Thread: Penang War Museum

Here's something that my editor wrote when she went to Malaysia recently. The article is for our magazine's travel section and will be released for circulation next week. I'll have to resize the pics in order to post them. Enjoy

Penang
Tales of rage and sorrow

Text and photos by Inday Espina-Varona

Blurb1: For decades the jungle was allowed to reclaim the 8-hectare fort that became a Japanese garrison and internment camp for World War 2 prisoners of war. Trekkers would come back with tales of ghosts and eerie cries and screams. Hundreds of prisoners had been beheaded there. Locals called it Hantu or haunted hill.

Blurb2: The odds and ends of a military life – spent bullet casings, broken radios, liquor bottles. You close your eyes in silent prayer for the departed owners of the rows of combat boots, muddied, fraying and, in some cases, still caked with dried blood.

Burb3: The where’s and when’s and how’s may change, but war has one constant – it’s ability to reduce lots of good folk into doing dastardly things.

PENANG – “The what?!” My high school classmate knits her brows. A resident of this Malaysian island state, she’s volunteered to guide us around the verdant island. Already, sister and I have seen the beaches, smiling politely but beating a retreat after ten minutes. Nice but, hey, we’re Filipinos, Visayans; no contest there. The Youth Park, with its lush forest, chattering monkey drama queens and lizards and colorful mechanical exercise machines, was more interesting. But on this two-day side trip, sandwiched between a visit to my old Melaka hunting grounds and the Singapore Global Brand Forum, I am gunning for the Penang War Museum.
“There’s no such thing,” my friend claims and promptly drives off for dinner at yet another beach resort.
Can’t really blame my old classmate. The morning after, we discover that staff at the glorious P&E Hotel, which has serviced the wild and restless for a century, hadn’t heard of the war museum either.
But after a huddle with a local cop, the driver of our hired car smacks his forehead. Yes, the hidden vale of tears, he mumbles. Well, maybe he didn’t say vale; maybe it is “place of weeping” because I do catch menangis, which means weep.

Haunting
The war museum, originally a British fort built in the 1930’s, isn’t nestled in some valley. It’s in Bukit Batu Maung on Penang’s south-east highlands, accessible through a winding road. You could easily miss it as directional signs are small.
The war museum exacts a tribute of sorts from foreigners. We get to pay 20RM, plus some more for every camera brought in; Malaysians only pay 10RM with a 50% discount for students.
We seem be the only visitors at 9 am.
The ticket kiosk lady, after being told we are not Malaysians, asks for our origins.
“Ah, Philippines!” She beams. “You have great war museums. Very long time now, no?” This, she says with one hand sweeping, “This is very new.”
The forests of Batu Maung aren’t for the faint-hearted. For decades the jungle was allowed to reclaim the 8-hectare fort that became a Japanese garrison an internment camp for World War 2 prisoners of war.
Trekkers would come back with tales of ghosts and eerie cries and screams. For years, the area, which witnessed the beheadings of hundreds of prisoners – not to mention days and nights of torture – was called Hantu or haunted hill.

Folly
Penang is at one end of the Straits of Melaka, a major global sea lane that even today hosts some 30% of the world’s trade in goods. On its other side, the capital of Georgetown is separated only by a narrow, 3-km channel from Butterworth, which lies on the Perai River estuary in the state Wellesley.
While the British showed foresight by building the fort in anticipation of a global conflict, their design and operations were all geared for an attack from the open sea.
The main goal was protecting Butterworth, the airfield by the harbor. Instead, in December 1941 the Japanese swept in from Kampuchea into the main Malay peninsula and caught the British napping.
Ahmed, our driver-guide, a very robust septuagenarian, was a child when the Japanese arrived. An uncle perished in the hands of the Japanese.
“Maybe he died here,” Ahmed muses while staring at greenish photos of war crime trials. “Nobody saw him after the Japanese took him.”
He sniffs while reading historical notes and looks disgusted as he turns away. “The British didn’t stand a chance.”
One of the fort’s four anti-aircraft guns remains in solitary splendor. There wasn’t much the 500-man garrison — which didn’t exactly feature the best and brightest of the colonial military — could do after the Japanese, led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, started aerial bomb runs on the islands on December 16.
Within the day, the enemy had seized most of the defender’s ships and boats, forcing a British evacuation from what they used to call “Fortress Penang.” The Japanese didn’t even have to cover their Penang landings with plane runs.
The takeover of the fort did not cost the invaders a single man. So hasty was the British retreat that they failed to destroy their radio station on the island. The Japanese used it for their hearts and minds campaign.

Snakes, wasps and fighting men
The war museum retains the old layout, including an observation tower. Anti-aircraft gun pits branch into underground tunnels and steel ladders that goes deep into the ground. The halls, the latrines and sleeping quarters remain. The air presses on you, too thick and cloying for comfort. There is a lumbering, almost thuggish quality to it even factoring in equatorial humidity.
The fort is a fascinating glimpse of a country — multi-racial and multi-lingual today but with lingering class and race problems. British engineers relied on South Africans, Indians, Nepalese, and prisoners of different races from various conflicts to build the fort.
British officers had their barracks, rank and file Brits their own; the Indians (and other residents with South Asian origins) and the Malays were separated in their own buildings.
“No Chinese troops?” I ask a passing staff. He shakes his head and smiles.
But they also serve who stay and wait and produce and trade for the war machine and the country. While few Chinese joined the official military, many were part of the guerrilla underground that fought with zeal but came to a tragic end after independence — though that’s another story.
Only a fraction of the entire complex comprises the museum. The rest of the grounds are used for more boisterous activities like paintball wars.
A sign reminds me the wilderness is just meters away. “Beware of snakes.” Indeed, a small 1-ft brown one slithers across our path minutes after. But it is an angry wasp that sends me scampering for safety. The insect and a partner that comes to join it also scatter a group of high school kids just settling down for a history lecture. A girl later screams with frustration at her futile attempts to drive away mosquitoes. We’re safe though; warnings on the rising incidence of dengue had convinced us to slather on some smelly goo.

Dark depths
At the first tunnel, the first thing that greets us is an insipid painting, a pastoral landscape of a plantation much like those managed by colonial masters. In Malaysia and Southeast Asia, they formed communities with kinky underbellies that fueled Somorset Maugham’s tales. (Maugham and Ernest Hemmingway and the literary crème of last century’s first part had stayed at the P&E, which dedicates some rooms to them.)
A few steps from the painting is a fading photograph of a smiling Malay soldier; his eyes indicate some Chinese blood. On the ground and on a makeshift wheelbarrow are the odds and ends of a military life – spent bullet casings, broken radios, liquor bottles. It is a nearby corridor that stops us cold.
There is nothing to do but close your eyes in silent prayer for the departed owners of the rows of combat boots, muddied, fraying and, in some cases, still caked with dried blood. There is a backpack. There are jackets and helmets. These were once owned by men who breathed and cursed and scratched their heads and crotches. Men who’d barely escaped internment but who would spend the next decade wondering at the fate of other men later brought to their old fort.
Just off the tunnel are square cement walls that look like dried up wells. Each has a ladder heading for dark depths. Nearby, wooden beams prop open trap doors that a staff calls “escape hatches.”
I see ladders and ask if it’s okay to explore the bottom.
The staff gasps, goes ashen and bellows, “No, no!”
He likes repeating words, “No” in particular. After a series that ends in a screech I am tempted to demand, “why, why, why?!” But he utters three words that dash all defiance. “Snakes! Snakes! Snakes!”
As he says every word, he takes a step towards us. We end up with him raising one hand as if he were dangling some serpent and I am pressed against the wall with both hands up. “Okay, okay, okay.”
The fort is old but a younger generation has taken to impress the horrors of war with some paintings. There is Death all over, with his long black robe and sickle. There are his victims. And there is what would in print be a cartoon bubble, very Western, much like those gothic graphic tales, with a tortured man spouting curses at his tormentors.
There is a room with a row of beds. It is strangely unsoldierly though at first there isn’t a single thing you can pinpoint. Then my eyes fall on a white slip by a chair; it is almost hidden from sight.
I turn around and hail another museum worker. It is a women’s dorm, he says. But his face twists in distaste at the word dorm and he looks hurriedly away.
I ask another worker; the same response. The woman in the souvenir shop is more forthcoming though she lowers her voice in a conspiratorial whisper. The Japanese brought women there, she says. Willingly? I ask. She shakes her head. From where? Here? She turns away abruptly.
Unlike Filipinos and Koreans, the Malaysians seem apologetic about the reality of WW2 sex slaves, forgetting they were victims and not war groupies.

The Generals
Other rooms serve up equally grisly reminders. On one bed a bright cloth covers a lump that could once have been a man.
There is a bare hall with a desk and two chairs. “Interview room” the sign says.
There are pails and buckets in cubicles that represent toilets. There are installation art using pails and bolos and bayonets and bicycles and motorcycles, either pinned to walls or hanging from chains that frame Japanese symbols.
In one room are photographs, green with age, that show Caucasian prisoners of wars brushing their teeth, bathing, burying their dead or just staring hopefully for the redemption that did come.
There are photographs of the Japanese generals hanged in the Philippines as war criminals following a trial by the American victors of World War 2.
There is handsome bald Japanese man, taller than most of his compatriots. He sports a small smile while chatting with the representatives of the war’s victors. I am drawn to his photo and wonder why both prisoner and captors look jovial. In another photo is a fragile, beautiful woman, much younger than the old man.
I come near and discover it is Gen. Masaharu Homma, known as the “Beast of Bataan.” This was the general who gave the American Douglas MacArthur his greatest defeat.
In most of the photographs, Homma radiates dignity. His bearing is aloof, as though he were simply an observer of a gripping morality play. In one photo though, he is weeping, face buried in his hands. In another, he walks with head bowed.
The woman turns out to be his wife, Fujiko. Homma leans down to her, his face affectionate. Without the rest of the other mementoes they are just another couple in the thrall of a May-September romance.
If Homma looks more artistic than brutish, it is because he was an artist. But I learn of this only after the photos of Homma and Japanese war admiral Yamashita, also hanged, leave me confused and thirsty for more information.

Shades of gray
Historian Hampton Sides has a riveting story as told by Lt. Robert Pelz, one of four officers assigned as Homma’s defense counsels.
They expected a monster; this, after all, was the man responsible for the deaths of 10,000 starving Filipino and American troops forced to march from Bataan to Tarlac. History lessons told me much about the Bataan Death March; it hardly fleshed out who Homma was.
The night after the war museum visit, I was devouring Sides’ tale and amazed once more at just how many shades of gray sweep through life.
Pelz met Homma in 1946. The general was 57 years-old and spoke fluent English with a British accent. (Hey, he was at the coronation of King George VI!).
That Homma would give America its most devastating blow was ironic. He was the most pro-Western of the Japanese generals, Sides notes.
“He had been openly pro-Western before the war, a self-described Anglophile who had lived for years as a military attaché in Oxford and London, and he was widely known as the most Europeanized of all the Japanese generals…” the historian writes. “He’d met Gandhi, Churchill, and Mussolini. During one of his several trips across the United States, he had been led to the top of the newly built Empire State Building by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.”
The general had a rather titillating background: Military tradition; much landed wealth in the family; a record of “liaisons with beautiful but socially undesirable women,” yet judged by his peers as “vaguely effeminate” – although that’s probably because there weren’t too many Japanese officers who could compose verse in the heat of battle.
He was called the Poet General, says Sides, though many, including kin, were befuddled by how this sentimental weeper climbed the military ranks.

Good men, bad deeds
Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, has an equally ambivalent story. He was general of an army that instigated atrocities in Malaysia, Singapore and in the Philippines, where he was assigned after a brief exile to Manchuria.
Yet many biographers and historians, including those hostile to Japan, credit Yamashita with trying his best to stop the outrage, even to the extent of cashiering and executing officer offenders.
Like Homma, he was a pro-Westerner who in the end did his duty for his country, right or wrong. Yamashita, according to WW2 historians, had wanted Japan to end its conflict with China and to keep peaceful relations with the United States and Great Britain. For his pains he languished in some provincial outpost for years.
By the time Yamashita completed his capture of the Malay peninsula in February 1942, his 30,000 soldiers had captured triple their number in English, Australian and Indian troops. He demanded – and got – unconditional surrender from Lt. General Arthur Percival.
He would later surrender to Percival and reportedly burst to tears when the latter refused to shake his hand.
I stand rapt before these historical photos of a bloody, yet strangely more innocent war, if war could be called that, until my sister’s tenth plea to leave.
It was a “good” war, some historians like to claim. I don’t know about that though once upon a time I, too, believed in “just” wars.
I give the photographs one last glance and trail fingers across some deteriorating gauze bandages.
The where’s and when’s and how’s may change. But war has one constant – it’s ability to reduce lots of good folk into doing dastardly things.