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By Root 1314 0

as well as those who have never tasted failure. Churchill had ordered them to fight to the end. But there were terrified civilians everywhere and the water was running out. Percival and his generals decided there would be fewer casualties if they threw in the towel. Had they had any idea of how grotesquely the Japanese would behave towards prisoners, they might have decided to fight on. But Percival did not know, as he also failed fully to grasp how vulnerable the exhausted and extended Japanese forces were. Yamashita understood that his troops’ fatigue demanded swift finality. It must be unconditional surrender by the British. The newsreel footage of the negotiations shows the bull-necked Japanese general leaning across the table towards a thin, distressed Percival, who asks for a day to consider his response. Knowing that with a day’s reflection the British might decide that they can, after all, fight on, the offer is refused: it must be all or nothing now. Percival looks around at his brigadiers and translator. His eyes blink furiously. And then he agrees to the biggest surrender of British troops in history. He and his generals had funked, and at some deep, instinctive level the whole empire shuddered. There could be no way back to the pre-war assertion of a natural right to rule.

It is as well to remember that the Japanese invaded as part of a plan to establish an empire of their own, and the brutal occupation of Singapore illuminated how benign the pre-war rule of the British had been. Japanese soldiers murdered and raped at will. They killed doctors, nurses and patients in hospital. Singapore was renamed Syonan-to, adults were forced into labour camps, children indoctrinated. Prisoners of war were used as slaves and the civilian population went very hungry. The rules of the Geneva Convention were completely ignored and all civilians obliged to proclaim the supremacy of the new master race (they were, for example, made to bow to any Japanese soldier passing on the street). The experience was sufficiently traumatic that at war’s end Singaporean nationalists determined to ensure that they never again lived under foreign rule of any kind.

As the defeated British fell back to Singapore from the Malayan peninsula they had attempted to dynamite the causeway linking the island with the mainland. Like much of the rest of the defence of Singapore, it was a botched job. But the explosion made a massive noise, heard by the staff and pupils of a school on the island. When the headmaster asked what had caused the bang, an eighteen-year-old schoolboy, Lee Kuan Yew, told him that it was the sound of ‘the end of the British Empire’.* The fall of Singapore had shown the world that Britain no longer had the capacity to protect its territories abroad. It was conclusive evidence that there was nothing superior about the white man and nothing permanent about his presence in the colonies. If the country couldn’t hold an island which had been acquired as a protective outpost, what could it defend? ‘The British Empire in the Far East depended on prestige,’ wrote an Australian diplomat. ‘This prestige has been completely shattered.’

To his immense disappointment, the British people thanked Winston Churchill for his inspirational wartime leadership by voting him out of office in 1945. The priorities of the Labour government which replaced him were crystal-clear. ‘The nation wants food, work and homes,’ said its manifesto, and the problems of the rest of the world were distinctly secondary. The party believed, of course, in a United Nations, in peace and friendship and in ‘a common bond with the working peoples of all countries’. As for the empire, the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had made it absolutely clear he considered that the principles of the Atlantic Charter, about which Churchill had been so one-eyed, applied to everyone. (‘We have always demanded that the freedom which we claim for ourselves should be extended to all men,’ he had said in 1941. ‘I look for an ever increasing measure of self-government in Africa.’) The Labour