One of a Kind (2nd Edition)

JUMPING IN WITH BOTH FEET

SIX

Clarence and his Midget, supported by a glowing invitation signed by no less a personage

than Mr. G. E. Bogaars, Permanent Secretary, MID, to school-leavers, university graduates,

Government and statutory boards’ employees and staff of quasi-Government organisations

like the People’s Association, corralled between 2,500 and 3,000 unsuspecting juveniles

and young adults. ‘Unsuspecting’ is a fair description of the state of mind of the applicants

because even MID did not, at that point, know exactly what the applicants would have to

go through: the training programme was being formulated with foreign advisors even as the

recruitment proceeded. But times were hard and Government jobs offered some security.

Singapore was mostly low-rise and slum and backbreaking labour, hawking and daily-rated

employment. Two hundred dollars plus keep was big money and if an MG Midget was

thrown in, what more could one ask? Not that it was assumed by all to be an army issue,

mind you—just the possibility of being able to afford one, like young Clarence.

But, something else was in the air. Hitherto, Singapore’s military security had been either a

British affair or, after 16

September, 1963, the Malaysian Federal Government’s. In both

circumstances, the military had been highly visible, too visible perhaps. About 15% of

Singapore’s land area comprised military installations occupied by the British, even after 9

August, 1965, and whose activities accounted for between 20-40% of Singapore’s GDP. The

first local military unit had been the Singapore Volunteer Rifle Corps, formed in 1854, an

expatriate force created to safeguard the expatriate community against the ‘native’ population.

In WWI, the Volunteers had played a big part in routing mutineers from the Indian Army

garrison stationed in Singapore who had been misled into believing that they were being

shipped out to fight their fellow Muslims in Asia Minor and executing 22 of the 41 through

a court martial by firing squad with considerable relish. After WWI, as relations with defence

treaty partner Japan soured irrevocably, the British Government undertook, though in fits

and starts, a massive build-up of Singapore as a bastion of the Empire, with special emphasis

on the Naval Base in Woodlands. It was ultimately to little avail. The defence of Singapore

against the Japanese in WWII had been a British/Dominions (British Indian Army/Australia

and New Zealand) business, while after the war, some of the British troops garrisoned

in Singapore had been deployed to suppress local rioting, in between operations against

the communist terrorists in peninsular Malaya. Even the two regular Singapore Infantry

Regiment battalions, the 1

and 2

, made up of Singaporeans, had been commanded by the

British before Malaysia. Under Malaysia, the two battalions and the significantly indigenised

Singapore Volunteer Corps had been subsumed under the Malaysian Armed Forces and, they

too had been deployed to suppress Singaporean rioters. Now, Singapore was a separate state:

booted out, yes, but to those who responded to the call to join the SAF, Singapore was truly

their own now. Sovereign independence; no foreign allegiance; national military forces; not a

Malaysian or British supreme headquarters; motherland under threat; manning the ramparts;

protecting their homes; paths of glory, etc.