The Japanese land on Singapore

On the night of 8–9 February 1942 the first waves of Japanese infantry crossed the narrow Johor Strait in boats and landed on the north-west shore of Singapore Island. By morning there were some 13,000 Japanese on the island, with thousands more following. The shore they struck was held by weakened Australian units strung out across fifteen kilometres or so of mangroves and river mouths. Over the next three days the Japanese took Tengah airfield, seized the shore by the Causeway near Kranji, broke an improvised defence line and on 11 February captured Bukit Timah hill with the garrison’s main depots. The Battle of Singapore, which was supposed to last for months, was in practice decided in its first three days.

Some calendars state that on 9 February British forces were “in full retreat to Singapore to fight a last battle”. That description is more than a week out of date: the last Commonwealth units had crossed from Johor to the island on 31 January, and by 9 February the fighting was already on the island itself. The day was not one of retreat but the first day of the Japanese landing.

The island before the attack

After the Causeway was blown, Singapore had a week’s respite, but it did not use it well. The commander in Malaya, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, had according to the British official history some 85,000 men, about 15,000 of them in rear and administrative services. Many battalions from the fighting on the mainland had been decimated and filled up with untrained recruits; the remnants of the 45th Indian Brigade, destroyed in January on the Muar, were only being rebuilt, and the Australian battalions that had gone to its aid there had been filled with replacements sent straight from home. The only complete, fresh formation was the British 18th Infantry Division, which had arrived at the end of January after many weeks at sea. The last convoy carrying its units arrived on 5 February, but Japanese bombers sank the transport Empress of Asia at the harbour entrance; most of the men were saved, but much of their equipment was lost.

Percival did not know where the blow would fall and decided to defend the entire coastline, more than a hundred kilometres long. He expected an attack in the north-east, where the naval base lay and where the Japanese were deliberately showing troop movements, and on the night of 7–8 February a small Guards detachment occupied the islet of Ubin at the eastern entrance to the strait as a feint. On this sector Percival placed Lieutenant General Lewis Heath’s III Indian Corps with the 18th Division. The west of the island, cut by river mouths, swampy and overgrown with mangroves, fell to two brigades of Major General Gordon Bennett’s 8th Australian Division. The sector of Brigadier Harold Taylor’s 22nd Brigade was about sixteen kilometres wide and was held by three weakened battalions, some 3,000 men, with the machine guns of the newly arrived 2/4th Battalion. Brigadier Duncan Maxwell’s 27th Brigade held a shorter sector between the Kranji River and the Causeway. Percival ordered the Australians to defend on the shoreline itself, which deprived them of depth and reserves.

From the tower of the Sultan of Johor’s palace and other heights above the strait the Japanese had an excellent view of the northern part of the island. Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita set up his command post there, and the British artillery was not given permission to shell the palace. The 25th Army had three divisions for the crossing: Lieutenant General Takurō Matsui’s 5th Division, Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi’s 18th Division and Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura’s Imperial Guards Division, some 30,000–35,000 men in the front line in all, as well as several hundred boats and barges brought up by road or carried through the jungle. It was short of ammunition and fuel, and Yamashita, as he later recalled, was counting on a quick decision, since his army might not withstand a long siege. Australian patrols that crossed the strait on the night of 6–7 February reported troop concentrations opposite the western sector. The command in Singapore did not regard these reports as proof that the main blow would fall there.

The night of 8–9 February

On 8 February Japanese artillery and aircraft pounded the positions of the 22nd Brigade for many hours. The fire was heavier than anything the Australians had experienced on the mainland: it cut telephone lines, isolated forward companies from their headquarters and destroyed some of the searchlights set up on the shore. Percival’s staff, however, concluded that this was the prelude to several days of shelling, and perhaps a diversion before an attack in the east. The British artillery was not ordered to shell the places where the Japanese were assembling their boats.

Shortly before 8.30 p.m. the first boats of the 5th and 18th Divisions pushed off from the Johor shore. Sixteen assault battalions struck the sectors of the Australian 2/18th and 2/20th Battalions, around the mouths of the Buloh and Murai rivers and Sarimbun beach, and some also hit the right flank of the 2/19th Battalion. Australian machine-gunners opened fire on the boats on the water and sank many of them. Most of the searchlights that were meant to illuminate the strait were never switched on, and calls for defensive fire, sent by signal flares, often failed to get through in time. Once the first Japanese were ashore, in the darkness among the mangroves and creeks, they easily infiltrated the gaps between the scattered platoons, surrounded them and attacked them from behind.

Around midnight the Japanese divisions fired flares to signal to Yamashita that the first objectives had been reached. By 1 a.m. the bridgehead was firm, and further waves were following the assault troops. The three Australian battalions tried to rally further inland, but many companies had been broken up or cut off; men fighting their way back to their own lines suffered heavy losses. The 2/20th Battalion alone lost several hundred killed and wounded in the first days of the battle, according to Australian figures. By the morning of 9 February there were some 13,000 Japanese on the island, and in the course of the day another 10,000 crossed with their guns.

9 February: Tengah and the Jurong Line

That morning British fighters appeared over the western part of the island for the last time. The last ten or so Hurricanes from Kallang airfield clashed with a large Japanese formation covering the landing and, according to British figures, shot down several aircraft. In the evening Percival agreed to send the surviving machines to Sumatra. From then on the Japanese had complete mastery of the air over the island.

Percival, still convinced that the main attack might yet come in the north-east, sent reinforcements west piecemeal. Bennett transferred the 2/29th Battalion from Maxwell’s sector to the 22nd Brigade, but before it could counter-attack the Japanese advanced on Tengah airfield, the largest on the island, and took it in the course of the day. By noon two weakened battalions of the 12th Indian Brigade had arrived, followed later by the composite 6th/15th Indian Brigade. Bennett decided to stop the Japanese on the so-called Jurong Line, between the upper reaches of the Kranji and Jurong rivers, east of the airfield. That line, however, existed mainly on maps: it had no fortifications, and the units manning it were intermingled, exhausted and poorly linked with one another. The 44th Indian Brigade, on the south coast, had to fall back to avoid being cut off.

Kranji

Late on the evening of 9 February the Imperial Guards Division attacked the 27th Brigade’s sector west of the Causeway. Here the defence inflicted the heaviest losses of the whole battle on the Japanese. The Australians had earlier released oil into the water from the nearby tanks at Woodlands. When the oil caught fire from small-arms and mortar fire, some of the Japanese boats and the soldiers who had waded into the shallows were engulfed in flames. According to the accounts of Japanese officers, Nishimura asked Yamashita for permission to break off the attack; Yamashita, irritated, ordered him to press on.

The fate of this sector, however, was decided by something else. Maxwell, out of contact with the neighbouring 22nd Brigade and fearing that the Japanese would get into his rear along the Kranji River, withdrew the 2/26th and then the 2/30th Battalion from the shore further inland during the night and early morning of 10 February. Who authorised this remains disputed: Bennett later maintained that he had issued no such order. The result was that the Guards took the shore and the high ground above the Causeway without a fight, and their engineers could begin repairing the breached Causeway, over which tanks and artillery soon crossed. The left flank of the 11th Indian Division was exposed, and its counter-attack with the 8th Brigade did not restore the situation.

10 February: the collapse of the Jurong Line

On 10 February the Jurong Line fell apart without much of a fight. Percival’s order to prepare a second line further east as a precaution was understood at several headquarters as an order for immediate withdrawal. Taylor pulled out with the remnants of the 22nd Brigade, followed by the commanders of the 12th and 44th Indian Brigades, each fearing that his neighbour had already gone. By noon the gap between the units was so wide that the road to Bukit Timah, leading straight to the city, lay open to the Japanese.

That day the commander of the Allied ABDA command, General Archibald Wavell, flew to the island for the last time. Upset by what he saw, he ordered the Jurong Line to be retaken. In the evening a telegram arrived from London from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who, convinced that the defenders had a great numerical superiority, demanded that the battle be fought “to the bitter end at all costs”, that no thought be given to sparing the troops or the population, and that commanders should die with their men. Wavell passed this tone on to Percival almost word for word. Making his way to his boat that night, he fell from a quay and injured his back, which hampered his work for the next few days.

11 February: Bukit Timah

The hastily prepared counter-attack never took place. On the night of 10–11 February the Japanese 18th Division attacked along the Bukit Timah road, supported by tanks that had already crossed to the island. It ran into the so-called X Battalion, a scratch force of some two hundred Australian reinforcements bivouacked in the assembly area for the counter-attack; two-thirds of them were killed or wounded. The 5th Division simultaneously attacked Bukit Panjang. On the morning of 11 February the Japanese took Bukit Timah hill, the highest point on the island, and with it the garrison’s main stores of food, ammunition and fuel. 11 February was the festival of the founding of the empire in Japan; according to some accounts Yamashita wanted to capture the whole fortress by that day.

That same day Japanese aircraft dropped over the British positions a letter from Yamashita to Percival in which the Japanese commander praised the courage of the defenders and called on them to abandon their “meaningless and desperate resistance”. Percival did not reply. In reality Yamashita was in a more difficult position than the British knew: his artillery was beginning to run short of shells, and ahead of him lay a city into which, with the refugees, nearly a million people had crowded and where house-to-house fighting might cost him more than he could afford.

The reservoirs

After the fall of Bukit Timah, water came to the fore. Singapore drew it partly from Johor, through a pipeline along the Causeway that had been cut on 31 January, and partly from three reservoirs in the centre of the island, MacRitchie, Peirce and Seletar, lying just east of Bukit Timah. On 11 February the 27th Australian Brigade tried to recover Bukit Panjang and cover the reservoir area, but the Guards beat off the counter-attack and the brigade was split in two on either side of the road. In the following days the fighting went on at the edge of the reservoirs, which changed hands, and on the night of 12–13 February Percival pulled his troops back from the north and east coasts to a perimeter around the city. The Japanese did not cut off the water. That was largely done by bombs and shells, which in the crowded city smashed pipes faster than the engineers could repair them.

Place in the war

The landing on the night of 8–9 February and the three days of fighting that followed sealed the fate of Singapore. The bridgehead in the west, the loss of the shore by the Causeway, the collapse of the Jurong Line and the capture of Bukit Timah stripped the defence of everything it could rely on: the airfield, the depots, the high ground and the ability to move reserves. After the war British and Australian historians long argued over who was to blame: Percival, who spread his forces along the whole shore and was too late in believing that the main blow had fallen in the west; Bennett and his brigadiers, whose withdrawals and misunderstood orders opened the way to the Japanese; or, finally, the strategy that for twenty years had rested the defence of Singapore on a fleet that in 1942 did not exist. Yamashita himself pointed to the British underestimation of the Japanese and to the delay in reinforcing the Australians in the west of the island.

After 11 February the defenders fell back to a tight perimeter around the city, in which nearly a million people were crowded together under incessant air raids. They fought on there for four more days, among other places on the Pasir Panjang ridge, until on 15 February Percival surrendered at the Ford factory at Bukit Timah. The fall of Singapore opened the way for the Japanese to Sumatra and Java, where the invasion of the Dutch East Indies had been under way since January, and for Australia, whose soldiers suffered particularly heavy losses in this battle, it was a signal that it had to look for salvation on the other side of the Pacific.