As Westforce, largely but not entirely Australians and Indians, went north into Johor, they did so against a tide of fleeing tuans, British plantation managers and bureaucrats, and trucks filled with British troops half-dead with exhaustion. ‘Lorries bearing the names of half the rubber estates in Malaya’ went past, said an Australian, and amongst them were also steamrollers, fire engines, tin-dredging machinery, private motor cars, including Rolls-Royces, and Red Cross ambulances.
It could be argued that Bennett’s disposition of his troops along the line to be held in Johor was little better than the tactics used by the British, but other commentators think his plan was a good one. He did seek to ensure that the defence should be fluid, with as many men as possible held back ready for counter-attacks and to deal with Japanese attempts to outflank them. Bennett planned to open hostilities by placing an ambush west of a village named Gemas on the main road south. He ordered that a wooden bridge over a small river at Gemas be wired for explosion. The ambushing soldiers, the 30th Battalion AIF under Frederick ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan, were put in place on the morning of 14 January, and the password ‘Switch’ was sent around, indicating that the retreating 3rd Indian Corps had passed safely through Bennett’s lines and that the next people they would see would be the enemy. Men waited in the jungle in high humidity through the ferocious heat of the midday hours, and at about four o’clock in the afternoon, six hours after the password was given, a long column of Japanese riding bicycles approached the bridge. They were men of the veteran Japanese 5th Division, the Carp Division, riding five or six abreast, relaxedly chatting, their rifles on their backs. Two to three hundred of the cyclists passed over the bridge and past the ambush, to be dealt with by the troops in the rear. Then the bridge was blown. Bicycles and men were hurled into the air, and the ambush began.
The Japanese military machine would soon enough take its vengeance for Gemas, and it is true that the Carp Division had been guilty of savagery in southern China and Saigon, but it is hard not to feel a certain pity for the infantry on their bicycles, those who survived the bridge detonation being now blown apart by grenades thrown down onto the road, and killed by weaponry. Lieutenant-Colonel G.D. Duffy, a thirty-year-old civilian soldier from Sydney, wrote, ‘The entire three hundred yards [275 metres] of road was quickly covered with dead and dying men.’ A thousand Japanese were killed in this operation.
After the ambush, it was time for the battalion to retire to the main line. One of the men, Lance Corporal I.G. Hann, a hotel barman from Moree in New South Wales who would die later in imprisonment, was captured by the Japanese, locked in a hut, released by a Malay and, dressed in a turban and other borrowed Indian clothing, made his way back to meet up with an Australian patrol from the main lines near the Muar River.
Towards the coast, on the left flank of Westforce, the 45th Indian Brigade and Australian artillery were under pressure at the Muar River ferry crossing. The Japanese air force had been bombing Muar since 11 January. Now the infantry attacked by way of fords across the river. The men in the Allied line were nervous, not knowing if there had also been a coastal landing behind their line by the Japanese. Bennett asked that Australian aircraft attack the Japanese lines in the Indian sector, and a number of Japanese tanks were destroyed by Australian anti-tank fire while approaching the bridge over the river. On 16 January, though Japanese landing craft at the river mouth were driven off, Japanese troops used a number of small boats confiscated from the Malays to cross the Muar River, and thus captured larger craft for ferrying troops to the Australian- and Indian-held side of the river. But so far Muar held.
The Japanese were not easily cowed, but the (temporary) failure of this attack, in a campaign where their march had had a feeling of inevitability, would certainly have given them pause. The battle at Gemas, and the arrival of a reinforcement column in Singapore, gave the Allies great if transitory comfort. The tide of battle was surely on the turn with, as was said on Singapore Radio, ‘The AIF as our seawall against the vicious flood.’ But suddenly Japanese planes were bombing the Westforce troops. There were men who escaped the prospect of long imprisonment that day, but only by becoming casualties. The Japanese were probing south of Gemas, and among the many Australians killed was Lieutenant P.W. Clemens, a Canberra public servant, twenty-three years old, shot through the heart.
The Indian units protecting Muar and the Australian guns were now surprised and nearly surrounded by numbers of the elite Japanese Guards Division, who had landed at various places either side of the crossing and the town. Lieutenant R. McLeod, from Bondi in Sydney, wrote, ‘Once the crossing had been made the untried Indians . . . were no match for the elite troops of the Japanese Army, especially as the secrecy and suddenness of the manoeuvre took the defenders by surprise.’ Another veteran Japanese force got into the rear of the Indian line and repeatedly ambushed the Indians and a regiment of the Norfolks. An unidentified Australian officer described the latter in terms that would eventually become true of Australian morale as well: ‘They [the Norfolks] were a fine body of men but almost dazed by the position in which they found themselves. Their training had been for open warfare, and not for the very close warfare of the Malayan countryside.’ They were also encumbered by ‘trunks, valises, baths, etc., all in the mud, much to the amusement of our lads’.
A withdrawal from the Muar area was ordered for one o’clock on 16 January, though the Australian batteries kept firing at the Muar ferry crossing until 8.30 p.m., when they were withdrawn along the coast road. The new position Westforce were to take up ran along a crossroads at a town named Bakri, and here armoured carriers and armoured cars operated with the infantry. On 18 January, the Japanese were beaten off.
Throughout the campaign, due to the lack of aerial reconnaissance, everyone on the Allied side, including General Bennett—who still believed he had the Japanese worked out—was unable to ascertain what was happening in terms of Japanese infiltration and flanking movements. The 29th Australian Battalion, for example, beat off an attack on the left flank of their position on the road to Bakri, pursued the enemy for some hundreds of metres, supported by a 25-pound gun manhandled into a new position by its crew, and attacked roadblocks just ahead. Carrier vehicles pushed to within a few metres of Japanese machine guns as men full of battle fury hacked into the Japanese roadblocks with axes. But as an officer wrote, ‘The enemy surrounded this ferocious little group.’ The Australians withdrew to a position by a bridge. Food and ammunition began to run out, as did morphine to treat the wounded.
The young university graduate/gunner Russell Braddon was part of a unit sent over the causeway to set up a mortar base on a hill named Bukit Langkap. They carried weapons and stores up its monsoon-slicked clay sides, dug trenches, established telephone lines and positioned the mortars, and were then ordered to abandon the place. After joining the retreat from the Muar River, they found the men of their supply column slaughtered. ‘I moved a leg off a case of beef and tried to forget it belonged to the most cheerful driver in our regiment.’
Braddon and his Westforce comrades had suffered the puncture of all their illusions. They had been told before that the Japanese were very small and myopic ‘and thus totally unsuited either physically or optically to tropical warfare . . . they had aeroplanes made from old kettles and kitchen utensils, guns salvaged from the war against Russia in 1905 and rifles of the kind used by civilised people only in films about the Red Indians. Also they were frightened of the dark.’ But during the retreat from Muar and when they reached a causeway above the paddy fields of Parit Sulong, one of Braddon’s friends declared, ‘They can see—which we were told they couldn’t. They can fight—which we were told they couldn’t. And they’re behind us for miles—which we were told they weren’t.’
By the time Gunner Braddon and his comrades had been digging in in Johor, the southernmost Malayan state, it was apparent that the good road system in the states of Selangor and Malacca had favoured the supplying of the Japanese troo
ps as they advanced. But the Japanese units, as Bowden pointed out in a cable to Canberra on 23 January, did not depend on the road for food but only for military supplies. They lived off the country and could travel fast in jungle where there were no roads—especially down the east coast.
During the Muar River retreat, Captain Curlewis was sent out frequently in the dark to search for Australian units with whom General Bennett’s HQ had lost touch. By 22 January the retreat accelerated, and Curlewis wrote of ‘wild drives at night that no nightmare could envisage, bombings, machine gunning from the air, telephoning, message writing, orders to go out and do a job at a moment’s notice . . . Some day when the story of Malaya comes to be written some hard things will be said.’
Bowden was already saying them about the farcical and tragic air situation. Although fifty-two Hurricanes had arrived on 23 January, and thirty-two had been assembled, only thirteen were serviceable, because there were only a handful of pilots and ground crew available, and no spare parts.
Meanwhile, all down the length of Malaya there were many extraordinarily brave assaults at company or battalion level, and self-immolatory rearguard actions. On 19 January, Captain H.C. McDonald, a thirty-eight-year-old grazier from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, wounded while leading a withdrawal, handed over control of his men to a sergeant and gave covering fire to allow them to escape, at least for the moment. He would not be seen again. At the town of Parit Sulong, south of Bakri, many Australians in forward positions ran out of ammunition and prepared themselves in mind and spirit as best they could for the Japanese to surround them.
On 22 January, Lieutenant B.C. Hackney (who would survive the war) discussed with his friend Lieutenant A.H. Tibbetts, a young estate agent from Melbourne who would die that day, the desirability of having a wash, seeing that their clothes were covered in blood and filth. Appearing after a considerable time, the Japanese guards herded the wounded together with curses, kicks and blows from bayonets. The guardsmen were mothers’ sons but conditioned by a particular code; they were disciplined in battle and savage in victory. The Japanese military culture was one that warranted the humiliation, torture and massacre of prisoners, and later events in Australia would demonstrate that they expected no better when they were captured. In the frenzy of their successes, Japanese treatment of soldiers, male civilians and women was beyond all justification. But madness is readily achieved when a system condones it, and when victory intoxicates young minds.
During their misuse of Australian troops that day, as Hackney’s diary would claim and later testimony confirm, these Japanese troops deliberately targeted their kicks to the places where a wound lay open. One of the dead was placed in an upright position on a table top and treated as ‘an object of ridicule’. A Japanese officer arrived and demanded that helmets and mugs be filled with water, and cigarettes be offered to the Australians. This scene was photographed, but the water was then thrown away by the conquerors and the cigarettes taken back, and a massacre began for which the divisional commander, General Nishimura, would one day be called to international account and hanged.
There is a question which, in light of the massacre of the innocents, is both almost blasphemous but also necessary to ask. Given that the Japanese soldiers had had induced in them by their officers a hatred for the arrogance of the Empire and of the white man generally, and that this must now have played into their barbarities, had they been specifically indoctrinated about the White Australia Policy, about which Japan had first complained as early as 1905? We do not know the answer, though it would have been quite a propaganda tool for propagandists of the Japanese forces to let lie idle.
Severely wounded Lieutenant Hackney escaped from the massacre, hid in a coolie hut, cut through his bonds and met up on the track southwards with two members of his battalion, who both smelled strongly of petrol. By feigning death, they had avoided being fired on with the other prisoners. Petrol was thrown on the dead and wounded, and then ignited, but these two men, Sergeant Croft and his wounded companion, got away. Due to his injuries, Hackney had to stay at a Malay hut the next day while the other two men moved on. He managed to crawl from village to village until he was captured by Malayan policemen on 27 February and handed to the Japanese. The Malay villagers he met had been of course reluctant to help him for fear of reprisals.
THE FORTRESS FALLS
It is believed that General Bennett was already planning his escape to Australia as his troops retreated back over the causeway to Singapore. In his subsequent book, Why Singapore Fell, he is quite frank in admitting this. His intention to escape is not generally thought to have been a matter of cowardice but more a symptom of his self-importance, and of his belief that he knew better than any other general officer on the island how to fight the Japanese. It is also hard to avoid the idea that his ambitions to lead the AIF, something impossible to do from a POW camp, must have also had an unacknowledged part in his decision.
The Australians began the defence of Singapore on the night of 8 February 1942 at the extreme western end of Singapore, beyond the mouth of the Kranji River. Thinned out by the battles in Johor, they took up positions around the inlets and rivers with orders to rebuff Japanese landings. Only the most hopeful could have said their numbers—even with recently arrived but nearly untrained replacements—were adequate, or that the jungle favoured a coherent line, but still they dug in their machine guns behind strands of wire. Flares were to be fired as the Japanese came ashore, to signal to the artillery behind the coast to start firing. But the flares were too swollen by humidity to fit in the Very pistols designed to fire them.
As waves of Japanese got ashore, wearing compasses on their wrists to guide them, the Australians were obviously outnumbered. The replacements amongst them found the artillery barrage and the flashes of light awful and bewildering. A Japanese commentator declared of the combat that night: ‘Words cannot describe the glorious hand grenade and hand-to-hand fighting encountered.’ In the meantime, Australian reinforcements moving up in the dark and amidst the jungles and marshes became disoriented and were reduced to small vulnerable parties, discussing in great anguish what to do and where to move. A fighting withdrawal occurred during the next day, and the airfield at Tengah was lost. The lack of air cover for his troops was such in any case that Percival wrote, ‘Why, I ask myself, does Britain, our improvident Britain, with all her great resources, allow her sons to fight without air support?’
The Australians drew up in a new line in the morning, but that night, 9 February, the Japanese Guards Division landed in the north-west sector. In their retreat, the Australians blew up oil tanks at the mouth of a creek named Mendai Kechil. The burning fuel spread onto the water, and the screams of a battalion of Japanese guards who were still in boats added to the horrors of the night. To the east the Indians were driven away from the naval base that stood for the hollow promises of Britain and the hollow hopes of Australia. By the night of 10 February, the Indians, Australians, Scots and Malays were directly to the west of the city of Singapore, formed up along the northward-running Reformatory Road, and only six kilometres or so from the outskirts of the city. Over the next day and a half, enemy tanks pushed these forces, and the Scots of the 2nd Gordons, away from the town of Bukit Timah, virtually the geographic centre of the island, further eroding the situation. The 26th Australian Battalion, who had been fighting the Japanese in plantations and jungles and were now being sent forward, were suddenly advancing amongst the elegant villas of Tyersall Park, an unreal venue for war. But these were the last habitations many of them saw, since they were soon victims of shelling and bombing. From Kallang airport, covered with bomb craters, only two Hurricane fighters had been operating, but now they were ordered to fly out to the Netherlands East Indies.
The Australians in the battle for Singapore had now been fighting for the better part of five days, and in that time had been able to get only a few hours’ sleep—in the case of Brigadier General Harold Taylor of the 8th Division, fewer t
han five hours in as many days. When the 13th Australian General Hospital fell to the Japanese, the wounded were taken prisoner in the face of the all-pervasive fears of massacre. But massacre did not occur. By daybreak on 14 February, the Australians occupied a salient centred on Tanglin Barracks. Bennett sent a message to Curtin that implied the possibility of surrendering: ‘If enemy enters city behind us will take suitable action to avoid unnecessary sacrifices.’ Indeed, by now the War Council in Singapore had ceased to function and many of its members were escaping or had already done so. Duff Cooper, Churchill’s Cabinet representative, had flown to Java, and thence to safety.
The pressure on the perimeter continued through that and the next day, as did the bombing of the city. On 15 February, rumours of a ceasefire and even of surrender were exchanged amongst troops. If they had not done so already, soldiers in the port and close to the coast began to consider escape. At the conference of commanders, held in a tunnel under the city that day, Percival decided with unanimous support to seek a ceasefire and to invite a Japanese deputation to discuss the terms for capitulation. Fighting continued north and south around the city while the joint ceasefire deputation walked out northwest along the Bukit Timah Road about 1 p.m.
So, on the afternoon of 15 February 1942, the Japanese were amazed to see a white flag appear in the line of forts outside Singapore. General Percival was seeking a truce. What astonished and delighted Yamashita was that, to that moment, the Japanese had been suffering casualties under bombardment from forts Changi and Canning. The defenders, however, were short of food, water and ammunition. The pumping of water from the reservoir feeding the besieged and bombed city had ended when the reservoir was captured. In the devastated city, Chinese women sat in ruins howling for their dead children. Bennett, returning to his headquarters from a despairing conference at Fort Canning, could barely make his way through the rubbled street: ‘Beneath was a crushed mass of old men, women, young and old.’