Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On Christmas morning a British officer and a civilian appeared with a white flag. They had earlier been captured and had now been sent to advise Maltby to surrender. The Japanese would observe an armistice until noon. Malby’s inclination was to refuse, but, after consultation with his subordinate commanders and after the Japanese, ignoring their own armistice, had made further inroads, he decided that there was no hope of any further effective resistance. That evening, at the Peninsula Hotel, the departure point for peacetime P&O steamers heading for England, Sir Mark Young and General Maltby signed the instruments of unconditional surrender to General Sakai. The total British and Empire battle casualties up to 25 December are estimated at around 4,400, of which perhaps 800 were killed. After the surrender, the remaining 7,500-odd became prisoners of war. The Japanese admitted to 675 killed and 2,079 men wounded.

  The news that Hong Kong had fallen after only eighteen days’ fighting came as a major blow to the government in London. Although all had accepted that the colony could be neither reinforced nor held for ever, it had been expected to resist for rather longer than it had. The reasons for the swift collapse were many. The overwhelming air superiority of the Japanese – although British officers were still convinced that the planes were being flown by Germans – the preponderance of the attackers’ artillery and the failure of mainland demolitions to slow up the advance were major factors, but so too was the inescapable fact that the soldiers of the Japanese infantry, only marginally more numerous than the defenders, were more experienced, better trained and better motivated than their opponents, who had either been too long as garrison troops or were inexperienced and, in some cases, barely trained. Finally, Japanese intelligence, provided by Japanese living and working in Hong Kong and Chinese fifth columnists, allowed the attackers to know exactly where the defences were sited, and where the vulnerable points were. Churchill claimed after the war that the garrison of Hong Kong had, by their heroic defence, won themselves ‘lasting honour’, but then he could hardly say anything else.

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  The northernmost island of the Philippines is Luzon, with the capital, Manila, at the southern end of it. On 22 December, three days before the Hong Kong surrender, 20,000 Japanese troops landed at Lingayen Gulf, about halfway down the island’s west coast and about 150 miles from Manila, and on 24 December another 7,000 came ashore at Lamon Bay, on the east coast this time and also about 150 miles from Manila. MacArthur had no ships or aircraft to stop the landings and the Japanese expected him to defend Manila on the plains of Luzon. MacArthur knew very well that, if he tried to do this, his men would be defeated, and instead, as the two Japanese columns advanced in a pincer movement to take Manila, he declared the capital an open city and prepared to withdraw to the Bataan peninsula, west of Manila, where he hoped to be able to hold out until relief arrived. In what General of the Armies John J. Pershing –‘Black Jack’, who had commanded the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War and who normally had little time for MacArthur – called one of the greatest moves in all military history,* MacArthur had the northernmost of his two little armies, commanded by Major-General Jonathan‘Snowy’Wainright, occupy a defence position across the Japanese line of advance and then, when the Japanese had massed to attack it, withdraw ten miles or so and do the same thing again, and so on, thus delaying the Japanese without actually having to fight – which, given the Japanese superiority in the air, would have been calamitous. This tactic allowed MacArthur’s southern army to withdraw without interference, and for Wainright’s army to follow. Called armies for political and morale reasons – they amounted to about four divisions between them – MacArthur’s men withdrew slowly. Blowing bridges behind them, by 6 January 1942 both armies were in the Bataan peninsula, with MacArthur and President Quezon on the island of Corregidor, just off the tip of Bataan. Including the troops not in the two armies, there were now 5,000 American and 65,000 Filipino soldiers in Bataan, along with a great many civilian refugees.

  While the retreat had been competently and efficiently executed, stores and rations had not been moved from their pre-war dumps into Bataan. MacArthur had originally intended to use sea power and air strikes to stop the Japanese landings, and stores dumps had been positioned accordingly. With the departure or destruction of aircraft and ships, he had to recast his plans and the stores were not moved. Given the string of Allied failures that had marked the Asian war so far, it is not surprising that the Siege of Bataan was trumpeted as an example of heroism against insuperable odds, and in fairness it was far less shaming than events in Malaya or Hong Kong. MacArthur showed tremendous personal courage, refusing to wear a helmet and frequently visiting the front line, and then tarnished his image by issuing bombastic and patently untrue statements about massive reinforcements of ships, men and aircraft on their way from the United States. His Filipino soldiers never lost faith in him, but his Americans, ‘the Battling Bastards of Bataan’ as they liked to be known, called him ‘Dugout Doug’ in the (mistaken) belief that his headquarters on Corregidor was a lot safer than the trenches on Bataan. After President Quezon was persuaded not to seek terms from the Japanese and to allow himself to be evacuated to Australia, the siege went on, with rations being increasingly reduced and with mounting casualties. President Roosevelt had agreed the Germany First strategy, and there were no resources to help the Philippines. Some rather feeble attempts were made to ship in some supplies, but Japanese submarines ensured that none reached Luzon.

  Then Roosevelt had a change of heart. Having written off MacArthur, whom he still saw as a dangerous demagogue, he decided that to allow a senior American commander, an ex-chief of staff of the army, to fall into Japanese hands would be to hand them a propaganda victory that they would make much of. On 23 February he ordered MacArthur to hand over his command to Wainright and leave the Philippines. Wainright was to negotiate the surrender of his Filipino troops as he thought necessary, but the Americans were to fight on to the end. MacArthur was incensed. Much of the subsequent MacArthur legend was based on his refusal to leave until repeated direct orders from his president, but all the evidence indicates that MacArthur genuinely was prepared to die in battle leading his men from the front. Eventually, and after much protest, MacArthur and his wife and child, having declined to board a submarine (he suffered from claustrophobia), left by Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat* and were delivered 700 miles away to Mindanao, the island south of Luzon and as yet uninvaded, whence he was flown by the Royal Australian Air Force to Darwin in northern Australia. On arrival he made the speech that was to pass into the lexicon of Second World War legend. He had left the Philippines, he said, to organize resistance to the Japanese, but ‘I shall return’.† On 9 April 1942 the defenders of Bataan surrendered, many of the soldiers by now not much more than walking skeletons, while Corregidor held out until 6 May. Wainright and his troops had done well: one could not have blamed them had they accepted the hopeless situation they were in and surrendered earlier, although, in view of what was to happen to them, many must later have wished that they had fought to the death.

  Somewhat to the surprise of the American hierarchy, but not, one suspects, to the man himself, MacArthur was hailed as a hero, in a war that was so far singularly lacking in heroes, or at least any not wearing riding boots and with a ‘von’ in front of their names. Brigadier General Lord Gowrie, the Governor General of Australia, who had won the Victoria Cross in 1898 in Kitchener’s Sudan Campaign, was much taken by MacArthur and conveyed his admiration to Churchill, who was always ready to give time to a swash-buckler. As the unkind might say, it takes one mountebank to recognize another. But if you have a hero, you might as well make use of him, and, rather than MacArthur being pensioned off (he was sixty-two), in April he was given command of South-West Pacific Area, with very few troops, no ships and not much in the way of air support. Those who assumed that MacArthur would be content to remain in what was effectively a non-job, however, would be proved wrong.

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  Prior to the withdrawal from the mainland, very little had been done to prepare Singapore island for defence. The plan had been to defend this vital naval base and Britain’s richest colony in the East by holding the enemy on the Malay peninsula, and, when it became obvious that this could not be done, there were issues of morale amongst the civilian population and difficulties in recruiting civilian labour in preparation for a battle for and on the island itself. Singapore is twenty-seven miles from east to west and thirteen from north to south. It is separated from the mainland by the Strait of Johore, which varies from 2.5 miles wide at its eastern end to about 600 yards at the causeway. The town of Singapore itself is on the south of the island, while the naval base was on the north, five miles east of the causeway that crossed the Strait at its narrowest point. Singapore city had a peacetime population of around half a million, but this had been swollen by refugees to nearly twice that number, all of whom had to be fed and watered. Those fixed defences that did exist were mainly located along the southern coast as an attack from Malaya had not been considered likely. Those who insist that the fixed coastal defence guns sited around the naval base could not fire across the Strait have not looked at a map: the guns could fire at the Johore mainland but the majority of the ammunition was armour-piercing, designed to get through a ship’s armour belt before exploding – the main threat was considered to be from a fleet – so when fired at a target on land they would drive deep into the ground before detonating to little or no effect. Six of the 9.5-inch guns did have high-explosive shells, but only thirty rounds per gun, not sufficient to deal with a determined attack across the Strait. There were four airfields on the island: three in the north which could be shelled from across the water and one in the south which, while safe from artillery fire, could be bombed and, as it was built on marshy ground, required more time than usual to repair bomb craters. It was planned to create temporary airstrips that could be used, but, as the civil labourers regularly (and possibly not unreasonably) deserted when subjected to air raids, nothing very much had been done. Wavell, from ABDA command, got into trouble from Churchill when he ordered all aircraft save a token force of eight Hurricanes and eight Buffaloes to depart for Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, but to leave them where they were would only have resulted in their destruction, given Japanese superiority in the air.

  General Percival considered that he could hold Singapore for a three-month siege, and for the battle he had 85,000 men. Fifteen thousand of those were administrative troops, but even so, when the last of the reinforcements arrived under heavy air attack on the night of 4/5 February, he had forty-five battalions of infantry – fifteen Indian, thirteen British, six Australian, four ISF, three Straits Settlement Volunteer Force (SSVF), two Gurkha and two Malay – supported by field artillery and two British machine-gun battalions and one Australian. All this was considerably more than the Japanese would throw against them, but many of the battalions were under-strength, many were packed with recruits who had undergone but the briefest of basic training, and those that had fought on the mainland were badly in need of rest and recuperation, which they could not get. Although the main threat was obviously from the Malayan mainland, the possibility of a seaborne landing to the south could not be neglected, and so Percival disposed his troops in three groups to cover the whole coastline. Northern Area, which ran from the Causeway fifteen miles east to just short of Changi, was the responsibility of the Indian 11 Division and the British 18 Division under Lieutenant-General Sir Lewis Heath; Western Area under Major-General Gordon Bennett with the Australian 8 Division and the Indian 44 Brigade ran from the Causeway west all the way round to the mouth of the Sungei Jurong on the south coast, a distance of about twenty miles; and Southern Area, twenty-five miles from the Jurong to west of Changi and including Singapore city, was defended by Fortress Command under Major-General Keith Simmons, who had been Commander British Troops Shanghai until the British withdrawal, with two Malay brigades and the Straits Settlements Volunteers Brigade, or three British, two Indian, two Malay, one ISF and three SSVF battalions. The Force Reserve was 12 Indian Infantry Brigade of one British and two Indian battalions, and in addition to the main defences some of the small outlying islands were occupied.

  Civil labour was now virtually impossible to recruit and so the infantry had to dig trenches, create anti-tank obstacles and erect beach defences to prevent landing craft from coming ashore. Morale was not improved when the soldiery realized that most of the RAF had gone and the navy was in the process of departing, destroying all civilian small craft as it went. Rumour was rife, not least amongst the Chinese population, who were concerned that the island might not be defended at all and naturally worried about the prospects of a Japanese occupation, to the extent that Percival found it necessary to have a stirring call to arms published in the local papers, assuring the readership that the Japanese would be driven off. Percival now found himself inundated with messages from the Chiefs of Staff in London, who, urged on by Churchill, were trying to micro-manage the battle from 8,000 miles away. One of their more encouraging instructions was that Percival must deny Singapore to the enemy, but, if that were not possible, then a scorched-earth policy was to be implemented. Percival pointed out – again, one is amazed how he kept his temper – that it was not possible to do both: scorched earth would destroy what he needed to deny the island, and, as both he and the governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, felt somewhat guilty about having left the non-European population of Penang in the lurch, Percival was not prepared to destroy the water, electricity and sewage infrastructure. He did his best to destroy military facilities, not always successfully, and much of the reserve stocks of field-gun ammunition was eventually captured by the Japanese – they could not use it in their guns, but then neither could the British.

  Air attacks increased, as did shelling from across the Strait. It was soon apparent that Japanese intelligence was well aware of the British dispositions, and on one occasion Radio Tokyo actually advised that an Australian field hospital be moved the following day. It was duly moved, shortly before the buildings in which it had been were shelled. The oil tanks at the naval base had been partially emptied into the rivers but, when set on fire by bombing, they retained enough oil to create a blinding black pall of smoke, adding to that from the burning rubber in dockside warehouses. Air reconnaissance was not possible and the only knowledge of Japanese dispositions came from observation and from patrols sent across the Strait. As the artillery stocks were limited, Percival restricted them to twenty rounds per gun per day, far insufficient to counter the Japanese gun positions.

  General Yamashita’s plan for the conquest of Singapore was for his 5 Division and 18 Division to force a landing on the north-west corner over a frontage of 4.5 miles, avoiding the naval base, where he considered the defences were strongest, using sixteen battalions with another five in reserve plus a tank battalion that would be ferried across the Strait on pontoons, while the Imperial Guards Division would create a diversion to make the British think that the attack would be against the Changi area to the north-east, following across twenty-four hours after the main attack. In the preceding days the Japanese, with the aid of an observation balloon, directed intense artillery fire on the island, mainly on the Causeway and areas other than the ones to be attacked. During the day of 8 February it was the turn of the north-west corner to be shelled, mainly in the area of 22 Australian Brigade. By nightfall most of the telephone wires had been cut and after a short lull the bombardment continued, now even more intensely. The defenders were completely bamboozled: they assumed that the fire would soon switch back to the Causeway and the north-east, where they had convinced themselves that the attack would come, and British artillery was not called upon to shell the likely assembly areas and forming-up places that the Japanese would have to use for a crossing. At around 2230 hours landing craft were seen approaching but there were no communications to the defenders’ guns and so the landings were not immediately shelled. By the t
ime the Australian infantry had been able to use prearranged Verey light signals to bring down defensive fire, it was too late and far too little.