Story of Leon Comber by Ms Lee SY

Born in 1921 to a father who was a master bookbinder and housewife mother, Leon was educated at Alleyn's School (founded by Edward Alleyn, a contemporary of William Shakespeare), the junior college of Dulwich College, in southeast London. There, Leon picked up Latin and history among other subjects, and distinguished himself in sports (earning “School Colours”) such as athletics, boxing, cricket and swimming.

His friendship with Charles George Frizell (3 October 1921 – 29 September 2014), goes back to the time when they were at Alleyn's School together. In 1939 Charles asked Leon to apply with him for a short-service commission as an officer in the Royal Air Force (RAF). World War 2 had not yet started then but the British Government wanted to build up the strength of the RAF in view of the perceived threat to peace posed by Nazi Germany. Leon, however, did not sign up as he was not particularly keen on flying and thought that when and if the time came, he would prefer to serve in the army. Hence, he went into local government service and became an articled clerk articled to the Town Clerk of Chelsea, with a view to studying law and obtaining a London LL.B. Chelsea is one of the big London boroughs on the Thames and has always been regarded as the cultural and artistic centre of London.

Anyway Leon was eventually called up for service in 1940, one year after the outbreak of war, as an officer cadet, and after further training at an officer training school in Bangalore in southern India became an officer in the erstwhile Indian Army, fighting in Assam and Burma against the Japanese Imperial army, before ending up at the time of the Japanese surrender in Malaya. Meanwhile, Charles who had entered the RAF in 1939, after he had finished his pilot training and earned his wings as a fighter pilot, was posted to one of the fighter squadrons flying Hurricanes guarding the southern approaches to England. He took part in the Battle of Britain - as Churchill put it in his memorable phrase, "never had so many owed so much to so few" - and was soon in the thick of it attacking daily and nightly the German bomber squadrons that were determined to break through and destroy London, break the morale of the British people, and obliterate the London docks. Later in the war, Charles was sent to China as an instructor for the Chinese air force (KMT). When the war ended, Charles moved to Canada and obtained a degree at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and had a long career as an English teacher in the Vancouver secondary school system. Leon had faithfully kept in touch with Charles all through the intervening years till the latter passed away in 2014.

Back to Leon: After he was commissioned, the 23rd Indian Infantry Division to which Leon was attached, was originally destined for the Middle East to join the Eighth Army in the North African campaign. By 15 February 1942, Singapore (Britain’s “Impregnable Fortress”) had fallen to the Japanese Imperial Army. Not long thereafter, the Netherlands East Indies (present-day Indonesia) also surrendered to the Japanese. More than 45,000 Indian and Malay soldiers in Singapore and British Malaya were asked to transfer their loyalties to the Japanese. Those who refused, paid the price with their life. However, about 20,000 Indians, convinced that the Japanese would oust the British and grant independence to India, decided to defect, joining the Indian National Army (INA) headed by Subash Chandra Bose, with the Japanese military being in overall command.

Following these series of events, Leon’s Division was therefore, diverted from the Middle East to Quetta in Baluchistan (now part of Pakistan; west of the Indian sub-continent). Then when the Japanese invaded Burma – to cut off the overland route to China via the famed Burma Road and carving a gateway to British India - Leon’s Division now had to swing right across India to the eastern sector. First to Ranchi and Bihar, then across the Naga Hills of Manipur state into the border between Assam and Burma at Tamu in the Kalewa Valley. Their job was to cover the retreat of the Burma National Army which was coming out as fast as it could, pursued by the advancing Japanese, across kilometers of difficult terrain. They also covered the advance of the first Chindit expedition under General Orde Wingate.

The Wingate expeditions into Upper Burma (there were actually two in succeeding years, 1943 and 1944) served to revive the flagging spirits of the British public who saw for the first time after the Singapore disaster and the loss of Burma that the British were at least taking the offensive against the up-to-then invincible Japanese infantry. Leon’s 23rd Indian Infantry Division covered the crossing by rafts of the first Chindit column across the Chindwin River as it entered Upper Burma. Fortunately, it was not opposed as it was not detected by the Japanese. After that, it was on its own. It was the first time that columns operating hundreds of miles behind enemy lines were able to be supplied by air. It marked the beginning of air supply (by parachute and free drop) which was later used so effectively against the Germans when the Second Front was opened in Europe, especially when troops were operating on extended lines of communication (L. of C.) or were cut off. Air supply was, in fact, used for the first time extensively in the Burma campaign and helped defeat the Japanese tactic of encircling troops, placing road blocks behind them, and effectively cutting them off. The troops knew they could stand fast, form defensive boxes, and fight it out without retreating, and be supplied by air with their requirements of food and ammunition. Leon, who found himself in the “Imphal Box”, saw some of the bitterest close-quarter fighting of the war. Today, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Imphal contains the remains of 1,600 who had fallen. The one at Kohima contains 1,420, made famous by the poignant Kohima Epitaph: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today.”

In 1944, Leon who was by then a captain, attended a course on air supply and transport at the Airborne Forces Training School at Chaklala, near Rawalpindi, to devise the best way to ferry supplies to forward troops in the Burma theatre of war. Staying on for a while in Chaklala as an instructor, Leon was posted to a forward air maintenance unit which was collaborating with a Canadian air transport squadron. This was at Ramree Island off the Burma coast of Akyab. Terrifyingly, part of the island was still occupied by the Japanese. Leon recalled that there was a dirt strip used as a base for the air transport squadron, dropping supplies to General William Slim’s 14th Army, heading for Mandalay, the cultural centre of Burma. The effort led to the capture of Mandalay. This Japanese defeat was significant as it turned Burmese national opinion against them, opened the road to Rangoon and, with it, the reconquest of Burma. Perhaps more importantly the victory restored respect for the British military, hitherto smarting from the defeats in Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore.

Throughout the Burma campaign, Leon sustained a few injuries - a deep cut between his eyebrows made by a bayonet; a shrapnel wound across his stomach as well as a knee injury (which stayed with him throughout his life) from an accident during night parachute training. Later on, during the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), his jeep fell into a ditch when it was shot at by the communists. Fortunately, he did not sustain any serious injury. In early 1945, Leon was pulled back as a junior staff officer to join the 34th Indian Corps which was forming up outside Bombay (present day Mumbai) as part of Operation Zipper to invade Malaya. However, by the time they landed on the beach at Morib, on the west coast of Malaya, on 5 September, the Japanese forces had surrendered following the dropping of the atomic bombs. Leon recalled coming ashore and directly opposite him was a very strongly constructed gun emplacement. Luckily, they were not manned. Otherwise, there would have been untold casualties. The morning after landing, Leon drove to Kuala Lumpur. He found the city in disarray, evidence of heavy looting. The Chinese communist guerrillas, emerging from the jungles, had ensconced themselves in Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere. The guerrillas were not at all pleased that the British had returned as they had been making plans to take over the territory. The 34th Indian Corps was disbanded and Leon, who had been promoted to Major, was asked by his commanding officer what he wanted to do. Leon decided to take part in the surrender of the Japanese forces in Kota Bahru, Kelantan, in northeast Malaya, where he remained as a SO2 (Major) with the British Military Administration of Malaya (BMA) until the civil government took over in April 1946.

Leon never continued to use the rank of Major after he left the army although he was entitled to do so. Incidentally, he was appointed a temporary Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Reserve of Officers (Intelligence Corps) to take part in the Korean War but fortunately for him the British Colonial Office refused to release him as by that time he was a senior Special Branch officer in the Malayan Police involved in fighting the Communist Party of Malaya’s armed uprising against the British colonial government in Malaya (the Malayan Emergency, 1948-60).

The BMA period was a fascinating and important time as Kelantan had been handed over to the Siamese (Thai) government by the Japanese authorities, and the BMA had the task of reorganising and restoring the Kelantan State Police Force to its former prewar position. Leon’s task was not made any easier by the emergence at the time of Chinese guerrillas, who came out of the jungle where they had been during the Japanese occupation, with the intention of taking over the State. At the end of the BMA period, he was commended for the work he had done in reorganising the police and maintaining law and order during a difficult period. He stayed on at Kota Baru for a short while after the resumption of civil government until he was demobilised from the army, and after an interview at the Colonial Office, London, he was appointed an Assistant Superintendent in the Malayan Police. He was then posted as OCPD (Officer-in-Charge Police District), Kuala Pilah, in Negri Sembilan (1946-7), where his main task was to reorganise the police force after the disruption caused by the Japanese occupation. The district was mainly a rural one covering Malay villages and small rubber estates in the Kuala Pilah and Bahau districts, where he had to deal with the growing influence of the CPM (Communist Party of Malaya) among the rubber estate tappers, and there were often unpleasant and dangerous confrontations with the communists even in those early days before the start of the Malayan Emergency. His next posting in the uniformed branch of the police was as OCPD Kuala Lumpur (South) (1948-49), which entailed responsibility for policing the southern half of Kuala Lumpur, the federal capital. Both the Selangor State Government and the Federal Government departments were included in this sector.

With the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency in June 1948, he took part in some of the earliest counterinsurgency operations against the CPM's jungle army in Selangor in which the police were often required to play an infantry role in addition to their normal policing duties, as there were insufficient army forces in Malaya at the time to deal with the situation. One of his last duties in the police uniformed branch, before he was transferred to the Special Branch at Federal Special Branch HQ, KL, was to command in May 1949 a police escort escorting one of the first batches of communist detainees who were being banished to China. He sailed from Port Swettenham on the S.S Anhui. There were 51 male Chinese “banishees” who had to be handed over as instructed to the authorities at Hoihau (Hainan Island), Hong Kong, Amoy (Xiamen), and Swatow (Shantou). The handing over of banishees at Hoihau was the first time that Malayan Police had come into direct contact with the Chinese army or police, and he was instructed to be extremely cautious in his dealings with the Chinese authorities.

In March 1949, his services were requested by the Head of the Federal Special Branch as he had by then passed the required government Malay-language examinations (Standards 1 & 2, with Jawi script), and had acquired a working knowledge of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), in addition to the Hindi and Urdu he had learnt as an officer in the Indian Army during the war. His transfer from the police uniformed branch was requested in a letter reference SF/14 (Y) dated 16 March 1949 from the Deputy Commissioner of the CID (at that time the SB was subsumed in the CID) to the Deputy Commissioner, Uniformed Branch, who commented that his services were required because “the maintenance of control in Special Branch was of paramount importance to the war effort.”

At that stage, there were relatively few gazetted officers in the Federal SB, and he worked under C.H. (Claude) Fenner, who subsequently became Tan Sri Sir Claude Fenner, the first Inspector-General (IGP) of the Malayan Police. Leon was appointed to head the Chinese section of Federal SB HQ, although as instructed he wrote intelligence reports on other aspects of security matters mainly concerned with communist activities in Malaya. It was at around this time, in 1949, he was appointed an honorary police A.D.C. (Aide-de-Camp) to the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, who was afterwards murdered in 1951 by the communist insurgents on his way up to Fraser’s Hill from KL. While Leon was at Federal SB headquarters, arrangements were made by the Director SB and the Commissioner of Police through the US Consul-General, Kuala Lumpur, for him to visit the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Division of Security, State Department, Washington DC, to give talks on the Malayan Emergency and the role of the Malayan Police, and to visit Manila to lecture to the Philippines’ gendarmerie.

On his way to the States, he stayed over in Hong kong, where a good friend of his, Van Helden who used to be an officer with him in the British Indian Army during World War 2, introduced him to Dr Elizabeth Kuanghu Chou (better known by her pen name Han Suyin), who at the time was working in the Casualty Department of the Queen Mary Hospital. They married shortly afterwards in 1952 and settled down in a Californian-Spanish style bungalow in Johor Bahru, which was owned by the Sultan of Johor but acquired as a residence for Government. Leon was then Head of the Special Branch for the state of Johor. His union with Han Suyin was to have an impact on his intelligence career later on. Back to his work trip - when Leon arrived at London from the U.S., he attended short MI5 and London Metropolitan Police SB courses, and on his return to Malaya, he was posted to the Johor Contingent SB HQ at Johor Bahru as “Communist Co-ordinator”, where he served until 1955, and participated in several actions against the communist jungle army. Worthy of note to understand the fight against the communists is that it hinged on the quality of intelligence gathered by the Special Branch. Men like Leon formed a small nucleus that trained many officers for this work. Both British and Malayan officers took great risks and were very courageous. Leaders of the Special Branch were vulnerable because they were specially marked by communists for assassination.

In 1956, Leon reluctantly retired from the Malayan Police, mainly on account of a novel written by his wife at the time (And the Rain my Drink), which was considered to be critical in some ways of the British colonial government in Malaya. Although he did not agree at all with the views expressed by his wife in the book, he resigned as a matter of principle at what he considered to be the undemocratic way in which the British colonial government tried to have the book withdrawn by the publishers, especially as in the Malayan Emergency they were fighting for democracy against Communism which stifled free speech. When he submitted his resignation, G.C. Madoc, then Director of the Malayan Special Branch, and W. Carbonell, the Commissioner of Police, flew down from Kuala Lumpur to see him in Johor Bahru in an attempt to get him to change my mind but he told them, “I intended to stand by my principles”.

On leaving the Malayan Police as an acting Assistant Commissioner Special Branch, Johor, Leon joined the personal staff of David Marshall, the first popularly-elected Chief Minister of Singapore. He assisted Marshall run the “Meet the People” sessions (1955-56), and subsequently became Deputy Registrar of Citizens, Singapore, when Singapore citizenship was first introduced. When Marshall resigned after the 1st All Party Mission to London to determine the terms of full internal self-government for Singapore was unsuccessful, all his personal staff including Leon, went out with him. Thereafter, Leon served as Adult Education Officer, Singapore Council for Adult Education (SCAE), until the functions of the SCAE were subsumed into the Singapore Ministry of Education under the People’s Action Party government.

Leon then found a job as an editor in the Eastern University Press, a leading local publisher, run by Donald Moore. This, in turn, groomed him for the opening when the London publishers, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, came along in 1960, looking for someone to take charge of its operations in the Far East. Leon was based initially in Malaya/Singapore as the Southeast Asian Managing Director and representative of the Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, responsible for providing suitable textbooks for Malayan and Singapore schools. During this time, he worked closely with the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in making available textbooks in Malay for Malayan secondary schools throughout the country. He operated for the first two years or so from Donald Moore’s office. Leon appointed Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaysia’s first Prime Minister and godfather to Leon’s daughter by his second wife) and Tan Sri Professor Hamzah bin Sendut, then Vice-Chancellor of the Universiti Sains Penang, as co-directors of Heinemann Asia Sdn. Bhd. At Heinemann, Leon was the founding General Editor of the Heinemann Asia “Writing in Asia Series”, which led the move to encourage the writing of fiction by Asian writers, especially those from Malaysia and Singapore, thereby helping to give Malaysian-Singapore writing in English a standing on the world stage. He was also the founding General Editor of the Heinemann Asia “Favourite Stories Series”, a series of simple reading books for children based on Asian folk tales and legends, for which he wrote several books himself which were later collated into two volumes and published under the title of Golden Treasure Box, Volumes ! and II, and the founding General Editor of the Heinemann Asia “Asian Studies Series”.

Retiring from Heinemann in 1985, Leon took up appointment as Publisher and Director of Hongkong University Press in January 1986. He chaired the Hong Kong Anglo-Chinese Educational Book Publishers Association in 1990, before moving to Melbourne in 1991 where he joined Monash University and was for several years the joint Managing Editor (with Dr Joan Grant), and latterly simultaneously Book Review Editor, of the Asian Studies Review, the flagship of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. During this time, he was appointed by UNESCO as a Publishing Consultant for the People’s Republic of China, and in 1993 ran a book publishing course for the People’s Education Press, Beijing.

Later in his life he took up appointment as Senior Visiting Fellow, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. As an academic he has written what has come to be accepted at the standard history of the Malayan Special Branch during the first Malayan Emergency, “Malaya’s Secret Police 1945-60. The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency”. He has written, too, books and articles spread over many years as an author, editor and academic on Malaysian subjects.

Some of the articles and papers he has written include
"The Malayan Special Branch on the Malayan-Thai Frontier during the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960)" London, Intelligence and National Security, 2006;
"The Origins of Intelligence. A Brief History of the Malayan Special Branch" in Off the Edge (Sun Newspaper Group), Kuala Lumpur. Issue 26, February 2007;
"The Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. The Case of the Communist Party of Malaya (1948-1960). A Special Branch Perspective", Kajian Malaysia, Vol. 27, Nos. 1 & 2, 2009 (Special Issue '1948 Insurgencies and the Cold War in Southeast Asia Revisited'), pp. 39-60., and so on.

Wondering how he came to be so versatile and accomplished, the answer perhaps can be found in his Comber family motto: Sapiens dominabitur astris - The wise man shall govern the stars.