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they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’

The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo ‘control group’ changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.

Before the battlecruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: ‘Brussels ball once again.’ Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: ‘We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes … I know the old ship will give a good account of itself … Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried … not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship – she is much too lucky.’ Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: ‘Every man waved and put his thumb up to me … as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton … I saw the spirit which wins wars.’ Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: ‘RAF – Rare As Fucking Fairies!’

In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1/14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying anti-tank guns had no time to unlimber. ‘Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,’ wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. ‘The din was terrific … almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover … within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks … passed me … They had crashed right through our forward companies … I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.’

The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: thirty of its men were killed in their first action, while only two hundred escaped with their weapons, leaving most to be captured. An officer recorded ‘scenes of indescribable confusion, with small leaderless parties of Indian and Gurkha troops firing in every direction … no one appeared to know what was happening … their own artillery was falling short among the