All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [135]
Churchill’s message is important, in emphasising the contrast between rival combatants’ conduct of the war. He demanded from Singapore’s garrison no more and no less grit and will for sacrifice than Germans, Japanese and Russians routinely displayed, albeit under threat of draconian sanctions. Even if Malaya was lost, the prime minister sought to salvage some redeeming legend of its defenders resisting to the last. But the concept of self-immolation was beyond the bounds of Western democratic culture. On the evening of 9 February an Australian brigade commander told Percival, ‘In civil life I am a doctor. If the patient’s arm is bad I cut it off, but if the whole body goes bad then no operation can save the patient – he must die. So it is with Singapore – there is no use fighting to prolong its life.’ A small number of British, Indian and Australian soldiers displayed courage during the defence of Malaya, but this was futile amid a general collapse. Few Allied officers appealed to their men for sacrifices they knew would be denied.
At Singapore more than on any other British battlefield, a chasm was revealed between the prime minister’s heroic vision of the Empire at war and the response of its fighting men. Percival’s soldiers had lost confidence in their leaders and in themselves. If confronted face to face by Churchill, they might have told him that if he wanted Malaya staunchly defended, he should have given them competent officers, better weapons, and some of the hundreds of modern fighters idling at English airfields. They lacked any appetite for the fight to the death he wanted. There was a matching unwillingness among their superiors to use extreme measures to enforce discipline. Some Australian deserters forced their way at gunpoint aboard a refugee ship. When these men were arrested and imprisoned on Batavia, British officers wished to shoot them. Australian prime minister John Curtin signalled Wavell, insisting that any death sentence imposed on his citizens must be authorised by Canberra, as of course it would not be. Even at this dire moment of the Empire’s fortunes, a squeamishness persisted which reflected ‘civilised’ Western values, but did scant service to the Allied cause.
In Singapore, emotional British civilians queued outside veterinary surgeries to have their pets humanely destroyed. A pall of smoke from burning oil tanks hung over the city, while military police used their rifles as clubs to drive back panic-stricken men, often drunk, from the last departing ships. A subsequent British report lambasted the Australians: ‘Their conduct was bestial.’ By that stage, such remarks merely reflected a search for scapegoats. At Wavell’s last meeting with Malaya’s governor before flying out to Batavia, he said again and again, thumping his knee with his fist, ‘It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened.’ As the Japanese drove forward into the city, atrocities became commonplace. At the Alexandra hospital, a twenty-three-year-old patient hearing the Japanese approach his ward, shooting and bayoneting as they came, thought sadly, ‘I’ll never be twenty-four. Poor Mum.’ In the event, he proved one of only four survivors in the ward, because his blood-soaked body persuaded the Japanese he was dead. At the Alexandra, 320 men and one woman were killed, and many nurses raped. One group of twenty-two Australian nurses escaped from the city, only to fall into Japanese hands on a Dutch island. As they were driven into the sea to be machine-gunned, the last words of their matron Irene Drummond were recorded by the sole survivor: ‘Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’
Percival surrendered Singapore to Yamashita on 15 February. The photograph of a British