Getting back a dispatch from which everything had been slashed except the little reservations that showed the situation was not entirely hopeless, one American correspondent contemplated building a great dispatch of all these inanities, molding them into a big paper ball, and rolling it down the Strait of Johore the evening after the causeway was blown. “Singapore can and will be held,” the message would begin, then it would roll on and on. Can a critic, a war correspondent for example, be more fatheaded than the authorities? No one ever heard of a public statement so gooeyly optimistic that before being fed to the public it stuck in the censor's throat.
Words, words, words. But these were words to remember. Those tiresome discussions in the Cathay involved the principles for which people were offering all they had, blood and sweat, tears and toil. The American and British peoples were fighting to be informed. They did not want to be fooled. They wanted to hear the truth. They could take it.
It is through knowing the truth that the people discover their hidden will.
THE RAIDS
After the first heavy raid, when the sign They can't stop our clock was hung up opposite the Victoria Theatre, the broken fuselage of a navy Zero was left on the lawn of the Cricket Club. Most of the club's windows had been smashed. It seemed impossible, touching this doll plane, that this small fuselage possessed the margin between holding and losing Singapore. The tail was so tiny it seemed rather to belong to a child's wagon made to imitate an airplane than to the real thing.
The Zero was made to be fought and used up quickly; whether the Jap pilots were meant to live or die, their planes were designed to fight hard, never to be repaired, but only replaced, and to perish soon. Chicagonews talked with two pilots who had fought Zeros, and they said: “The Japs are afraid to dive them, because their wings come off, but they can outmaneuver us. What really counts is being able to turn inside the Jap. We can't do that yet.” The Zero was a butterfly, and looked like one, but in this case the butterfly had a vicious sting. A plane which can “turn inside” another plane, by a single simple loop, can turn itself from prey into pursuer, dealing death where it was taking it two seconds before.
Airdrome control is like checkers; every move is felt in its consequences all the way back along the line. After Singapore became untenable, the Japanese raiders exploited every scrap of advantage they knew they had. Their schedule was simple. They merely calculated the fighting time of the Hurricanes over Singapore plus the length of fuel time needed to return to Palembang. Then they would lead meager defensive fighters on a chase all over the island—high-speed climbing is a devourer of fuel—and when the Hurricanes were forced to turn home, the bombing of Kalang and Thailand would start. The Hurricanes could either land under the bombing and be destroyed, or make for Palembang and be ineffective. The British could not meet this attack by dividing their forces, because they were too few.
A raid by day was as different from a raid by night as man from woman. Singapore was the first gratuity of the war to suffer regular bombing by day and by night, something more than London ever endured. Furthermore, it was ceaselessly under the threat of invasion. That threat was two-dimensional: it could come across the water or it could drop through the great sea of air above.
Raids by day are costly, because they usually involve the loss of many bombers. But they pay off heavily. When directed against a great city they either tie up all its affairs completely or they slow them down so greatly that it amounts to paralysis. The human being awakens in the morning alive, rested, full of vitality, and open to new impressions. If the first flush of the day's activity is dampened by a scurried flight to an air-raid shelter, if the whistle and stamp of bombs and the great shudder of the earth beneath them are the opening chord of his day, subsequent work will be carried on slowly, vaguely, and with a kind of absence of mind.
It is possible to take a raid calmly, and to rationalize the required concessions to the fear of the mind. But the fear remains in the body. The body is still fearful when the mind is either courageous or resigned. The body in this hour is more timid than the mind, for though the mind says “Your chances of escape are ten thousand to one,” the body responds, “Yes, but that ten-thousandth chance is annihilation. I am near Death, and I know it. And it is a Death which is not coming from within the body, but a brutal stranger falling out of the sky upon my head. This Death does not meet me walking down the street or in a quiet room; he falls on me suddenly, carelessly, indifferent whether now or later, whether it is myself or someone else. The great indiscrimination of this tumbling Death, this purposeless designation as to whether he kills me or someone else—this is what makes air warfare terrible.”
At first the revolt of the body, directed against the induced calm of the mind, is hard to take. The body rebelling against the unnaturalness of this kind of war has no shame. Pulses beat in the throat that never were felt before. The eyebrows contract with premonition. The voice falls to a whisper, as though the enemy could hear. (Some Chinese believed the Jap pilots could not only hear but see them.)
The final indignity is this: The fearful bowels, where the Greeks rightly situated the terrible emotions, turn and give up holding power, and finally abjectly yield. It cannot be denied: the body is unreasonable, but it is afraid. For the first underground shelters in London to have been without toilet facilities was a neglect the importance of which only those who have seen a large number of frightened people can understand. Water was always lacking in Singapore after the siren sounded; the demand was too great for the big pipeline from Johore.
The Singapore sirens placed all over the city, from the police station on Bukit Timah Road to the top of the Cathay, were the usual rising and falling wailers. It is astonishing that the Allies criticize the fear-making whistles attached to German and Japanese bombs while committing a deed of terrorism against their own populations with the unholy banshee cry of warning. The siren's moan has in it something that does not merely inform, but terrifies, preying on the public nerves. What is needed is a siren equivalent to someone stepping up and saying quietly: “Let's look around for a bit of cover, shall we?” rather than “Here they come—run!”
Over Singapore, after feinted raids started around eight o'clock, the real thing would begin about ten, usually from 25 to 27 planes flying tightly in an open V. (An American flier who underwent raids at Nichols Field told Chicagonews it was “the most nearly perfect formation flying I have ever seen, including our own.”) There was a high degree of organization in the Japanese squadron, all aircraft depending strictly upon signal by hand or radio from the leading bomber. The Japanese strive to lay the same V-shaped scheme upon their target as they maintain in the air. This is pattern bombing. If the sights taken by the leading bombardier are accurate, the target will be obliterated by the other aircraft. In bombing, each takes the signal from the one ahead, and the Japanese are experts at this coordination.
It is hard to express a raid in words. A raid is at once more terrifying than a description, and less so. Singapore had piled sandbags before its downtown arcades. Behind the mighty granite of its bank buildings anyone could be protected against splintered hits. But by daylight women and children are not downtown. And it was in the homes of the poor down the waterfront near Kalang, and in the hundreds of flats and tenements along the North Bridge Road, that most deaths occurred. It was terrible to see humanity, confused, lost, shelterless, hacked down by the bombs.
And not only humanity was outraged; every living thing felt the ordeal. Particularly pitiful were bomb-shocked animals, unwounded—dogs and cats, pet monkeys, and parrots with their eyes staring from their heads, glittery with terror, clinging to the earth with frightened claws, sometimes unable to recognize owners who had been the whole world of their affection a few minutes before.
North Bridge Road lay parallel with the Singapore waterfront, three blocks back from the harbor. Here lived all the girl jitterbugs who helped support families with what they brought home from the cabarets. Som
e with country relatives moved to the villages in the western part of the island, putting notices in the personal columns: “Miss Dolly How Cheng informs her friends and clients of the New World cafe that she is absenting herself for a short sojourn in the country.” The reason frequently was that Dolly's home was now a cascade of bricks and mortar, with the face of the little shop across the street punched in like that of a battered witness.
The Air Raid Protection was the most efficient organization in Singapore; its Chinese, Indian, and Malay youths worked with authority, speed and courage, and there was common sense hidden under their plain grey steel helmets. “If I want the most efficient in Singapore,” said an Australian officer, “I go first to the Scotsmen, then the Chinese.” Japanese bombers would fly the length of the waterfront pumping long sticks of bombs onto North Bridge Road, where there were no shelters, not even the six-foot-deep stone culverts that lined parts of the Bund and Orchard Road.
The only really efficient shelter in Singapore was the ramp of the Cathay, and it was always thick with squatting grandmothers in black, little boy babies, and Chinese mothers with faces white with rice powder. Malays rarely sheltered there.
For one who went through most of the raids in Room 32 at the Raffles, the moment of greatest tension came when the rooftop watcher, the irascible engineer of the hotel, blew four whistles from the cupola above. This meant the droning silver planes were practically overhead, and their leader was making the decision that meant life or death. The lookout had some peculiar ideas; one was that the church behind the Raffles had been placed to make a line with its spire directing bombers to the Cathay. This would have been like a cricket pointing his antenna at an elephant.
The slow crunch of bombs as they marched up the street was unforgettable. It sounded like a giant walking. Once two big ones landed in the rear of the Raffles, plastering against the wall the Indian porter who frequently carried the dispatches of Chicagonews to the telegraph office. There was little of him to be found, but what there was the other porters gathered up in a cloth, the engineer standing nearby, his dusty sleeves rolled to his elbow, as the elderly bellboys carried away their comrade. A black cat that prowled around the washhouse was shriveled, its skin stretched taut. There had been no fire; only complete disemboweling of the buildings in the rear.
If one can see the planes in the blue sky, and observe the direction of their flight, one can say either “They can't get me on this run” or “It may be mine this time.” Either way, the tension is short. But a daytime raid was a continuous ordeal from the first rising sigh of the warning siren to the last all-clear. From the rational strategist in the operations room of the fighter base to the terrified mother, lying perhaps in the maternity room of the hospital with her baby beside her, all feel alike a sense of being made ignoble by helplessness to retaliate. There is a degradation in being bombed, and that selfish “Thank God they're hitting someplace else” rising from within ignores that the whole body of humanity is vulnerable.
Indeed, no one who has heard a bomb land nearby even in countryside can doubt that the earth itself revolts against the unfair and unnatural blow; there is a protest, a muffled shudder of revulsion, in the tremor even when a bomb lacerates only wet and open earth. Half the raids upon Singapore were made when the whole island was covered with the thick mist of the monsoon. Even had bombers dared to descend to 500 feet, they could have seen nothing of their target. Perhaps they came over hoping to find rifts that would enable them to aim, but when no rifts appeared, they dumped their bombs through the rain, sometimes accurately, sometimes indiscriminately. Especially in a rainstorm there is something about being bombed that debases the whole human race. It seems pure unaimed hatred; the striker has not the faintest notion where his victim is, and seems to care not who he is.
One day from the terrace in front of Room 32, Chicagonews watched a heavy raid in the middle of a slashing rain. The engineer on the roof, soaked to the skin, shouting wild orders down into the courtyard, had no idea where the bombers were and was blowing his whistle like a distraught policeman. The bombs were falling; you could hear them biting into the waterfront, kicking into the houses with a noise like a big boot kicking a bass drum. The rain spattered on the black pavement and went hissing and whispering through the deep gutters where the coolies, their rickshaws carelessly upended against the buildings, stood knee-deep in the cold running water, huddled down against the sideways flash of the bomb. A great smoking hole was open in the sidewalk; nearby an automobile that had puffed into flame slowly burned up blackly through the raindrops.
And in the middle of the rain-washed street, quite alone and neatly placed together, was a pair of coolie's sandals. Why had this unknown coolie, having run all his life in those sandals, thought in the last moment that he could now flee faster in his bare feet? Abandoned in the shining black street with the water running all around them, they seemed like the empty sandals of all humanity. They remained there side by side while the bombs fell and while, in the languid tropical way that slowed down everything but the bombs, the rain continued falling and falling.
The most terrible death tolls, like the 453 killed and 1100 known wounded already noted, were mostly the work of sunlit raids. Sometimes when there were fewer dead it seemed more tragic; it is easier to realize what 9 deaths mean than 90. A single raid on the Bund wounded 135, mostly workmen, and killed 56. Three days later, January 21, the bloody totals were 304 dead, 725 wounded.
Beside the naked day raids, the night raids were almost sporting affairs. The Japanese tried to murder the city's sleep and in a measure they succeeded. But the defense had its effect. Unless blinded by clouds or by the radiance of the moon that makes the sky a milky pearlish opacity, the searchlights quickly found the Japanese. There were one or two night fighters based on Kalang, but the heavy day raids soon chopped them up. After that it was anti-aircraft guns versus high-level bombers.
At night the Japanese bombed only in good weather and were able to orient their attacks upon the four airdromes and the naval base by the twinkling waters of Johore Strait and the harbor. Bombs falling by night claimed fewer lives, because many workers had gone by bus to their homes in outlying kampongs and kangkars (Chinese villages), which unless they were near the naval base rarely received hits. At night these little villages became isolated when the great sirens in downtown Singapore were heard moaning across the dark roads and valleys of the island. But by night transport went on, trucks groping across the island taking supplies toward the causeway up to the front, and there were no crowds downtown to be terrified. Night was the dark coverlet that seemed both to excuse the indiscrimination of the invaders' bombing and to soften the victims' apprehension of it.
The game in the sky, up among the sharp stars, was enthralling. But the Japanese never tried spectacular stunts like the Luftwaffe over Greece, where one had seen a harried pilot, cornered in a persistent searchlight, dive straight down the blinding beam, firing tracer bullets until it sputtered out. There were no man-to-man duels over Singapore. The Japanese kept at fingertip length from the searchlights. There are few things so beautiful to see as a perfect maypole of them, with streamers coming in from every circumference to meet in a crowning halo, within which moves the steadfast attacker, while starry death twinkles in the sky, and the earth lifts and shakes with the upward-leaping shells, and finally with the total thunder of the fallen bombs. Sometimes the air plays strange tricks, and one feels a pushing thrust in the face from far off before the grunting impact is heard.
Even after the bombs dropped it was not quite over, for the lights held the planes, banking slowly away, which did not break formation. Still in their tight V, still held loosely by the beams from below, they faded into the iridescent moonlight, evaporating away till the searchlights winked off. One woman found the perfect image for the appearance of a Japanese formation in a searchlight. “It was like a silver brooch hung in the sky,” she said.
When a plane was hit by night, there was no f
laming torch; rather there was a momentary gap in the V as one member fell back and was lost in the darkness. The next moved up into position, so one had to keep counting the bombers over and over again to be sure how many the antiaircraft guns had brought down.
Moonless nights were ordinarily without heavy raids, but the Japanese tried to deprive the city of sleep by sending over planes in pairs every two hours, creating a continuous alert. In this way they sought to map the antiaircraft defenses at low expense and find out where the immovable searchlights were. This effort failed, because after the siege began the salient searchlights of Singapore were dragged to the northern shores of the island to illuminate the crossing of the Japanese troops. And there the searchlights, those great moon-faced creatures that had served so well, met their end, smashed by Japanese artillery and mortars firing at a range of a mile.
Counting up aircraft lost in battles over Singapore gave little indication of the true losses, because 5 or 10 planes were lost on the ground for every one in the air.
For several days the people of Singapore were dying faster than the people of London in the Blitz. Open graves were dug each day in the cemetery, awaiting those who would be killed by explosives that were even then being loaded upon Japanese bomb racks in Kuala Lumpur and Sungei Patani. Whoever thinks that Singapore's people were anything less than noble may keep in mind that more people died in the four heaviest raids than in two years of bombing of Malta, and twice as many were wounded in a single raid as the 583 “seriously injured” in Malta's first two years.
Weller's War Page 23