Battle Story (15 page)

My Attack on Singapore was a bluff – a bluff that worked. I had 30,000 men and was outnumbered three to one. I knew that if I had to fight for 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.

P. Elphick,
Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress
, London, 1985

In this respect Yamashita’s analysis of the situation was cautious or even pessimistic. The ground force available to the Allied commander was unquestionably much greater than the Twenty-Fifth Army in number, but most of the troops had been engaged in a long retreat that had caused the loss of a great deal of their equipment and, perhaps more significantly, of any confidence that they were capable of defeating the Japanese on the battlefield. Allied troops could be fairly certain that any aircraft overhead were likely to belong to the enemy and could be utterly confident that if they heard tanks in the distance, they would be hostile ones. Moreover, if Yamashita’s ammunition supply was limited, Percival’s was not really much better. The shells, grenades and bullets may have existed, but there was no means of getting them to where they needed to be.

Percival was also obliged to consider the civilian population. Regardless of Churchill’s cable to Wavell urging him to reject any thought of sparing the civilians, the practical reality was that there was something in the region of a million people concentrated in just a few square miles. If Yamashita was to adopt a policy of shelling and bombing the Allies into surrender the death toll would be horrendous. Percival had no reason to assume that the Japanese were so short of ammunition that this would not be a viable proposition. Even if Yamashita did not choose a policy of bombardment, Percival was all too aware that with the major reservoirs either captured or damaged, there would soon be a drastic shortage of water.

With Percival’s own troops short on supplies of all kinds, increasing evidence of a breakdown in discipline and with no prospect of relief, Churchill and Wavell’s instructions to fight on to the very last were utterly unrealistic. Although there was a still a huge reservoir of men on hand, there was no means of organising them into anything like a viable force. Many had lost or abandoned their rifles; quite a large number of air force and navy personnel had never been issued with a weapon in the first place and many had had little weapons training, let alone
tactical training of any kind. Large numbers of men from infantry battalions had become detached from their units – some quite deliberately in the hope of escaping by ship or simply to take cover until the fighting came to an end. Men from the other branches of service had come to the same idea, but even those who had remained with their units were at a loss. A great many of the artillery units had lost some or all of their guns during the retreat and those which had kept their guns had little or nothing in the way of ammunition.

41. The Japanese victory parade in Fullerton Square, Singapore, 17 February 1942.

With the decision to surrender accepted by all of his senior staff, Percival started the process of capitulation. At about 1130hrs he sent a deputation consisting of a staff officer, an interpreter and the colonial secretary to make contact with the Japanese to
arrange terms. They came back with instructions that Percival should make his way to meet Yamashita at the Singapore Ford Factory at Bukit Timah and that the flag of Japan should be raised on the Cathay building, the tallest edifice in the city, to show that the battle was over. Yamashita was not interested in discussing terms; he wanted an immediate and unconditional surrender. The discussions lasted less than an hour and at 1810hrs Percival signed the capitulation document.

It is often easy – or at least tempting – to assume that any major defeat was a foregone conclusion. The failure of successive British governments to take a realistic approach to defence in the Far East went a long way toward making the fall of Singapore inevitable. Even in the last days of the campaign there was a general tendency to ignore the practicalities of the situation. This signal from Churchill to Wavell exemplifies that tendency:

I think you ought to realise the way we view the situation in Singapore. It was reported to cabinet by the CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff – Sir Alan Brooke) that Percival has over 100,000 men, of whom 33,000 are British and 17,000 Australian. It is doubtful whether the Japanese have so many in the whole Malay Peninsula … In these circumstances and in a well-contested battle they should destroy them. 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. The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Army is at stake.

Major General Woodburn Kirby,
The War Against Japan
,
HMSO, 1957

The cable shows Churchill’s complete misunderstanding of the entire situation. Apart from the fact that he seems to have retained some confidence in the ideas of racial superiority in disregarding the Indian, Malay and Chinese service personnel, he had seemingly failed to grasp that the Japanese had been able to seize and retain their initiative due to better training, better leadership, better air support, their daring use of armour and a better understanding of what could and could not be achieved on the battlefield. None of these issues could be remedied simply by demanding a ‘do or die’ attitude. Defeat in the air meant that movement by day was extremely vulnerable to Japanese air strikes. Since neither Allied fighter strength nor anti-aircraft capacities presented very much of a challenge, Japanese pilots could afford to take their time seeking targets of opportunity. On the ground, the Allies had no real answer to Japanese armour. Yamashita’s tanks may have been old-fashioned, lightly armoured and under-gunned, but the Allies had lost a great many anti-tank guns during the campaign, and even if the guns had been replaced the general approach to training had been so basic that most units had very little idea of how to deal with an armoured threat.

Percival went to The Ford Factory ostensibly to seek terms, though in practice he must have been aware that neither he nor Yamashita really had much room to manoeuvre. Realistically, Yamashita could only accept an unconditional surrender and Percival had nothing else to offer.

Percival’s surrender was unconditional, though not strictly speaking, without terms, since there were a number of practical issues to be addressed. Neither Percival nor Yamashita had effective communications with all of their units, so a ceasefire deadline was set for 2030hrs to allow news of the surrender to be relayed to units out of radio contact. The surrender document explicitly required Percival to ensure that all military materiel – arms, ammunition, supplies of all kinds, transport, papers, ships and aircraft – was surrendered undamaged immediately. Yamashita accepted Percival’s word that there were no aircraft
or ships left in Allied hands, but in fact he had already given instructions that all heavy artillery and documents were to be destroyed before 1600hrs.

42. Lt Gen. Percival and party en route to surrender Singapore to the Japanese.

Clearly there was already a good deal of disorder in the streets with soldiers and civilians looting shops and homes across the city. It would be some time before Japanese troops could be deployed all over the city, so Percival was allowed to retain 1,000 armed men to maintain law and order pending Japanese takeover.

Percival can certainly be counted among the losers in any examination of the 1941–42 campaign. To a considerable degree the dice were heavily loaded against him from the outset. An inexplicable tide of political and diplomatic constraints prevented him from taking positive courses of action from the very beginning of the campaign. Although a plan (Operation Matador) had been formulated to slow the Japanese advance in one of the few real ‘choke’ positions, diplomatic and political considerations conspired with poor communications and a lack of clarity to prevent the operation being put into action in time for it to be successful. He was obliged to follow strategic and tactical policies
that were not remotely suited to the situation. The belief that the material production on the Malayan Peninsula, as well as the prestigious naval base and vital commercial facilities of Singapore, could be only protected by maintaining a strong air force may have been well founded, but that forced Percival to scatter his troops to protect the airfields. However, the airfields were only valuable if there was an adequate supply of modern fighter aircraft and pilots to fly them. Neither of these were to be had in 1941.

The absolute and wilful blindness in Whitehall and the British Army on the question of armoured vehicles was another problem. Simply assuming that the terrain was unsuitable for armoured warfare did not make it so. It was certainly true that tanks would struggle to cope with jungle and swamps or oil palm and rubber
plantations, but the reality is that tanks mostly stick to roads, and without a good road system the produce of Malaya could not have been transported to Singapore for export around the world. Percival’s problems did not stop there. A powerful belief on the part of various individuals in the civil authority that the Japanese would never attack impeded any progress toward an adequate civil defence policy. Similarly, a refusal to offer a living wage for local labour meant that very little was done to prepare defences in Singapore. The policy of defending the Singapore naval base continued to be a factor in Percival’s planning, even when there were no ships left for the base to tend.

43. Rice country in eastern Malaya. Far from being covered by ‘impenetrable jungle’, a great deal of 1940s Malaya was agricultural land. (Author’s collection)

That said, Percival did make his own difficulties. He could and should have made much stronger representations for an allocation of tanks. Vehicles that were being relegated to training-only status in Britain – or even being consigned to scrap metal – might not have made the difference between ultimate defeat and victory, but with no tanks at all Malaya Command was virtually guaranteed to struggle against the Japanese. Percival also failed to ensure any viable degree of training at battalion or formation level. A small number of units – notably the Argylls – had been put through extensive training programmes by their commanding officers, but nothing was done to encourage this. At the level of brigades, divisions and corps there was virtually no training at all, which proved to be disastrous once the battle had been joined. Withdrawing in front of a determined enemy calls for a high level of competence and confidence at formation headquarters, which was conspicuous by its absence throughout the campaign. Percival repeatedly failed to replace senior officers who had been found wanting, though a decent training programme would probably have revealed some of the weaker officers and improved the understanding and competence of others. Throughout the Malayan campaign Percival was continually driven by two conflicting policies. On the one hand there was the need to retain territory, and on the other to preserve his army for what he called ‘the main battle’, which he envisaged fighting in northern Johore.