Colin Smith - Singapore Burning: Heroism And Surrender In World War Ii

Heroism and Surrender in World War II

COLIN SMITH

VIKING

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VIKING

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First published 2005
1

Copyright Colin Smith, 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN 0670913413

And some there be, which have no memorial, who are perished as though they have never been.

Ecclesiasticus 44:9

Indian Army mutineers about to be executed against the outer wall of Singapores Outram Road jail, 1915 (IWM)

An Indian havildar leads his men on a training exercise in the Malayan jungle, 1941 (IWM)

Young Gurkha rifleman with a 17-inch bayonet (IWM)

Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival arriving at Singapore, 1941 (IWM)

Tomoyuki Yamashita on the day of his wedding to Hisako, daughter of a general (from John Deane Potter, A Soldier Must Hang)

Japanese infantrymen gathered around their colours on Hainan Island (IWM)

The American-made Thompson Tommy sub-machine-gun (IWM)

An Australian soldier strips and cleans his Tommy gun (IWM)

Australian signallers at a field headquarters (IWM)

An American Brewster Buffalo plane, known as the Flying Barrel (IWM)

A twin-engined Nell plane being gingerly bombed up by its own crew (IWM)

A newly arrived RAF Blenheim bomber being serviced in a Singapore hangar (IWM)

Colonel Frederick Spencer Chapman (from Ralph Barker, One Mans Jungle)

More conventional defences being erected on one of Singapores southern beaches (IWM)

Australians prepare defences in a rubber plantation (IWM)

Lewis Piggy Heath, commander of Percivals Indian forces (National Army Museum)

Major-General Murray-Lyon, commander of the 11th Indian Division in northern Malaya (Dr Iain Murray-Lyon)

A Dogra battalion exercising in rubber boats (IWM)

Indian troops demonstrate how two rifles can serve as a makeshift stand to steady a Bren gun (IWM)

Australian nurses being escorted by an Argylls officer in full dress uniform (AWM)

21. Interned Japanese women and children boarding a British ship (IWM)

Sailors from the battleship Prince of Wales haul themselves on to the deck of HMS Express (IWM)

Young seaman off the Prince of Wales recovering in hospital (IWM)

The last known photograph of Admiral Tom Thumb Phillips (right) with Rear-Admiral Palliser, his chief of staff (IWM)

Japanese infantry, led by a sword-carrying officer, charge across open ground, Penang (Robert Hunt Library)

European women and children evacuated from Penang Island arriving in Singapore (IWM)

Japanese infantry advance along a railway track (IWM)

A wounded Japanese prisoner (IWM)

Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Stewart, the commander of the Argylls, with Sergeant-Major Munnoch and Major Angus MacDonald (from J. Moffatt and A. Holmes, Moon over Malaya)

Sikh mountain gunners hidden in a rubber plantation (IWM)

Argylls officers and NCOs at an Orders Group (IWM)

Argylls cooling their feet (IWM)

Japanese troops storm the railway goods yard at Kuala Lumpur (IWM)

Japanese infantry skirmishing with the British rearguard in Kuala Lumpur (IWM)

Australian anti-tank gunners on the MuarBakri road (AWM)

View of the jungle defile where the slaughter of the tanks took place (IWM)

No mercy was shown by the Australian infantry to the surviving Japanese crew members (AWM)

Helmeted Japanese infantry spread out and advance through young rubber (Robert Hunt Library)

Smoke break for some Australian Bren gunners (AWM)

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Anderson, the South African-born battalion commander who won the Victoria Cross (IWM)

Thick black smoke covers Singapore Island (IWM)

Chinese civilians trim the spare rubber off locally made gas masks (IWM)

Soldiers and civil defence workers try to help with a line of blazing trucks (IWM)

44.Singapore burning (IWM)

Chinese women mourn a dead child (IWM)

Japanese engineers repair the gap blown in the Johore Causeway (Robert Hunt Library)

Japanese tanks being towed across the Straits of Johore on pontoons (AWM)

An Australian or British soldier being searched by his captors (IWM)

Two young Australian nurses: Elizabeth Pyman survived, Ellen Keats died (AWM)

Badly wounded Sergeant Pony Moore of the 1st Cambridgeshires (from Michael Moore, Battalion at War)

The expensive car of an evacuee is pushed off the dock at Keppel harbour (IWM)

Curious enemies examine each other at close range as the surrender negotiations begin (IWM)

Japanese artists impression of the formal signing of the surrender agreement (AWM)

Japanese troops march into the centre of Singapore city (Robert Hunt Library)

Honeymoon period: jubilant Japanese pose for a picture with their captives soon after the surrender (Mainichi Newspaper Company)

The humiliation begins: Australian prisoners are made to sweep the streets (IWM)

Major Tominga, Japanese camp commandant, who received ten years imprisonment (IWM)

Lieutenant-General Shinpei Fukuyei who was shot by firing squad (from Mamoru Shinozaki, Syonan My Story)

Near-naked war crime suspects at Changi jail kowtow to a British military policeman (Popperfoto)

Jack Becky Sharpe, a regular in the Leicesters, in hospital after his release from jail (Popperfoto)

The Anglican Bishop of Singapore, Leonard Wilson, examining the crosses painted for the graves of some of the 800 prisoners who died in Changi jail (Popperfoto)

Vivian Bullwinkel at a reception with her mother on her return to Australia in 1945 (AWM)

Singapore, a wet low-lying island some 85 miles north of the equator, lies like the dot to an exclamation mark punctuating an end to the impertinent intrusion of the Malayan Peninsula into the South China Sea. It is separated from this southern extremity of mainland Asia by the narrow straits from which the Sultan of Johore takes his name, and from whose coastal palace the northern shore of the nearby island over which he once held sway can plainly be seen. In Malay its name has a regal sound, for it means lion island, though there is no evidence that the long-extinct Asian variety was ever hunted there.