The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [29]
The eighth of December 1941 in Singapore was a balmy summers’ day just like any other. The only unusual thing was the failure of our ‘trusty’ Tamil to show up for work as normal. The tempo of work at the base had really increased and late in the evening I was still dealing with papers in the office when, at around 10 p.m., a tremendous explosion just fifty yards from my small office sent me diving under the desk for cover. Japanese bombs had started raining down on Fort Canning.
The first bomb had exploded on the nearby tennis court, leaving a ten-foot-wide crater on the baseline and rocking my office. Huddled under the desk, scared to death and waiting for the next bomb to drop, I realised this was it. War. I would finally learn why my father’s hands shook during thunderstorms.
I should have known that 8 December was to be the day. The mystery of the Tamil’s non-appearance was now solved. He was never seen again, confirming in my mind my earlier suspicion that he was a spy for the Japanese and had been ciphering secret information and documents out of our office, from beneath our noses.
While the Japanese were targeting Fort Canning and the naval base at Singapore from the air, their army was landing up-country on the eastern coast of Malaysia – on the undefended beaches originally identified in Matador as landing points. Imperial shock troops blooded against Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist army, Mao Tse-tung’s Communist guerrillas and Marshal Zhukov’s mechanised Red Army in Mongolia strolled ashore in neutral Thailand and walked into Malaya virtually unopposed.
Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific, in a separate time zone, it was still 7 December, a sleepy Sunday morning in Hawaii. The bulk of the United States’ Pacific Fleet was moored at Pearl Harbor when Admiral Yamamoto’s dive-bombers struck without warning on a day that President Roosevelt predicted would ‘live in infamy’.
For the next two days the bombs kept falling. Oddly Fort Canning suffered very little. Whether it was because the fort was situated on a hill or because the Japanese calculated that they could not get to the underground complex, I never knew. But we escaped most of the bombs. They always seemed to fall short and the main buildings bore little actual damage.
Singapore was not so lucky. The city was ill-prepared for this oriental blitz. On that first night no order was issued to black out the lights in the city and from Fort Canning I looked down to witness the incredible sight of Singapore ablaze with street lights, their glow acting as a magnet for Japanese bombers and their fighter escorts, which buzzed around the city like wasps around a jam pot. There was insufficient British air support either. Hopelessly outnumbered our pilots took to the air on suicide missions. Tragically some of our planes were also shot down by our own anti-aircraft batteries. Soon the Japanese had mastery of the skies and a great black pall of smoke hung over the city. Singapore was burning.
At the same time reports came flooding in from up-country in Malaya and most were utterly depressing. Japanese troops under General Yamashita, who would later become known as ‘The Tiger of Malaya’, were storming south at an unbelievable speed, relying on bicycles and the ingenuity of their engineers, who quickly restored sabotaged bridges and roads. Critically the Japanese infantry was supported by three hundred tanks. The war machines that the British Army had decided were unsuitable for conditions in Malaya cut swathes through our lightly armed troops.
On 10 December General Percival issued a special order of the day. He announced, ‘The eyes of the Empire are upon us. Our whole position in the Far East is at stake. The struggle may be long and grim but let us all resolve to stand fast come what may and to prove ourselves worthy of the great trust which has been placed in us.’
On the very same day we received the shocking news that HMS Prince