Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II [Hardcover]

'Smith succeeds brilliantly in weaving hundreds of individual stories into a coherent whole'

...beautifully told, shrewd and fair in its judgments and on occasions wryly funny...the definitie book on this extraordinary drama

"a magisterial account...Colin Smith knows how it feels to be a soldier and his story is unforgettably well told"
Neal Ascherson

'Smith tells the story vividly . . . a fine history of what now seems primarily a particularly poignant and horrifying human tragedy'

"He has a sharp eye for the telling anecdote...incidents well known to Australians... are fresh in the telling."

"A meticulopus account of the advance on Singapore... an excellent opportunity to revisit these hard
questions."

Churchill called it 'the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.' This description of the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, after Lt-Gen Percival's surrender led to over 100,000 British, Australian and Indian troops falling into the hands of the Japanese, was no wartime exaggeration. The Japanese had promised that there would be no Dunkirk in Singapore and that was so - no one was spared and its fall led to imprisonment, torture and death for thousands of allied men and women. In this extraordinary book, using much new material from British, Australian, Indian and Japanese sources, Colin Smith has woven together the full and terrifying story of the fall of Singapore and its aftermath. Here, alongside cowardice and incompetence, are forgotten acts of enormous heroism; treachery yet heart-rending loyalty; Japanese compassion as well as brutality from the bravest and most capricious enemy the British ever had to face.

Colin Smith is an author and award-winning journalist. He covered many wars for the Observer and served terms as its Defence, Middle East, Asia and Washington correspondent. His previous books include The Last Crusade and (with John Bierman) Alamein: War Without Hate.

* Singapore, circa-1935
For the young British male seeking the pleasures of the East, nowhere was as glamorous, or sometimes as debauched, as Singapore. The island was rapidly becoming known, even more so than Nairobi, as one of the most hedonistic beacons of the sprawling empire on which the sun never set. (‘Because God doesn’t trust the British in the dark,’ declared nationalists from Peshawar to Penang.) Even when rubber prices slumped in the world-wide economic depression that began with the New York stock market crash in 1929, and redundant Tuans were being declared ‘Distressed British Persons’ and granted government-assisted passages home, Singapore somehow partied on.

On the whitewashed walls of St Andrew’s Cathedral there were brass plaques commemorating some of those killed restoring British rule during the sepoy mutiny of February 1915. ‘Ready Aye Ready’, read the epitaph for the stoker from HMS Cadmus assigned to one of the shore parties. But twenty years on it seemed that all most people were ready for was fun. Few of the younger dancers at Raffles, or on the terrace of the Swimming Club with its five bars, or at the Happy World with the professional Chinese dance hostesses known as Taxi Girls, or the spectators at the races at Bukit Timah, knew or cared about the mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry; even fewer about the grisly executions which followed.
* Australian bombers attack Japanese transports off Singapore
Flight Lieutenant Oscar ‘Ossie’ Diamond had missed with all his bombs on his first sortie against the Japanese transports and was determined to do better next time. The moon suddenly broke through the cloud and drizzle and picked out the Ayatosan Maru, the second-largest of the three transports. Diamond, the son of a Russian Jew whose real name was Dashevsky, made three passes at the ship. First his Hudson machine-gunned the decks and bridge with wing and rear guns; in a second attack, he dropped two of his four bombs. Then Diamond did something that, for cold-blooded nerve, was at least the equal to Ramshaw’s skip bombing.

Turning into his third attack to drop his last two bombs, instead of flying as fast as he could, he confused the anti-aircraft gunners on the transport and the escorting warships by doing exactly the opposite. Suddenly the Hudson shuddered almost to a halt as Diamond put up his landing flaps; the aircraft was flying so slowly it was near to stalling and dropping out of the sky. As he passed low over the stern of the Ayatosan Maru, the bomb bay opened and the huge ball of flame that followed was accompanied by a blast which lifted the Hudson’s tail and seemed bent on tossing it nose-first into the sea. Diamond pulled back on the stick as hard as he could and gradually the front of the aircraft came up, though no sooner had he gained height than he lost his starboard engine, obliging him to make a single-engine landing on Kota Baharu’s unlit, if wet and shiny, runway.

Here it was discovered that fuselage, tailplane and wings had all been badly damaged by gunfire, and there was a piece of shrapnel in the starboard oil tank that may have come from one of their own bombs. Casualties among those troops still aboard the Ayatosan Maru were heavy, although her crew eventually managed to extinguish the fires the bombs had started. Diamond was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.
* 45 minutes after Tennant’s veteran battleship ‘The Repulse’ and Phillips’ flagship ‘The Prince of Wales’ came under fire, it became clear that help was not on the way
Tennant asked his Chief Yeoman of Signals for the log of messages monitored from the flagship to Singapore that morning. His reply must have hit him like a bucket of very cold water. There had been no messages. Phillips had stuck firmly to his wireless silence and Admiral Palliser remained a chief of staff with no firm idea of where his boss was or that his ships were under heavy aerial attack. So there were no Buffaloes on their way. Tennant did not bother to contact the flagship to ask why. There could be no justifiable reason for maintaining radio silence when the enemy knew exactly where they were. To try and make up for lost time the first brief morse message his wireless room tapped out was not encoded but sent in plain English:
FROM REPULSE TO ANY BRITISH MAN OF WAR. ENEMY AIRCRAFT BOMBING. MY POSITION 134NTW 22 x 09.
This was followed by a coded message which presumably gave what details it could of damage and casualties, and stressed the urgent need for air support which would have been obvious to Palliser as soon as he got the first message. But for some reason this second message failed to arrive.
Then Tennant’s lookouts reported that the 'Prince of Wales' had hoisted two black balls to its yard arm, the signal for ‘not under control’. His own wild ‘hard over’ turns and the flagship’s sad, incessant circling had put them at least 3 miles apart, so now Tennant turned his ship and narrowed the gap, signalling by Aldis lamp as he went: ‘Thanks to providence have so far dodged nineteen torpedoes.’
But Leach was too preoccupied to answer his old friend’s jaunty message, perhaps understandably envious of his good luck, and as he got closer Tennant could see why. The Royal Navy’s newest battleship, in which less than a week before the Royal Marines band had played ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ for the Japanese consul and Phillips’ other cocktail guests, was a pathetic sight. She was moving sluggishly along, still leaning dramatically to port as counter-flooding on the starboard side had reduced her list by no more than 1 degree. Her waterlogged stern was no higher than a coal barge – 2 feet above sea level instead of its normal 24. What Tennant couldn’t see was even worse.’ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.