Insides of the Penang War Museum

Thursday, May 17 2012

THE PENANG War Museum located on Bukit Maung has had an interesting yet horrific history as previously covered by iGT here. This week, iGT focusses its slideshow on the various other sections of the museum like the underground military tunnels, ventilation shafts, cook houses, etc.

Giving visitors a peek into a early 20th century defence establishment, the war museum retains the old layout, including an observation tower. The halls, the latrines and sleeping quarters also all remain quite well conserved.

The haunting piece below reveals the domain further:

“At the first tunnel, the first thing that greets us is an insipid painting, a pastoral landscape of a plantation much like those managed by colonial masters... A few steps from the painting is a fading photograph of a smiling Malay soldier... On the ground and on a makeshift wheelbarrow are the odds and ends of a military life – spent bullet casings, broken radios, liquor bottles.

“It is a nearby corridor that stops us cold... for the departed owners of the rows of combat boots, muddied, fraying and, in some cases, still caked with dried blood. There is a backpack. There are jackets and helmets. These were once owned by men who breathed and cursed and scratched their heads and crotches. Men who’d barely escaped internment but who would spend the next decade wondering at the fate of other men later brought to their old fort...

“Other rooms serve up equally grisly reminders... There is a bare hall with a desk and two chairs. Interview room the sign says... There are pails and buckets in cubicles that represent toilets. There are installation art using pails and bolos and bayonets and bicycles and motorcycles, either pinned to walls or hanging from chains that frame Japanese symbols... In one room are photographs, green with age, that show Caucasian prisoners of wars brushing their teeth, bathing, burying their dead or just staring hopefully for the redemption that did come.”

Source: Penang War Museum, WW11 Forum, 18.09.10

Another interesting feature of old fort are the remarkable section of underground tunnels – one even leads all the way to the sea, acting as an access tunnel to get to submarines – forces one to walk, or even crawl through very narrow, confined places. (Penang Online)

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