The World at War (31 page)

CAPTAIN OKADA

We are always taught camouflage from early stages of training. There were many things we don't like in the jungle, leeches and all kinds of things, but I like the jungle and it did not have the fear that it seems to have had for some Allied soldiers. I would have thought that with the Allies being in such an area long before us they must have completed ways of training or manoeuvres in the jungle long before we did.

HARRY MILLER

British civilian in Singapore

Pearl Harbor was a bit of a shock, the fact that they were capable of launching such a massive operation and succeed beyond all dreams in sinking much of the American fleet. Nevertheless there still persisted the idea that this was a fluke, that they had taken the Americans by surprise, the Japanese airman was a short-sighted, rice-eating individual flying a deathtrap of an aircraft and certainly not a very fast one. All that was disproved, of course, very, very soon when they came into Malaya and started dominating the air and we realised that the Zero aircraft was a superb machine and that the men in them were superb fighters and that we in Singapore – in Malaya – didn't have anything in the way of aircraft to match up with the Zeros.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

The
Japanese Air Force gained such a tremendous superiority over the whole of Malaya in the first forty-eight hours that movement was made extremely difficult. Percival's idea was to oppose the Japanese as they landed but that didn't come off – they were able to land in Thailand and we would not break Thai neutrality, so we were at a disadvantage from the start.
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CAPTAIN OKADA

Our training would be the normal training, for instance we had no special training for desert fighting in north China – we did get sand glasses against sandstorms but that was about all. We got mosquito nets against mosquitoes but there was no special training for specific jungle conditions as such. The jungle is not such a terrible place. Our clothing and the food we carry, you see we can live on rice, salt and sesame seeds and salted fish, this can keep a soldier going a long time, also we can find many things in the jungle to eat. And especially when the enemy aircraft come the jungle can be very friendly to you.

HARRY MILLER

The bombing in Singapore started with a vengeance somewhere around four o'clock on the morning of 8th December when the bombers appeared.
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Singapore was still lit up with street lamps and it was a fine moonlit morning so they had the whole city at their mercy. They dropped their bombs on an air base but also into the heart of the city, leaving their calling card, so's to speak, and that produced about thirty-three dead and about a hundred and twenty-five wounded. It hit Chinatown; it really hit the heart of the city. After that there was quite a lull because their targets were elsewhere, in northern Malaya, but as they moved closer the attacks became more frequent. It was after they crossed the causeway that the intensive air strikes on Singapore began and the last three days before it capitulated was a sheer hell of concentrated bombing and artillery and the Japanese aircraft were rarely out of the sky and there were none of our own aircraft. There were artillery duels between our fellows and theirs, but with the Japanese bombers overhead and the Japanese fighters our gun crews became their targets and they were knocked out one by one.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA

We took Singapore in sixty-five days; we made a surprise attack, so we made a great success. Your forces are not so aggressive as we expect them and, one other point, they had not fortified along the coast the northern part of the island, so we easily attacked and occupied the northern part of Singapore. We do not expect that British forces should be surrendered according to our demand, which I prepared beforehand. I was surprised but we respected them going to surrender.

DAVID MARSHALL

All the time we believed we were going to be rescued at the last minute. The British Empire had a tremendous psychological place in our lives: its strength, its massiveness and the need to protect Singapore not for the sake of the people of Singapore – we recognised that – but for the sake of maintaining the British Empire. It was important to maintain this pivotal military centre, which was the naval base for the Far East of the British Empire, for the protection of Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the financial and commercial interests of the Empire.

HARRY MILLER

The fighting soldier fully expected that in view of the situation that existed there would be another Dunkirk from Singapore. Fighting morale was very badly hit by the lack of any of our aircraft and it was one of the most serious aspects of the war at that particular time; it really contributed quite a lot to defeat. There came a time when there just weren't any more ships coming into Singapore to pick people up. So the Europeans, the great mass of civil servants and municipal and business people who were there, realised that they were in for a pretty sticky time. Morale was pretty high, nevertheless, perhaps higher among the civilian population – and I include the Asians in that – than among a certain element of the fighting forces. It wasn't just the Australians, it was anybody who came back from the fighting front, leaderless and completely giving up. They just threw their rifles into canals or drains along the side of the road and moved rapidly into the city, sheltering among the civilians, finding refuge in one of the big buildings and refusing to be moved out of it. It was a pretty oppressive spectacle considering the fact that Asian and European civilians were still fighting the war in their own way, in the sense of manning first-aid posts, casualty stations, fire brigades and all the other essential services.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA

We prepared the plan, but it was the first time for us to have such a meeting and when the news from the front that the ministers came to the headquarters of the 5th Division they did not know how to deal with them. I was asked by the headquarters of the brigade to meet your ministers and we talk about how to surrender but your ministers do not say 'surrender'; they want us to come to Singapore headquarters to talk with the High Commissioners. But according to our plan we want some pressures on our side. Then we departed and returned back to my headquarters to report our meeting and then we went to the front and I saw the place where we met later. So the conference was held at about 7pm and they had little idea how to deal with their own, I guess because they're not enough time to prepare for the meeting and they had little knowledge of surrenders, because the Staff Officers did not expect surrenders so soon. They believe the British Army stay and fights against us, so they had not enough knowledge about the detail concerning the meeting. General Yamashita wanted to get an answer from the British side. And there were possibles: General Percival wanted to keep some troops in Singapore to keep order and peace within the city, but we wanted the British Army disarmed all over.

HARRY MILLER

It was the morning after the surrender and I had gone back into the city just to see what was happening, and almost unostentatiously we were being taken over by long lines of Japanese troops, unkempt, bearded, squat and bandy-legged individuals who came shuffling and slouching in. Extremely tired men, grim-visaged. They set up barricades at strategic points and then stood beside them and one thought – Well, was the great British Army beaten by runts like these? And by golly we had been beaten by them.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA

We were so surprised because we expected your forces about fifty thousand and we found about one hundred thousand prisoners, so it was just over twice what we expected.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

I don't think any country could have been more
unprepared for war than Burma was at this particular time. The government was unprepared, the civil organisation and the people were unprepared and the defence forces practically did not exist. And this was all the more remarkable when one realises that Burma was taken over by the War Office for defence purposes in 1935 and did nothing about it at all. The priority for arms and equipment for Burma was very low indeed and when the war started the War Office very callously handed the unwanted baby back to the Commander-in-Chief in India.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM JAMES

100th Indian Infantry Brigade, Burma

I went to Burma from India with an independent Indian brigade before there was any thought of a Jap invasion. At the time I went over, which was in 1941,1 personally was disappointed because I'd hoped to go to the desert and at that time one never thought the Japanese would be so foolish as to take on the Allies. It was merely an independent brigade going into a very peaceful country in which there were two British battalions, one was based just south of Rangoon and the other was up in the hills, and there were of course the Burma Rifles.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

Wavell of course had become a national hero when he defeated the Italians in the desert at the beginning of the war, but then of course he had a series of disasters against the Germans in Greece, Crete and against Rommel in the desert. Anthony Eden said that he'd aged ten years in one night when he was defeated by Rommel. So he was at that time a very tired man and he very much wanted a rest. Now Winston Churchill, who was a law unto himself over these military appointments, insisted on exchanging Auchinleck with Wavell. The Viceroy of India protested, the Secretary of State for India protested and most of all Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, protested very strongly. He went to Winston about this and he said that Wavell was essentially a Westerner and knew nothing about the Far East, and Auchinleck was essentially a man in the right place as Commander-in-Chief in India. He deprecated the exchange very much, but it took place. Wavell had one marked characteristic which was a very great disadvantage to him the whole way through the Malayan and Burma campaigns: he had utter contempt for the Japanese as soldiers and that led him into all sorts of difficulties. To start with he refused two Chinese divisions that had been offered to him by Chiang Kai-shek, which was a disastrous blunder – he spent the rest of the campaign trying to get them back. And then it was a great mistake him sending his Chief of Staff in Delhi, General Hutton, as Burma Army Commander. Now Hutton was an excellent Staff Officer – he was the man in the right place in India – but he was quite out of place as a battle commander and I'm sure he would be the first to admit that. The Chiefs of Staff were against this appointment and so was the Viceroy and eventually they persuaded Wavell to accept Alexander in place of Hutton, but that was not until the 19th of February and of course Alexander arrived really too late to make any marked effect.

MAJOR MIKE CALVERT

Pioneer British jungle-warfare expert

When Burma was attacked I was given the job of forming the
Bush Warfare School out of all sorts of headquarters staff plus my own staff. And because the Japanese tactics were to do right or left hooks around the British, who rather stuck to the roads, we kept on finding ourselves used as the only force to oppose those hooks. Also we did a raid down the Irrawaddy in a paddle steamer: we were a hundred men and I had recently returned from Australia and brought back Australian bush hats, so we pretended we were the advance guard of an Australian brigade from the Middle East and we kept a Japanese regiment entertained with only a hundred men for two or three weeks.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

Wavell called me up to see him on the 28th of December 1941 at his house in Delhi and told me then that two brigades of my 17th Division, which I thought were on their way to Baghdad, had been diverted at sea and they had gone to Singapore, which came as a great shock to me, and then he said that he wanted me to go to Burma with the remaining brigade to form a new 17th Division. But in all our conversations that we had that afternoon it struck me that he didn't anticipate that Burma was in any immediate danger at all. And then during the operations when I asked him to speak to my brigadiers and staff, when we'd been hanging on by our eyelids for several days against two Japanese divisions, I expected him to say, 'Well done, stick to it,' that sort of thing. But the whole gist of his remarks were that he didn't think the Japanese were any good and therefore we, by implication, were worse.

MAJOR CALVERT

The main thing was the Japanese had experience. They had been fighting in China and the Chinese is a good foe. They were fanatical, they were tremendous patriots and once they were told to do a thing they got on with it and did it. They instilled the fear of God in everyone by the fact that in a rapid advance they were told not to take any prisoners, so any prisoners they did take, they shot. The Japanese were not equipped with a mass of trucks like the British Army so they did not have to use roads and they were trained to march and travel light. They were also taught to fire their weapons effectively and not to put down barrages of massed automatic weapons.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

The Sittang disaster undoubtedly was the cause for the loss of Rangoon and the loss of Burma. Quite briefly what had happened was that we had been withdrawing towards the broad
Sittang river with one long and narrow railway bridge, and it was quite obvious that what we wanted to avoid at all costs was being caught by the Japanese in the act of crossing this river. Therefore on the 12th of February, which was crisis day, really, in this Burma campaign, I sent my Chief of Staff to see Hutton and I told him that if I was to get my division across the Sittang safely in time to prepare a proper position on the far side I must start immediately. But Hutton was under great pressure from Wavell that I was not to withdraw under any circumstances because Wavell and Winston Churchill were trying to persuade the Australian Prime Minister to allow two Australian divisions to land in Rangoon and they wanted to see the 17th Division stuck out on the map well in front. On the 19th, General Hutton came forward and allowed me to withdraw but faced with two Japanese divisions and a far superior Air Force it was by then going to be a desperate race to get anyone at all across the Sittang.