by Peter Brune
At around 9.00 am on 12 December, Murray-Lyon arrived at 15th Brigade HQ. Two issues dominated his thoughts. The first was the disturbing news concerning the rapid Japanese progress from Patani towards Kroh against Lieutenant-Colonel Moorhead’s Krohcol—already examined by us—which if sustained at its present pace, would gravely threaten his 11th Division’s line of communication. The second, and more immediate, was the situation at Jitra. All his reserves had been committed; a worrying Japanese penetration of his right flank had occurred; there had already been significant losses in men and material; and he noticed the debilitated condition of his troops. He therefore asked permission for his 11th Division to stage a 49-kilometre withdrawal to Gurun.
Lieutenant-General Heath was in no position to consider Murray-Lyon’s request. At this very time, he was on a train to Singapore to demand permission for Brigadier Key to be allowed to withdraw his brigade from Kelantan State. It will be remembered that Key’s 8th Indian Brigade had, at this juncture, withdrawn south of Machang, having abandoned the defence of the Kota Bharu and Gong Kedah airfields. Heath has received criticism for his journey to Singapore. Kirby has referred to it as ‘an apparently unnecessary journey’.20
In his postwar despatch, General Percival explained his reasons for disallowing Murray-Lyon’s request for the withdrawal to Gurun:
Such a long withdrawal had not been considered in our prewar discussions of war plans and it would immediately have prejudiced our chances of denying the west coast aerodromes to the enemy. Moreover I felt that such a withdrawal would have a most demoralising effect on both the troops and on the civil population. This view was endorsed by the War Council which was sitting at the time. I therefore replied to the effect that pending further orders the battle was to be fought out on the Jitra position. At that time, the Jats were, in point of fact, the only battalion which had incurred serious losses although two battalions had, as already recorded, been rendered ineffective the previous day.21
This passage deserves close scrutiny. First, the fact that the current state of affairs had not existed in prewar discussions of war plans defies reality—nor had the RAF being virtually destroyed on the first day, and two Royal Navy capital ships sunk, been considered in prewar war plans. Second, with regards to Percival’s claim that a withdrawal would ‘have prejudiced our chances of denying the west coast aerodromes to the enemy’, it should have been obvious to him that the airfields in northern Malaya were already lost; that should his three brigades in contact with the enemy suffer extreme casualties, and/or lose their line of communication—which was a possibility at this critical time—then the airfields in western Malaya would have no chance—all would be definitely lost. Third, the notion that a withdrawal at this time would have a demoralising effect upon both the troops and the civil population is a feeble assessment. The morale of the 11th Division was already floundering. What condition would it have deteriorated into had further heavy casualties and a possible rout have occurred? Last, his last sentence above is a contradiction in terms. How could the Jats have been the only battalion to have incurred ‘serious losses’ when, in the same sentence he states that two others had been rendered ineffective the previous day?
The truth is that there were three battalions engaged in operations at this time that had had the ‘stuffing’ knocked out of them, and, to compound Murray-Lyon’s problems, his reserve had been eaten away to virtually nothing.
Malaya Command’s prime mission had fundamentally changed within a mere 48 hours of the enemy landings with the almost total ruination of the RAF in Malaya. What mattered now was blatantly obvious. They must delay the enemy by a fighting withdrawal into Malaya and Singapore’s vital ground: southern Johore. Lose that and lose the war. At this exact time, the RAF was no longer the prime defensive weapon in Malaya and Singapore—if it ever had been—and the Prince of Wales and Repulse lay at the bottom of the South China Sea. Airfields were no longer the vital ground. When any air force is outnumbered and outgunned then all does not augur well for the future. Moreover, the notion that an 11th Division withdrawal would have a demoralising effect upon the civil population borders on the comical. Any competent commander will put the morale of his fighting troops first. The civil population had, within a few days, suffered the shock of the Royal Navy being humiliated and of having Singapore being bombed on the first night of the war. The potential shock to the civil community of the loss of the Jitra Line should always have come a very poor second to keeping the 11th Division intact and able to fight another day.
Meanwhile, back on the Jitra Line at about noon on 12 December, the commander of the Japanese 9th Infantry Brigade, Major-General Kawamura, arrived at the front to take over from the advance guard. Kawamura then ordered his 41st Infantry Regiment to reinforce the advance guard and attack the British east of the main road. Clearly, he wished to exploit the weakness between the Leicesters’ and the Jats’ positions. But the enthusiasm of the advanced guard had not waned, and before the fresh troops could be committed, it put in a battalion strength attack just to the east of the road. The sheer concentration and aggression of the attack drove a deep wedge through the Jats’ left forward company, which then forced a withdrawal of the rearward company to the south-east. The advanced guard then attacked the right flank of the Leicesters and also penetrated the British perimeter further south to make contact with the 2/2nd Gurkhas on the line of the River Bata. Despite the fact that this Japanese attack punched a wedge of some 1600 metres between the Leicesters and the 2/2nd Gurkhas, both battalions held firm. A counterattack by the East Surrey carrier platoon stabilised the front and at least ‘temporarily checked the enemy’s attempt to envelop the Leicesters’ right. By 3 p.m. all was quiet.’22
Perhaps this lull in the fighting bolstered Brigadier Carpendale’s confidence, for he now planned a tightening of his perimeter and a counterattack. To plug the gap between the Jats and the Leicesters, he ordered the Jats to pull back and occupy the ground between the village of Kelubi and the right of the Punjabis, while the Leicesters were to concentrate west of the Trunk Road and just north of the river—these moves would then enable the Leicesters to counterattack to the east the next morning. But Carpendale quickly lost his enthusiasm for the notion of a Leicesters’ counterattack. Instead, he now ordered the Battalion to swing its line using its established western or left flank point at Rimba, and pivot in an south-eastern arc back along the River Jitra, to Padang, and thence to the River Bata. The Leicesters protested to Carpendale, pointing out that they had not lost ground, had suffered only minor casualties, and had not recced their proposed positions. The Battalion was ordered to move at 4.00 pm and had settled into its new perimeter by 7.30 pm. Although the British Battalion found the move hard enough, the Jats displayed their lack of training and sound staff work by failing to notify the right forward company of the withdrawal—it was incorrectly believed that they had been overrun.
We now arrive at the point where all the characteristics of untrained, exhausted and indeed demoralised troops cause them to finally crack—through no fault of their own. Alan Warren has quoted the Leicesters’ unit diarist:
The scene at the Bata [river] Bridge and for two hundred yards south of it from 5 p.m. onwards, was one of indescribable confusion. Indians and Gurkhas were firing in most directions, but chiefly to the north east, from both sides of the main road and, as far as could be seen, into the backs of elements of the 2/9th Jats and one of the Gurkha battalions. Several men were seen to be shot dead by their comrades at a range of less than the road’s breadth.23
Amidst this panic, which was compounded by the Japanese mortaring Jitra village and the nearby battalion perimeters, an Indian non-commissioned officer (Halvidar) of the Royal Engineers asked for permission to blow the Bata Bridge—before all of the transport and anti-tank guns had been recovered from the far side.
Major-General Murray-Lyon had witnessed aspects of this panic when forward at around 6.00 pm. On arriving at his HQ thirty minutes late
r, he was informed that ‘the Leicesters had been attacked as they were withdrawing, that the Jats had been overrun and that the enemy was attacking 2/16th Punjab at Kelubi’24—all of which was untrue. To add to his dismay, he now learnt that Krohcol had arrived at Kroh with a strength of only 350.
Murray-Lyon had known that the game was up before his first request to withdraw. The panic he witnessed whilst forward, the disturbing Krohcol news and the potential for the Japanese to employ a fresh tank assault against his disorganised dispositions and troops—which were lacking in tank defences—all demanded another plea to Percival to allow him a withdrawal to a position covering Gurun during the night. Percival’s biographer Clifford Kinvig:
. . . his [Murray-Lyon’s] message was again relayed to Singapore where Heath and Percival were still conferring. This time they let him go, confirming that his task was to fight for the security of North Kedah and suggesting that he should dispose his force in depth on the axis of the north/south roads and based on good tank obstacles.25
It would seem ‘conferring’ is a soft term for Heath and Percival’s Singapore meeting. For Heath to have left his HQ when he did was, in some ways, ‘inopportune’ as Kirby has put it, but it might well have been that Heath had had enough of the lack of purpose—of the weak-minded dithering—which was causing a deterioration of his 11th Division’s physical and mental energy reserves. In the end, Heath had been earlier advocating either a decisive order for Matador, or a similar order to occupy the Jitra Line. For critical hours his 11th Division were empowered to do neither—it was unforgivable. While it is easy for the historian or the reader to allow Percival to hide behind Brooke-Popham’s weakness, there is no evidence that he aggressively supported his Corps Commander, nor the soldiers for whom he bore the ultimate responsibility. Prewar war plans, civilian morale, the protection of a now redundant collection of Malayan airfields and an air arm that was already confined to night fighter operations and the protection of convoys were largely irrelevant issues that simply shrouded his real challenge.
At 10.00 pm on 12 December 1941, Major-General Murray-Lyon issued the order for his troops to stage a withdrawal from the ill-fated Jitra Line beginning at midnight. When given permission by Percival and Heath to withdraw from the line, he had also been informed that the command of Krohcol was to be now taken back by III Corps HQ as from midnight. The first phase of Murray-Lyon’s 11th Indian Division’s withdrawal to Gurun was to the south bank of the Kedah River at Alor Star. It was an understandable disaster.
The Kedah River lay some 24 kilometres to the south; the main line of communication along that withdrawal was a single road; there were no vehicles available for the movement, requiring the troops to march back; communications within the perimeter were threadbare and, in places, non-existent; units were dispersed over difficult ground, thereby making that communication, and the coordination of movement, difficult; and the withdrawal was staged in darkness and at times in heavy rain. To break contact with one’s enemy and then perform such a withdrawal under these conditions is no mean feat for well-trained, well-led, highly experienced and tough infantry. It almost becomes ‘mission impossible’ for the novice. While the 6th Brigade, under the least amount of contact and pressure, made a relatively clean break from its perimeter, the units of the 15th Brigade floundered.
The first problem was communication. Two companies of the Leicesters, one company of the 2/9th Jats and a detachment of the 2/1st Gurkhas failed to receive the withdrawal order and remained in their perimeters until the next morning.26 Events like this do not merely dent morale, they are more likely to destroy it. The consequence was a fragmentation into sub-units which, while most escaped, were forced to leave their equipment. Many of those who did receive the order reasoned that the single escape road might be crammed, and worse, used by enemy tanks, and therefore made their way out across country, or along the railway to Alor Star, or made for the coast in anticipation of movement south by boat. One small party’s enthusiasm for the withdrawal saw them reach Sumatra.
An example of the nature of the withdrawal is provided by the 1st Leicesters’ historian who has described the CO and his main group’s move:
After a very arduous march through swamps and paddy this party reached the railway line and turned south down it, and finally reached Alor Star at 1400 hours in a very exhausted condition. It was here found that the only bridge across the river had been blown some hours before. The party was engaged by Japanese in the town and was split in two. Some forty other ranks with the C.O. and R.S.M. managed to get across the river with the help of some friendly Chinese boatmen, but the remaining seventy-odd, under Captain Burder, were mostly never seen again.27
The CO’s party then undertook a sixteen-kilometre forced march, after which they were picked up by motor transport and taken to a position two kilometres south of Gurun early on 14 December—‘for the time being reduced to a mere handful of utterly exhausted men’.28
While the fighting at Jitra had been a disaster for the British, Lieutenant-Colonel Tsuji was full of praise for his troops’ efforts:
. . . each man had moved to the front with dry bread and rice sufficient for only a few days in accordance with the plan: ‘depend upon the enemy for rations.’
We had to be grateful to General Percival, not only for provisions for the men, but also for cars and gasolene abandoned in abundance. If such tactics as these could be kept up then our fighting officers and men would not go hungry. Speaking to an English engineer taken prisoner, I asked, ‘How long did you think this fortified position would hold out?’
He replied, ‘Held by the full strength of the 11th Division I believed it would hold out for three months at the least.’29
And later during the conversation: ‘What was the reason for the feeble breakdown?’ I asked. ‘God alone knows,’ he answered.30
God should not have been the only one who knew. The fighting at Jitra really constituted nothing more than pronounced bungling at the highest levels of command. It tragically impacted upon the largely ill-trained, inexperienced and therefore vulnerable soldiers who had to pay a severe price for it.
From a high command perspective, the first failure was the whole concept of Matador. We have stated that staff plans are one thing, but having trained troops to implement them is fundamental to operational success. The fact that Matador was beyond the ability of the troops chosen to embark upon it was amply demonstrated. When a force cannot deal with 300 Siamese police without military training and military support, and is restricted to an eight-kilometre gain in 24 hours, one is entitled to question its prowess. Infantry companies which are continuously overrun or by-passed and scattered merely show the worth of their training and experience. The fact that General Percival believed in Matador merely shows that he lacked the essential ability to translate a war plan into action. In short, Matador was a plan always doomed to fail its practical test.
The 11th Indian Division’s defence of the Jitra Line is undeniable proof that its training was barely adequate for the most basic of tasks. If the line was to have had any hope at all, a set-piece defence of a first-class perimeter would have had to have been enacted. It wasn’t, because its soldiers were preparing its defences at the last possible minute—exhausted, wet and with minimal equipment. We have outlined Brigadier Simson’s top class training in Scotland and his sound strategies for set defences at defiles down the Malay Peninsula and on Singapore Island. It would seem curious that much has been made—justifiably—of Malaya Command’s lack of trained specialists, of the number and quality of its soldiers, and its support. And yet Simson was arguably amongst the best in his field and much of the equipment he needed was at hand. He was made to sit idly by and watch tragic events unfold.
At the tactical level, Major-General Murray-Lyon’s defensive perimeter lacked depth at its vital ground: the Trunk Road through Jitra itself. Once the Japanese had penetrated the vital ground between the Leicesters and the Jats, that lack of depth told. In hi
ndsight, he might have chosen his troops for this key ground more carefully. He could have left the Leicesters where they were, but deployed the Surreys to the right side of the road. However much that idea might have split brigade battalions, had the Surreys been able to hold in the same manner as the Leicesters, a more efficient defence of that road might have occurred. Despite the fact that the breakdown in communication across the perimeter was partly caused by the last minute laying of exposed cable on swampy ground, there can be no excuse for companies failing to receive orders to withdraw, however late those orders might arrive. Jumpy, inexperienced soldiers should never be left high and dry when those around them are withdrawn. Also, the notion that local commanders are able to request and receive reinforcements without the knowledge and approval of the divisional commander can only lead to a confusion of plan and purpose. In fairness to Major-General Murray-Lyon, his withdrawal from the Jitra Line should have been allowed when first requested. After the war, he told Kirby that ‘the reluctance to face facts which caused the delay in granting permission to withdraw, was undoubtedly an important contributory cause of the difficulty and costliness of the withdrawal’.31 Heath concurred. It would seem that Percival made his initial decision based on his ‘pre-war war plans’ and the morale of the army as a whole and the civil population, rather than placing his trust in his commanders on the spot. If Heath was criticised by Kirby for embarking on his train journey to Singapore, and therefore being too-distant from his III Corps battles, then Percival made a fundamentally flawed decision from as great a distance.