Two and a half hours before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor it began its assault on Malaya. This was to be one of the principal theatres of the war, the scene of what was probably its most brilliant campaign, and of disaster and disgrace for Britain which was to bring about the twilight of the British in Asia.
Malaya was a peninsula inhabited by Malay sultanates. Great Britain had extended its colonial rule over them in the nineteenth century while leaving formally intact the machinery of the sultanates; and the territory, with the great importance of its rubber, had become a major part of the British colonial empire. The rich and peaceful country had attracted the Chinese, who became a very large minority.
Malaya had a special significance for all the Western Powers with territorial possessions in the East. At the southernmost tip of the peninsula is the island of Singapore, the size of the Isle of Wight. In the early 1920s, with the ending of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Britain had determined to build up Singapore into a great naval fortress, and to make Malaya the vital centre of British power in the Far East. Singapore was to be a dockyard, a naval base, barracks and communications centre. It was to safeguard the communications with Australia and was the base from which the British Navy would operate to ensure that the Indian Ocean continued to be a British lake. The British, having decided to rely in the Far East on steel and reinforced concrete instead of on diplomacy, spent £60 million, which at that time was a very large sum, on the fortification of the base. When finished, it was regarded as one of the four greatest sea-fortresses in the world (the others being Pearl Harbor, Malta and Gibraltar). As we have seen, it was also regarded by British defence planners as one of the two keystones of British imperial defence (the other being metropolitan Britain) upon whose security the very existence of the British Empire depended. It would have such obvious military might that, while it stood, it would provide a guarantee of the continuity of British power and thus it would be looked to by all other British territories in Asia; nor was it without significance to France and Holland for the security of their empires in South-East Asia.
The plan was carried through. Singapore was completed. It seemed to double-lock the gateway of the Empire so that it was useless for an unfriendly rival Power, such as Japan, to dream of forcing an entrance. Japan might have been expected to be daunted by such prestige, and to avoid a direct attack on such an invincible place. It was to prove, however, that the complacency and false security which were generated about Singapore told against drawing up plans for a modernized, flexible defence of the system in case it should ever be challenged.
Almost unbelievably, a totally false estimate of its strength became general. It proceeded from an erroneous view of military reality, which was to prove so eminently disastrous that it is inconceivable how it could ever have been formed, or that, once it had come to determine the fixed lines of policy, it was allowed to continue for nearly twenty years unchallenged. There were two delusions. The first was that, as Singapore lay at the southern extension of 200 miles of jungle, it was militarily impregnable to land attack. Without any serious tests having been made in time, and as it turned out without any basis in reason, this fortress was given the certificate of virtual invulnerability. It was taken for granted that no enemy could carry on tank warfare in the hinterland of rubber plantations, and it was thought to be impassable, a region exempt from the manoeuvres of modern armies. The actual arrangements for the defence of Singapore were made from this misreading of fact. The rubber jungle was left undefended by human arts. Efforts made by the chief engineer of Malay Command, Brigadier Ivan Simson, to erect fixed defences, blow up bridges and lay down minefields were resisted by General Arthur Percival, his commander, who regarded such steps as these – and the civil defence efforts which were also Simson’s responsibility – as counter-productive and bad for the morale of British troops, local politicians and the native races of Malaya. From over-confidence, the garrison of Singapore was lamentably inadequate; the roads were poor; no network of airfields was made which would have been adequate for a great Air Force; no great Air Force had ever operated from the Malayan Peninsula.
The second fatal miscalculation was that, as Singapore was to be a naval base, it would be threatened only in a great naval war. Singapore was envisaged as the centre of a titanic naval struggle, with a large fleet occupying her to capacity. The eyes of the world would always be on her, and those eyes would always look seawards. All the guns of Singapore would point seawards also. It was prepared with the most modern artillery which money could buy; but the guns were never in a position to fire effectively at an adversary who came by land.
Alas, it was never to play its part in a great war of the seas; its guns necessarily remained silent, for they were not the mobile things of a hundred years before. They were built in concrete and could not in a matter of days or weeks be re-adapted to a new kind of war. The traversing mechanisms of electrically fired long-range guns of the period were fitted with stops to prevent their crews fouling control cables or damaging adjacent batteries and other installations by the effects of the blast cones of these devastating weapons. Nevertheless, in the final days of the siege at Singapore, one or two of the guns were modified so as to fire above Singapore town at the Japanese on the Malayan mainland. In any case, the effect of fifteen-inch AP (armour-piercing) naval shells on moist jungle was less than edifying. Had these guns been equipped with HE (high explosive) shells or proximity fuses, they would have wrought terrible carnage upon the Japanese. Money spent on Singapore was largely useless, for the same reason as was the treasure of France which had been squandered on the Maginot Line; they succeeded in deterring one form of attack, and greatly reduced the danger of a surprise attack, but the generals whose duty it was to integrate these magnificent fixed defences into an overall flexible response to invading forces elsewhere proved unequal to the challenge of war.
In the opening years of the war – before Japan suddenly made its nature real and alarming to them – British people living in Singapore had had time to digest how deadly was their peril. Most of them did not do so. The old myths bore them up. They were cheered by the belief that the British Navy, though it was away in other waters, had power to neutralize the Japanese. They could still see the apparent strength of Singapore, which they thought would house its Navy, and did not grasp its essential weakness.
Only a few British soldiers during this time saw the ominous cracks appearing. One was Colonel Stewart, the commanding officer of a battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who refused to accept the conventions which govern the training of garrison troops. Day after day the soldiers under his command spent their time in jungle training. The Argylls were considered eccentric; but in the end, Colonel Stewart formed the view that Singapore was not in fact surrounded on the north and east by a vast and easily defensible belt of jungle. It was possible for an invading Army to use tanks in the jungle; and in a short time the Japanese Army, made formidable by all the instruments of modern war, would be at its doors. This was the uncomfortable message which he preached, but virtually nobody attended to him.
It happens that one of the Japanese officers concerned with preparing the Japanese offensive has left a full account of the processes involved (Singapore – the Japanese Version, by Colonel Tsuji Masanobu). It was conceived as a rescue operation to free the inhabitants from British imperialism. It was not planned years ahead, and in great detail, as was wrongly supposed by the British Government. The expedition was improvised, and planned on a shoestring. The serious preparation and advance studies began only eleven months before the actual attack, in January 1941, at the same time as Admiral Yamamoto set to work on the plans to attack Pearl Harbor, and had started with a monthly budget of no more than 20,000 yen (or less than £2,000). The initial planning was carried out in Formosa, which was then a firm part of the Japanese Empire, and it was rehearsed on Hainan Island, which had been annexed to the Japanese Empire in February 1939. The Japanese forces were able to use a mass of photographs and other data which its enthusiastic agents had been busy gathering, partly as a matter of habit and by voluntary initiative. Every town and village had had its Japanese businessmen, Japanese doctors and Japanese dentists, and these were now revealed as the advance guard of the invasion that was being launched; but it is surprising how sketchy was much of the information. It was discovered that for their coastal operation the Japanese had to rely upon the data furnished by a single master mariner, who had collected the facts for years in case they should come in useful.
The invasion did not begin with a surprise massive Japanese attack from the air, similar to that on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The war started with the transport of two divisions of Japanese soldiers from Indo-China, and the overcoming of the weak coastal defences in northern Malaya. At first, the Japanese were too distant from Singapore to make effective use of the air; today it is overlooked how comparatively limited the range of massive air operations still was. The Japanese landing in the north did not take the British by surprise. It had clearly been a possibility ever since the Japanese took Indo-China, and plans had been worked out, which were in fact forestalled by the Japanese, for a possible seizure of a part of southern Thailand, as a defensive move. The British were, however, outmanoeuvred by the speed and resiliency of the Japanese in moving from their bridgeheads to a lightning drive on the south.
In the first two days of the war the British commanders at Singapore disposed of two major warships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, which the Government at home, as the skies blackened in the days before Pearl Harbor, had been persuaded to detach from other operations and to spare for the East. These were a powerful reinforcement: with them, Singapore appeared to be about to play the part intended for it by British planning. In theory, at least, they would restore mobility to British arms. They were meant to insure the safety of Malaya, in case the Japanese struck out during the negotiations at Washington. The battleship and battle-cruiser would enable Britain to strike at great distances. With sea power, Britain could exercise what Bacon had described as its natural advantage in all its wars: to take as much or as little of the war as it desired.
Yet the voyage of these two ships was a perilous excursion into the unknown, and filled those who ordered it with great alarm. They moved northward from Singapore with the intention of disrupting the landing of the Japanese forces and their supplies. It was a sound objective and it might have altered the course of the war. They were moving against forces which they could not compute. The Japanese had a history of waiting for, and dealing with, naval units sent out from European waters to alter the balance of force in the East. Admiral Rozhdestvensky had sailed a fleet half-way round the world in 1905 to be destroyed at the battle of the Japan Sea. In like manner, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were to be the victims, not it is true of a waiting Japanese Navy, but of the new Japanese Fleet Air Arm which sank the two warships on the third day of the war. The commander of the two capital ships, Admiral Tom Phillips, had been confident of air support from local RAF units, but, disgracefully, that support never materialized and this was, perhaps, the main cause for the disaster that occurred.
With these warships swept from the chess board, the Japanese advance down the peninsula to Singapore could go forward unimpeded. Troops came in by transport from Indo-China, and nothing availed to stop them; more alarmingly, they were accompanied by tanks, which against forecasts, overcame the natural barriers of the jungle. They advanced south with surprising speed. A clear picture of the Japanese strategy began to show itself. The British Army, heavily burdened with its impedimenta, untrained for jungle warfare, resisted as hard as it could by throwing up positions across the roads. Meeting their challenge, the Japanese forsook the main road, advanced through the allegedly impenetrable jungle, and took the British in the rear. The jungle betrayed the British; the jungle which had been in their possession for eighty years and whose possibilities for war they had never learned. By these means, repeated so often that they became monotonous, the Japanese came on, and within six weeks were within sight of Singapore.
The achievement of the Japanese has been glossed over. It was remarkable. The Japanese Army had until now acquired its battle experience in China, a terrain vastly different from Malaya: and its battle training had been almost exclusively the steppe country of Manchuria. Its performance in the tropics showed an adaptability and resourcefulness in the Japanese officers, and endurance by the Japanese soldiers, which had been insufficiently recognized. Though the imaginative qualities of the Japanese Army were not afterwards always apparent, they shone in this campaign.
The manner of fighting by the Japanese surprised their antagonists. They showed none of the preference for long-range combat, such as most of the other civilized combatants exhibited. They seemed to exult in struggle body to body. They produced gestures of defiance and glee and also of fear which, by most other soldiers, were regarded as childish. A skirmish was accompanied by grunts, gasps and blood-curdling yells. Later, when Japanese films became popular in the West, it was seen that the Japanese soldier had fought very much as Japanese actors traditionally represented him as doing. It made him a surprising and alarming adversary.
As the Japanese assault on Malaya intensified, it was noticed that the Japanese had a string of successes in air raids upon British aircraft. Time and again the British were caught on the ground. Japan’s aircraft appeared in great force just when the British were getting ready to take to the air. Finally one reason for this striking good fortune of the Japanese came to light. An officer in the RAF, a New Zealander of Irish stock, was pursuing his ancestral country’s age-old feud of twenty years back with the British Government, and was detected signalling to the Japanese. This affair was kept secret. It accounted for an unfortunate part of the air losses in the early stages of the campaign.
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In the confused ill-temper of the retreat – and it was always retreat, without one solid success to restore self-respect – there was recrimination between the British commanders, and, the commander of the large force of Australians which had been a part of the Allied garrison and who had shared in the defence. It was reflected in the lower ranks. Many of the Australians had been stationed in the Middle East before they fought the Japanese. As this was largely a time of defeat they had formed a disgruntled view of British competence. Their transfer back to the defence of the region where Australian interests were more vitally at stake had been agreed to with a rather ill grace by Churchill; this put the Australians in the mood to be touchy partners. By ill fortune they were under a general, Gordon Bennett, who, though a rather dashing soldier, had in addition qualities which hardly endeared him to the usual type of British officers. He was not of a modest nature, he did not minimize any affronts shown to him, he did not agree with those people who saw virtue in silence.
To the necessary disgraces which afflicted the beaten Army, there was thus added the scandal of a dangerous difference of opinion between England and one of the Dominions which at bottom had always been loyal to it and whose feelings were the more ruffled because they had been so warm. The quarrel threatened to widen out into a dispute which uncovered a diversity in war aims. Australia was left with the feeling that it had been betrayed. Its interests were treated as of slight concern. It seemed that England would unfeelingly sacrifice Australian soldiers for its own advantage. It was the type of ill-feeling which sooner or later was bound to cloud the cooperation of England and the Dominions. A considerable effort was needed to overcome the bitterness: Britain was too occupied for the diplomacy needed. Singapore, which was becoming a curse to the Empire which it had been called into being to serve, merely added to its demerits that, in the turmoil of this period, it caused London and Canberra for some weeks to be estranged.
In the long retreat through Malaya, the British had suffered much more than a great military reverse. For the first time their administrative system in oriental countries had been exposed, and was reduced to ridicule. They, the masters of political craft in conciliating the oriental, found that they had used up all their reserves of prestige, and had no comfort anywhere. In Penang, in Kuala Lumpur, in all the centres of administration, the events were disastrous. The institutions built up over decades, the loyalties so laboriously produced, the habits which the British had so complacently regarded as fixed and permanent – all were swept away. The British were not regarded with fear or hatred: had that been so, they would not have been so quickly written off. Their day was regarded as closed. The local Malay population (not the Chinese), giving a lead to other colonial communities of the Empire, regarded it as politic to transfer their loyalties as quickly as possible to the Japanese.
When the backward movement of the British began, it was supposed by home public opinion that, with the example of a scorched earth policy in Russia before them, arrangements would be made for the Japanese to meet with a similar bleak reception. But in almost all cases, the Government lacked the nerve to demand the sacrifice from the local people, or, more rarely, the demand was made, generally too late in the day. Key leaders and the people refused to cooperate. The British efforts to build up a resistance behind the rear of the Japanese Army, and to create an adequate spying and Intelligence system were at first unsuccessful. Later on in the war, when the Japanese had made themselves detested, SOE and other similar organizations were to begin to function effectively: but this was to be in the future.
It must not be supposed that the psychological atmosphere changed abruptly to contempt or hostility towards the British. There were many warm and compassionate acts of loyalty and friendship by the Malays and the very mixed population of this cosmopolitan peninsula. The British, in defeat and disillusion, often found unexpected shelter.
How news of great and dramatic events transmits itself in Asia, by what means it travels to remote valleys and distant villages, is not clear. At this time there were very few radio sets outside the larger towns. But in these months a great sensation was felt throughout Asia. The British Empire was dying. It had been overturned in Malaya, and was found to have rotten roots. Soon it would be treated in the same way in the other countries, and in all parts of Asia where the union flag still flew, Britain never recovered from the deplorable events of these few weeks. The happenings in one small section of its Empire were enough to destroy its prestige everywhere: and the life and soul of the British Empire had consisted of prestige, which is almost indistinguishable from the oriental concept of ‘Face’.
While Singapore was in its death throes, the British committed one more egregious mistake. Large reinforcements of British troops, complete with equipment, had been spared from the war in Europe and ordered to Malaya. These arrived off Singapore when the siege of the fortress was about to begin. With remarkable folly, and in the belief that there would be a final effort to redeem the fortress by undertaking a siege, they were disembarked instead of sailing away to India or Burma where they were urgently needed, as quickly as they could. These troops, with all their artillery and stores, were put ashore, never to fire a shot, and were to enter on the long martyrdom of Japanese imprisonment.
On 31 January 1942, the British and Commonwealth forces, defeated, bewildered and demoralized, re-entered Singapore. Their rear-guard was led across the causeway which connected Singapore with Johore by the remnants of the pipe band of the Argylls.
The final defence lasted fifteen days. Singapore surrendered on 15 February. It gave in because its defences crumbled; because its water supply passed out of its control; because the Japanese, again falsifying expectation, managed to infiltrate the island’s defences at all points, and, within a week of crossing, were seen to be everywhere; because the troops were disorganized, and no pattern of defence established itself; because it was clear that the civilian population in the city had been paralysed and most of it, lacking training or proper organization, did not commit itself to self-defence; because the enemy, which had penned them up in the ‘fortress’, had swollen in their imagination to such a size by a unique series of triumphs that further resistance was not really thinkable. He had sunk two battleships which the English had naïvely supposed would have overawed him; at Pearl Harbor he had struck away the Navy that would have made the Americans an effective ally; he had demonstrated that the jungle, that was feared by all other armies, could be treated as the home of the Japanese, from which Japan could draw strength. When this Japanese Army began to follow the British into Singapore, and to infiltrate over the island, the British recognized that the battle for South-East Asia had gone against them. By a local decision the fact was recognized: and Singapore was Japan’s.
Yet it remained true that the Army in Singapore was twice as large as the besieging force, and, in theory at least, a prolonged resistance would have been possible. Even the fact of the non-existence of prepared defences did not cancel out the fact of the great British superiority in manpower. There have been famous sieges in history that have been carried on long enough to embarrass the besiegers and which have been begun in circumstances as disastrous as those in Singapore. Exactly a year later, Singapore was to be followed in the news interest of the world by Stalingrad, and its defenders were not moved by the civilized sentiments of those who had to make the decision at Singapore. It is true that the defenders, unlike those of Stalingrad, could not have cut their way out to safety: but, in theory at least, they could have put up a notable resistance. The defeat was not gilded by any valiant enterprise, such as the rescue of the British troops at Dunkirk, which in after days made Dunkirk a stirring myth, instead of one of the worst reverses to British arms on the continent. In fact it became known later that General Yamashita Tomoyuki, the rather eccentric commander of the Japanese, had outrun his supplies. He would have been in no position to support the troops which he had filtered through to the island; they must have fallen back if the garrison had made the determined counter-attack of which it was capable. Thus, to other humiliations, the British added that of being bluffed.
To one man the decision was particularly unwelcome: to the British Prime Minister. It is a little hard to say how at any one moment the events of the war in the Far East affected him. On the whole they were always secondary to affairs in Europe. It would seem that throughout the brilliant first hundred days of Japan he never succeeded in getting a grip of what was happening. Before the Japanese attack, he had continually underrated the chances of Japanese intervention. He did not equal the grasp he often had on the war in the Middle East. His speeches and his writings about it have a faint note of unreality, of a theatre of war where his views are not translated into action. The impression is dreamlike, of playing with vast conceptions which are fatally unrelated to fact; there is the occasional tumble into an abyss, which he must have foreseen but could not be reconciled to. Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival’s decision to surrender at Singapore had been approved by General Sir Archibald Wavell, who only two days before, had ordered the landing of the Eighteenth Australian Division at Singapore against the advice of Auchinleck. Percival, the man on the spot after all, evidently convinced Wavell, who paid him a flying visit on 10–11 February, that the battle was lost. Percival took the view that the soldiers had done all that could be expected of them, and that further resistance would have been a pointless waste of life. Wavell went off to Java after trying to salvage what he could from the disaster. In Churchill’s distrust of Wavell, which was to become so painfully obvious, perhaps there was an element of resentment for his part in the capitulation.
Churchill’s speeches at this juncture are very curious. They are the comment of a detached observer rather than of a committed politician who had to explain the disaster which had befallen one of his projects. The British had surrendered Singapore: that was the bare fact, which people in Britain must stomach, and which they could not be expected to dwell on with satisfaction.
There departed into Japanese captivity a large British force and most of the civilian staff who had passed their lifetime in the administration of Malaya. They had little further part to play in the war, though the suffering of the prisoners was very great and was periodically used by the British Ministry of Information to stir up public effort, and to keep the people resolute on their liberation. Given the chance to resist, these same prisoners, many of whom died before they could be released, might have preferred to be sacrificed in making the end of Singapore a little more creditable than it was.
The Japanese rejoiced, and not without cause. They looked almost incredulously at the size of their forces, and what they had achieved against much larger British forces. Usually the attacking force has to be considerably greater than the defenders if it is to have any chance of success; in the Malaya campaign this was reversed. The Japanese losses had been extravagantly small. From the time of their first landing to their occupying the Johore causeway and beginning the assault on Singapore their casualties were, according to Japanese official information which need not in this case be disbelieved, 1,793 killed and 2,772 wounded. They had deployed a force at Singapore not greater than 35,000 men, leaving another 35,000 or so men up country in Malaya. From information afterwards obtained, they found that the defending force numbered 85,000 out of an original strength of 139,000 British, Australian, Indian and local volunteer forces. In the actual assault on Singapore they lost a further 1,714 men killed, and 3,378 wounded. The Japanese claim that not a single Japanese soldier was captured. Certainly it would appear that none of those who did, lived to tell the tale: at least five wounded Japanese prisoners were among those murdered by rampaging Japanese troops at the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore following the British surrender. The myth has grown up that the Japanese troops were helped by having a corps of men trained in Malayan affairs. This is quite false. The number of Malayan experts in Japanese service was less than ten.
During 1940 and 1941 Germany had discussed with the Japanese from time to time the possibility of an attack on Singapore. But the German estimate was that the initial campaign would last one and a half years and would need five and a half divisions. Actually Japan required fifty-five days and the initial assault required only two divisions. At the outset of the campaign, Yamashita had been offered a third division but had declined it. His employment of the forces he had, and their logistical support, was masterful.
Japanese publications since the war have shown a high, rather theatrical morale among Japanese troops. The telegrams are still extant which Japanese generals sent to one another; their style is extremely patriotic, conventionally moralistic, reasonably free of the rivalries between officers and between services which were so common later in the war. One of the ceremonial acts which the Japanese performed after their victory was to build a tower which was dedicated to holding Buddhist requiem masses for the British killed in the campaign.
The Japanese, perhaps because they had taken Singapore with such an inadequate force, established there an occupation régime which governed it with extreme strictness, and rather purposeless brutality. They felt uneasy. Soon reports began to circulate of extraordinary Japanese measures against any suspected organization. Singapore was principally inhabited by Chinese, and the Kuomintang had used its citizens to extract funds for the Chinese Government. They were determined to stop this. The Chinese, in general, were irreconcilable; some had the reputation of being extremely radical in politics, which Japan also feared. The existence, in a peculiarly ramifying form, of the Chinese secret society, was another thing which provoked them. So, from the earliest days of their triumph, ugly tales of police terror and torture were mingled with a great victory. In the first days of the occupation of the city, they compiled a list of hundreds of Chinese and arrested them en masse. The beaches near the centre of the city became execution grounds by night where the Kenpeitai – the Japanese military police – took their preventive action. Altogether some 30,000 Chinese were massacred at Singapore by the Japanese as a matter of policy in those few days. Tens of thousands more were murdered up-country in Malaya.