Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cowardism and incompetence, balanced by heroism and loyalty., 24 Aug 2005
Colin Smith has produced an excellent, extremely readable account of what Churchill described as ' the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British History'. Always interesting, beautifully written, with, at its core, a compelling narrative based on individual, first-hand accounts of the impact on 'ordinary' (though many are most extra-ordinary) people, this book is hard to put down.
As regards the behaviour of the Japanese, once again we are left struggling to understand how an enemy, often courageous in the extreme, could also display such heartless cruelty towards those captured. In the Author's own words, 'perhaps even the Japanese do not know the answer to this'.
Although the book does contain a significant amount of 'behind the scenes' detail related both to contemporary political machinations and to military strategy, the account is never boring, and is always enlivened by frequent reference to the relevance of such data to subsequent events in Singapore. This is, in essence, the compelling story of a unique period in our Colonial history, and of the individual men and women involved. The tale is all the more remarkable when one considers that these events took place a mere 63 years ago. A superb read.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SINGAPORE - THE HUMAN FACE OF DEFEAT, 24 Jul 2005
This is so much more than military history. Smith has established a style of bringing individual players to life - brave and cowardly, brilliant and incompetent, or just plain ordinary - while driving forward his plot remorselessly. You know how it is going to end, but you are desperate to know what is going to happen to the individuals whom Smith has brought to life so vividly. Some of these people are fascinating: the Australian sheep-farmers who turned their weekend soldiering into military competence and bravery; the Indian professionals who had their loyalty so severely tested by the Japanese; the Japanese officers at the pinnacle of their careers; the dour Scottish sergeant-major who led his soldiers out of danger; several women who show their courage in different ways - and so on.Smith takes an analytical and challenging look at the sheer awfulness of what happened, and it makes sobering reading. Our strategic assumptions were wrong, and we assembled the wrong force, giving them the wrong orders. A bad hand can be played well, yet, with some honourable exceptions, we failed to do even that. You read with equal fascination the story of the officer who stems the tide with his inspired leadership and the story of the officer who made the culpable decision to withdraw when there was no need to. It is an achievement to turn a well-documented defeat into a page-turner, and Smith has achieved this in spades.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Totally excellent!, 8 Mar 2006
I use to live in Singapore, I am an avid military historian and I've been to almost every place mentioned in the book from the Army town of Aldershot (Uk), Fort Canning (Singapore), the village of Mersing (Malaysia) and the prison town of Freemantle (Australia). You bet I've walked around a fair share of the roads, bunkers, barracks and gun emplacements, wondering about the feelings and fears of these men caught up in history.This book took me back to those places that I visited and brought them alive in a way I had originally failed to imagine. Such a complicated subject so well written, it read like a novel and contained so many individual stories carefully woven into a hard to put down read. I would have loved more information about the time of the occupation by the Japanese in Singapore- sadly much of this information is lost or hidden by the islands goverment. The paper placing by the mad Japanese execution selector, the burning of local people's land deeds and the massive boom in the islands population during this time are all depressing but ultimatley fascinating and undisclosed subjects. Maybe a follow up? These stories obviously would have been outside of the original scope of the book but that aside I thought this book was simply brilliant and now I am left with a sense of emptiness after having finished it. I'm also left with the feeling that I want to go back and retread these sites with new eyes. Anyway thank you!
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