The Malayan campaign begins

Shortly after midnight on 8 December 1941, Malayan time, soldiers of an Indian Dogra battalion guarding the beaches near Kota Bharu in the sultanate of Kelantan made out in the darkness the silhouettes of three transports dropping anchor about three kilometres offshore. At about 12.30 a.m. the Japanese warships opened fire and the first landing craft headed for the beach. It was 5 p.m. on 7 December Greenwich time, more than an hour before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor (7.48 a.m. Hawaiian time, 6.18 p.m. Greenwich time). By the American calendar, then, the Pacific War began on 7 December in Hawaii; by Asian clocks and calendars it began on 8 December in Malaya, and it was here that its first shots on land were fired. That same night the main forces of the Japanese 25th Army were coming ashore several hundred kilometres further north, in the Thai ports of Singora and Patani, and at dawn navy bombers struck Singapore for the first time. In less than a week the Japanese had won their beachheads, smashed the British air force in the north of the country and broken through the first line of defence at Jitra.

War chronologies usually record under 8 December that “the Malayan campaign begins”, and under 13 December that the Japanese under General Yamashita are continuing their advance into Malaya. Both entries are accurate and concern two stages: the landing and the first week of fighting.

Malaya and Operation Matador

Britain’s possessions on the Malay Peninsula – the colony of the Straits Settlements, with Singapore, Penang and Malacca, and the federated and unfederated sultanates under British protection – supplied the empire with rubber and tin, and the great naval base at Singapore was meant to be the key to the defence of the whole Far East. For twenty years it had been assumed that in a war with Japan the main fleet would sail for Singapore, and the garrison need only hold out until it arrived. The war in Europe put paid to those calculations. In 1941, according to the British official history, there were some 88,000 troops in Malaya, most of them from the Indian Army, together with Major General Gordon Bennett’s Australian 8th Division and local volunteers. Many units were under-trained, there was not a single tank, and the air force numbered about 160 front-line aircraft, many of them obsolete, with Brewster Buffalo fighters that were no match for the Japanese. The land forces were commanded by Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, and Far East Command as a whole, minus the fleet, by Air Chief Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham.

The British knew where the Japanese were most likely to land. As early as 1937 the then commander in Malaya, General William Dobbie, warned that during the north-east monsoon the enemy could come ashore on the east coast, at Singora and Patani in Thailand and near Kota Bharu, and strike from there at western Malaya. This was the basis of the plan known as “Matador”: in the event of a threat, the 11th Indian Division was to move into southern Thailand, seize Singora and defend it against a landing. The plan had one fundamental weakness: it required entering the territory of a neutral state before the Japanese did. London feared that such a move would make Britain the aggressor in American eyes, and only on 5 December left the decision to Brooke-Popham.

At about noon on 6 December an Australian Hudson of No. 1 Squadron RAAF sighted Japanese convoys at sea south of Indochina. The Japanese transports had sailed on 4 December from Samah Bay on Hainan and had been joined on the way by ships from Saigon. It was not certain, however, whether they were heading for Thailand or for Malaya, or merely manoeuvring to provoke the British into firing the first shot. On 7 December a British Catalina flying boat of No. 205 Squadron, which had found the convoy again, was shot down by Japanese fighters before it could send a report; its eight-man crew under Flying Officer Patrick Bedell were the first British casualties of the war with Japan. Brooke-Popham hesitated, and on the evening of 6 December Percival judged a pre-emptive strike premature. Matador did not go ahead. When on the morning of 8 December it became clear that the Japanese were already ashore, the plan was finally abandoned and the 11th Division was ordered to occupy the unfinished positions at Jitra. Instead of a large operation, only a few small columns were sent across the border, the most important of which, Krohcol, was to block the road from Patani. Delayed and held up by the resistance of the Thai police, it arrived too late.

The landing at Kota Bharu

The landing at Kota Bharu was made by Major General Hiroshi Takumi’s detachment of the 18th Division, some 5,000 veterans of the war in China. The shore was defended by Brigadier Berthold Key’s 8th Indian Brigade of the 9th Indian Division. The narrow beaches, cut by lagoons and river mouths, were fortified with pillboxes, wire and mines, and behind them lay an airfield, one of three in that part of the country. The rough sea capsized landing craft, some soldiers drowned, and fire from the Dogras’ pillboxes pinned the first two waves to the beach. Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, a staff officer of the 25th Army, later wrote that the Japanese soldiers lay on the shore “half in the water”, unable to raise their heads. Only after two pillboxes had been destroyed in hand-to-hand fighting did the landing force win a beachhead.

The transports were attacked by Hudsons of No. 1 Squadron RAAF from Kota Bharu airfield. In a dozen or so sorties they lost two aircraft but badly damaged all three ships, and Awazisan Maru caught fire and was abandoned. These were the first Allied air attacks of the Pacific War. Even so, by the morning Takumi had three battalions ashore. Key’s counter-attacks during the day failed to close the breach. In the evening, when a rumour spread around the airfield that the Japanese had already broken into it, the air force personnel hastily abandoned it. During the night of 8–9 December the Japanese occupied the airfield, and on 9 December the town itself. According to Japanese figures the landing cost them about 320 killed and more than 500 wounded, most of them in the first few hours. Key’s brigade withdrew inland, and the 18th Division began to advance south along the east coast.

Singora, Patani and Singapore

The main blow fell elsewhere. That same night Lieutenant General Takuro Matsui’s 5th Division landed at Singora (Songkhla) and Patani on the east coast of Thailand, from where good roads led across the isthmus to western Malaya. The commander of the whole operation, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had taken over the 25th Army on 6 November, also came ashore. Thai soldiers and policemen resisted for several hours, until the government in Bangkok ordered a ceasefire and free passage for the Japanese; the invasion of Thailand was taking place simultaneously at several points on the coast and overland from Indochina. The Imperial Guards Division was to join Yamashita overland via Bangkok. From the first hours the army air force used Thai airfields, which were receiving Japanese fighters as early as 9 December.

At about 4 a.m. the sirens sounded over Singapore. Seventeen Mitsubishi G3M bombers of the Mihoro Air Group, which had taken off from Thủ Dầu Một airfield near Saigon, bombed Seletar and Tengah airfields and the commercial districts in the city centre. The radar at Mersing had detected them almost an hour earlier, but the city was brightly lit and the anti-aircraft defences fired to no effect. According to the most frequently cited figures, 61 people were killed and more than a hundred wounded, most of them civilians. Most of the Japanese bombers assigned to the raid turned back because of bad weather over the sea. For the people of Singapore it was the first sign that the war had begun.

In the morning and through the day the Japanese army air force struck the airfields of northern Malaya: Alor Setar, Sungai Petani and Butterworth. The British lost about 60 aircraft on the first day, most of them on the ground. The Japanese had more than 450 army and navy aircraft for the campaign, experienced pilots and better machines. Within the first week they had won air superiority, and the remnants of the RAF and RAAF squadrons fell back from one airfield to the next. On the evening of 8 December Admiral Tom Phillips’s squadron, with the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, sailed north from Singapore to attack the Japanese transports. Two days later both ships lay on the bottom.

Jitra

In the west the 5th Division set off south from Singora along the main road towards the border of the state of Kedah. At its head moved Lieutenant Colonel Shizuo Saeki’s motorised detachment with tanks. Major General David Murray-Lyon’s 11th Indian Division was to stop it at Jitra, on a position that had been prepared only as a second priority, Matador having come first. Torrential rain flooded the trenches and gun pits, the telephone cables failed, and the front, more than 20 kilometres long, ran from wooded hills through paddy fields and rubber plantations to the mangroves by the sea.

The forward battalions were to buy time. On the evening of 10 December the Punjabis at Changlun destroyed two Japanese tanks, but on the afternoon of 11 December, in pouring rain, Saeki’s tanks drove into the middle of the 1st Battalion, 14th Punjab Regiment, which was just boarding its lorries, and scattered it. A few hours later the same fate befell a young Gurkha battalion at Asun. On the evening of 11 December the Japanese came up against the main position at Jitra. Murray-Lyon asked for permission to withdraw to a better position at Gurun, but Percival refused, fearing the effect of so early a retreat on the morale of the troops and the population.

On 12 December Saeki, believing he faced only a covering force, attacked the Leicestershire battalion and the Jats. The Japanese drove a wedge between the two battalions, and a counter-attack by two companies of the 1st Battalion, 8th Punjab Regiment, broke down, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel R. C. S. Bates, being killed. In the evening Percival agreed to a withdrawal. The night withdrawal of 12–13 December, carried out with communications broken, cost the division more than the battle itself: orders failed to reach many companies, some men struggled through the swamps or got away by boat along the coast, and equipment and stores were left behind. On 13 December the Japanese took Jitra and pressed on towards Alor Setar. The force that had captured a position held by a division numbered, according to historians, no more than a few battalions. In a few days the 11th Division lost the equivalent of almost three battalions, and on 23 December its commander was relieved.

At the same time, on the right flank near Kroh, the Japanese column from Patani drove Krohcol back into Malayan territory and threatened the rear of the 11th Division. After Jitra, Percival ordered that until reinforcements arrived the remaining aircraft should above all defend Singapore and the convoys, while the 11th Division fell back from one position to the next: at Gurun it held out only until 15 December.

Penang and the advance beyond

On 11 December Japanese bombers struck for the first time at George Town on the island of Penang, which had neither fighters nor almost any anti-aircraft artillery. The number of victims of the first raid is uncertain; local accounts speak of about two thousand killed and wounded. The civil authorities fell apart, and policemen and officials fled the town along with the population. Penang was meant to be a fortress, but the command concluded that it could not be held. On 13 December European women and children were taken off, and on the night of 16–17 December the remaining Europeans were quietly evacuated, while the Asian inhabitants were left to fend for themselves. The demolitions were not thorough: dozens of boats and barges were left in the harbour, and the radio station continued to work and was soon broadcasting Japanese propaganda. On 19 December the Japanese occupied the island without a fight. According to the historian Raymond Callahan, it was in Penang, not in Singapore, that the “moral collapse” of British rule in South-East Asia took place, because the inhabitants saw that the British were saving only their own.

The Japanese moved fast, often on bicycles requisitioned from Malayan towns and shops, outflanking British positions through the plantations and the jungle, or by sea in boats along the west coast. British engineers blew up bridges, but Japanese engineers repaired them within hours. At the end of December Lieutenant General Lewis Heath’s III Corps withdrew behind the Perak River; on 28 December the Japanese entered Ipoh, and on 30 December they began attacking the position at Kampar, where the British 11th Division held out successfully until 2 January 1942, when landings on the coast forced it into another withdrawal. On 27 December Brooke-Popham was replaced by Lieutenant General Henry Pownall; the change had been decided in London before the war.

Place in the war

The attack on Malaya was one of the pillars of the Japanese war plan, which had been adopted in the autumn of 1941 and set in motion at the beginning of December. The attack on Pearl Harbor was to secure the flank, while the conquest of Malaya and Singapore was to open the way to the oil of the Dutch East Indies, for the sake of which Japan, cut off from American supplies by the embargo, had gone to war. The bases it had seized in southern Indochina in July 1941 gave it airfields within range of Singapore and ports for its convoys.

The first week decided the character of the whole campaign. The British lost the initiative when they gave up Matador, air superiority within a few days, and command of the sea with the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse. From then on they fought in retreat. Prime Minister Winston Churchill long believed in Singapore as a fortress that would withstand a siege. In January 1942 the Japanese took Kuala Lumpur; at the end of the month the last Commonwealth troops crossed to Singapore and blew up the causeway over the Strait of Johor, and on 8 February the Japanese landed on the island. On 15 February 1942 Percival surrendered. More than a hundred thousand British, Indian and Australian soldiers went into captivity, which Churchill called the worst disaster in the history of British arms. Soon afterwards the Japanese military police carried out the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore, directed against the Chinese population. Yamashita, then dubbed “the Tiger of Malaya”, conquered Malaya in 70 days, faster than the Japanese plan had assumed.