The Railway Man Read online

  The regiment was an old-established one, and had expected to stay on guard at the Empire’s most romantic outpost for a while yet. Instead it was hastily mobilizing, under strength with its sixteen 4.5 inch howitzers, and deficient in all kinds of equipment. Soon after I got to Nowshera, the regiment took delivery of brand new tractors for its guns, Karrier KT4 ‘Spiders’, which were ordered to be painted green. Knowing officers predicted that we were headed for Malaya.

  On 11th October the guns and vehicles left Nowshera for Bombay in three special trains. Mobilization took a lot of trains, and the innocence of railways, if not of the machines themselves, was complicated for me by realizing more and more how essential they were to the conduct of war. Then, on 17th October, General Wakeley, the commanding officer of the 7th Indian Division, took the salute at a farewell parade on the huge square in front of the barracks.

  In the course of the parade Wakeley announced that we might have to fight the Japanese. No senior officer had ever suggested this in public to his men before, in my experience, and it gave a frisson of excitement and aggression to the occasion.

  General Wakeley went on to say that we should try to fight the Japanese at night, as they suffered from night blindness.

  When the band of the Lincolnshire Regiment played us out of the siding at Nowshera the following day on our special military train, we did not know that we were very nearly blind ourselves, being led by the blind.

  * * *

  At Bombay harbour a few days later we saw an imposing liner approaching the quay. It was the Orient Line flagship Orion, another wonderful example of the democracy of war: our travels were now all on special trains and requisitioned luxury cruisers.

  I was the last to board the ship, after midnight, and the captain didn’t want me even then. I had in my charge several crates of carboys of neat, undiluted, full-strength sulphuric acid which we needed to keep our radio batteries topped up, for if they were less than fully supplied they gave less than full power. The captain needed this particular Jonah in the way that he needed a Japanese torpedo. But our regimental commander somehow persuaded him that the security of the entire British Empire in the Far East depended on me and my acid, and eventually, watched by the entire cheering regiment, my crates were swung inboard in a net by the ship’s derrick.

  After a brief stop at Colombo, the main port of Ceylon, we sailed eastwards, suspecting that we knew what our mysterious ‘tropical’ destination was but in fact kept properly in the dark. On 6th November, green hills, jungle-clad from their summits to the sea, appeared to starboard, our southern side, and we could make out a similar coast to the north. We were clearly sailing through a bight between substantial masses of land: the Straits of Malacca. Singapore it had to be.

  The Orion docked at Keppel Harbour, in the south of Singapore Island. If our journey had been a secret, our arrival certainly was not. A band of the Manchester Regiment was waiting on the quayside playing ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ and other tunes with gusto, the trumpets and tubas and cymbals making their huge summery brass noise. It was triumphant and joyful. A crowd of dignitaries was there: port officers, civil servants, officers. Someone pointed out Lieutenant-General A.E. Percival, the General Officer Commanding Malaya. He was the man in charge of The Fortress, and we had come to help him defend it.

  * * *

  A month later I was living in a khaki canvas tent in a camp by the edge of a road on the east coast of Malaya. It was a pleasant sandy area full of coconut palms, half a mile from the beach. Behind the camp stretched endless regular acres of rubber trees with their thick glossy leaves.

  The fine rain was constant in the warm heat, and almost soothing. This cluster of guarded tents was our Regimental HQ, and the thirty signalmen were the heart of the camp. We had our radios set up, their low hum a constant background noise. A man was always sitting in front of each set, headphones to hand, ready to receive or transmit. We were at work. The place was called Kuantan.

  We were waiting for an assault by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, which we knew were out there on the sea over the horizon, for we were now formally at war with them.

  Early on the morning of 8th December I was sleeping in a trench when a messenger woke me to show me a message with the ominous priority ‘O ii U’. This was the code for the highest possible priority signal. The Japanese had attacked all over the Far East; a dreadful attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, all the US battleships destroyed, an air raid on Singapore, and at Kota Bharu two hundred miles to our north, near the border of Malaya and Siam, they had stormed ashore from small boats and landing craft.

  The scramble was immediate. Messengers and radio signals went out to all the gun positions, extra men were sent to the observation and guard posts. The urgency and tension were extraordinary, and yet the war still seemed a long way away from this deceptively peaceful tropical camp. It was as though it was taking one last breather before finally pouncing, after all those false starts and premonitions.

  I could not see any guns from the camp. They were scattered around the area, among the pawpaws with their heavy yellow gourds and the flame-of-the-forest trees, a mile between each gun so as not to be vulnerable to a massed Japanese naval barrage. I could go out of my tent and walk for a mile, or ride a motorbike even further, and almost forget our deadly business, enjoying the illusion that I was alone in this beautiful place, surrounded by the splendour of its plant life. Then you would come on a single howitzer with sandbags around it standing silently in the forest, the men edgily fingering their rifles.

  We kept in touch with them as best we could. Like much else in warfare, signals theory was one thing, jungle practice another. Those cumbersome radios didn’t generate a lot of wattage, when it came to it, and a lot of energy was lost in the surrounding trees, electromagnetic waves soaking into the trunks and leaves, distorting voices, drowning messages in static. We resorted to sending wireless signals down the phone lines, an ingenious improvisation which we christened Line Assisted Wireless, by setting up our aerials a few feet below the overhead wires: the outgoing signals were attracted to the wires and another radio further down the line of wire could capture the signals. We were discovering that our army was part of a connected system, that machines had only limited power. They, still needed our voices and our eyes to give them intelligence.

  We were forced to rely more and more on our land lines, telephone wires strung around the area, to talk clearly to each other. Our old-fashioned switchboard lent a touch of civilian absurdity to a command centre from which a terrible artillery bombardment could be called down on an enemy; with its plugs and jacks it looked as though it should be in some provincial hotel.

  Our troops were mostly Indian: Sikhs to the west of us, Garhwalis to the east. We were halfway up the peninsula of Malaya, which dangles the island of Singapore from its foot, and Singapore was the only reason for our presence on this coast. The island was the ‘Fortress’, the ‘impregnable fortress’ as it was always called in official descriptions, on which the defence of the Empire in Asia depended. The citadel of the fortress was the celebrated naval base in the north of the island, from where the great ships of the Royal Navy could sail out to dominate the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam. Huge 15-inch guns looked out from the southern shore, for that was the way the enemy would come: from the sea. We hoped that our battleships would now be moving out from their base to search for and destroy a Japanese invasion fleet. We were merely guarding an airfield a few miles inland which was part of a chain of defences on the landward side of the island. It had finally dawned on our leaders that the Japanese might attack Singapore from the rear, and perhaps not at night, and from the rear it was anything but impregnable.

  I remember precisely, only hours after I arrived in Singapore, a Signals staff officer, some hopeless decent man, telling me that the Japanese could not attack through Malaya. He said ‘there is nothing there. It’s just solid jungle, all the way up. They will not come that way.’

/>   Now it must have been obvious to the staff in Singapore and certainly to my colonel and to every private soldier, that we were, despite the tranquillity of our surroundings, trapped and desperate. We had seen a lot of Malaya since we disembarked in Singapore, from Ipoh in the west and right across the waist of the country to where we now were, and it was not solid jungle. It was intensively cultivated, rich land, with good and plentiful roads for traders – or for soldiers.

  The one place in the country that lacked roads was Kuantan. If the Japanese drove down on us from the north, there was only one road out for us, to Jerantut, which was about sixty miles inland behind us. East of that town was the river Pahang, a wide fast stream crossed by a ferry. This obstacle course was bad enough, but Kuantan too had its river, a mile west of the town, and it was a horrible sight to military eyes. The river was wide and brown and sluggish, its ferry made up of two rusty barges fastened together, which were moved by winching a cable that stretched from shore to shore: a primitive watery version of the system that worked the old Edinburgh trams would have to rescue us if things went wrong. It spelled massacre and disaster; bad ground and bad water. It was hard for us to imagine who had chosen this spot for us to make a stand, and what good we could do except to die at our posts. Our orders were, indeed, more or less to do just that: to defend the airfield to the last man. The Garhwali troops had to defend eleven miles of beaches and the little town of Kuantan with a pitiful total of four companies. The Sikhs had equally few men. There were no troops at all to defend the coast to our south; and none for the main road out of the trap.

  But we were soldiers, part of a great tradition, so we tried not to think about our leaders’ vision and prepared to fight. Besides, the Japanese did not seem a formidable enemy. They had surprised the Americans, we thought, but we were forewarned.

  The Japanese first came the day after I had been rousted from sleep by that sensational signal. Early that morning we heard a new engine note in the sky, different from the Hudson and Blenheim bombers which we had grown accustomed to hearing take off from the airfield. In a clear sky, I saw waves of twin-engined planes with rising sun emblems on their wings, three neat waves of nine each, like migrating geese. They passed and repassed over the area where we knew the airfield to be, and dropped bombs that looked so small and black in the distance. The explosions were mingled with the crack and rattle of light machine-guns and cannon as the Sikh company shot up at them, but the bombers calmly and methodically went to and fro over the earth, walking their bombs around in it, then turned and flew away.

  In the afternoon we heard our own planes take off one by one, wheel around and head south. In the sunlit silence that followed we thought we heard the sounds of road vehicles through the trees, lorries moving away from us. Major Fennell, our second-in-command, took me and a small group out to the airfield to investigate.

  We drove on to the long spacious runway that had been dug and levelled out of the forest. It was empty apart from a few wrecked planes, and so silent that you could hear the birds and the insect sounds from the forest. I walked towards the trees. The huts for accommodation were in there, the radio shacks hidden further back. It was spooky, as though there were rifles pointing at us from the dark under the trees. But the huts were empty, scattered clothes all over the floors, photos of women and children strewn among the vests and jackets. In the radio rooms, the equipment had been wrecked, wires trailing out of smashed panels, the glass of valves crunching under my boots. Out on the runway, there were cold mugs of tea half-full by the aircraft on which mechanics had been working. I picked up a blue flimsy envelope with an Australian postmark. It was unopened.

  The place for which we were supposed to sacrifice our lives had simply been abandoned, without explanation. Our headquarters had told us nothing; the local air force commanders had not consulted us before fleeing. We were left on this awful ground with no air cover.

  From then on, the probabilities began to look harsh and unfavourable to us. Very late that same evening, an observer on one of the beaches reported that he had seen Japanese landing craft moving towards a village further up the coast. As darkness fell, I transmitted an order from Colonel Jephson to the guns. Within seconds of speaking into the mouthpiece and hearing the squawked acknowledgments from the batteries, I heard the deep flat blast of a howitzer firing, immediately followed by several more. All that night the guns slammed like bolts on a massive door being pushed heavily back and forth. We could see quick flashes occasionally, a patch of rubber trees reversing out of the darkness for a second, but nothing more. I knew the shells would form a shifting pattern, moving across a square of sea and beach like a flail, and that landing craft and soldiers would burst and drown in the geometrical figure drawn on the gunnery officer’s map.

  Dawn broke. We had fired over a thousand shells. There had been no response to the night long barrage, and when observers went out they reported that Colonel Jephson had been scourging the empty sea. There were no landing craft.

  Later that morning I walked down to the beach. I had been up most of the night, on duty with my signalmen. These beaches were incredibly beautiful; they had coconut and nipah palms, fine clean sand and the warm green of the sea. I stood beneath the trees admiring the way the waves came in. It was so peaceful, standing on a mile of deserted sand with a long line of palms at my back. I felt I was waiting for the Japanese, at that moment, completely alone. Then the loud rumbling started again, a deeper and more distant version of the night’s barrage, like thunder but obviously not thunder, drifting in from the sea. It went on for about an hour.

  I had heard the British Empire begin to fall, if I had but known it. Out at sea, just over the horizon from where I stood, the two mightiest, most invincible battleships in the world, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, and their escort destroyers, were being attacked by swarms of Japanese torpedo bombers. They had no air protection; like the land dreadnought of Singapore, like us, they were playing tragic roles in an outdated military drama. Their day was done. I remember myself as I was then, hearing the huge cracks of the explosions as my comrades, the radio men, were trapped at their posts under the bridges of the great ships.

  We had seen these ships as our salvation. We lost hope when it was confirmed over the radio that they had both been sunk within a couple of hours off Kuantan. Admiral Phillips had turned his titanic weapons towards us because he also believed that we were being invaded; he too had heard that Japanese troops were storming ashore in our sector: our own panicky observer had helped unwittingly to bring a strategic and historical era to an end. It was absurd. The weak, shortsighted, nightblind Japanese had destroyed our ultimate deterrent. For the first time, we began seriously to consider defeat.

  On 10th December we received reinforcements: some armoured cars and the remnants of a Frontier Force Regiment battalion arrived, tough Sikhs who had withdrawn from the north of Malaya; and although we no longer had an airfield at Kuantan, we at least acquired a chaplain, a nice man called Pugh. Percival’s orders to the Frontier Force soldiers and to all the others in the north had been to fight, to ‘impose delay’ on the Japanese, retreat and fight again all the way down the peninsula. We were about to discover that a leapfrogging, fighting retreat is easier to imagine than to carry out.

  We had watchers out on the tracks to the north, organized by a civilian from the Malayan Forestry Service who knew the area well. We got reports of mysterious parties coming through the jungle; every day, we expected a fight. There were false alarms, and a permanent screwing up of tension. Two weeks passed like this. We celebrated Christmas, Padre Pugh conducting impressive and well-attended services at our camp and out among the batteries in the forest. We killed a lot of local ducks and ate well.

  Our unit’s particular orders were still to stand and fight in defence of the now derelict airfield. We accepted this task stoically, wondering what Percival would say if he could see the jungle reclaiming the landing strip. But two days after Christmas, we were order
ed to withdraw immediately and regroup west of the river. A sudden retreat on this scale would cause chaos, our commanders felt, and Brigadier Painter, who was in overall charge of our immediate area, protested vigorously to the major-general above him. The previous orders were reinstated. I dutifully relayed these contradictory messages between my superiors.

  While their debate was going on, one of our forward posts phoned in to say that it had been attacked by Japanese troops, and some of our vehicles had been destroyed. We were now in a battle zone without doubt, and the Japanese wished to keep us there. They tried to destroy our ancient ferry by bombing it, but it survived.

  The first of my friends to die was Lieutenant Taffy Davies, an artillery officer, a friend since Nowshera. He and two signalmen called Cartwright and Howe drove off on their motorbikes alongside a truck that was delivering some ammunition to a battery. I discovered later that he and Cartwright set off to return on their own. We found Taffy’s body a few hours later on the road beside his wrecked machine, machine-gunned and bayoneted, and stripped of his boots, puttees and equipment. Cartwright’s bike was there, but he had disappeared. Further along the same road, thirty Garhwali troopers lay dead among their burnt out lorries.

  Our orders were changed again, for the third time in three days. All guns and vehicles were to be withdrawn across the river.

  The ferry was a nightmare. The bottleneck was even worse than we had predicted: a line of vehicles a mile long waited to cross it. Relays of men tugged and strained on the old cables, floating artillery pieces two by two across the turgid brown stream. I sat on a motorbike at the back of this line, hoping the truck in front would move; I remember the mortal fear that a passing Japanese bomber would sight this dense column of targets.