Article

The Petagas war memorial and the creation of a heroic past in Sabah

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The Petagas war memorial and the creation of a heroic past in Sabah

Danny Wong Tze Ken (2007) examines the Petagas War Memorial in Sabah and the construction of a heroic narrative around the 1943 Jesselton Uprising against the Japanese, arguing that the memorial and its associated commemorative practices served as a vehicle for creating a multi-ethnic heroic past that met the political needs of both the colonial administration and the post-independence state.

Summary

The article traces three interlocking narratives: the military events of the uprising and its brutal suppression, the post-war establishment and maintenance of the memorial, and the evolving historiographical framing of the Kinabalu Guerrillas from a predominantly Chinese resistance movement into a symbol of Sabah’s multi-ethnic unity. Wong draws on survivor testimony—particularly the unpublished manuscript of Chong Kui Fah, a prisoner at Batu Tiga who witnessed the selection process—and the Japanese civilian police chief Oho Masuo’s memoir, published in 1995, to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the mass execution on 21 January 1944. These primary accounts are supplemented by colonial administrative records and a range of Chinese-language publications, from the Nanyang Nianjian (1951) to Sia Yuk Tet’s 1978 monograph, which together reveal how the memory of the guerrillas was selectively shaped by different communities and political actors over decades.

A central concern of the article is the tension between historical reality and commemorative narrative. Wong demonstrates that while the uprising was overwhelmingly led by and composed of Chinese men in Jesselton, the official post-war narrative—initiated by colonial officer John Maxwell Hall in 1949 and reinforced by K. G. Tregonning—deliberately foregrounded inter-ethnic cooperation to serve the political interests of the Chartered Company and later the Malaysian state. This reframing was not merely academic; it was embedded in school textbooks, state ceremonies, and the very epitaph on the memorial stone, which speaks of “gallant men of all races.” Wong shows how this narrative was further instrumentalized after 1963, when the memorial became a site for diplomatic gestures (notably the 1997 visit by Philippine Governor Nur Misuari during BIMP-EAGA promotion) and a tool for fostering national identity in a newly independent state.

Key Findings

  • On 20 January 1944, 175 names were read out from among approximately 300 prisoners at Batu Tiga; five were beheaded with samurai swords (Albert Kwok, Kong Tze Phui, Li Tet Phui, Charles Peter, and Tsen Tsau Kong), and the remainder were machine-gunned into two pre-dug pits at Petagas (pp. 20–22).
  • A further 131 prisoners were transported to Labuan on 8 February 1944 for hard labour; only seven survived the war and returned to Jesselton (pp. 22–23).
  • The War Victims Caring Committee was established on 20 October 1945; the colonial government agreed in 1948 to declare 21 January as Remembrance Day for the Kinabalu Guerrillas (pp. 23–25).
  • In 1949, the remains of more than 90 men who had died at Labuan were exhumed, placed in six large earthenware burial jars, and interred at Petagas in a ceremony attended by the Resident of West Coast (p. 24).
  • A major renovation in 1979, costing $190,000, replaced the original wooden memorial with a seven-foot marble stone bearing the names of 292 fallen heroes (p. 26).
  • The Japanese Consul in Kota Kinabalu first attended the annual memorial service and laid a wreath in 1998, ending a half-century of conspicuous Japanese absence (pp. 26–27).

Conclusion

Wong’s definitive takeaway is that the Petagas War Memorial is less a monument to fixed historical fact than an instrument of political memory-making. The uprising was historically a predominantly Chinese affair, but successive authorities—colonial, state, and educational—have progressively recast it as a multi-ethnic hero narrative to serve purposes of national unity, diplomatic engagement, and patriotic education. The memorial endures not because it preserves an unmediated past, but because it remains a flexible site through which Sabah’s political elites can project a shared identity onto a complex and often contested history.

Context

  • Primary sources include the unpublished manuscript of survivor Chong Kui Fah, the Japanese witness account of Oho Masuo (via Mochizuki 1995), colonial records (WO235/945, AWM54/773/4/11), and a corpus of Chinese-language publications spanning 1946 to 1993.
  • The article’s historiographical contribution lies in tracing the ideological shift in the guerrillas’ representation from Chinese nationalist framing to multi-ethnic national hero narrative, and in demonstrating how state institutions (education, ceremony, diplomacy) actively produced this transformation rather than merely reflecting it.

References