Nothing stays permanent in Singapore. The old makes way for the new with the certainty of its underground mass rapid transit train arriving on time. Singapore is unsentimental and pragmatic to the point of appearing ahistorical. The city’s planners and officials have kept emotions aside while razing old settlements and structures and replacing them with high-rise buildings; reclaiming land from the sea and building an entire new downtown; making that new downtown look pleasant and human by creating an artificial garden nearby; and unclogging traffic jams by burrowing a long tunnel underwater.
And yet, as you drive towards the Malaysian border check-post along Upper Bukit Timah Road, there is an old car factory, which has been scrubbed and cleaned and painted to look presentable. When the French architect Emile Brizay designed the building, he sought to give the building a stately, functional look—it exudes the aura of the art deco style but without the ornate frills of office headquarters. This was a place to assemble cars; it was not meant to be a showroom. It had to be functional; its appearance was less important.
Singapore no longer makes cars, and the building hasn’t produced anything for decades. What it stores, however, are memories of some of the most tumultuous years of Singapore’s history. For this is the old Ford Motor factory, where on 15 February 1942, despite having vastly superior numbers, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, who commanded the Allied forces, surrendered to General Yamashita Tomoyuki of the invading Japanese army.
The humiliating and swift collapse of the British forces was remarkable. Singapore was meant to be the impregnable fortress, overseeing the strategically significant Malacca straits. To protect Singapore, the British had placed guns facing the waters, assuming the attack would come from the south. Instead, the Japanese invaded from the north, through Malayan jungles and plantations. The Allies capitulated quickly, as they lacked the supplies to hold the advancing Japanese. With Britain itself beleaguered, trying to defend itself from ferocious Nazi attacks, Percival raised the white flag in Singapore.
The old Ford factory recreates that humiliation with painstaking detail. As you enter the museum, you see old weapons and grenades, and newspaper clippings such as advertisements from Singapore Cold Storage, a grocery chain, announcing altered opening hours so that its staff could return home before dark because of “brown out” orders the administrators had imposed. J.G. Farrell’s excellent 1978 novel, The Singapore Grip, shows the unreal world in which the expatriates lived. The book revolves around Walter Blackett, who runs the firm Blackett and Webb during that lull before the storm, fully expecting the Allied Forces to ward off attackers and assuming that the sun simply wouldn’t set on the British Empire. “You had only to stroll around the centre of the city, and look at the monolithic government buildings and the luxurious department stores and at the marmoreal dignity of the banks, to realize that Singapore was the work of a great and civilized nation,” Farrell writes early in the novel, before recreating a haunting image of its destruction by Japanese bombs. After surrender, Singapore was renamed Syonan-to (the light of the south).
Among the memories in the museum, particularly vivid is the monument of abject surrender—the wooden table across which Yamashita and Percival sat, where Yamashita laid down his conditions, gesticulating wildly and shouting loudly, forcing Percival to comply before the British could find out that the Japanese were stretched and did not have the luxury of time.
There are also memories of Subhas Chandra Bose, who took over the command of the Indian National Army in 1943 with a rousing speech at the Cathay Cinema. There are photographs of him inspecting troops and of the women who formed the Rani of Jhansi regiment. There are testimonies of older Indians speaking with awe of Bose’s command and presence.
But if the Japanese occupation gave a glimmer of hope to Indians that they could secure independence from the British quickly, the Chinese experience was different: it deepened their agony. There are photographs of beheaded Chinese, their heads stuck on stumps as trophies to warn other Chinese from attempting to fight the Japanese. Singapore’s overseas Chinese had supported—morally and materially—the Chinese forces fighting against the Japanese troops that had invaded and occupied China. For the Japanese, every Chinese in Singapore was a potential enemy. The Chinese heroine was Elizabeth Choy, who was arrested and tortured because she passed medicines, money and messages to prisoners at Changi. The museum’s windows show the moving sketches of W.R.M. Haxworth, who was a police inspector interned in Changi and who recorded what he saw, revealing the gradual emaciation of soldiers and prisoners. There are old Japanese currency notes, which over time became worthless, and photographs of the moment the tide turned, of victorious Allies returning following Japan’s surrender after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Singapore was a reluctant setting for the war. Its people had threatened no one, and yet they were the victims. That occupation shaped the thinking of the island’s politically conscious men and women; independence followed in two decades. Today Singapore is prosperous and independent. It has remained at peace. When you step out of the defunct car factory, the mood is serene and calm. The only sound is of the traffic moving swiftly on the road below the Bukit Batok hill. It was different in 1942, and this factory is a mute witness of that time.
Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.
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