It seemed incomprehensible that the Australian, Indian and British brigades defending the northern front would be driven back in three days from Bukit Panjang to Bukit Timah, the last line of defence, but such was the effect of a totally confused Command issuing unrealistic orders. Eyewitnesses noted Australian soldiers looting, throwing away their guns, hot-footing it to the city centre or the harbour.27 Hutchinson of the Johore Volunteer Engineers spoke from the heart: ‘We were very cold, very dirty and very depressed – everyone was running away and leaving us, and we hadn’t even seen a Jap.’28 The city itself was clogged with bomb debris and aimless human traffic. All the hospitals had been shelled and were overflowing with casualties; St Andrew’s Cathedral, a temporary dressing station, was crammed with wounded. Yet, to Tom Kitching’s disgust, everywhere there were soldiers doing absolutely nothing. By Tuesday 10 February Malaya Command knew the situation was irredeemable, but they ignored a Japanese invitation to capitulate. Churchill was still urging the 18th Division to fight to the last man and make its name in history.29 Governor Shenton Thomas resorted to the obvious piety – ‘We are all in the hands of God …’ This ‘exceeded all others for its sheer fatuity’ remarked Morrison of The Times.30 The next day, the 11th, after telling General Percival that the Army must fight to the bitter end, the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, General Wavell, flew out of the beleaguered island.
The option to stay or to go was not open to everyone – certainly not to the bewildered Asian and Eurasian population, nor to many of the European civilians in uniform, the infirm, the over-fifties and the old hands who had lived in Malaya since before the Great War. For the likes of old ‘Abang’ Braddon, now an octogenarian, and the survivors of the pioneer generation, T. E. Edmet, who came out in 1898, F. W. Douglas, there since 1895, R. H. Young, doyen of Malayan surveyors, approaching ninety, who first arrived in 1875, and H. W. H. Stephens, who founded the Cold Storage and the Royal Yacht Club and was now ninety-one, there was little point in running away. And there were a number of other pre-1914 veterans not many years younger, such as E. N. T. Cumming, Jack le Doux, Edwin Brown, Dugan Hampshire, Captain Barton, Captain Ramsay, and the elderly Archdeacon Graham White and his wife, a sweet, frail lady, for whom home and duty lay for ever in Malaya. On the other hand, members of the press corps were advised to leave on the 11th, the day on which the transmitters of the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation were destroyed and Wavell ordered the final evacuation of naval and air-force staff to the Dutch East Indies.
Two days later that order to leave was extended to key service and civilian personnel, including the two naval and air-force supremos, the peacetime head of the Public Works Department, the newly appointed Colonial Secretary, Hugh Fraser, Brigadier Paris of 12th Brigade, Charles Moses, head of the Australian Broadcasting Company; and the Australian commander, Major-General Gordon Bennett (the latter leaving in controversial circumstances, without General Percival’s prior knowledge).31 Another group who left on the night of the 11th were the Singapore Harbour Board staff, who managed to avoid the minefields and reach Batavia in the old Penang ferry. However, not all European officials who were given the green light to leave did so; some still refused to abandon their posts and accepted the consequences. Dr Philip Bloom and his American wife, Freddy, an auxiliary nurse, who were married during an air raid on 6 February, decided to stay as a matter of conscience. Constance Sleep, who worked in the Blood Transfusion Service, decided that to leave when the demand for blood was ever more urgent would be to desert the very people she was there to serve.32 Tom Kitching also stayed, though, like countless others, he was now without a home, having been forced out of his beautiful residence in Mount Rosie Road by the approaching bombardment.
Thursday 12 February was a day of wild rumour, indicative of the febrile atmosphere that prevailed. As a precaution, the Governor ordered the removal of all alcoholic spirits, to calm the soldiery. In the evening Kitching went down to the Singapore Club. It was packed out with new arrivals for what proved to be a grand reunion of old friends on an historic evening:
the last stengahs are being quaffed prior to the destruction of stocks. They have over 200 cases of whisky alone, which must be got rid of … The Club of course is absolutely filled to capacity with refugee members from upcountry and Singapore members washed out of hearth and home by the ever-advancing wave of the hordes of Nippon: all the fossils of Malaya are there, paleozoic (Abang [Braddon]), mesozoic (E. N. T. [Cumming]) and cainozoic (me). All the boys have disappeared, except one faithful retainer, dumping out stengahs behind the Bar, with Broadbent, the Club Steward perspiringly assisting. And what stengahs! You still go through the formality of signing for them … but you can have ‘em any strength you like, it matters not, one, two, three, four fingers, take what you want, the rest will be down the drains and into the Singapore River before noon tomorrow.33
It was an astounding scene, enacted on a day when law and order had disintegrated, Government House was subjected to heavy shelling, and the Japanese 5th Division was advancing from the Bukit Timah Road towards the outskirts of Singapore town, now ringed by fires.
In the next few hours orders went out to destroy the oil tanks on Pulau Bukum and sabotage Singapore’s strategic reserves. Thick black smoke filled the entire sky, turning day into night; paradoxically, it was visible 120 miles away. Down at the docks the mood was one of sauve qui peut. Armed and drunken deserters forcibly boarded the Empire Star, a cargo ship designed to take sixteen passengers but now crammed with 2,154 servicemen and nurses, preparing to leave under naval escort.34 Loading also on the l2th were the ill-fated Vyner Brooke, once the pride of the Straits Steamship Company’s Kuching run, taking on service people, women and children, and sixty-four Australian nursing sisters, and the Chiang Bee with Robert Scott on board – as Director of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Ministry of Information he knew he would be a wanted man.
There were still an estimated fifty vessels in Singapore waters – though some were scuttled in these last hours to deny the enemy – when the call came on Friday the 13th for the final evacuation.35 The order was to move under cover of darkness and to lie low under camouflage by day. A group of Straits Steamship and Mansfield’s staff were told to take out two of the Company’s remaining 75-tonners, Rantau and Relau, with Chief Marine Superintendent Baddeley and his assistant, Captain Chamberlin, in command. Joining Captain Baddeley on the Rantau were Singapore’s Chief Pilot, Captain McAlister, the Superintendent Engineer Les Froggatt and Bill Price, who had supervised both boats’ construction. In the heat of Singapore’s Dunkirk no records were made of this flotilla, but among the little ships were the Chiang Tay, the Tien Kwang, the Kwang Wu, the Mata Hari (a coaster used to plying the Malacca Straits between Singapore and Belawan, now full of women, children and Harbour Board officials), the Hung Jao (a customs boat from the Yangtse, carrying sixty officers from Military Headquarters at Fort Canning) and a fast naval patrol launch, the Fairmile (which would take a complement of forty servicemen, including Rear-Admiral Spooner and Air Vice-Marshal Pulford).
Throughout that day, Friday the 13th, nearly a thousand civilians – men, women and children – waited to embark in glaring heat at the water’s edge. At one point Japanese planes roared over dropping bombs; the crowd flattened, a great human wave lying upon each other. Afterwards the survivors picked themselves up from among the dead and wounded to continue with the waiting game. Then, Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown remembered:
A distant sniper from the roof of some high building was sending an occasional spray into them with a ‘rat-tat-tat-tat’ … [But] he was certainly not destroying the morale of the waiting crowd. Gramophones were playing – I shall never forget ‘Violons clans la nuit’ as long as I live – and babies were being fed.36
The captain of the Kuala took on some 600 passengers. Half were women and children; the rest were RAF personnel, Volunteers such as Naval Reservist and former customs officer Sub-Lieutenant Stuart Sim, doctors and nurses like Dr Margare
t Thompson and Nora Kitching, and most of the Public Works Department, including the popular G. J. O’Grady and Major Nunn and his wife. With them, too, were members of the Hartley family, who had made the long trek down from Kuala Ketua on the Thai border. They had been trying in vain to get passports for some time when, suddenly, 13 February seemed to be their lucky day. Clutching pass forms, they headed for the docks. Thirteen-year-old Ken recalled how he and his brother Gordon got past the trooper armed with a Tommy gun, and with their mother, grandmother, aunt and crippled uncle boarded the Kuala. ‘My father didn’t even try; he knew where he stood. A couple of my brothers were there to see us off … that was the last we saw of the men of the family … We looked back and could see Singapore. It was just flames.’37
In the sweltering heat and darkness of that Black Friday, the motley flotilla headed out to sea. Bringing up the rear of the armada was the little Kedah, beloved by countless Europeans whom it had taken on many happy trips to race meetings in Penang before the war. The Kedah, converted to a naval auxiliary vessel, had been bombed on entering the harbour, was shelled at the wharf, and would be repeatedly bombed again at sea by as many as eighty-five enemy planes – ‘the most fearsome five hours I have ever experienced … I was absolutely petrified’, admitted Mrs Muriel Reilly, the Governor’s cipher officer. But Kedah defied the odds, dodging enemy ships to reach Tanjong Priok, the port of Batavia, largely due to the cool skill of Captain Sinclair.38 Blue Funnel’s steamship Gorgon, which had left on the 10th, and the cargo ship Empire Star, which formed the advance guard of the mass evacuation, also endured the full onslaught of Japanese dive-bombing, the latter receiving three direct hits before she limped into Batavia, and thence to Fremantle. In the capable hands of Captain Marriott, the Gorgon withstood being bombed and machine-gunned and also miraculously reached Western Australia.
However, in the disorganized evacuation, the Singapore authorities took no account of the warning from Allied intelligence in Java that Vice-Admiral Ozawa’s squadron had sailed on 10 February to cover the Japanese attack on southern Sumatra and Java and was steaming towards the Banka Straits. In contrast, the British ships, patched up and grossly overcrowded, could make only slow progress. In the menacingly clear dawn of 14 February a number were visibly strung out across the Riau-Linggi archipelago. They were caught in mid-morning by forty Japanese planes, which deployed a relentless hail of bombs and bullets, and in the next five hours eleven boats were destroyed. The Kwang Wu, lying off Pompong Island, sank in five minutes. The Chiang Bee was caught by an enemy destroyer, and, although a group led by Robert Scott left by lifeboat to try to parley with the Japanese captain, their approach was ignored and the ship was blow up. Cunyngham-Brown on the Hung Jao stopped to save some badly wounded men from the Chiang Bee. Firing the single gun on the foredeck was a prominent planter and cricketer from Negri Sembilan; with the ship listing sharply, he went down with it, the gun still blazing. The sole survivor from the Chiang Tay, which blew up around 11 a.m. in the same attack, was another well-known planter, Puckridge, from Damansara Estate near Klang.39
Meanwhile, the Kuala had also been caught off Pompong Island. At 9 a.m. a spotter plane flew by. Ken Hartley saw it, and ‘I got a ringing lip across the ear for creating panic,’ he recalled. But by eleven the Japanese were there in force, and the boy watched the horror unfold.
They flew really low, and you could see the bomb bays opening … One of the bombs went straight down through the bridge to the engine room. The boilers exploded, which blew the Lewis gun off the bridge and wounded the Captain very severely. It was pandemonium. My mother took her life-belt off, tied it on me and shoved me over the side. I can only remember being terrified. I bobbed along and lost contact with everyone. So far as I knew, I was the only one alive – and then the second wave of aircraft were back. I remember those fantastic waves, twenty or thirty feet high, immediately after the bomb had exploded.
There was a massive wall of water, and shrapnel whizzing through it … At some stage I lost consciousness.40
Another survivor recalled the scene as men, women and children fought for their lives.
Between the islands and the phosphorescent sea floated boats and rafts laden with people; and here and there, upheld by his life belt, the lone swimmer was striving to make land. All around the rafts and the swimmers were dismembered limbs, dead fish and wreckage drifting with the currents; below, in all probability, were the sharks; and above at intervals the winged machines of death.41
After the morning’s crushing attack the little Kuala continued to burn until she sank under a canopy of black smoke at 4.30 p.m. Some of her survivors were later picked up from Pompong and other nearby islands by native craft or passing boats. On the second night a Chinese-owned launch, the Tanjong Pinang, commanded by a young New Zealand Volunteer Reservist, was diverted to Pompong to collect the priority evacuees – 180 women and children and twenty wounded – who braved a stretch of jagged rocks in pitch tropical darkness to reach the ship. It is thought that Nora Kitching was among them, a mother of three, who had worked tirelessly at the General Hospital and was the last of the Survey Department’s wives to leave Singapore. Probably, too, this was the ship which took Mrs Hartley: ‘Gordon told me that Mother played hell trying to stay behind but she was forced on board with the rest of the party.’42 Their respite was tragically brief. The next night, caught like a trapped hare in the glaring beam of a searchlight, the Tanjong Pinang was slammed by shells. There was a massive explosion, and instantly ‘the ship was a ghastly shambles of mutilated bodies’. As she went down, ‘the cries and screams of the wounded, the helpless and the dying were quite terrible’, a survivor recalled.43 Almost all were lost, including Nora Kitching, Violet Samuel of Penang, and, it would seem, Mrs Hartley, the planter’s wife and mother of Gordon and Ken.44
As massed Japanese warships and aircraft homed in on the natural passage of the Banka Straits – ‘Bomb Alley’ as it came to be known – the chances of survival for those fleeing Singapore fast diminished. In an attempt to escape from a formation of Japanese cruisers, the Fairmile, with Rear-Admiral Spooner and Air Vice-Marshal Pulford aboard, ran aground on Sempang, an inhospitable, malarial island some twenty miles from Banka. Helplessly shipwrecked, their prospects of survival rapidly decreased. Half the forty-two-strong party died, including the two senior British commanders. Meanwhile, on Saturday the 14th the Vyner Brooke was approaching the Banka Straits when nine enemy dive-bombers scored several direct hits. The ship was soon ablaze, her lifeboats smashed; she sank in forty minutes, leaving the wounded to drown and the survivors to swim for the Banka shore. By nightfall they had dragged themselves on to a beach near Muntok and set up a rough camp. Here they were discovered by a Japanese patrol on Monday the 16th. The sexes were separated. Officers and men were blindfolded and taken round a small headland where they were bayoneted to death. Twenty-one nurses were made to walk into the sea and machine-gunned. The atrocity might never have become known but for the testimony of two survivors, a stoker from the Prince of Wales and an Australian nursing sister.45 At much the same time the Mata Hari was fortunate to escape the fate of the Tanjong Pinang. Having survived several air attacks, she was lit by searchlight and ordered to surrender and unload her passengers on Banka Island.
The Straits Steamship boats Rantau and Relau were also saved from destruction by a twist of fate. Captain Chamberlain recalled that on Monday the 16th
as daylight came we saw a large cruiser which signalled us to stop immediately, and as the light got better we found ourselves in the midst of a large Japanese convoy of vessels … bound for the occupation of Palembang [in southern Sumatra]. We were off the northern tip of Banka Island. We considered the scuttling of Relau but we had so many sick and wounded on board that it was decided against.46
Taken prisoner by a boarding party, the Relau’s crew were disembarked on Muntok’s long finger of a jetty, where they met up with their comrades from the Rantau, who had had the same experience. ‘
We got as far as Banka. I remember we woke up in the morning to find ourselves under the guns of a Jap cruiser,’ Bill Price recalled. ‘They’d have blown us out of the water but they were too close. So they sent a boarding party instead. There was nothing to be done but to take it on the chin.’47 They were followed into Muntok some hours lacer by a third former Straits ship, the minesweeper HMS Tapah.
Out of the whole flotilla which left Singapore between 11 and 14 February, only six emerged unscathed in the region of Banka Island, to be captured on 16 or 17 February. In this desperate coda to the battle of Singapore, some 3,000 people had died at sea and the vast majority of the little ships that carried them lay at the bottom of the ocean.
On land, too, lives were snuffed out. The Indian army base hospital at Tyersall Park was hit on 11 February and almost 200 soldiers in the wooden huts were burned to death in the ensuing firestorm. As the Japanese net closed ever tighter around Singapore’s perimeter, pressing on the west around Mount Faber, another of the many atrocities of the war occurred. On Saturday the l4th (‘St. Valentine’s Day! What a mockery!’ wrote Tom Kitching, on hearing that 12,000 people had been killed the day before)48 enemy shells exploded an ammunition dump at Alexandra Barracks. The Japanese believed they had been fired on from the site, so they overran the Barracks and the adjacent Military Hospital. There they proceeded to bayonet or shoot patients and medical staff, doctors and orderlies, in cold blood.49
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