All Hell Let Loose (36 page)

Duff Cooper, British resident minister in the Far East, wrote to Churchill about Britain’s military commander in Malaya, Arthur Percival: ‘a nice, good man … calm, clear-headed and even clever. But he cannot take a large view; it is all a field day at Aldershot to him. He knows the rules so well and follows them so closely and is always waiting for the umpire’s whistle to signal ceasefire and hopes that when the moment comes his military dispositions will be such as to receive approval.’ The British defence of Malaya was hampered by Percival’s limitations, poor communications, and the familiar institutional weakness of the British Army. Some units resorted to communication by bugle call when radio failed and field telephone lines were cut. The Japanese could exploit almost absolute command of sea and air. When Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces met stubborn resistance at Kampar in central Malaya, he simply launched a new amphibious landing to outflank the defenders. The British were confounded by bold Japanese use of tanks, against which the defenders lacked even Molotov cocktails. Yamashita’s three divisions, though heavily outnumbered, displayed an aggression and energy of which their opponents were bereft. Their commander penned a poem:

Churchill asserted that the Japanese army was expert in jungle warfare. Yamashita’s three divisions had indeed gained combat experience in China, but their men entered jungle for the first time when they landed in Malaya. In China, they had used horses for transport, but now bicycles were substituted – 6,000 were issued to each division, in addition to five hundred motor vehicles. In the intense heat the bikes suffered frequent punctures, and two-man repair teams attached to each company mended an average of twenty tyres a day. Infantrymen meeting resistance on roads merely sought a bypass, humping their machines across rivers and through jungle, pedalling up to twenty hours a day, carrying a sixty-pound pack behind their saddles. Even old Lt. Col. Yosuke Yokoyama, commanding an engineer regiment, rode a bicycle. Short, chunky, dripping with sweat, he followed close behind the leading infantry inspecting British demolitions and directing bridge repairs, effected by raiding local sawmills for lumber. The Japanese referred to the huge ration dumps they captured, and exploited for their own units, as ‘Churchill supplies’.

‘The Jitra line was penetrated in about fifteen hours by barely five hundred men,’ Col. Masanobu Tsuji wrote contemptuously. In that action, he reported Japanese casualties of only twenty-seven killed and eighty-three wounded. ‘The enemy retreated leaving behind as souvenirs about fifty field guns, fifty heavy machine-guns, three hundred trucks and armoured cars, and provisions for a division for three months. Over 3,000 men surrendered having thrown away their arms in panic and taken refuge in the jungle … The majority of these were Indian soldiers.’

Some such units crumbled swiftly, especially when their British officers fell, as many did. The reputation of the Indian Army suffered severely in Malaya, where the lack of motivation of many of its mercenaries was laid bare. The Japanese used ‘jitter’ tactics to formidable effect, panicking defenders into retreat and sometimes headlong flight by noisy demonstrations behind their front. The huge wartime expansion of the Indian Army had resulted in some British officers being deployed with only six months’ training in place of the usual thirty, and unable to speak Urdu, thus incapable of communicating with their men. The cultural chasm between foes was exposed when British troops surrendered. They expected the mercy customarily offered by European armies, even those of the Nazis; instead, they were stunned to see their captors killing casualties incapable of walking, often also unwounded men and civilians. The teenage daughter of a Chinese teacher who brought food to an Argyll officer in his jungle hiding place one day left a note in English for him about the Japanese: ‘They took my father and cut off his head. I will continue to feed you as long as I can.’ At an early stage, discipline collapsed in parts of Percival’s army, in a fashion evidenced by fleeing soldiers’ looting of Kuala Lumpur. Counterattacks, a vital element of any successful defence, were seldom pressed. Most Indian units were composed of young and poorly trained soldiers. Whatever else Percival’s subordinates lacked, they displayed considerable courage, reflected in a high loss rate among British officers striving by example to keep Indian troops fighting. In this, they were seldom successful: one entire Indian brigade simply melted away under attack.

Some British units performed no better: the 18th Division arrived at Singapore as a belated reinforcement, and suffered swift humiliation. One of its battalions, 6th Norfolks, lost six subalterns and a captain in its first seventy-two hours of action. The attacking force might be small, but Yamashita’s three divisions were among the best in the Japanese army; they moved fast, and losses seldom deterred them from mounting attacks. The code of
bushido
caused them to treat themselves as mercilessly as they did their foes. A Japanese fighter pilot crash-landing in Johore fired a pistol at curious Malays who surrounded him, then used his last bullet to shoot himself.

From the outset, fleeing British clung to the racial conventions of empire and shamelessly abandoned their native subjects. The commissioner in Penang refused to allow Malay firefighters to enter the European quarter after bombing raids, and rejected pleas to demolish some European houses to create a firebreak. When Penang island was evacuated, non-Europeans were denied access to shipping. A Chinese judge was evicted after boarding, though the fortress commander’s car was embarked. A woman refugee from the island said later that the manner of the British evacuation was ‘a thing which I am sure will never be forgotten or forgiven’. Sikh police in Singapore were assured by their British chief that he would stay with them to the end; instead, he fled. In the Cameron Highlands, departing settlers appealed to Asian members of the local defence force to stick with their units; unsurprisingly, they resigned en bloc. In Kuala Lumpur, British doctors abandoned hospital wards to the care of their Asian counterparts. A young actor with a Chinese theatre troupe told his audience in the mining centre of Ipoh: ‘The British are treating their empire as property and handling the whole thing as if it was a business transaction.’

The behaviour of British communities in Malaya and later Burma was rational enough: word had reached South-East Asia about the orgy of rape and massacre which accompanied the fall of Hong Kong at the end of December. But the spectacle of white rulers succumbing to panic mocked the myth of benign imperial paternalism. Racism and self-interest were almost absolutes: when Chinese stewards aboard the light cruiser
Durban
mutinied, Captain Peter Cazalet wrote ruefully, ‘We have not treated the Chinese well in peacetime … they have no real loyalty towards us and why should they have?’ He noted that one mutineer expressed a desire to join the Japanese army. An eyewitness at Singapore noticed that as civilian bombing victims were thrown into mass graves, in death as in life European and Asian bodies were segregated. The condescension of the rulers was exemplified by the reaction of Malaya’s governor when his manservant was killed by a Japanese bomb behind Government House. Shenton Thomas wrote in his diary: ‘Terribly sad about my boy. He was such a faithful soul.’ Other nations of the British Empire ‘family’ showed scant enthusiasm for receiving refugees from South-East Asia. Australia at first agreed to grant entry to just fifty Europeans and the same number of Chinese; Ceylon set an initial limit of five hundred, with priority for its own citizens. Immigration barriers were lifted only belatedly, in the face of catastrophe.

On 31 January, the causeway linking Malaya to Singapore Island was blown up. The British principal of Raffles College, hearing the explosion, asked what it signified. A young Chinese, Lee Kuan Yew, claims to have responded: ‘That is the end of the British Empire.’ For fifty-five days, the Japanese had maintained a daily average advance of twelve miles, fighting ninety-five engagements and repairing 250 bridges. They were now almost out of ammunition, and Percival’s remaining 70,000 combatants were more than double Yamashita’s strength. But the British general made the cardinal error of dispersing his strength to defend Singapore’s seventy-two miles of coastline. Morale was wretchedly low, and fell further as engineers began demolitions in the naval dockyard. Belated efforts were made to evacuate dependants to the Dutch East Indies. Over 5,000 people sailed amidst scenes of chaos, panic and sometimes violence at the dockside, as military deserters sought to force a passage. Barely 1,500 of the refugees eventually reached the safety of India or Australia. Almost every ship approaching or leaving Singapore faced an ordeal by Japanese air attack. A Northumberland Fusilier described the experience of running the gauntlet on a transport under fire: ‘It was as if you were locked inside a tin can which people were beating with sticks.’

Yamashita’s forces began landing on Singapore Island in darkness on 8 February, employing a makeshift armada of 150 boats which carried 4,000 men in the first wave, two divisions in all. The British mounted no searchlights, and their artillery scarcely troubled the assault troops. Shellfire quickly severed most phone communications in forward areas, and heavy rain left sodden defenders huddled in their trenches. The Japanese pushed rapidly forward, while demoralised Australian units fell back. As it became plain that Singapore would be lost, the commanding officer of the naval base, Rear-Admiral Jack Spooner, wrote bitterly: ‘The present state of affairs was started by the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] who just turned tail, became a rabble, and let the Japs walk in unopposed.’

A disconsolate Maj. Gen. Gordon Bennett, commanding 8th Australian Division, told one of his officers: ‘I don’t think the men want to fight.’ He himself anyway did not, catching a plane which took him home in twelve days. And if the Australians performed poorly, so did British units, reflecting a collapse of will throughout Percival’s command. Captain Norman Thorpe, a Derbyshire Territorial serving in the Sherwood Foresters, described his curious sense of detachment from the catastrophe unfolding around him: ‘I myself only feel mildly excited and hardly feel it concerns me.’ When Thorpe led a counterattack, he found that only a handful of his men followed him forward; the little party’s advance was soon crushed. The commanding officer of an Australian unit spoke of fugitives from the forward positions who were ‘quite out of control and stated they had had enough’. The Japanese were no more merciful to those who quit than to those who resisted. Corporal Tominosuke Tsuchikane described his bewilderment at encountering enemies who hoped to save themselves by mere inertia: ‘Having lost their nerve, some soldiers were simply cowering in terror, squatting down and avoiding hand-to-hand combat in a wait-and-see position. They, too, were bayoneted or shot without mercy.’

Churchill dispatched a histrionic signal to Wavell, newly appointed Allied Supreme Commander, urging a last-ditch resistance in Singapore: ‘There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs … Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no weakness or mercy in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.’

Churchill’s message is important, in emphasising the contrast between rival combatants’ conduct of the war. He demanded from Singapore’s garrison no more and no less grit and will for sacrifice than Germans, Japanese and Russians routinely displayed, albeit under threat of draconian sanctions. Even if Malaya was lost, the prime minister sought to salvage some redeeming legend of its defenders resisting to the last. But the concept of self-immolation was beyond the bounds of Western democratic culture. On the evening of 9 February an Australian brigade commander told Percival, ‘In civil life I am a doctor. If the patient’s arm is bad I cut it off, but if the whole body goes bad then no operation can save the patient – he must die. So it is with Singapore – there is no use fighting to prolong its life.’ A small number of British, Indian and Australian soldiers displayed courage during the defence of Malaya, but this was futile amid a general collapse. Few Allied officers appealed to their men for sacrifices they knew would be denied.

At Singapore more than on any other British battlefield, a chasm was revealed between the prime minister’s heroic vision of the Empire at war and the response of its fighting men. Percival’s soldiers had lost confidence in their leaders and in themselves. If confronted face to face by Churchill, they might have told him that if he wanted Malaya staunchly defended, he should have given them competent officers, better weapons, and some of the hundreds of modern fighters idling at English airfields. They lacked any appetite for the fight to the death he wanted. There was a matching unwillingness among their superiors to use extreme measures to enforce discipline. Some Australian deserters forced their way at gunpoint aboard a refugee ship. When these men were arrested and imprisoned on Batavia, British officers wished to shoot them. Australian prime minister John Curtin signalled Wavell, insisting that any death sentence imposed on his citizens must be authorised by Canberra, as of course it would not be. Even at this dire moment of the Empire’s fortunes, a squeamishness persisted which reflected ‘civilised’ Western values, but did scant service to the Allied cause.