The raid on Singapore

On the morning of 5 November 1944 American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers appeared over the northern coast of Singapore. They had taken off the night before from airfields around Kharagpur in Bengal, more than 3,000 kilometres from the target, and had come to destroy the largest installation of the former British naval base – the King George VI Graving Dock. The attack succeeded: the dock was unusable for roughly three months. It was the first American raid on the city, which had been in Japanese hands since February 1942, and the beginning of a series of attacks that lasted until the end of March 1945. Tallies speak of eleven raids on Singapore between November 1944 and March 1945; the figure includes both bombing attacks and night-time missions to mine the waters around the island, so depending on how they are counted it is sometimes given slightly differently.

A base in enemy hands

The British had spent most of the interwar period building the naval base on the northern shore of the island, on the Strait of Johor. It was to be the keystone of the so-called Singapore strategy: in a war with Japan the main British fleet would sail to Singapore, and the base would provide it with repair facilities. The King George VI Graving Dock, opened in 1938, was one of the largest in the world and could take the biggest capital ships. Beside it lay a great floating dock, brought out in the 1920s.

The strategy collapsed within a few weeks. After the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941 and the lightning campaign on the Malay Peninsula, the Singapore garrison surrendered on 15 February 1942. The base came through the fighting almost intact and became the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most important establishment outside Japan. As under the British, it was worked by local labourers – Chinese, Malays and Indians, as well as workers brought in from Java and Sumatra – who were subjected to harsh discipline. Minor offences were punished with beatings; theft or suspected passing of information meant prison or death.

Singapore’s importance grew in 1944. American submarines were cutting Japan off from the oil of the Dutch East Indies ever more effectively, so between February and April 1944 the main strength of the fleet was moved from Truk and from Japan to the area of Singapore and the nearby Lingga archipelago, closer to the refineries of Sumatra and Borneo. It was from there in October that Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s force sailed to take part in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After the defeat some of the damaged ships returned south; among those sent to Singapore were the heavy cruisers Takao and Myōkō, both hit during the battle. The great dock was one of the few places where heavy ships could be repaired without returning to Japan.

A decision from Washington

The B-29s of XX Bomber Command had been based in India since the spring of 1944. Their main task was to raid Japan, Manchuria and Taiwan from forward airfields in Sichuan, but roughly half their missions supported other Allied operations. In August the bombers, flying from Ceylon, attacked the refinery at Palembang on Sumatra (the raid on Palembang). From 29 August the command was led by Major General Curtis LeMay, but the B-29s answered not to the theatre commanders but to the Twentieth Air Force, which General Henry H. Arnold directed personally from Washington.

According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces and later studies, it was Arnold who, on 27 October, after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, suggested to LeMay that the Singapore docks had grown in importance and asked whether they could be attacked. There was little fresh intelligence; on 30 October a reconnaissance B-29 flew over the island and brought back good photographs. LeMay’s staff, however, regarded a daylight raid on a target some 6,000 kilometres away there and back as an undertaking doomed to fail. Arnold nevertheless gave the order.

The raid

Seventy-six bombers took off from the airfields of the 58th Bombardment Wing around Kharagpur. Because of the distance each carried only two 1,000-pound bombs (about 450 kg) – a fraction of a normal load. The crews were to bomb from about 6,000 metres, lower than usual, and to fly in loose formation to save fuel. The primary target was the King George VI dock; the secondary was the refinery at Pangkalan Brandan in northern Sumatra.

The first aircraft reached the base shortly before 7 a.m. By the standards of the B-29 in 1944 the bombing was exceptionally accurate: according to American reports the lead aircraft’s bomb fell a dozen or so metres from the dock gate, and those that followed hit the dock itself. A freighter about 140 metres long under repair in the dock was damaged, as were other installations of the base. Fifty-three aircraft bombed Singapore and seven attacked Pangkalan Brandan; the rest turned back or dropped their bombs on other targets. The Japanese air defences – a few army guns, navy batteries and a handful of fighters, with no fire-control radar and no cooperation between army and navy – barely reacted. The Americans lost two B-29s, both in accidents rather than in combat. According to American figures the round trip was the longest daylight bombing mission flown up to that time.

The raid also had a price for the people on the ground. Many labourers employed in and around the dock did not manage to escape the bombs and were killed. According to accounts gathered by historians, after the attack Japanese soldiers murdered a group of wounded Indonesian workers. The exact number of victims has never been established.

Consequences

The King George VI dock was out of service for about three months. For that period the Japanese fleet lost the ability to repair in Singapore the heavy ships damaged at Leyte; some of them had to remain in a makeshift state or risk the voyage to Japan through waters full of American submarines. After each raid the base’s workers stayed away for a time, and the Japanese had to raise their wages, increase their food rations and build shelters.

The result surprised LeMay and his staff: a mission they had considered impossible came to be regarded as one of the best executed in the history of XX Bomber Command. It did not, however, change the overall verdict that basing B-29s in India and China was costly and inefficient. From October 1944 far more convenient bases for the bombers were being built in the Marianas (B-29s in the Marianas), and on 24 November the first raid on Tokyo took off from Saipan.

Later raids

The next attack on Singapore came only in January 1945. On 11 January 47 bombers were sent against the floating dock and the commercial docks on the southern coast; only 27 reached the target, and heavy anti-aircraft fire from Japanese warships in the Strait of Johor meant they did no damage. From January XX Bomber Command was preparing to move to the Marianas and concentrated on targets in South-East Asia within reach of India: the ports of Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon and Singapore. On 1 February 1945 the floating dock was sunk together with the ship lying in it; on 24 February incendiaries burned a large part of the warehouses at the commercial docks (Empire Dock), but also destroyed more than a hundred residential and commercial buildings nearby; on 2 March the attack was repeated; and on 12 and 29/30 March the bombers struck fuel tanks on the islets off the coast. In addition there were night-time missions to mine the waters around Singapore, which the Royal Air Force continued until May 1945 after the B-29s had left.

Some targets were exempted from attack by Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia: in February 1945 he forbade the bombing of the King George VI dock and other installations that were to serve the Allies after the expected liberation of Malaya. In the whole campaign the Japanese shot down only nine B-29s over Singapore. Some of the downed airmen were taken prisoner; those held by the navy at the base were beheaded, and those responsible were tried after the war.

The people of Syonan

Singapore, renamed Syonan by the Japanese, had endured a harsh occupation since February 1942: mass executions of Chinese men during the Sook Ching operation, the terror of the Kempeitai, an ever more acute food shortage and the resettlement schemes of Japanese food policy in Malaya. According to historians of the occupation, the sight of B-29s over the island lifted the morale of the population, who took the raids as a sign of imminent liberation – though they carefully hid this from the occupiers. The bombers were thought to be indestructible, and because their targets were above all military installations, civilian casualties were relatively few and their accuracy was impressive. The Japanese authorities tried to counter this by exhibiting the wreckage of downed aircraft and parading captured airmen, to little effect. The expectation of further raids also had an economic effect: people hoarded supplies, and the prices of food and other goods rose.

Place in the war

The raid of 5 November 1944 was a secondary episode, but it illustrates Japan’s situation after Leyte well. Her fleet, deprived of fuel at home and of repair facilities in the south, was losing its ability to operate, and the bases captured in 1942 were no longer safe. The series of raids made it harder to use Singapore as a dockyard, although the attacks on fuel stores proved of little effect – many tanks were still serviceable after the surrender. The British returned to Singapore in September 1945, after Japan’s surrender, without a fight; the planned landing in Malaya was no longer needed. LeMay took the experience of long-range flights and low-altitude bombing with him to the Marianas, where from January 1945 he directed the raids on Japan.