Torrance- Escape From Singapore
Page 31
Torrance thought of ‘Blanco’ White and the others. ‘They’ll be all right. They’re out of it now.’
‘In a Jap POW camp?’ Rossi said dubiously.
‘Look, it wouldn’t help them if we were prisoners alongside them. The only thing that helps them now is for us to win this war, and the sooner the better.’
‘You think we still can?’
‘We might be on the ropes, but—’
‘On the ropes!’ spluttered Quinn. ‘On the bloody canvas, I should say.’
‘But not out for the count!’ insisted Torrance. ‘Okay, we’ve not exactly covered ourselves in glory in the first round. Now we gotta pick ourselves up and start landing some punches.’ He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘These smokes taste nice. What brand are they?’
‘I have them custom made to my own recipe by a tobacconist’s in Bombay,’ said Varma.
‘Custom made, eh! That must set you back a pretty penny. There must be more money in chemistry than I realised.’
‘Actually I’m independently wealthy. Or rather, my father is.’
‘Oh?’ Rossi said guardedly. ‘What dis he do?’
Varma hesitated with the air of one reluctant to make a confession. ‘He’s the Maharajah of Kandhapore.’
‘What?’ spluttered Rossi. ‘Do ye mean to tell me you’re royalty?’
‘It’s not like it’s something I asked to be born into—’
‘I should bloody say it isnae! And I had so much respect for ye, thinking ye’d worked your way up frae the gutter to study chemistry, when nae doubt yer family had all the money it could wish for to put ye through school! And how did they get that wealth? I’ll tell ye: by propping up a quasi-feudal social structure that supports a capitalist society in its exploitation of the working classes…’
Torrance clapped his friend on the shoulder. ‘Maybe one day you’ll be able to overcome your irrational prejudices, Lefty.’
‘My prejudices are no’ irrational! D’ye no’ ken the whole concept of royalty is an affront to the basic dignity of every working man that—’
‘Put a sock in it, Lefty!’
‘Are ye giving me an order?’ Rossi turned to Varma. ‘Hark at him! Typical bloody NCO.’
The Indian nodded sympathetically. ‘Give them a couple of stripes and they think they’re Lord God Almighty…’
Torrance sighed. Something told him it was going to be a long voyage to Java.
Historical Notes
Churchill called it ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’. The one thing about the fall of Singapore known even to those who have never read a book about it is that one of the reasons for the fall was that the fifteen-inch naval guns were unable to rotate through 360º to fire shells at the Japanese attacking from the landward side. Anyone who has read an account of the fall of Singapore, on the other hand – one of the better ones, at least – will know that in fact the guns could turn through 360º; the problem was the kind of shells they had been provided with: armour-piercing, which were very effective against the warships of that era but not much cop against ground forces, rather than high explosive, which could have wreaked chaos amongst General Yamashita’s invading army.
But, as with so many things about ‘Fortress Singapore’, that too is not entirely true. There were two batteries of fifteen-inch naval guns in Singapore in 1942. The ones at Changi – at the eastern end of the island, where they protected the approaches to the naval base at Seletar – could indeed swivel through 360º to hurl ineffective armour-piercing shells against Yamashita’s landing forces. But such guns only had a range of 33,550 yards – a little more than nineteen miles, and certainly not long enough to threaten the beaches where Yamashita’s men first landed on the night of 8th February 1942. Those beaches were within range of the second battery, at Buona Vista on the south coast, but those were the guns that could not rotate through 360º and therefore could not have been brought to bear on the invasion force in the precious few hours when it was first trying to establish a footing on the island.
A number of explanations have been given over the years to try to account for the fall of Singapore. The first explanation was that the plucky British were let down by cowardly Australians. It is easy to see why British officers were tempted to make this baseless accusation: a lot of Australian soldiers were seen marching down Bukit Timah Road in the last few days, so it was assumed they were running away from the fighting. Some of them undoubtedly were: units like the 2/19th Australian Infantry, which had proved their courage at Parit Sulong only a couple of weeks earlier, had suffered heavy losses, and had had the gaps in their ranks plugged by rookies who had not even had time to complete their basic training, never mind to acclimatise to the tropics. It was not to be wondered if some of them broke under the relentless onslaught of the Japanese (as many British and Indian troops likewise did).
Many of them did not break, however, but held on in pockets near the western coast, cut off and surrounded by the Japanese, who pushed past them in their determination to reach their first objective, Tengah Airfield. Most of the troops seen marching down Bukit Timah Road over the next few days were obeying their orders, which were that if they found themselves cut off from their units, they were to head to the ANZAC Club where they could be rallied and led back into battle. Heaven knows who selected a location so far behind the Allied lines as the rallying point for the Australians. One suspects it was the self-proclaimed military genius General Gordon Bennett, the commanding officer of the Eighth Australian Division, who slipped out of Singapore Harbour – snivelling like a little girl according to one eyewitness account – while other generals amongst the defenders preferred to stay with their men even if it meant spending the rest of the war in captivity. I don’t mean to suggest I would have behaved any differently from Gordon Bennett if I had been in Singapore on that dark day, but I am not a general and have never held any pretensions to being one.
Another door at which the blame has been laid is that of General Sir Arthur Percival, the overall commander. Percival was the victim of a brilliant bluff by General Yamashita and his staff, who managed to convince him the Japanese were going to cross the Strait of Johore on the north-east coast of Singapore, largely by having large numbers of commandeered lorries drive east along the north shore of the strait, night after night, with their headlamps on, giving the impression vast quantities of men and materiel were being amassed at a place on the north shore opposite the coast between Seletar and Serangoon. What the observers on the British side of the strait did not pick up on was that once the empty trucks had reached the supposed unloading point, they simply switched off their headlights and drove back the way they had come. No one on the British side of the island seems to have carried out a reconnaissance, which the Australians did on the other side: if they had done, they would have found nothing; unlike the Australians, who did carry out a couple of reconnaissances and found large concentrations of troops, but because they failed to discover any boats, their reports to Percival’s staff were ignored. Yamashita’s bluff worked so perfectly that for three days after the Japanese had begun the invasion of the island, Percival failed to move any of the British troops from the north-east side of the island to where the thinly spread Australians were fighting a losing battle, he was so convinced that the landings at Sarimbun were merely a diversion from the main attack, which was still to come. By the time he realised his error, it was too late: the Japanese had established their foothold on the island, and Singapore was doomed.
Percival’s defenders have pointed out that due to neglect of defensive works in Malaya, the failure of all but a few units (the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Australians) to train for jungle warfare, and the absence of any tanks on the British side, the Malaya campaign was lost before Percival was appointed to the command there. That is probably true. It is also true that while the actual number of Allied troops garrisoned in Singapore when the Japanese made their attack was far superi
or to the numbers that Yamashita had at his command, a significant proportion of the Allied troops were support troops, not suitable for combat.
Sunday 15th February was not the end of the British Empire but it was what Churchill might have called the beginning of the middle of the end. The British would return to Malaya in 1945, after the Japanese surrender. But that return could only ever be temporary. Like Kipling’s Kafiristanis, the Malays had seen the British bleed and learned they were not gods nor devils but only men.
We Brits tend to get very cocky about the fact we were able to crack Germany’s Enigma code and often overlook the fact the Americans had their own signals intelligence coup. The US Army’s Signals Intelligence Service cracked the Japanese diplomatic service’s code by reverse-engineering the machines that produced it. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the Americans gave us two of these decoders in exchange for Ultra intelligence gleaned from Enigma intercepts. One of these machines was kept at Bletchley Park, the other was sent to the wireless intercept station (‘Y-Station’) at Kranji in Singapore. It never arrived, however: en route, it was transferred from a Royal Naval battleship to a merchant freighter at Durban. The master of the freighter claimed he had delivered it to the navy at Singapore and even had a receipt for his pains, but the navy denied all knowledge. If it did arrive in Singapore, it would have done so about the same time the men and women of the Far East Combined Bureau – an outstation of the Government Code and Cypher School, the forerunner of today’s GCHQ – were being evacuated to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known. Had the Japanese found that machine when they marched into Singapore a few weeks later and recognised it for what it was, they would not have been using that code fourteen months later when Admiral Yamamoto made an inspection tour of the South Pacific in April 1943. The Americans would never have learned the admiral’s full itinerary and thus a squadron of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings would not have been able to ambush the Mitsubishi G4M bomber transporting Yamamoto to the Solomon Islands, depriving the Japanese of their most brilliant admiral.
Jungle War
Torrance: Blitz in Malaya
Torrance: Escape from Singapore
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo
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Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2020
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ISBN 9781788636759
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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