The George Adams Interview — Part Six

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of George Adams, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. Adams fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
Other parts to this story can be found at:

INDEX: A7544630

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This is a transcript taken from audio footage made by the Department of Sound Recordings at the
Imperial War Museum,
Lambeth Road,
LONDON SE1 6H7.

It has been copied almost exactly as recorded, therefore the terminology and grammar are as spoken and have not been manipulated in any way. Where place names that could not be found in an atlas, and/or unfamiliar terminology are mentioned, phonetic spellings are used and are subject to alteration.

On some occasions, sentences were not completed; the following symbol is used to denote that: ……………………
Only repetition has been suppressed.

Bill Ross — BBC People’s War Story Editor.
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Int: What positions did you take up there?

GA: Well, we were…………

Int: Were you just in a building?

GA: We were just in the building and on the gates, on the main gate, that was all. We’d been patrolling round the buildings and stood on guard at the main gates. That was the only time…..I think it was rather eerie there. You’d built all this business of the fifth column up, and the way they’d built it up, you almost expected some attack being made in the area itself, even though the Japanese were way back up country; the way they’d built this thing. I suppose it was a good thing, you were always on guard.

We stayed there until — I think we were there three or four days: we ran short of rations, they never brought any. Gregson came to visit us, asked the sergeant, “Everything alright?” “No sir, we’ve very little food left, we’re a bit tight, really rationed down.” Gregson blew his top. They should have been round two days before with the truck, and who should roll in, but the truck, just as he was there, and he blew his top again against the officer who was on the truck. Anyhow, that was straightened out, they got the food for us, then the defence force was called up, and they moved in. They were engineers from tin mines, planters, from all walks of life really. They were quite a good crowd, they were. They had it very rough, I think, right from the start because they’d no mosquito nets, and we were down on the waterfront, and, oh, they were vicious, the mosquitoes down there, there were thousands.

The first night they were there, when they got up the next morning, their faces were swollen and bitten — terrible, and I think they got things sorted out but we didn’t remain long after that. I think we’d another day there until they got settled in, then we came away and back to transit camp.

Int: So, when would that have been, would that have been still in December?

GA: Yes, it was very early December. That was only a few days after it started. We were on transit camp for a few days, well, perhaps two or three days, and then we were down on the jetty at Keluang, where the American clipper used to come in. We were down there for only a couple of days.

Int: What were you meant to be doing there?

GA: We were on guard there.

Int: Guarding the fixtures or guarding the stores?

GA: Guarding just that area, on the waterfront. We were there only about two days then we moved back to transit camp again. We were in transit camp, no more than 48 hours, when we were moved up to a radio location station, which was radar, up on the south west tip of Johor. On the hills there, the highest point overlooking the straits, the radar station was. There were two stations, one there and one at the north east of Johor, a place called Kota Tinggi, but we were on the one down on the south west. That was isolated, it was er………..

Int: Just your section again?

GA: Yes, just our section; it was built up, he took a few more men from the other section and built us up because it was quite a big job there.

You come out on the south west there, follow the straits along and out through the pineapple fields and into jungle and onto the top of this ridge. The radar station was right on top of the ridge, the mast and everything. Our billets were situated on terraces around it, and we built all the gun posts there.

Int: How did you go about that?

GA: Sandbags, filling loads of sandbags. They had loads of sand brought up and we were filling sandbags and hammering them down tight, and we built all the gun posts all along different parts around this ridge. And then, you’d also - two sections of the group would be on guard all day; on and off, you’d take it in turns. You’d come off sandbagging and go on, and they’d be patrolling this ridge, up to the radar station and back the other way into the jungle.

Int: Did you know what was going on in the radar station? It was pretty secret I expect.

GA: All we knew was what the lads would come out with off duty: plotting anything; it was pretty quiet at first, we’d not much at all until one morning, we woke up to a heck of a din of aircraft. They’d put the first, big daylight raid in with fighter protection, and, they’d plotted it down country of course, but we couldn’t do much about it. As I said, these buffalos were terrible fighter aircraft, and they really suffered, those lads did.

Int: Was this raid a blanket bombing or was there a target?

GA: Yeah, it was, as I remember it, it was an attack over one of the airfields, I’m not sure which one it was, but it was an attack on that and an attack on the docks.

Int: So, your location station wasn’t a target.

GA: No, it was over the other side of the straits in the Singapore on the island. That was the target, and I always remember there were parachutes all over the place, but the thing was that most of those parachutes were our parachutes. It was then that they began to realise that the navy or the Japanese fighter was far in advance of anything we’d got out there.

REEL 5

Int: We were talking about the gradually deterioration situation really, from December on, and, how long did you stay up on this radio direction finding job, I mean, guarding it?

GA: We had Christmas up there, the fifteenth of February was the surrender, and we were there, I should say, until almost the beginning of February.

Int: Were there other incidents while you were up there?

GA: No, we should have been there until getting on to the last week in January. Yes, we’d one or two little incidents while we were up there. I always remember one, it was very strange. We were making these gun posts, and we were carrying sandbags from this heap of sand, and going back for more. As we went back for more, there was a person who came through the camp - it was a narrow ridge on the top — down this path, trotting. It was very strange. He appeared from out of the jungle on the hill, ran down, and we’d a lot of Chinese coolies working on the camp at the time, they were still doing a certain amount of repair work and building, things like that. We thought, “Well, he must be one of the coolies.” He passed us, continued past the guardroom, up the hill by the radar station, and we shouted, “Stop him,” but he’d gone past everybody. We dashed up to the top of the hill as fast as we could — it was all jungle the other side, and scrub jungle — he’d gone and I’m still firmly convinced that he was a Japanese. The way he came through, as I remember it now, and we thought so immediately. He’d gone, and that was it. Another night when we were on guard, down in the pineapple fields, they’d rake all the pineapple leaves up into heaps, and, we could see this light, we could see there was a cabin down there, we could see this light from the hill, from this cabin, then suddenly, these heaps of pineapple refuse, were set on fire, and there was a direct line, in the middle of the pineapple field. There was a direct line of light, straight through to the city, and about — not a quarter of an hour afterwards, aircraft were coming down and there was a raid on the city that night.

Int: So, you felt that there was actual Japanese infiltration of one sort and another.

GA: Oh yeah, we reported it immediately and the adjutant came out, and he had a look and rang the police up, down in Johor Baharu, but I don’t know what happened, but these fires were still burning. It was rather isolated and quite a way to get to, from Johor Baharu, so they’d probably think nothing about it. Anyway, a quarter of an hour afterwards, they were coming down.

Int: What about, I mean, did they clear away, the Chinese Coolie Labour after that?

GA: Yes, they moved off the cam, there were just our people left on. There were Chinese, and some Indians stayed there. There was a sheikh surveyor there, surveying for other plots of land, for other buildings in case it was held; in case we did stay there. He was there quite a long time with us. He’d got his family down in the local village, about three miles away. Gradually, they all drifted away but he stayed with us until we moved off. He was a very disappointed man, because the great white Raj…. Then things started to all go wrong.

Int: Did the attitude of the local population change towards you when things started to go wrong, I mean, did you notice it at that stage?

GA: With being up there, we were rather isolated and we didn’t come into contact with them very much. We used to get into Singapore on ration runs occasionally. When the air raids started there, you’d see those, but we weren’t in contact with them a lot. When we were in contact, I remember we’d an escape path, down through the jungle, off this ridge if we couldn’t get down the road.

Int: Did you actually prepare this track specially, or was it already there?

GA: No, it had been cut out by the coolies before we went up there; they’d got it all ready. We went down there one day to have a look, into the village, a Malay village. They were quite nice. We were invited into their homes. One of them took us in. He was an ex Johor Regiment man. He’d finished them, he was getting on, the poor old lad was, but he invited us in and to his sons and daughters, and all the family. We sat and had a drink with them and we sat talking the best we could.

Int: Did you know what was happening in the campaign at all?

GA: Oh yes.

Int: How did yer find out, who was telling you, was it the radar people?

GA: Well, apart from the news bulletins every day, which we didn’t believe, because we knew how desperate things were getting, we always got this business, what we got with the fall of France. We were falling back onto prepared positions, and so it went on. “Ay ay, here we go again, we’re going through it all again.”

Int: So where DID you get your information from, if you didn’t believe the bulletins?

GA: Soldiers we met down in Singapore, one or two of the lads who were on strong points in dromes, and occasionally meet some of the other sections. They’d always come up with something that they’d heard from the squadrons, so you knew things weren’t very satisfactory. Things were going from bad to worse.

Int: So, what was the next thing to happen to you? You moved in late January, anything else before then?

GA: Nothing much. We just got orders to evacuate the camp…………..

Int: Did the radar people go with you, or did they stay on?

GA: They came out with us.

Int: Did they smash up the station?

GA: They took the mast down and all the………….. 24 hours before we moved, they got everything prepared. It took quite a few days to get everything ready, and then 24 hours before they moved, they got all the transformers out and everything, and the mast down. Everything was loaded, and they came out with all the equipment, so that was that.

New Year’s Day, as I remember it: they came out from the locator, with the news that there was a heck of a plot with aircraft coming down country: tremendous, the biggest they’d had. They always used to fly in twenty sevens — threes. Nine threes. There were three batches — eighty one planes with their escorts above them. As they went over, they rang headquarters on Singapore, reporting this lot, three batches, three formations of 27 each. They didn’t bomb Singapore, I don’t know whether they flew on — they’d probably bomb Borneo, or New Guinea or somewhere like that, because they didn’t bomb Singapore. Just after they’d flown over, they came back on the phone from ‘ops’ room to say that those in the radar post must have been imagining things. Had we had a good New Year’s Eve? This is the sort of thing you used to get, nobody………y’know, it was all confusion, all the time.

Int: So what happened when you went on leave in late January?

GA: Yes, it was late in January when we went back to transit camp. There were sections still out; one section remained, they never moved, they stayed down at air raid quarters in the centre of the island. They never moved at all. We came back, and if I remember rightly, we did a bit of lorry guards, moving bombs and things like that to various places.

Int: On the island?

GA: On the island, yes, for a couple of days.

Int: Were you guarding or driving?

GA: We were guarding.

Int: Guarding the lorries?

GA: Yes, we were on board with the bombs at the back and ammunition in the back.

Int: What were they fearing?

GA: Well, it was getting desperate then, they were nearly down at the causeway and I think they were moving this ammunition out to various places where they thought they’d have to make their strong points, and use it from there. Then, we were told to move to another airfield. We moved up there a few days before they came over the causeway, and we took over various strong points up there. We built a few gun posts upon the hill above the airfield.

Int: What guns did you have with you? I should have asked you before. As a section, what guns did you have with you?

GA: We’d twin Lewis, for low flying aircraft, we’d our ordinary Lee Enfield rifles, and a few Tommy guns thrown in, and also, you’d got a few boxes of grenades. We moved up there and we built low flying anti-aircraft posts for our guns upon the top. We were just starting to get those in when the Japs reached the straits, and that became very unpleasant because we were in direct line and they could shell the drome from the other side of the straits.

Int: You were guarding the aerodrome were you?

GA: That’s right, and the first time we realised it, was when a Buffalo had landed, it was damaged and they asked us if we’d go down there and get it off the drome, push it off. We went down there, and suddenly, bang. There was shellfire dropping all over the place; everybody scattered, but they got the plane off. The pilot was very very annoyed.

Int: Why?

GA: He was a Flight Lieutenant; he was quite a nice fella, great big chap — no, that wasn’t the pilot, it was a pilot who’d gone down — he’d been in action and he’d gone down to see how his friend was — he’d brought this one in. He was very annoyed. He said, “That’s that, I’ve had enough.” Apparently, it was the fifth time he’d baled out. They’d hardly any aircraft left anyhow. They’d had a right punishing time.

Int: This was a one off, you helping on the drome. You were actually guarding it.

GA: Yes, we were guarding it.

Pt 7: A7542669

Pr-BR

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