Percival surrendered Singapore to Yamashita on 15 February. The photograph of a British officer named Major Wylde, in baggy shorts and helmet askew beside his general as they carried the Union flag to the Japanese lines, became one of the most memorable images of the war. It seemed to symbolise the bungling, blimpish ineffectuality of the men who had been entrusted with the defence of Britain’s eastern Empire. Along with Singapore, Percival signed away a significant portion of the honour of the British and Indian armies, as Churchill and his people well understood. The Japanese had gained their victory in barely seventy days, at a cost of only 3,506 dead, half of those in the battle for Singapore. Imperial forces lost around 7,500 killed, while the victors counted 138,000 prisoners, half of them Indians. One such officer, Captain Prem K. Saghal, saw his unit’s British second-in-command beheaded before his eyes and said later: ‘The fall of Singapore finally convinced me of the degeneration of the British people.’ Saghal concluded that by their conduct the imperial rulers had forfeited their claim upon the loyalty of Indians. Likewise another officer, Shahnawaz Khan, who felt he and his men ‘had been handed over like cattle by the British to the Japs’. The Japanese began immediately to recruit among PoWs for their ‘Indian National Army’ to fight against the British, and achieved some success. The prestige of the Raj hinged upon the myth of its invincibility, which was now shattered.
Another prisoner, Lt. Stephen Abbott, recorded the scene as he and his companions began the long trek through Singapore to improvised prison camps: ‘The area presented a picture of appalling destruction. Overturned lorries, bicycles, prams, furniture lay in huge bomb craters, or were scattered over roads and pavements. Buildings with gaping holes displayed their pathetic interiors to the world. Naked bodies and grotesque human limbs rested where they had been flung. A repulsive stench rose in the humid atmosphere. The local population – Chinese, Malay and Indian – stood by the wreckage of their former homes in stunned misery, tiny children clinging in fear to their mothers’ clothing. From every building which remained standing in any shape or form, the red ball of the Japanese flag was hung … I stared at the Japanese soldiers in the streets as we passed. Were these the men we had been fighting, and who were now to be our masters? They were like unkempt children in their ragged uniforms, but children triumphant, and more than ready to mock their victims.’
For Singaporeans, after more than a century of colonial rule the revelation of its frailty changed everything. Lim Kean Siew, eighteen-year-old son of a Chinese notable, wrote: ‘The heavens had indeed opened for us. From a languid, lazy and lackadaisical world, we were catapulted into a world of somersaults and frenzy from which we would never recover.’ Likewise Lee Kuan Yew, who as an eighteen-year-old student at Raffles College watched the British enter captivity: ‘I saw them tramping along the road in front of my house for three solid days, an endless stream of bewildered men who did not know what had happened, why it had happened or what they were doing here in Singapore in any case.’
Savouring Japanese victory, Maj. Gen Imai, chief of staff of the Imperial Guards Division, said to captive Indian Army Maj. Gen. Billy Key: ‘We Japanese have captured Malaya and Singapore. Soon we will have Sumatra, Java and the Philippines. We do not want Australia. I think it is time for your British Empire to compromise. What else can you do?’ Key replied defiantly, ‘We can drive you back. We will eventually occupy your country. This is what we can do.’ The Japanese seemed unconvinced, because the battlefield performance of Britain’s forces in Malaya had been so pitiful. Yamashita and his officers celebrated victory with dried cuttlefish, chestnuts and wine, gifts of the Emperor, set out upon a white tablecloth.
Col. Masanobu Tsuji, one of the Japanese army’s foremost and most brutal militarists, gazed with contempt upon British and Australian prisoners, who had so easily allowed themselves to be defeated: ‘Groups of them were squatting on the road smoking, talking and shouting in rather loud voices. Strangely enough, however, there was no sign whatever of hostility in their faces. Rather was there an expression of resignation such as is shown by the losers in fierce sporting contests … The British soldiers looked like men who had finished their work by contract at a suitable salary, and were now taking a rest free from the anxiety of the battlefield.’
MP Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that Singapore’s surrender ‘has been a terrific blow to all of us. It is not only the immediate dangers … It is dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted.’ Churchill agreed. He was disgusted by the poor British showing in Malaya not merely because defeat was bitter, but because the Japanese won so much at such small cost. In a 20 December 1941 strategy paper for the Anglo-American leaderships, he had asserted: ‘It is of the utmost importance that the enemy should not acquire large gains cheaply; that he should be compelled to nourish his conquests and be kept extended – and kept burning his resources.’ British forces’ conspicuous failure to fulfil this objective was gall and wormwood to the prime minister. ‘We had cause on many previous occasions to be uneasy about the fighting qualities of our men,’ wrote Gen. Sir John Kennedy, director of military operations at the War Office. ‘They had not fought as toughly as the Germans or Russians, and now they were being outclassed by the Japanese … We were undoubtedly softer, as a nation, than any of our enemies, except the Italians … Modern civilization on the democratic model does not produce a hardy race, and our civilization … was a little further removed from the stage of barbarity than were the civilizations of Germany, Russia and Japan.’
Masanobu Tsuji, who later wrote several books celebrating the Japanese army’s achievements, was a prime mover in its Malayan atrocities. It was sometimes asserted that Yamashita’s post-war execution for war crimes was unjustified, but the general was never even indicted for the systematic massacres of Chinese which took place at Singapore under his command. Yamashita once delivered a speech in which he asserted that, while his own people were descended from gods, Europeans were descended from monkeys. British racism in South-East Asia was now eclipsed by that of the Japanese. Tokyo’s new regime was characterised by a brutality such as the evicted imperialists, whatever their shortcomings, had never displayed.
The Japanese began their treatment of Allied prisoners as they intended to continue. After the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, the invaders launched an orgy of rape and massacre which embraced nuns and nurses, and hospital patients bayoneted in their beds. Similar scenes took place on Java and Sumatra, largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, which were easily overrun after the fall of Singapore. The Japanese army in its new conquests sustained the tradition of savagery it had established in China, a perversion of virility and warrior spirit which was the more shocking for being institutionalised. Soldiers of all nations, in all wars, are sometimes guilty of atrocities. An important distinction can be made, however, between armies in which acts of barbarism represent a break with regulations and the norm, and those in which they are indulged or even incited by commanders. The Japanese were prominent among the latter.
On Java, Lt. Col. Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, an Australian surgeon, dismissed a parade of his men after they had been inspected and addressed by a certain Lt. Sumiya on 19 April:
I moved to the Nipponese officer, saluting. To my astonishment, he swung a ‘haymaker’ which hit me heavily on the jaw. I narrowly avoided being felled by moving my head back a little … Lt. Sumiya ripped out his sword and lunged at my throat with a deadly tigerish thrust. I avoided the point with a boxer’s reflexes, but the haft hit my larynx with a sickening thud and I could not temporarily breathe or speak.
The troops muttered angrily and began moving forward. The guards levelled their rifles and thrust their bayonets menacingly towards them. The scene was tense with the impending massacre. I put my left hand towards my troops, motioning ‘Don’t move!’, and then turned to the officer, gave a coldly formal bow … I stood to attention too coldly furious to flinch, whilst he swung the sword about my head, fanning my
ears and bellowing loudly.
In the years that followed, Dunlop and his comrades suffered many worse beatings, and thousands died of disease and starvation. The Australian surgeon became an acknowledged hero of the terrible experience of Japanese captivity, a secular saint. The battle for Malaya might have taken a different course had its defenders foreseen the price they would pay for their ready submission to defeat.
Within days of the fall of Singapore, the Japanese struck out for the East Indies and its precious oil, their foremost strategic objective. From the Palau islands, invasion convoys sailed for Sarawak, Borneo and Java, supported by overwhelmingly powerful naval forces. The Allied defenders were weak, demoralised and ill-coordinated. In a series of dogfights over Java on 19 February, Japanese aircraft destroyed fifteen fighters. On the 27th an Allied squadron commanded by the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, composed of two heavy and three light cruisers escorted by nine destroyers, attempted to attack the amphibious convoy approaching Java, covered by two Japanese heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. The rival fleets sighted each other at 1600, and opened fire. The first exchanges did little damage, for both sides’ shooting was poor: of ninety-two Japanese torpedoes fired, only one achieved a hit, sinking a Dutch destroyer. The cruiser Exeter suffered serious damage from a shell which struck in its boiler room, and limped towards the safety of Surabaya. At 1800, the American destroyer contingent quit the squadron on its own initiative, having expended all its torpedoes.
The next encounter, after darkness fell, proved disastrous for the Allies: the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java were sunk by torpedoes, and Admiral Doorman perished with many of his sailors. Perth and Houston escaped, only to meet the main Japanese invasion fleet next night in the Sunda Strait, where both were sunk. On 1 March, Exeter and two escorting destroyers were caught and sunk attempting to make a break for Ceylon, while one Dutch and two more American destroyers were lost on passage to Australia. Ten ships and more than 2,000 men had thus vanished to the bottom in less than a week, almost eliminating the Allied naval presence in the East Indies. Dutch and residual British forces ashore kept up a desultory resistance for a week, before the Japanese secured mastery of the East Indies. No other outcome of the campaign was plausible, given the overwhelming Japanese strength deployed in the region.
2 THE ‘WHITE ROUTE’ FROM BURMA
The conquerors, emboldened by their Malayan triumph, seized the opportunity also to occupy British Burma, partly to secure its oil and natural resources, partly to close the ‘Burma Road’ to China. The first bombs fell on its capital, Rangoon, on 23 December. In a little house on Sparks Street, one of Indian railway engine-driver Casmir Rego’s sons was practising ‘Silent Night’ on his violin. Lena, his little sister, was making paperchains, while their parents were out Christmas shopping. Suddenly, the sounds of aircraft and machine-gun fire burst upon the seasonal idyll. Bombs exploded, fires broke out, wholesale panic spread.
A Burman midwife, Daw Sein, recalled later that though she had heard vaguely about a war, at first she was uncertain who was fighting who. Now, her husband burst into the kitchen and yelled: ‘Out! Quick! We must get away!’ They fled their house and were halfway to the railway station when she realised that she was half-naked. Her husband tore his own longyi in half and gave her the rent cloth to cover her breasts. Thus clad, they tumbled aboard the first departing train, for Moulmein. Packed to the doors with fugitives like themselves, after some miles it halted, then stood immobile for hours with its cargo of foetid, hungry, thirsty, desperate humanity. Finally a man walked along the track beside the coaches shouting, ‘Moulmein has been destroyed! Bombs are falling everywhere! The train isn’t going any further!’ After fevered consultation, Daw Sein and her husband set off on foot towards Mandalay, far to the north.
In the days that followed, as air raids continued, food distribution broke down. Many Rangoon inhabitants became scavengers, breaking into abandoned homes in search of anything edible. After one raid, to the horror of the Rego family their youngest son Patrick vanished. As his brothers scoured the streets for him, they came upon a van laden with corpses and severed limbs. They glimpsed a woman who cried out from under the heap of bodies, ‘I’m not dead! Please take me out!’ Then more dead were thrown on top of her, and the van was driven away. Patrick reappeared unharmed, but the children never forgot the woman trapped among corpses.
Colonial mastery crumbled as swiftly and ignominiously in Burma as in Malaya. A host of Indian fugitives took to the jungle or set out westwards, including the low-caste ‘sweepers’ who emptied their rulers’ ‘thunderboxes’ and cleaned the streets. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the governor, reflected ruefully on the revelation that such people were indispensable to sahibs’ lives: ‘Life begins with the sweeper. That lowest of all human beings, who holds in his hands the difference between health and disease, cleanliness and filth.’ The civilian administration rapidly collapsed, and so too did the defence: through February and March, the Japanese swept across the country. When soldier Robert Morris of the 7th Hussars landed at Rangoon, he found chaos: ‘All we saw were blazing fires and oil dumps set alight. Mounds of equipment such as aircraft marked “Lease-Lend to China from USA” lay in crates awaiting assembly. The number of lorries lined up ready for shipment to China amazed us. The port had been deserted and ransacked.’
Dorman-Smith was yet another poor specimen of proconsulship. He professed himself baffled as to why, after a century of British rule, there was no Burmese loyalty to the Empire such as appeared to exist ‘among other subject nations’. Civil servant John Clague provided an easy answer: ‘We Europeans lived in a world where very often the people hardly counted in our human or intimate thoughts. No Burman belonged to the Moulmein Gymkhana. No Burman came to dinner and breakfast.’ Now, orders were issued that no Burmese or Indian should be accommodated on refugee transports.
Far East C-in-C Sir Robert Brooke-Popham matched Dorman-Smith’s gloom. He reported, accurately enough, that many local people openly favoured a Japanese victory: ‘It is rather disheartening, after all the years we have been in Burma and the apparent progress that has taken place under our rule, to find that the majority of the population want to be rid of us … I can only suggest the three things that are, at any rate, worthy of investigation. First a tendancy [sic] among Englishmen to regard themselves as naturally superior in every way to any coloured race, without taking steps to ensure that this is always a fact. Secondly, a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese … Thirdly, the fact that the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned with making money … than benefiting the native population.’
A Burmese could not have expressed the matter better. Two out of three national prime ministers since separation from India had been detained by the British for making advances to Tokyo, as was a group of student nationalists receiving Japanese training in preparation for collaboration. In the unlikely event that a referendum had been held in Burma, offering the population a choice of wartime allegiances, pro-Japanese sentiment would assuredly have prevailed. Maj. Gen. Sir John Smyth, newly appointed commander of 17th Indian Division deployed in the south beyond Moulmein, wrote later that the Burmese provided the invaders with eager assistance: ‘[The Japanese] not only got information of our every movement, but they got guides, rafts, ponies, elephants and all the things which we could not get for love, and only with great difficulty for money.’
Mi Mi Khaing, a twenty-five-year-old Burmese woman who had studied at Rangoon University, wrote bitterly about the fashion in which her people were thrust into the war with no pretence of popular consultation. Hers was, she said, ‘a country which had lost proud sovereignty fifty-years before, which had not yet gained a modern replacement for it, and which felt itself to be only incidentally in the path of the war monster’s appetite’. By chance Burmese prime minister U Saw was passing through the United States at the moment of Pearl Harbor. Impressions of American disarray and
hysteria enhanced his contempt for the white races. Back in Burma shortly afterwards, Ultra decrypts revealed U Saw making overtures to the Japanese, which caused him to be exiled to East Africa. In such circumstances, British claims to be upholding the cause of democratic freedom by fighting in Burma seemed less than wholly convincing.
The invaders, meanwhile, were astonished by the warmth of the welcome they received, especially from Burmese youths. One of their liaison officers wrote: ‘It came to us how strong was their passion for independence.’ Burmese villagers crowded around Japanese soldiers, offering them water and saybawleit cheroots. Soldiers were bewildered to be questioned in English, the only foreign language local people spoke. The commonest question was: ‘Has Singapore fallen?’ Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro said: ‘I answered proudly, “Yes, Singapore has fallen.”’
Some of the first bombs to fall on Mandalay wrecked the colonists’ Upper Burma Club. A guest at a lunch party there said, ‘We didn’t know what hit us. One minute we were seated at table, the next the roof caved in, tables, chairs, food and ourselves were scattered all over the room.’ The attacks started fires which burned down much of the city. Bodies lay unburied for days, intensifying popular contempt for British incompetence. With a symbolism that did not go unnoticed, flowers in the colonists’ gardens began to die, because the servants who watered them had abandoned their posts. The British bosses of the Burma Corporation washed their hands of their local staff, shrugging that they could do nothing for them.
In reply to a plea for reinforcements for Burma, Wavell in Java signalled Rangoon on 22 January: ‘I have no resources with which I can assist you … Cannot understand why with troops at your disposal you should be unable to hold Moulmein and trust you will do so. Nature of country and resources must limit Japanese effort.’ When the modest Japanese invasion force of two divisions launched its attack from Siam in the last days of January, some Indian units mounted a stalwart defence, but the locally recruited Burma Rifles crumbled quickly. The British had no significant air or artillery support, and John Smyth was furious that his superiors insisted on an attempt to hold exposed Moulmein. The first crisis of the campaign came in the early hours of 23 February, at a bridge across the Sittang eighty miles north of the town. As the Japanese approached, in darkness British engineers fired demolition charges. Two of Smyth’s brigades were cut off east of the river. All but a handful of men were obliged to surrender, a crippling moral and strategic blow.
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