In 1941, Malaya was comprised of the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca and Penang, which all formed a British colony under Governor Sir Shenton Thomas. Also included were the Federated States of Malaya, together with Perak, Selangor and Negri Sembilan. All were ostensibly ruled by a Federal government with its capital located at Kuala Lumpur. However, in many respects, each Federated State was self-governing and administered its own policy. In addition, there were also the Unfederated States of Johore, Trengganu, Kelantan, Kedah and Perlis, each governed by its own autocratic Sultan with a British adviser, and all incorporated into the British Empire by separate treaties. As governor of the Straits Settlements and high commissioner of both the Federated and Unfederated States, Sir Shenton Thomas frequently negotiated with eleven separate governments before any major policy affecting Malaya as a whole could be reached. This was a very cumbersome governing structure and, in a similar fashion, mimicked the British military command structure of Malaya and Singapore. Such a tangled hierarchy would make it difficult to both create and implement war plans as the peacetime days were rapidly fading in the late autumn of 1941.
The Malayan portion of the Malay Peninsula approximates 450 miles in the north-to-south direction. Malaya possesses a high north-to-south mountain range, which essentially bisects its portion of the peninsula that is shared with Thailand (see map, The Malaya Campaign, 8 December 1941–15 February 1942). This spine of jungle-covered hills, approximately 7,000 feet in the north and scaling down to 3,000 feet in the south, is flanked on both sides by coastal plains. The peninsula’s western coast flanking the coastal plain has many mangrove swamps, while the eastern shore has many sandy beaches suitable for amphibious landings. Another topographic feature is that the peninsula has numerous east-to-west running rivers that intersect the eastern and western coastal plains. These waterways make their way from the mountains to the sea and are often filled with dense jungle and large areas of swamp. Heavy annual rainfall on the peninsula, over 250 inches in the mountains, allows for dense vegetation making the Malayan jungles thicker than Indian and Burmese counterparts, with battling mud always a problem. Some of these jungles and fields are almost impenetrable and visibility could be limited to a yard or two. On the western plain, though, and in the south at Johore, areas had been cleared extensively for cultivation of crops such as rice and tapioca as well as rubber tree plantation. This also meant that troops would have a much easier trek along the western coastal plain with its motor road trunk than on the eastern one.
At the very tip of the Malay Peninsula, across the Straits of Johore, named after the Sultan of Johore, was Singapore Island, which was the epicentre of Britain’s defensive plans in the Far East. Singapore is a wet low-lying island 85 miles north of the equator covering about 240 square miles with some of its coastline fringed by mangrove swamp. It extends 27 miles from east to west and 13 miles (at its maximal width) from north to south. The Straits of Johore, which separates the Malay Peninsula from Singapore Island, has a width that varies from 600 to 5,000 yards, and near the narrowest point the British constructed a causeway. Most of the coastline is coursed by creeks and small rivers. Most of the roads lead to Singapore City, located on the southern shore of the island towards its eastern end. In 1941, the island’s population was approximately 550,000 inhabitants, comprised of Malays, Chinese, a few Tamils and Europeans, and most of the population lived in Singapore City. Except for scattered towns and settlements, the rest of the island was covered with rubber plantations and jungle growth.
The British High Command, as well as its political leaders, believed Singapore Island to be impregnable, as it had strongly fortified the southern and eastern coasts of the island with large calibre naval guns against seaborne assault. Singapore’s main port was located at Keppel Harbour, which lies on the island’s southern coast on the eastern end of the Malacca Straits, which separate Malaya and Singapore from the elongated island of Sumatra. It was not the 15-inch naval artillery guns of the Buona Vista and Johore batteries that concerned the Japanese High Command during their offensive strategy planning sessions in the autumn of 1941, but rather the fear that British Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) aircraft (with some Dutch Air Force aircrew as well) stationed on Singapore and at multiple airfields on the Malay Peninsula could interdict Japanese lines of communications (LOC), and potentially interfere with scheduled Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) offensives in resource-rich Sumatra and Java. Because of this geo-strategic position for Singapore, with numerous RAF and RAAF airfields, both Malaya and Singapore had to be captured before any subsequent operations against Java and Sumatra could be mounted.
After the carrier attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, the IJA conducted offensive operations across an incredibly broad front of 7,000 miles from Singapore to Midway Island. From early war planning sessions, Malaya and Singapore were targets for the IJA’s major thrust while additional supporting operations were mounted to seize the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong and parts of British Borneo in the Western Pacific. The Japanese High Command planned that once Malaya and Singapore were captured, these British bastions would serve as a springboard to seize southern Sumatra and an invasion of the Netherland East Indies (NEI) with its vast resources to supply Japan and its war effort, which had been occurring on the Asian mainland for almost a decade. Finally, southern Burma would be invaded with the intent of defeating the British and Indian forces there in order to sever the Burma Road and, thus, Chiang Kai-shek and his army’s supply lifeline through the Burmese port of Rangoon. Ironically, the IJA utilized only eleven of its fifty-one divisions during these offensive operations in southern Asia, reserving the majority for home defence, continued offensives on the Chinese mainland and to possess a sufficient force in Manchuria to counter any possible Soviet moves against Japan there. This was to become, indeed, Imperial Japan’s high-water mark.
In early January 1942, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell was appointed supreme commander of ABDACOM, the cumbersome new combined American, British, Dutch and Australian Command to be headquartered in Bandung on Java after Churchill had designated him commander-in-chief (CIC) Far East on 30 December 1941. Wavell, as C-in-C, India, had previously noted about Singapore, before Pacific hostilities erupted, ‘My impressions were that the whole atmosphere in Singapore was completely unwarlike, that they did not expect a Japanese attack and were very far from being keyed up to a war pitch.’ This indifferent view was expressed by the local British military service commanders despite the vast Singapore naval base, which had been built at Sembawang on the north-east corner of the island after vociferous debate in the halls of Whitehall that had spanned years. The naval base was finally opened in 1938 and cost over £60m sterling. Its principal purpose was to serve as a deterrent to Japanese aggression against Britain’s Far East colonies from Hong Kong and Malaya to the Antipodes.
The British High Command in London had envisioned that Singapore’s 15-inch naval gun batteries of the Changi Fire Command on the east coast, covering the Johore River and eastern sea lanes through the South China Sea, as well as those at the Buona Vista overlooking Keppel Harbour, could sink any attacking enemy ship, while RAF and RAAF bombers and fighters, stationed along both coastlines of the Malay Peninsula after having been carved out of the Malayan jungle, would also deter any invading force. However, Singapore’s naval base did not possess its own battle fleet moored at its docks. In the event of war, it was envisioned that the Royal Navy’s battle fleet would sail through first the Suez Canal and then across the Indian Ocean and through the Malacca Strait to Singapore Island. In light of the anticipated lengthy Royal Navy sea voyage, if Japan attacked Malaya and Singapore, it was left to the RAF and RAAF to protect the relatively new naval base at Sembawang, while the British Army and its Commonwealth contingents were to protect the airfields on the Malay Peninsula. As events would soon demonstrate after the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the RAF and RAAF possessed too few frontline combat aircraft that could successfully engage the far superior Japanese Army and Navy aircraft, and the British and Commonwealth forces were so undermanned and poorly trained for jungle combat and the aggressive Japanese jungle assault tactics that it could not even defend the paucity of planes stationed at those jungle airfields. Thus, Churchill committed only a token naval presence (Force Z) to Singapore, comprised of the modern battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the old battlecruiser HMS Repulseand four vintage destroyers (see Chapter Three for details) under the command of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. There was no accompanying aircraft carrier for air cover against what would soon be the savage waves of Japan’s twin-engine land-based naval bombers in the South China Sea and Gulf of Siam as the fleet aircraft carrier, HMS Indomitable, which was to join the two battleships, ran aground at Jamaica on 3 November 1941 and was in dry-dock for repairs. No other large carrier was available at the time.
On a brief visit to inspect Singapore’s defences on 7 January, Wavell noted that there wasn’t a single Allied tank in all of Malaya. This observation was made by the field marshal the day after fifteen Japanese tanks burst through the front lines of the 11th Indian Division and crossed the Slim River Bridge, which was only 250 air miles from Singapore. The military minds in London had concluded that tanks were unsuitable for jungle warfare. Also, Churchill was committing Britain’s armoured forces to North Africa and Greece to combat the Italians and Germans rather than Singapore. In May 1941, this had become a major point of contention between the prime minister and his chief of the imperial general staff, General Sir John Dill, who favoured reinforcing Singapore with some armour. Also, Churchill was sending his new ally, the Soviet Union, Britain’s older model infantry tanks (i.e. ‘Matildas’ and ‘Valentines’), either of which would have been equal or superior to the Japanese armour that had landed on the Malay Peninsula and was making rapid southwards progress down the main trunk road on Malaya’s west coast.
Therefore, while the respective staffs of the IJA and IJN were planning in the autumn of 1941 to invade and seize Malaya and Singapore in less than 100 days, the British service chiefs and civilian leaders were proposing a response to Japanese aggression that was fractured by both military and political concerns. The lack of consensus on the defenders’ part was to prove highly inauspicious for the British Empire in the Far East after 7 December 1941.
Invading Japanese troops of the Twenty-fifth Army’s 5th Division disembark from a barge with their equipment during an uncontested landing at Singora, Thailand on 8 December 1941. (USAMHI)
Japanese soldiers of the 18th IJA Division exit from their landing craft without opposition at Patani on Thailand’s eastern coast on 8 December 1941. (USAMHI)
Japanese engineers attached to the invasion forces manually support a makeshift log bridge across one of Malaya’s numerous waterways as was envisioned by Colonel Masanobu Tsuji of the Twenty-Fifth Army Headquarters. (USAMHI)
A British infantry section on patrol crosses a wooden pontoon bridge over a Malayan river. (USAMHI)
Japanese troops in heavy jungle camouflage infiltrating behind the enemy via a Malayan swampy area. These manoeuvres never-endingly caused havoc and panic among British and Commonwealth forces in Malaya who were usually road-bound. (USAMHI)
Mud was the ubiquitous enemy for both armies. Here Japanese troops pull one of their trucks out of Malayan earthen morass. (USAMHI)
Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart (centre), commanding officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, marches through thick Malayan mangrove swamp mud to assess the difficulty of manoeuvring in such terrain. With him is Sergeant-Major Munnoch (right) and Major Angus MacDonald (left). (USAMHI)
A British infantry section marches through dense Malayan jungle. Not only did terrain necessitate an enormous amount of time to traverse but also many of the Allied troops were not properly acclimatized to it. Due to these factors, among others, Allied troops tended to confine themselves to roads and clearly marked trails whenever possible. (USAMHI)
In single file, troops of the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders train in Malaya’s dense vegetation. This body of British troops was considered the best trained at manoeuvring in difficult terrain. Here the individual soldier’s head is barely visible above the tall grass. (USAMHI)
The 2nd Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was one of the three British battalions mixed in with the brigades of the 11th Indian Division. Here, two are deployed with a machine-gun and a SMLE rifle in a Malayan rubber plantation. A 1927 Model Lanchester armoured car is in the background. (USAMHI)
Indian troops marching in column as part of their training along a Malayan road on the western coast of the peninsula. Unfortunately, during combat with the Japanese they were often outflanked because they preferred to stay on the roads. (USAMHI)
Japanese cyclists with heavy kit pedal down the main trunk on western side of Malay Peninsula. When the tyre rubber wore out, the Japanese soldiers kept riding their bicycles on the metal rims. (USAMHI)
The sultan’s palace across the Straits of Johore in Johore Bahru from the Singapore side of the waterway. The Japanese occupied the palace using it as Lieutenant-General Yamashita’s headquarters prior to Singapore’s invasion. A breach in the causeway is evident below the tower, February 1942. (USAMHI)
RAAF over Malaya flying Lockheed Hudson bombers October 1941. These aircraft provided some useful aerial reconnaissance but were of limited value in stopping the Japanese onslaught with many aircraft destroyed on the ground in early air attacks after hostilities commenced. (Library of Congress)
RAF Catalina Flying Boats set out on patrol over Malayan coast before the war with their principal mission being aerial reconnaissance to locate an approaching hostile Japanese fleet. (Library of Congress)
Dutch Air Force pilots in Malaya go over a patrol plan prior to embarking on one of their missions. (Library of Congress)
Japanese troops ashore watch from a high vantage point during a bombardment of enemy positions in early December 1941. (USAMHI)
Brewster Buffaloes of an RAAF squadron fly in the equatorial cumulus clouds over Malaya. (Library of Congress)
Field Marshal Wavell arrives at Batavia, NEI, for the ABDA Conference in early 1942. This combined American, British, Dutch and Australian command came into being on 3 January 1942. Wavell set up his HQ in Lembang in Java on 15 January 1942 in order to oversee all Allied forces in the Far East. The ABDA was disbanded on 22 February 1942 after Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and the NEI had all fallen. (USAMHI)
Wavell as ABDA commander meets with Americans Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, and Lieutenant General George Brett, commander of United States Army Air Forces in Australia. The ABDA command was ludicrous since it encompassed all Allied forces in Burma, Singapore, Malaya, the NEI and the Philippines (of which Wavell never assumed control). (USAMHI)
General Sir Henry Pownall (left), who replaced Brooke-Popham as commander-in-chief Far East but shortly thereafter became the ABDA deputy commander. Here he tours Singapore’s defences with Wavell (right) in January 1942. (USAMHI)
Singapore’s long-awaited and expensive naval base under construction in 1938 at Sembawang adjacent to the Johore Strait at the extreme northern end of Singapore Island. (USAMHI)
One of Singapore’s 15-inch naval guns. A battery of two guns was located at Buona Vista guarding the southern approaches to the island, while three guns comprised the Johore Battery on the island’s eastern tip covering the Johore River and sea attack through the South China Sea. (USAMHI)
RAF personnel congregate on rubber plantations in northern Malaya before hostilities erupted. From here, the air and ground personnel would be relocated to one of the several airfields charged with interdicting any Japanese invasion. (USAMHI)
Japanese troops emerge from the Malayan jungle after having outflanked the road-bound British and Commonwealth forces. This manoeuvre worked repeatedly for Yamashita and his divisional commanders. (USAMHI)
Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, commander of Force Z, inspects Australian troops on Singapore Island. His task force of the HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse and four destroyers lacked an aircraft carrier for suitable air cover. (NARA)
The Japanese Army commanders used combined infantry and light tanks to perfection during their advance through the Malayan jungle. The Allies were totally devoid of armour, having to rely almost exclusively on their 2-pounder anti-tank guns as their 25-pounder field guns were seldom used against the Japanese in an anti-tank role as was customary in North Africa. (USAMHI)
Japanese medium tanks advance down main trunk road in western Malaya. The Allies, except for rare occasions, used their ordnance effectively against Japanese armour. (USAMHI)
Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham (C-in-C Far East) (left), who was subsequently replaced by General Sir Henry Pownall, is seen here with Alfred Duff Cooper, Churchill’s appointed Special Emissary in the Far East. The relationship between the military man and the civilian did not operate smoothly. (USAMHI)
Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, who was considered very intelligent by his subordinates, seen here with Allied war correspondents on Singapore Island. Critics of Percival have claimed that he was a colourless character, more a staff officer than a commander and certainly not a natural leader. He did have difficulties inspiring confidence in his corps and divisional commanders, whether British or Australian. (USAMHI)