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engineer who had been one of the last to leave in February 1942. ‘Two Indians and a Chinese boy, looking very dazed, appeared from a near-by shed. They were the only people in sight and I addressed them in Malay, getting no response but a stupefied stare. Walking to the Station Buildings, we passed two more Chinese, and exchanged a subdued “Tabek” (good-day), which, in the circumstances, seemed an inadequate greeting.’ The mood was one of ‘overwhelming desolation’. Two hours later Gilmour joined a small convoy of three jeeps that sped through the residential areas of Chinatown, along New Bridge Road. Crowds lined the route, Union Jacks appeared at windows, but as the British crossed Singapore river the ceremonial and municipal heart of the city around the Padang was empty of people. There were no more than a dozen spectators to the hoisting of the Union Flag above the Municipal Building at around 13.45 hours. The Japanese officers assigned to witness the event were nowhere to be found. They were indeed still on Tokyo time, as the whole of Singapore had been for three and a half years. They had come and gone two hours earlier. One of Gilmour’s first tasks was to put the public clocks back two hours.80 On Saturday 8 September the first British libertymen came ashore, including seventy sailors from HMS Cleopatra who marched through the streets to Jalan Besar stadium for a game of football.81

If the main British landings on the Malay peninsula had been opposed, there is a strong possibility that they would have been swept into the sea by the Japanese. Despite the intimate knowledge of the terrain professed by many British officers, the sites chosen were entirely unsuitable. The first landings at Morib on 9 September were a disaster. On the first day, fifty trucks and tanks sunk or were mired in the sand and very few made it to the beach without being winched out. There was hardly any room on the beachhead and only one good road leading away from it. Vehicles were hemmed in by drainage ditches and a raised water pipe; this meant that the off-road area required to de-waterproof tanks and lorries was not available and the beach road flooded. ‘“Zipper”’, according to 17 Squadron’s war diary, ‘seemed to come slightly “Unzipped”.’ If the 6,000 Japanese at Kuala Lumpur had attacked in concentrated force, British commanders would have had little option but to withdraw their forces.82 Chin Peng stood beside John Davis and watched from the Japanese lines: it was ‘an anticlimax – a dramatic scene – but an anticlimax nonetheless’. He recalled his feelings many years later: ‘We are letting them back unimpeded to reclaim a territory they have plundered for so long.’ Then, in a final humiliation, Force 136 was ordered to break cover and ask the Japanese for transport to allow British troops to move inland.83 The other landing zone at Port Dickson was choked by sightseers. ‘It was’, according to another Force 136 witness, ‘a circus atmosphere. A carnival with roadside stalls, puppet shows and entertainers.’84

For the next few days the British grip on events was uncertain. Detachments did not reach Malaya’s largest state of Pahang for a further three weeks: along the entire east coast the colonial government was represented by a handful of Force 136 officers. The first British troops reached Kuala Lumpur on 12 September to find the streets deserted. ‘If the populace were happy to see us,’ remarked one officer of the Royal Devon Yeomanry, ‘they proved adept at concealing their emotions.’85 The jungle fighters of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army were already established in the capital. Chin Peng, together with the military commander, Liew Yao, moved into a commandeered bungalow in the elite white suburb of Kenny Hill. Chin had been travelling widely, enforcing the peace between the British and the MPAJA. His mood was bleak. ‘I had been required to calm and pacify, restrain and arrest. I was mentally and emotionally drained.’86 There were confrontations between the MPAJA and the north-Indian troops of 5 Division, who took them to be Japanese.