Long Forgotten, Long Overdue
Long Forgotten, Long Overdue: The Saga of Alfred Bird and the Singapore War Crimes Trials
By Aimee Liu
Seventy-five years ago this September, in one of the last official surrender ceremonies of World War II, Singaporeans gathered in their city center, in front of the grand façade of the Supreme Court Building, to witness Japan’s formal return of Singapore to British colonial rule. Singaporeans, like other Asians, had suffered innumerable atrocities and privations under the Japanese, and even the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) initially welcomed the British back as liberators. All were eager to see the enemy brought to justice for the suffering they had inflicted during the war. So it was that, just three months later, British War Crimes Trials commenced in this same Court.
Picture the scene, as described in the Straits Times on 22 January,1946:
Military personnel, Allied observers, news cameramen, and reporters jostle among members of the public in the courtroom’s gallery… The accused enter the dock, bow, and stand to attention. They wear identical khaki pants and short-sleeved shirts. They have signs numbered from one to ten for identification. At the bench, three British military judges take their places. Two judges are British, and one judge is of Indian ethnicity. The presiding judge calls the court to order and declares that the accused will be treated “in accordance with the principles of British justice”.
This was the first of 131 war crimes trials prosecuted in Singapore between 1946 and 1948, which in turn accounted for more than a third of the 330 trials in total that the British conducted throughout Asia. Yet, as Lim Jia Yi, a research fellow with the Singapore War Crimes Trials Project (SWCTP), told me, these trials have largely been forgotten today.
One reason for this historical neglect is that the Japanese suspects tried in Singapore and elsewhere were lower-ranking “Class B” and “Class C” suspects, unlike the 28 notorious “Class A” military and political leaders prosecuted at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. As compared to the Tokyo and Nuremberg Trials, according to Ms. Lim, “the class B and C war crimes trials are relatively under-researched and lesser-known” even within Singapore. The SWCTP seeks to correct the record and restore this chapter of the war to our collective memory.
My own introduction to these trials reflects the difficulty of unearthing this history, as well as the human price of losing it. About a decade ago, while conducting research for a WWII novel set in India’s Andaman Islands, I learned about a British civilian named Alfred Bird, who was murdered early in the Japanese occupation of the Andamans. His case proved in several ways to be representative of the Singapore War Crimes Trials.
The Andaman archipelago had marked the western front of the Pacific Theater during the war’s final years. Located in the middle of the Bay of Bengal, some 990 miles northwest of Singapore, the islands were mostly wild except for the colonial capital of Port Blair, which featured a strategically desirable airstrip.
The port originally was built as a penal colony for Indian and Burmese independence fighters in the late 1800s. With hundreds of miles of water in every direction, no prisoner ever escaped. By 1940, however, after a succession of hunger strikes and the intercession of Mahatma Gandhi, most of the political prisoners had been repatriated. Port Blair’s remaining population consisted primarily of released convicts and descendants who chose to stay on. The Indian Independence League had a strong foothold here, and Alfred Bird numbered among the local British who supported the Indian freedom movement. Bird also was one of the handful of British officials who surrendered Port Blair on March 22, 1942.
Born and raised in India and a veteran of the Indian Army, Bird had lived in the Andamans for twenty years, working as a supply officer and deputy commissioner. He’d raised five children in Port Blair, and by all accounts, he was liked and trusted by the local population, with one critical exception.
Pushkar Bagchi was not a political prisoner. He was a thief who’d been jailed after Bird testified against him. One of the first acts of the Japanese was to release all the port’s remaining prisoners—including Bagchi. No sooner was he freed than Bagchi arranged to have pieces of a wireless set planted in the house where Bird was now being held. He accused Bird of spying, and just six weeks into the occupation, the whole town was summoned for a public show trial. Bird was quickly convicted, then surrounded by Japanese soldiers.
In Black Days in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, historian Rabin Roychowdhury describes Bird’s final moments:
…his ankles were broken, his arms twisted and his shoulders crushed…Some one showered kicks at his back and the others punched blows on his stomach. His body was turned into a lifeless lump of flesh and blood… When his plight was ineffable [sic], convulsion started, the old men [sic] yearned for water but all in vain. To the contrary his head was severed in one stroke to quench the thirst of the earth.
Although the story of Alfred Bird’s death is well documented in Port Blair, it never reached his widow and children, waiting for news in England. They had last seen Bird the day they were evacuated, just one week before the Japanese invaded. Bird expected to follow them with the last of the Indian troops, but his ship never arrived.
It took nearly 60 years for Bird’s grandson Chris Pratt-Johnson to discover the relevant archives in Port Blair. In all that time, the British Government had told his family nothing about Bird’s fate. Even when Pratt-Johnson informed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of his findings, they refused to add Bird’s name to the Roll of Honor, citing insufficient evidence to support a ruling that his death was “a direct consequence of the war whilst detained by the enemy.”
Then, in 2017, Pratt-Johnson received a note from Lim Jia Yi. She wanted to know if his grandfather was the same person whose case she was researching for the SWCTP. It seemed that two of the men who participated in Alfred Bird’s murder had been convicted at the War Crimes Trials 71 years earlier—even though no one in London had ever recorded Bird as a casualty.
Lieutenants Hirakawa Mitsuki and Egami Masao were tried for Bird’s killing over five days in June, 1946. They were low-level naval officers. According to the SWCTP case summary, witnesses testified that the men had enjoyed the execution. “For example, the accused had laughed.” Nevertheless, they’d been acting on orders of a superior—a superior who most likely was Bird’s actual executioner. Records in Port Blair named Bird’s killer as Colonel Bucho, but Ms. Lim told me that Bucho’s name never appeared in trial documents. “The beheading of Major Bird was also not mentioned during the trial.” The two lieutenants were each sentenced to ten years in prison.
The truncated nature of these proceedings was typical of the Singapore trials. Junior officers were prosecuted, Ms. Lim said, while “lowest- and highest-ranked soldiers tended to escape punishment.” In some cases, junior officers were charged as representative of their units, thus sparing the court from a scale of mass litigation that would have been untenable.
British authorities did their best to conduct free and fair trials with what was available, she explained. “Investigation teams were dispatched all over South and Southeast Asia to collect information, and Japanese lawyers were also provided with translators, guidance, and information.” But conditions in post-war Asia were hardly conducive. The Japanese had destroyed most of the necessary records before surrendering, and few witnesses survived.
Chaos in post-war Singapore, meanwhile, pressurized the trials. In an overview for the Singapore Law Review, SWCTP co-founder Cheah W.L. wrote, “Prisoners of war (POWs) had to be located and repatriated. There was a severe shortage of food, basic necessities, and housing. In addition, the British faced increasing resistance to continued colonial rule.”
After six months under British Military Administration, civilian governance resumed, but the British military remained on guard as “the MCP reverted to its pre-war anti-British stance, demanding more political power and organizing mass strikes.” Other groups, including trade unionists and student activists, opposed British rule, as well. This meant, Prof. Cheah noted, that the opposition no longer belonged to the elite. “After the war, political activity and defiance took on a ‘youthful, militaristic face’.” As the protests mounted, it didn’t help that the BMA’s corruption was earning it the nickname “Black Market Administration.”
It also didn’t help that the trials threatened to remind Singaporeans of Britain’s failure to protect her colonies early in the war. Like Alfred Bird, thousands of British subjects were abandoned when the U.K. surrendered Singapore, Rangoon, and Port Blair, all within five weeks of each other and without any official acknowledgment of the true danger the local populations faced.
With this debacle in the rearview mirror, Ms. Lim said, “an element of performance” crept into the trials, “directed towards the colonized population in particular (especially to re-assert British power in the region) but also to the Japanese participants (asserting Allied power).”
Indicted Japanese war criminals standing to attention in the dock of the Singapore Supreme Court at the beginning of the trial—21 January 1946. From WikiCommons. Source: IWMCollections IWM Photo No.: CF 1051. Post-Work: User:W.wolny. Licence: Unrestricted in due to IWM
This performance element may help to explain why the Bird case, along with other crimes committed in the Andamans, was prosecuted in Singapore. Port Blair, located in one of the last and most badly battered territories to be liberated, had no infrastructure to host war crimes trials, so Bird’s case couldn’t have been heard there. But it could have been tried closer, perhaps at the war crimes tribunal in Rangoon. I found it odd that crimes committed in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands represented more than a third of all the Singapore trials (more than were committed in Singapore itself). According to Prof. Cheah, the reason may have had to do with the history of the Independence Movement in Port Blair.
During the war, the Japanese had made a great show of raising the flag of Free India over the Andamans, even as they rounded up and executed most of the Independence League members. For propaganda purposes, all of Asia was told that the Indian National Army was “based” out of Port Blair and supported by the Japanese occupation forces. So, Prof. Cheah speculates, when anti-colonialists started beating the drum for independence in Singapore, “the British probably believed it was politically important to show that the Japanese had committed crimes against locals in these islands.” This implicitly cast the British on the side of liberation.
New political realities, however, complicated the performance aspects of the trials. Not only were the British wrestling with Communism and anti-colonialism, Ms. Lim said, but they were “treading a thin line between local appeasement and maintaining cordial relations with Japan,” who was now an American ally and military dependent. It was awkward, to say the least, to jail mid-level Japanese soldiers for war crimes without raising the inconvenient truth of atrocities inflicted on civilians by America. “The atomic bombings were most certainly war crimes but yet no one had been prosecuted for them.”
As a result of all these factors, most cases were dispatched with haste. Trials lasted, on average, just six days.
All in all, according to Prof. Cheah, the Class B and C war crimes trials “would contravene many of today’s human rights standards.” But this conduct reflected the political exigencies in East Asia at that moment.
“The very fact that the trials were conducted was an important statement,” Lim Jia Yi acknowledged. As part of a very delicate political balancing act, however, they were “also intended to be a quick end to the WWII chapter.”
To that end, the convicted prisoners were jailed locally, but within a few years most were repatriated to serve the remainder of their sentences at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. By that time, the Cold War had descended, adding another layer of obscurity to the record of Singapore’s post-war trials.
Given the mounting Communist threat from Korea and China, the Allies now were intent on forging an unbreakable alliance with neighboring Japan. This required burying the last traces of WWII hostility as quickly as possible. “On a governmental level,” Ms. Lim explained, “the 1950s was basically marked by a race between the Allied governments to pardon and release the war criminals in Sugamo.”
The last prisoner convicted at the war crimes trials was freed on the first day of 1957, less than a decade after the trials ended.
As far as families like Alfred Bird’s were concerned, case files from the Singapore War Crimes Trials were sent back to London and became publicly available—but only if one knew to look for them. Even today, though searchable through the International Criminal Courts and National Archives websites, the documents still can only be read by visiting the archives in person. Whether intentional or not, this bureaucratic filing system has amounted to a cover-up.
Despite having had access to all the necessary records for seven decades, the War Graves Commission only consented to recognize Bird as a war casualty after his grandson presented them with the evidence supplied by the SWCTP. Finally, in 2017, Alfred George Bird was added to the Civilian War Dead Roll of Honor 1939-1945.
Alfred George Bird. Courtesy of Chris Pratt-Johnson.
Aimee Liu is the author of the new WWII novel Glorious Boy. Her previous fiction includes Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Ms., Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA. More at aimeeliu.net.
References:
- Lim Jia Yi <jiayi_lim@u.nus.edu> research fellow with the Singapore War Crimes Trials Project
- “An Overview Of The Singapore War Crimes Trials (1946 – 1948): Prosecuting Lower-Level Accused,” by Professor Cheah W.L., head researcher and co-founder of the Singapore War Crimes Trials Project. Singapore Law Review, Volume 34: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2861802
- Black Days in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, by Rabin Roychowdhury. Manas Pub., New Delhi, 2004.