The retreat to Singapore

On the morning of 31 January 1942 British sappers blew up a section of the Causeway linking the Malay Peninsula with Singapore Island. A few hours earlier the last Commonwealth units had crossed it; since 8 December 1941 they had been retreating down the whole length of the peninsula before the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army. The very last of them, the remnants of a Scottish battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, marched over, according to those who were there, to the sound of the pipes. That day the 54-day Battle of Malaya came to an end: there were no organised Allied forces left on the mainland, and the Japanese entered Johor Bahru, from where they could see the island across the narrow strait. Before it came to this, the last three weeks of January had brought intensifying bombing of Singapore, defeat on the Muar, the order to withdraw issued on 27 January, and a dispute over whether the fortress was worth defending at all.

Johor in the second half of January

When the Japanese took Kuala Lumpur on 11 January, the British command decided to fight its last battle on the mainland in Johor, the southernmost sultanate of the peninsula. General Archibald Wavell, from 15 January head of the Allied ABDA command set up at the Arcadia Conference, entrusted the main sector to Major General Gordon Bennett’s Australians, while Lieutenant General Lewis Heath’s exhausted III Indian Corps fell back to the second line. The General Officer Commanding Malaya, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, was to hold the Japanese at least until reinforcements reached Singapore by sea.

The plan fell apart within a week. The Australians inflicted painful losses on the Japanese in an ambush at Gemas on 14 January, but on the west coast Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura’s Imperial Guards Division crossed the Muar river and, with landings from the sea, outflanked the half-trained 45th Indian Brigade. In the fighting on the Muar, which lasted until 22 January, the brigade and two Australian battalions sent to its aid were destroyed, and the wounded left behind at Parit Sulong were murdered by the Japanese. From then on the line that was meant to run across Johor from Batu Pahat in the west through Kluang to Mersing on the east coast was under attack along its whole length and being outflanked from the sea.

On the western flank the 6th/15th Indian Brigade and the newly arrived British 53rd Brigade held out at Batu Pahat until Japanese units cut the road in their rear. The Indian brigade, cut off, fought its way to the coast, from which in the last days of January small Royal Navy vessels evacuated some 2,700 men by night, according to British figures. In the centre, along the railway, the 22nd Indian Brigade was cut off after the railway bridge was blown prematurely and wandered for several days in the jungle until its remnants were taken prisoner; few reached Singapore. On the east coast the Japanese landed at Endau on 26 January. The last British torpedo bombers, obsolete Vildebeest biplanes thrown against the transports, suffered heavy losses, and in a night action at sea the destroyer HMS Thanet was sunk. The Australian 2/18th Battalion laid an ambush at Jemaluang that held up a Japanese column for a time but did not change the position of the front as a whole.

Bombs over Singapore

The island itself had long ceased to be safe. The first raid on Singapore came on the night of 7–8 December 1941, in the first hours of the war; then for several weeks attacks were infrequent and struck mainly military targets. From the end of December the bombers came by night, and from 12 January by day as well, in ever larger formations, from airfields in Indochina and in time also from airfields captured on the peninsula. Bombs fell on the airfields at Tengah, Seletar, Sembawang and Kallang, on the naval base on the north shore and on the harbour, but also on the crowded districts of the city, into which tens of thousands of refugees from the north had poured. The often-repeated statement that on 20 January “the Japanese bomb Singapore as their troops approach the city” therefore describes not a single event but one day in a series of raids that intensified as the Twenty-Fifth Army marched south and continued right up to the surrender. Civilian casualties ran into thousands; the exact number is not known.

The British tried to respond. On 13 January some fifty Hawker Hurricane fighters arrived in Singapore in crates together with the 53rd Brigade, along with a group of experienced pilots, among them veterans of the Battle of Britain. The aircraft were assembled within a few days and went into action over the island for the first time on 20 January. Sources differ on the outcome of these first engagements: some speak of several Japanese aircraft shot down for the loss of three Hurricanes. It soon became clear, however, that these heavy fighters, fitted with dust filters, could not change the situation. The Japanese had a manifold numerical superiority, nimble Nakajima Ki-43 fighters escorted the bombers, and the airfields, lacking an effective early-warning system, were bombed before aircraft could take off. At the end of January most of the remaining air force was moved to Sumatra; only a small group of fighters was left on the island.

Reinforcements and the dispute over Singapore

Convoys sailed into Singapore throughout January. After the 53rd Brigade came the 44th Indian Brigade and several thousand Indian recruits on 22 January, an Australian machine-gun battalion and nearly two thousand half-trained Australian replacements on 24 January, and on 29 January the main body of the British 18th Infantry Division under Major General Merton Beckwith-Smith. The division was at full strength, but after many weeks at sea and with no preparation for tropical warfare; it had originally been bound for the Middle East and was diverted to the Far East only after the outbreak of war with Japan. The reinforcements increased the garrison’s numbers but not its fighting strength. British historians, including the authors of the official history, point out that sending fresh brigades into Johor, where they went into action piecemeal, only added to the losses.

It was just then that London grasped the state of the fortress. Prime Minister Winston Churchill recorded in his memoirs that he was shocked to learn from Wavell’s telegrams of 16 and 19 January that the north shore of the island, facing Johor, had no permanent fortifications at all. On 20 January he instructed the Chiefs of Staff that the entire male population should be put to work building defences, and that the city should be turned into a citadel and defended to the last man. At the same time, however, he began to consider whether it might be better to divert the reinforcements still at sea to threatened Burma. When this idea reached Australia, the Prime Minister, John Curtin, replied on 23 January with a cable in which he called the evacuation of Singapore an “inexcusable betrayal”. In the face of this stance Churchill dropped the idea, and the convoy carrying the 18th Division sailed on to Singapore.

After the war the question of the defences gave rise to the legend of guns “pointing the wrong way” that could not fire landwards. Historians regard it as an oversimplification: most of the heavy coastal batteries could traverse towards Johor, but they had mainly armour-piercing shells intended for use against ships. The real weakness was the lack of field fortifications on the north shore and in Johor. The command’s chief engineer, Brigadier Ivan Simson, had been proposing their construction since December, and according to his account Percival refused, arguing that defences were bad for the morale of the troops and the civilian population. Work began in earnest only in the last days of January, when time and labour were already running out.

The order to withdraw

After the collapse of the Batu Pahat–Kluang–Mersing line, further defence of Johor threatened the destruction of what was left of the army. On 25 January Percival, after conferring with his corps commanders, concluded that a withdrawal to the island was necessary, and on 27 January he obtained Wavell’s consent and issued the order. Under that date it is often stated that the British “withdrew all their forces to Singapore”; in reality the decision was taken on 27 January, while the withdrawal itself took several days and ended on 31 January.

The plan called for all the columns to converge on the single road leading through Johor Bahru to the Causeway. The Causeway, a little over a kilometre long, had been built across the Strait of Johor in the 1920s; it carried a road, a railway line and the pipeline that brought a large part of Singapore’s drinking water. The withdrawal was covered by two bridgeheads: an outer one, held by the Australians, and an inner one just in front of the Causeway, manned by the Scottish battalions of the Gordon Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. During the night of 30–31 January the last columns of troops crossed the Causeway, followed by the outer bridgehead.

Last of all came the Argylls, a battalion that had fought in the rearguard since December and had been rebuilt from survivors after the defeat on the Slim river. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart, was one of the few British officers who had trained his men for jungle warfare before the war. According to his soldiers, the battalion’s two surviving pipers played “Hielan’ Laddie” and “A Hundred Pipers” as it crossed, and Stewart is said to have told an Australian officer that his battalion would go down in history as the last to cross the Causeway, and to the sound of its own pipes at that. Stewart himself is said to have been the last man over. At around 8 a.m. on 31 January the sappers fired the charges. According to most sources the explosion blew a gap some twenty metres wide in the Causeway, cut the water main and destroyed the road and the railway track, but at low tide the water in the gap was only waist-deep, and for several days afterwards the odd straggler still made his way across. The same day the Japanese entered Johor Bahru.

The balance of the Battle of Malaya

In the 54 days from the landing at Kota Bharu on 8 December to the blowing of the Causeway on 31 January, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s Twenty-Fifth Army had advanced more than a thousand kilometres from southern Thailand, an average of more than ten kilometres a day. In that time the British had lost, by various calculations, some 50,000 men killed, wounded and taken prisoner, as well as most of their equipment, almost all their aircraft and, as early as 10 December, the two capital ships on which the defence from the sea had rested. Japanese losses were many times smaller. The head of the Twenty-Fifth Army’s operations section, Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, recalled after the war that the army had kept pace with the fleeing enemy thanks to bicycles, to captured stores, which the soldiers called “Churchill rations”, and to the rapid repair of the bridges the British had blown up during their retreat.

According to the British official history, some 85,000 Commonwealth troops ended up on the island, including well over ten thousand in rear and administrative units, and many battalions were depleted or had only just arrived. Yamashita had three divisions in the front line, some 30,000 men, and was beginning to run short of ammunition. The defenders’ numerical superiority was thus illusory, but they did still have the advantage of time: the Japanese had to prepare a crossing of the strait, while the British could fortify the shore in the meantime. Most of the population of the city, which with the refugees numbered nearly a million people, still believed that the fortress would hold.

Place in the war

The retreat to Singapore closed the first, mainland chapter of the Malayan campaign. Blowing the Causeway delayed the Japanese attack by more than a week. Yamashita, who set up an observation post in the tower of the Sultan of Johor’s palace, with a view over the whole northern part of the island, used the time for reconnaissance and to gather boats. Percival spread his troops along the entire shoreline, expecting the main blow in the north-east. On the night of 8–9 February 1942 the Japanese crossed the strait in the western sector, defended by the weakened Australians; on 11 February they took the Bukit Timah hill with the garrison’s depots; and on 15 February Percival surrendered. Some 130,000 Commonwealth soldiers in all went into captivity, and many of them later died in the camps and building the Burma Railway. Soon after the surrender the Japanese military police carried out the Sook Ching massacre, directed against Singapore’s Chinese inhabitants.

The fall of Singapore, which in practice began with the retreat of 31 January, opened the way for the Japanese to Sumatra and Java, where the invasion of the Dutch East Indies had been under way since 11 January, and to the Indian Ocean. For Australia it was proof that the British promise of defence from the Singapore base had been hollow, and it hastened the country’s turn towards the United States. For Britain, whose leader was still placing his faith in the fortress at the turn of January and February, it was a defeat that Churchill later called the worst disaster in the history of British arms.