The destruction of the Singapore dock

At the beginning of February 1945 American B-29 Superfortress bombers of XX Bomber Command, part of the Twentieth Air Force, carried out their largest raid so far on the naval base at Singapore. Their main target was the Admiralty IX Floating Dock – one of the two installations that made the base the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most important repair yard outside Japan. The dock went to the bottom together with the ship lying in it, and bombs also fell on the base’s offices and workshops.

War chronologies place this event under 2 February and state that the naval docks at Singapore were destroyed by B-29 raids. According to the American official history of the air force (Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, “The Army Air Forces in World War II”) and the studies based on it, the raid took place on 1 February 1945. The word “destroyed” also needs qualifying: it was the floating dock that was sunk, whereas the great King George VI dry dock had been out of action since the November raid, and the base as a whole continued to function – the Americans attacked it again on 2 March.

Two docks

Throughout the interwar period the British had been building the base at Sembawang on the north coast of the island. It was to be the centrepiece of the so-called Singapore strategy: in the event of war with Japan the main British fleet would sail from Europe to Singapore, and the base would receive it, supply it and carry out its repairs. Its most important installation was the King George VI Graving Dock, opened in 1938 and some 300 metres long – the largest dry dock in the Far East and one of the largest in the world, able to take any battleship or aircraft carrier of the day. It was complemented by the Admiralty IX floating dock (PL), a huge steel pontoon structure which, once a ship had been floated in, was raised out of the water together with it.

The strategy failed. After the fall of Malaya the Singapore garrison surrendered on 15 February 1942, at the end of the Battle of Singapore, and the base, almost untouched by the fighting, passed into Japanese hands. When in 1944 American submarines were increasingly cutting Japan off from the oil of the Dutch East Indies, the main body of the fleet was moved to the area of Singapore and the nearby Lingga archipelago, closer to the refineries of Sumatra and Borneo. It was from there that Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s force sailed in October, and after the defeat at Leyte Gulf some of the damaged ships returned to Singapore for repair.

From November to January

The first B-29 raid on Singapore, on 5 November 1944, put the King George VI dry dock out of action for about three months. It was one of the most accurately executed missions of XX Bomber Command, but also an exceptionally difficult one: the bombers took off from airfields around Kharagpur in Bengal, more than three thousand kilometres from the target, and could carry only two bombs each. The second attack, on 11 January 1945, aimed at the floating dock and the commercial docks in the south of the island, achieved nothing – 27 of the 47 aircraft reached the target, and heavy anti-aircraft fire from warships lying in the Johor Strait scattered the bombing.

In January the command began preparing to move to the Marianas, where the B-29s of XXI Bomber Command had been operating since the autumn. General Curtis LeMay flew there on 18 January, and Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey took over the command in India. The bombers stopped flying through China and concentrated on targets in South-East Asia within reach of Kharagpur, above all ports and shipping – as in the raid on Bangkok at the beginning of January.

Mines were one of the tools of this campaign. On the full-moon night of 25/26 January, 41 B-29s laid six minefields in the approaches to Singapore, while other aircraft mined the waters off Saigon and in Cam Ranh Bay the same night – according to American records, the largest aerial minelaying operation in the Pacific up to that time.

The raid

According to Craven and Cate, 112 bombers were sent on the attack of 1 February, each carrying four 1,000-pound bombs (about 450 kg) – twice as many as in November. Eighty-eight aircraft reached Singapore. Sixty-seven of them bombed the floating dock, which sank together with a ship about 140 metres long that was lying in it. The remaining 21 attacked the so-called West Wall – the part of the base that housed the main offices – destroying many buildings and some of the heavy equipment. Around 20 bombers that did not reach Singapore dropped their bombs on secondary targets on the island of Penang and at Martaban in Burma. A Japanese fighter shot down one B-29, and a second crashed on landing after being damaged in air combat.

The result hurt the fleet more than the base itself. The Japanese lost the last large dock in which they could repair heavy ships at Singapore, and the King George VI dry dock, damaged in November, was still out of action. According to studies based on American records, the floating dock remained unavailable to the Japanese until the end of the war. The base’s workshops, storehouses and wharves nevertheless kept working, and the labourers returned to work, though with growing reluctance after each raid – the Japanese had to raise their pay, increase their food rations and build shelters.

Mountbatten’s ban

XX Bomber Command was already preparing another attack on the base, set for 6 February, when on 3 February it was called off by Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia. He ordered that the naval installations at Singapore and Penang be spared, because after the liberation of Malaya planned for 1945 they were to serve the British fleet. Ramey asked for clarification and met Mountbatten at Kandy in Ceylon, where new targets were agreed, among them in the Kuala Lumpur area.

This did not mean the end of the raids on Singapore. On 24 February more than a hundred B-29s showered incendiaries on the commercial port of Empire Dock – the planners regarded it as the only suitable primary target in the theatre free of restrictions – burning about 39 per cent of the warehouses there, and many houses in the vicinity besides. On 2 March 49 bombers again attacked the base’s workshops and storehouses, this time with 500-pound bombs; fire from warships brought down two of them. On the night of 27/28 February ten B-29s laid 55 mines in the Johor Strait, and in March the command also attacked fuel tanks on the islets off the south coast of the island. At the turn of March and April its units moved to the Marianas, and the mining of the waters around Singapore was taken over by the RAF’s No. 222 Group, which continued it with Liberators until 24 May. Air-laid naval mines sank three ships near Singapore and damaged ten, and each minefield laid closed the port for several weeks before minesweepers could clear it.

A fleet without a base

The loss of the docks coincided with the break-up of the Japanese force in the south. Less than two weeks after the raid, on 10 February, the hybrid battleship-carriers Ise and Hyūga left Singapore with an escort. In Operation Kita they carried fuel and raw materials to Japan and reached Kure without loss on 20 February – they were among the last large warships to break through from the south past an ever tighter blockade. Left behind at Singapore were the heavy cruisers Takao and Myōkō, damaged at the end of 1944 and now beyond repair; until the end of the war they served as floating anti-aircraft batteries.

Singapore ceased to be a fleet base and became a haven for ships that could no longer return home. The main forces of the Japanese navy were now concentrated in home waters, cut off from the oil of the south – the very reason they had been moved to Lingga only a year earlier.

Place in the war

The sinking of the floating dock was a secondary episode, but it illustrates the last months of the war in South-East Asia well. The Japanese fleet, which in 1942 had captured Singapore together with all the facilities of the British base, had by early 1945 nowhere to repair its ships and nothing to fuel them with. For XX Bomber Command it was one of the last major operations from India – a costly experiment that had not lived up to the hopes placed in bombing Japan from the Asian mainland and gave way to the campaign from the Marianas. For the Allies it was also a sign of their return: Mountbatten was already treating the base as a future prize and not merely a target. The British returned to Singapore in September 1945, after Japan’s surrender; the King George VI dry dock was repaired and served the Royal Navy once more.