Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [129]
How could the defensive planning have been so inept? Churchill claimed that ‘the possibility of Singapore having no landward defences no more entered my mind than that of a battleship being launched without a bottom’. Was there also some residue of a nineteenth-century belief in an innate racial superiority alive in the British high command, who seemed to consider that while the Japs might be able to defeat a Chinese army (as they had done in the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s) they were no match for Europeans? ‘I trust you’ll chase the little men off,’ had been the response of the Governor of the island, Sir Shenton Thomas, when a general reported that the Japanese had landed in Malaya. But the Japanese were formidable soldiers, commanded by a bold and ruthless general, Tomoyuki Yamashita.* The British forces may have contained elements from all over the empire. But they were largely untested and they were not especially well led: General Percival’s military headquarters was known among the men as ‘Confusion Castle’. As the enemy forces neared, an order went out that all the alcohol on the island was to be poured away, to prevent it falling into enemy hands and triggering a drunken Japanese rampage. Some Australian soldiers were seen face down in the gutter, scooping up whatever whisky they could. Panicking civilians fought their way on to vessels leaving Singapore, sometimes pushing Asians aside as they did so.
Before the war, Churchill had acknowledged that the island was a ‘stepping stone’ to Australia and New Zealand and, at the last minute, dispatched the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser HMS Repulse. They sailed for Singapore on a tide of sonorous phrases. ‘Thus’, Churchill proclaimed, ‘we stretch out the long arm of brotherhood and motherhood to the Australian and New Zealand peoples.’ Unfortunately, the two great ships also sailed as unprotected as they might have done before the development of air power. Both were sunk by Japanese bombers. This left the defence of the island in the hands of 90,000 or so empire troops, many of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger. In London, an impotent Prime Minister issued increasingly frantic orders – that the entire male population should be used to build earthwork defences, that ‘Commanders, Staffs and principal officers [were] expected to perish at their posts’, that ‘every inch of ground [was] to be defended’, that there was to be no question of surrender ‘until after protracted fighting among the ruins’. All in vain. Despite their advantage in numbers, the British were incapable of staunching the Japanese advance. Troops were rushed first to one sector, then to another, but always the wrong one. Japanese aircraft rained bombs down on the city. British generals accused Australian soldiers of running away. The Australian commander, General Gordon Bennett, levelled the familiar accusation that British commanders were stuffed shirts, while he himself scurried off to Australia, where, he claimed later, he was needed in order to brief people on how to fight the Japanese.
In his sweltering bunker Percival now had to make a decision. Perhaps the empire troops could hold the island, for the Japanese forces must almost be at their last gasp and their supply lines stretched close to breaking point. On the other hand, Percival’s forces were either untested or the survivors of the defeated army which had fallen back through Malaya: beaten men do not fight