Inferno - Max Hastings [137]
At Singapore more than 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 the 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 1 woman were killed, and many nurses raped. One group of 22 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 officer named Major Wylde, in baggy shorts and helmet askew, beside his general as they carried the union flag to the Japanese lines became one of the most wretchedly memorable images of the war. It seemed to symbolise the bungling, blimpish ineffectuality of the men who had been entrusted with the defence of Britain’s eastern empire. Along with Singapore, Percival signed away a significant portion of the honour of the British and Indian armies, as Churchill and his people well understood. The Japanese had gained their victory in barely seventy days, at a cost of