by Peter Brune
Boyes had every reason to ‘not like this’. The Japanese had pushed fighting patrols westwards from their captured ground near Bukit Timah and by the time ‘X’ Battalion gained its designated perimeter, they had virtually surrounded the Australians.
The Japanese struck at about 3.00 am. A fuel dump adjacent to Battalion HQ, which consisted of 44-gallon drums ‘stacked in several layers’,26 was ignited by tracer fire. Against this brilliantly lit background, many dazed Australians were bayoneted where they lay, while others were very quickly cut down by sniper, automatic and small arms fire. Both Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Boyes and Major Dick Keegan died early during the assault. Very little counter fire could be employed because the battle in many places was hand-to-hand and extremely confused. During that mass slaughter at Jurong I that night, ‘X’ Battalion lost somewhere between 100 and 150 of its men. The few survivors—in small groups ranging from two or three to section-strength—were those who chanced their fortunes by either seeking cover and waiting for their opportunity to move out, or others who made a desperate dash for freedom via a journey southwards towards Pasir Panjang.
Away to the south-east, in their perimeter at Sleepy Valley, Merrett’s 200-strong Force saw tracer fire and heard ‘X’ Battalion’s battle erupting at 3.00 am. Their turn came at dawn when the Japanese, who had occupied the surrounding high ground during darkness, wrought concentrated machine gun fire upon them. After bitter and yet again confused fighting, Merrett’s men withdrew in two groups to the 2/18th area near Reformatory Road. Major Merrett was wounded during this action and evacuated to hospital. His force had suffered around 50 casualties during the early morning of 11 February.
In a statement in his later report, Thyer would claim that:
. . . Merrett Force had demonstrated clearly that if given resolute leadership, stray parties from disintegrated battalions could be welded into an efficient fighting detachment capable of engaging superior forces. The end of this Force was far from being an inglorious one.27
This superficial statement merely masks the truth. Merrett Force’s action just after dawn on 11 February was no more than a brave and fortuitous escape from annihilation by capable officers and other ranks. The real issue on Brigadier Taylor’s Brigade front from the moment of its fighting on 8–9th until 11 February was simple. The formations had, right from the start, been allotted impossible tactical tasks and were manned by a combination of exhausted veterans and untrained and untried reinforcements. Trained, tried and seasoned officers such as Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Boyes and Major Dick Keegan deserved better.
Having described the fate of Paris’s 12th Indian Brigade and Taylor’s 22nd Australian Brigade in their attempts to recapture the Jurong Line, we now turn to Brigadier Coates and his 15th Indian Brigade. Coates was only required to move his battalions a little forward to reach his phase one positions on the night of 10 February. By 11.00 pm his British Battalion constituted his left flank, astride the Jurong Road at Milestone 9 with the Special Reserve Battalion to its left; the 3/16th Punjab occupied a ridge just north of the road; and to the right of the Punjabis were the Jats. Coates intended to move on his phase two objective at daylight on the 11th. In a prelude to impending disaster, Kirby has stated that, ‘The Jats on the right reported—somewhat naturally—that they were unable to make contact with 12th Brigade.’28 ‘Somewhat naturally’, because the 12th Brigade unit they attempted to make contact with were the Hyderabads who, as we have recorded, had suffered ‘many desertions during the day’. Paris believed that ‘he could only rely on about 100 men from that Battalion’.29
As the tragedy that befell Paris’s 12th Indian Brigade, Taylor’s ‘X’ Battalion and Merrett Force began to unfold during the night of 10/11 February—witnessed only vaguely in terms of various illuminations on the horizon and distant noises of battle by Saggers’s Special Reserve Battalion and Coates’s soldiers—Coates sent a liaison officer back at around 2.30 am to report in. By 5.30 am he realised that his Brigade had lost communications and, with firing heard from his rear, he knew he was cut off. Orders were sent cancelling the dawn attack, but were not received by the Jats, who duly attacked at dawn and according to Kirby ‘were never seen again’.30 Wigmore was more revealing: ‘The Battalion remained in the locality, unable to make its way back, until the fall of Singapore, then it broke up. Its commander, Lieut-Col Cummings, and some of his British and Indian officers eventually made their way to Sumatra, and were transported to India.’31
After having withdrawn about 350 metres during the last hours of darkness, dawn brought fierce Japanese fire upon the forward Special Reserve and the British Battalion. The Brigade HQ was attacked by an enemy force which had moved from Bukit Timah village. Coates was forced to move forward to the British Battalion lines, where he subsequently ordered a general brigade withdrawal to Reformatory Road. Only a determined counterattack by elements of both battalions allowed the 15th Brigade to withdraw in three groups: one British, one Indian and the last Australian.
After gaining about 900 metres through good cover, the three columns were forced to cross an open depression and were caught in a hail of fire which inflicted severe casualties and caused them to become dispersed. When, after heavy fighting, the remnant reached Reformatory Road, they were mauled again before forming up on the eastern side of that feature.
By the early morning of 11 February 1942, General Bennett’s counterattack to retake the Jurong Line had been a costly disaster. In a number of cases, units failed to gain their phase one startlines, while others, already close to their initial objective, reached it but made no ground in attempting to occupy their phase two lines. And in the process, the 12th and 15th Indian Brigades—two reserve formations—were savaged to such an extent that they ceased to exist as formations. On that fateful morning, the Special Reserve Battalion could muster a mere 80 of its soldiers, while the combined survivors of Coates’s Brigade now stood (with the Jats missing) at 400—little more than half-battalion strength. Taylor’s 22nd Brigade, already decimated by its fighting on the north-west coast, had had its newly formed ‘X’ Battalion all but annihilated, and Merrett Force had also suffered heavy losses. Brigadier Taylor now possessed nothing more than a threadbare force to hold the Japanese advance along Reformatory Road and into Singapore Town.
When, during the early hours of 11 February, General Bennett became aware of the magnitude of the losses to Brigadier Paris’s 12th Indian Brigade, and, most of all, the loss of Bukit Timah and its associated stores of food, ammunition and petrol, he ordered his newly acquired 18th British Division’s Tomforce reserve to recapture Bukit Timah and then Bukit Panjang village. It was a tall order given that by the time Tomforce attacked, it was faced by the 18th and 5th Japanese Divisions, each with two regiments forward and one in reserve, and in possession of the high ground. While the defenders had committed their scant, and tired reserves piecemeal, Yamashita had paused after his capture of Bukit Timah, consolidated and was now in a strong position to either blunt counterattacks, or resume his advance.
Against a depressing background of a still-smouldering Bukit Timah, and the ever present black clouds of burning oil, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas sent in his Tomforce 1/5th Sherwood Foresters along the left of the road, the 4th Norfolks on the right of it and the 18th Reconnaissance Battalion along it. However, the recurring problems of movement through a maze of jungle, scrub and plantations, and the very steep nature of the country, not only caused a loss of contact within units, but slowed their progress. Those difficulties were compounded by the fact that the 4th Norfolks, although gaining two of their high-ground objectives, were then pushed off them, and in the case of the Foresters, one of its company’s progress was retarded by a movement through its path by elements of the retreating 15th Brigade. Scattered, and therefore vulnerable to any concerted Japanese attacks during the night, Major-General Beckworth-Smith ordered Tomforce to withdraw to the racecourse. These events then impacted upon the neighbouring 2/29th Battalion, which in
turn also withdrew. This unit, now manned by very inexperienced reinforcement junior officers and other ranks, was widely dispersed by spasmodic skirmishes during the night, which later saw only Lieutenant-Colonel Pond and elements of his Headquarter Company arrive at Bennett’s HQ at Tanglin Barracks at first light.
Fighting at and near the Jurong Line and Trunk Road during the period 10–11 February had seen unit after unit belatedly committed, torn to shreds, demoralised and then scattered.
With the dimensions of his Singapore perimeter diminishing rapidly on the early morning of 11 February 1942, General Percival moved his HQ from Sime Road to Fort Canning. Not long after, the main petrol depot just east of the racecourse caught fire, which thickened the dull, black blanket that had enveloped the Island. Percival now made three key decisions. He assigned all operations east of the racecourse to General Heath; bolstered General Bennett’s Western Command by moving the 2nd Gordons from Changi to it; and created a unit composed of base reinforcements and deployed it at the eastern end of the racecourse.
Aware that the Imperial Japanese Guards Division might well attack southwards towards the reservoirs from their landing points on the Causeway Sector, and that Yamashita might also thrust eastwards from Bukit Timah through the gap between the reservoirs, Heath created another new brigade formation called Massy Force (Brigadier Massy-Beresford), which was to hold a line extending from just east of the MacRitchie Reservoir to Thompson village and thence to the Woodleigh pumping station—all vital locations to be held. Massy Force was also created in part to bridge the gap between Tomforce and the reservoirs. Wigmore has recorded that Massy Force:
. . . comprised the 1/Cambridgeshire, from the 55th Brigade, the 4/Suffolk (54th Brigade), the 5/11th Sikh (from the Southern Area), a detachment of the 3rd Cavalry, one field battery, and eighteen obsolescent light tanks recently landed, and manned by a detachment of the 100th Light Tank Squadron.32
When Percival visited Massy-Beresford on the afternoon of 11 February he now considered Massy Force’s main priority was to bridge the gap between Tomforce and the reservoirs. To this end he ordered him to capture a locality named Point 300, which was the high ground just north-west of the racecourse. But before the operation could be executed, the Japanese occupied that feature. In the interim, however, the 18th Division’s Major-General Beckwith-Smith had visited both his Massy and Tomforce HQ and decided that the ground occupied by both forces was unsuitable for defence and, with Heath’s approval, withdrew both to a new defensive position along a line extending from MacRitchie Reservoir to the racecourse and then to the racecourse village.
By the morning of 12 February, the critical Malaya Command western front—facing Yamashita’s 18th and 5th Divisions—now consisted of Southern Command’s 1st Malaya Brigade, which occupied a line extending from just west of the coastal village of Pasir Panjang, northwards to a line just west of the Reformatory Road–Raja Road junction; its 44th Brigade was deployed from that junction to the Ulu Pandan Road junction; Bennett’s Western Area now consisted of Taylor’s 22nd Brigade’s front which swung in an eastwards arc from the Ulu Pandan Road–Reformatory Road junction to the railway and Holland Road junction, where the 2nd Gordons continued that arc to link up with Tomforce and Massy Force. Alan Warren has left us with a succinct and damning sentence which describes Malaya Command’s delayed and fragmented attempts to hold Singapore: ‘It had taken Percival almost three days to get the main body of the 18th Division actively involved in the defence of Singapore.’33
While General Yamashita’s 5th and 18th Divisions had attacked aggressively and won substantial objectives on Bennett’s Western Area perimeter, the Imperial Guards Division had continued to play a less formidable role. It will be recalled that Brigadier Maxwell’s premature 27th Brigade withdrawal from his Causeway Sector during the early hours of 10 February had laid General Key’s 11th Division’s left flank bare. In response to Maxwell’s withdrawal, it will also be remembered that Key had ordered Brigadier Trott to secure three high ground positions to the immediate rear of the 27th Brigade’s former perimeter. When only two of those three objectives were gained, Key had ordered the 2/10th Bulach to secure the gap between his left flank and the 27th Brigade early on the 11th.
Now, on the early morning of that day, we come to more controversy and varying accounts of disjointed and confused actions by commanders. Kirby, the British Official Historian, has claimed that at around 7.30 am on the 11th, Maxwell informed Key that his Brigade was no longer under Heath’s command, and that he had been ordered to ‘occupy and hold Bukit Panjang Village’.34 Warren states that Maxwell told Key that he was ‘going to move southwards towards Bukit Panjang’, and that Maxwell ‘later claimed that he was acting on the orders of Malaya Command’.35 The Australian Official Historian, Lionel Wigmore, states that ‘Heath’s anxieties grew when he learned early on 11th February that the 27th Australian Brigade had been ordered to recapture Bukit Panjang’.36 Wigmore, not for the first time when dealing with controversy, then gives us critical evidence which is relegated to the obscurity of a footnote:
No conclusive evidence has come to light as to who issued the order, although an attack on the enemy rear supplementary to a frontal attack by Tomforce would have been a logical move to retrieve the situation in this most critical area. According to General Key (11th Division) and his senior staff officers Brigadier Maxwell told them at the time that it came from General Bennett, but General Bennett has denied having given it. Brigadier Maxwell has recorded emphatically that it came from General Percival. It would have been contrary to military practice for either Percival or Bennett to issue it direct to the 27th Brigade while the brigade was under Key’s command. However, in the confusion of the time the chain of command might have become somewhat dislocated.37
Thyer, in his voluminous record of the campaign, made no mention of 27th Brigade being transferred back to Bennett, or of the consequences for Key. We will probably never know who issued that critical order, but, yet again, we note Brigadier Maxwell’s distant, uncoordinated and seemingly contradictory accounts of his actions.
The critical issue concerning Brigadier Maxwell’s command of his Brigade at this juncture is the fact that his HQ was now around 7.25 kilometres east of Mandai village, which, given the poor communications throughout the campaign, was foolhardy in the extreme. The time taken for his orders for the attack on Bukit Panjang to reach his 2/30th and 2/26th Battalions demonstrate the point. Incredibly, in the case of the 2/26th Battalion, those orders were taken by one of its officers (Captain Anderssen), returning to his unit from hospital. He was forced to travel on a motor cycle, then by foot, and did not reach 2/26th Battalion HQ until 10.30 am, where he found that Oakes and all but C Company had moved. Oakes, who had realised that the Japanese had captured Bukit Panjang, had instigated his Battalion’s move to the previously ordered rendezvous along the pipeline to the racecourse. This move began fifteen minutes before Maxwell’s planned attack on Bukit Panjang—which Oakes was completely unaware of. In his movement out, Oakes ordered his 2/26th companies to move independently if the enemy attacked. The enemy did. Eventually, three companies found their way back to the Singapore Golf Club and the last to the General Base Depot.
Meanwhile, when Lieutenant-Colonel Ramsay received his orders for the Bukit Panjang attack, his 2/30th Battalion had had no contact with either the Baluchis nor the 2/26th. Ramsay was now being pressured by the enemy to his rear, was still out of contact with the 2/26th and also with Maxwell, and had no idea of the enemy strength at Bukit Panjang. As a consequence he wisely decided to withdraw. During the afternoon, he was able to talk with Maxwell after making contact with a Brigade signals party which was laying a line at the proposed Bukit Panjang attack assembly point. Ramsay was then ordered to occupy a position between the Peirce Reservoir and the Seletar Rifle Range.
Brigadier Maxwell had yet again failed to exercise effective command over his Brigade. He had yet again placed the inexperienced Oakes and Ramsay�
�whom he had appointed for dubious reasons—under incredible strain. By the morning of 12 February 1942, Maxwell had again compromised the potentially beneficial deployment of two of the best and still intact battalions in Malaya Command.
General Heath reacted to Maxwell’s second withdrawal from his Northern Area left flank by ordering the evacuation of the naval base and its demolition. By about 6.00 pm the base had been evacuated; his 53rd Brigade had formed an arc facing north-west and extending from the River Simpang southwards to shield the Sembawang airfield; Trott’s 8th Brigade had extended the arc to a point a little west of the Nee Soon road junction; and the 28th Brigade was deployed south as a reserve.
To add further misery to a disastrous day, 11 February saw Japanese aircraft drop numerous copies of a demand from Yamashita for Singapore’s surrender.
The Japanese had accomplished a series of most impressive landings along the north-west shore of Singapore Island during the night of 8/9 February. During the next two days, that initial success had been spectacularly exploited, culminating in the capture of the critical high ground at the centre of the Island: Bukit Timah. On 12 February, General Yamashita now sought to complete the concentration of his force, hurriedly finish his repair of the causeway, and thereby increase his artillery gun numbers and ammunition supply.
Early on the morning of the 12th, the Japanese attacked Massy Force, which was deployed astride and just north of Bukit Timah Road. By 8.30 am a number of enemy tanks had reached the racecourse village before they were checked by a troop of the British 45th Anti-Tank Battery. But to the north of the road, the enemy infantry were able to infiltrate Massy Force (now fighting with Tomforce attached), which caused Lieutenant-Colonel Massy-Beresford to order a withdrawal to the junction of Bukit Timah and Adam and Farrer Roads. The move was completed by late afternoon and, as the Japanese now paused and did not attack again that day, the 18th Division’s Massy Force and Tomforce remnant were able to dig in, and further anti-tank guns and reinforcements were used to bolster this vital main road into Singapore Town.