What happened at the fall of Singapore?
On the night of 8 February 1942 the Japanese 25th Army under Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita crossed the Johor Strait and landed on the north-west coast of Singapore Island. In a week of fighting the British, Indian, Australian and Malayan defenders were driven back to the edge of the city. With the water supply failing and food and ammunition running short, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival met Yamashita at the Ford factory in Bukit Timah on 15 February and surrendered unconditionally. About 85,000 men went into captivity on the island, and Singapore stayed under Japanese occupation until 1945.5
The Australian War Memorial counts the surrender among the largest and most dramatic reverses in modern British history, and Churchill called it the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history. The rest of that day is told in 15 February in military history, and the wider war in our guide to the Pacific War.6
The base without a fleet
After World War I, Britain chose Singapore, set between the Pacific and Indian oceans, as the site of a great naval base. The National Museum of Australia writes that construction of the base, covering 54 square kilometres, began in 1923, with Australia and New Zealand helping to pay for it. The plan, known as the Singapore Strategy, was that in a war with Japan a battle fleet would sail from Britain to use it.7
That promise was never kept. Chris Coulthard-Clark of the Australian War Memorial notes that the fleet was first promised within six weeks, a period stretched to three months in 1939, and that plans for the base had called for roughly 350 to 550 aircraft that were never provided. When war came, Britain was fighting Germany, and what reached Singapore in early December 1941 was a small squadron built around two capital ships, the new battleship Prince of Wales and the old battlecruiser Repulse.8
Japanese aircraft sank both ships off the coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes that it was the first time capital ships at sea had been sunk by aircraft. From that day the base had no fleet to protect it, and Japan held the sea around Malaya.9
Seventy days down the peninsula
The Japanese 25th Army opened its invasion on 8 December 1941 with landings at Kota Bharu in north-eastern Malaya and at Singora and Patani in southern Thailand. The Australian War Memorial's London site notes that the first battalions came ashore at Kota Bharu some ninety minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the same day Japanese aircraft bombed Singapore, killing 61 people and injuring 133, according to the National Library Board's BiblioAsia.10
The defenders fell back down the peninsula. The CWGC timeline records the Japanese victory at Jitra on 11 to 13 December, a delaying action at Kampar at the turn of the year and the disaster at Slim River on 7 January 1942, where an estimated 500 Allied soldiers were killed and 3,200 captured. Kuala Lumpur fell on 11 January. The 8th Australian Division fought its first action in an ambush at Gemas on 14 January and then, with Indian troops, the long battle on the Muar River.11
On 31 January 1942 the last troops crossed the causeway from Johor to Singapore Island, and engineers blew a gap in it behind them. The National Museum of Australia notes that the Japanese had covered the 700 kilometres from their northern landings to the southern tip of the peninsula in less than two months. A BiblioAsia caption records how the Japanese later bridged the gap in the causeway, 70 feet (21 metres) wide, with a girder bridge.12
A long front on a small island
Percival had to hold the island with tired and incomplete units. He wrote in his despatch that he believed his strength to be in the neighbourhood of 85,000, the equivalent of four weak divisions, with a large number of base and administrative troops among them, and that probably about 70,000 were armed and equipped. Many of them, he added, were very inadequately trained.13
The British 18th Division, newly arrived, held the beaches of the north-east. The north-west, along the mangrove creeks of the Johor Strait, went to the 8th Australian Division under Major General Gordon Bennett. The Australian War Memorial's London site notes that its depleted battalions, most of them at half strength after the fighting on the mainland, had a front of 12 miles to hold, partly with recent recruits.14
Yamashita prepared with care. According to Wigmore's Australian official history, the Japanese assembled 168 guns, with 1,000 rounds for each field gun, and gave sixteen battalions with five more in reserve to the main attack on the front of the 22nd Australian Brigade, where only two Australian battalions stood. The Imperial Guards Division was to stage a feint toward the naval base in the north-east, and on 7 February a Guards battalion landed on Pulau Ubin, the island off the north-east coast.15
The night crossing, 8 February
After a day of heavy shelling and bombing, the 5th and 18th Japanese Divisions crossed the strait late on the night of 8 February. Wigmore puts the start of the landings soon after 10.30 p.m., and the Australian War Memorial's London site writes of landings after 10.00 p.m. from 260 landing craft. Percival recorded that, according to Japanese sources, 13,000 troops landed during the night and another 10,000 soon after dawn.16
The Australian machine gunners did great damage on the water. Wigmore describes barges set on fire and boats beaten off or sunk at the mouth of the creeks, but the defenders were too few to stop so many landing places at once. Failures of communication kept the artillery from firing where it was needed. By the morning of 9 February the Australians had fallen back toward Tengah airfield.17
At about 9 p.m. on 9 February the Imperial Guards landed in their turn near the causeway, on the front of the 27th Australian Brigade at Kranji. After close fighting the defenders there also fell back. In the west, a new line between the headwaters of the Kranji and Jurong rivers was formed on 10 February and lost the same day.18
Kranji, Bukit Timah and Wavell's order
General Archibald Wavell, the Allied supreme commander in the region, flew in on 10 February. Wigmore records that a Japanese air raid struck during his conference with Percival and Bennett, and that Wavell insisted the Kranji to Jurong line be retaken. A counterattack was ordered but never got going, and on Wavell's orders the last serviceable aircraft and the remaining airmen left for the Netherlands East Indies. Phan Ming Yen dates the withdrawal of the RAF aircraft to 9 February.19
On the night of 10 to 11 February Japanese tanks pushed down the main road through the Argylls' roadblocks to the outskirts of Bukit Timah village. That was a heavy loss: the Bukit Timah area held the reservoirs, the main food and petrol depots, and the trunk road into the city. Wigmore notes that after these dumps were lost only about fourteen days of military food remained under Percival's control.20
On the morning of 11 February, the anniversary of the accession of Japan's first emperor, Yamashita had aircraft drop twenty-nine wooden boxes over the British lines, each holding a note to the British command that advised it to surrender. Percival did not reply. Churchill had told the commanders that the battle must be fought to the bitter end because the honour of the British Empire was at stake, and Wavell passed the order on.21
Pasir Panjang and the Alexandra Hospital
In the south-west the Japanese 18th Division attacked along the Pasir Panjang ridge on 13 and 14 February, toward the Alexandra area where the island's largest ammunition magazine, the ordnance depot and the main military hospital stood. The 1st Malaya Brigade held the ridge, and Wigmore praises the 1st Malay Battalion, a regular unit, which showed how well such troops could have been used in the defence of their homeland.22
The National Heritage Board tells the story of Lieutenant Adnan Saidi, who was ordered to hold Bukit Chandu, also called Opium Hill. By its account his men fought on into the afternoon of 14 February until they were overrun, and the badly wounded Adnan was put to death by his captors. Wigmore records that many Malay posts held their ground and were wiped out almost to a man.23
On 14 February Japanese troops coming along Ayer Raja Road reached the Alexandra military hospital in pursuit of Indian soldiers who fell back into it still firing. Wigmore writes that they bayoneted staff and patients, including a patient lying on an operating table, and herded about 150 people into a bungalow and executed them the next morning. The CWGC timeline lists the Alexandra Hospital massacre on the same date.24
Water, Fort Canning and the decision
By 14 February the front ran in a semicircle about three miles from the city centre, and the city held more than a million civilians and refugees. Japanese guns on the Bukit Timah heights shelled the town, and broken mains were losing water faster than it could be pumped. Percival wrote that on the morning of 15 February the Director General of Civil Defence warned that the supply would not last more than another 24 hours.25
At 9.30 a.m. on 15 February Percival met his senior commanders in the underground headquarters at Fort Canning, known today as the Battlebox. His despatch lists the state of things: military food for a few days, small arms ammunition adequate but field gun and Bofors ammunition almost gone, and petrol only in vehicle tanks. He saw two choices, an immediate counterattack to retake the reservoirs and depots or an immediate surrender.26
The formation commanders judged a counterattack impracticable, and Percival decided to capitulate. Phan Ming Yen, writing in BiblioAsia, stresses that eleven other men took the decision with him. According to Percival's minutes, Lieutenant General Lewis Heath argued for immediate surrender, Bennett agreed, and Major General Frank Keith Simmons said he was reluctant but saw no other course. A message from Wavell that morning had given Percival discretion to cease resistance once he was satisfied that further fighting was no longer possible.27
The meeting at the Ford factory
A deputation went up Bukit Timah Road under a white flag and returned with orders for Percival to come in person. The photograph at the top of this page, taken by the Japanese photographer Kageyama Kōyō, shows his party on the way with a white flag and the Union flag, escorted by a Japanese officer. Phan Ming Yen names the four British officers in it: Major Cyril Wild, who carried the white flag, Brigadier T. K. Newbigging, Brigadier K. S. Torrance and Percival himself. Their destination was Yamashita's headquarters in the Ford Motor Factory on Upper Bukit Timah Road.28
The sources give slightly different times. SG101, a Singapore government site, says the party left at 5.15 p.m., Wigmore that the meeting took place about 5.15 p.m., and the National Heritage Board that the document was signed in the factory's boardroom at around 6 p.m. Yamashita would not negotiate. SG101 writes that he demanded an immediate, unconditional surrender and threatened an attack on the city that night.29
Percival never received a copy of the terms and set them down from memory: unconditional surrender of all forces in the Singapore area, hostilities to cease at 8.30 p.m. British time, troops to stay where they stood, and weapons and equipment to be handed over. A force of 100 armed British soldiers was to keep order in the town until the Japanese took over. Percival told Yamashita that the heavier weapons and secret documents had already been destroyed, and Yamashita accepted it.30
Orders to cease fire went out soon after 7 p.m., and hostilities ended at 8.30 p.m. on 15 February, the first day of the Chinese New Year. That night Bennett handed over his command and left Singapore with two staff officers, an escape that made him, in a phrase BiblioAsia quotes, Australia's most controversial commander of World War II. Japanese troops entered the town on 16 February, when, Percival recorded, 175 tanks took part in a military parade.31
Counting the army that surrendered
The prisoner figures depend on what is counted. Wigmore gives about 85,000 British, Indian, Australian and local troops taken on the island, matching Percival's own estimate of his strength. For the whole campaign the National Museum of Australia and the CWGC give more than 130,000 prisoners, and Percival put the number of men who took part on the British side at a little over 125,000. More than 15,000 Australians were captured, and the National Museum of Australia writes that more than 7,000 of them died as prisoners.32
The Japanese strength is just as disputed. The CWGC gives Yamashita 36,000 troops for the battle, and Coulthard-Clark three divisions for the whole campaign. Percival, writing in 1946, believed the Japanese had used five or perhaps six divisions in Malaya and estimated a minimum of 150,000 men and 300 tanks, and asked that the very different figures given in official statements be corrected. The Japanese losses in the capture of the island, by the figures Wigmore gives, were 1,714 killed and 3,378 wounded.33
Syonan-to and the Sook Ching
The Japanese renamed the island Syonan-to, Light of the South, and held it for three years and eight months. The surrender, the National Heritage Board notes, marked the start of the Japanese occupation, and the Ford factory itself went on assembling military vehicles for the Japanese army.34
Three days after the surrender, on 18 February 1942, the Japanese began the Sook Ching, a mass screening of the Chinese population. Lim Tin Seng writes in BiblioAsia that all Chinese men between 18 and 50 were summoned to screening centres, where those who passed received good citizen cards and those who failed were taken to remote places, many of them beaches, and shot. The National Heritage Board notes that the Kempeitai, the military police, sought five categories of suspects, among them volunteers of the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, communists, secret society members and anyone with arms.35
No exact death toll exists. Lim Tin Seng writes that the Japanese put the figure at about 5,000 and the Chinese community at around 100,000, while it has been widely assumed that the victims numbered between 25,000 and 50,000. For the Allied prisoners, captivity meant years of hunger and forced labour, and the Australian War Memorial notes that those sent to build the Burma-Thailand Railway suffered most from overwork, hunger and disease.36
Why Singapore fell
Historians still argue over the causes. Coulthard-Clark points first to the strategy itself: a base built for a fleet that never came, and an air defence that was never provided, left the garrison at the mercy of an enemy with command of the air and sea. The CWGC adds that the fixed defences were designed mainly against attack from the sea, and that many units on the island were under strength or inadequately trained after the retreat down Malaya.37
Some of the best-known explanations are myths. Coulthard-Clark writes that the story of fortress guns pointing the wrong way is untrue, since nearly all of them did engage the Japanese, although they were short of high explosive ammunition. A British report released in 1992 blamed indiscipline among Australian troops, but he argues that acts of indiscipline happen in any such collapse and that the real cause lay in the weakness of the defence. Ted Green, writing for the Historical Association, sets out the same questions: whether Percival was to blame, whether the Australians refused to fight and whether Yamashita bluffed Percival into surrender.38
Phan Ming Yen argues that Percival has been made a convenient scapegoat for a decision that twelve men took together. For Australia the defeat was also a turning point. The National Museum of Australia sees in it the final failure of the Singapore Strategy, the loss of almost a quarter of Australia's soldiers overseas at the start of the Pacific War, and the moment the country began to look to the United States instead of Britain.39
Remembering 15 February
The surrender room survives. The Former Ford Factory at 351 Upper Bukit Timah Road was gazetted as a national monument on 15 February 2006 and holds an exhibition on the battle and the occupation, renewed for the 75th anniversary in 2017. The discovery of a Sook Ching mass grave at Siglap in 1962 led the Chinese community to campaign for a memorial and a resting place for the victims. The Civilian War Memorial in the city centre was unveiled on 15 February 1967, the 25th anniversary of the fall.40
At Kranji, overlooking the strait the Japanese crossed on 8 February, the CWGC's Kranji War Cemetery holds the graves of more than 4,400 Commonwealth servicemen and women, and the Singapore Memorial above it bears more than 24,000 names of those who have no known grave. The first burials there were prisoners of war, laid to rest by their comrades from a nearby camp.41
Singapore was taken back without a fight after Japan's surrender: General Itagaki Seishiro agreed to a peaceful handover, formalised on 12 September 1945. For Singapore, SG101 reminds its readers, 15 February 1942 opened three years and eight months of occupation, and for the prisoners from Britain, India and Australia years of captivity.42
