ON FEBRUARY 15th, 1942, 55 years ago today, the Imperial Japanese, led by General Yamashita, the so called, "Tiger of Malaya" took Singapore, some 70 days after their invasion force had landed at Kota Bahru, on the north east coast of British controlled Malaya. The island colony had 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops at its disposal, but fatally, because the military, under Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, had expected a land and sea assault, they were without air cover.
The flames were still licking the wreckage of Pearl Harbour as Nipponese dive bombers hit Singapore. Yamashita's men began a relentless assault down the peninsula, many of the 18,000 troops travelling on bicycles through malarial jungle. Singapore's principal line of defence, the HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales had been blown out of the water by the time they were massing in the southern city of Johor Bahru. As Japanese soldiers filed across the Johor causeway on February 7th, a city without so much as pill boxes or barbed wire by way of civil defence, awaited them.
The Singapore of the 1930s and early 1940s is long vanished, most of the old quarters having gone before the wrecking ball to make way for today's antiseptic metropolis. But life then was lived at a relaxed pace for the 30,000 or so European residents, together with the Chinese,
Malay and Indian communities. Their Singapore was that depicted by Conrad and Somerset Maugham, a place of painted terraces and fishing junks, where old Etonians played cricket on the lawn and at Raffles Hotel, one could sip a Singapore sling beneath spinning fans.
Slow Strangulation
With Japanese forces on the brink of destroying all this, Churchill sent word that the city was to be held at all costs. Percival, mindful that the city was already half fallen and that a slow strangulation of the city could result in utter slaughter, announced that negotiations would begin for a surrender. The Japanese were stunned; they had severely stretched their resources and feared they would have to retreat within a few days. The defeat was one of the worst humiliations in British Imperial history and to emphasise this, the Japanese paraded senior British officers in the aftermath of Singapore's fall. The whole European population was herded onto the Padang, a large riverfront park, and processed for wartime internment, many men ending up in the notorious prisons at Changi and Havelock Road, from which they were later transferred to the infamous Burma railroad.
Already Despised
More than 20 years earlier in another of Britain's island dominions, the same General Percival, then just Major Percival, was commanding British troops, sent to police an ever more recalcitrant Ireland. It was the second half of 1920 and the already despised Black and Tans had been joined by the Auxiliaries, a force of about 1,500 men, raised at Churchill's suggestion, from among ex officers and under the command of Brigadier General F. P. Crozier. They acquired a reputation for brutality to equal that of the Black and Tans.
By comparison, the regular British army acted with restraint in those times, but an exception in this respect was the Essex Regiment which included Major Percival. Tom Barry, of the IRA's West Cork Brigade, who made an abortive attempt to assassinate Percival in Bandon in 1920, described him as "easily, the most viciously anti Irish of all serving British officers".
Mental Breakdown
It was Percival's men who interned and tortured two West Brigade officers, Tom Hales and Pat Harte, the latter consequently suffering a mental breakdown and ending his days in an asylum. When Hales was tortured and sent on to Pentonville prison, he managed to get an account of his interrogation back to Michael Collins. "A really good case should be made of this statement," wrote Collins to Arthur Griffith, especially as "the treatment meted out by us to Brigadier General Lucas should be contrasted with the treatment meted out by them to Brigadier General Hales."
Although the Propaganda Department made full use of this information, the men in the field thought more of revenge: Tom Barry's brigade harried the Essex Regiment at every available opportunity. Major Percival, who was said to wear a tunic of mail under his uniform, survived an IRA ambush in October, 1920, and was awarded an OBE for his troubles.
When, as Lieutenant General in February, 1942, he capitulated to the Japanese, Tom Barry was prompt in his response: he sent Percival an ironic telegram.