushed in at short notice — veterans of the Burmese war. Initially, these didn’t take too kindly to 5th Parachute Brigade, who had only been in the Far East for about five minutes. Such feelings, however, were soon swallowed up in the general reaction to what we found on entering the city - incidentally, the third capital in which I had happened to have been with the first relieving troops.
We were not, of course, expecting acclamation, as in Brussels or Copenhagen. This was not a European capital. However, from my own direct, first-hand experience I can assure the reader of one thing. The inhabitants of Singapore were beyond all argument glad to be rid of the Japanese. They had had three-and-a-half years of the Dai Nippon Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere, and as far as they were concerned you could keep it. There had been precious little prosperity, and no prospect of any.
Most of us were already mentally inured to the poverty, squalor, disease and beggary common to Oriental cities. I had myself experienced not only Karachi and Bombay, but also Cairo and Alexandria, Jerusalem, Amman, Ma’an and, of course, in weekly doses for a year, Gaza, that celebrated couple of shit-bins and a camel. Yet all these places had been, in their own ways, going concerns, and were inhabited by people pursuing traditional styles of life which collectively they more or less accepted. You knew where you were and felt that at least there was a certain stability about local ways and daily life, even if those ways were not ours.
By contrast, you felt at once that throughout Singapore there was something badly wrong; a dislocation which seemed to permeate everything. The place might be compared to a run-down engine which was being mishandled and likely at any moment to seize up for lack of oil or water or because of flat batteries. It was like a city in a fantasy film, a city run by some sort of intelligent apes with just about enough know-how to keep things going at the roughest level. To start with, inflation was over the moon, but although that was one of the basic factors it wasn’t, of course, among the visible, tactile first impressions which struck us at the outset. Everything was worn-out or broken: nothing worked properly and no Japanese seemed particularly aware of it. John Smith (who was, you will recall, Brigade Signals officer) told me that the whole telephone exchange was in the most awful state. I myself, as Brasco, couldn’t find a single refrigerator on the Island in working condition: the Japs just weren’t interested in refrigerators, let alone in air conditioning. (The Island, by the way, is about the same size and shape as the Isle of Wight.) Other specialists - Sappers, R.E.M.E. and so on - reported similar states of affairs on their respective fronts.
The brigade’s first task, of course, was to get the Allied prisoners out of Changi jail. As the world has learned, their condition was very bad indeed: too bad to try to describe. They were divisible into the dying, those who would soon die, and those whose lives would be shortened on account of what they had suffered.
Indifference, callousness and cruelty are three different things. Most of the horrible suffering we saw was really due, I think, to indifference: that same indifference which had left the refrigerators and the sewage works to break down. The Japanese were indifferent to mortal illness. You can see the like any day in the treatment of animals by deprived or backward people all over the world. These prisoners were not animals, however, but human beings. It was hard to believe, except that it was there before your eyes, that one group - any group - of human beings could be indifferent to another group to a degree which had brought about such suffering as this.
So much for the Japanese collectively. Those who actually had the task of guarding and dealing with the prisoners, however, needed, to achieve this result, to be more than indifferent. They needed to be callous - to administer the suffering day by day and not to care about it. Finally, a third category had to be actually cruel - that is, to inflict torment and suffering, over and above that brought about by starvation, squalor and neglect, and - yes, I’m afraid - to enjoy it.
Of course we were angry. Wouldn’t you have been? I have avoided dealings with the Japanese ever since: the only dignified way, really, of keeping in check the feelings aroused by that terrible business. Though if a Japanese asks me sincerely for forgiveness, I will forgive; as I know certain other people have. And before you laugh, reader, at the absurdity of the very idea, let me tell you that I have been asked for forgiveness, with sincerity, by Germans; more than a few. One lot were Christian pilgrims to Coventry: they were carrying a brick, which they showed me, from Dachau, to be built into the new cathedral.
I am not going to try to describe what it was like dealing with the released prisoners, or organizing such immediate relief as we were able to administer before the specialists took over. The Brigade as a whole had other necessary things to be seeing to — so many that you wondered whether they’d ever be done - but until further notice all medical officers and medical staff on Brigade strength remained on duty at the jail and the hospitals.
As I have said, one of my closest friends at this time was the Brigade H.Q. medical officer, Tommy Hanley (who was only about my own age, twenty-five). That evening, in his continued absence at the jail, I grabbed a billet for us and got his gear more or less laid out along with my own.
Tom himself came in about midnight, exhausted. There was no electric light (you have to realize that at the outset there were no services at all in Singapore, even the water not being reliably potable until treated), but my batman, Tommy Hearn, had managed to scrounge a Tilley lamp and some paraffin, and we conversed while Tom did his best to relax and finish his unpacking. The humidity was appalling and we were both sweating to an extent which made an ordeal of any activity whatever.
‘Do you know, Dick,’ said Tom, ‘if I had my medical books here - the ones I left in London - I could write an article which would burn the covers off The Lancet? Medically speaking, it’s almost unbelievable. There are diseases down there which no European has contracted in living memory and hardly any living European can ever have seen at all.’
‘How do you diagnose them, then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s not hard to diagnose,’ replied Tom. ‘Not hard at all. The symptoms - once I’d told you what they were you could pretty well do the diagnoses yourself. They - well, they thrust themselves upon your attention, so to speak.’ I could see that he was trying not to cry. ‘Of course,’ he went on at length, ‘I’d foreseen for a while back that it was going to be very bad, but not like this.’
‘Is it - well, copable with?’ I asked.
‘They’re flying in antiseptics and all the other stuff they can from Ceylon, round the clock,’ answered Tom. ‘And flying patients out, too, of course: all the ones they reckon can stand to be flown. Medically speaking, this is something that’ll probably never be seen again. Anyway, let’s finish up that rum and get to sleep.’
The following morning Brigadier Poett sent for me personally, thereby cutting through at least two ‘usual channels’. As I’ve said, he was well-known as a getter-onner when he wanted something done.
‘You’re the Brasco,’ he began.
‘Sir.’
‘There isn’t a ‘fridge on the Island that works.’
‘Sir.’
‘But there are any number of ‘fridges, I’m told.’
‘Sir.’
‘From now until it’s complete, your job is to get a working ‘fridge into every officers’ mess in the brigade.’
‘Sir.’
‘Any questions?’
‘Yes, sir. Do I get any technical help?’
‘You can commandeer anyone or anything you think you need, on my authority. As for what you do, that’s up to you. Now get on with it.’
I got. I had my jeep, my Brasco’s corporal (a rather colourless individual) and Tommy Hearn, a batman/driver who certainly wouldn’t have disgraced C Platoon. It seemed to me that the first thing we needed was someone who knew why the ‘fridges didn’t work, and what was required to make them work.
So began the most unorthodox and extraordinary job of my whole time in the Army. We had always been taught that R.A.S.C. officers had to be highly flexible and capable of turning their hand to whatever might arise. Well, here was a real ingenuity test. Poett was not a man likely to be patient with slow results, either.
After a bit I found a Chinese civilian called Mr Kwek Choon Chuan, who confessed to having been a refrigerator engineer before the fall of Singapore. He explained to me that the ‘fridges all ran on some fluid called ‘Free-own’. But there wasn’t any Free-own: not anywhere in the Dai Nippon Co-Prosperity Sphere. There wouldn’t be any nearer than Ceylon. If only he had some, he could set about the job of tackling each ‘fridge individually and making it work. Without Free-own, the job couldn’t even be attempted.
Mr Kwek, like everyone else, needed money, for at a stroke all Japanese currency had been declared invalid, possessing no exchange value. He had struck me right away as a nice chap and we got on well. I at once obtained authority to have him paid a reasonable wage. However, this still left two problems: how to procure the Free-own from Ceylon and where to find the manpower and transport I would need to get the ‘fridges to Mr Kwek (or him to them) and then distribute them to the various officers’ messes.
Those who know the Army will appreciate the impracticability, at such a time, of indenting in writing to Ceylon for urgently needed Free-own. We were in a city where we had arrived to find nothing working - no repaired roads, no gas, no electric light, no refrigeration, no air conditioning (Singapore is spot-on the Equator), no telephones, nothing potable out of a tap - you name it, we hadn’t got it. From Singapore to Ceylon is something like 1,500 miles. (No jets in those days.) The foremost out-going priority was for sick and/or dying men. I could never have got a place on a ‘plane for Ceylon. I doubt whether the Brigadier himself could have got one. Of the inward priorities I have no idea: they must have been worked out daily, I imagine, at a far higher level than mine. Mr Kwek’s English was good, but not up to explaining to me in detail exactly what sort of a fluid Free-own was, how it worked, how it was packed, how it behaved at equatorial temperature, whether it evaporated, how it ought to be stored, how long it lasted and how much we were going to need. How much space would it take up on an incoming ‘plane? Apart from all this, I didn’t even know whether there was any Free-own (or any to spare) in Ceylon; and if there was, who was in charge of it, where to look for it or whom to ask for it. I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, and I was going to see my first Heffalump, in the form of Brigadier Poett, quite shortly.
It was at this point in the story that the grey-eyed goddess Pallas Athene appeared. As the reader will recall, she often used to appear in the likeness of somebody or other. This time it was Frank Espley, no less.
Walking along the street with Mr Kwek, I became aware of a soldier wearing a shoulder-flash which I had never seen before. It was quite big - almost as big as a Pegasus flash - and depicted, if I remember rightly, a yellow aeroplane on a blue ground. The regimental flash above it was ‘R.A.S.C.’ I stopped the man and asked him what his unit was. He told me that they were something very new in the R.A.S.C., namely, an air supply company; he wasn’t sure how big, but it was a major’s command. I told him to take us to his leader forthwith. Into his jeep we piled and off we set for the outskirts of Singapore.
The major turned out to be Frank Espley! A field officer at twenty-five. This wasn’t so very surprising. Frank had always stuck out a mile - a born officer. He had been promoted Captain at twenty-one and given a virtually independent command; R.A.S.C. transport officer in a medical field ambulance unit. Well, here he was in Singapore, with the command of a completely new kind of R.A.S.C. unit, whose work involved daily co-operation with the R.A.F. (and with the Yanks, too, I gathered, if the situation should require).
We fell on each other’s necks and talked long and happily of old days (three-and-a-half-years ago!) in Northern Ireland. Of course there was no kind of lifemanship between Frank and myself, but all the same I felt easier because if he had a crown, I at least had wings. It amused and delighted me to hear his men speak of ‘Major Espley this’ and ‘Major Espley that’. As far as I could make out he’d become a sort of John Gifford. They obviously thought the world of him. Did he send chaps to Doullens twice by night? I wondered. He was proud of his company. They could do anything, he said - and had already proved it in many a tight supply corner.
In this way, quite naturally, came up the matter of the Free-own. Frank listened carefully and asked for all the necessary information - most of which, as I’ve explained, I hadn’t got. Finally he said ‘Right, Jeep’ (it was splendid to be called ‘Jeep’ again): ‘I can’t go to Ceylon myself, obviously, but I’ve got a first-rate chap who goes regularly and he’s top-hole in emergencies like this.’
Frank thereupon sent for his trusty subaltern (whose name I can’t remember) and told him, in effect, not to bother to come back from Ceylon next time unless he brought untold floods of Free-own with him. In less than three days I had it in my possession and at my disposal.
I knew where all the ‘fridges were and so did Mr Kwek. We had the power to commandeer them. What we now needed, however, was manpower, transport, floor space and people who were ready-to do what Mr Kwek told them. (In those days Europeans didn’t usually like working to the instructions of non-Europeans.) Frank’s lot were far too busy to help and anyway, 5th Para. Brigade’s ‘fridges were none of their business.
It was here that desperation brought forth ingenuity. To explain, I must digress.
Each of the two British airborne divisions included, as divisional troops, an Independent Parachute Company. Their special job, in an airborne operation, was to jump first, to secure the dropping zone, mark it out with coloured smoke and fluorescent panels and then do whatever might be necessary to hold it for the in-coming troops. After the drop, they came under the direct control of the Divisional Commander as a tactical reserve. During the Arnhem operation, 21st Independent Parachute Company, under their famous commanding officer, ‘Boy’ Wilson, had played a vital part, first in holding the dropping zone and then in the defence of the Oosterbeek pocket. With 22nd Independent, their counterpart in 6th Division, I had not had a great deal to do until 5th Brigade actually reached Singapore. However, I had certainly got to know them then, as we went about our task of patching and mending the bled-white city.
As you might suppose, the people in the Independent companies tended - some of them, anyway - to be highly individual, not to say well-nigh idiosyncratic, in character. They were entertaining. Not only was the relationship between officers and men more personal and rather less formal than in the infantry battalions, but the sort of people you were likely to come across - at any level - were in some cases distinctly out of the ordinary. Apart, of course, from physical fitness and a high standard of self-reliance, what the Independent companies really valued was motivation. As long as a man possessed that in a high degree, they seemed positively to welcome unconventionality. You were quite likely to find yourself dealing with a former lecturer from Warsaw university, a couple of George Orwell’s old comrades from Spain, an ex-Dutch Resistance man, or indeed anybody at all whose one overwhelming desire was to get at the enemy. They cared little for any officers but their own, and the quality of those officers was high.
22nd Independent had a very nice, comfortable little mess, in a relatively high-up and airy location on the outskirts of Singapore. Compared with other units, there were relatively few officers and, as in 250 Company, there was a pleasantly friendly, informal atmosphere. The commanding officer, Major Lane, was a quiet, down-to-earth, direct man who seemed to take everyone as he found them (he probably needed to, in his job). He had a marvellous line in rude stories, but he didn’t compromise his position as C.O. by telling them very often. If ever an officer’s authority rested on individual personality, it was Major Lane’s.
22nd Independent - like every other unit in the Brigade in those early, exiguous days in Singapore - often found that they could do with the services of the Brasco. I took good care to cultivate them, their informal readiness to oblige you without military formality (and their relative carelessness about rank) being a great help to myself, who often had problems that needed a hand or two, and no soldiers of my own to draw upon. I took good care that 22nd Company got their fair share - their distinctly fair share — of whisky, cigarettes, chocolate and whatever else was going in the way of amenities.
They liked Mr Kwek and treated him as they treated people of all nationalities who were on our side. There was no awkwardness for him in their mess.
It was in these circumstances that there grew up a friendship between myself and Independent’s second-in-command, Captain Doug. Campbell. Doug., although very different from Paddy Kavanagh, also (I should imagine) must have struck a lot of people as the very acme of a parachute officer. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, whose sheer physical appearance was impressive. Instead of the bravado and sometimes rather exhibitionist dash of Paddy, he had an air of smooth, easy-going optimism and unshakeable reliability. In story-book terms, you could picture Doug. putting his shoulder to a heavy, barred door while the others stood back, and the door collapsing inwards, Doug. thereupon remarking ‘Well, I reckon that ought to be all right now.’ His quiet good nature and self-confidence - the self-confidence of a titan - must have made a very firm fulcrum for that disparate bunch of unorthodox heroes.
It wasn’t long before Doug. and I discovered that something we had in common was a passion for swimming. By this time the Brigade had managed to get one of the swimming pools in Singapore into working order, but it was usually as full as you’d expect and anyway what Doug. and I fancied - if we could get it - was something to extend us a little more. This was how we came to invent point-to-point swimming.
There are two huge reservoirs - great, inland lakes, each about two miles long and half a mile broad - on the island of Singapore, known as the Peirce and the MacRitchie. At this time neither of these was under any supervision whatever. They were remote and lonely. The Peirce, actually, was too remote for our purpose, for it lay in rather dense jungle in the very centre of the Island; the access roads were in bad repair and the overgrown shore seemed a likely place for snakes. The MacRitchie, however, was exactly what we wanted. The open, sandy foreshores were accessible and there was no one about at all. The temperature of the water, of course was well up in the eighties or even a little more.
The MacRitchie is irregular in shape, with points and inlets all round the circumference. Doug. and I - it gives me a pang now to think how very fit and energetic we were - used to take a jeep out to some convenient place and stroll down through the trees to the shore. Then we would select some bay or point to swim to on the far side of the reservoir - anything from half to three-quarters of a mile away. It was splendid to find yourself far out in open water, making leisurely for the other shore. Having got there, we would lie around in the sun, relax and talk about nothing until we felt ready to go on. Then we would select another place to make for, this time usually somewhere further along the same shore, perhaps across an inlet or round a point. In this way we might quite often I suppose, have swum two or three miles in an afternoon, before drifting lazily back to the mess for whatever there might be in the way of a drink and a meal. Looking back on it, I can’t remember many things I have ever done which were more enjoyable than this.
My own anxiety was for my batman, Tommy Hearn. Tommy couldn’t swim a stroke, but he didn’t want to be left out of the fun to pass the afternoon idling by the jeep. So he used to thrash across the reservoir on an inflated inner tube. The trouble was that he wouldn’t keep inshore: he was determined to follow us across. We left him to his own devices, for we had come to extend ourselves and settle into the satisfying rhythm of fairly long-distance swimming. When you were at last lazing on the warm sand of the destination beach, however, it didn’t exactly add to your peace of mind to see Tommy flailing along, more than four hundred yards out.
‘What on earth is he going to do if the valve blows?’ I asked Doug. ‘Or if something punctures the tube, come to that?’
‘P’raps it won’t,’ replied Doug. sleepily. He was a man who positively seemed to create calm and security. In his ambience, things didn’t go wrong much. Anyway, he was relaxing after what must have been a very bad, stressful year: I don’t know - I never asked. I expect he’d have manhandled Hearn out somehow or other; if not, well, many airborne soldiers were silly, reckless sods, anyway, and it was my batman, not his.
From all this the reader will no doubt have grasped that, although I had no soldiers under my own command - apart from my administrative corporal — I was nevertheless able to find a few spare people to give Mr Kwek a hand with the refrigerators. We got the job done, every mess in the Brigade duly received its working model and I reported as much to the Brigadier. However, he was now somewhat preoccupied with other matters.
Singapore was by this time getting back on its feet and the place was daily becoming more normal. So was the military set-up. Several fresh units were arriving. A regiment of Ghurkas came into camp next to us. It was the first time that I had had any experience of these renowned soldiers, and I was as deeply impressed as everyone else who has had to do with them. Not only was Lord Mountbatten in Singapore (he had presided at the formal surrender of the Japanese on 12 September) but also General Slim, the commander of the 14th Army, which had first retreated through and then re-conquered Burma.
As I got to know a fair number of people who had served in the Far Eastern campaigns, I realized - we all did - that most of them felt a certain sense of grievance and resentment against people coming out from the United Kingdom. They thought not only that they themselves had had a very bad time, fighting the worst and most merciless of all enemies under horrible conditions, but also that the Allied European armies had been given priority over them and that they had been left at the bottom of the list for equipment and reinforcements. The press called them ‘the forgotten army’ and I personally came to be convinced that there was a good deal of truth in it. They had first defended India and then re-conquered Burma on a shoestring, and they reckoned little to people newly out from England who had not been through what they had. It was widely believed that General Slim himself shared his soldiers’ views. He had commanded them through some horrible actions — Kohima, Imphal and Myitkina must have been as bad as anything that took place during the whole war — and it would have been surprising if he had not thought as they did, especially as it was he himself who must have felt more frustrated than anyone else by the shortage of supplies.
Brigadier Poett was keen for General Slim to dine in 5th Brigade’s mess, and in due course he came. I got the impression -I think all the junior officers did - that he actually meant to show how little he cared for red berets and for whatever reputation they might have brought with them from Europe. This - if it is true -was perhaps a bit unfair, for Brigadier Poett had shown himself, in two airborne operations, to be a most heroic and competent commander. He had, however, always been well supplied and he hadn’t been in the Burmese jungle.
General Slim turned up late for dinner, without (unless I’m much mistaken) having changed out of the day’s working clothes. He wasn’t complimentary about anything and he wasn’t conversational or warm to the junior officers (as General Dempsey, commanding 2nd Army in Europe, had been on an earlier occasion at which I was present). In fact, not to mince words, he seemed off-hand, grumpy and not particularly concerned to conceal it. I had — and still have - nothing against Brigadier Poett, and the professional ambitions and aspirations of regular Army officers meant nothing to me; but I think that if I had been Evelyn Waugh I might have felt sardonically amused by the Brigadier’s compunction to show respect and to try to please the General, and the General’s corresponding implication that he cared for none of it. It was a distinctly sticky evening: there wasn’t much conversation, and it was embarrassing to hear the Brigadier’s courteous remarks dropping like lead pellets between the General’s corroborative nods and shakes of the head.
It was at about this time — as a lot of the fun went out of Singapore, the notorious 13th Para. Battalion mutiny took place, and there began, coincidentally, to be talk of the Brigade moving on to cope with the troubles in Java (which it eventually did) – that I became a great deal more conscious of something of the greatest importance to me. I qualified, and was due, for what was known as ‘Class B’ release. This was demob. queue-jumping. The Government - it was Attlee’s Socialist Government now, of course, Mr Churchill having been heavily defeated in the ‘khaki election’ earlier in 1945 - had decided that with the war won, it would be in the public interest for certain categories of people to be demobbed and back in their civilian occupations as soon as possible. One of these categories was that of undergraduates whose academic courses had been interrupted by the war. I was officially told that I qualified and so was a friend of mine at H.Q., Rob Stevenson. Naturally, we became expectant.
However, weeks slid by and nothing happened. At length, having talked it over with the Brigade Major and one or two other senior brigade H.Q. officers, I decided to ask the Brigadier if he could help. I requested a personal interview and got it.
The Brigadier’s greeting, after I had saluted and been told to stand easy, was not particularly cordial. In reply to his asking what I wanted, I said ‘Well, sir, as far as I can see I’m being mucked about for my Class B release.’
I guess it wasn’t very tactfully put. People aged twenty-five aren’t always terribly diplomatic. Perhaps it seemed to imply inappropriate criticism of authority: I don’t know. Anyway, the Brigadier replied ‘It annoys me when you say that. Class B release is a privilege, for which anyone who gets it ought to feel thankful. It’s not something to demand.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that surely the position was that the Government had decided that it would be best for the country if certain categories of people - but you don’t say that sort of thing to brigadiers. I apologized and said I didn’t want to press the matter against his wishes.
However, the Brigadier, as was often his way, having said a piece to make it clear who was the boss, then showed himself ready to be reasonably helpful. As though grudgingly and against his will, he said ‘Well, if I send a telegram about it, stating the details - which you can give to someone in the office - will that satisfy you?’ I said it would, thanked him very much and got out.
My release duly came through, but not Stevenson’s: a pity, as I’d hoped we might have been able to travel home together. But now another obstacle appeared. I — and others — were supposed to be sailing home on the S.S. Orontes. She was known to be somewhere between Hong Kong and Singapore, but that was all that was known. As she became more and more overdue we grew worried, for in those days you could never be sure of anything and for all we knew she might well have been diverted elsewhere. At length the delay became quite the talk of Singapore. I used to go down every day to the docks to have a look. So did many others. When at last she arrived, a large blackboard was put up at the berth, saying ‘Believe it or not, the Orontes!’
I realized, now, that I was glad to be getting out of the lashing, three-times-a-day rain of Singapore, and out of the humidity and damp. When I came to pack I found a lot of things ruined either by rust or by mildew.
The prospect of actual release from the Army had given matters a different aspect altogether. It took six weeks to sail home but, naturally, it was a happy voyage for everyone on board. From Biscay onwards we were in the heart of winter, and after the Equator it struck cold indeed.
At the demobilization centre everything went smoothly. Indeed, they seemed to me anxious to rush us through as quickly as they could. For the final formalities, I found myself in the office of a fairly young, rather abrupt major, who told me to ‘sign here, and here’ and gave me my Class B release papers (which I still have).
‘That’s all,’ he said at length, as I stood waiting.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I replied. ‘I wonder, could I ask you to be so kind as to look into the case of a friend of mine, a Captain Stevenson, a fellow officer due for Class B, whom I left in Singapore? I’ve got his details written down on this bit of paper -’
‘Why don’t you get out?’ he said. ‘You’ve got your release: I don’t know what more you want.’
It seemed a fitting conclusion to the Army. Quite as good, in its way, as the Aldershot ‘bus conductor’s ‘’Ow the ’ell d’you expect me to know?’