Fall of Singapore
Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942, and some 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops went into Japanese captivity in a single day. Churchill called it the worst disaster in British military history, and the numbers support him. The base had been built through the 1920s and 1930s as the anchor of British power east of Suez, on a strategy that assumed a fleet would arrive from Europe if it were threatened. In December 1941 there was no fleet to send: Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by aircraft off Malaya on 10 December, three days after Pearl Harbor, and there was no air cover because the modern aircraft were in Europe and North Africa. Yamashita landed in northern Malaya and Thailand and came 500 miles down the peninsula in ten weeks, using bicycles, infiltration through the rubber plantations and jungle the defenders had been told was impassable, and repeated small outflanking landings by sea. The famous detail about the guns pointing the wrong way is a myth — most could traverse, and they had armour-piercing shells for ships rather than the high-explosive needed against infantry. Yamashita crossed the strait on 8 February with about 30,000 men against more than twice that number, and was nearly out of ammunition when Percival surrendered. The Chinese population then suffered the Sook Ching massacres. The prisoners went to the Burma railway and the mines. The Empire's credibility in Asia did not recover. Percival had asked for defences on the landward side and been refused on the grounds that it would damage civilian morale, which is the detail that best summarises the whole position. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner and stood behind MacArthur on the Missouri in 1945.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Military
