The Japanese take Kuala Lumpur

On the evening of 11 January 1942, at around 8 p.m., the first units of the Japanese 5th Division entered Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Federated Malay States and of the state of Selangor. The city was undefended: the British had blown up the airfield and the railway station the day before and withdrawn southwards, leaving huge stocks of food, fuel and equipment in the warehouses. The road to the capital had been opened for the Japanese by the battle fought four days earlier on the Slim River, in which a company of tanks had smashed two brigades of the British 11th Indian Division in a single morning. Between these two dates the new commander of Allied forces in South-East Asia, General Archibald Wavell, inspected the front, saw what was left of the shattered division and decided to give up the whole of central Malaya without a fight and to make his stand only in Johore, on the approaches to Singapore.

Many war chronologies state under 8 January that the Japanese “broke through the outer defences of Kuala Lumpur”. This is inaccurate. Kuala Lumpur had no ring of fortifications, and the decisive breakthrough came on 7 January on the Slim River, some hundred kilometres north of the city. On 8 January the Japanese were merely reaping the fruits of that victory: in the afternoon their spearhead entered Tanjong Malim, on the border of Selangor, while the broken British units struggled south through the jungle.

From Kampar to the Slim River

After a month of fighting, the Malayan campaign had gone badly for the British from first to last. Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s Japanese 25th Army had landed on 8 December 1941 in southern Thailand and at Kota Bharu, routed the 11th Indian Division at Jitra and was pushing it back from one position to the next down the west coast of the peninsula. The British fleet had ceased to count as early as 10 December, when Japanese aircraft sank Prince of Wales and Repulse, and in the air the Japanese had held a clear advantage since the first week.

The 11th Division put up its first serious resistance at Kampar, south of Ipoh, where from 30 December to 2 January its artillery inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. Once again, however, the Japanese outflanked the position from the sea: troops of the Imperial Guards Division brought in by boat landed on 1 and 2 January near Telok Anson, at the mouth of the Perak River, and the division, threatened with being cut off, had to fall back. Its new positions lay near the village of Trolak and on the Slim River, where the main road and the railway ran through a narrow corridor in dense jungle and then through a rubber plantation to two bridges, one rail and one road.

The division was temporarily commanded by Brigadier Archibald Paris, who had replaced Major General Murray-Lyon, relieved on 23 December. Of his three brigades he had two at hand, both badly depleted in earlier fighting: Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart’s 12th Indian Brigade, made up of battalions from Hyderabad and the Punjab and the Scottish 2nd Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the 28th Gurkha Brigade. For weeks the soldiers had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch, and the units were short of officers who spoke their men’s language. The positions had anti-tank obstacles only at the very front; further back no one had prepared for tanks, since it was believed they would play little part in the jungle.

The Battle of Slim River

On the afternoon of 5 January the advance guard of Colonel Andō’s Japanese 42nd Infantry Regiment ran into the Hyderabad battalion and was driven back. Instead of outflanking the position through the jungle as usual, the commander of the tank company, Major Toyosaku Shimada, proposed something no one expected: a night attack by tanks straight down the road. He had about seventeen Type 97 Chi-Ha medium tanks and a few Type 95 Ha-Go light tanks. A night armoured attack was a rarity in the Second World War, because the crews could see almost nothing.

The attack went in before dawn on 7 January, in pouring rain, after a short bombardment by mortars and artillery. The infantry broke through the Hyderabad battalion’s roadblock, the engineers cleared the obstacles within a quarter of an hour, and the tanks drove through the scattered battalion. The next one, the 5th Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment, put up stiff resistance: mines and anti-tank rifles disabled two tanks and a third was set ablaze with a Molotov cocktail, blocking the road and halting the column on a narrow stretch in the jungle. This was the moment when the British artillery could have destroyed it, but the telephone lines had been cut and no one called it down. The tanks found a way round along an old loop of the road and at about 6 a.m. drove on.

At around 6.30 a.m. the tanks reached the Argylls near Trolak. This was one of the best-trained battalions in Malaya for jungle fighting, but it had no obstacles or mines, and the first tanks were mistaken for the Punjabis’ carriers. The column cut the battalion in two; the Scots fought on in scattered groups for another hour, but at roll call the next day only 94 of them answered. Further on the tanks came upon the 5th Battalion, 14th Punjab Regiment, which was marching up the road in column of route to help the 12th Brigade, and raked it with machine-gun fire at close range. At around 8 a.m. they drove into the headquarters area of the 28th Brigade, which did not know what had happened to the 12th Brigade, and scattered two Gurkha battalions. The third, the 2nd Battalion, 1st Gurkha Rifles, was marching along the road with its back to the oncoming tanks; at roll call the next day twenty-eight men answered for the whole battalion.

The railway bridge was blown, but there was no time to blow the road bridge. Lieutenant Sadanobu Watanabe with three tanks drove through transport columns, gun positions and dressing stations; on the way two British artillery commanders were killed, caught by surprise in their car. At around 8.30 a.m. he reached the bridge, which was defended by a battery of Bofors guns whose shells failed to penetrate the armour, and according to both Japanese and British accounts he himself cut the demolition leads with his sword. Only a few kilometres beyond the river did two British field howitzers stop the Japanese reconnaissance force, knocking out the leading tank.

Within a few hours the Japanese had advanced some twenty-five kilometres and destroyed two brigades at small cost to themselves. According to British calculations, the 11th Division lost about 3,200 men, most of them missing, and almost all its equipment. About 430 men were gathered from the 12th Brigade and about 750 from the 28th. Thousands of stragglers wandered through the jungle and plantations, and most of them were captured over the following weeks; a few groups of Scots and Gurkhas stayed in hiding until the end of the war. A surviving Argyll officer related that on a plantation near Trolak the Japanese divided the prisoners into those who could walk and those who could not, and shot and bayoneted the badly wounded. After the war Lieutenant Colonel Stewart conceded in a letter to the British official historian that he had been rightly criticised for the siting of his headquarters and for not using his field artillery against the tanks, adding: “The use of tanks on the road at night was a surprise.”

Wavell in Malaya

A few days earlier the structure of Allied command had changed. At the Arcadia Conference in Washington, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to set up a joint American-British-Dutch-Australian command, ABDA, covering Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. Its commander was Wavell, until then Commander-in-Chief in India; he formally assumed command on Java on 15 January. Before that, he flew into Singapore on 7 January and on 8 January flew up to the front at Kuala Lumpur, where he met the commander of III Indian Corps, Lieutenant General Lewis Heath, and saw the survivors of the Slim River. Their condition shocked him: the men were exhausted after a month of retreat without sleep, and the division was unfit for further fighting.

The commander in Malaya, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, had until then wanted to delay the Japanese as far north as possible, to hold the airfields of central Malaya and gain time for the reinforcement convoys sailing to Singapore. Wavell judged this impossible. On 9 January in Johore he set out his plan to Percival and to the commander of the Australian 8th Division, Major General Gordon Bennett. III Corps was to withdraw without stopping, by rail and road, to southern Johore to rest and refit. The defence of north-western Johore, from Segamat to the coast near the town of Muar, was to be taken over by a force called Westforce under Bennett’s command, made up of the Australian 27th Brigade, the 9th Indian Division and the newly arrived 45th Indian Brigade. The other Australian brigade was to defend the east coast at Mersing. Wavell was counting on the Australians, who had not yet been engaged, to stop the Japanese. The plan meant giving up the states of Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, with Kuala Lumpur, their ports and airfields, without a fight. Wavell was aware that III Corps could not hold the Kuala Lumpur area beyond 11 January.

Wavell also asked Percival why no field fortifications had been built on the north shore of Singapore island and in Johore. According to several accounts, Percival replied that such work would be bad for the morale of the troops and the civilian population. Wavell ordered it to be started, but little time remained.

The capture of Kuala Lumpur

The Japanese gave the British no respite. The 5th Division replaced Andō’s exhausted regiment with Colonel Watanabe’s regiment, and the pursuit continued down the main road. At the same time units of the Imperial Guards Division were advancing along the coast and by sea: on 9 January they took Kuala Selangor and at noon on 11 January the town of Klang with the neighbouring Port Swettenham, today Port Klang, closing the line of retreat to the sea for the defenders of Kuala Lumpur. The British made no attempt to defend the city. On 10 January the engineers blew up the airfield and the railway installations, and on 11 January the last units of III Corps left the capital and set off south through Seremban towards Johore.

The evacuation was chaotic. The civil authorities left, and according to eyewitnesses the looting of shops and warehouses began in the city before the Japanese appeared. The destruction of the stocks accumulated over the years in Kuala Lumpur, the main supply base for the north, was not achieved: Japanese accounts mention large quantities of food, fuel, ammunition and maps, which greatly eased the further march on Singapore. Troops of Watanabe’s regiment entered the city without a fight on the evening of 11 January. The commander of the 5th Division, Lieutenant General Takurō Matsui, ordered his forces to assemble there before the final stage of the campaign, and the Japanese air command soon moved its headquarters to Kuala Lumpur.

The Japanese were now only a little over 300 kilometres from Singapore as the crow flies, and less than two hundred from the Johore border. On 13 January a convoy reached Singapore carrying the 53rd Brigade of the British 18th Division and 51 crated Hawker Hurricane fighters. From 12 January Japanese aircraft stepped up their raids on the island, which continued, with intervals, until the end of the campaign.

The bicycle army

The speed of the Japanese advance came as a shock to the British. The Japanese had needed little more than a month for Jitra, Kampar, the Slim River and Kuala Lumpur, and Yamashita had no numerical superiority at all. One reason was that his infantry rode bicycles. The Japanese had not brought them along, so as not to burden the landing force: they knew from reconnaissance that there were thousands of them in Malaya, a country of good roads, and they took them from shops and houses. A soldier on a bicycle carried more equipment than a foot soldier and covered several dozen kilometres a day, and the Japanese units, which called themselves the “silver wheels”, could keep pace with tanks and lorries without crowding the road. When tyres burst in the heat, the men rode on the bare rims; at night, it is said, the British mistook the grinding for the clatter of tank tracks. The bicycle mattered to the Japanese also because British engineers blew up more than a hundred bridges during the retreat: a bicycle could be carried across a river on the shoulder or taken over a ford, while Japanese engineers repaired the bridges for tanks and lorries within a few hours.

More important than bicycles, however, were tactics. The Japanese divisions had years of war in China behind them. On coming up against a position on the road, they did not attack it frontally but went round it through the plantations and jungle, or along the coast by boat, landing behind the defenders. British, Indian and Australian units, trained to fight in open country and tied to the road that brought their supplies, had to fall back each time before they could fortify the next position. On the Slim River the Japanese showed that they could also surprise the enemy with a straight-on blow. Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the 25th Army’s operations officer, attributed the campaign’s successes after the war above all to its pace, which never gave the defenders a moment’s respite.

Place in the war

The fall of Kuala Lumpur closed the first part of the Malayan campaign. The British had lost northern and central Malaya, with their tin mines and rubber plantations, one of the empire’s principal sources of revenue, and their army on the peninsula had lost one of its two Indian divisions. Wavell’s plan shifted the main battle to Johore. A few days later the Australians did indeed inflict the first serious setback on the Japanese in the ambush at Gemas, but on 15 and 16 January the Guards crossed the Muar River on Westforce’s western flank, destroyed the 45th Indian Brigade and forced Bennett to withdraw. On 31 January the last Allied units crossed to Singapore island, and on 15 February Percival surrendered.

For the people of Kuala Lumpur an occupation began that lasted until September 1945. It fell especially hard on the local Chinese, whom the Japanese regarded as enemies because of the war in China: by various estimates several thousand people were killed in the city and its surroundings in the “cleansing” operations of February and March 1942. Thousands of Malayans, especially those of Indian origin, were later taken away to work on the Burma Railway. The Battle of Slim River has gone down in history as one of the most successful Japanese armoured attacks of the war and one of the most often cited examples of how a small, boldly led unit can shatter a division that does not expect to be struck.