The surrender at Singapore

On 12 September 1945, in the Municipal Building in Singapore, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia (SEAC), accepted the formal surrender of all Japanese forces in his area of command. The instrument was signed by General Seishirō Itagaki, commander of the Seventh Area Army, on behalf of Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group. According to British accounts, Terauchi, who had suffered a stroke in the spring, was unable to travel from Saigon. The surrender covered – by British estimates – some 680,000 soldiers and sailors scattered from Burma to Malaya, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and southern Indochina.

The ceremony closed a road that had begun three and a half years earlier in the same city. On 15 February 1942 General Arthur Percival had surrendered Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita at the Ford factory at Bukit Timah. Now the British were returning to the city as victors, and the Japanese generals were signing the surrender a few hundred metres from the places from which their military administration had ruled during the occupation.

From Rangoon to Singapore

After Hirohito’s broadcast of 15 August it was not certain whether armies thousands of kilometres from Japan would obey the Emperor’s order. According to British and Japanese accounts, some officers in Singapore were ready to fight on, and Itagaki himself at first hesitated over whether to comply. He was persuaded only by Terauchi, to whom Itagaki flew in Saigon. Around 20 August the commander of the Seventh Area Army informed Mountbatten that he would submit to the Emperor’s decision.

General Order No. 1 assigned to Mountbatten the surrender of the Japanese forces in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Sumatra, Java and Indochina south of the 16th parallel. On the night of 27/28 August, in Rangoon, Terauchi’s envoys signed a preliminary surrender agreement. MacArthur, however, stipulated that no Allied forces were to land in Japanese-occupied territory before the general instrument of surrender had been signed. That happened on 2 September aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, where Percival was also present.

Operations Tiderace and Zipper

Even before 15 August, SEAC headquarters had been preparing two operations. Operation Zipper was to be a large-scale landing of more than 100,000 troops on the west coast of Malaya, in the area of Port Swettenham and Port Dickson, scheduled for 9 September. Once ashore, the troops were to advance southwards and, in a further operation planned for the turn of 1945 and 1946, recapture Singapore. Japan’s surrender changed this plan. In addition, Operation Tiderace was prepared – the swift occupation of Singapore itself by sea, without a fight.

The convoys sailed on 31 August from Trincomalee in Ceylon and from Rangoon. On the way, on 2 September, the British accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison on the island of Penang without a fight. On 4 September the fleet, with the cruiser HMS Sussex as flagship, entered Singapore harbour. On board, Itagaki and Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, commander of the 10th Area Fleet, signed an agreement on the surrender of the forces on the island before Lieutenant General Philip Christison. On 5 September troops of the 5th Indian Division went ashore. The Japanese units withdrew from the city to designated camps, and according to British figures some 77,000 Japanese soldiers were taken into captivity on the island alone.

On 9 September Operation Zipper began, now carried out with no enemy to face. The landing on the beaches near Port Dickson and Morib exposed the plan’s weaknesses: lorries and equipment bogged down in the soft ground, and unloading was chaotic. British historians stress that had the Japanese put up resistance, the landing might have proved very costly. Within a few days the British had occupied the west coast of Malaya and linked up with the forces in Singapore.

The ceremony of 12 September

The ceremony took place in the council chamber of the Municipal Building. Guards of honour from the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the Indian Army and Australian paratroopers were drawn up in front of the building, and Mountbatten arrived to a gun salute. His commanders were present: Admiral Arthur Power, General William Slim, Air Marshal Keith Park and the American General Raymond Wheeler, the deputy supreme commander, as well as representatives of China, France, the Netherlands and Australia. According to accounts, some 400 spectators looked on, among them the Sultan of Johor.

Mountbatten made a short speech in which he stressed that the Japanese were surrendering to superior force, not on the basis of a negotiated agreement, and announced that the terms of surrender would be strictly enforced. At 11.10 a.m. – according to British accounts – the instrument was signed. Alongside Itagaki, the other senior commanders of the Japanese army, air and naval forces in the region signed, among them Fukudome. Eleven copies of the document were drawn up in all. Mountbatten then stepped out onto the steps of the Municipal Building and the British flag was hoisted on the flagpole; according to tradition, it was the same flag that had flown in Singapore before the war and had been kept hidden during the occupation. A victory parade was held on the Padang in front of the building.

The city after the occupation

The British found a city ravaged by three and a half years of occupation. The Japanese had renamed it Shōnan-tō, “Light of the South Island”. Immediately after the surrender of February 1942, from 18 February, the Kempeitai military police and units of the 25th Army carried out the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore, and later in Malaya, directed against the Chinese population. After the war the Japanese command admitted to some 5,000–6,000 victims; Singaporean and Chinese estimates speak of several tens of thousands, and historians usually give a range of about 25,000 to 50,000. Throughout the occupation the arrests and torture of people suspected of anti-Japanese activity continued, and towards the end of the war the population suffered from food shortages, the inflation of occupation currency and disease.

In the camps at Changi and elsewhere on the island were tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees, many of them utterly emaciated. Some had come back here from building the Burma Railway. The RAPWI organisation (Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) had been dropping food and medicine to them since the end of August, and after the British arrived it began evacuating them by ship to India, Australia and Britain.

Authority over Singapore and Malaya was assumed by the British Military Administration, which governed until April 1946. The return of the British was greeted with relief, but the authority of colonial rule had been undermined by the defeat of 1942. In Malaya a strong position was held by the guerrillas linked to the Malayan Communist Party, who had fought the Japanese during the war with British support and now had to lay down their arms.

Terauchi, Itagaki and the reckoning

The Singapore ceremony did not complete the formalities in the region. Lower-ranking Japanese commanders laid down their arms at separate ceremonies in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina over the following weeks. On 30 November 1945 in Saigon Terauchi, by then partly recovered, personally handed his swords to Mountbatten. He died in captivity in Malaya, in Johor, on 12 June 1946, before he could be brought to trial.

Itagaki was taken to Tokyo and tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The tribunal found him guilty of participating in the planning and waging of wars of aggression and of war crimes, including the ill-treatment of prisoners of war and internees in the territories under his command in 1945. On 12 November 1948 he was sentenced to death, and on 23 December 1948 he was hanged in Sugamo Prison. In Singapore itself, British military courts tried members of the Kempeitai and camp guards from 1946 onwards; in 1947 officers accused over Sook Ching also stood trial.

The Japanese soldiers did not go home at once. The British held them as “Japanese Surrendered Personnel” rather than as prisoners of war within the meaning of the Geneva Convention, and used them for clearing-up and reconstruction work, and in Indonesia and Indochina also to maintain order. Some of them returned to Japan only in 1946 and 1947.

Place in the history of the war

The surrender at Singapore was the largest of the regional ceremonies that, after the act of 2 September, carried Japan’s general surrender over to the individual theatres of war. For Britain it held special significance: it symbolically wiped out the humiliation of February 1942, and the ceremonial setting in the heart of the city was meant to restore the prestige of British rule in Asia.

At the same time, accepting the surrender brought SEAC new and difficult tasks. Mountbatten was now responsible for a vast area stretching from Burma to Java and Indochina, in which independence movements were active – in Indonesia independence had been proclaimed on 17 August, and in Hanoi on 2 September Hồ Chí Minh had proclaimed the independence of Vietnam. British and Indian troops, sent to disarm the Japanese and free the prisoners, soon found themselves in the midst of conflicts over the future of these countries. For Singapore, 12 September opened a post-war period in which growing aspirations to self-government led to autonomy in 1959 and to independence in 1965.