An important part of our work in Kuala Lumpur was preparing the senior Malayan officers to take over command and the senior Staff appointments. Brigadier Tunku Osman would head the Army and officers were earmarked for other specialist appointments. Malaya had its own Military Academy, but needed help in a number of specialist areas for the further training of officers. In many areas for all three services Pakistan had been providing help. Like Malaya it was a Muslim country and could provide well-established training facilities.
Colonel Micky Hamid was the right man for control of training. A Pakistan tour was arranged for him and with my five years of Indian service I was to accompany him. A flight to Bangkok took us to a main air route and we flew on to Karachi where the Pakistan Navy, commanded at the time by a British Admiral, took us in hand. Pakistanis with Naval experience were needed in increasing numbers. The same situation existed in Malaya where Bill Dovers, a formidable Captain from the Australian Navy, was in command. We would make enquiries on his behalf.
Rawalpindi in the north was our next port of call. It was still the interim Capital city whilst Islamabad was being built and was to remain the location of national military headquarters. A British Brigadier was amongst the few remaining UK officers on the staff and he was soon to leave but gave us a valuable briefing. Two of my fellow instructors at Quetta Staff College before partition were now Pakistani Generals. There was no doubt that the deep affection between those of us who served the war years together remained strong and was carried forward to younger generations; a heart warming experience.
A full programme had been arranged for us and this was not limited to the training help that could be provided for Malaya. Visiting the Signals Training staff I found one of my wartime officer cadets briefing us. They were experiencing the same problems as I had in Germany with ageing equipment and showed imaginative improvement work to carry them through to the time when modern replacements would arrive. There was military work for them too on civil side, helping with communications to remote and outlying areas; a useful contribution. There was similar work on old vehicles. We visited mechanical installations where a programme was in progress to rebuild tired vehicles and extend their useful life. Factories had been established for producing weapons and ammunition. Tremendous advances had been made in a decade of hard work.
Of particular interest to me was the visit to Quetta Staff College. The old buildings of my time were to be replaced. As I was to see in later years, military buildings of the highest class were to replace older structures in many places. The Army was to be well looked after. After partition, India had to find a new abode for their Staff College and their establishment in the Nilgiri Hills in southern India is equally fine.
A visit to Peshawar in Northwest Frontier Province is remembered more for the grandeur of its ancient buildings and surroundings then any military training establishment. We were taken up the Khyber Pass to gaze into Afghanistan and given lunch at what was probably the Frontier Force Mess of earlier times. Surrounded by a high matti wall, a local village skill, we lunched al fresco in surroundings that reeked of earlier history.
The Airforce was not left out. In this area we visited an active fighter station. The strange relationship between the Indian and Pakistani officers of the former Indian Airforce were illustrated by a charming story. An Indian crew of a reconnaissance plane had entered Pakistan airspace and been shot down. The Indian Chief of Air Staff rang up his old friend and Pakistan equivalent and after the initial chat got down to business. "By the way, have you seen one of our planes earlier today?" "Yes old boy, I’m very sorry, we had to shoot it down", which brought the question, "Are the chaps all right?"
More detail of the tour would be superfluous, but we were not allowed to leave until we had seen Lahore. If there was some military purpose I have forgotten it. I had visited the city before but with little time to admire the many palaces and fine buildings. It was where Sheelah had spent her early childhood. I was to visit it with her at a later date and description can await the time. Micky Hamid and I flew to Bangkok to be told on Christmas Eve that there were no flights to Kuala Lumpur. Mysteriously one materialised and I made it home to wife and children for Christmas.
It was business as usual until the summer of 1960 when I returned from some minor mission to discover feverish activity in all departments. The Belgian Congo government was under threat from a rising generated by General Mobutu. The United Nations intervened and Malaya agreed to send a battalion to play a part in any operations involved. A battalion had been selected and a route planned to take them by sea to Beira in Mozambique. The Ordnance branch was constructing containers that would be used for the transit of stores and could then be stacked with drop fronts for store management on arrival. Enquiries were in hand about documentation, passports and other needs. Transport was arranged for the battalion from their station on the border with Thailand to the port of embarkation. Medical arrangements were in hand both in terms of individual protection and support on arrival and so it went on. Having had no part in this preparation it is fair to say that I was very impressed with the quick reactions made. So it was that the operation was launched.
In due course it was decided at Government or military level that our senior Malayan officer, Brigadier Tunku Osman, should visit the Congo on a formal visit to his troops. I was to accompany him. It seemed that our best route was to get to Rome to pick up a flight to Leopoldville or Kinshasa as it is now called. In a routine now considered barbarous our eight-year-old son, Crispin, was due to go prep school in September. He could travel much of the way with me and spend a few weeks with my parents in Rye before term started.
Travel had its problems. The three of us stayed in Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The next morning we learned that the QANTAS plane was delayed. When we reached Karachi we spent the night and awaited further repairs. As we disembarked I saw a tall figure in front of me that I recognised. I slapped him on the back and said ‘Hello Peter’. This was one of those impossible coincidences that should never happen. Peter Cargill and I had known each other well in this very city of Karachi during his Indian Civil Service days in 1946. He was now domiciled in America and employed by the World Bank.
Arrived in Rome, Crispin went on his way leaving us to enquire about onward flights. We were asked ‘did we have French visas in our Passports? ‘No, we were not thinking of going to France’. It transpired that civilian aircraft were not permitted to land at Leopoldville. We would be landed in the French Congo and carried over the mighty Congo River by military aircraft. Mighty the river is with raging cataracts near the capital, even though the river still has 250 miles to go before reaching the sea. Whilst waiting for visas from the French Embassy we became interested tourists.
The aircraft of the day did not fly at great altitudes. We had good views of the Atlas Mountains and other features as we headed south and a minor equator crossing ceremony with some fizzy drink took place as we went. On arrival after the cross-river flight we were fitted with pale blue UN berets and met our Malayan contingent commander, similarly garbed. There was a surprise in store. A lunch party reception awaited us and the guests included the future President Sese Mobutu himself as well as the heads of contingents with Commonwealth connections, past or present. There was no British contribution as such to the UN Force. Canada was looking after communications and I was glad to meet Indians and Pakistanis. Both countries had sent Service Corps teams and they worked together as happily as they had once done in the wartime Royal Indian Army Service Corps. Nigerian and Ghanaian contingents and probably others included British officers.
Our Malayan contingent had settled in well. Smart and well turned out they saluted anyone who might deserve it and the big smile they gave with it made them immediately popular. They had challenged other contingents to football matches and in every way made themselves part of the International force. It is a compliment to say that a certain natural innocence helped to make them firm partners in the enterprise more quickly than most.
Dining out with a Signals friend we were joined by an educated local citizen and conversed freely in French or as freely as my comprehension would allow. When leaving he asked if I could give him a lift on his way in the car provided for me. Arriving near my UN accommodation he asked if he could be taken further but I refused. Leaving the car he made a panic stricken dash across the square and disappeared. This was the first indication to me that we existed in an atmosphere of volatile uncertainty. One should be constantly alert and cautious. One British officer summed it up in this way. ‘Proceed with care or you may face a sordid death with great loss of dignity’.
With the formalities of the official visit over, Brigadier Tunku Osman returned to Malaya and Nazaruddin and I started to discover what lay in store for his contingent. We made contact with the British Ambassador who was helpful to all those with a Commonwealth association and then sought military advice. India had provided a senior officer in the person of General Rieki. He and I had a number of mutual friends in India. His impressive title was ‘Military Adviser to the Secretary General’s Special Adviser’. Rather then forecasting a future job for the Malays, he mentioned that the Irish Lt General Sean MacEoin was taking over the office of Commander of the United Nations Force from his Swedish predecessor. A tour of important places had been arranged for him as part of his briefing. Rieke would add our names to the list of those to travel with him. This was the best initial briefing that we could possibly have had. Not only would we get a grasp of the geography, but we would also be able to listen to briefings in several localities.
In the short while that we waited I was able to experience some of the hospitality extended between nations. In particular I recall a Moroccan guest night with couscous, conversation in French and much conviviality.
Our flight to the east set off with a mixed bag of officials and military including two newly arrived African commanding officers in need of the same introductory experience as our Colonel Nazaruddin. Both were strapping great men with infectious smiles. They would take over the Nigerian and Ghanaian battalions. At first we journeyed over many miles of savannah, changing to endless tropical rain forest with never an indication of habitation. Eventually we sighted the northern end of Lake Tanganyika and on landing were driven to Bukavu. We were now close to the point where the frontiers of Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi all meet. The mention to this day of enduring racial troubles in this area highlights one of the main difficulties in governing Zaire. There are more than a dozen ethnic groups in the country with French adopted as the common language. There are nine different international frontiers to be watched as well. The only seaboard is a stretch of a mere thirty miles at the mouth of the river Congo.
If this ever becomes a peaceful area Bukavu could become a delightful tourist resort. It is part of the Great Rift Valley with its lakes and mountains. At a height of 5,000 feet the climate is equable. We had strawberries for tea, the first I had seen since my move to the ‘Tropics’. However these were not peaceful times. At night we were likely to hear rowdies outside the hotel and find blood on the pavement in the morning. Driving on my own one day I saw an unruly crowd approaching. I turned back as it is foolish to challenge a mob.
Whilst there our United Nations Commander was making a visit to an Indonesian Battalion and took me with him. I had friends who served in Indonesia in little known operations after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. They provided an extension of the best part of a year to an already long war. An Indian Division that I had served in was involved, as was the great 5th Indian Division. There were many casualties. The 5th took the surrender of Singapore. The Japanese there far outnumbered the Indian force but accepted the task of maintaining law and order whilst the hand over was taking place. No such arrangement took place in Indonesia. There was no Allied representation there when the war ended, so surrender was made to a Dutch Naval officer who had been a Japanese prisoner of war. Indonesians forcibly seized Japanese arms, arrested the Naval Captain and mayhem ensued. For the Dutch and their families there was murder, rape, imprisonment with inadequate food or water. It was not until late October that the first Indian troops began to arrive. It was nasty war executed with considerable skill.
We flew the sixty-mile length of Lake Kivu to land at Goma and found a flourishing Indonesian battalion that was immediately impressive. We were at home with them from the start. They busied themselves with Minor training whilst awaiting a military task.
Our return journey started to the north with a circulation of the crater of a mildly smoking Nyiragongo volcano in the Ruwensori Range. Its sudden eruption forty years later was to engulf Goma. After a lengthy flight over rain forest we landed at Stanleyville, or Kisangani as it has been renamed. The open-air lunch and briefings provided the purpose of our visit. Thoughts of exploration of the area by Stanley, a hundred years earlier, brought astonishment at the hardihood and enterprise of the explorers of his age.
Back in Kinshasa my visit was over. It was time to return to K-L and make my report.
It was a few months later that orders came for my return to Britain in the summer, well short of the three-year tour that was planned. We would return home under British arrangements and miss the perk of travelling round the world eastward that some of my friends contrived. They were credited with the standard Malay cost of repatriation and made their own plans for the route. Towards the end of our time Jack Rampton and I set aside a week when his Treasury travels and my duties would allow us take a short family holiday together before our departure. Spencer Chapman’s book of his wartime experiences, ‘The Jungle is Neutral’ told an interesting story of behind the lines activities during the Japanese occupation and the work of Force 136 in Malaya. Pangkor Island, in an isolated position on the West Coast, became important to them. Submarines could be brought in there with reasonable safety, stores could be paddled ashore by folboat and personnel delivered and evacuated. Enquiries enhanced the view that this would be a place of great interest.
In the flat area of this part of the coast there is a long inlet of some twenty miles before reaching the river estuary. No road runs near the coast, so we took a boat from the nearest village for the five mile trip to the mainland fishing village and on across the two mile channel to Pangkor. There we took over the two hutted living bungalows with a simple restaurant close by. There was no shortage of good fish. The whole island with its long sandy beaches and clear water for warm swimming was ours. As on any unvisited shore there were many treasures of shells to be found.
On the seaward side there was the Emerald Isle which was a pleasure to visit. It had been used for simple visual signalling to visiting submarines and was the shore from which Freddie Spencer Chapman was eventually to leave Malaya. We had no reason to expect then that our two families would enjoy joint exploration of distant places for the next forty years.
We were to travel home by ‘Trooper’, the diminishing fleet of ships plying to and fro carrying soldiers between home and Foreign Service in many parts of the world. This form of travel was a great experience for the children travelling with us. The Captain and crews of these vessels were skilled in their task and kept every one well informed and entertained throughout the voyage. There was further help from a ship described as a Naval Auxiliary that took our car and an oversize packing case to England. Without even the formality of a signature the case was found months later deposited on the drive of our Catterick married quarter.
There were calls of a day or two at military stations along the way. Some friends were met in Aden where military operations were to build up over the coming years. We also had time to look round Gibraltar and rehearse the tale of an ancestor, Major General Sir John Smith, an ancestor in charge of the Artillery there from 1810-14 during the Peninsular War. In his younger days he had served in Canada and for nine years in America, some of it as a prisoner of war.
For our disembarkation leave we had the use of a 14th century farmhouse in Rye, long distant from any fields, that my brother had bought. Through the generations members of my family were never content unless they had a project in hand. Ours was to clear wartime and other rubble from Landgate Square, a square in name with houses remaining on two adjacent sides. It was a pleasant surprise in later years to see how all the residents had carried on the good work that we had started.
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