The plans for the attack were months in the making. By December 1941, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji and his Taiwan Army Research Section boldly forecast a campaign of 100 days to speed through the jungles of Malaya and seize the island-bound city of Singapore, Britain's jewel of Southeast Asia. General Tomoyuki Yamashita and the three divisions of his 25th Army were given the honor of carrying out this task in the name of the Japanese emperor, to capture what one English writer called "a bulging, glittering purse, carelessly dangled from the belt of Asia."1
Two years earlier, Winston Churchill had summed up the hopes of a nation (and the hopes hardly had changed by 1941) when he stated firmly that Singapore was so far removed from Japan that "the operation of moving a Japanese army with all its troopships and maintaining it with men and munitions during a siege would be forlorn," and that such a siege "should last at least four or five months." In the intervening time, he believed, the fleet would arrive from home waters to rescue the embattled fortress. "It is not considered possible," Churchill wrote confidently, "that the Japanese . . . would embark upon such a mad enterprise."2
In the end, everyone was proved wrong. Japan's campaign through Malaya lasted only 60 days; the subsequent siege of Singapore lasted not four or five months, but a mere seven days.
The conquest of the "Lion City" was Japan's most spectacular victory of World War II, a blitzkrieg on bicycles that rivaled Germany's mechanized successes in Poland and France. But Axis victory brought an equal measure of Allied defeat, as crushing and shocking as few other losses during the entire war. Not only did Britain and its Commonwealth lose a vital shield against attacks on Australia, Burma, and India, but the old colonial image of white invincibility was dashed forever, opening the door to Asian independence after the war. Greater than all of this, however, were the individual human consequences of the city's fall. Like so many aspects of the war, they are consequences still felt today.
On 15 February 2001, 59 years to the day after the fall of the city to the Japanese 1942, Singaporeans, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, and others gathered to paid tribute to those who died during the occupation and those who survived the brutal captivity that was shared in one way or another by civilian and soldier alike. Every year since 1967, not long after the island nation broke from its brief marriage with Malaysia, Singapore has marked the anniversary of the beginning of the Japanese occupation with a ceremony at War Memorial Park downtown near the old colonial center of the city.
Members of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry explained the significance of the memorial, alternating in Singapore's dual languages of English and Chinese, and welcomed the hundreds of guests. "It is extremely important that our future generations remember the atrocities of war and bear in mind the people who have sacrificed their lives for the sake of peace," they said, addressing directly the more than 1,000 school children who also attended. "Only with that knowledge can our future generations appreciate the peace we have now, [and] understand the value of freedom and the importance of total defense."
In addition to the national ceremony, a very different—more intimate, more emotional—gathering took place that night at Changi, at the eastern extreme of the island. The evening included the opening of a new museum, which contains a replica of a wooden chapel built by prisoners of war in 1944. This part of Singapore was the site of at least seven camps—mostly within the confines of old British Army installations in the area—that served as wretched homes for more than 50,000 prisoners. Changi before the war had been the site of most of the coastal guns that had been the meager evidence of the island's claim to being called a "fortress." After the surrender, Selarang, Roberts, and Kitchener Barracks, and the nearby civilian jail (which remains Singapore's maximum-security prison) together became a vast holding pen, where the prisoners were left to fend largely for themselves.
Changi and its chapel have become a gathering place for all those who want to remember that time and what happened at that place during the war. A choir sang under the eaves just as some of the POWs had done 60 years before, wreaths of red poppies and personal mementos were laid at the altar, and visiting diplomats and government representatives paid their respects to those who had come that day—and to those who were gone. More important than the ceremony, however, were the stories that began to be shared. The middle-aged son of one Australian ex-POW, when asked when his father had begun talking about his experiences during the war, quickly answered: "24 hours ago."
The circumstances of the ex-POWs six-decades-long association with Singapore varied considerably. Many, such as Platoon Sergeant Les Cody of the 2/4th Machine-Gun Battalion AIF (Australian Imperial Forces), arrived in the city at the end of January 1942 among some of the last reinforcements before the fall. Thousands of soldiers—Australian, British, Indian—arrived in the final days, the last on 5 February.3 Most witnessed their first combat when Yamashita launched his final attack. They were hardly off their transports before the fighting was over, and they began what would become a three-and-a-half-year captivity.
Captain John Wilson of the 6th Battalion, 1st Punjab Regiment, was too busy after the war to think about his experiences. "I didn't talk about it much," he said, "I was trying to make up time." He had been a lawyer in New Zealand before he joined the Indian Army in 1941. He too was a late arrival in Singapore, coming with the 44th Indian Brigade—which suffered heavily in the fighting on the western side of the island less than two weeks after the brigade arrived. He was brought down with a machine-gun hit to the leg, and was taken to Alexandra Hospital just to the southwest of the city. There he witnessed the infamous massacre that took place on the ground floor, as Japanese troops moved through the hospital grounds, killing the wounded and using the nurses as bayonet targets. Wilson, miraculously, was bedridden on the second floor and was spared.
Like so many of his compatriots, Wilson eventually was sent off to Thailand to work on the "Railway of Death"—the Bangkok-Rangoon Railroad—which was immortalized in the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. "We built a bridge very similar to that," he said. But unlike in the movie, there always were conflicting desires to see the bridge stay up—and avoid punishment by the Japanese—while simultaneously hoping it would crumble into the river.
Others came to Changi from other areas in the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as Stoker Sydney Harper, who had survived the sinking of HMAS Perth off Java on 1 March 1942. He spent a year in camps alongside men from the USS Houston (CA-30) before being shipped to Changi. He was one of the "lucky" ones who was not sent to the work camps in Thailand and Burma. On what turned out to be the last day of the war, he and about a thousand of his fellow prisoners were sent out to work—but without tools. They were led to the antitank ditches they recently had dug, ditches that strangely ran parallel to the roadway. Harper remembers a messenger scurrying up the road from the city, and soon the word was being passed that the war was over. "I'm firmly convinced in my own mind," Harper said, that the Japanese were going to execute them. "I'm firmly convinced they knew what was going to happen to them" once the Allies discovered the horrific treatment given to prisoners by the Japanese.
In one of the countless little ironies that punctuated the war, the day after Harper returned to Australia following his captivity he received the one postcard—limited to a terse 24 words—that the Japanese had allowed him to send home. He had sent it three years before.
Singularly missing from the gathering were Indian ex-POWs, who had made up the largest percentage of the soldiers defending Malaya and Singapore. Perhaps a third—about 20,000—of the subcontinent soldiers captured at Singapore joined the collaborationist Indian National Army, but more than 40,000 stayed loyal. "The Indian government does not know how to recognize the Indian contribution to the war," said Jeyathurai Ayadurai, director of the Changi Museum. The Indian Army immediately after the war could not believe so many had fought for the Japanese, and after independence Indian nationalists soon began wondering why so many had fought for the British. Among individual Indian veterans, however, "there is no ambivalence at all," said Ayadurai. "I have yet to see anyone from either side who was not passionate about his involvement in the war."
Also missing from the week's gathering were representatives of the 800 Americans held at Changi. These came from two groups—survivors of the Houston, and members of the "Lost Battalion," the 2nd Battalion of the 131st Field Artillery, Texas National Guard. Originally imprisoned on Java, many of these men stayed only temporarily in Changi before being sent to camps in Japan, Thailand, and Burma. A final group that was not seen—but always was present—was the Japanese, and the memory of what they had done. Feelings about the POWs' former jailers remain passionate, but the range of emotion is curious. One elderly Briton took a moment to hawk the book he had written, energetically arguing that he had written proof of Japanese intentions to execute prisoners systematically. Others were more circumspect. "Such a dedicated race," one ex-POW said. "Back then, the Japanese were focused on war, raw materials, empire," but now Japan pursues its goals peacefully. If its leaders were to change that focus, however, he cautioned, "it could happen again."
Historians have not been kind to the role the Australians in particular played in the final days before the surrender in 1942—because of lingering evidence that desertions from the AIF numbered in the thousands.4 Even so, whatever animosity that might have flared between Commonwealth partners 60 years ago seemed long gone; there was a warm collegiality among the reunited ex-POWs. There also was an odd air of undiminished invincibility among the small crowd of elderly men. They had endured the worst that war could throw at them, and had come out alive. It would have been easy for them to dwell on the string of apparent misfortunes that befell them—sent to a battle that could not be won, asked to fight without proper equipment or training, forced to live in impoverished captivity. But one Australian octegenarian explained it all very differently. They all had led charmed lives—shaped by good luck and strengthened by the memory of their mates who didn't make it back. "Our luck started 60 years ago," he said. "Somebody must have been looking down on us."
1. Kate Caffrey, Out in the Midday Sun: Singapore, 1941-45—The End of an Empire (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), p. 26.
2. The Churchill War Papers, Martin Gilbert, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), vol. 1, p. 401.
3. Peter Elphick, Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress (London: Coronet Books, 1995), pp. 541-43.
4. Elphick, Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress, pp. 435-99.