Michael Arnold - The Sacrifice of Singapore: Churchills Biggest Blunder

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Text Michael Arnold 2011

Design Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited 2011

Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions

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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Arnold, Michael, 1935

The sacrifice of Singapore : Churchills biggest blunder / Michael Arnold. Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2011.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978 981 4435 43 7

1. Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965 Military leadership. 2. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945 Military leadership. 3. World War, 1939-1945 Campaigns Singapore. 4. Singapore History Siege, 1942. I. Title.

D767.55

940.5425957dc22 OCN677585861

Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd

FACTORS

PEOPLE

FORCES

EPILOGUE

Egypt is not even second in order of priorities, for it has been an accepted principle in our strategy that in the last resort the security of Singapore comes before that of Egypt. Yet the defences of Singapore are still below standard. If we wait until an emergency arises in the Far East, we shall be too late.

General Sir John Dill, memo to Winston Churchill, April 1941

National disasters and their attendant shock need scapegoats.

George Victor, The Pearl Harbour Myth

ON THE SLEEPY NORTH-EAST COAST of Malaya just outside the small town of Kota Bharu in the state of Kelantan lies the Beach of Passionate Love, or Pantai Cinta Berahi to give its Malay name, which seems an unlikely place for the start of a vicious military campaign. However, on that beach on a starless, rainy night and shortly after midnight on Sunday, 8 December 1941, a detachment of apprehensive young Indian soldiers guarding the beach caught sight of three large black shapes not far off the shore. The shapes were transport ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. On board were over 5,000 battle-hardened troops, all veterans of the war in China who would shortly land on the beach, sweep aside the inexperienced Indian resistance and force them to flee inland.

What happened over the ensuing 10 weeks culminating in the fall of Singapore was described by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, 11,000 km away in London, as the worst disaster and capitulation in British history. It has also been scathingly described as a national disgrace, an inexcusable betrayal, Britains greatest defeat, and so on. Some versions of the collapse seem to present a sniping account of the demise of a perceived lotus-eating white society who exploited the hardworking locals and whose just deserts were only a matter of time. The fact that successive British governments had proclaimed Singapore to be the Gibraltar of the Far East, a bastion of imperial power and a much-vaunted emblem of the British Empire probably invited and fuelled this perception. When the whole faade came tumbling down it was perhaps inevitable that the literary scavengers should come slinking in to feed off the carcass. Empires by their very nature have for ages been targets for challenge and objects of derision, and the fall of Singapore provided these authors with some delicious morsels to chew on. Perhaps one of the strangest features in all the various accounts of the Japanese conquests in South-east Asia is that Singapore seems to be the only focus whereas a far greater debacle occurred concurrently in the Philippines where, the greatest assemblage of American air power anywhere in the world outside the United States was wiped out by the Japanese in a couple of hours. This was a calamity of monumental proportions and, on the face of it at least, a massive national disgrace, yet it has been all but ignored, perhaps because there were too many underlying political skeletons that would be uncovered by closer scrutiny and therefore it was too hot a potato to handle.

Those involved in the gradual collapse that unfolded in Malaya have largely, and quite unfairly, been labelled as disorganised ditherers lacking in backbone. The commanding officer, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, was shunned by the British government and military establishment after the war in order to deflect and disguise their own shortcomings and omissions. In his book The Pearl Harbor Myth, George Victor succinctly states that national disasters and their attendant shock need scapegoats and for Singapore, Percival was the obvious target. Certainly some mistakes were made for no campaign is ever error-free but given the polyglot, hodgepodge, under-manned army that had been assembled in a staccato fashion, this was virtually inevitable. That there were ditherers who avoided decisions was true, but they were mostly in London, not in Singapore. Even on occasions when decisions could have been made more rapidly, such quick assessments are easier made when there is a luxury of adequate forces and weapons to deploy; it is a totally different situation when none of these factors are present. It should be remembered also that there were sizeable desertions during the campaign, with some 20,000 Indian troops defecting to the Japanese immediately after the Singapore surrender. It is not known how many of these were influenced by Churchills earlier anti-Indian rhetoric but obviously this would have been a factor when the soldiers concerned were young, untrained and under-armed and were being asked to defend a foreign territory far from their own country. The Australian contingent, also untrained and mostly badly led and making up 20 per cent of the total defending force, just about collapsed as an effective entity, their ignominy being crowned when their commanding officer, Major-General Gordon Bennett, slipped away in the night to Sumatra after having ordered his own troops to fight on. Nonetheless, despite all these factors the ultimate fate of Singapore was never in the hands of those who fought there, but was sealed by other people and other events in other places.