The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [119]
Racial honour was one thing, the facts on the ground in Singapore quite another, but it is clear that Hitler was not the only leader of a great power to issue ‘Stand or die’ orders during the Second World War, although this was easily the harshest Churchill ever gave.
Tragically, large numbers of reinforcements continued to be landed in Singapore harbour, almost up to the surrender. They went straight into captivity, instead of being deployed where they were desperately needed to defend India, Burma and Australia. Most of their stores and equipment was also captured before it could be destroyed.53 The 130,000 men who surrendered on 15 February included many local recruits, and refugees from the north who had lost the will to fight. The Malays meanwhile swiftly made their peace with the Japanese, who promised them independence and freedom within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet it was not long before the Japanese military police, the notorious Kempeitai, began executing on the beaches Malay Chinese they considered untrustworthy. A sign of how disillusioned the Indians were with the British can be seen in the fact that, of the 55,000 Indians taken prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore, 40,000 volunteered to fight for the India National Army, the pro-Japanese force commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose.54
‘This retreat seems fantastic,’ wrote the commander of the Australian troops, General Gordon Bennett, on his way back to Singapore. ‘Fancy 550 miles in 55 days – chased by a Jap army on stolen bikes, without artillery. It was a war of patrols. All that happened was that they patrolled outside our resistance [capabilities] and sat on a road behind us. Thinking we were cut off, we retreated… Never felt so sad and upset. Words fail me.’55 The Japanese suffered only 9,824 casualties during the whole campaign. A photograph was beamed around the world of Percival and other senior British officers in their shorts and long socks, flat tin hats and rolled-up sleeves walking beside two Japanese officers to surrender to Yamashita, one Briton with a flagpole over his shoulder from which hung a white flag, another with a limp Union Jack. Indeed everything about the defence had been limp. Percival had been bluffed by Yamashita, who had outrun his supplies and might have buckled before a determined counter-attack from forces twice his size, but such was the demoralization that that was never going to happen. (Had they known the fate that awaited them, however, they would doubtless have tried.) It was not solely the British who had underperformed. ‘Bennett and [Brigadier D. S.] Maxwell were unequivocal failures,’ records an Australian historian. ‘Although Australia and other Dominions were critical of British generalship in the world wars, they themselves had no mechanism for producing an obviously better type of senior commander.’56
Percival had lost only 7,500 casualties in the campaign, but when he surrendered to the much smaller force led by Yamashita he also lost the respect of the Japanese, who thought his soldiers cowards for having given up so easily. They would probably have been just as viciously ill-treated if they had held out for longer, but the lives of one million civilians were in jeopardy on the island, especially with water supplies in a critical state after the Japanese captured the reservoirs. A campaign that the Japanese General Staff had started planning for only in January 1941 had laid low an island fortress that had for decades and at immense cost