The Battle of Muar

On 19 January 1942 the Japanese Imperial Guards Division closed its ring around the village of Bakri in western Johor, some 150 kilometres north-west of Singapore. Trapped inside were the remnants of the 45th Indian Infantry Brigade and two battalions of the Australian 8th Division, several thousand men in all. On the same day the Japanese drove a British battalion from Norfolk, which was supposed to hold the only line of retreat, off the ridge behind them. This was the midpoint of the Battle of Muar, fought from 14 to 22 January – the last great battle of the Malayan campaign before the withdrawal to Singapore Island. It ended with the encircled column’s four-day march through Japanese roadblocks and with the atrocity at Parit Sulong, where soldiers of the Guards murdered some 150 wounded Australian and Indian prisoners.

Many war chronologies state that on 19 January the Japanese took large numbers of British soldiers prisoner “north of Singapore”. No mass surrender took place that day, however. The encircled units did not give in but fought their way south; men were taken prisoner throughout the week – stragglers, mainly Indian soldiers of the scattered battalions of the 45th Brigade, and the wounded left behind at Parit Sulong. The great surrender came only on 15 February, in Singapore.

The line in Johor

A month after the Japanese landings in Thailand and at Kota Bharu, after the defeat on the Slim River and the fall of Kuala Lumpur on 11 January, General Archibald Wavell decided to fight the decisive battle for Malaya in northern Johor. The shattered III Indian Corps was pulled back to the rear, and the front was taken over by Westforce under Major General Gordon Bennett, commander of the Australian 8th Division. The main forces, the Australian 27th Brigade and the 9th Indian Division, held the trunk road and the railway near Gemas and Segamat. Bennett entrusted the western flank – the coastal sector along the Muar River, with the town of Muar at its mouth – to Brigadier Herbert Duncan’s 45th Indian Brigade.

It was the weakest point in the whole deployment. The 45th Brigade had landed in Singapore at the beginning of January. Its three battalions, from the Rajputana Rifles, the Royal Garhwal Rifles and the Jat Regiment, consisted mostly of very young recruits who had received only brief training, had few experienced officers and had never practised jungle fighting. With a single battery of artillery, the brigade was to defend a front of more than 40 kilometres, and Bennett ordered two battalions to be strung out along the riverbank itself, with only one in reserve. The commander in Malaya, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, expected the main blow to fall on the road through Gemas; in fact the entire Japanese Imperial Guards Division under Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura was advancing along the coast.

The ambush at Gemas

On the trunk road the Australians had prepared the ambush for which Percival had long been pressing. B Company of Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Galleghan’s 2/30th Battalion lay hidden by the bridge over the Gemencheh stream, a few kilometres in front of Gemas. The bridge was mined, and a battery of artillery was positioned in the hills behind. At about 4 p.m. on 14 January the Japanese advance guard – several hundred men on bicycles, followed by tanks and engineers’ lorries, from Colonel Mukaida’s armoured detachment – reached the bridge. The Australians let the head of the column cross, then blew the bridge and opened fire on the crowded road. The Japanese cyclists who had already passed, however, had cut a concealed telephone cable, and the artillery never received the signal to fire. The company withdrew in the evening, having lost one man killed and six missing, who were later murdered in captivity.

Estimates of Japanese losses in the ambush vary widely. The Australians spoke of several hundred dead, some even of six hundred; the war diary of the Japanese brigade to which Mukaida’s detachment belonged recorded 70 killed and 57 wounded in the detachment alone. The bridge was repaired within a few hours. On 15 January the 2/30th Battalion spent the whole day beating off infantry and tank attacks on its main position at Gemas; Australian anti-tank guns knocked out six of the eight attacking vehicles. In two days the battalion lost 17 killed, 9 missing and 55 wounded, and Australian historians put the losses of the Japanese 5th Division at about a thousand men. Encouraged by this success, Bennett told the press that his men would not only stop the Japanese but would force them onto the defensive. It was one of the few Allied tactical successes of the entire campaign, but the outcome was decided by what was happening to the west.

The Guards on the Muar

On the night of 15–16 January men of the Guards seized barges moored on the south bank of the Muar and crossed upstream, while other units came along the coast by boat. At dawn they overran a Rajput company, and three companies stationed on the north bank were cut off and captured before brigade headquarters realised that the Japanese were already across. An attempted landing in the port itself was repulsed by Australian artillery, but in the afternoon the Japanese who had crossed upstream entered the town. The commanding officers of the Rajput and Garhwali battalions and most of their officers were killed in the fighting, and a Japanese air raid destroyed brigade headquarters, killing almost all the staff officers and stunning Brigadier Duncan. By the evening of 16 January Muar was in Japanese hands, and the remnants of the brigade were falling back south.

Bennett threw into a counter-attack two Australian battalions that he had withdrawn from Gemas: Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anderson’s 2/19th and Lieutenant Colonel John Robertson’s 2/29th. On 17 January they joined the remnants of the 45th Brigade at Bakri, on the road leading inland from Muar. The counter-attack on Muar collapsed before it had begun, because one of the columns ran into a Japanese ambush. On the morning of 18 January Nishimura attacked Bakri. In the lead were nine light tanks under Captain Shigeo Gotanda, which went in without infantry, following the example of the Slim River. Two Australian anti-tank guns under Lieutenant Bill McClure destroyed every one of them. That same day, however, Robertson was killed, and the Japanese infantry – although Nishimura later described the fighting as “fierce and bloody” – began to encircle the position.

19 January

By 19 January the Japanese had worked round Bakri and cut the road behind the defenders. The only line of retreat ran through Parit Sulong, where the bridge over the Simpang Kiri river was guarded by only a small detachment, to the crossroads at Yong Peng. It was covered by a defile beneath the hill of Bukit Pelandok, held by the 6th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment from the British 53rd Brigade, which had arrived in Singapore only on 13 January after an eleven-week sea voyage. It was the British 18th Division’s first action in Malaya. On the afternoon of 19 January two battalions of the Japanese 4th Guards Regiment drove the Norfolks off the hill; the British battalion had no wireless and could not even inform its headquarters of its situation. The next morning a counter-attack by a Punjabi battalion broke down, partly under fire from the Norfolks, who mistook the Indians for Japanese, and its commanding officer was killed. Meanwhile, in the east, Westforce began to withdraw from Segamat. The British had lost their last chance of opening the road to the encircled troops from outside.

Anderson’s retreat

On 20 January, after Brigadier Duncan had been killed leading a bayonet charge to recover lost vehicles, Anderson took command of all the units at Bakri. Born in South Africa in 1897, he had served as an officer in East Africa during the First World War and had then farmed in Kenya and Australia. On the morning of 20 January he was ordered to break through to Yong Peng. He waited a little longer for the Jat battalion, as a result of which part of the 2/29th Battalion was cut off. The column that set out comprised some two hundred Australians of that battalion, the 2/19th Battalion and about a thousand Indian soldiers, with the wounded in lorries.

Only two kilometres beyond Bakri the column was stopped by a roadblock of lorries captured by the Japanese. It was broken only by a bayonet charge that Anderson led in person. Then came further roadblocks, air raids and tank attacks from the rear. Australian Bren carriers destroyed machine-gun nests at close range, sappers fought as infantry, and field guns fired over open sights at the roadblocks. By dusk the column had covered five kilometres; Anderson allowed no rest, and the march continued through the night. In two days the column covered about 24 kilometres.

On the morning of 21 January a patrol reported that the bridge at Parit Sulong was in Japanese hands; its guard from the Norfolk battalion, cut off and without food, had earlier made off along the river. The Australians retook most of the village, but at the bridge itself the Japanese had fortified machine-gun positions, tanks, artillery and air support. The column, squeezed into a few hundred metres of road, fought off attacks from both sides all day. In the evening Anderson sent two ambulances carrying the seriously wounded to the bridge under a white flag, asking for them to be let through to the British lines. The Japanese refused, demanded the surrender of the whole column, promising to care for the wounded, and ordered the ambulances to stand on the bridge as a roadblock. After dark the wounded Lieutenant Austin and a driver released the brakes, let the vehicles roll silently back off the bridge and drove them back to the column.

On the morning of 22 January two British aircraft dropped food and morphine to the column and bombed the Japanese positions beyond the bridge, but another attempt to break through failed. Bennett informed Anderson that relief would not arrive in time: “Sorry unable help after all your heroic effort. Good luck.” At about 9 a.m. Anderson had the guns and vehicles destroyed and ordered everyone who could walk to make his own way through the jungle and swamps eastwards to Yong Peng. The wounded who could not walk were left in the care of volunteers. Of the more than four thousand men of the 45th Brigade and the two Australian battalions, according to the Australian official history some five hundred Australians and four hundred Indians reached the British lines. For his leadership during these days Anderson was awarded the Victoria Cross, gazetted on 13 February 1942.

The atrocity at Parit Sulong

The wounded left behind at Parit Sulong – according to the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 110 Australians and some 40 Indians – surrendered to the Guards. Those who could not move were beaten with rifle butts and kicked, and some were killed on the spot. The rest were crammed into a few small rooms of a labourers’ hut and denied water and medical care. According to the survivors’ testimony, the guards brought buckets of water to the door and poured it onto the ground. In the evening the prisoners were led out, tied together in groups with rope or wire, and machine-gunned. The bodies, among them men still alive, were doused with petrol and set alight. According to witnesses, some of the Indian soldiers were beheaded. Sources put the number of those murdered at between about 135 and about 155; the figure most often given is about 150.

A very few survived. Lieutenant Ben Hackney of the 2/29th Battalion, with both legs broken, feigned death and crawled into the undergrowth; for more than a month he hid with the help of local Chinese until he was caught and handed over to the Japanese. He survived captivity and the building of the Burma Railway, and his account, the testimony of Private Reginald Wharton and of two Indian soldiers, and the remains found after the war formed the basis of the post-war investigation.

The commander of the Imperial Guards Division answered for the crime. Nishimura, first sentenced by a British court in Singapore to life imprisonment for his part in the massacres of the Chinese population of Singapore in February and March 1942, was taken off a ship by the Australians in 1950 as he was returning to Japan and put before an Australian military court on Manus Island. The court found that he had ordered the prisoners to be killed and their bodies destroyed, and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on 11 June 1951. His responsibility is sometimes questioned: Hackney did not recognise him in a photograph, and one Japanese officer reportedly admitted that it was he who had carried out the execution. The claim made in 1996 by the Australian journalist Ian Ward that the prosecutor had manipulated the evidence has, however, been challenged by later historical research.

Place in the war

The Battle of Muar cost the Allies some three thousand men, one brigadier and four battalion commanders. The 45th Brigade ceased to exist, and both Australian battalions lost most of their strength. Percival put the blame on the brigade, writing that it had “never been fit for use in a theatre of war”; historians more often point to those who placed the least experienced unit opposite an elite division enjoying superiority in the air and in tanks. Yet the week of fighting on the coast was not in vain: it delayed the Guards long enough for the main body of Westforce to withdraw from Segamat through Yong Peng before the Japanese could cut it off.

Johor could no longer be held. At the end of January the Japanese also landed on the east coast at Endau, the last line from Batu Pahat through Kluang to Mersing gave way, and on 27 January Wavell agreed to the withdrawal to the island. On the night of 30–31 January the last units crossed the Causeway over the Johor Strait, and on 15 February Singapore surrendered. Parit Sulong was the first great atrocity committed by the Japanese army against Australian prisoners. For Australians it became a portent of the fate of more than twenty thousand of their soldiers who fell into Japanese hands in 1942–1945, most of them in Malaya and Singapore; more than a third of them did not survive the war. Nishimura himself was in bitter conflict with the commander of the 25th Army, Tomoyuki Yamashita; in April 1942 he was recalled to Japan and placed on the retired list.