At the same time, even in its hour of agony, Singapore had its traitors and fifth-columnists, Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian. Even when the island was surrounded, the spying continued. The Straits Settlements police, excellent men with steadfast officers, were kept busy following the tricks of the agents of Japan.
One clever device was the bamboo lamp to signal bombers during a blackout. A thick hollow length of bamboo rested leaning against a house, inconspicuous in the darkness, its top perhaps twenty feet above ground. No glow or reflection was visible; no smoke could be smelled. Yet inside, well below the top, there was a lamp burning. Two houses away was another pole propped carelessly against a house, and along the kampong street was another. They made a dotted line of light, invisible from the ground, but bright as a flashlight to aircraft over the blacked-out island.
Most irritating and dangerous was the concealed radio transmitting station, traced as far as a marshy wild area, but not ascertainable beyond that because the radio direction-finder was not acute enough.
Exactly a week after the blowing of the causeway, the Japanese started to use their sampans and barges on the eastern side of Singapore, first eliminating Pulau Ubin, where the granite for the causeway had been mined. By taking this small island the Japanese could not only prevent the British sending river gunboats through the strait; they also ensured themselves granite for filling in the open 75 yards of the causeway.
The tall Cathay skyscraper, sticking above Singapore's hills and houses like the Empire State Building above Manhattan, furnished a handy point of range for the Japanese gunners and spotter aircraft and a good place for British counter-observation. The Cathay was the jewel in the treasure chest of Singapore, and the Japanese, while shelling indiscriminately, left the skyscraper almost unmarked.
In the heavy raids while the Japs were massing their invasion barges, the black-pyjamaed Chinese women still gathered on the marble ramp of the Cathay's cinema. One day a baby was born on the ramp; The Philadelphia Story was playing inside. After three or four days, while the Japanese advanced across the island, the Chinese families began to desert their towering air-raid shelter. On the roof the two lookouts with their direct telephone to headquarters began to hear singing sounds. Whee, whee said the tiny voices in the air, and the observers knew for the first time that they were under rifle fire. The lookouts could see everything, every dogfight over the city, every flight of low-hurrying bombers, and occasionally even the betraying flash of a Japanese gun before the shells burst. They watched the new artillery placed on Pulau Ubin methodically demolish Seletar airdrome. Then the Japanese guns swung around and began dropping shells on Government House.
From then on no place on the island was safe. The finger of the guns had reached the heart of Singapore. Shells began to fall in Change Alley, through whose hardware and gimcrack bazaars one had been able, as through a tunnel, to see from Raffles Place to the lively waters of the bay.
Time was when the observing officers on the Cathay had had difficulty in keeping away intruders who wanted to see the struggle; as soon as bullets began twanging overhead, visitors appeared no more. For a while a policeman who possessed a seized collection of the indecent photographs that seem a stable part of Japanese colonial families' household effects had kept the observers' minds upon terrestrial matters. Then he too disappeared. At length, feeling lonely, the observers dropped a phone line down fourteen storys to the small private villa of R. E. Marriott, who lived with his American wife in a small villa by the Cathay's parking. It was a strain being fired at continuously day after day, and the observers liked to know occasionally what was going on in the nether world of the streets.
Among the paradoxes of Singapore, perhaps the most extraordinary was the voice of the radio. Between news bulletins from the front and abroad, most of them discouraging in character, seething swing numbers came jumping, jittering, jiving out over the kampongs and villas, the shell-racked hotels and flats. Nothing much stranger could be imagined, while shells crisscrossed overhead, than the shrill clarinet rollicking merrily away, the deep bass thumping out its offbeat rhythms, and the muted trumpet inviting all the world to dance. Most of these records had been made far away, the work of big American dance bands playing in security in some Manhattan studio. But America was in the war too. Why so gay?
As one heard this whipping hot music, one's feet could hardly keep quiet; a fast and jittery pendulum swung inside the body. Then the siren on the police station at the crossroads would begin to wind up its warning. Across the trampled green padang of the house at the foot of Caldecott Hill, with the broadcast radio towers poking their invitation to the Japanese bombers up in the sky, there would come two or three Indian gunners, asking for shelter from the morning's raid. “And so it's goodbye to Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights until tomorrow morning. …”
Japanese artillery fire kept growing thicker and heavier, breaking up the roads with craters. Bombing was intermittent, but shelling was persistent and endless. Almost the entire sky was black. The big brick-lined oil tanks by the causeway's head went up in towering pillars of smoke. Every boom signalled the destruction of new millions of gallons of hard-won fuel.
The Japanese fighters never ceased patrolling the roads, machine-gunning everything and searching beneath trees and beside deserted villas for motor trucks, particularly of the Indian divisions. The Japanese specifically avoided bombing the Alexandra Hospital. An improvised hospital, unmarked, was hit by incendiary bombs and burned in a high wind before the wounded could be removed.
The Japanese never ceased trying to obtain a surrender. Repeatedly they called across the lines, sometimes in Hindustani, sometimes in English: “Why not give up this useless fight?” Leaflets signed by Yamashita told the cramped forces to give up because “the Japanese forces desire to refrain from seeing the city reduced to ashes.”
Shells were falling all over Monday and Tuesday, the more dangerous because the fire was unpredictable. There were shell holes everywhere, and no longer anyone who cared about filling them. The Japanese were now playing at newsboy. EXTRA in large letters topped the leaflets, saying that President Roosevelt was negotiating a separate peace with the Japanese and had asked for a declaration making Singapore a “neutral zone.” This last attempt, with the smoke so thick it shut out the sun and the shells falling ceaselessly through it, was beyond ridicule.
The Japanese had penetrated almost into the suburbs of Singapore. By 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon they actually were in possession of the chief police station on Bukit Timah Road, less than six minutes from the Raffles and the waterfront. Then, with more Australians blocking them, the Japanese became cautious.
Thousands of vehicles, the sediment of the entire Malayan campaign, stood crammed on the overhanging lip of the island, among the granite colonnades of the deserted banks and shipping companies. Shells came over in some places every fifty seconds; the 5.9s hit Government House and the waterworks. The Argylls, fighting beside the marines, were overrun. Colonel Stewart told Chicagonews: “As we lay in the ditches the noise of Japanese tanks passing was incessant through the night.”
Until Singapore fell, its entire southeastern coast, almost 15 miles, was still in British hands. On Wednesday the RAF blew up its own headquarters at Sime Road. The Japanese had never bombed the RAF headquarters, though they claimed to know where it was, because—so the Penang radio said—“We consider the RAF our best friends.” Perhaps they did not know exactly where its headquarters were.
All males, including civilians, regardless of age were refused permission to leave Singapore. It was too late to leave, anyway. The harbor front was under almost constant bombing and bombardment. On Wednesday the Sultan of Johore and Yates McDaniel lunched together, and far from being pleased that the British were losing, as his enemies represented him, he was according to McDaniel “a broken man.” In his demeanor of defeat he stood far above the playboy reputation with which he had been saddled by Singapore's gossips. He started back a
lone, to find a place where he could give himself up and ask the Japs to return him to Johore Bahru. He left it to his wife, a Rumanian Jewess, to decide whether she would join him or escape and go abroad. All that afternoon she was unable to make up her mind, but by evening she started back, following her husband. About twenty British and Australian nurses stayed too, to care for the 4000 wounded forced back into the island.
On Thursday the guns finally found the range of Singapore's general arsenal. It blew up with a mighty roar. One or two barge-loads of bombs from the RAF base, which were to have been destroyed by engineers, fell intact into Japanese hands. The engineers had always more jobs of demolition than they could possibly handle.
Although they must have been bewildered, Percival and Thomas rolled up their sleeves and helped to fight the fires catching everywhere. A new spirit came to Singapore. The Free Press, still carrying on amid the falling shells (never failing to tell of the narrow escapes of its Chinese reporter), informed all who were still able to obtain the paper that they might now open the gates of any villa and take shelter underneath the trees of any padang. There was no more private property. Under a sky full of death Socialism had flown in and roosted, of all places, in Singapore.
With dawn Thursday morning headquarters announced that a demand for surrender had been dropped by Japanese airplanes, and no reply had been made. Admiral Spooner sent his aide to the chart office to collect the last maps for the long and dangerous run to Colombo. Steel and McDaniel drove a car to the waterfront and pushed it off, photographing it toppling into the harbor. They made their way down the coast and turned up in Batavia. Most of the military censors appeared in Java, but the civil censors, Duckworth and Fearon, went to Colombo. Duckworth's wife, a refugee in Australia, later joined him in Durban.
The eminences on Pulau Ubin in the eastern strait had been figured out by Yamashita as the best places for artillery, so fire would fall on the city. In this way the Japanese troops could cross from north to south without passing under their own artillery barrage from the east. A general can use lateral artillery fire on a retreating enemy like a housemaid sweeping a room with sidewise swipes of a broom.
It had become apparent that resistance was hopeless. A British officer carrying a white flag approached the Japanese lines.
The interview between Yamashita and Percival on February 15, 1942, in the Ford Motor assembly plant, was hard and peremptory on Yamashita's part, without any trace of that respectful address which the Japanese customarily use on formal occasions. Although such Allied humiliations, when offered to the Japanese people, are frequently exaggerated to set an example of ruthlessness—it is hard to say, for example, whether the captive crew of the U.S.S. Houston was beaten with whips, as the Japanese people were told—the Japanese version of the conversation is worth giving, if only to indicate what they believe such a submission should sound like:
Yamashita: I am not asking whether you wish to surrender or not, and, if you wish to do so, I insist it be unconditionally. What is your answer, yes or no?
Percival: Will you give me until tomorrow?
Yamashita: Tomorrow? I cannot wait. It is understood, then, that Japanese forces will have to attack tonight.
Percival: How about waiting until 11:30 P.M. Tokyo time?
Yamashita: If that is to be the case, Japanese forces will have to resume the attack until then. Will you say yes or no?
Percival was silent.
Yamashita: I want to hear a decisive answer, and I insist upon unconditional surrender. What do you say?
Percival: Yes.
Yamashita said he would “consider a triumphal entry into London” but had “no plans to hold one for the fall of Singapore.” He had little time to dawdle; the glorious conqueror was needed on Bataan to handle the stubborn Americans.
Lieutenant General Bennett escaped two hours after the surrender. His aide, Captain Gordon Walker, swam from the waterfront to a sampan and with several other officers started down the strait. They got aboard a junk crowded with British officers, slipped past the silent guns of Blakang Mati, and so south for five days. Walker has said: “All of us were in a bad state of nerves and everyone wanted to run the boat. After twenty-four hours we began to eat, and took a cup of water a day, a handful of rice and some carefully divided cubes of pineapple and bully beef.” From the junk the Bennett party transferred to a launch and went through Sumatra to Java.
The Japanese spent a week, beginning February 15, sweeping up mines. Then their vessels came down the South China Sea and entered the harbor. They claimed to have taken 26 transports and warships, including a “boat evacuating British women and children.” Singapore to the end was never taken by sea.
Two map rooms were the centers of Singapore's operations. One was in the green-camouflaged building in the hollow cut by the Japanese golf course. Here Chicagonews had seen General Percival produce his identity card before entering. (Had the Japs substituted another Percival in his place, they would have been foiled.)
Five hundred miles to the south, by the great Java volcano of Bandoeng, were the master charts of the vast South Pacific, Wavell's overwhelming responsibility. Here, among others, was a map of Singapore Island. When the maps were not in use a white curtain was drawn, to be raised each morning when staff conferences began.
Then came the day when the Japanese crossed the island, their tank column finally bisecting Singapore.
The next morning, when the maps of Sumatra, the Philippines, Borneo, Java, Celebes, New Guinea, and Australia stood revealed in vast array, their isinglass covered with crayoned lines and scribbled numbers of units—American, British, Dutch—over one chart the white shroud had been drawn down, covering the line in orange pencil from the causeway of Johore to Pasir Panyang. And the blank face of the map, white and empty, looked out upon the last staff conference, asking an unspoken question.
When would the deliverers of Singapore come?
1*Voluptuous and masked piratical villainess, armed with both cutlass and automatic rifle, who opposes steely Steve Conrad in several 1940 issues of Adventure Comics.
2*Lieutenant General Arthur E. Percival, operational commander of the British army.
3*Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita.
IX
The Collapse of Java
George Weller Lands in Java from Singapore
Batavia, Java—February 4, 1942
Seventy-seven American refugees have arrived here from Singapore aboard a freighter, the bridge of which was scarred with shrapnel from Japanese bombers.
The radio officer was slightly wounded in the attack. Men, women and several children remained below deck when Japanese bombers straddled the ship.
The Daily News correspondent stepped over the body of a badly wounded coolie when he boarded the ship and slept in his clothes out of doors on the ship's bulkhead during the four nights required for the journey.
—Chicago Daily News
Having escaped Singapore barely a step ahead of the Japanese, Weller's twenty dispatches from nearly a month on the huge island of Java show he was under no illusions that the heart of the Dutch Indies empire could hold. By early March the Japanese would take prisoner thirty-two thousand Allied troops.
Years later, Weller remembered: “Laurens van der Post, caught with me on Java when it fell, asked me to join his private underground to hold out against the Japanese till a British submarine should come. … Having been stood up by a British consul on the shores of burning Salonika, I declined. … He spent three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp.”
After the loss of Java and the rest of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese, Australia and New Guinea could only be next.
This section contains the first of the three short stories included in this book: “Farewell in Java.” A dispatch covering the same material was published by the newspaper, but the short story contains better detail.
The heroic actions of Navy doctor C. M. Wassell (1884-1958) were first described in We
ller's dispatch about his own escape by island steamer from Java and in the later dispatch solely devoted to Wassell. After the doctor was awarded the Navy Cross by President Roosevelt in the spring of 1942, the story caught the attention of the public and of the movies. Cecil B. DeMille asked the government if it might be amenable to him making a film about the doctor; it immediately transferred Wassell to U.S. Navy Public Relations and moved him to Hollywood to serve as technical adviser. DeMille hired novelist James Hilton to produce a “non-fiction” book about the Janssens' voyage which was only partly accurate. Still, The Story of Dr. Wassell (1943) was a modest bestseller and set up the Gary Cooper film of the following year, which was the whole idea.
Amid all this Weller, on home leave for the first part of 1944 to get over severe bouts of malaria, did a few joint interviews with Wassell, who after the furor died down returned to active service and finished as a rear admiral. The doctor's share of the book and film money all went to charity.
This is the first of several chapters—along with the Australia, New Guinea, and Islands sections—which roam far forward chronologically. Though Java was in Japanese hands until the close of the war, Weller continued to write about it as in formation came his way. I have included some of these later dispatches.
BOMB VICTIMS ‘DIED BUT THEY DIDN'T CRY OUT’
Batavia, Java-February 5, 1942
An American oilman who had just arrived from Singapore aboard a freighter passed his hand across his eyes. He doesn't wish to remember what he saw. He was the only American among sixty-five refugees crammed aboard the vessel.
When three Japanese bombers discovered the freighter somewhere along the sea route to Java, he found himself saving victims of the Jap air attack. Three times in two hours, big two-motored bombers attacked the ship from an altitude of 1000 feet. Sixteen bombs were dropped but the only one that struck home penetrated the engine room. Let's have the Yank tell his own story:
Weller's War Page 26