Malayan campaign

Shortly after midnight on 8 December 1941, Malayan time, Japanese warships opened fire on the beaches near Kota Bharu in the north-eastern corner of Malaya, and the first landing craft headed for the shore. This was more than an hour before the air raid on Pearl Harbor, on the same night that the main body of the Japanese 25th Army was coming ashore at the Thai ports of Singora and Patani. Seventy days later, on the evening of 15 February 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival signed the surrender at the Ford factory outside Singapore before the commander of that army, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita. In that time the Japanese had covered more than a thousand kilometres, defeated in turn Indian, British and Australian divisions, sunk two great capital ships and taken the base that had been built over twenty years as the Empire’s fortress in the Far East. Some 130,000 British, Indian, Australian and Malay soldiers went into captivity – more than the entire army that had defeated them. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the fall of Singapore the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.

Name and dates

In Polish writing the campaign is called the Malayan campaign or the battle for Malaya; in Japan it was the “Malaya operation” (Marē sakusen). Its last stage, the fighting on the island itself on 8–15 February 1942, is often described separately as the Battle of Singapore or the fall of Singapore. Most British and Japanese historians, however, treat the whole as a single campaign, from the first landing on 8 December 1941 to the surrender on 15 February 1942. Some accounts end the “Battle of Malaya” on 31 January 1942, the day the last Commonwealth units crossed to the island, but this is a conventional division: both phases were conducted by the same army, under the same command and according to a single plan.

Dates are given in local time. Malaya lay on the Asian side of the International Date Line, so the landing at Kota Bharu began on 8 December, although by the clocks of Washington and Hawaii it was still the evening of 7 December. Times differ between sources, because the Japanese kept Tokyo time and the British Malayan time, which was an hour and a half behind Tokyo. According to the most commonly cited calculation, fire was opened at Kota Bharu at about 12.30 a.m. Malayan time, that is, about 5 p.m. GMT on 7 December, while the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor at 6.18 p.m. GMT.

Background

A fortress without a fleet

British Malaya was not a single colony. The peninsula comprised the Straits Settlements, with Singapore, Penang and Malacca, ruled directly from London; four federated sultanates under British protection; and five unfederated ones, including Kedah, Kelantan and Johor. The country was the world’s largest producer of rubber and one of the largest of tin, and the revenue from them propped up the Empire’s finances, while Singapore controlled the Strait of Malacca, the route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. After the First World War the British government decided to build a great naval base there. The Washington Treaty of 1922 prohibited the fortification of Hong Kong but did not cover Singapore, which was to become the mainstay of the defence of the whole Far East, Australia and New Zealand. Construction, halted several times for reasons of economy, went on until 1938; the base, with what was then the largest dry dock in the world, was opened in February of that year.

The whole concept, known as the “Singapore strategy”, rested on a single assumption: in a war with Japan the main fleet would sail from Europe to Singapore, and the garrison had to hold out until it arrived – a few weeks, later a few months. That is why the strongest element was the coast batteries with 15-inch (381 mm) guns. The story repeated after the war that they “faced the wrong way” is an oversimplification: most of them could traverse towards the land and in February 1942 did fire on the Japanese in Johor, but they had mainly armour-piercing shells, intended for use against warships and of little effect against infantry. The real weakness lay elsewhere. As early as 1937 the General Officer Commanding Malaya, Major General William Dobbie, had warned that during the north-east monsoon an enemy could land on the east coast, at Singora and Patani in Thailand and near Kota Bharu, and approach Singapore from the north, overland. The base therefore had to be defended across the whole peninsula, and that required a strong air force and many divisions.

The war in Europe wrecked these calculations. Britain had no fleet to send to the Far East, and aircraft, tanks and the best divisions went to Britain itself, to the Middle East and, from the summer of 1941, to the Soviet Union as well. The Chiefs of Staff judged that the defence of Malaya required 336 modern aircraft; in December 1941 there were about 160 serviceable front-line machines on the spot, many of them obsolete. Tanks intended for Asia were sent to North Africa, where Operation Crusader began in November. Towards the end of 1941 Churchill, against the views of part of the Admiralty, decided at least to make a show of strength to the Japanese, and sent to Singapore the new battleship Prince of Wales – a veteran of the hunt for the Bismarck, aboard which he had met Roosevelt in August – and the battlecruiser Repulse. The aircraft carrier that was to accompany them ran aground in Jamaica. The squadron, named Force Z, reached Singapore on 2 December 1941 under the command of Admiral Tom Phillips.

The Japanese plan

For Japan, Malaya was not an end in itself but a gateway. When in the summer of 1941 the United States, Britain and the Netherlands cut Japan off from oil, its leaders decided to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies. That could not be done while leaving Singapore and the Philippines on their flank. The plan for the “southern operation”, finally adopted by the Imperial Conference of 5 November, provided for simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor, Malaya, the Philippines, Hong Kong and the Pacific islands. The capture of Malaya and Singapore was entrusted to the 25th Army, which was given a hundred days to do it. The bases Japan had occupied in southern Indochina in July 1941 were crucial: naval bombers from the airfields around Saigon could reach Singapore, and convoys could assemble in Cam Ranh Bay.

The plan was worked out in detail. From early 1941 a small army research unit on Taiwan was at work, in which Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji gathered knowledge about fighting in the tropics, while Japanese diplomats, merchants, photographers and fishermen supplied maps, descriptions of roads and bridges and information on British airfields. The Japanese knew that Malaya had good roads and thousands of bicycles, and that the British had few tanks and even less experience. The landings were to take place during the monsoon, which the British did not expect, at several points at once: the main forces in Thailand, from where roads led to the west coast of Malaya, and a subsidiary force near Kota Bharu to seize the airfields there.

Opposing forces

Tomoyuki Yamashita took over the 25th Army on 6 November 1941. He was one of the ablest generals of the Japanese Army, but as a former member of the Kōdō-ha faction he had long been out of favour with the Prime Minister, Hideki Tōjō, who nevertheless gave him the most important task of the whole operation. His chief of staff was Lieutenant General Sōsaku Suzuki, and Tsuji headed the operations section. The army had three crack divisions: Lieutenant General Takuro Matsui’s 5th Division, veterans of the fighting in China trained in amphibious operations; Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi’s 18th Division; and Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura’s Imperial Guards Division, which was to come overland through Thailand. According to accounts from his staff, Yamashita turned down a fourth division he was offered, judging that he could not keep it supplied. The divisions together numbered about 50,000 men, and with army and rear-area troops the army had, by various calculations, 60,000–80,000 soldiers. It also had about two hundred tanks, including about eighty medium tanks, mainly Type 97s, and strong artillery. It was supported by about 460 aircraft: the army’s 3rd Air Group and the navy’s 22nd Air Flotilla, flying from airfields around Saigon. The convoys were covered by Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa’s fleet.

Malaya Command, under Lieutenant General Arthur Percival from May 1941, numbered about 88,000 soldiers in December 1941 according to the British official history, and during the campaign received reinforcements that raised the total to more than 130,000. Percival was a well-educated staff officer who, as Dobbie’s chief of staff in 1936–1938, had helped draw up a study of the defence of Malaya that anticipated the Japanese plan, but he had no experience of commanding large forces in the field. In the north stood Lieutenant General Lewis Heath’s III Indian Corps with the 9th and 11th Indian Divisions; in Johor two brigades of Major General Gordon Bennett’s Australian 8th Division; and Singapore was defended by the Fortress troops with two Malay brigades and volunteers. Most of the Indian battalions were made up of young recruits, because the Indian Army had sent its experienced soldiers to the Middle East and Africa. No one had been trained for jungle warfare, and the only tanks were some twenty obsolete light vehicles.

Above Percival stood the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham, who had authority over the land and air forces but not the navy. In addition there was the Governor, Shenton Thomas, responsible for the civil administration, and Duff Cooper, the minister sent out by Churchill, who after the outbreak of war became Resident Minister in the Far East. This division of authority, with no single commander whom everyone obeyed, weighed on the defence to the very end.

Course of the campaign

8 December: the landings and the Matador that never moved

The British had a plan for the event of a Japanese landing in Thailand. Operation Matador envisaged the 11th Indian Division entering neutral Thailand and seizing Singora before the Japanese could. London, however, feared that entering a country that had not yet been attacked would make Britain the aggressor in American eyes, and only on 5 December did it allow Brooke-Popham to take the decision himself. On 6 December an Australian Hudson spotted Japanese convoys sailing from Indochina, but it was not certain where they were heading, and on 7 December a British flying boat that found them again was shot down by Japanese fighters before it could send a report. Brooke-Popham hesitated, Percival judged a pre-emptive move premature, and Matador never went ahead. The 11th Division, ready to march north, had at the last moment to occupy unfinished positions at Jitra.

About 5,000 soldiers of the 18th Division under Major General Hiroshi Takumi landed near Kota Bharu. The shore was defended by the 8th Indian Brigade with pillboxes, wire and mines, and Hudsons of No. 1 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, took off from the nearby airfield. Fire from a Dogra battalion pinned the first waves to the beach, aircraft damaged all three transports, and one of them burned. According to their own figures, the Japanese lost about 320 killed and more than 500 wounded, but by morning they had three battalions ashore, and during the night of 8–9 December they took the airfield, which its personnel had abandoned in haste. Meanwhile the 5th Division and Yamashita himself landed at Singora and Patani without serious opposition. Thai soldiers and police resisted for a few hours until the government of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram ordered a ceasefire.

At about 4 a.m. on 8 December seventeen naval bombers from the airfields around Saigon bombed brightly lit Singapore, killing 61 people according to the most commonly cited figures. During the day army aircraft attacked the airfields of northern Malaya. The British lost about sixty aircraft on the first day, most of them on the ground, and within a week the Japanese had won an air superiority they kept until the end of the campaign.

10 December: the end of Force Z

On the evening of 8 December Admiral Phillips sailed from Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, the battlecruiser Repulse and four destroyers to strike at the Japanese transports off Singora. He knew that the air force could not give him air cover. When a Japanese submarine and reconnaissance aircraft detected his force, he turned back, and on the return voyage headed for Kuantan, where, according to a false report, the Japanese were landing. On the morning of 10 December he was found by some 85 bombers and torpedo bombers of the 22nd Air Flotilla from Indochina. In little more than two hours both ships went to the bottom. According to British figures about 840 sailors were killed, among them Phillips, while the Japanese lost only a few aircraft. For the first time in history, aircraft alone had sunk capital ships under way on the open sea. From then on the Japanese controlled the waters around Malaya and could land behind the retreating troops.

Jitra, Penang and Kampar

In the west the 5th Division advanced from Singora along the main road towards the border of the state of Kedah. Its spearhead, a few hundred men with tanks under Lieutenant Colonel Shizuo Saeki, routed the forward battalions of Major General David Murray-Lyon’s 11th Indian Division in a downpour on 11 December, and on 12 December broke into the main position at Jitra. The front, more than twenty kilometres long, with flooded trenches and broken communications, did not hold. The night withdrawal of 12–13 December turned into a rout: companies lost their way, equipment and stores were left behind, and the division lost the equivalent of almost three battalions. The next positions, at Gurun and on the Muda River, fell after a day or two.

The island of Penang, bombed from 11 December, had no fighters and almost no anti-aircraft defences. On 16 December the military authorities evacuated the Europeans, leaving the Asian population to fend for itself, while dozens of boats and a working radio station were left behind in the port. On 19 December the Japanese occupied the island without a fight. Many historians believe that it was there, and not at Singapore, that the moral authority of British rule in Malaya collapsed.

The Japanese fought in a way for which the British were unprepared. When they came up against a position on the road, they did not attack it frontally, but went round it through the rubber plantations and the jungle, or by sea in boats commandeered along the west coast, and appeared in the defenders’ rear. The infantry rode bicycles taken from Malay towns; when the tyres burst they rode on the rims, and at night the grinding noise was mistaken for tanks. British sappers blew more than a hundred bridges during the retreat, but Japanese engineers repaired them within hours. Each time the defenders had to fall back before they could fortify a new position. On 23 December Murray-Lyon was removed, on 27 December Brooke-Popham was replaced by Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, and on 28 December the Japanese entered Ipoh.

They met their first serious resistance at Kampar, where from 30 December 1941 to 2 January 1942 the 11th Division, including a composite battalion formed from the remnants of the Leicestershire and East Surrey Regiments, beat off attacks from well-chosen positions on the hillsides, and the British artillery inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese. But when the Japanese landed from the sea south of Kampar, the division again had to withdraw.

Slim River and Kuala Lumpur

The heaviest blow fell on 7 January 1942 on the Slim River. Major Toyosaku Shimada, with a company of about twenty tanks, mainly Type 97 mediums, proposed a night attack straight down the road, which no one expected. The tanks drove through the successive positions of two Indian brigades, passed batteries not ready for action and troops resting by the road, and in the morning captured the road bridge intact, more than ten kilometres behind the front line. The 11th Division ceased to exist as a fighting formation; thousands of soldiers scattered into the jungle, and most of them were taken prisoner. The road to the federal capital lay open, and on 11 January the Japanese entered Kuala Lumpur without a fight, capturing large supply depots.

Meanwhile the Allied command had changed. On 15 January General Archibald Wavell took command of ABDA, the combined American-British-Dutch-Australian Command with its headquarters on Java, which was responsible for Malaya, Burma and the Dutch East Indies. Having visited the front, he decided to hand the defence of Johor to Bennett’s Australians and withdraw the remnants of III Corps to the rear. Reinforcements were on their way to Singapore: the first brigade of the British 18th Division arrived on 13 January and the rest of the division at the turn of January and February, along with untrained Indian and Australian recruits.

Johor: Gemas, Muar and Endau

On 14 January Australians of the 2/30th Battalion laid an ambush near Gemas in which several hundred Japanese were killed or wounded at a demolished bridge. It was one of the few tactical successes of the campaign, but the bridge was repaired within hours, and Nishimura’s Guards were already outflanking the position to the west, along the coast. Near the town of Muar, on the river of the same name, stood the newly arrived, half-trained 45th Indian Brigade. From 15 January the Japanese crossed the river and landed from the sea in its rear. The brigade was destroyed, and its commander and all three battalion commanders were killed. Two Australian battalions sent to help were cut off at Bakri. Under the command of the Australian Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anderson, the remnants of five battalions fought their way south for four days until at Parit Sulong they found the bridge in Japanese hands. Anderson ordered every man to save himself, and for this action he received the Victoria Cross. The wounded who had to be left behind were murdered by the Japanese: more than a hundred Australians and Indians were shot or burned. The fighting on the Muar cost the Allies about three thousand soldiers.

On 26 January the Japanese landed at Endau on the east coast, and the last British bombers that tried to stop them, among them Vildebeest biplanes from the 1930s, suffered such heavy losses that the remnants of the air force were sent away to Sumatra. The last line of defence in Johor, from Batu Pahat through Kluang to Mersing, collapsed. On 27 January Wavell agreed to a withdrawal to the island. During the night of 30–31 January the last units crossed the causeway over the Johor Strait, piped across by the pipers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Scottish battalion covering the withdrawal. On the morning of 31 January sappers blew a gap some twenty metres wide in the causeway. The Japanese had taken the whole peninsula in less than two months.

Singapore, 8–15 February 1942

Some 85,000 Commonwealth soldiers had gathered on the island, many of them in units that were depleted, exhausted or had only just arrived. Yamashita had three divisions for the crossing, about 30,000–35,000 front-line troops, and his ammunition was running low. Percival, convinced that the main blow would fall in the north-east, where the naval base lay, spread his troops along the whole coast and placed the fresh 18th Division there. The western sector, cut by river mouths and mangrove swamps, was held by the weakened 22nd Australian Brigade – about three thousand men on more than ten kilometres of shoreline.

On 8 February the Japanese artillery shelled the Australian positions for many hours, cutting the telephone lines. At about 8.30 p.m. the first waves of the 5th and 18th Divisions crossed the strait in boats. Most of the searchlights set up on the shore were never switched on, and the British artillery did not open its defensive barrage in time. During the night some 13,000 Japanese landed, and in the morning another 10,000. The Australians fought fiercely, but were outflanked and pushed back inland, and on 9 February the Japanese took Tengah airfield. During the night of 9–10 February the Guards attacked at Kranji, west of the causeway. The Australians set fire to oil released into the water and inflicted heavy losses on them; Nishimura reportedly wanted to call off the attack, but Yamashita ordered him to press on. The withdrawal of the 27th Australian Brigade from this sector, the circumstances of which are still disputed, opened the way for the Japanese to repair the causeway and bring their tanks across.

The defence line between the Kranji and Jurong rivers fell apart on 10 February, partly because of misunderstood orders. That evening Churchill telegraphed Wavell that the battle must be fought “to the bitter end at all costs” and that commanders should die with their troops. Wavell, who visited the island that day, ordered a counter-attack, but it failed. On 11 February the Japanese took Bukit Timah hill, with the garrison’s main food and fuel depots, and Yamashita dropped Percival a letter calling on him to cease his “senseless and desperate resistance”. He himself was in a difficult position: his artillery was beginning to run short of shells, and a long battle in the city might have ended badly for him. He later said that his attack on Singapore had been a bluff that worked.

On 12 and 13 February the defenders withdrew to a perimeter around the city, in which about a million people were crowded together under constant bombing and shelling. On the Pasir Panjang ridge the 1st Malay Brigade – including a battalion of the Malay Regiment in which Second Lieutenant Adnan Saidi, later a national hero of Malaysia, fought – held out until 14 February. On 14 February Japanese soldiers broke into the Alexandra military hospital and bayoneted doctors, orderlies and patients, some of them on the operating table; the next day they killed about two hundred people held there. The city’s water mains were damaged, and water was beginning to run out, as were shells for the artillery and fuel for the vehicles.

On the morning of 15 February, the first day of the Chinese New Year, Percival gathered his commanders in the bunker at Fort Canning. A counter-attack to recover the reservoirs and depots was judged impossible, although post-war analyses suggest that the Japanese were then at the end of their strength. Percival decided to surrender. In the afternoon he drove under a white flag to the Ford motor factory at Bukit Timah, where Yamashita, according to a famous account, banged his fist on the table and demanded a “yes or no” answer. Yamashita himself later claimed that what had made him impatient was chiefly the slow interpreting. The unconditional surrender was signed in the evening, and the firing was to stop at 8.30 p.m. Bennett handed over command of his division to a subordinate and escaped by boat to Sumatra and from there to Australia, which weighed on his reputation for the rest of his life.

Losses

According to Japanese figures, the 25th Army lost about 3,500 killed and 6,000 wounded in the whole campaign; other calculations raise the total losses to about 15,000. Commonwealth losses are estimated at 130,000–139,000 men, including about 7,500–8,000 killed, more than 10,000 wounded and more than 120,000 taken prisoner: according to the most commonly cited breakdown, about 38,000 British, 18,000 Australians, 67,000 soldiers of the Indian Army and 14,000 local volunteers. According to the Australian historian John Coates, the Australians, who made up about 13 per cent of the land forces, suffered nearly three-quarters of the battle deaths. It is not known exactly how many civilians died in the air raids and fighting.

For many prisoners, captivity proved worse than the battle. The British and Australians were sent to the camps at Changi and from there, in their thousands, to build the Burma Railway and to other labour camps, where many of them died of hunger, disease and ill-treatment. The Japanese separated the Indian prisoners from them; some of these joined the Indian National Army, formed under Japanese patronage. A few days after the surrender, from 18 February, the military police (Kempeitai) and units of the 25th Army carried out in Singapore, and later throughout Malaya, a “purge” of the Chinese population known as Sook Ching. Men arbitrarily singled out as “anti-Japanese” were taken to beaches and shot. The Japanese command later admitted to about 5,000–6,000 victims; Singaporean and Chinese estimates speak of several tens of thousands, most often about 50,000 in Singapore and up to 70,000 including Malaya.

Significance

The Malayan campaign was the heaviest defeat in the history of the British Army. An army larger than its enemy, defending a fortress prepared over twenty years, was beaten in less than ten weeks by troops whom the British had held in contempt before the war. Many reasons have been put forward: the absence of the fleet and air force on which the whole defence plan rested; Japanese superiority in the air and at sea from the first days; their experience from China and their skill at outflanking positions; the poor training and dispersal of the Commonwealth troops; the hesitation over Matador; the lack of fortifications in Johor and on the island’s north shore; the divided command; and finally the passivity of Percival, whom many historians blame, although others stress that he was given an impossible task. The dispute over responsibility, including between the British and the Australians, continues to this day.

The fall of Singapore opened the way for the Japanese to the Dutch East Indies, Burma and the Indian Ocean, and Australia, concluding that the British promise of defence from the Singapore base had proved hollow, turned to the United States. The longest-lasting consequence, however, was the loss of prestige. The peoples of Asia saw a European empire surrender to an Asian army, and its officials in Penang and Singapore save themselves first. Although the British returned to Malaya in 1945, their rule in South-East Asia never regained its former standing. Yamashita, hailed in Japan as the “Tiger of Malaya”, was soon sidelined to Manchuria, and in 1946 he was executed after a trial for crimes committed under his command in the Philippines.