In the darkest days of World War II,
when disaster after disaster almost overwhelmed the Allies, it took a lot to
shake a leader like Winston Churchill. But when the news arrived that the fortress
of Singapore had surrendered to the Japanese on February 15, 1942, along with
eighty thousand British troops, even Churchill was stunned.
“He felt it was a disgrace,” recalled Lord Moran,
the prime minister’s physician. “It left a scar on his mind. One evening,
months later, when he was sitting in his bathroom enveloped in a towel, he
stopped drying himself and gloomily surveyed the floor: ‘I cannot get over
Singapore,’ he said sadly.”
Seventy-five years later, it is difficult
to conceive of just how devastating the fall of Singapore was. It was the
largest surrender in British history, a humiliation to British arms that would
linger for years in the minds of friends and foes alike. It was not just the
capitulation of the hub of Britain’s Asian empire, the “Gibraltar of the East”
as the British public had been assured. Even worse, it had been conquered by a
Japanese army inferior in numbers—and, by the standards of Europeans and
Americans at the time, inferior in race as well.
Singapore had long been a strategic prize,
perched as it was on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, astride the
Straits of Malacca and the key shipping shipping lanes between Asia and Europe.
But in the 1920s, Britain saw it as the key to its Far East possessions.
Realizing that it was no longer strong enough to take on both Germany and Japan
simultaneously in the next war, Britain’s solution was to turn Singapore into a
naval fortress that could hold out against a Japanese siege until the Royal
Navy could sail to the rescue from Europe.
Terrain was an ally, or so the British
thought. With the Malay Peninsula sheathed in jungle, swamp and river, they
were were confident that a Japanese attack launched from the north, out of
Thailand, would bog down as it advanced down the long, narrow strip of land
between Thailand and Singapore. Therefore there was no need to fortify
Singapore’s defenses on the landward side, facing north to the Malayan
mainland. Any attack on the island had to come by sea through amphibious
invasion, which would be blasted out of the water by big coast-defense guns.
“Curiously enough, throughout all these
years of bickering and indecision, it had occurred to barely anyone that Malay
had over 1,000 miles of coastline, half of it exposed to Japanese attack,”
writes author Arthur Swinson in Defeat in Malaya: Fall of Singapore.
“It had occurred to no one either that the defence of the naval base on
Singapore island was bound up with the defence of the whole Malayan Peninsula.”
Or, as Churchill recalled, the possibility
that the fortress would have no landward defenses “no more entered into my mind
than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom.”
Perhaps given enough money, troops and
aircraft, the strategy might have worked. Unfortunately, Britain’s strategic
reach exceeded its financial grasp. With money tight during the 1930s, defense
preparations languished while the army, navy and air force argued over who was
responsible for defending the island. Meanwhile, a lethargic colonial attitude
reigned to the point where troops couldn’t train because rubber planters
complained it would ruin their crops.
However, the fatal flaw in the British
plan turned out to be a crazy German ex-corporal named Adolf Hitler. Not in
their darkest dreams had it occurred to British planners that western Europe
would be conquered in 1940 and Britain left to confront the Nazi colossus
alone. With England under assault by bombers and U-boats, and the Suez Canal
and Middle East oil threatened by Rommel, there were no forces to spare for the
Far East.
However, as frequently happens with military
disasters, frantic measures were taken at the last minute, which only made
defeat more painful. As war loomed in the Pacific, reinforcements were hastily
dispatched, including crack Australian and Indian battalions: it turned out
that many of the troops, including the Australians and Indians, were only
half-trained. The Royal Air Force had perhaps a hundred fighters—obsolete
American-made Buffalo and aging Hurricane fighters—that were blasted out of the
air by Japanese Zero fighters flown by elite pilots.
The battleships Prince of Wales and
Repulse were dispatched to the area, though a pair of capital ships
with little air or naval support stood little chance against the Japanese
offensive. “Are you sure it’s true?” Churchill asked when told both ships had
been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers. It was.
The Japanese landed in southern Thailand
and northern Malaya on December 8, in a meticulously planned operation. Still,
against Japan’s thirty thousand men, the British could pit eighty thousand.
Despite Japanese control of the skies, this should have been more than enough
to drive the invaders into the sea.
What ensued was as much farce as tragedy.
Convinced that tanks were useless in the jungle, the British had no armor. No
one thought to inform the Japanese, who brought ashore tanks that successfully
maneuvered through the trees as they stampeded British troops. Time and again,
the British attempted to make a stand, only to be outflanked and routed by
Japanese forces who compensated for lack of numbers by relying on mobility,
aggressiveness and deception. For example, small Japanese units infiltrated
British lines to attack artillery positions and command posts, a tactic that
also worked against the Americans—for a while.
Finally, on January 31, the Japanese
reached the Straits of Johore, between Singapore’s island and the mainland. The
straits were one to three miles wide, not insurmountable but still quite
formidable if defended. The Japanese were running low on supplies, and running
on a tight timetable if they were to complete their Pacific conquests.
That didn’t daunt Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita,
the Japanese commander later dubbed the “Tiger of Malaya.” As Yamashita said
later, “My attack on Singapore was a bluff, a bluff that worked. I had 30,000
men and was outnumbered more then three to one. I knew if I had to fight long
for Singapore I would be beaten. That is why the surrender had to be at once. I
was very frightened all the time that the British would discover our numerical
weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.”
The British were too disorganized and
dispirited to perceive their opponent’s weakness. While bombers pounded
Singapore and feint landings deceived the defenders, the Japanese crossed the
straits in small boats on February 8. Their initial foothold could have been
crushed by prompt counterattacks. The counterattacks never came.
On February 15, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival,
the British commander, met Yamashita to sign an unconditional surrender. More
than eighty thousand British troops found themselves penned barbed wire. Many
died in the hellish conditions of Japanese prison camps, or while working on
the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway
(immortalized in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai). Some of the
Indian prisoners defected to form the Japanese-controlled Indian National Army
that fought against the British.
Yamashita went on to defend the
Philippines against a U.S. invasion in 1944. He was later charged with war
crimes in Singapore and the Philippines, on the basis that even if he didn’t
order atrocities, he was still responsible for those committed by troops under
his command (some wondered whether he was also being punished for humiliating
the Allies on the battlefield). He was hanged on February 23, 1946.
What were the lessons of Singapore? Like a
Biblical prophet, the battle delivered the message that the few could defeat
the many—if the many were ineptly led. The British didn’t just suffer from
poorly trained troops, deficient commanders, negligent preparation and
government penny-pinching. They were victims of lack of imagination, as in
failing to conceive that an army of Asians could drive tanks through the
jungle.
Perhaps the biggest consequence of the
fall of Singapore was the destruction of Britain’s Asian empire. Depleted by
the First World War and then squeezed dry by the Second, Britain would have
lost its empire eventually. But the photos of British generals and soldiers
marching into captivity under Asian guns left their mark on colonial subjects.
The collapse of Britain’s Asian empire, along with those of the Dutch, French
and eventually the Japanese, left a power vacuum that would be filled by the
United States and China.
Three-quarters of a century later, the
legacy of the fall of Singapore still haunts us.
Michael Peck is a contributing writer for
the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter
and Facebook.
Image: Winston Churchill. Library
of Congress/Public domain
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