Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  However, these irritations made no difference to the effort put in by Volunteers, nor did they affect the mounting crisis as the New Year approached.51 Singapore had enjoyed a phoney peace since its first blitz, but now, as if to warn Malaya Command that the campaign was moving up a gear, Japanese planes appeared out of a starry, moonlit tropical sky to usher in the New Year with bombs. ‘I was foaming with rage at them,’ observed a helpless Muriel Reilly.52 At the same time the Indian brigade holding Kuantan (and its airfield) withdrew too late into west Pahang, suffering heavy casualties. The threat from west-coast infiltration was also serious, and FMS Volunteers Hay and Soper found themselves involved. Hay, now attached to the 73rd Royal Artillery, was moved to Kuala Selangor: ‘We heard that a Jap convoy was approaching the mouth of the river at Kuala Selangor’; in the subsequent barrage, several boats were hit. Then ‘our officers, who of course knew the country, told the Regulars that the party repulsed at Kuala Selangor would probably try to land at Sabak Bernam. No notice was taken of this, and that is exactly what they did. The landing was unopposed. Meanwhile there had been another landing at Telok Anson.’53

  As the situation changed and casualties increased, many Volunteers found themselves being redeployed. Soper, now Company Sergeant Major with a mobile light-arms patrol, was south of Port Dickson when there was ‘a brand new “flap” … Not only had the Japs landed a force up the Bernam river, and so threatened the flank of the Slim River and Tanjong Malim positions, but they had also got in at Port Swettenham still further South, and were threatening Kuala Lumpur from the West.’54 It was known that, with their good road systems, the states of Selangor and Negri Sembilan would be difficult to hold. Also, ‘Malacca has no defences, and no troops,’ a civil servant’s wife casually told Tom Kitching, ‘in fact nothing to stop the Japanese walking in at their own sweet will.’55 The Barnes family did not wait to find out the truth of this: they shut their home and left on 6 January. In that first disastrous week of 1942 the battles of Kampar and Slim River sealed the fate of central and eastern Malaya. ‘Slim River was one of the few places where we had the Japs trapped,’ Norman Bewick protested. ‘It’s the coastal plain, you might say. They couldn’t run that way because of the mountains, and they couldn’t run that way because of the sea, and we had them really tied up there; but they got through finally by our withdrawal, withdrawal, withdrawal … They didn’t come down the main road, they came down the jungle.’56

  Last-minute efforts were made to deny the enemy soft supplies: ‘We are not going to defend KL and in pursuance of the “scorched earth” policy X helped to destroy 51,000,000 cigarettes, $50,000 worth of ‘whisky, 800 tons of meat in the Cold Storage,’ Tom Kitching recorded.57 However, the 11th Indian Division was decimated at Slim River and sent reeling; the survivors fell back 125 miles to Johore, leaving Kuala Lumpur, the federal capital, to be taken by the Japanese on 11 December without a shot being fired.58

  The next stand was to be along the line from Muar to Gemas or Segamat on the western flank. Tom Kitching had doubts about its efficacy. Although ‘it should be possible: the Muar river is a big obstacle anywhere near its mouth … there’s always this “infiltration” bogey … they can infiltrate anywhere, through jungle, rubber, through anything. What I fail to understand is why infiltration should all be on the one side. Why can’t we infiltrate in the reverse direction?’59 The trend, however, was irreversible, despite a build-up of reinforcements and the assurances of the Australian commander, Gordon Bennett, that his men were itching to get at the enemy. By 18 January the word in Singapore was that ‘the Australian Imperial Forces are fighting at Gemas; the Japs have crossed the Muar River at Muar! It seems incredible …’ By the 24th the line had moved again: ‘Official, we are holding the Japs at points north of Kluang and Mersing and at Batu Pahat’; and ‘the Japs were fussed then, really fussed’. But two days later ‘We are out of Batu Pahat … Jap vessels observed off Endau – why don’t we bomb them?’ On the 28th, ‘We are now fighting at Rengit, south of Senggarang and Ayer Hiram …’60 Kitching was unaware of a desperate sea evacuation, spread over the nights of 26-8 January, by the gunboats Dragonfly and Scorpion and a cluster of small craft from Singapore manned by Volunteers of the Naval Reserve, who picked up 2,700 British and Indian troops from the mangrove swamps south of Batu Pahat. In truth, the Japanese had cut through Johore ‘like a knife through cheese’.61

  On the night of 27-8 January, Lance-Bombardier M. C. Hay slept on the grass in front of the State Palace at Johore Bahru, where he had once been Acting General Adviser Johore. Until recently the traffic had been two-way, creating huge congestion in the town as reinforcements pushed north past lines of southbound ambulances and carloads of civilian refugees in search of friendly hospitality. Together they created – in Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown’s phrase – the atmosphere of some insane tea-party. Hay’s unit crossed to Singapore on the morning of the 28th. He was genuinely puzzled about the Allied retreat in which he had taken part. ‘We have retired over fifty miles from a strong position, which we had been told to hold at all costs, without having seen an enemy or fired more than one shot. We retired in perfect safety. The whole army with the exception … of one brigade passed the bottleneck of the causeway without air attack … with what object?’62 Hay was lucky: there were, in fact, formations of lost men, stragglers, wounded, ambush survivors, scattered throughout Johore, some of whom never made it back. Kitching’s diary recorded, ‘Thursday, Jan. 29th. Johore Bahru has been evacuated and blitzed …’63 That evening Lieutenant Soper found himself retreating across the Johore Causeway for the second time in a fortnight.64 After Guy Hutchinson’s Johore Volunteer Engineers had prepared the key demolition targets around Kota Tinggi, Australian troops blew the communications on the night of 30-1 January. Hutchinson’s men were among the last Volunteers to cross the Causeway, and they were surprised how easy it was. ‘We … prepared to fight our way to Singapore … All we saw was one Red Cap who waved us over.’65 ‘Saturday, 31 January: The Naval Base is evacuated … So much for all the millions spent on it … We expect the causeway to be blown up at any moment now,’ Tom Kitching wrote.66 By day ‘A Jap observation balloon was up in Johore having a good look over Singapore Island’;67 at dusk, constant artillery fire boomed in a blood-red sky. Years later a war correspondent relived the emotion of those last hours:

  I saw the Argylls coming back across the Causeway by moonlight, leading their wounded. I don’t know how many of them got out of it. Perhaps one tenth of them. One man was just able to keep the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ on the bagpipes. Coming through the moonlight in the last stage of the

  battle …68

  That battle for mainland Malaya was over, but the battle for Singapore was about to begin.69

  16

  An Inexcusable Betrayal

  From the start of hostilities the residents of Singapore had been buoyed by a mood of false optimism. One of Shenton Thomas’s closest office staff, Mrs Muriel Reilly, insisted that ‘the Governor had repeatedly assured me Singapore would not fall’; and she believed him.1 To the European community there was still an air of unreality about events on the peninsula. In mid-January, Alex Cullen, a municipal surveyor, watching ‘an eagle soaring majestically and unconcerned away high in the sky’, took comfort from the sight. Remarkably, nature was undisturbed. ‘In the garden the golden orioles and kingfishers flash and wheel in their glorious colour.’2

  Thanks to Percival’s conviction that to fortify the shores on the Johore Straits would somehow undermine morale, the north side of the island had no defences. When Churchill finally learned of this dire news on 19 January, he was horrified and issued a ten-point action plan requiring the whole male population to be conscripted for defence work. He warned his Chiefs of Staff in Whitehall that ‘this will be one of the greatest scandals that could possibly be exposed’.3 It was little wonder that the planter Guy Hutchinson was stunned when, immediately after he and his weary section of engineers had crossed from Johore
, they were ordered to start setting up barbed-wire entanglements along the beaches facing the Scudai river. ‘I nearly wept,’ he said. ‘We had expected a rest – and we were told the Island was a fortress!’4 Though they carried out the task to order, the machine-gun posts intended to punctuate the barbed wire were never built. Others were equally shocked. When the Australian Prime Minister learned that events might force a withdrawal from Singapore, he sent Churchill a stern warning of the strategic implications if this ‘central fortress in the system of the Empire’ were to be allowed to fall: it would be seen throughout the Southern Hemisphere as ‘an inexcusable betrayal’.5

  In the second half of January the raids on the island had intensified, the naval base and the aerodromes of Seletar, Sembawang and Tengah receiving the heaviest pasting. In Muriel Reilly’s words, ‘for weeks there had been huge oil fires burning and the whole of Singapore was covered by a pall of black smoke. I would awaken up at night almost choking.’6 Tom Kitching kept a tally of the casualties resulting from the indiscriminate bombing of the town – 150 on the 17th; 50 killed, 150 injured on the 20th; 304 killed, 625 injured on the 21st; 383 killed on the 25th; rising by February to around 2,000 casualties a day – yet despite these figures he felt assured that ‘the civilian morale in Singapore is magnificent. Asiatics of every race are doing their duty most nobly’, while European civilians laboured equally beside them in the air-raid, fire and medical services.7 However, the civil-defence problem was exacerbated by the acute congestion in the built-up areas. Singapore’s population had mushroomed to over a million with the influx of thousands of refugees of all races from the mainland. In addition to the whole rank and file of the defending army, all the top brass of the armed services, civil servants from the Malay Straits, Penang and Malacca, members of the specialist services, planters from all over the peninsula, and the whole tin-mining and commercial community, most with wives and families, were now packed into the island. ‘They came across the Johore Causeway like the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea into an already crowded Singapore,’ remarked the architect Kenneth Brundle.8

  The government, however, was dilatory about evacuating women, children and elderly civilians.9 In 1940 and 1941 a number of European wives, among them Marjorie Soper, Dorothy Cullen, Peggie Snell, Sylvia Cannell, Edith Warin and Ursula Holttum, had chosen to move to Australia, mainly to settle their children into school. When May Froggatt and Kathleen Price decided to make for Perth in December 1941, a number of their acquaintances felt it was premature to leave their husbands, so that there were still berths available to Australia to the end of the year.10 But the movement of non-European wives was hampered by red tape: it was not until the situation appeared critical that the Australian government, for instance, relaxed immigration restrictions. Meanwhile, one group of women had been singled out for compulsory evacuation and were treated with unnecessary officiousness by the authorities. When the refugee train from Penang reached Singapore, typewritten notices were handed out to passengers, indicating a government order. Women without children were required to remain in Singapore; women with children – ‘non-effectives’, to use the bureaucratic language, who included Mabel Price and her sons – were kept locked inside the train for at least three hours, receiving refreshments from the hands of agitated friends through the carriage windows until they were driven by officials to the wharf and herded on to an old Eastern & Australian steamship, the Nellore, bound for Java. According to a subsequent report, ‘There was no appeal. None of the women knew anyone in Batavia: they had, for themselves and their babies, only the money and the clothes that they could take in their suitcases, and some of them had lost their suitcases at the embarkation at Penang.’11 As a concession, each woman was allowed to notify her husband by telegram that they were leaving for an unknown destination. The bewildered Price family were confined daily to the hold as far as Batavia. At dusk Mabel took her two sons above, and they ‘slept on the deck right beside my lifeboat, the one allotted if misfortune befell us. It wasn’t comfortable sleeping on a hard, draughty deck but I felt we had a better chance of rescue should we have been torpedoed.’12 From Batavia they were shipped on to Australia.

  As the Japanese continued to advance down the peninsula in January 1942 the trickle of escapees became a flood. The Barnes, Pallister and Webb families were among those who left aboard the Blue Funnel ship Charon on 8 January 1942. For Geoffrey and Ken Barnes, due back at their Australian school in February, the war put a question mark over everything: ‘We had no idea what the future had in store or when we should be together again. Mother, bless her, was wonderfully self-possessed and calm. Many were not; and tearful, agitated wives, fretful children and strained faces were to be seen everywhere along the rail facing the dockside as the ship slowly drew away.’13 The Charon reached Fremantle on 18 January after an uneventful voyage, but schoolboy Derek Allton, returning to Western Australia on the SS Orion, packed with women and children, recalled the dread of air and sea attack. ‘Some are still “swithering”, not knowing whether it is safer on the sea or the land,’ Alex Cullen observed in Singapore.14 Those who had been in Australia for some time and had been keeping abreast of events by letter and radio found the news profoundly depressing. ‘I imagined that a great stand would be made when they [the Japanese] got down to the Straits of Johore, and that a great battle would be fought for the city,’ asserted Ursula Holttum, wife of the Director of Singapore’s Botanical Gardens, knowing that her husband was trapped there.15

  By the end of January, 7,000 European women and children had left Singapore (more than twice the number of Indian and Chinese), many hoping to get back to England or at least to India.16 Among the last ships to take the westward route via Colombo and the Cape of Good Hope were four converted troopships which had arrived on 28 January with 12,000 soldiers. Two days later, amid constant alerts and with the docks ablaze, ‘an indescribable scrum’ of passengers boarded the Duchess of Bedford and the Empress of Japan. The Empress sailed in the rainy hours of darkness, carrying 1,221 evacuees, some of whom have already figured in these pages: Katharine Sim, Joan Kitching, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Tom and Nora Kitching, Guy Hutchinson’s wife, Jessie, and their baby daughter, Mrs Edington, wife of the Johore tin-mine manager, Nancy Madoc and her son David, Valerie Walker and her mother and sister, from Kampar Estate near Ipoh, Phyllis Benton and her young son from Negri Sembilan, and the Vowler family of Batang Malaka Estate. Eventually the liner reached England safely by way of South Africa.17 Five days later her sister ship, the Empress of Asia, bringing last-minute reinforcements into Singapore, met a different fate. Already bedevilled by rumbles of mutiny, the troopship was dive-bombed in a ferocious Japanese air attack off Pasir Panjang on the island’s south coast. It was a major emergency, and Lieutenant Cunyngham-Brown, Malayan Civil Service and Volunteer Naval Reserve, would never forget that day, spent ‘hauling soldiers out of the sea – some of them without a stitch of clothing – and landing them at Collyer Quay’.18 In the rush to save the survivors, their kit together with essential equipment for the British 18th Division was lost, and with the burning wreck of the Empress went the hope of escape for 2,000 of Singapore’s trapped civilians.

  Yet, despite the intensifying air raids and the boom and stench of demolition at the naval base, the first few days of February seemed strangely uneventful to those who had battled their way down the peninsula.19 ‘Nothing happens,’ recorded Bombardier Oppenheim, the former Ipoh accountant, on Saturday the 7th: ‘A few raids … P.T. – reading – arguing – drinking …’20 Troops were encamped haphazardly wherever there were defensible positions with some space and shelter from rains. Periodically they were subjected to intense shelling, and one close pounding brought home to John Soper ‘that dreadful experience of stark terror’.21 But in his last letter to his wife Alex Cullen was bullish: ‘It will take a whole lot more than the enemy has been able to do so far.’22 After a peaceful night, Sunday 8 February dawned fair; ‘it seems incredible’, thou
ght Tom Kitching, ‘that 15 miles away 100,000 men are waiting to kill each other, armed with every inconceivable engine of destruction’.23 In the afternoon, the Japanese artillery began to soften up the north-west sector of the island. By evening a major bombardment was under way – a prelude to invasion. ‘Hell breaks loose. Shells, shells and more shells all night long,’ wrote Bombardier Oppenheim summarily.24

  Having gained a foothold on the island of Pulau Ubin in the eastern sector of the Johore Straits, the Japanese launched their main assault near Sungei Kranji, in the north-west. A breakdown in communication meant the British defence plan to highlight ‘the killing area’ with searchlights failed; and between dark and daylight 23,000 Japanese troops landed, to begin skilfully infiltrating between the Allied sectors. In twenty-four hours Tengah aerodrome was in enemy hands. Soon after the RAF ground staff abandoned Seletar, the north-eastern airfield. Yet, after wandering round Seletar to locate some guns on Monday the 9th, Bombardier Oppenheim, with surreal timing, was granted a day’s leave to have his hair cut at Robinson’s, where everything was normal: ‘the place is full of folk having elevenses’.25 Tom Kitching, meanwhile, was mulling over demands for his subscriptions for Singapore Golf Club and Swimming Club while shells whistled overhead, noting drily that ‘they should cut down the sub when you get absolutely nix for it!’26