Inferno - Max Hastings [132]
Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted a cultural shock as devastating as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: “I said to myself, ‘You silly bastard, roll over.’ ” A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.
Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which 66 were Buffaloes, 57 Blenheims and 22 Hudsons. The obsolesence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When invaders began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp: it was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how “one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had … become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor boats … and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.”
Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. “How is this possible? They are all sahibs,” a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: “They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.” But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British commander 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