by Ian W. Toll
“Well, I suppose you’ll shove the little men off,” the civilian colonial governor said to General Arthur E. Percival, upon learning that the Japanese had attacked Kota Bahru in northeast Malaya on the first day of the war. No blackout regulations were decreed in Singapore, and the city lights provided good targets for the Japanese bombers that struck later that night. The sudden reduction of British airpower forced the RAF to concede the skies above northern Malaya, allowing the Japanese amphibious landings to proceed unmolested. Having secured their beachheads, the Japanese forces moved with remarkable speed. Infantrymen traveled on bicycles. They quickly routed the 11th Indian Division, which met them in the west, and forced the 10th Indian Division on the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula into a headlong southward retreat. The Japanese followed close on their heels. When the invaders met resistance, they combined flanking movements with ferocious frontal banzai charges that drove the defenders from their positions and sent them running for their lives. The Japanese navy worked effectively with the army in covering landings and in moving troops down the peninsula with well-coordinated coastal sea lifts. The retreating British blew hundreds of bridges behind them, but the Japanese army engineers quickly rebuilt them using native timbers hewn from the surrounding forest.
It was only now, in the crucible of battle, that the British recognized how feeble the local RAF presence really was. Their best aircraft and pilots had been pulled back to Europe to deal with the Luftwaffe’s air assault on England. It was a policy born of the deep institutionalized contempt for the Japanese air forces, a syndrome shared with the Americans. The loss of so many aircraft to combat, mechanical failures, and accidents in the first two weeks of the war was a disaster compounded by the capture of several British airfields by the invasion forces. In some cases, the fields were yielded to the Japanese without a fight. The British Far East commander in chief, General Robert Brooke-Popham, lamented that there were “instances where aerodromes appear to have been abandoned in a state approaching panic. Stores have been left behind, material that is urgently required has been abandoned and a general state of chaos has been evident. . . . In the majority of cases the bombing of aerodromes has been on a smaller scale than that suffered calmly by women and children in London and other towns in England, and aerodromes have usually been vacated whilst still well out of range of enemy land forces.”
The RAF commanders pulled their remaining aircraft back to Singapore, where they would be held in reserve for the defense of the city. But the nightly air raids continued with little or no opposition. On January 13, 1942, a local headline proudly trumpeted: “Singapore Beats Off 125 Raiders.” CBS war correspondent Cecil Brown wryly noted in his diary, “What actually happened is that the Japs dropped their bombs and went home.” More critically, the near-total absence of friendly planes in the skies above northern Malaya could not be disguised from the British Commonwealth troops fighting on the ground, who were continuously dive-bombed and strafed by Japanese planes. They had counted on total air superiority, but now the enemy aircraft were free to operate with impunity over their heads.
The British commanders had concentrated their defenses on the main roads. They had largely neglected the peninsula’s jungles and mangrove swamps, assuming them to be impenetrable. But the Japanese soldier proved a cunning and dexterous jungle fighter. Unlike his British counterpart, who wore boots and carried 40-pound packs, the Japanese infantryman wore light cotton clothing and soft-soled shoes, and carried only a rifle, an ammunition belt, and a bag of rice. In some cases he also carried a light infantry mortar on his shoulders. Small units of five to ten men advanced swiftly and quietly, in single file, along primitive jungle trails. They passed through swamps by hopping lightly from root to root. They crept around the British positions and opened fire with rifles and mortar fire from the flanks and the rear. They blended into the jungle with camouflage facepaint and stems of grass passed through a mesh covering on their helmets. They hid in the underbrush or in the branches of trees, and waited there for days, if necessary, until enemy soldiers wandered into their killing range. They disguised themselves as native workers and infiltrated the British camps, then assassinated their enemies one by one with knives or bayonets. They lay in leech-infested swamps with branches covering their heads, and remained there, motionless, for hours. If and when an enemy soldier advanced into range, they rose suddenly and opened fire. The British deplored those “shrewd oriental tricks” but were slow to amend their tactics to deal with them.
General Brooke-Popham, after observing Japanese troops on the Hong Kong–China border a year before the war, had described them as “various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniforms, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers. . . . If these represent the average of the Japanese army, the problems of their food and accommodation would be simple, but I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force.” Now, in the jungles of Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, and the East Indies, a different myth was gaining currency. The Japanese infantryman was a “super-warrior,” to be feared and respected as a creature uniquely adapted to jungle warfare. When asked to explain why the British forces were faring so badly in northern Malaya, Brooke-Popham now repeated the same observation he had made a year earlier, but with a very different emphasis. “The Japanese have a capacity to live on the country,” he said. “They require very, very little and what they do find to eat is what they are used to. The British can’t do that.”
The subhumans of 1941 had mutated into the superhumans of 1942. Many Allied soldiers apparently believed that the Japanese possessed preternatural senses and abilities. Like bats, they could see in the darkness. Like panthers, they could move soundlessly through the underbrush. Like ants, they could communicate with their own kind by some unspoken brainwave. Unlike men, they had no fear of death. “The Japanese trooper was supposed to be fearless, scornful of U.S. soldiers, invisible, a superb sniper, and willing to fight to the death rather than give up a position,” wrote Floyd W. Radike, a junior U.S. Army officer who fought in the South Pacific. “Of course, some of this was sheer nonsense, but unfortunately it took U.S. generals and colonels a long time to figure out how to counter such a creature.” The new myth, like those it displaced, was founded on absurd racial canards. But it struck fear into the men who had to face those reputed superwarriors on the ground, and for that reason it threatened to turn self-fulfilling.
Again and again, the pattern was repeated. The British lines quickly crumbled in the face of flank attacks or frontal attacks. The officers tried and failed to rally their fleeing men, then gave up and followed on their heels. The island-city of Penang, off the west coast of Malaya, was evacuated in great haste on December 17. British troops were ordered to demolish military assets and stores, but they had little time to complete the work, and much useful weaponry, supplies, and shipping was left to the enemy. The army evacuated only white civilians from Penang, a practice bitterly resented by the native Malays and Chinese, many of whom had offered to fight alongside the British troops. The British commanders had decreed a “scorched earth” policy, but more often than not the retreating forces could not bring themselves to carry it out, perhaps because they clung to the hope that they would soon recapture the surrendered territory. As a result, the Japanese gained control of Malaya’s vital rubber plantations and tin mines with most of the buildings, equipment, and supporting infrastructure intact.
In Singapore, Cecil Brown confided in his diary, “You can almost see morale collapsing like a punctured tire.” No one knew the truth, and few trusted the reports of the local civilian or military officials. “People are believing the worst. For all they know the Japs are right outside Singapore.” The official communiqués were full of hollow bravado and clumsy euphemisms. After British forces had been driven into retreat near the Krian River, it was reported that they had “successfully disengaged the enemy.” Censors attempted to suppress bad news even when it was widely known. Air raids over the city were a
nightly trial, and the inhabitants could see the Japanese bombers picked out in the searchlights, flying in perfect formation, seemingly indifferent to the antiaircrafts bursts. Often they attacked in broad daylight, and no RAF fighters rose to engage them. Propaganda leaflets were dropped, sometimes written in Malay or Mandarin Chinese—for example: “Burn all white devils in the sacred white flame of victory.”
The native workers did not want to work, and the soldiers did not want to fight. Brown recorded a conversation with a British major who confessed that he could not “work up any venom” against the Japanese because they were (in contrast to the Germans) “unimportant blighters.” The journalist was flabbergasted by this case of cognitive dissonance: “The British are getting the pants beat off them and the major doesn’t think the Japs are worth bothering about.” The local civilian grandees vacillated between dread and denial. Lady Brooke-Popham later said, “It was just parties, bridge and dancing to the very last. . . . They simply refused to believe that war could come to Singapore. . . . I asked a certain lady to help me [with civil defense measures] two hours a day. She said it would interfere with her tennis.”
On January 17, it was announced that the Japanese were in the state of Johore, only 110 miles north of the city. British troops retreating from the north brought the incubus of their defeatism with them. It spread. The navy had let them down, the air force had let them down, and the leaders had proved incompetent. In the city, the inhabitants began their unseemly scramble to escape. Ship fares were hiked. Favors were called in to gain seats on outgoing commercial flights. Staff officers arranged to be reassigned to Field Marshal Wavell’s new ABDA headquarters on Java. Native Malays, Chinese, Indians, and other Asian ethnic groups knew that they would be left behind, and demonstrated their resentment by refusing to work. In districts bombed out in the Japanese air raids, the dead were left in the streets; work parties could not be raised to cart them away for burial. By late January, the stench of the dead had settled like a pall over the city.
The island-fortress prepared to be laid under siege. On January 31, all remaining British troops retreated across the strait of Johore and dynamited the causeway behind them. But in making Singapore impregnable against attack by sea, the British had neglected to plan adequately for invasion across the strait. Landward defenses were in a shambles. No staff plan even existed to repel the attack that now loomed. The heavy artillery emplacements guarding Singapore harbor could not be moved or even turned to fire in the direction of the forthcoming onslaught. Singapore was virtually naked, with no naval power, no air cover, and diminishing hopes of reinforcement. Food stocks would not feed the population for long. More than 60,000 troops were now in the city, but the best among them were acutely demoralized and the worst were refusing to fight.
Churchill was outraged. He had been led to believe that Singapore Island was a fortress, and now he began to distrust the competence of his military commanders. In meetings with his war cabinet, the prime minister grew uncharacteristically snappish. According to General Brooke, Churchill often burst out with remarks like: “Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles, have none of them any ideas, must we continually lose battles in this way?” To Admiral Pound he complained that enemy small craft were operating freely off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, a condition that “must be reckoned as one of the most astonishing British lapses recorded in naval history.” After receiving a pessimistic report from Wavell concerning Singapore’s landward defenses, he flew into a towering rage. “I must confess to being staggered by Wavell’s telegram,” he wrote the British military chiefs on January 19. “It never occurred to me for a moment . . . that the gorge of the fortress of Singapore, with its splendid moat half a mile to a mile wide, was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward. What is the use of having an island for a fortress if it is not to be made into a citadel? . . . How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me at any time when these matters have been under discussion? . . . I warn you that this will be one of the greatest scandals that could possibly be exposed.” He ordered that the island-city be “converted into a citadel and defended to the death. No surrender can be contemplated.”
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese forces, prepared his main assault. Troops, landing craft, and heavy artillery were moved into position on the northern side of the strait. On the night of February 7, a diversionary attack was launched to the left of the site of the recently destroyed main causeway, but the main attack fell on the western side of the island the following night, when units of the Japanese 5th and 18th divisions crossed the strait in small boats. They stormed ashore under heavy fire by the Australian 24th Machine Gun Battalion. The Australians fought hard but could not deny the invaders their foothold, and by morning the defenders were falling back. Johore Strait was very shallow; at low tide there were points at which the Japanese soldiers could simply wade across it, holding their rifles above their heads. Small parties of Japanese infantrymen came ashore at several places on the western side of the island and pushed into the city against light and disintegrating opposition. The British Commonwealth troops they encountered broke ranks and ran with distressing regularity. Meanwhile, the crackerjack Japanese army engineers rebuilt the causeway across Johore Strait, and within a matter of hours columns of tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery were rolling across it.
Wavell flew into Singapore on the 9th and toured the defensive lines with General Percival, the local commander. He reminded his commanders on the spot that the British troops in the city heavily outnumbered the enemy. “We must defeat them,” he wrote on February 10. “Our whole fighting reputation is at stake and the honour of the British Empire. The Americans have held out on the Bataan Peninsula against far greater odds, the Russians are turning back the picked strength of the Germans, the Chinese with almost complete lack of modern equipment have held the Japanese for four years. It will be disgraceful if we yield our boasted fortress of Singapore to inferior enemy forces.” He ordered total ruthlessness, even if it meant the mass slaughter of both the military forces and the civil population. He flew back to Java on February 11 and reported to Churchill that night: “Battle for Singapore is not going well. . . . Morale of some troops is not good, and none is as high as I should like to see.” He referred to an “inferiority complex” among the defenders, “which bold and skilful Japanese tactics and their command of the air have caused.”
Defeatism was endemic. Australian diggers were overheard to say, “Chum, to hell with Malaya and Singapore. Navy let us down, air force let us down. If the bungs [natives] won’t fight for their bloody country, why pick on me?” It was an attitude widely shared by the front-line fightingmen. Amidst such rank ineptitude, in a land so far from home, when the cause was so clearly doomed, why throw their lives away?
As the Japanese swept toward the urban center of Singapore, they gained control of the freshwater reservoirs that provided its drinking supply. That extinguished any remaining hope of a long siege—in a day or two the great city would die of thirst, if nothing else. The ominous thump of Japanese artillery and the whistling of shells could be heard throughout the city. Columns of oily black smoke rose from the blackened shells of bombed-out fuel storage tanks. Panicked throngs pressed down toward the wharves and bid or begged to be taken aboard one of the last departing ships. “There was a lot of chaos and people killed on the docks during these bombardments,” recalled an American sailor on a ship in the harbor. “Everywhere you looked there was death. Even in the water there were dead sharks and people floating all around.”
Yamashita was shocked and even shaken to learn that British troop strength in the city was twice what he had been led to believe by his intelligence sources. But he resolved to bluff his way through to a negotiated surrender. On the 14th, an ultimatum from Yamashita, addressed to Percival, was dropped from an airplane behind the British lines. “In the spirit of chivalry we have the honour of advising your surrender.
. . . From now on resistance is futile and merely increases the danger to the million civilian inhabitants without good reason, exposing them to infliction of pain by fire and sword.” On the same day, Percival was forbidden to consider such an offer by Wavell, who urged that “You must continue to inflict maximum damage on enemy for as long as possible by house-to-house fighting if necessary. Your action in tying down enemy and inflicting casualties may have vital influence in other theaters.” At the same time, however, Wavell cabled Churchill to report that Singapore was done for, and after consulting with the British military chiefs that night, the prime minister agreed to allow a surrender.
The next morning, Sunday, February 15, Percival traveled under a flag of truce with a Japanese colonel to meet Yamashita. The meeting was lavishly documented by a crowd of Japanese reporters, photographers, and camera crews. Yamashita demanded an unconditional surrender and refused to order a cease-fire until such a surrender document had been signed. The Japanese general pledged to treat the civilian population properly and to observe the rights of prisoners of war. (Neither pledge would be honored.) Percival signed the instrument of surrender, with hostilities to cease at 8:30 p.m. that night.
The “Gibraltar of the East” had fallen. The army charged with its defense had surrendered to an enemy force less than half its size, after a battle lasting less than a week. Even at the time, it was recognized as the most ignominious episode in the annals of British military history. An editorial in the Daily Mirror summed up the feelings of the British people: “The Japanese have wrenched out this cornerstone of the greatest Empire in history, and have propped it up as a jeering monument to brave men who are dying for the folly of others who have much on their conscience.”
HAVING BET THE POT ON SINGAPORE, and having seen the great pile of chips swept from the table, Field Marshal Wavell did not pretend that the East Indies could be saved. Indeed, he did not even want them reinforced, lest the reinforcements be delivered straight into the hands of the enemy. Java, the only major island in the group still in possession of the Allies, was 500 miles long and threatened with invasion on both its eastern and western flanks. The day after Percival’s surrender, Wavell told Churchill: “Landings on Java in near future can only be prevented by local naval and air superiority. Facts given show that it is most unlikely that this superiority can be obtained.” On February 21, 1942, he amplified the point: