The Second World War (50 page)

Only a few recognized the paradox of German sentimentality amid the vicious war which they had unleashed. On Christmas Day, the prisoner-of-war camp outside Kaluga was evacuated in temperatures below minus 30 degrees. Many of the Soviet prisoners, of whom some had been reduced to cannibalism, collapsed in the snow and were shot. It was perhaps hardly surprising that Soviet soldiers exacted revenge by killing German wounded abandoned in the retreat, in at least one case by pouring captured fuel stocks over them and setting them on fire.

Nobody was more conscious of the dramatic shift in world affairs than Stalin. But his impatience to exact revenge on the Germans and seize the opportunities offered by their retreat led him into demanding a general offensive along the whole front, a series of operations for which the Red Army lacked the necessary vehicles, artillery, supplies and above all training. Zhukov was horrified, even though operations so far had gone better than he had expected. The vastly over-ambitious Stavka plans aimed for the destruction of both Army Group Centre and Army Group North, and a massive strike back into Ukraine.

After so many months of suffering, the mood of the Soviet people also swung wildly towards excessive optimism. ‘
We’ll get it over by spring
,’ many were saying. But they, like their leader, still had many shocks ahead.

The British colony of Hong Kong, which had maintained a form of neutrality during the last four years of the Sino-Japanese War to the north, represented an obvious target. Apart from its wealth, Hong Kong had been one of the main supply routes to Nationalist forces. As in Singapore, the Japanese community had provided detailed information on its defences and weaknesses to Tokyo. Plans for its capture had been considered for the previous two years. A fifth column, largely based on heavily bribed Triad gangs, had also been prepared.

The British community, after so many years of asphyxiating supremacy, had no idea whether the Hong Kong Chinese, the refugees from Kwangtung province to the north, the Indians or even the Eurasians were likely to stay loyal. As a result they did little to inform them of the situation, and shrank from arming them to resist the Japanese. Instead, they decided to rely on the 12,000 British and Dominion troops and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, which was almost entirely European. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists offered help in defending Hong Kong, but the British were extremely reluctant to accept it. They knew that Chiang wanted to regain the colony for China. Paradoxically, British officers were to enjoy much closer relations with Chinese Communist partisans, and later provided arms and explosives to them, a move which appalled the Nationalists. Both the Communists and the Nationalists suspected that the British would prefer to lose Hong Kong to the Japanese than to the Chinese.

Churchill had no illusions from a purely military point of view. If the Japanese invaded, he believed, there was ‘
not the slightest chance
of holding Hong Kong or relieving it’. But pressure from the Americans persuaded him to reinforce the colony in a show of solidarity with the equally threatened Philippines. On 15 November, 2,000 Canadian soldiers had arrived to augment the garrison. Although inexperienced, they could foresee the fate in store for them should the Japanese army attack. They were not convinced by the Allied plan that the colony should be defended for up to ninety days to provide time for the US Navy at Pearl Harbor to come to their aid.

On 8 December, just as Japanese forces moved in to occupy Shanghai, Japanese aircraft in a strike on Kai Tak airfield wiped out the colony’s five aircraft. A division of Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi’s
23rd Army
crossed the Sham Chun River which marked the border of the New Territories. The British commander Major General C. M. Maltby and his men were caught off balance. Apart from blowing up a few bridges, his forces withdrew rapidly to what was called the Gin-Drinkers’ Line of defence across the isthmus of the New Territories. The lightly equipped and camouflaged Japanese moved silently and rapidly across country on
their rubber-soled shoes, while the defenders clumped around in the rocky hills in metal-studded ammunition boots and full battle-order. Triad members and supporters of the Chinese puppet leader on the mainland, Wang Ching-wei, guided Japanese troops round behind the defensive line. Maltby had deployed only a quarter of his force in the New Territories. The majority were held back on Hong Kong Island, ready to face an attack from the sea which never came.

The Chinese population in Hong Kong felt that this was not their war. The food rationing and air-raid shelters organized by the colonial authorities proved totally insufficient for them. Those employed as auxiliary drivers slipped away, abandoning their vehicles. Chinese police and air-raid precaution personnel simply discarded their uniforms and went home. Staff in hotels and servants in private houses also disappeared. Fifth columnists stirred up trouble in the refugee camps filled with those fleeing the war in China, by stealing all the rice. Soon riots and looting began, led by Triad gangs. Somebody raised a large Japanese flag over the tall Peninsula Hotel near the Kowloon waterfront. This caused panic among some Canadian soldiers, who thought they had been outflanked. At midday on 11 December, General Maltby felt that he had no choice but to pull all his troops back across the harbour to Hong Kong Island. This produced chaos as crowds tried to storm the departing boats.

News of the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
confirmed that there was no hope of relief from a Royal Navy task force. The island itself was also in a state of ferment after the relentless artillery bombardment and bombing by Japanese aircraft. Sabotage by fifth columnists increased the hysteria. The British police rounded up Japanese on the island and arrested saboteurs, of whom a number were shot out of hand. The crisis forced the British to approach Chiang Kai-shek’s representative in Hong Kong, the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak. His Nationalist network of paid vigilantes was called upon to help restore some sort of order and combat the Triads, who were plotting to massacre the Europeans.

The most effective method was bribery. Triad leaders agreed to a meeting in the Cecil Hotel. Their demands were outrageous, but a deal was struck. Admiral Chan Chak’s vigilantes, operating under the name of the Loyal and Righteous Charitable Association, soon grew to 15,000 strong, of whom 1,000 were attached to the Special Branch. An underground war was then waged against Wang Ching-wei’s partisans. Most of those captured were executed in back alleys. The British became rather fond of the piratical Chinese admiral who had saved the situation, and they finally agreed to seek help from the Nationalist armies.

With rumours of relief and order virtually restored, morale on the besieged island rose. But Maltby, uncertain where to concentrate his
troops to repel a landing, failed to strengthen his forces on the north-east corner of the island. A group of four Japanese swam across at night to reconnoitre this stretch; and on the following night of 18 December 7,500 troops crossed, using every small craft they could find. The 38th Division, once established, did not try to push round the coast towards Victoria, as Maltby expected. Instead they forced their way across the hilly interior, pushing back the two Canadian battalions, to split the island in two. Soon both Stanley and Victoria were without electricity or water, and much of the Chinese population was starving.

Already the governor, Sir Mark Young, had been persuaded by General Maltby that there was no hope of holding out. Young sent a signal to London on 21 December, requesting permission to negotiate with the Japanese commander. Churchill replied via the Admiralty that ‘
There must be no thought
of surrender. Every part of the Island must be fought over and the enemy resisted with the utmost stubbornness. Every day that you are able to maintain your resistance you help the Allied cause all over the world.’ Young, apparently dismayed to think of himself as ‘
the first man to surrender
a British colony since Cornwallis at Yorktown’, agreed to fight on.

Despite some brave stands, the morale of the doomed defenders was collapsing. Indian troops, especially the Rajputs who had suffered heavy casualties, were in a very bad state. Their morale had also been sapped by constant Japanese propaganda urging them to defect, with the implication that the defeat of the British Empire would bring freedom to India. The Sikh police had deserted almost to a man. Their resentment of the British was fuelled by memories of the Amritsar massacre in 1919.

With fires raging and with water supplies cut, which had also created a major sanitation problem, the British community, especially the wives, started to put pressure on Maltby and the governor to end the fighting. Young remained obstinate, but on the afternoon of Christmas Day, after the Japanese had intensified their bombardment, Maltby insisted that resistance was no longer possible. That evening the two men were taken across the harbour in a motorboat by Japanese officers to surrender to General Sakai by candle-light in the Peninsula Hotel. Admiral Chan Chak, with several British officers, escaped in motor torpedo boats that night to join up with Nationalist forces on the mainland.

Over the next twenty-four hours, the Triads looted at will, especially the British houses on the Peak. Despite General Sakai’s orders to his troops to treat their prisoners well, the heavy fighting on the island had enraged them. In a number of cases medical staff and wounded were bayoneted, hanged or decapitated. There were, however, relatively few cases of rape of European women, and the offenders were severely punished, which made a surprising contrast to the terrifying performance of the Imperial
Japanese Army in the war on the mainland. In fact, Europeans were generally treated with some respect, as if to prove that the Japanese were just as civilized. But then, in a perverse contradiction of Japanese propaganda, which claimed that they were undertaking a war to liberate Asia from the whites, officers made little effort to restrain their men from
raping Hong Kong Chinese women. More than 10,000
are estimated to have been gang-raped and several hundred civilians were killed during the ‘holiday’ after the battle.

General Yamashita’s army, successfully established on the Malay Peninsula, although inferior in numbers, enjoyed the support of an armoured division and air superiority. The Indian troops, most of whom had never seen a tank before, were overawed. They were also spooked by the jungle and the eerie gloom of the rubber plantations. But the most effective Japanese tactic was to advance down the eastern and western coast roads, led by their tanks, and on reaching a roadblock to outflank the defenders with infantry skirting round them through paddy fields or jungle. The speed of the Japanese advance was greatly increased by bicycle troops, who often overtook the retreating defenders.

Advancing down both the west and the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, Yamashita’s battle-hardened troops pushed back the mixture of British, Indian, Australian and Malay units towards the southern tip of Johore. In a number of actions, certain units fought well and inflicted heavy casualties. But the incessant retreats were both utterly exhausting and demoralizing against Japanese tanks and constant strafing by Zero fighters.

General Percival still refused to establish a defence line in Johore because he thought it would be bad for morale. This lack of prepared positions was disastrous for the defence of Singapore. Even so, the Australian 8th Division in particular managed to hold the Japanese Imperial Guards Division and throw it off balance with ambushes.

A force of Hurricanes had also arrived to strengthen Singapore’s defences, but they proved inferior to the Zero. After two weeks of fighting in Johore, the remnants of the Allied forces were pulled back to Singapore island. The causeway across the Johore Strait was then blown up on 31 January 1942, just after the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders crossed, bagpipes playing. The Japanese are said to have decapitated 200 Australian and Indian soldiers who had been left behind, too badly wounded to move.

Raffles Hotel continued to offer dinner dances on most nights, with the idea that business as usual would keep up morale. But to officers back from fighting down the Malay Peninsula it seemed more like the band
playing on board the
Titanic
. Under relentless Japanese bombing, much of the city lay in ruins. Many European families had begun to leave, either by flying-boat to Java, or to Ceylon on the returning troopships which had just delivered reinforcements. Their fathers and husbands had mostly enrolled in volunteer units. Some women bravely stayed on as nurses despite fears for their fate when the Japanese conquered the city.

The inherent weakness of Singapore island along the Johore Strait was made worse by Percival’s conviction that the Japanese would attack the north-east of the island. This derived from his strange belief that the naval base, which had already been destroyed, was the key element to be defended. He ignored instructions from General Wavell, now the Allied commander-in-chief in the region, to strengthen the north-west part of the island which, with its mangrove swamps and creeks, was the most difficult sector to defend.

The Australian 8th Division, which was given this sector, immediately saw the danger. It lacked clear fields of fire as well as mines and barbed wire, because the bulk had been allocated for the north-eastern side. Its battalions had been reinforced with fresh troops who had just arrived, but most of them hardly knew how to handle a rifle. General Gordon Bennett, although aware of Percival’s fundamental mistake, said little and simply retired to his headquarters.

On 7 February, Japanese artillery opened fire for the first time on Singapore, which lay under a huge pall of black smoke from the naval base’s oil dump bombed the night before. The next day, the bombardment intensified dramatically on the north-east flank as a diversion. This convinced Percival even more that this was where the attack would come.

Yamashita observed events from a tower of the palace belonging to the Sultan of Johore overlooking the narrow strait. He had decided to use up the last of his artillery ammunition just before his troops crossed in boats and barges that night to the mangrove swamps on Singapore’s north-west shore. Vickers machine guns inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers, but the 3,000 Australians holding the sector were rapidly overrun by Yamashita’s sixteen battalions, who surged on inland. The massive Japanese bombardment had cut all the field telephone lines, so the artillery in support took some time to react, and 8th Division headquarters had little idea what was going on. Even the Very lights shot into the sky by the Australian front line remained unseen.