Arthur Percival

Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival commanded British Commonwealth forces in Malaya and surrendered Singapore in February 1942, the largest capitulation in British military history. He had a genuinely distinguished earlier record. He enlisted as a private in 1914, was commissioned within months, won the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and was regarded between the wars as an unusually capable staff officer. He served in Ireland during the war of independence, where his intelligence work made him a target of the IRA. He arrived in Malaya in 1941 to command a force that was large on paper and hollow in practice: no tanks, almost no modern aircraft, and many units newly arrived and untrained for jungle warfare. He had himself warned in a 1937 appreciation that the Japanese would come overland down the peninsula rather than by sea, and the defences were never built to match that assessment. When the invasion came in December 1941 the Japanese moved faster than his formations could react. Singapore's guns were not the problem, contrary to the enduring myth that they faced only out to sea; the problem was water, ammunition and a broken chain of command. He surrendered around eighty thousand men on 15 February 1942. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Manchuria and was brought to Tokyo Bay to witness the Japanese surrender. Historians have argued since that the underfunding of Malaya's defences mattered more than his generalship, but the surrender defined him. After the war he worked for years on behalf of Far East prisoners of war, pressing their claims for compensation against Japan, and he led the association that represented them.

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