by Peter Brune
Meanwhile, in the streets of Singapore Town, the issue of stragglers was reaching alarming proportions. On 13 February, Lieutenant ‘Hec’ Chambers recorded:
Captain Menz had patrols out through the streets, directing all Australians to report at the Anzac Club. We set up a kitchen and fed as many as possible before loading them into trucks and sending them on to their distribution centre at the Botanical Gardens. We fed nearly two thousand men during the day.16
But whilst in the majority, the Australians were by no means the only stragglers. On 13 February the 8th Division Provost Company Unit Diary recorded: ‘British and Indian troops wandering aimlessly about. Representations made to APM [Assistant Provost Marshal] Malaya Command to provide directional information for British troops, but with no result.’17 And 14 February brought even less pleasure to Chambers and his fellow MPs:
The fourteenth was a wicked day. More and more troops had poured into Singapore during the night . . .
Men were straggling in from the front line continuously now. Some of them were ‘bomb happy’—that apt name for shell shock—and fine physical specimens sat on the grass and wept, others, whenever a plane was heard, cowered trembling behind the slightest shelter. Most of them were dirty and bedraggled, carrying many days growth of beard. Some had rifles and ‘tommy guns’, others had thrown their arms away; all of them were hungry.18
On 14 February 1942, Yamashita found himself with only one operational handicap in his final advance on Singapore Town: he needed more artillery guns and ammunition. Colonel Tsuji would later write:
On the evening of the 14th February the Kanoe [Imperial Guards] Division completed repairs to the Causeway and pushed forward. Our heavy guns moved in rapid succession to positions on the heights to the east of the reservoir. For the first time our whole army was across the Johore Strait and concentrated on Singapore Island.19
Given that the build-up described above would probably take a further 24 hours to complete, the Japanese chose to attack along the south-west coast, where they had achieved some measure of success the previous day, on the north near the MacRitchie Reservoir and on the eastern side of the British perimeter just south of the airfield at Paya Lebar.
At about 8.30 am a number of thrusts were made against the 1st Malaya Brigade between the south coast and Raja Road. After attacking for most of the morning, during which both sides took heavy casualties, the afternoon saw a renewed enemy thrust reach a line extending from Bukit Chermin, along the canal to the brickworks, and thence to the Depot Road–Raja Road junction. During their movement along Raja Road, elements of the Japanese 18th Division reached Alexandra Hospital during that afternoon. It was here, on the afternoon of 14 February, that the Japanese added to their long, infamous catalogue of indiscriminate slaughter against defenceless noncombatants. After having been fired on by retreating Indian troops on their approach to the hospital, they entered it and proceeded to bayonet staff and patients, ‘including a patient lying on an operating table’.20 Their next act was more premeditated and therefore more shameful. After securing around 150 hospital occupants in a bungalow that afternoon, they proceeded to execute them on the morning of the 15th.
As on the previous day, Yamashita chose to leave Bennett’s 8th Division’s bulge-like perimeter alone, other than to subject it to periodic but concentrated artillery fire. Bennett would not have endeared himself to 1st Malaya Brigade’s defenders on his left flank when it was discovered that Australian artillery support was not forthcoming—support that could have operated with superb observation over the area of fighting. Having heard that Malaya Command’s artillery ammunition stocks were very low indeed, Bennett had ordered the previous day that the Australian artillery was to fire only in defence of its own perimeter, and even then, only upon ‘observed targets’. In a further twist of fate, elements of the Australian 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion were also frustrated witnesses to that Japanese advance, but could not offer machine gun fire because they had been rearmed as infantry in the AIF perimeter.
On the Northern Area front on the 14th, the Japanese gained additional ground. The first attacks occurred along Thomson Road and resulted in an enemy capture of Point 105. This movement created a gap between the 18th Division’s 55th and 53rd Brigades. Although the 11th Division despatched one of its battalions to plug the gap, a further attack in the afternoon along Sime Road, which was spearheaded by medium tanks, broke through and reached the outer limits of residential Mount Pleasant. Although a counterattack was planned, it did not materialise, and by dark the 18th Division had given ground and now occupied a ‘U shaped’ loop in its line extending from the MacRitchie Reservoir pier, southwards to Mount Pleasant Road, along that feature westwards to a point south of Bukit Brown, and then north to the original perimeter line west of Adam Road. On their eastern front, the enemy attacked around midday, and achieved some initial success before the 11th Division again managed to stabilise the front by the onset of darkness.
During that fateful day, Percival received two reports—one in the morning and the second during the late afternoon—which gave him a slim but forlorn hope that the water supply to the Town might still last for some time. During the morning, after being told that at best that supply might last for two days, he assigned 100 of the Royal Engineers to attempt to repair leaks in the pipeline. At the second meeting, Percival was informed that the water supply to the Town had slightly improved. He then asked the Director General of Civil Defence (Brigadier Simson) for an update at 7.00 am the next day (15 February).
If various units in Malaya Command had ‘disintegrated’ or were ‘not seen again’ along a rapidly diminishing defensive perimeter, then the term ‘disintegration’ was an apt title for the continuing destruction of Singapore Town and its inhabitants. The 8th Division Provost Company Unit Diary, 15 February 1942:
Enemy air and artillery action on Singapore greatly increased. Water mains severed, electricity cut off, and town very badly battered. Soldiers everywhere. Daily requests to Malaya Command to collect and direct British soldiers, but nothing done. AIF soldiers collected by this unit and transported to Botanical Gdns, but morale shocking. A lot of men hid themselves to prevent and avoid return to the line. Very heavy air raids and shelling about 1600 hrs. Fires in several parts of the town, vehicles on fire along the whole length of streets, general pandemonium and confusion.21
Captain Alf Menz, 8th Division Provost Company, diary 15 February:
As we drove around I found streets impassable. Blocked with burning vehicles, (S’pore was full of Army vehicles), debris everywhere, corpses all over the place. You could smell death, confusion abounding, trolley bus wires telephone & electric wires all over the road, electricity off, gas off. Telephones out of action and a good part of the town without water . . .22
Brigadier Simson’s morning report to Percival on the 15th was not encouraging. The constant bombing and shelling of the water pipes towards, and in the Town, was continuing to create more breaks than could be repaired. To compound the problem, the increasing debris and human cluttering of roads made the engineers’ tasks more time-consuming and labour intensive. At a commanders’ meeting at Fort Canning at 9.30 am, Simson now went further than his earlier report, by stating that Singapore’s water supplies could now be expected to last no longer than another day.
Percival now gave an appreciation. Although Malaya Command’s food supplies were rapidly diminishing, there were still significant civil food stocks. However, whilst small arms ammunition supplies were still considerable, artillery shell supplies were very low indeed, and anti-aircraft ammunition stocks were threadbare. He then declared that petrol supplies were almost down to those presently held in vehicle tanks—there was no real reserve of petrol. And underpinning this state of affairs remained Simson’s just mentioned report of a rapidly failing water supply.
In summary Percival stated the obvious: a maintenance of the present defensive perimeter could only end in the just-described administrative problems
forcing a surrender, or worse, that a concentrated Japanese attack would more than likely gain them the confines of the Town and a needless slaughter of innocent civilians would result. He identified two alternatives. The first was a counterattack to restore the Town’s water supply and food dumps. Clearly, those objectives would entail attacks upon the reservoirs and an attack in the Bukit Timah area where most of the food dumps had been lost. The second alternative was capitulation.
It is little wonder that the commanders’ unanimous response was capitulation. Given the appalling supply problems outlined by Percival, the notion that any counterattack would constitute anything other than a token gesture—and further senseless killing—was fanciful.
Percival finally faced the inevitable. A belated telegram from Wavell that morning probably fortified his decision:
General Wavell to General Percival 15 Feb 42
So long as you are in position to inflict losses and damage to enemy and your troops are physically capable of doing so you must fight on. Time gained and damage to enemy are of vital importance at this crisis. [and then the key sentence] When you are fully satisfied that this is no longer possible I give you discretion to cease resistance.23
At 11.30 am on the 15th a delegation of three—Brigadier Newbigging, Major Wild and the Straits Settlement’s Colonial Secretary—left Fort Canning by car and after reaching a part of the 18th Division’s perimeter at the junction of Bukit Timah and Adam Roads, proceeded on by foot for another 500 metres before they were met by a Japanese staff officer. The three men returned to Percival with a Japanese flag that was to be flown over the Cathay Building as a recognition of Percival’s intent to meet Yamashita at 4.00 pm to officially surrender. Later that afternoon, a Japanese officer observed a ‘pale and thin and ill’ Percival arrive at the Ford Motor Factory to formally capitulate.24 The surrender document was signed at around 6.10 pm.
And so on 15 February 1942, on what General Percival would later describe as ‘Black Sunday’, the biggest military capitulation in the history of British Arms occurred. In a mere 70 days Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita and his 25th Army had swept through Malaya and captured the prized jewel of Singapore: the gateway to Britain’s commercial and colonial influence in the Pacific.
The reactions of the soldiers on that day were many and varied. Private Gus Halloran, 2/19th Battalion, a veteran of Muar: ‘. . . we believed that a decent fight could have been made of it, and hadn’t been. So we felt really frustrated by that.’25 And then there is the age-old humiliation every soldier in history has felt when forced to surrender. Private Paddy O’Toole, 2/29th Battalion: ‘Oh Jesus Christ! I was devastated! I was just bloody rat shit! . . . that was the most humiliating day, I think, in my whole life, when they said, “Lay down your arms.”’26 For others there was another more immediate fear. Sergeant Frank Baker, 2/20th Battalion, distinctly remembered the thought of possible mass executions: ‘Oh yes! We had worries about that! We just didn’t know what they’d do! . . . Not a very good feeling!’27
But for most Australians there was a chance to eat a decent meal, drink their sorrows away, and to finally sleep. Sergeant Stan Arneil, 2/30th Battalion:
The odd types of food, at least odd from an army point of view, came from the buildings within the perimeter we were holding.
Our particular area included the French Consulate. It was to our eyes the ultimate in luxury and included an enormous wine cellar . . .
About 5 p.m. all firing ceased. It was uncanny, one could almost hear the silence.
We saw no Japanese that night and spent hours talking about the prospects for the morning. Some men got drunk on French wine whilst others were so shocked they could hardly speak.28
The thoughts expressed above on that fateful day did not apply to a significant number of soldiers who sought a final, desperate escape from capture. General Gordon Bennett was the most senior of them, and would prove the most controversial. He had, since Malaya Command’s withdrawal to Singapore Island, been thinking of his means of leaving. Late on 15 February, Bennett, his ADC Lieutenant Gordon Walker, and one of his liaison officers, Major Charles Moses, made good their escape to Sumatra. Bennett subsequently landed at Broome at 5.00 pm on 27 February 1942. He had escaped without informing General Percival, or indeed, without seeking his permission. In his stead he appointed Brigadier Callaghan to assume command of the 8th Australian Division.
At war’s end and for many years to come, there would be a reckoning. General Bennett would face the final wrath of the Staff Corps after his escape, and most significantly, a final all-consuming confrontation with his old arch enemy: General Blamey. There would be bad blood and accusations between British senior commanders and between their Australian counterparts. In 1957 the Official Histories of both Britain and Australia would be completed; Kirby and Wigmore would ‘cooperate’ in a large measure as to what was said, and how it was said, culminating in both books being published on the same day. Over the next 35 to 40 years the controversy would not go away. In 1993 previously classified documents would unearth new evidence and new controversy.
But on or before Sunday 15 February 1942, those who had been incarcerated by the Japanese were faced with a far more immediate challenge: survival. Gunner Richard Haynes, 2/10th Field Regiment:
We had yet to learn that pride may be carried to the grave, unsullied, but it must humble itself at the gates of a prison camp.29
PART III
PUDU AND CHANGI PRISONS
. . . purgatory
Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows
that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to
make of heaven an effective reality.
Arnold Bennett
23
‘ROARING REGGIE’
It has been said that war consists of prolonged periods of boredom punctuated by the most intense and horrifying moments in a soldier’s life. The prisoner of war experience is very different. With either a mass capitulation, or the isolated local engagement that brings capture or surrender, comes the realisation that the primary function of one’s existence—to fight and defeat the enemy—is gone. There is a certain humiliation, a sense of hopelessness, and above all, the awareness that one’s destiny is no longer in the hands of one’s commander or oneself. And then there is the new master. The treatment meted out to the captive is determined by a number of factors, some of which are ideological, religious or cultural, but critically, at the personal level, the character traits of the immediate master at any given place or time is paramount. An example is the experience of British and Australians captured by the Germans in North Africa compared to the fate of Russians who were captured by them on the Eastern Front. In short, through German eyes, there was an immense difference between a fellow Aryan and a Slav.
During the Second World War 8174 Australians were captured during the campaigns in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Of those some 265 died in captivity—around three per cent. Within a mere three months of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and their landings in Thailand and Malaya, around 22 000 Australians became prisoners of war. In August 1945, three years and five months later, one in every three lay buried or their ashes scattered across an appalling trail of slavery, deprivation and torment which extended from Timor to Java, to Ambon, Sumatra, Singapore, Malaya, Borneo and later to Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, Manchuria and finally to Japan itself. The cost would constitute nearly half of the Australian nation’s Pacific sacrifice. Our story will examine two of those camps, Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur and Changi on Singapore Island. Both were to generate new leaders and to cause others to flounder in captivity.
The Japanese term for officer is shoko. In an interview with the author in Singapore on 4 January 2008, Private Charles Letts of the Malay Volunteers would claim that one’s chances of survival as a prisoner of war—particularly on the notorious Thai–Burma Railway—would depend on one’s shoko.1 And Letts was referring to Australian and Bri
tish officers—not Japanese.
We have noted that the breakneck speed of the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula had caused no small number of Indian Army, British and Australian troops to have been cut off and captured. The fate of those groups—some large and others small—had been a lottery of life and death according to the whim of Japanese senior commanders responding to stubborn resistance and heavy casualties (as at Parit Sulong), or at other times, the totally erratic behaviour of junior commanders or other ranks. Many of those fugitives were simply never seen again. Any British or Australian soldier endeavouring to make good his escape was also faced with the problem of being a conspicuous Caucasian in the midst of an Asian population, and with the fact that the Malays often cooperated most keenly with the Japanese for a monetary reward for information leading to their capture. As the tide of battle swept past them, parties of prisoners were placed in a string of regional gaols. When those became full, they were transferred by road and rail to Kuala Lumpur’s Pudu Prison.
Completed in 1895, Pudu was built to accommodate ‘all medium and long term prisoners’2 in Malaya. Sited on a triangular, open tract of land in the very heart of Kuala Lumpur, its dull-grey concrete wall was about eight metres high and ran roughly 274 by 228 metres. The wall was topped with embedded broken glass and contained a number of observation towers. After entering the main gate, the prisoner was confronted with two entrance buildings each of two floors. This then led to the main gaol building which was shaped ‘like a huge X with an elongated centre’.3 At either end of this X-shaped gaol block lay two three-storey wings. The ground floor of the elongated central portion commenced with a gruesome whipping tripod which led along an open air courtyard and thence to a stage. A fountain was situated on the southern side of the prison, and another on its eastern perimeter. Also within the compound were further buildings comprising administrative offices, workshops, guards’ rooms and hard labour lines. In all, the prison had been designed to house around a thousand civilian prisoners. In late January 1942, the Japanese forced the civilian authorities to remove their inmates, and began to concentrate their British and Australian prisoners in Pudu. In The Naked Island, Russell Braddon stated that, ‘Padu Gaol was a place of fascinating stories. Every man in it had been captured in extraordinary circumstances . . .’4 A number of familiar characters now re-enter our story.