The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  General Yamashita’s army, successfully established on the Malay Peninsula, although inferior in numbers, enjoyed the support of an armoured division and air superiority. The Indian troops, most of whom had never seen a tank before, were overawed. They were also spooked by the jungle and the eerie gloom of the rubber plantations. But the most effective Japanese tactic was to advance down the eastern and western coast roads, led by their tanks, and on reaching a roadblock to outflank the defenders with infantry skirting round them through paddy fields or jungle. The speed of the Japanese advance was greatly increased by bicycle troops, who often overtook the retreating defenders.

  Advancing down both the west and the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, Yamashita’s battle-hardened troops pushed back the mixture of British, Indian, Australian and Malay units towards the southern tip of Johore. In a number of actions, certain units fought well and inflicted heavy casualties. But the incessant retreats were both utterly exhausting and demoralizing against Japanese tanks and constant strafing by Zero fighters.

  General Percival still refused to establish a defence line in Johore because he thought it would be bad for morale. This lack of prepared positions was disastrous for the defence of Singapore. Even so, the Australian 8th Division in particular managed to hold the Japanese Imperial Guards Division and throw it off balance with ambushes.

  A force of Hurricanes had also arrived to strengthen Singapore’s defences, but they proved inferior to the Zero. After two weeks of fighting in Johore, the remnants of the Allied forces were pulled back to Singapore island. The causeway across the Johore Strait was then blown up on 31 January 1942, just after the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders crossed, bagpipes playing. The Japanese are said to have decapitated 200 Australian and Indian soldiers who had been left behind, too badly wounded to move.

  Raffles Hotel continued to offer dinner dances on most nights, with the idea that business as usual would keep up morale. But to officers back from fighting down the Malay Peninsula it seemed more like the band playing on board the Titanic. Under relentless Japanese bombing, much of the city lay in ruins. Many European families had begun to leave, either by flying-boat to Java, or to Ceylon on the returning troopships which had just delivered reinforcements. Their fathers and husbands had mostly enrolled in volunteer units. Some women bravely stayed on as nurses despite fears for their fate when the Japanese conquered the city.

  The inherent weakness of Singapore island along the Johore Strait was made worse by Percival’s conviction that the Japanese would attack the north-east of the island. This derived from his strange belief that the naval base, which had already been destroyed, was the key element to be defended. He ignored instructions from General Wavell, now the Allied commander-in-chief in the region, to strengthen the north-west part of the island which, with its mangrove swamps and creeks, was the most difficult sector to defend.

  The Australian 8th Division, which was given this sector, immediately saw the danger. It lacked clear fields of fire as well as mines and barbed wire, because the bulk had been allocated for the north-eastern side. Its battalions had been reinforced with fresh troops who had just arrived, but most of them hardly knew how to handle a rifle. General Gordon Bennett, although aware of Percival’s fundamental mistake, said little and simply retired to his headquarters.

  On 7 February, Japanese artillery opened fire for the first time on Singapore, which lay under a huge pall of black smoke from the naval base’s oil dump bombed the night before. The next day, the bombardment intensified dramatically on the north-east flank as a diversion. This convinced Percival even more that this was where the attack would come.

  Yamashita observed events from a tower of the palace belonging to the Sultan of Johore overlooking the narrow strait. He had decided to use up the last of his artillery ammunition just before his troops crossed in boats and barges that night to the mangrove swamps on Singapore’s north-west shore. Vickers machine guns inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers, but the 3,000 Australians holding the sector were rapidly overrun by Yamashita’s sixteen battalions, who surged on inland. The massive Japanese bombardment had cut all the field telephone lines, so the artillery in support took some time to react, and 8th Division headquarters had little idea what was going on. Even the Very lights shot into the sky by the Australian front line remained unseen.

  By dawn on 9 February, nearly 20,000 Japanese troops had landed. Yet Percival still did not make any major changes to his deployment, apart from sending two under-strength battalions to form a blocking line. He also allowed the last Hurricane squadron to be withdrawn to Sumatra. Confusion rapidly led to the collapse of his hopes of forming a last-ditch defence line north-west of Singapore city. The Japanese had landed tanks, and they soon smashed through any remaining roadblocks. On the governor’s orders, the treasury began to burn all the banknotes in its possession. Motorcars were pushed into the harbour to prevent them falling into the hands of the Japanese, but most were burned-out wrecks on the streets. The bombed and burning city stank from rotting bodies, and the hospitals were submerged in wounded and dead. The evacuation of women, including nurses, had accelerated as the last ships set sail, but a number of these vessels were bombed. Some of the survivors who managed to get ashore were bayoneted or shot down by Japanese patrols. The naval craft trying to escape ran straight into a Japanese flotilla of warships.

  Percival, who had been ordered by Churchill and Wavell to fight to the very last, was under pressure from his subordinate commanders to surrender to avoid further loss of life. He signalled Wavell, who was firm in his order to continue fighting, street by street. But the city was running out of water, due to pipes broken by the bombing. Japanese troops charged into the military hospital at Alexandra and bayoneted patients and staff. One man under anaesthetic was stabbed to death on the operating table.

  Finally, on Sunday, 15 February, General Percival surrendered to General Yamashita. General Bennett, after ordering his men to unload and stay where they were, slipped away. With a group of other men, he swam out to a sampan and then, after bribing the captain of a Chinese junk, made it to Sumatra. He claimed, on reaching Australia, that he had escaped to pass on his experience of fighting the Japanese, but the soldiers he had left behind were understandably bitter.

  The recriminations against Percival, the governor Shenton Thomas, Bennett, Brooke-Popham, Wavell and several others were overwhelming in the aftermath of the humiliating disaster. ‘We are paying very heavily now,’ General Sir Alan Brooke, who had succeeded Sir John Dill as chief of the imperial general staff, wrote in his diary, ‘for failing to pay the insurance premiums essential for security of an Empire.’ But even though the preparation and the conduct of the Malayan campaign had been deplorable, Singapore could never have been an impregnable fortress with Japanese control of the surrounding air and seas. As well as the troops, there were over a million civilians on the island, so they would soon have been starved out in any case.

  On 19 February, Japanese aircraft attacked the port of Darwin in the north of Australia, sinking eight ships and killing 240 civilians. The Australian government was both angry and alarmed. The country was exposed since its best divisions were still in the Middle East. Australians had only started to wake up to their vulnerability the previous November when the cruiser HMAS Sydney was sunk off their coast while intercepting the German armed raider Kormoran flying a Dutch flag. During the long and heated debate that ensued, with two government inquiries carried out since 1998, many suspected that the German raider was not alone. They believed that the Sydney was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine operating with the Kormoran eighteen days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Australian anger at the British failure to defend Malaya was justified, but the fact remained that the country had spent little on defence. And ironically it was mainly the ferocity of Australian criticism which had pushed Churchill into sending more reinforcements to Singapore, almost all of whom fell into Japanese hands.

  Sumatra in the Dutch
East Indies lay just across the Malacca Straits from Singapore, and the Japanese wasted no time in continuing their conquests. On 14 February 1942, the day before Percival’s surrender, Japanese para-troops dropped on Palembang to secure the oilfields and Dutch Shell refineries. A Japanese task force, with a carrier, six cruisers and eleven destroyers to escort the troop transports, arrived offshore.

  The island of Java was the next objective. The Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February rapidly decided the matter. An Allied force of Dutch, American, Australian and British cruisers and six destroyers attacked two Japanese convoys escorted by three heavy cruisers and fourteen destroyers. During the next thirty-six hours, the Allied ships were outgunned and out-torpedoed. It was a gallant but doomed engagement. By 9 March, Batavia (now Jakarta) and the rest of the Dutch East Indies had surrendered.

  Japanese army commanders in China saw Burma as the most important objective for them. This offered the best way of cutting off supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies as well as defending the whole western flank in south-east Asia. Imperial General Headquarters had originally planned to occupy only southern Burma, but this soon changed with the momentum of their advance.

  The battle for Burma had begun on 23 December 1941, when Japanese bombers attacked Rangoon. Further raids caused a stampede of refugees out of the city. The Allies had only an RAF squadron of Brewster Buffaloes and a squadron of American volunteer pilots known as the Flying Tigers with P-40 Curtiss Warhawks. Three Hurricane squadrons, diverted from Malaya, arrived soon afterwards.

  On 18 January 1942, General Iida Shojiro’s 15th Army attacked over the border from Thailand. Major General John Smyth VC, who commanded the 17th Indian Division, wanted to form a line along the Sittang River which provided a strong barrier. But Wavell ordered him to advance to the south-east towards the Thai frontier to slow the Japanese advance as far forward as possible, because he needed more time to reinforce Rangoon. This proved to be disastrous, with just one under-strength division trying to defend the whole of southern Burma.

  On 9 February, Japanese policy suddenly changed. ‘Victory fever’ convinced Imperial General Headquarters that they could take most of Burma as well in order to cut off the Chinese supply route at source. Smyth was later forced, as he had foreseen, to retreat back to the Sittang, but this now meant pulling his division back across a single-file, planked bridge during the night of 21 February. A truck jammed, and the whole column was halted for three hours. When dawn rose, most of the division was caught in a totally exposed position east of the fast-flowing river. Attempting to cut them off, a Japanese force threatened to capture the bridge. Smyth’s second-in-command felt obliged to blow it up. Less than half the division got away. A chaotic retreat to Rangoon ensued.

  The Burmese capital had been protected by the Flying Tigers and the RAF, who had forced the Japanese to switch to night-bombing. As a result reinforcements were landed in the port, including the 7th Armoured Brigade with light Stuart tanks. But Rangoon was doomed, and stores were shifted north before the place was finally abandoned. A zoo-keeper let out all the animals, including the dangerous ones, which caused some panic. In the half-deserted city, the governor Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith and his aide had a final game of billiards after finishing the last few bottles in the wine-cellar. Then, to deny the Japanese the stern portraits of former governors, they threw their billiard balls through the canvases.

  General Sir Harold Alexander, appointed commander-in-chief Burma, flew in to Rangoon as the Japanese approached. On 7 March, he ordered the destruction of oil tanks outside the city, and instructed the remaining British forces to withdraw north. Fortunately for the British, the Japanese failed to carry out a major ambush effectively the following day, and they escaped. The plan was to form a new line of defence in the north along with the 1st Burma Division of Keren hill tribesmen, ferociously opposed to the Japanese, and 50,000 Chinese Nationalist troops led by the American commander in China, Major General Joseph Stilwell. ‘Vinegar Joe’ was a ferocious anglophobe. He claimed unconvincingly that Alexander was ‘astonished to find ME–mere me, a goddam American–in command of Chinese troops. “Extrawdinery!” Looked me over as if I had just crawled from under a rock.’

  The Japanese, having occupied Rangoon with its port, were able to reinforce their army rapidly. Their aircraft, now operating from airfields inside Burma, managed to destroy almost all the remaining RAF and Flying Tiger fighters on an airfield further north.

  At the end of March, the Chinese forces were beaten back and what now became the Burma Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General William Slim, was forced to retreat rapidly to avoid encirclement. Chiang Kai-shek accused the British of failing to hold the line. Certainly, liaison between the two armies was ineffectual, if not chaotic, partly because the Chinese had no maps, and they could not read the place names on the ones the British provided. Disaster was then made certain by Stilwell insisting on an offensive, which the Chinese armies were incapable of carrying out.

  Stilwell rejected Chiang Kai-shek’s plan to defend Mandalay as too passive. Without warning the British, he sent two Chinese divisions into an attack south, and refused to allow the 200th Division to retreat from Tounggoo. The Japanese rapidly took advantage of these over-extended formations by advancing past them to Lashio, north-east of Mandalay, and thus outflanking the British as well. Stilwell, refusing to admit responsibility for the disaster, blamed his Chinese forces for a stupid reluctance to attack and losing the chance of a great victory. The British were rather more appreciative of their efforts and as furious with Stilwell as was Chiang Kai-shek.

  On 5 April, a powerful Japanese task force entered the Bay of Bengal to attack the British naval base at Colombo. Admiral Sir James Somerville managed to send most of his ships out of the way in time, but the damage inflicted was still extremely serious. By the beginning of May, the Japanese had seized Mandalay and even crossed into China by the Burma Road, forcing some of the Chinese Nationalist forces back into Yunnan province. But it was Indian civilians from the large community in Burma who suffered most in the retreat north, including small merchants and their families unused to hardship. They were attacked and robbed by the Burmese, who hated them. The remaining Allied troops had to retreat towards the Indian frontier, having suffered some 30,000 casualties. The Japanese occupation of south-east Asia appeared complete.

  17

  China and the Philippines

  NOVEMBER 1941–APRIL 1942

  The year 1941 had begun more encouragingly for the Chinese Nationalists. The Japanese 11th Army was so spread out that it could not concentrate for an effective offensive. South of the Yangtze, the Nationalists even managed to inflict a severe reverse at the Jin River on the 33rd and 34th Divisions, causing some 15,000 Japanese casualties. And Chiang Kai-shek, in a calculated gamble, had forced the Communist guerrilla New Fourth Army to abandon its areas south of the Yangtze and move north of the Yellow River. It appears that although an agreement was reached on this withdrawal, Mao ensured that it broke down. Bitter fighting broke out when Communist troops, deliberately misdirected by Mao, blundered into Nationalist forces. Inevitably, accounts of what happened differed entirely on both sides. All that is certain is that it made a subsequent civil war even more difficult to avoid. Soviet representatives restricted themselves to expressing concern that Nationalists and Communists were fighting each other when they should be attacking the Japanese. But, in the wider world, foreign Communist parties used the incident as propaganda to claim that the Nationalists were always the aggressors.

  The generalissimo, meanwhile, was outraged by the growing Soviet control over the extreme north-western province of Sinkiang which bordered Mongolia, the USSR and India. Working through the local warlord, Sheng Shih-tsai, the Soviet Union had constructed bases and factories, installed a military garrison and started mining for tin and drilling for oil. A secret camp also trained cadres for the Chinese Communist Party as their influence in the province grew. Sheng Shih-tsai had e
ven applied for membership of the Chinese Communist Party. This move was vetoed by Stalin, but he was then accepted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union instead. As Sinkiang was an essential staging post for supplies and trade with the USSR, the Nationalists’ hands were tied. Chiang Kai-shek could only bide his time until a more favourable moment arose to reassert control over what had become a Soviet fiefdom.

  In spite of these tensions, Soviet supplies had resumed for the moment at least, mainly because Stalin feared a revived Japanese threat in the Far East. In a battle for southern Hunan province the Nationalists again used their tactics of withdrawal followed by a counter-attack. Only in southern Shensi did the Japanese achieve a significant advance and seize valuable agricultural areas on which the Nationalists depended for food and recruits. This came about with their crushing victory in the Battle of Zhongyuan, which Chiang Kai-shek described as ‘the greatest shame in the history of the anti-Japanese War’.

  Ernest Hemingway and his new wife Martha Gellhorn were travelling in China at this time, and the misery and squalor around them ground down even the intrepid Gellhorn. ‘China has cured me–I never want to travel again,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share.’ The dirt, the smells, the rats and the bedbugs had their effect. In the Nationalist capital of Chungking, which Hemingway described as ‘grey, shapeless, muddy, a collection of drab cement buildings and poverty shacks’, they lunched with Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the generalissimo, and were told afterwards that it was a great honour to be received by him without his dentures.