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Introduction
How the screening was done?
Introduction
Few days after the British surrender, suddenly, the Japanese 25th Army
headquarters issued an astounding decree: all male Chinese in Syonanto
(Singapore) between the age of 15 and 50 years were ordered to
concentrate at five assembly points at noon on 21 February 1942.
They were warned of severe punishment for disobedience. The five
points were: the open area near Jalan Besar Stadium and the north end
of Arab Street; the eastern end of River Valley Road near the junction
of Clemenceau Avenue; the open area near Tanjong Pagar Police Station;
the rubber factory near the junction of Kallang and Geylang Roads; the
open area off Paya Lebar Road.
There was fear and trembling in every Chinese home. What did
this mean? That was the question on everyone's lips.
Japanese soldiers and military police, kempeitai, went around searching
for young Chinese, dragging them into the open spaces. There was
no water, and there were no toilets. Here they waited, perhaps
for days, to be checked and classified.
The decree, as the Chinese soon discovered, was part of Operation
Clean-up (called Sook-Ching). It had been planned by
Lieutenant-Colonel Tsuji, officer in charge of planning and action.
The 25th Army intended to move to Sumatra. Only the Defense
Force would be left behind to hold Singapore. Tsuji argued that
before they went the 25th Army should clean up all anti-Japanese
elements including the Chinese volunteers who fought so tenaciously
against the Japanese, all members of the China Relief Fund, and other
anti-Japanese organizations. The most brutal massacre for
weeding out and exterminating anti-Japanese elements began in
Singapore.
The Japanese method of identifying dissidents was crude and arbitrary.
The kempeitai and their informants decided who was innocent and who
was not, sometimes by look and by instinct. These suspects had
no defense. The lucky ones who cleared the screening process had
"examined" stamped on their foreheads, arms or cloths. The less
fortunate were taken away by the truckload to outlying areas and were
shot or bayoneted, or both, to death. Changi Beach was but the
first of several killing grounds along the eastern and northeastern
shore. Tanah Merah, Sentosa and Punggol were the others.
As a result, many thousands of Chinese men lost their lives during the
ruthless Operation Clean-up. But today the official figure said
only several thousands died while many sources indicate the death toll may be as
high as 50,000. At the War Crime Trial in 1947, the Japanese
defendants admitted to killing only 5,000 Chinese civilians. Which one is correct? SPI share with you the details
and some amazing findings from our investigation.
(1) In Jalan Besar and
Jalan Sultan, women and children were also screened. They went without
food or water for days.
(2) People detained at Tanjong Pagar Polic Station were executed at
sea near Blakang Mati Island.
(3) This photo was taken at the early stages of the operation.
(4) An exit gate through which all detainees had to pass. The
soldiers behind the table empowered to decide who to live, who to die.
How the screening was done?
The Deadly Show-hand
From the morning of the 21st to the afternoon of 22nd, some thousands
of youths were detained in concentration camps of different locations.
One of them was at the intersection of River Valley Road and
Clemenceau Avenue where the
UE Square complex is standing today.
No form of systematic questioning or any interrogation procedures were
applied. Some people were asked solely their names. Others
just occupations. In most cases, the Japanese based those
life-or-death decisions in River Valley Road during that 36-hour
period in River Valley Road was pure whim. Those people whose
faces perhaps were displeasing to the Japanese were simply taken to be
executed.
The kempeitai officer in charge of the Telok Kurau English School
concentration point, off Telok Kurau Road, between Joo Chiat Place and
Lorong J, developed perhaps the shortest of all screening short-cuts.
Based on a "show of hands" principle, it dispensed with the need for
any form of personal questioning whatsoever. The Japanese
officer started by massing all Chinese from the Telok Kurau - Tanjong
Katong locality onto the school field which is today part of the La
Salle School campus. Males were quickly segregated from females.
Elderly men were then allowed to leave. Those males remaining
were all in the 15 to 50 years age group.
"Hands up", the officer commanded through an interpreter, "those with
property worth $50,000 or more". The very few wealth men were
immediately set aside. Came the next command, "Hands up all the
volunteers", followed by "hands up the lawyers", "doctors", "school
teachers, merchants, .. laborers, mechanics, Government servants,
Hainanese ... etc..".
As each group was identified, its members were placed in special
roped-off enclosures on the school field. By late afternoon,
they had set aside the people in the different categories. Not
one personal question had been posed. Not a single answer
recorded. Not a single name taken. Come nightfall, all
those in the special enclosure were transferred to locked classrooms
within the main school building or to guarded compound houses nearby
in Telok Kurau Road. The following morning they were
transferred, group by group at staggered intervals, to military
lorries and driven to the 7-1/2 milestone, Siglap Road, massacred.
The Deadly Body Search
While the dreaded kempeitai enforced all screening programmes within
the heavily populated areas of downtown Singapore, responsibility for
these activities to the north and east of the island fell to units of
the Konoye Imperial Guards. Commandeering a large colonial
bungalow known as Oehlers' Lodge, on Upper Serangoon Road, the Guards
deployed sizable numbers of troops on house-to-house searches
throughout the area. Here their tactics differed from those of
the kempeitai. Elderly men, females, and all children below the
age of fifteen years were not required to attend the concentration
camp at the lodge.
The lodge built by a member of the Oehlers family was located on the
northern side of Upper Serangoon Road, several hundred yards before
the Punggol Road turn-off. One side of the property was a tennis
court, contained within a high, rectangular mesh-wire fence. The
Guards decided this would be an ideal location for screening the
entire Chinese community living alone Upper Serangoon Road to the
eastern end at Kangkar where there resided Teochew fishermen and their
families.
Some 1,000 Chinese males found themselves incarcerated on the tennis
court. The Guards began a body search on those with tattoos.
Those with body markings were likely to be members of Chinese secret
societies or other gangster elements. Every male spotting a
tattoo was routinely set aside for execution.
Then began a Q&A interrogation of all detainees on the tennis court
through Taiwanese interpreters. They were asked about their
attitudes towards the Japanese, whether they were communists, whether
they were Government servants, merchants, students, employees of
Japanese companies, working for British companies or laborers.
At the end of the interrogation came 12 military lorries pulled into
the lodge driveway. Prisoners who had been discovered with
tattoo marks were loaded into the back of the first vehicle.
With them went a number of Japanese troops armed with rifles and light
machine guns. One by one the remaining eleven lorries were
filled with Chinese men, youths and boys who were led across in groups
from the tennis court.
The 12 vehicles drove off in convoy along Upper Serangoon Road, turned
left into Punggol Road and motored to the bus terminus located then,
as it still is today, at the extreme end of the route where the road
meets the Straits of Johore. All prisoners were ordered to get
down from the lorries. Then as evening approached, they were
escorted to the Punggol foreshore, group by group, and executed by
firing squads.
Locals in the immediate vicinity had been driven away by the troops.
Put Puay Ah Boh, a fisherman who lived at 163 Punggol Road, at the
11th milestone, saw the convoy of lorries pass by that afternoon.
In a while, he heard the rhythmic "pop-pop-pop..", then sporadic
"bang! bang!" of the execution squad's weapons, and the screams of the
victims.
Chinese against Chinese
Under continuing pressure from Tsuji and his fellow organizers, the
Japanese military relied increasingly on locals for screening
assistance. Some selected Chinese men would volunteer to provide
information on who are anti-Japanese. The reward for such
volunteer job varied from gentle coercion, to promises of special
treatment, or open threats of execution for self or family. It
was an ridiculous process that frequently set friend against friend,
neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, and even
family relatives against one another. The informants were masked
when they were picking out who were the suspects from the innocents.
But, at the end, together with the prisoners whom they selected, the
informants were trussed up in the backs of lorries for execution as
well.
(2) Identification of
anti-Japanese was left entirely in the hands of the officers at the
mass-screening centres. Hooded informers were used to identify
those suspected of being anti-Japanese.
(3) & (4) The lucky ones who passed the screening left with an
"examined" chop or a piece of clearance pass.
Photos and information credits
By courtesy of the following sources, this
article was made possible:
Media Masters
Singapore National Archives
Asahi Shimbun
Australian War Memorial
Public Record Office, London
The Imperial War Museum, London
The New Straits Times
The New Paper
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