JAPS. AND MALAYA

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 March 1943, Page 2

JAPS. AND MALAYA

RE-TAKING DECLARED EASY

Malaya, though temporarily under the conqueror’s heel, has a lively faith that its deliverance is certain and that possibly before very long. By most of the natives the Japanese are regarded as passing visitors —and often they are told so openly (wrote B. Whittingham-Jones, in the London “Daily Telegraph.”)

Little has been heard about conditions in Malaya since the invaders in the first flush of success, streamed down it and into Singapore. Now, however, the mystery has been relieved, at least in part, by the arrival in London of a British mining engineer who w’as actually there during the campaign and after its close, and who was able to make good his escape only in June. This homecomer is Mr. Harry Knight, who has lived in Malaya for 16 years, and what he has just told me is a remarkable story. Perhaps its most heartening feature is his belief that Malaya will be just as easy to re-take by the United Nations when the time comes as it was to take by the Japanese. The Peninsula, he assures me, is very lightly held. North of the Straits of Johore there was no sign, at least when he left, of coastal defence. Little has been done in the way of the construction of new aerodromes and the military garrison is small.

From the time of the Japanese occupation in January until his escape, Mr. Knight twice travelled nearly the whole length of the Peninsula through the jungle on foot, a journey of some 300 miles each way. Frequently he was in communication with interned British prisoners, thanks to Malay and Tamil servants and runners, who willingly acted as messengers. His escape by junk from Port Swettenham to Sabang, in Sumatra, was arranged by a friend. Several days he spent idling in a Chinese tea shop, and then a member of the crew of a Dutch submarine on patrol came in, spotted him as British, and offered to convey him to safety. „ Under the Japanese the output of rubber is at least 75 per cent, of the normal pre-war production. The vield of tin, on the other hand, is less than 25 per cent, of what it was owing to the wholesale destruction of the dredges by the “scorched earth policy and to the inability of the invader to make or secure the indispensable spare parts. Such tin as the Japanese are obtaining comes mostly from Chinese opencast workings. The railways, though there is plenty of rolling-stock, are operating patchily. Coal is very scarce apa wood is being used instead. The only European prisoners who are confined in internment camps a>'e military and police, with a few recalcitrant civilians. . The great majority of European civilians iesident in Malaya and all Government servants have returned to tneir Ola jobs. So long 'as they give the apbearance of working normally, theie is no intimidation and little restriction on their liberties. n lantNo objection is made.io old P la fU ers and miners wandering about the country provided they W away from military, industrial and railway centres. Woe betide the European who is found near the coast. JEALOUS ALLIES Hundreds of German technicians, Mr Knight tells me, have been qi an " cd ’ into Malaya from China, Hong Kong and the Netherlands Indies and Placed in executive command ot the railways, telegraphs and tin mines. The Germans, however, have no use lor their Japanese “allies, and they would like, if they could, to cleai them out of the country and usuip complete control themselves. The delay in news of British prisoners taken in Malaya Mr. Knight ascribes to their wide dispersal. Not a single prisoner remains on Singapore Island. Large numbers of them were sent north to Alor Star, Bangkok and Saigon, and some are said to have gone on to Japan. The chief internment camp is at Sauk, a small village between Kuala Kangsar and Chenderoh, where most of the Australians, many Indians, and nearly all the railway personnel are confined. There is a camp south-west cf Ipoh, and another in Johore Bahru, near the gaol, where Chinese and Tamil political prisoners are placed. So far as Mr. Knight knows, prisoners’ rations are reasonably satisfactory. The chief shortage is of flour. The “Aussies” have the good fortune to have Australian mutton, supplied by arrangement between Australia and Tokio. 'Other prisoners have goat or mutton from stock raised on the spot, as well as rice, fish and fruit. The whereabouts of the European women are not known. The six or seven hundred women and children who were caught in Johore Bahru before the fall of Singapore were sent i'P Cameron Highlands, the largest hill-station in Malaya, 6,000 ft. above sea-level, and it is probable that those captured in Singapore have joined them there. AH the Chinese are intensely, if secretly, pro-British. “They have got their tails up, too,” Mr. Knight cheerfully added. It was two days after Christmas that he had his own first encounter with the Japanese. It was then that Batu Arang, his own colliery near Kuala Lumpur, was invaded by advance troops, who had landed on the east coast. “They reached the Chinese cantonment and let fly,” he explained. “But the Selangor Volunteers made a stand and the enemy retired.” Orders to destroy the colliery before the evacuation were carried out most thoroughly. Subsequently Mr. Knight wandered the country, but when seeking food and shelter in a Malaya kampong or Chinese grog-shop he was without exception received most hospitably and freely treated to chicken, Japanese beer and the usual Asiatic fare. He was careful to avoid a tin-mine or rubber estate, as those places were generally the headquarters of a Japanese detachment put in to work or protect them. Often he met other planters or miners doing what they could to destroy anything likely to be useful to the Japanese. They would part after exchanging stories and wishing one another luck. Any body of Europeans moving about together would not have been tolerated.

Mr. Knight was captured on February 10 at Batu Arang—“as the Japs swept on most of us were left behind in our bungalows”—but there was no strict surveillance, and he got away in the night early in March. ACROSS THE CAUSEWAY He made his way south, and on reaching Johore Bahru he saw Indian Army officers (Britons who had been taken prisoner) coming and going across the Causeway. Observing that they were neither challenged nor called upon to produce a pass, he also ventured across by night, at first tentatively, and the “dozens of times”. From Changi steps he was ferried across to Kuala Luban, the island quarry from which Johore Causeway was built, and this he made his base for several weeks. Finding the prospect of escape from the Singapore area hopeless, he decided to head north for Port Swettenham, passing through Adam’s old rubber estate in Johore, Sungei Ujong, Sungei Bosi, past the railway centre at Ipoh, and so across country to his destination, which he reached on May 25. He tells me that in the whole of Malaya the chief sufferer from combined bombing and looting was Ipoh. In Singapore the damage is “here

and there.” Raffles, the famous cosmopolitan hotel, has been burnt out. The big modern structures on Collyer Quay were damaged but still stand. Among the buildings demolished by British sappers were Fort Canning, the Government House, the Race Course buildings, Raffles College, the Seaview Hotel, and most of the military storehouses along Changi Road. The “Straits Times, ” the “Malaya Tribune” and the “Malay Mail” are still published in English, but only on a single half-sheet, and are simply used as organs by which the Japanese publicise their ideas of “CoProsperity.” 4