I Went Looking for Hidden World War II-Era Art And Found a Forgotten Artists Legacy in Singapore

I have come to Singapore to find the part of its history that was, for two generations, mostly lost.

Looking for World War II in Singapore means peering through a fast, feverish, imaginative city, for a slow, old, and forgotten story.

Today’s Singapore is a glass and steel landscape, a Blade Runner skyline married to a container port bursting with the planet’s most cutting-edge technology. It is a city of possibility, never the same place twice. There’s so much future in Singapore that it’s almost impossible to see the past.

But it’s there.

Singapore’s modern identity was generated when travel was slow. When empires drew the maps of the world. Hotels were large and necessary: To get from one place to the next was a project of months and years. Every traveler waited for onward passage at some entrepot such as Singapore’s sheltered, deep-water harbor. There were no connecting flights. So every single traveler needed somewhere to stay. And wait. In North America, this moment saw the birth of great railway hotels at the spokes and nodes of cross-continental tracks: the Fairmonts of the Canadian Rockies or the Palmer Houses and Drakes of the Midwest.

In Singapore, this history is best lived at the Raffles Hotel, which in our day of fast travel remains emotionally dedicated to the global voyageur, the kind of well-heeled wanderer who does not visit, but takes up residence, whose endeavors were part of a global project: trade, imperial accession, maybe aesthetic experience, but always enduring ample time in a single spot. Raffles is all verandas and colonnades, ceiling fans and enclosed gardens, turbaned doormen and turndown service, but without too much pretension to some languid colonial fantasy. Raffles is just a wonderful place to time travel–that is, to travel as if you have all the time and all the world.

I have come to find the part of Singapore’s history that was, for two generations, mostly lost. And for that, I must take a taxi to the farthest edges of the city state, beyond the spot where most visitors begin today: Changi airport.

From the center of Singapore, my taxi takes me past an Ikea, military barracks, and prisons, to the Changi Chapel Museum.

War history can be hard to find. Often, people don’t want to remember. War is bloody. War is hard. Or, the forward march of time just papers over the past. We are today at the farthest edge of living memory for World War II. The very last of the teenagers who fought in the war are now deep into their 90s; every day, we lose a little more memory. Sometimes the world just moves on.

Here, beyond Changi Airport, Singapore keeps a special, tiny, unheralded and little-visited memorial to a war that few in the region now recall.

I have come to find Bombardier Stanley Warren’s war.

Stanley Warren, the Artist Bombardier

With a handful of red pencils and a pocket of thick paper file cards, a 19-year-old British soldier was shipped out for the Pacific in January 1942. Young Stanley Warren was a human camera, an Observation Post assistant–he stood watch for an enemy’s approach, then drew them on paper. Developing photographs took a long time then, and the chemical process of darkrooms and clotheslines could let any enemy ship or installation hide or escape long before a gunner could get a bead on the target. If instant panoramic images of a landscape had to be drawn onto maps, this was possible only in the hands of a good, quick sketch artist. That was Stanley Warren’s job as an artilleryman for the 344 Battalion, 135 Regiment, of the Royal Regiment. He was an artist bombardier.

In civilian life, Stanley was a lad with some talent; he attended art college and had been a commercial billboard maker, painting marquees for cinemas up until Germany invaded Poland. Movie posters could be produced quickly on a silkscreen press, but the two-story signs with, say, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, required artists to animate those heaving bodices in front of burning Atlantas, if such were needed to hang high over the streets of London and Liverpool.

World War II came to Singapore when it was a British colony. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese entered the war by bombing Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii. They captured Singapore two months later, on February 15, 1942.

By then, Stanley had been in the jungle heat of the island for all of one month. The myth of “Fortress Singapore” was punctured at once: British cannons were pointed the wrong way to fend off the invasion, say history books, that is, the guns faced out to sea, never anticipating a land attack from the north, via the Malay peninsula, and never an aerial bombardment.

From Stanley’s observation post, as the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force attacked, the entire unit got peppered with bombs, pasted with sticks of explosive missiles, and strafed with artillery fire.

While a nearby anti-aircraft officer was destroying his own guns, anticipating capture should the equipment fall into enemy hands, the gun misfired and shattered the officer’s left leg. Stanley crawled over to the man during the barrage, pressed his thumbs into the femoral artery to staunch the bleed, then lay still beside the wounded man, “hoping that if the fighters came…and if they see that great patch of blood and see two figures there, they wouldn’t bother [with me], they’ll think I was dead anyway.”

Stanley became a prisoner of war along with 80,000 other Allied fighters and civilians.

Stanley Warren, Prisoner of War

Jailed in the same work camps made famous in Bridge on the River Kwai, the 1957 Oscar-winning war epic, Stanley ached for home, like any captive. In prison, his sketchbook became a tool that transported him to the serenity of life before Hitler and Hirohito, a way to instantiate his own humanity. He drew the bulge-eyed goldfish he studied in his fish tank in England, quotidian memories of home.

Conditions in the internment camp were brutal, crowded, hungry, exposed, and hot. By May 1942, Stanley was laid up with kidney failure and dysentery in the camp hospital, and “[t]here for the first time I came in contact with the chapel. I heard the choir singing.”

The priests from the makeshift chapel noted Stanley’s ceaseless scribbling, his ever-present sketchbook. Would he paint murals for the hospital chapel, they asked?

On death’s door, Stanley began to sketch out five large scenes–four on the life of Jesus Christ, and one on the patron saint of the chapel, St. Luke, protector of artists and doctors.

Materials in a prison camp were hard to come by. Other prisoners helped Stanley scrounge up a can of brown camouflage paint, billiard cue chalk was crushed and minced to make blue pigment, other colors were scraped off wrecked jeeps and trucks.

Some days, Stanley was too weak to work more than 15 minutes at a time, much like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel; he became partly paralyzed, frequently fainting on a ladder. “I didn’t know whether I would live to complete the mural I was working on, or live to complete the next one.”

It was not the Vatican ceiling, but in time, he completed five large wall frescoes, each about 7 feet tall and 10 feet long. He began with the Nativity. “It isn’t, curiously enough, an impassioned work,” Stanley said. “It is gentle and full of humor. I wanted it to be so.”

Christ’s birth among a crowd of farm animals was finished in time for the Christmas service of 1942.

“You know,” the priest said to Stanley as he continued painting, “it is so hard to try and persuade men to live.”

The murals are not intricate or even especially beautiful out of context. They are almost pedestrian, but for the wondrous circumstances of their birth. Biblical characters stand in dark outlines, in muted colors, with little artistic flourish or nuance. They are bold gestures in the direction of greater artists’ renderings. Stanley hoped they would be “familiar to the men who had seen stained glass.”

Four more frescoes followed: The Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, and St. Luke in Prison, all painted under the watchful glare of Japanese and Korean captors and their machine guns. Some days, Stanley would rest his head against the wall and “converse with God.”

When Stanley’s barrack was called up to work on the Thai-Burma railroad, the infamous “Death Railway,” a commander held him back in the hospital instead of sending him off, figuring the painter would not survive the labor that was to claim at least 345,000 lives, a monthly death toll that rivaled Auschwitz. “So the murals very directly saved my life.”

Stanley Warren never signed his works. The closest he came to inserting himself was painting his own wood and rubber sandals into the Last Supper.

In August 1945, Japan surrendered after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Stanley Warren returned to England. For all he knew, the murals were destroyed in Allied bombing.

Stanley Warren, Tabloid Sensation

This story doesn’t end with the war. Singapore’s stories are long, like the Raffles’ famed “long bar.” They just keep going.

The harsh and lost world of Stanley Warren’s artwork is almost impossible to imagine at my next hotel, on a lounge chair half-submerged in an incongruously modern and luxe infinity pool that stretches across three massive skyscrapers, at the Marina Bay Sands.

After the war, Singapore was reclaimed by the British. The Royal Air Force took over the Changi camp. Then, in 1965, Singapore gained independence as a nation.

As Singapore’s return to self-determination drew near, whispers of the World War II chapel murals hidden in the forgotten RAF storage room got around, beyond the walls of Changi camp.

British tabloids soon went looking for the anonymous artist, who allegedly painted the works in human blood. Nuns were shot, it was declared, while smuggling eggs to the painter, so he might use the whites to mix his colors.

In 1959, Stanley Warren was found living in London with his wife and son. He was an art teacher.

“I never received any eggs,” he said. “Had I got my hands on the eggs I would have eaten them.”

Just before Singapore’s independence, Stanley was asked to return and restore the murals in the concentration camp that had been his jail for four starving, sickly years. The works had been whitewashed over many times. He carefully peeled away each layer, revealing his past, his imprisonment, and his paintings of the son of God. It was a quiet, last act of colonial remembrance for Allies who had fought, suffered, and died in the defense of Singapore.

Stanley Warren would return to Asia twice more to restore the murals, after independence, the final time in 1988.

But the murals at the Changi museum today are not Stanley Warren’s paintings at all. Those are too fragile now–even when a journalist begs Singapore’s authorities for just a peek at the originals, pretty please? The museum’s murals are replicas, painted in scale by a Romanian artist. They are breathtaking too, not for their skill, but for their enduring humanity, because they represent Stanley’s recreation of the life of Christ and his own defense of his captured soul.

“It was a fight against insanity,” he said. “If I was going to survive, I was going to survive as a person not a vegetable.”

Stanley Warren lived to old age. He died in Dorset, England, in 1992.

I think about Stanley while overlooking the Singapore Straits, now the busiest shipping corridor on earth. Some part of the computer on which I write was funneled to my home via a containership that plowed these waters he defended, which are free to trade because of some 500-year combination of European imperialism, open markets, the world war in the Pacific, and sheer bounty of human creativity.

This is the world Stanley Warren fought for, with pen, pencil, brush, and potentially his dying breath. He went to war for the Singapore of the past, but also for all its many tomorrows, in every form they might take.