• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1719 0

been readied to withstand attack and siege. The German Staff had estimated that the capture of Singapore would take five and a half divisions and eighteen months; Yamashita had achieved it with two divisions in less than two months. In London on 10 February, accepting the likelihood of defeat in Singapore, Churchill had told the War Cabinet that Britain was ‘In for a rough time – Smashing blows – [but we shall] not come out bust – No gloom or disheartenment… Screw down rations – Eat into reserves of food – Army at home [must] brace themselves.’57 Yet Singapore was not about to become another Leningrad.

From being a bandy-kneed, myopic, oriental midget in Western eyes, the Japanese soldier was suddenly transformed into an invincible, courageous superman. Of course neither racial stereotype was accurate, but events in the Philippines, Malaya and elsewhere did nothing to damage the new myth, even though General Douglas MacArthur’s 130,000-strong force in the Philippines fought much better and for much longer than Percival’s had. The colonial powers – American, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Australian – were woefully under-equipped to fight a modern war against a nearby major industrial power like Japan, which had already had ten years’ combat experience. Run for years on prestige, minimal military commitment, small budgets and an element of bluster, the colonial territories of South-East Asia also suffered from poor infrastructure, long lines of communication with the metropolitan centres, plenty of invadable beaches, and nationalist local independence movements. A powerfully aggressive militarist nation of seventy-three million, with bases in Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and Indo-China, was eager to wrest power from them. Nonetheless, the various sections of the new Japanese Empire had very little in common with one another, as was displayed with sublime irony in November 1943 when General Tojo presided over a conference in Tokyo of the prime ministers of all the puppet governments in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The leaders took it in turns to praise the freedom that Japan had promised their countries from the evil Western imperialists, but as there was only one language common to all of them, the proceedings had to be conducted in English.58

Douglas MacArthur, a charismatic leader and former US Chief of Staff, had only ninety fighter aircraft, thirty-five Flying Fortress B-17 bombers and a hundred tanks to protect the Philippines on 8 December, and his army, though large on paper, was primarily made up of under-trained and under-equipped Filipinos, some of whom disappeared back to their barrios (villages) as soon as the Japanese invaded.59 In trying to pursue his original policy of meeting the invasion on the beaches of northern Luzon and the Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur was stymied by the successful bombing of the Clark Field air base north of Manila. Even though news of Pearl Harbor had been received at Clark at 02.30 hours on 8 December, and other bases in the Philippines had been attacked, and the head of the USAAF General H. H. ‘Hap’ Arnold had telephoned a warning to Major-General Lewis H. Brereton, the commander of US Far East Air Forces, American planes were still stationed unprotected on the ground at 12.15 when 108 twin-engined Japanese bombers and 34 fighters arrived from Formosa. American pilots were queuing for lunch in the mess when they struck. No fewer than eighteen of the B-17s were destroyed, as were fifty-six fighters and other aircraft, at a total cost of seven Japanese planes.60 Inter-service confusion at headquarters was blamed for the disaster, but, whatever caused it, by the eighth day of the campaign MacArthur had only fifty planes left and had therefore lost air superiority, a recurring feature in explaining defeats in the Second World War. The 22,400 US regular troops and many Filipino regulars, however, put up a sturdy resistance, especially once MacArthur had accepted on 23 December that he could not hold Manila, retreating into the jungles, mountains and swamps of the Bataan peninsula