‘Yes, that makes sense,’ broke in John Theopulos. ‘My Nepali labour force could be a link in their planning. But who to send?’
‘I recommend Kamal Rai, whom I personally know, as he is the one and only man I trust to go and find out what it was all about. You know that he was my “eyes and ears” for much of the war. He could possibly find out if any such Nepalis attended the meetings, to recognise them and, were they to join the new British Gurkhas serving in Malaya, help to identify them.
‘Another reason for recommending Kamal Rai to go is that a principal attendant is Lee Soong. They knew each other during the war. He was a member of the post-war British Military Administration’s Singapore Advisory Council as well as now being on the Town Committee of the Communist Party of Malaya – they are not banned, you know – to say nothing of having been to Prague last year as a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. Tell Kamal to go to Singapore, contact me at a number I’ll give you and I’ll fully brief and finance him.’
John Theopulos was unhappy with all that but agreed to it, reluctantly: after all, Reggie does know what he’s talking about
Lance Sharkey stayed over in Singapore and before embarking for Calcutta, Reggie Hutton had found out that had had a private meeting with Chin Peng, a member of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), and Lai Tek, a double agent working for the British, both of whom were in Singapore. He also found out that nothing substantial was discussed and an invitation was given to the Australian to attend the MCP’s 4th Plenary Session on his return from Calcutta.
There was a goodly gathering at the Youth Conference. When Kamal Rai set eyes on Lee Soong he felt sick at being so close to him. Lee Soong had originally thought Kamal had very little English but later he knew differently. Kamal and Reggie Hutton had wrongly presumed they had never conversed in English in his hearing.
The organisers of the programme were the same English-speaking Indians who later similarly organised the 2nd Plenum. The small group from French Indo-China who had been anti-Chinese longer than they had been anti-French, were keener to get rid of the latter than the former who had loomed over them for centuries, in this case being unable to change either history or geography. They did not speak English but an interpreter from the Air France office was found for them. Those from the Dutch East Indies were less lucky, speaking neither English nor French. One of them had learnt basic Arabic before going to Mecca and an Arabic speaker was found in one of the city banks. Despite not being altogether satisfactory, the all-powerful ‘Cause’ won the day.
It was Lee Soong who had asked about Mao Tse-tung and his guerrilla war. Luckily some homework had been done and copies of some of his dated writings were available for discussion. One was titled A Single Spark Can Start A Prairie Fire, published as far back as 3 January 1930. There were some extensive notes on guerrilla warfare, written in May 1938, but they were directed against Japan, not western imperialists and certainly not set in tropical rainforest terrain. But did it matter? It certainly brought forth more discussion than had the heavy-handed Soviet doctrine. It meant more to simple people. Eventually, much to Lance Sharkey’s chagrin, it was the Chinese doctrines that caused the most interest. Such points as, for instance, Six Specific Problems in Guerrilla War, Guerrilla Zones and Base Areas and The Basic Principle of War is to Preserve Oneself and Destroy the Enemy brought a spark of interest where little or none had previously been observed. But, as ever, there was a negative side to it as much was made of ideology and political education, heady stuff if one was a zealot but pretty meaningless when many ethnic Southeast Asians had no political vocabulary – democracy? fascist? feudal? what are they? – and ‘education’ merely meant a village school and boring homework. As for ‘ideology’ … ?
Sharkey’s speech went on for too long as he had to make many pauses for the interpreters. It had seemed so easy in theory but, sadly, in practice, to him, the Conference had not come up to expectations. Not enough thought had been put into the programme to start with: strategy or tactics? politics or armed struggle? people or leaders? guerrilla warfare with weapons or trade unions stoppages? It was all very well to quote Soviet doctrine: Surprise is the greatest factor in war. There are two kinds, tactical and strategic. Tactical surprise is an operational art. A skilled unit commander can generally achieve it. Strategic surprise is attained at the political level but what meaning did that convey to most of the listeners who, till then, had probably only ever held a catapult in their hands? ‘Look, what I’ve heard you talk about makes me realise that you have not got your act together. Here, in India, your communism stems from when the British tried to give you some of their educational ideas from way back in the nineteenth century. But since then you have split: some of you are Marxist, some are Marxist-Leninist and even some of you are trying to be Maoists. You will never achieve real communism until you all think alike. Can’t you see what I am getting at?’ he asked but no, his rhetoric was on too high a level and his Australian accent left the English speakers, including the interpreters, bewildered. ‘Anyone got any questions for me?’ he asked at the end.
‘Yes, I have,’ said a youth, holding up his arm.
‘Who are you and what is it you want to ask?’
‘I am a Darjeeling Nepali. My name is Padamsing Rai. My question is can you see any contradiction in the Chinese proposals and teaching compared with their Soviet counterparts?’
The Australian thought for a moment. What is he getting at? ‘No, Marx and Lenin are the bedrock of them both. Why should there be any difference?’
‘Because I have read that the Soviets try to impose their will on the countries of Europe, and even India, from the top downwards whereas the Chinese think that, once the masses know what is wanted and are converted, Communism will spread upwards. Would you agree with that? I want to know as I intend to work on the Gurkha soldiers in the British Army, in other words, start from the bottom. I can’t start at the top.’
That caused some of the staff to look at each other, almost in dismay, that analysis being new to them. Sharkey, having no definite answer and not wanting to seem ‘bested’ by a mere lad, said that although tactically matters were always different, strategically the two parties would never be far apart.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the man from Darjeeling and sat down, looking round as he did as though he were more than pleased with himself.
After it was all over, Lee Soong told Padamsing Rai to enlist in one of the eastern regiments he had heard that was now part of the British Army, ‘Try to get a posting as a clerk, an intelligence man or an educational instructor, if possible in an army school, so as to spread the word among the Gurkha soldiers and to try and inveigle them to change sides or leave the army, in any case, so to disgrace the Gurkha name by indiscipline the War Office would disband them.’
Padamsing said he would try but, of course, there was no telling till he tried.
Lee Soong also spoke at length with Kamal Rai, telling him how he envisaged matters developing, with him to be a link with Padamsing Rai. ‘By the way, you remember when I had than man punished and killed for being a spy?’ Kamal shivered as he remembered it. ‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ continued the Chinese. ‘He was the wrong man. I thought he was you with your friend Hutton.’ He fixed the Gurkha with a gimlet-like stare. ‘If you manage with Padamsing Rai my suspicions will be allayed.’
Lee Soong did not go straight back to Singapore as he had meetings in Bangkok, with whom he did not divulge. Kamal returned to Singapore on the same boat as did Sharkey and fully briefed Reggie Hutton on what had transpired. As for Sharkey, he had a long session with Chin Peng, Lai Tek not being present, and strongly urged him to change current MCP policy to military action to try and overcome the Security Forces … thus setting the scene of much bloodshed and many brave deeds on both sides for the next decades.
It is, of course, a moot point indeed how much of what Calcutta tried to inculcate was responsible for the way in which events developed: what is not in doubt is that develop they did. What no one could have ever imagined was that one of very first, if not the first, British officer the Communists fired on to kill was, at the very last gasp of anti-British endeavour in 1968 after twenty years of Communist military activity, which would end not in the proverbial bang but the equally proverbial whimper, the very same British officer when three aborigine ‘blowpipe marksmen’ were ordered to aim their blowpipes at his head and shoot their poisoned darts to kill him … never having yet missed their intended target.
The author’s friend, Mr Denny, the proprietary owner of the nearby Sungei Pelek Estate, told him that the Japanese, believing his bungalow to be haunted, touched nothing the whole war when he was a prisoner. No local looted anything either. ↵
Its full name was The Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence. It lasted from the 19th to the 23rd of March. Its delegates were invited to attend the following 2nd Plenum of the Indian Communist Party. ↵
I
1948-1954
1
Malaya, early January 1948
When the troopship SS Empire Pride sailing from Burma– which had been given its independence five days earlier – carrying the 1st Battalion of the 12th Gurkha Rifles and two other British Army Gurkha battalions reached Prai, opposite the island of Penang, it was like coming back home after nearly ten years to only one of the passengers, Captain Jason Rance. With fair hair, penetrating, clear blue eyes, his features were almost hawk-like and stern. He showed his pleasure with a wonderful open smile. He was nearly six feet tall with a taut, lean body and the indefinable air of a natural commander. He was sixteen when he had left Malaya, hurriedly, for England and after a war in which he has seen action many times, here he was back again. Eyes fixed on Penang Hill, his mind drifted back all those years …
He had been born in Kuala Lumpur where his father, unobtrusively working in a revenue office, had, in fact, been Britain’s senior Intelligence officer in Malaya. Before her marriage, his mother had worked with her father’s Punch and Judy show and had learnt how to be a ventriloquist, her son also mastering this rare skill. He had his own dummy and a model krait, this latter he had acquired after he had watched a Gurkha soldier defang one of these lethal creatures with an elegant calmness.
Mr Rance’s Chinese partner’s son, Ah Fat, was the same age as Jason and the two boys became as close as brothers from when toddlers. They each had their Chinese nicknames, Ah Fat’s was P’ing Yee, Flat Ears, as his ears were close to his head, and Jason’s was Shandung P’aau, Shandong (Southern mountain) Cannon, as the people from that part of the world were strong and burly, as was Jason. By the time he was ten, Jason was a fluent Chinese speaker with a good knowledge of the writing. His Malay was almost as good as his Chinese. During their school holidays they used to go and camp in the jungle inland from the coastal village of Sepang and meet up with young Gurkhas from Bhutan Estate, becoming as ‘at home’ in the jungle as any seasoned Forest Ranger. He learnt to speak basic Gurkhali with one of his friends, Kamal Rai, his elder by a few years.
The crisis that had caused Jason to leave Malaya was instigated by Japanese intelligence operatives working with senior members of the banned Indian Independence League. It was thought that Rance senior had secret plans against any future Japanese militancy. The Japanese agent in Kuala Lumpur, Sugiyama Torashira, inveigled Akbar Khan, a Pathan lawyer for the overt Indian Association and, subversively, the Indian Independence League, to get his son, Tor Gul Khan, and his two nephews, Abdul Hamid Khan and Abdul Rahim Khan, to burgle Mr Rance’s office, disguised as a humble tool shed at the back of the garden, to retrieve what they could of Japanese interest. There was a fourth man who went with them, a Gurkha, Rabilal Rai from Bhutan Estate, who happened to be in Kuala Lumpur with his father who had to go there on business. They were prevented by Rance junior who happened to look out of the lavatory window and see them in the moonlight. He skilfully ambushed them, laying low all four and capturing them. They were handed over to the police, all four of them vowing to kill him if ever they got the chance. For his son’s safely, Rance senior sent him to England for the rest of his education – and then the war broke out.
Jason joined the army, was sent to India for officer training in the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, where he outshone all the other cadets in his knowledge of jungle lore. He learnt to make a cuckoo call as well as the real bird which misled many a hearer on patrol exercises when a cuckoo answered his calls. On being commissioned he was posted to the 1st Gurkha Rifles. The three Indians and the Gurkha joined the Indian National Army, composed of Indian Army prisoners of war in Singapore. Intercepted by ‘Magic’, the highly guarded codeword given to the breaking of Japanese codes which the Indian National Army command in Singapore was allowed to use, the four men were captured; Rabilal Rai by Jason Rance and his men when he tried to get to India in a Japanese submarine; the two nephews, captured after parachuting into Burma and later hanged, and Tor Gul Khan, who was killed in Burma. Amazingly Jason Rance had been witness at the capture of the two Indians and the death of the one.
During the early stages of Japan’s invasion of Malaya Jason’s parents had escaped to India and his father had been commissioned in the Indian Intelligence Corps and worked in General Headquarters in New Delhi. He had met his son when Jason went to GHQ for briefing for two special jobs; teaching units of the Chinese Army to use British Light Machine Guns; being loaned to the Nepalese Contingent’s battalion in Burma to teach them the use of snipers’ rifles. A third meeting was at the trial of the two captured parachutists.
At that time victory over the Japanese had yet to occur and the future of India was in doubt. The future of Gurkhas was, too, and no one expected either to be allowed to serve in the post-independent Indian Army or that there would be Gurkhas in the British Army. Having no civil job to go back to he had volunteered for a regular commission and been awarded one so when he heard that Gurkha regiments had been divided between the two armies he had volunteered for continued service with them and to his intense delight he had been commissioned into the 12th Gurkha Rifles, made up of men from the east of Nepal. After Indian independence, the British Army’s Gurkhas were sent either to Hong Kong or Malaya. Jason’s new battalion had been detailed to go the latter and that was why it was, in its way, a home-coming for him.
To date his soldering had been with Gurkhas from the west of Nepal, now he had to serve with easterners. He was to learn that both were as good as each other with one main difference: in the west, one could foster a friendship but in the east one had to wait until the other man took the initiative.
He heard orders for disembarkation over the Tannoy. He looked at his watch and saw it was half past three. He had yet to be given a job in charge of troops but his batman, Rifleman Kulbahadur Limbu, was reputed to be the battalion’s expert tracker. Jason wondered if that meant his future was to be the commander of the Recce Platoon.
‘Saheb, time for us to leave the boat. I’ll be happy to get off it and onto the firm ground again,’ he heard a voice behind him and looking round there was Kulbahadur with Jason’s and his own kit. ‘I’ve been told we’ll have our meal on the dockside before getting on the train’, rel to Gurkhas, ‘and moving all through the night. Do you know where we’re going? It’s all the same to me, new, green and fresh, so unlike it was in India.’
India, since the end of the war, had been a terrible place to serve in. Anti-British and anti-Gurkha tensions were constant: Hindu versus Moslem antipathy had resulted in a raging lust for religious superiority that caused myriad deaths, horrendous injuries, abject penury, widespread starvation and a collapse of all civil authority. Civil law and order were nowhere. The birth of the new country of Pakistan was something that generations of Britons who had loved and worked for India could never, in nightmares, have imagined or foretold. The final evacuation for Britons to leave in late December 1947 was Scheme QUIIM for Quit India Immediately, a name making those with a knowledge of one particular nickname of the most private part of a woman’s body giggle.
So yes, the comparison between India and this new, green and fresh country, with no nose-to-tail, a-hundred-miles-long convoys of bullock carts of homeless refugees, no stench of death, no rotting corpses by the roadside and no hordes of hungry beggars. ‘I agree with you, Kulé. It will a great change, too, no killings, proper peacetime, no war, training not operations, no casualties like there have been for so long.’
Jason was a born linguist and his Nepali, honed over the wartime years, was of a higher standard than many other British officers’. ‘Saheb, your Nepali accent is as I have heard how the western Gurkhas speak, different from our eastern accent. Were you born in India and not in Belayat?’ his batman asked.
‘No, Kulé, I was born in this country.’
‘So I suppose you speak Malay?’
‘Yes’ and fluently, but he did not let on that his Chinese was of a higher standard and, if his face were covered, he would be taken for a Chinese and not an Englishman, an Angrej, a Belayati. He somehow felt that he ought not to ‘show off’ his Chinese language ability, quite why he never really worked out, but at the back of his mind was the thought that it might be of the greatest use if he kept quiet about it.
Orders for entraining were given. Their destination was Seremban, a town south of Kuala Lumpur, in the state of Negri Sembilan. It had never had a regular army unit there before so there was no suitable accommodation ready for them. Going there pleased Jason as it meant he could go to Bhutan Estate where Rabilal Rai had lived, find out his parents and tell them that their son was dead, how they had become great friends, how Jason had managed to get him enlisted in the 1st Gurkha Rifles but how, sadly, he had been killed, by whom he never knew, as the Japanese were being driven south towards Rangoon.
The contrast between those last six months in India with the 1st Gurkha Rifles and the first three months in Malaya with 1/12 Gurkha Rifles took much getting used to. On the surface life was placid, humdrum, unexciting and boring. Initially the mass of paperwork required for the soldiers to change armies was time-consuming, mind-deadening but essential. Such matters as giving men their new army numbers, new pay books, a new currency, new accounting systems, new kit inventories and will forms in case a man died in service without a legal will had a high priority as did much else that was new. There were also a whole lot of new faces to recognise, new names and numbers to be learnt, a new accent and different words to get used to. There were many shortages: clerks, drivers, cooks, weapons specialists, signallers, pioneers and buglers, to say nothing of maps, compasses, wireless sets and even storage space, though there were several football grounds in the town. The weather was so different from what it had been in India, one could almost set one’s watch by the daily afternoon showers at twenty past four so the footballers finished playing wet from rain and sweat.
Although life was, generally, boring, there were two surprises. The first, unpopular in the extreme, was, very early on, to be told that the battalion had become a gunner regiment, no longer were soldiers ‘riflemen’ and ‘corporals’ but ‘gunners’ and ‘bombardiers’, with ‘companies’ becoming ‘batteries’. And indeed, the proposed ‘new-look’ Gurkha Division had the unit as 101 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, (12 Gurkha Rifles) but they still called themselves 1/12 Gurkha Rifles. The soldiers were bemused but it only made a difference when 25-pounder artillery pieces arrived and with half a dozen new British officers, Gunners all, knowing nothing about Gurkhas or their language. Apart from a new weapon to be learnt, that meant a second lot of new sahebs to get used to: certain over-educated hot heads felt that they had made the wrong decision in becoming British Army Gurkhas. It also posed a dilemma for those British officers who had come across from the 1st Gurkha Rifles and who had no wish to be a ‘nine-mile sniper’ as the derogatory phrase had it: bug out to a British infantry regiment of the line, try to convert to be a Gunner or leave the army altogether? The majority decision was to stay for one three-year tour if only to help the Gurkhas by being a buffer between them and this new influx.
Apart for any administrative consideration, the main task of the battalion for the next four months was to learn what was known as ‘gun drill’ with the new ‘pieces’. Peacetime routine also included drill, physical training, small arms weapon training and games, phantoms of memory in the past three and a half years. The regiment was badly under-strength as many men had opted to stay in the Indian Army, fed on anti-British propaganda by Congress Party sympathisers that there would be no rice in the rations which would only contain beef and bread. Likewise, it would be the first time ever that families were to live in a land beyond the Black Water, anathema to any Hindu.
But above all, people were thankful there was no war and peacetime conditions were now the norm … but they were all wrong. What nobody knew was that, within six months, death and destruction, chaos and confusion would reign as the Communists launched a deadly offensive that would last a dozen years.
Mid-January 1948
Jason’s parents had left India at the end of the war and settled in London. Jason’s father became critically ill and Jason was allowed two weeks’ compassionate leave, just in time to see him before he died. He was allowed to travel by air, an almost unknown privilege: it took two and a half days to get to England with night stops in Karachi and Rome. He almost had to wait for a ship to bring him back but was lucky to be given a flight instead. He decided to buy a Gurkha broach for his mother to wear. He went to Terrier’s, a jeweller’s shop in Regent’s Street, and told the man there what he wanted, mentioning that he was returning to Malaya. ‘I wonder you can do something for me?’ he asked and Jason felt he was almost duty bound to say, ‘I’ll certainly try to.’
It transpired that before being taken a prisoner by the Japanese in 1942, a Tamil estate comprador, Subramanian Mudaliar, had helped him recover when wounded by hiding him till he was better, otherwise, as he said later, he would probably have died in captivity. ‘I’d love to thank him and now is the chance of asking you to take a watch out for him as a present. Could you please manage that? Mind you, I don’t know if he is dead or alive, but I’ll risk it.’
