Bamboo Guerillas (1977, Guy N. Smith)

 

Bamboo Guerillas is notorious.  Guy N. Smith was riding high on the success of Night of the Crabs- which had been a big hit during the sweltering hot summer of 1976- but for a change of pace swaps crustaceans for castrations with Bamboo Guerillas, a book which captures all the fun and frivolity of a Japanese prisoner of war camp. 

 

Around the same time, Smith had been writing a series of relatively respectable action books centered around the trucking industry- ‘The Black Knights’ and ‘Hijack’- which were published by Mews, an arm of New English Library.  The company policy appears to a been that Mews was the imprint they'd use for sci-fi, action and war titles, while New English Library was the home of the nasty material. 

Seemingly on account of the truckers books they gave him a crack at penning a WW2 novel without any restrictions on what he could write about… and Bamboo Guerillas is what you get when you turn Guy N. Smith loose on the subject of World War 2 atrocities without restrictions.  The company were reportedly a little taken aback with what he delivered, asked Smith to tone it down for it to go as a Mews title, then when he refused released it as a N.E.L, which in fairness was exactly where Bamboo Guerillas belonged. 

 

Bamboo Guerillas takes us back to the war torn Malaysia of 1941 as Colonel Hugh Carter aka ‘Jungle Carter’ leads his men deep into the jungle in order to team up with Chinese bandit Li Chu.  Once Jungle Carter and his men meet Li Chu and his ragbag of Chinese and Malaysian mercenaries -the ‘bamboo guerillas’ of the title- they go about the business of liberating twenty nurses from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  One that is lorded over by the dreaded Colonel Siki, a depraved despot, who is “more dangerous than any tiger that roamed the Malaysian jungles”.  On the outset Bamboo Guerillas resembles your standard World War 2 novel as Jungle Carter and fellow Brits Captain Cole and Sanders perilously hack their way through the jungle whilst smarting over the fall of Kuala Lumpur.  Looks can be deceptive though and only a few chapters in sees Bamboo Guerillas transform into something you definitely wouldn’t want your grandparents reading over your shoulder.  In 1977, when Bamboo Guerillas was released, I'm not sure Smith's name was as synonymous with extreme horror as it would become.  So, I suppose it was still possible that people who bypassed The Sucking Pit and Night of the Crabs wouldn't have been aware of what they signed up for here.  I'm curious at what point the penny would have dropped for them that with Bamboo Guerillas they were being sent up sleaze creek without a paddle.  Would it have been when Carter and Cole are woken up by the sound of Sanders grunting and shaking about in his ground sheets, then fearing he has the fever instead discover that Sanders is merely beating himself off.  Apparently a valuable way of keeping yourself warm in the outdoors “I learned it when I used to go mountaineering” Sanders tells the other two “and was forced to sleep out in the open, do me a favor though don't interrupt me again”.  Would the penny drop moment have been when they are discussing forming an allegiance with Li Chu, despite his reputation for cannibalizing his Japanese adversaries?  At which point Carter attempts to reassure the other two that “as long as he confines his liking for human flesh to the Japs, I'm not going to worry”.  Or is it when we meet the gregariously sadistic Li Chu, who brags about how he and his men tortured a Japanese soldier in order to see if a Japanese penis could be stretched to the same size as other nationalities. “They will not, gentlemen, take it from me”. 

 

Up to this point we've had masturbation, anecdotal cannibalism and anecdotal genital abuse, all before we have even met the villain of the piece.  World War 2 sex maniac to end all World War 2 sex maniacs, that is Colonel Sika, who prior to his introduction in the book has been masturbating for “virtually two whole days and nights”.  Sika immediately earns his reputation as a stone cold pervert by having male prisoners stripped, tied to a barbed wire fence, then forces them to get aroused in the company of one of the nurses, who has been similarly stripped bare for the occasion.  “This is the woman you are going to mate with… so get yourself erect” yells one of Sika’s flunkies.  Once the prisoners manage to get hard though, its curtains for them, as Japanese soldiers step in and cruelly bayonet them to death instead.  Erections, or ‘protrusions’ as Smith sometimes euphemistically refers to them as, was a recurring theme in his writing and something that has also opened his books up to sniggering and ridicule over the years.  Bamboo Guerillas captures him at arguably the height of his protrusion obsession.  Bamboo Guerrillas might well be the most priapic book of the 1970s, you're never far away from someone’s erection in this book.  It’s a characteristic that practically defines Sika who is introduced to us nursing a hard-on, caused by thinking about all the Chinese virgins he has deflowered.  Sika then turns his lustful gaze and protrusion in the direction of Sonia Barnes, a dark-haired nurse that Sika insist become his sex slave and “submit to almost every technique of sex known in the Japanese nation”.  A role Sonia reluctantly agrees to in the hope that it will keep herself and the other nurses alive.

 

Bamboo Guerrillas is riddled with below the belt insults aimed at Japanese men.  What with Li Chu’s claim that not even torture can extend the Japanese manhood to the size of other nationalities, as well as Sonia’s observation that Colonel Sika’s physique was “little more than that of the average European boy in his early teens”.  At times it feels like Smith was pushing the idea that Japan's involvement in World War 2 may have been motivated by penis size envy and feelings of sexual inadequacy.  A theory that Smith only contradicts due to his obsession with Colonel Sika’s apparently impressive erection, which “threatened to burst its way out his trousers”.  Elsewhere in the book, Sika “knew that the bulge in the front of his trousers was visible to all his men but he did not mind. It enhanced his reputation”.  Based on that evidence it doesn't sound like Sika is lacking too much in that department, even if his torture techniques are suspiciously hung up on cutting other nationalities down to size.  There are moments in Bamboo Guerillas when you can feel your brain trying to fight against its natural inclination to visualize what you are reading.  Never more so when Chan- one of Li Chu’s men- is captured by the Japanese and ends up in Sika’s torture chamber.  There Sika quite literally breaks Chan’s balls, before spending the rest of the night alternating between using Sonia as a sexual receptacle and working out more ways to destroy Chan’s genitals.

 

I think one of the reasons Bamboo Guerrillas can take people off guard is that with a horror, skinhead or biker paperback from that era you half-expect there to be some sexual content.  Whereas a World War 2 novel set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp doesn’t exactly sound like it is going to be a non-stop orgy.  When people talk about Smith’s books they tend to claim that part of their popularity was due to soft porn elements, this I would not challenge, but I don't know if that description does Smith’s books justice.  On film and in photographic form it is easy to draw a line between softcore and hardcore.  In print it is a little more difficult to call, but I would say that the sex in Bamboo Guerillas is closer to hardcore than softcore.  Bamboo Guerillas is a very sex driven book, with the expected action part of the narrative often taking a backseat to Sika forcing male and female prisoners into performing live sex shows in front of the Japanese “you have three minutes in which to begin copulating.  Any man who hasn't made it in that time will be bayoneted”.  Whilst tender moments arrive when Jungle Carter deliberately allows himself and several of Li Chu’s men to be captured by the Japanese and immediately develops romantic and sexual feelings for Jenny, one of the captured nurses.  I suppose you have to admire the lustful stamina of Jenny and Jungle Carter, despite the fact that she has been repeatedly raped by the Japanese, despite the fact that they are in the company of others, and despite the fact that they've been flung into a place that smells of shit and piss, they are still all over each other like a rash.  “He felt her vagina it was warm and ready and there was no evidence of Japanese maltreatment”.  You can always rely on Smith to put the Guy in gynecology.  Jungle Carter’s only reservation about having sex with Jenny is that he has to do so in the company of non British people “he did not want to lose the respect that the guerillas had for him.  If it had been an all British company it wouldn't have mattered.  But these bandits were savages”.

 

Even though Chinese and Malaysian characters in Bamboo Guerillas are allies, the book does still peel a suspicious eye in their direction and they are consistently portrayed as more barbaric, disposable and cowardly than the British.  After gunning down Japanese soldiers in the jungle, the bamboo guerillas begin gutting the bodies and impaling the heads of dead Japanese on sticks.  Sickening the British, who nevertheless decide that it's better to let them have their fun, rather than play killjoy and risk a mutiny.  Later on in the book, Jungle Carter encounters a hut full of Japanese soldiers raping a Chinese woman.  However rather than rescue her, as he has done with the Western nurses, Carter instead ops to throw a grenade into the hut, killing all inside, on the reasoning that “she’ll probably be glad to die after what they had done to her”. 

 

The bulk of Bamboo Guerillas’ hate though is aimed at the Japanese.  Bamboo Guerillas makes ‘Men Behind the Sun’ and ‘Fist of Fury’ look like fair and even handed portrayals of Japanese people.  Whenever the word ‘Japanese’ is mentioned in this book it's usually in close proximity to the word ‘bastards’.  Japanese characters exist in this book purely to sexually assault women and emasculate and murder men.  So despicable are the Japanese in this book that they seem to succeed in making actual Orientals feel racist towards Orientals, with even the Chinese Li Chu hurling around anti-Oriental slurs “Carter declined to remind Li Chu of his own colour”.

 

Indeed Smith seems to whipped himself up into such an anti Japanese state of mind whilst writing Bamboo Guerillas that it bled on over into his next book, Killer Crabs (1978).  The opening of that Crab sequel initially being focused on conflict between Australian and Japanese characters over fishing rights, with bullets and racial insults being exchanged between the two.  All of which bills up to a Bamboo Guerillas /Crabs crossover when the Japanese fishing ship comes under attack from the crabs.  Apparently Smith did write a sequel to Bamboo Guerillas that has never been published, and I do wonder if rather than completely scrap the sequel novel he instead he incorporated a few of its ideas into Killer Crabs.  Towards the end of Bamboo Guerillas the action is moving closer and closer to Australia, which is where Killer Crabs was set, so there are story connections there.  Due to the fact that the sequel has never seen the light of day, Bamboo Guerillas stands as Smith’s only published war novel.  Although a few of the Crabs books could, I suppose, be perceived as war novels.  This seems particularly true of ‘Crabs on the Rampage’ (1981) which comes across as Smith’s ‘imaginary Nazi invasion of Britain’ novel with the Crabs making strategic attacks on the shores of Britain, and the series’ hero Cliff Davenport mostly relegated to war room brainstorming of how to second guess the crabs’ plan of attack.  All of which I suppose makes King Crab, Hitler reincarnated in crustacean form. 

 

However, I don't think Bamboo Guerillas had the same legs, or pincers, as Smith’s horror material.  Two editions of Bamboo Guerillas were published, both in September 1977, and that was it.  Unlike Night of the Crabs, The Sucking Pit and The Slime Beast, this one never came back around in the 1980s.  As a child of the Eighties I vividly remember seeing those on bookshelves, especially at seaside resorts, but I don't ever recall seeing Bamboo Guerillas around.  Either it didn't sell well originally, or it was too extreme to be republished or maybe Smith had become so synonymous with horror by then that putting a non-horror title of his back out there would have confused the public.  Whatever the case Bamboo Guerillas has become one of his rarer books, these days second hand copies usually fetch in the region of £40 to £50.  I did ask around to see if his estate have plans to republish the book and apparently they do but getting the Crabs books back out there is their number one priority.  Towards the end of his life, Smith had actively embraced the internet, and through his website was selling second-hand copies of his books, putting out his older work in eBook form and writing new material.  Now I believe his family are in a process of building that business back up, although they’ve also had to cope with all the standard upheaval caused by a parent’s death as well as the unwanted distraction of a legal case against his former cleaner Nichola Whiffen.  From what I understand, Whiffen had been employed by him as a cleaner, then helped manage his internet affairs, but had been stealing from him on the sly.  A situation that caused much hurt, bad feelings and friction on account of her father having been a long time friend of Smith’s.  After Smith’s death, she was convicted of stealing £2,400 from him, and was ordered to do 130 hours of community service.  Which I get the impression his family consider an unsatisfactory, slap on the wrist, gesture.  It does sound like the last few years have been a very difficult period for the Smith family.

 

What I find astonishing about Bamboo Guerillas and its ilk is that they never triggered any censorious backlash, and I'm not been able to find any evidence of these books having been banned or having to be re-released in cut versions.  They were quite lucky in that respect, compared to what was happening in the British video industry around the same time.  It is mind-blowing to think that in a period where grown adults were having the right to watch films like The Evil Dead and I Spit on your Grave taken away from them, people of any age could still pick up a copy of Bamboo Guerillas or Night of the Crabs.  I can only speculate that what saved these books was that the censorious regarded the written word as a higher art form and were of a snob, elitist mindset that… ‘these sub-moron, working class grunts who watch video nasties all day probably don't know how to read, so we don't need to worry about banning books’.  While the late 1970s and early 80s gets remembered as a time when movies were pushing the envelope in terms of screen explicitness, that is nothing compared to what books were getting away with.  A good example of the divide between how far books could go then, in contrast to movies is the novelization of the Norman J. Warren film ‘Inseminoid’.  The book version contains all manner of ideas and scenes that Warren passed on bringing to the screen.  For example, in the book the Alien has not one, but two giant sized penises, which it uses to rape the main female character… something the film side steps around depicting with that ‘is it or isn't it a dream sequence’.  The book also includes lesbianism, necrophilia and a scene where the alien puts its fingers through someone's eye sockets, pulls their head off, then later uses the head as a kind of bowling ball.  While the Warren movie does have its fair share of unpleasant and gooey moments, I suspect you’d be a disappointed man if you saw it on the basis of having read the book, because the grossest aspects to the book did not survive the transition to film.  I’m in no doubt that had Bamboo Guerillas been done on film rather than in print, copies would have been seized in every video shop from Lands End to John O'Groats during the video nasties furore.  Even the most irresponsible and reckless of pre-cert video distributors usually attempted to cover their backs by putting phony  X or 18 certificates on video covers or disclaimers along the lines of ‘for adults only’ or ‘not for minors’ yet there is not even anything like that on the covers of either edition of Bamboo Guerillas.  Had a kid brought home a copy of Bamboo Guerillas, I'm sure that going off the cover, parents probably thought this was no stronger than your average copy of Eagle, Commando or G.I. Joe.  Little did they know that their offspring were reading things like “she was not willing to drop the subject even though he has got all four fingers of his right hand inside her” and “he breathed a deep sigh of relief that all his men had attained full erections, but he knew that this was only the start”.

 

What appears to have happened with the book equivalent of the Video Nasties is that that market just got flooded with cheap, gratuitous, badly written books and the British public eventually got tired of them and moved along.  I suspect that had the video market been left alone, a similar thing would have happened there, but because there was a censorious intervention there, it resulted in the Video Nasties attaining legendary status.  To this day we are still seeing even the lesser Video Nasties brought back in deluxe, bells and whistles editions.  Whereas with their book equivalents, because they were never taken away from us, because they didn't become the forbidden fruit, they don't attract the same amount of reverence.  The irony doesn't appear lost on Guy N. Smith that during his lifetime everyone of his other passions ended up becoming demonized or banned… be it indoor smoking, gun ownership or hunting… but his books were left alone.

I'm curious what mental image of the author you’d get from reading Bamboo Guerillas in 1977, possibly of some grizzled old World War 2 veteran using the book as a backwards gazing trip down memory lane to when he was fighting and fucking his way through the jungle.  Whereas is in reality Smith was born in 1939 and was of a generation that lived through World War 2 but didn’t see active service.  Overall though he does a decent job of feigning first-hand knowledge of a hellish, sweaty, leach infested jungle environment here.  He does also indulge in his regular trait of offloading some of his own DNA onto the lead character.  Jungle Carter, like Smith, having a background in the banking industry, and becomes Smith’s mouth piece on the subject.  “Civilian life is just one long monotonous existence… I worked in a bank up until 1939.  No chance to think for yourself or make decisions.”  While Smith’s grievances with banking aren’t as loudly amplified here as they are in ‘Thirst’ (1980), the message of Bamboo Guerillas in that respect seems to be “better to die like a man, than live as a bank manager”.  The extreme violence in Smith’s books, coupled with their perverse elements and mean spiritedness, do conjure up negative ideas about what Guy N. Smith must have been like in real life.  Which, by all accounts, was very divorced from reality.  Jonathan Sothcott was optioning a movie adaptation of one of Smith’s books at one point and on account of that had met and had lunch with Smith, and Sothcott told me that he was amazed that such a charming and gentle man came up with these endless splatter-fests.  In his autobiography- ‘Pipe Dreams’- Smith does portray his younger self as a bit of a practical joker.  He even gamely includes a famous joke about himself… that Guy N. Smith is such a good farmer because he spreads his own books on his land… and if you're prepared to include a joke comparing your work to manure in your own autobiography you must have a sense of humour.  People who make fun of ‘bad’ movies and books, like to cling to the idea that the creators of the material were oblivious to how absurd and ridiculous their output was.  In Smith's case though I do suspect he would have been chuckling to himself when he wrote things like “she would become a nun and enter a convent, a sanctuary from lusting erections and male selfishness”. 

Bamboo Guerillas is so excessive, so over-the-top that after a while the only way to relate to it is as a black comedy.  Either that or a practical joke akin to the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Cocksucker Blues’… where the Stones deliberately recorded a song so raunchy and indecent that their label was unable to put it out.  Only in Smith’s case, New English Library took the bait and actually published Bamboo Guerillas uncensored.  It’s as if Smith was suffering from the writing equivalent of tourette's syndrome but rather than blurt out the most offensive and anti-social things he could think of, managed to get it all down on paper.  A strong stomach is required for Bamboo Guerillas, this book could even be used to test how shock able you really are, but you do learn much about World War 2 from it.  Such as the fact that not even torture can extend the size of a Japanese penis to the length of other nationalities, that slitting someone's throat produces a sound that “could have been made by a wild animal urinating” and that masturbation will keep you warm in the jungle.  Every day is a school day when you're reading a Guy N. Smith book.