Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo ‘control group’ changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.

Before the battlecruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: ‘Brussels ball once again.’ Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: ‘We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes…I know the old ship will give a good account of itself…Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried…not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship – she is much too lucky.’ Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: ‘Every man waved and put his thumb up to me…as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton…I saw the spirit which wins wars.’ Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: ‘RAF – Rare As Fucking Fairies!’

In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1/14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying anti-tank guns had no time to unlimber. ‘Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,’ wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. ‘The din was terrific…almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover…within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks…passed me…They had crashed right through our forward companies…I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.’

The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: thirty of its men were killed in their first action, while only two hundred escaped with their weapons, leaving most to be captured. An officer recorded ‘scenes of indescribable confusion, with small leaderless parties of Indian and Gurkha troops firing in every direction…no one appeared to know what was happening…their own artillery was falling short among the British troops’. Some units, notably including a battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, acquitted themselves well. But isolated stands were of little value when Japanese who met resistance repeatedly outflanked the defenders by infiltration through jungle the British had deemed impassable.

Duff Cooper, British resident minister in the Far East, wrote to Churchill about Britain’s military commander in Malaya, Arthur Percival: ‘a nice, good man…calm, clear-headed and even clever. But he cannot take a large view; it is all a field day at Aldershot to him. He knows the rules so well and follows them so closely and is always waiting for the umpire’s whistle to signal ceasefire and hopes that when the moment comes his military dispositions will be such as to receive approval.’ The British defence of Malaya was hampered by Percival’s limitations, poor communications, and the familiar institutional weakness of the British Army. Some units resorted to communication by bugle call when radio failed and field telephone lines were cut. The Japanese could exploit almost absolute command of sea and air. When Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces met stubborn resistance at Kampar in central Malaya, he simply launched a new amphibious landing to outflank the defenders. The British were confounded by bold Japanese use of tanks, against which the defenders lacked even Molotov cocktails. Yamashita’s three divisions, though heavily outnumbered, displayed an aggression and energy of which their opponents were bereft. Their commander penned a poem:

On the day the sun shines with the moon

The arrow leaves the bow

It carries my spirit towards the enemy

With me are a hundred million souls

My people of the East

On this day when the moon shines

And the sun also shines.

Churchill asserted that the Japanese army was expert in jungle warfare. Yamashita’s three divisions had indeed gained combat experience in China, but their men entered jungle for the first time when they landed in Malaya. In China, they had used horses for transport, but now bicycles were substituted – 6,000 were issued to each division, in addition to five hundred motor vehicles. In the intense heat the bikes suffered frequent punctures, and two-man repair teams attached to each company mended an average of twenty tyres a day. Infantrymen meeting resistance on roads merely sought a bypass, humping their machines across rivers and through jungle, pedalling up to twenty hours a day, carrying a sixty-pound pack behind their saddles. Even old Lt. Col. Yosuke Yokoyama, commanding an engineer regiment, rode a bicycle. Short, chunky, dripping with sweat, he followed close behind the leading infantry inspecting British demolitions and directing bridge repairs, effected by raiding local sawmills for lumber. The Japanese referred to the huge ration dumps they captured, and exploited for their own units, as ‘Churchill supplies’.

‘The Jitra line was penetrated in about fifteen hours by barely five hundred men,’ Col. Masanobu Tsuji wrote contemptuously. In that action, he reported Japanese casualties of only twenty-seven killed and eighty-three wounded. ‘The enemy retreated leaving behind as souvenirs about fifty field guns, fifty heavy machine-guns, three hundred trucks and armoured cars, and provisions for a division for three months. Over 3,000 men surrendered having thrown away their arms in panic and taken refuge in the jungle…The majority of these were Indian soldiers.’

Some such units crumbled swiftly, especially when their British officers fell, as many did. The reputation of the Indian Army suffered severely in Malaya, where the lack of motivation of many of its mercenaries was laid bare. The Japanese used ‘jitter’ tactics to formidable effect, panicking defenders into retreat and sometimes headlong flight by noisy demonstrations behind their front. The huge wartime expansion of the Indian Army had resulted in some British officers being deployed with only six months’ training in place of the usual thirty, and unable to speak Urdu, thus incapable of communicating with their men. The cultural chasm between foes was exposed when British troops surrendered. They expected the mercy customarily offered by European armies, even those of the Nazis; instead, they were stunned to see their captors killing casualties incapable of walking, often also unwounded men and civilians. The teenage daughter of a Chinese teacher who brought food to an Argyll officer in his jungle hiding place one day left a note in English for him about the Japanese: ‘They took my father and cut off his head. I will continue to feed you as long as I can.’ At an early stage, discipline collapsed in parts of Percival’s army, in a fashion evidenced by fleeing soldiers’ looting of Kuala Lumpur. Counterattacks, a vital element of any successful defence, were seldom pressed. Most Indian units were composed of young and poorly trained soldiers. Whatever else Percival’s subordinates lacked, they displayed considerable courage, reflected in a high loss rate among British officers striving by example to keep Indian troops fighting. In this, they were seldom successful: one entire Indian brigade simply melted away under attack.

Some British units performed no better: the 18th Division arrived at Singapore as a belated reinforcement, and suffered swift humiliation. One of its battalions, 6th Norfolks, lost six subalterns and a captain in its first seventy-two hours of action. The attacking force might be small, but Yamashita’s three divisions were among the best in the Japanese army; they moved fast, and losses seldom deterred them from mounting attacks. The code of bushido caused them to treat themselves as mercilessly as they did their foes. A Japanese fighter pilot crash-landing in Johore fired a pistol at curious Malays who surrounded him, then used his last bullet to shoot himself.

From the outset, fleeing British clung to the racial conventions of empire and shamelessly abandoned their native subjects. The commissioner in Penang refused to allow Malay firefighters to enter the European quarter after bombing raids, and rejected pleas to demolish some European houses to create a firebreak. When Penang island was evacuated, non-Europeans were denied access to shipping. A Chinese judge was evicted after boarding, though the fortress commander’s car was embarked. A woman refugee from the island said later that the manner of the British evacuation was ‘a thing which I am sure will never be forgotten or forgiven’. Sikh police in Singapore were assured by their British chief that he would stay with them to the end; instead, he fled. In the Cameron Highlands, departing settlers appealed to Asian members of the local defence force to stick with their units; unsurprisingly, they resigned en bloc. In Kuala Lumpur, British doctors abandoned hospital wards to the care of their Asian counterparts. A young actor with a Chinese theatre troupe told his audience in the mining centre of Ipoh: ‘The British are treating their empire as property and handling the whole thing as if it was a business transaction.’

The behaviour of British communities in Malaya and later Burma was rational enough: word had reached South-East Asia about the orgy of rape and massacre which accompanied the fall of Hong Kong at the end of December. But the spectacle of white rulers succumbing to panic mocked the myth of benign imperial paternalism. Racism and self-interest were almost absolutes: when Chinese stewards aboard the light cruiser Durban mutinied, Captain Peter Cazalet wrote ruefully, ‘We have not treated the Chinese well in peacetime…they have no real loyalty towards us and why should they have?’ He noted that one mutineer expressed a desire to join the Japanese army. An eyewitness at Singapore noticed that as civilian bombing victims were thrown into mass graves, in death as in life European and Asian bodies were segregated. The condescension of the rulers was exemplified by the reaction of Malaya’s governor when his manservant was killed by a Japanese bomb behind Government House. Shenton Thomas wrote in his diary: ‘Terribly sad about my boy. He was such a faithful soul.’ Other nations of the British Empire ‘family’ showed scant enthusiasm for receiving refugees from South-East Asia. Australia at first agreed to grant entry to just fifty Europeans and the same number of Chinese; Ceylon set an initial limit of five hundred, with priority for its own citizens. Immigration barriers were lifted only belatedly, in the face of catastrophe.

On 31 January, the causeway linking Malaya to Singapore Island was blown up. The British principal of Raffles College, hearing the explosion, asked what it signified. A young Chinese, Lee Kuan Yew, claims to have responded: ‘That is the end of the British Empire.’ For fifty-five days, the Japanese had maintained a daily average advance of twelve miles, fighting ninety-five engagements and repairing 250 bridges. They were now almost out of ammunition, and Percival’s remaining 70,000 combatants were more than double Yamashita’s strength. But the British general made the cardinal error of dispersing his strength to defend Singapore’s seventy-two miles of coastline. Morale was wretchedly low, and fell further as engineers began demolitions in the naval dockyard. Belated efforts were made to evacuate dependants to the Dutch East Indies. Over 5,000 people sailed amidst scenes of chaos, panic and sometimes violence at the dockside, as military deserters sought to force a passage. Barely 1,500 of the refugees eventually reached the safety of India or Australia. Almost every ship approaching or leaving Singapore faced an ordeal by Japanese air attack. A Northumberland Fusilier described the experience of running the gauntlet on a transport under fire: ‘It was as if you were locked inside a tin can which people were beating with sticks.’

Yamashita’s forces began landing on Singapore Island in darkness on 8 February, employing a makeshift armada of 150 boats which carried 4,000 men in the first wave, two divisions in all. The British mounted no searchlights, and their artillery scarcely troubled the assault troops. Shellfire quickly severed most phone communications in forward areas, and heavy rain left sodden defenders huddled in their trenches. The Japanese pushed rapidly forward, while demoralised Australian units fell back. As it became plain that Singapore would be lost, the commanding officer of the naval base, Rear-Admiral Jack Spooner, wrote bitterly: ‘The present state of affairs was started by the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces] who just turned tail, became a rabble, and let the Japs walk in unopposed.’

A disconsolate Maj. Gen. Gordon Bennett, commanding 8th Australian Division, told one of his officers: ‘I don’t think the men want to fight.’ He himself anyway did not, catching a plane which took him home in twelve days. And if the Australians performed poorly, so did British units, reflecting a collapse of will throughout Percival’s command. Captain Norman Thorpe, a Derbyshire Territorial serving in the Sherwood Foresters, described his curious sense of detachment from the catastrophe unfolding around him: ‘I myself only feel mildly excited and hardly feel it concerns me.’ When Thorpe led a counterattack, he found that only a handful of his men followed him forward; the little party’s advance was soon crushed. The commanding officer of an Australian unit spoke of fugitives from the forward positions who were ‘quite out of control and stated they had had enough’. The Japanese were no more merciful to those who quit than to those who resisted. Corporal Tominosuke Tsuchikane described his bewilderment at encountering enemies who hoped to save themselves by mere inertia: ‘Having lost their nerve, some soldiers were simply cowering in terror, squatting down and avoiding hand-to-hand combat in a wait-and-see position. They, too, were bayoneted or shot without mercy.’

Churchill dispatched a histrionic signal to Wavell, newly appointed Allied Supreme Commander, urging a last-ditch resistance in Singapore: ‘There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs…Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no weakness or mercy in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.’

Churchill’s message is important, in emphasising the contrast between rival combatants’ conduct of the war. He demanded from Singapore’s garrison no more and no less grit and will for sacrifice than Germans, Japanese and Russians routinely displayed, albeit under threat of draconian sanctions. Even if Malaya was lost, the prime minister sought to salvage some redeeming legend of its defenders resisting to the last. But the concept of self-immolation was beyond the bounds of Western democratic culture. On the evening of 9 February an Australian brigade commander told Percival, ‘In civil life I am a doctor. If the patient’s arm is bad I cut it off, but if the whole body goes bad then no operation can save the patient – he must die. So it is with Singapore – there is no use fighting to prolong its life.’ A small number of British, Indian and Australian soldiers displayed courage during the defence of Malaya, but this was futile amid a general collapse. Few Allied officers appealed to their men for sacrifices they knew would be denied.

At Singapore more than on any other British battlefield, a chasm was revealed between the prime minister’s heroic vision of the Empire at war and the response of its fighting men. Percival’s soldiers had lost confidence in their leaders and in themselves. If confronted face to face by Churchill, they might have told him that if he wanted Malaya staunchly defended, he should have given them competent officers, better weapons, and some of the hundreds of modern fighters idling at English airfields. They lacked any appetite for the fight to the death he wanted. There was a matching unwillingness among their superiors to use extreme measures to enforce discipline. Some Australian deserters forced their way at gunpoint aboard a refugee ship. When these men were arrested and imprisoned on Batavia, British officers wished to shoot them. Australian prime minister John Curtin signalled Wavell, insisting that any death sentence imposed on his citizens must be authorised by Canberra, as of course it would not be. Even at this dire moment of the Empire’s fortunes, a squeamishness persisted which reflected ‘civilised’ Western values, but did scant service to the Allied cause.

In Singapore, emotional British civilians queued outside veterinary surgeries to have their pets humanely destroyed. A pall of smoke from burning oil tanks hung over the city, while military police used their rifles as clubs to drive back panic-stricken men, often drunk, from the last departing ships. A subsequent British report lambasted the Australians: ‘Their conduct was bestial.’ By that stage, such remarks merely reflected a search for scapegoats. At Wavell’s last meeting with Malaya’s governor before flying out to Batavia, he said again and again, thumping his knee with his fist, ‘It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened.’ As the Japanese drove forward into the city, atrocities became commonplace. At the Alexandra hospital, a twenty-three-year-old patient hearing the Japanese approach his ward, shooting and bayoneting as they came, thought sadly, ‘I’ll never be twenty-four. Poor Mum.’ In the event, he proved one of only four survivors in the ward, because his blood-soaked body persuaded the Japanese he was dead. At the Alexandra, 320 men and one woman were killed, and many nurses raped. One group of twenty-two Australian nurses escaped from the city, only to fall into Japanese hands on a Dutch island. As they were driven into the sea to be machine-gunned, the last words of their matron Irene Drummond were recorded by the sole survivor: ‘Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’

Percival surrendered Singapore to Yamashita on 15 February. The photograph of a British officer named Major Wylde, in baggy shorts and helmet askew beside his general as they carried the Union flag to the Japanese lines, became one of the most memorable images of the war. It seemed to symbolise the bungling, blimpish ineffectuality of the men who had been entrusted with the defence of Britain’s eastern Empire. Along with Singapore, Percival signed away a significant portion of the honour of the British and Indian armies, as Churchill and his people well understood. The Japanese had gained their victory in barely seventy days, at a cost of only 3,506 dead, half of those in the battle for Singapore. Imperial forces lost around 7,500 killed, while the victors counted 138,000 prisoners, half of them Indians. One such officer, Captain Prem K. Saghal, saw his unit’s British second-in-command beheaded before his eyes and said later: ‘The fall of Singapore finally convinced me of the degeneration of the British people.’ Saghal concluded that by their conduct the imperial rulers had forfeited their claim upon the loyalty of Indians. Likewise another officer, Shahnawaz Khan, who felt he and his men ‘had been handed over like cattle by the British to the Japs’. The Japanese began immediately to recruit among POWs for their ‘Indian National Army’ to fight against the British, and achieved some success. The prestige of the Raj hinged upon the myth of its invincibility, which was now shattered.

Another prisoner, Lt. Stephen Abbott, recorded the scene as he and his companions began the long trek through Singapore to improvised prison camps: ‘The area presented a picture of appalling destruction. Overturned lorries, bicycles, prams, furniture lay in huge bomb craters, or were scattered over roads and pavements. Buildings with gaping holes displayed their pathetic interiors to the world. Naked bodies and grotesque human limbs rested where they had been flung. A repulsive stench rose in the humid atmosphere. The local population – Chinese, Malay and Indian – stood by the wreckage of their former homes in stunned misery, tiny children clinging in fear to their mothers’ clothing. From every building which remained standing in any shape or form, the red ball of the Japanese flag was hung…I stared at the Japanese soldiers in the streets as we passed. Were these the men we had been fighting, and who were now to be our masters? They were like unkempt children in their ragged uniforms, but children triumphant, and more than ready to mock their victims.’

For Singaporeans, after more than a century of colonial rule the revelation of its frailty changed everything. Lim Kean Siew, eighteen-year-old son of a Chinese notable, wrote: ‘The heavens had indeed opened for us. From a languid, lazy and lackadaisical world, we were catapulted into a world of somersaults and frenzy from which we would never recover.’ Likewise Lee Kuan Yew, who as an eighteen-year-old student at Raffles College watched the British enter captivity: ‘I saw them tramping along the road in front of my house for three solid days, an endless stream of bewildered men who did not know what had happened, why it had happened or what they were doing here in Singapore in any case.’

Savouring Japanese victory, Maj. Gen Imai, chief of staff of the Imperial Guards Division, said to captive Indian Army Maj. Gen. Billy Key: ‘We Japanese have captured Malaya and Singapore. Soon we will have Sumatra, Java and the Philippines. We do not want Australia. I think it is time for your British Empire to compromise. What else can you do?’ Key replied defiantly, ‘We can drive you back. We will eventually occupy your country. This is what we can do.’ The Japanese seemed unconvinced, because the battlefield performance of Britain’s forces in Malaya had been so pitiful. Yamashita and his officers celebrated victory with dried cuttlefish, chestnuts and wine, gifts of the Emperor, set out upon a white tablecloth.

Col. Masanobu Tsuji, one of the Japanese army’s foremost and most brutal militarists, gazed with contempt upon British and Australian prisoners, who had so easily allowed themselves to be defeated: ‘Groups of them were squatting on the road smoking, talking and shouting in rather loud voices. Strangely enough, however, there was no sign whatever of hostility in their faces. Rather was there an expression of resignation such as is shown by the losers in fierce sporting contests…The British soldiers looked like men who had finished their work by contract at a suitable salary, and were now taking a rest free from the anxiety of the battlefield.’

MP Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that Singapore’s surrender ‘has been a terrific blow to all of us. It is not only the immediate dangers…It is dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted.’ Churchill agreed. He was disgusted by the poor British showing in Malaya not merely because defeat was bitter, but because the Japanese won so much at such small cost. In a 20 December 1941 strategy paper for the Anglo-American leaderships, he had asserted: ‘It is of the utmost importance that the enemy should not acquire large gains cheaply; that he should be compelled to nourish his conquests and be kept extended – and kept burning his resources.’ British forces’ conspicuous failure to fulfil this objective was gall and wormwood to the prime minister. ‘We had cause on many previous occasions to be uneasy about the fighting qualities of our men,’ wrote Gen. Sir John Kennedy, director of military operations at the War Office. ‘They had not fought as toughly as the Germans or Russians, and now they were being outclassed by the Japanese…We were undoubtedly softer, as a nation, than any of our enemies, except the Italians…Modern civilization on the democratic model does not produce a hardy race, and our civilization…was a little further removed from the stage of barbarity than were the civilizations of Germany, Russia and Japan.’

Masanobu Tsuji, who later wrote several books celebrating the Japanese army’s achievements, was a prime mover in its Malayan atrocities. It was sometimes asserted that Yamashita’s post-war execution for war crimes was unjustified, but the general was never even indicted for the systematic massacres of Chinese which took place at Singapore under his command. Yamashita once delivered a speech in which he asserted that, while his own people were descended from gods, Europeans were descended from monkeys. British racism in South-East Asia was now eclipsed by that of the Japanese. Tokyo’s new regime was characterised by a brutality such as the evicted imperialists, whatever their shortcomings, had never displayed.

The Japanese began their treatment of Allied prisoners as they intended to continue. After the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, the invaders launched an orgy of rape and massacre which embraced nuns and nurses, and hospital patients bayoneted in their beds. Similar scenes took place on Java and Sumatra, largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, which were easily overrun after the fall of Singapore. The Japanese army in its new conquests sustained the tradition of savagery it had established in China, a perversion of virility and warrior spirit which was the more shocking for being institutionalised. Soldiers of all nations, in all wars, are sometimes guilty of atrocities. An important distinction can be made, however, between armies in which acts of barbarism represent a break with regulations and the norm, and those in which they are indulged or even incited by commanders. The Japanese were prominent among the latter.

On Java, Lt. Col. Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, an Australian surgeon, dismissed a parade of his men after they had been inspected and addressed by a certain Lt. Sumiya on 19 April:

I moved to the Nipponese officer, saluting. To my astonishment, he swung a ‘haymaker’ which hit me heavily on the jaw. I narrowly avoided being felled by moving my head back a little…Lt. Sumiya ripped out his sword and lunged at my throat with a deadly tigerish thrust. I avoided the point with a boxer’s reflexes, but the haft hit my larynx with a sickening thud and I could not temporarily breathe or speak.

The troops muttered angrily and began moving forward. The guards levelled their rifles and thrust their bayonets menacingly towards them. The scene was tense with the impending massacre. I put my left hand towards my troops, motioning ‘Don’t move!’, and then turned to the officer, gave a coldly formal bow…I stood to attention too coldly furious to flinch, whilst he swung the sword about my head, fanning my ears and bellowing loudly.

In the years that followed, Dunlop and his comrades suffered many worse beatings, and thousands died of disease and starvation. The Australian surgeon became an acknowledged hero of the terrible experience of Japanese captivity, a secular saint. The battle for Malaya might have taken a different course had its defenders foreseen the price they would pay for their ready submission to defeat.

Within days of the fall of Singapore, the Japanese struck out for the East Indies and its precious oil, their foremost strategic objective. From the Palau islands, invasion convoys sailed for Sarawak, Borneo and Java, supported by overwhelmingly powerful naval forces. The Allied defenders were weak, demoralised and ill-coordinated. In a series of dogfights over Java on 19 February, Japanese aircraft destroyed fifteen fighters. On the 27th an Allied squadron commanded by the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, composed of two heavy and three light cruisers escorted by nine destroyers, attempted to attack the amphibious convoy approaching Java, covered by two Japanese heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. The rival fleets sighted each other at 1600, and opened fire. The first exchanges did little damage, for both sides’ shooting was poor: of ninety-two Japanese torpedoes fired, only one achieved a hit, sinking a Dutch destroyer. The cruiser Exeter suffered serious damage from a shell which struck in its boiler room, and limped towards the safety of Surabaya. At 1800, the American destroyer contingent quit the squadron on its own initiative, having expended all its torpedoes.

The next encounter, after darkness fell, proved disastrous for the Allies: the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java were sunk by torpedoes, and Admiral Doorman perished with many of his sailors. Perth and Houston escaped, only to meet the main Japanese invasion fleet next night in the Sunda Strait, where both were sunk. On 1 March, Exeter and two escorting destroyers were caught and sunk attempting to make a break for Ceylon, while one Dutch and two more American destroyers were lost on passage to Australia. Ten ships and more than 2,000 men had thus vanished to the bottom in less than a week, almost eliminating the Allied naval presence in the East Indies. Dutch and residual British forces ashore kept up a desultory resistance for a week, before the Japanese secured mastery of the East Indies. No other outcome of the campaign was plausible, given the overwhelming Japanese strength deployed in the region.

2 THE ‘WHITE ROUTE’ FROM BURMA

The conquerors, emboldened by their Malayan triumph, seized the opportunity also to occupy British Burma, partly to secure its oil and natural resources, partly to close the ‘Burma Road’ to China. The first bombs fell on its capital, Rangoon, on 23 December. In a little house on Sparks Street, one of Indian railway engine-driver Casmir Rego’s sons was practising ‘Silent Night’ on his violin. Lena, his little sister, was making paperchains, while their parents were out Christmas shopping. Suddenly, the sounds of aircraft and machine-gun fire burst upon the seasonal idyll. Bombs exploded, fires broke out, wholesale panic spread.

A Burman midwife, Daw Sein, recalled later that though she had heard vaguely about a war, at first she was uncertain who was fighting who. Now, her husband burst into the kitchen and yelled: ‘Out! Quick! We must get away!’ They fled their house and were halfway to the railway station when she realised that she was half-naked. Her husband tore his own longyi in half and gave her the rent cloth to cover her breasts. Thus clad, they tumbled aboard the first departing train, for Moulmein. Packed to the doors with fugitives like themselves, after some miles it halted, then stood immobile for hours with its cargo of foetid, hungry, thirsty, desperate humanity. Finally a man walked along the track beside the coaches shouting, ‘Moulmein has been destroyed! Bombs are falling everywhere! The train isn’t going any further!’ After fevered consultation, Daw Sein and her husband set off on foot towards Mandalay, far to the north.

In the days that followed, as air raids continued, food distribution broke down. Many Rangoon inhabitants became scavengers, breaking into abandoned homes in search of anything edible. After one raid, to the horror of the Rego family their youngest son Patrick vanished. As his brothers scoured the streets for him, they came upon a van laden with corpses and severed limbs. They glimpsed a woman who cried out from under the heap of bodies, ‘I’m not dead! Please take me out!’ Then more dead were thrown on top of her, and the van was driven away. Patrick reappeared unharmed, but the children never forgot the woman trapped among corpses.

Colonial mastery crumbled as swiftly and ignominiously in Burma as in Malaya. A host of Indian fugitives took to the jungle or set out westwards, including the low-caste ‘sweepers’ who emptied their rulers’ ‘thunderboxes’ and cleaned the streets. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, the governor, reflected ruefully on the revelation that such people were indispensable to sahibs’ lives: ‘Life begins with the sweeper. That lowest of all human beings, who holds in his hands the difference between health and disease, cleanliness and filth.’ The civilian administration rapidly collapsed, and so too did the defence: through February and March, the Japanese swept across the country. When soldier Robert Morris of the 7th Hussars landed at Rangoon, he found chaos: ‘All we saw were blazing fires and oil dumps set alight. Mounds of equipment such as aircraft marked “Lease-Lend to China from USA” lay in crates awaiting assembly. The number of lorries lined up ready for shipment to China amazed us. The port had been deserted and ransacked.’

Dorman-Smith was yet another poor specimen of proconsulship. He professed himself baffled as to why, after a century of British rule, there was no Burmese loyalty to the Empire such as appeared to exist ‘among other subject nations’. Civil servant John Clague provided an easy answer: ‘We Europeans lived in a world where very often the people hardly counted in our human or intimate thoughts. No Burman belonged to the Moulmein Gymkhana. No Burman came to dinner and breakfast.’ Now, orders were issued that no Burmese or Indian should be accommodated on refugee transports.

Far East C-in-C Sir Robert Brooke-Popham matched Dorman-Smith’s gloom. He reported, accurately enough, that many local people openly favoured a Japanese victory: ‘It is rather disheartening, after all the years we have been in Burma and the apparent progress that has taken place under our rule, to find that the majority of the population want to be rid of us…I can only suggest the three things that are, at any rate, worthy of investigation. First a tendancy [sic] among Englishmen to regard themselves as naturally superior in every way to any coloured race, without taking steps to ensure that this is always a fact. Secondly, a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese…Thirdly, the fact that the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned with making money…than benefiting the native population.’

A Burmese could not have expressed the matter better. Two out of three national prime ministers since separation from India had been detained by the British for making advances to Tokyo, as was a group of student nationalists receiving Japanese training in preparation for collaboration. In the unlikely event that a referendum had been held in Burma, offering the population a choice of wartime allegiances, pro-Japanese sentiment would assuredly have prevailed. Maj. Gen. Sir John Smyth, newly appointed commander of 17th Indian Division deployed in the south beyond Moulmein, wrote later that the Burmese provided the invaders with eager assistance: ‘[The Japanese] not only got information of our every movement, but they got guides, rafts, ponies, elephants and all the things which we could not get for love, and only with great difficulty for money.’

Mi Mi Khaing, a twenty-five-year-old Burmese woman who had studied at Rangoon University, wrote bitterly about the fashion in which her people were thrust into the war with no pretence of popular consultation. Hers was, she said, ‘a country which had lost proud sovereignty fifty-years before, which had not yet gained a modern replacement for it, and which felt itself to be only incidentally in the path of the war monster’s appetite’. By chance Burmese prime minister U Saw was passing through the United States at the moment of Pearl Harbor. Impressions of American disarray and hysteria enhanced his contempt for the white races. Back in Burma shortly afterwards, Ultra decrypts revealed U Saw making overtures to the Japanese, which caused him to be exiled to East Africa. In such circumstances, British claims to be upholding the cause of democratic freedom by fighting in Burma seemed less than wholly convincing.

The invaders, meanwhile, were astonished by the warmth of the welcome they received, especially from Burmese youths. One of their liaison officers wrote: ‘It came to us how strong was their passion for independence.’ Burmese villagers crowded around Japanese soldiers, offering them water and saybawleit cheroots. Soldiers were bewildered to be questioned in English, the only foreign language local people spoke. The commonest question was: ‘Has Singapore fallen?’ Lt. Izumiya Tatsuro said: ‘I answered proudly, “Yes, Singapore has fallen.”’

Some of the first bombs to fall on Mandalay wrecked the colonists’ Upper Burma Club. A guest at a lunch party there said, ‘We didn’t know what hit us. One minute we were seated at table, the next the roof caved in, tables, chairs, food and ourselves were scattered all over the room.’ The attacks started fires which burned down much of the city. Bodies lay unburied for days, intensifying popular contempt for British incompetence. With a symbolism that did not go unnoticed, flowers in the colonists’ gardens began to die, because the servants who watered them had abandoned their posts. The British bosses of the Burma Corporation washed their hands of their local staff, shrugging that they could do nothing for them.