Singapore...
a thriving, multicultural world city.
An Asian tiger playing a key role on the world stage.
But just below the surface of this former British colony
lies a history of foreign invasion, smouldering racial tension
and violent struggle against imperial power.
After more than 100 years of colonial rule,
in 1941, the flames of independence were lit
when Japan bombed Singapore.
It was the next morning, when I went up to my room and that's what I discovered.
The shrapnel, right in the middle of my pillow
where my head would have been.
A brutal campaign began to expel the white colonials from Asia.
The Japanese despised the Anglo-Saxon powers that had occupied most of Asia.
The propaganda at the time is all about ridding Asia of the white man.
British Empire forces were plunged into war in Southeast Asia,
fighting a determined enemy
in the unfamiliar jungles of Malaya and Singapore.
The only Commonwealth unit
to have any idea of how to fight the Japanese
was the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
They were what I call a first-class soldier -
highly trained to jungle warfare.
They played the Japs at their own game.
The invasion unleashed an explosion of social conflict
amongst the Chinese, Malay and Indian communities,
who resented British rule.
The coming of the Japanese presented
a very good opportunity for them to get independence.
It was a call to arms that echoed within the ranks of the British Army,
causing 20,000 British Indian Army soldiers
to switch sides and fight for the Japanese.
When those men at the end of the war go back to India,
they're hailed as national heroes,
because they fought against an imperial power.
Singapore, the bastion of the British Empire,
fell in just 70 days.
It was Japan's greatest victory,
and Britain's most humiliating defeat of World War II
The fall of Singapore changed the face of Southeast Asia forever
and heralded the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
In the early 20th century,
the bustling trading port of Singapore
and the fertile Malay Peninsula to its north
were the jewels in the crown of Britain's East Asian colonies.
The existence of Singapore really underlines the power of the Empire.
This is a place where, in 1820, it was a fishing village.
By 1920, it's the biggest commercial city in Asia,
it's the clearing house
for wares from all over the East heading back to Europe.
It's a massive commercial success.
To power the colonial economy,
the British brought Chinese and Indian workers
into the predominantly Malay community,
creating an undercurrent of ethnic tension.
The Chinese were doing very well,
especially with the prosperous tin mining industry,
giving employment to thousands of tin mine workers
who came from China.
The Chinese were a very large component.
By 1900, they were about 70% plus
of the population of Singapore itself.
Both Chinese and Indians,
they formed the biggest racial groups within the country,
and the Malays are never very happy about this.
They're really never very happy with what the British have done
for allowing the unrestricted entry
of especially Chinese into the country.
But the British colonial ruling class
were largely oblivious to the tensions around them
as they revelled in the prestige and privilege of empire.
We had a lovely bungalow and I was looked after by an amah.
I remember my mother was very fond of our amah.
I don't know Amah's real name.
All I know is that in the war she protected me.
I can remember there was a very big social life.
Lots of sports days, lots of events.
Housie-housie, as it was called, bingo.
Well, we look up to them and we call them the big masters,
and they call us...
er...natives.
Well, the British colonials, of course, they're a breed apart.
They think they're very superior
because they had servants to look after them.
The women did nothing during the day except just go out to chatter.
Local people weren't allowed in their clubs.
Natives had to travel in different compartments on trains.
They behaved so much as if all this was the natural order of things,
that they were brilliantly successful
in maintaining this illusion for a very, very long time.
At this time, Britain was THE superpower.
Its empire covered a quarter of the globe,
from Africa, the Middle East,
India and the Americas,
to one of its far-flung dominions, Australia,
a very British country on the fringe of an Asian world.
The importance of Britain to Australia pre-war
was critical to our identity, to our culture, to our economy.
If a war was to come to Australia,
we'd look to the mother country, Britain, to defend us.
They were our protector, they were our ally.
Britain was everything.
The 1933 census, most Australians identified themselves as British.
Britain was not the only colonial power in Southeast Asia.
The Netherlands, France and America
were also plundering the riches of the Orient.
But there was one Asian country that had its own imperialist ambitions
and saw itself in direct competition with the West - Japan.
Japan felt that it had a destiny to have an empire in Asia.
But when it looked around
and it saw all these European empires in Asia,
it thought, "Why not us?"
It saw racism, condescension of a kind that proud Japanese Imperialists
and especially proud Japanese soldiers found intolerable.
In 1931, Japan made its move.
Short of raw materials, it invaded Manchuria.
The poorly-equipped and badly-led Chinese
were no match for the modern, powerful Japanese army,
who eventually overran nearly a third of China.
In 1936, Japan moved closer to all-out war
when it signed an alliance with Nazi Germany.
They sent rising general, Tomoyuki Yamashita,
to meet with leaders of the Third Reich
to learn of the German plans for making war.
Those plans became brutally clear three years later
on 1st September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland,
and the world was plunged into war.
With the war expanding, Britain's dominions from around the world
rallied to the defence of the mother country.
Australia straight away dispatched tens of thousands of troops
to the Middle East and Europe.
And so off went a 100,000 Australian troops,
off went all of our Air Force and our Navy.
And we were left, effectively, defenceless.
Now the thinking was, if Japan were to invade,
we would rely on Britain and God help us if the British didn't come.
Standing between Australia and Japan
was the supposedly impregnable British fortress of Singapore.
During the 1930s, they'd fortified the island with 20 huge coastal guns
guarding the approaches against any Japanese seaward invasion.
The British feared that if Japan entered the war on Germany's side,
it would attack Singapore.
As a deterrent, British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
sent a multinational force of British and Indian troops
to strengthen the island's defences.
The Gordon Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
were among the first British troops to arrive.
We'd waited three weeks because of a tremendous snowstorm.
When we actually arrived, the heat was so oppressive.
We just wondered just what we were coming to.
We saw the old Singapore
with the Chinese sitting,
smoking their pipes and playing mah jong
and the smell of the villages
was something you'd never experienced before.
Well, it was a hot and sunny place.
Remarkable the way one has sun nearly every day.
People were living very normal lives, as they were used to it.
The Argylls were the next generation of the ferocious kilted soldiers
from World War I that the Germans nicknamed "Ladies from Hell".
Their Commanding Officer was Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart.
He was my CO.
They used to call him Busty. He was a thin fellow.
He didn't say much.
He was quite a hard man in many ways,
but he wanted his battalion to be the best one there was
and made this feeling go into all the men there.
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
had come from the harsh cold of the Scottish winter.
They'd no idea how to fight in the tropics.
Stewart led them deep into the steamy jungles of Malaya
on rigorous training exercises.
"In jungle warfare, it is the quality of the men,
"far more than the quality of the weapons, that counts.
"His psychological, his physical and tactical training,
"his morale, his toughness, his discipline."
You've got to learn how to move through it,
how to keep in touch with each other.
Before I went there, we'd normal weapons training
and that sort of thing had been done.
But after that, I was taken to the jungle
and we had to deal with the other problems that arise.
The jungle is neutral, but you've got to live in it.
You suddenly find your legs are covered in leeches.
How do you deal with it?
They were learning to cope
with all the jungle creatures, and the climate and the rivers.
In fact, that was probably the key to the success for the Argylls,
that they had this superb training - I think it was up to five weeks.
And there's photographs of Stewart with them
ploughing through the mud and so on as well, as they crossed creeks
and did all the things that they had to get used to -
finding snakes curled up beneath their bedding and things like this.
But they felt they could trust him, very much so,
and that was pretty important.
In September 1940, with the Battle of Britain raging,
the Japanese rolled into French Indochina,
just to the north of Malaya.
The French gave up without a fight.
The first of the colonial dominoes had fallen.
The Singapore fortress needed to be bolstered.
Australia's response was emphatic.
In February 1941, it sent the first wave of 10,000 troops
to join the British allies in Singapore.
Well, it was supposed to be secret
and there must have been 5,000 people there.
We went like first class passengers. Great way to go to war!
As far as I was concerned, it was an adventure that was too good to miss.
We were going to war,
and in wars, other people get killed but you don't.
I knew that our freedom was at stake, and I thought to myself...
"This war can't go on without an Edwards in it".
Two days into the journey, the troop convoy split.
In a symbol of Australia's now divided responsibilities
the main fleet headed for the Middle East,
while the Queen Mary peeled off towards the tropics,
taking the 8th Division to Singapore.
Well, the first thing I noticed was "No swimming. (Sharks.)"
It was on the end of the wharf, in big letters like that.
Oh, that made me feel at home!
With the war in Europe a long way away,
the mood in Singapore was relaxed.
The mix of Commonwealth troops largely kept to themselves,
but when they did meet, there was often fireworks.
"On pay day, the Jocks went to visit their usual haunt,
"only to find the Diggers in full occupation.
"Before you could say Jack Robinson, a riot started.
"What a battle!"
Boys will be boys, and we can't take this too far,
but there were a lot of brawls
between Australian and British troops
in Malaya and Singapore in 1941.
It was pretty clear
that there was a lot of rivalry and chest thumping going on.
"Afterwards, there were a number of very belligerent Jocks
"being rounded up by the Military Police and herded into the trucks,
"whilst numbers of Australians were loaded into ambulances."
The young men of the British Empire forces quickly awakened
to the delights of Singapore.
Clubs featuring exotic taxi dancers were a favourite new experience.
You paid so much, like a dollar or something,
and you got so many tickets,
and then on the back of them, funny enough,
was all the photographs of these taxi dancers.
And you'd say,
"Oh, I fancy number six. I'll go and ask her for a dance."
Very, very attractive women, always wore these long dresses.
They were split right up to the hip, almost.
They looked very, very attractive to we young Australians.
While Commonwealth troops
happily rubbed shoulders with the locals and absorbed Asian culture,
they were being fed virulent anti-Japanese propaganda,
designed to convince the troops that the Japanese were racially inferior
and would pose no real threat.
They said, "They all wear glasses, they can't see."
An intelligence officer came around and said,
"Oh, they only shoot with .25 guns, like a pea rifle."
We were told that they were short-sighted,
they wouldn't fight of a night.
That they were useless buggers,
that one Australian was worth ten Japanese.
At its most shocking, it cast the Japanese people as subhuman,
as monkeys, as baboons.
As Churchill described them, yellow dwarves.
Huh! We found out how good they were.
In May 1941, with Japan on the brink of war,
the British sent Lieutenant General Arthur Percival to Singapore,
to command the assortment of multinational Empire forces.
His appointment gave the first inkling
that Singapore was not a British priority.
Because the British were then prioritising
the campaigns in the Mediterranean and the Middle East,
they sent their best, or at least, least bad Generals there.
And Malaya was bottom of the queue for Group Command
as it was bottom of the queue for anything else.
But Percival was a pretty poor specimen.
While Percival was coming to grips
with the task of defending Malaya and Singapore,
his Japanese counterpart,
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, was in southern China
drawing up his battle plans for an invasion of the British colonies.
Contrary to British propaganda,
he was accomplished and battle-hardened.
Yamashita was probably the best Japanese General of the war.
Very tough, very experienced, very clear-sighted.
Yamashita was in a completely different class from Percival.
The idea of putting them in the ring together, I mean, it was ludicrous.
On 4th December,
British signals intelligence intercepted Japanese orders.
The Imperial Army was heading towards Northwestern Malaya.
Percival scrambled his forces at Kota Bharu.
With few British troops available,
the defence of the coastline was left to the 8th Indian Brigade.
Action front!
The Indians had fought loyally
alongside the British for generations
and were expected to hold the line.
On 6th December,
an Australian Air Force bomber flying out of Kota Bharu
spotted a large Japanese fleet steaming towards the coast.
On the 8th December 1941,
Japan entered World War II when it sent an invasion force of 25,000 men
to attack the British colony of Malaya.
5,500 went straight at the Indian troops at Kota Bharu.
MASSED BATTLECRIES
The Japanese made simultaneous landings on undefended beaches
in Thailand and advanced quickly towards the Malay border.
At Kota Bharu, the battle raged.
The 5,000-strong Indian force took the brunt of the attack.
At first, under their British officers, they put up a stubborn fight.
A second wave of Japanese swept ashore,
and the Indians were overrun.
General Yamashita had successfully landed his invasion force.
As the Japanese army was taking Kota Bharu,
their air force was en route to the American Naval Base in Hawaii.
They inflicted a crippling pre-emptive strike
on the American fleet moored in Pearl Harbour.
Three hours later,
a second wave of bombers headed for an unsuspecting Singapore.
There was no blackout and the streets were brightly lit,
allowing the Japanese pilots to easily find their targets.
I was sleeping and, about 4.30,
I suddenly woke up, because the house vibrated.
I remember looking up at the sky.
The sky was full of planes
and each one had a little light.
And what I remember most is the noise.
It was like thousands of bees flying overhead.
We heard a lot of siren warnings going on and off
and we didn't care very much about it.
I was observing there was a small, black dot,
flying very far above the sky.
The Japanese bombing raid on Singapore
delivered the alarming message to the island's citizens
that their colonial masters could not keep them safe.
It also set alarm bells ringing in Australia.
It is our privilege tonight to introduce the Prime Minister,
the Honourable, John Curtin.
In a sign the government was beginning to think independently,
Prime Minister John Curtin didn't wait for Britain
to declare war first, as was the protocol.
He broke the news to the Australian people.
'Men and women of Australia, we are at war with Japan.'
Suddenly, we had war on our doorstep and we just weren't ready for it. It shocked people.
They were forced to curtail their golfing parties,
they were forced to forego Christmas parties,
all sorts of war rationing was suddenly introduced.
We were on a war footing very quickly.
With the American fleet crippled at Pearl Harbour,
the only Allied warships in the region to take on the Japanese
were the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, in Singapore Naval Base.
But there should have been many more.
Britain had promised to send a large battle fleet from Europe
to defend Singapore and Australia if the Japanese showed aggression.
It was always naive of Australians
ever to suppose that, in the middle of a desperate struggle
in which we had our backs to the wall in Europe and the Western Hemisphere,
that there were ever going to be forces available to reinforce in Asia.
On 8th December, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales,
with four destroyers, left Singapore Harbour
to support the embattled British Empire troops in Northern Malaya.
Two days later, they were sighted by Japanese bombers.
Without air cover, this tiny fleet was fatally exposed.
I can still remember the ship bouncing
when the bombs and the torpedoes hit us.
I still remember going down a rope ten feet down and catching my foot
in one of the portholes. With that, I just sort of gave a heave
and let go and dropped the 60 foot straight into the water.
In less than three hours,
1,000 British sailors had perished.
Early next morning, Prime Minister Churchill was informed that,
for the first time in history, ships of the Royal Navy
had been sent to the bottom by the supposedly inferior Japanese.
"The full horror of the news sank in upon me.
"There were no British or American ships in the Indian Ocean
"or the Pacific.
"Over all this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme
"and we, everywhere, were weak and naked."
With the seas belonging to the Japanese,
it would be down to the British Empire Army to defend the colony.
In northern Malaya, near Grik, the Japanese moving south from Thailand
encountered an army that was eager to take them on...
the jungle-trained Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
They were men who really learned to be this band of brothers.
There was this considerable bond, which wasn't just heritage.
It was the fact that they had worked hard, trained hard
and suffered in the training, too, because it wasn't easy.
We had to attack the Japanese in front of us,
and being fresh, we pushed them back.
As I was looking, a young soldier came up to me on my side.
He wasn't one of mine.
He was from one of the other platoons.
And when he was there, a bullet went straight through his head
and he died, just like that.
Then the fullness of hatred against the Japanese came at that point,
thinking, "There is a young life snuffed off."
And the Japanese were right in my sights,
so I joined in with my pistol.
The Argylls hung on tenaciously at Grik,
but suffering heavy casualties,
and with large numbers of Japanese troops pouring across
the Thai border, they begrudgingly gave ground.
As the Japanese pushed deeper into Malaya, in village after village,
they were welcomed as liberators by indigenous Malays.
Feeling overrun by the large numbers of Chinese and Indians
brought in by the British, they saw the Japanese invasion
as their chance to regain control of their country.
To them, the coming of the Japanese presented a very good opportunity
and gave the impression that the Japanese will come
and deliver freedom from British colonialism.
Before the war, there had been a growing independence movement
among Malays, but the British had arrested and imprisoned the leaders.
They were trying to end British colonialism in Malaya,
to bring Malaya as an independent nation,
even if this means collaborating, or working, with the Japanese.
These men were now freed and, increasingly,
many local Malays began to help the Japanese.
ENGINE STARTS
To encourage their Asian neighbours
to join the fight against European colonialism, the Japanese
promoted their vision - The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Anti-British propaganda quickly spread the message.
AIRPLANE ENGINE
The Japanese were remarkably successful in persuading
Southeast Asian nations that there was a place for them,
an honoured place for them, in Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
in which they would have rights, their own governments and be treated
with a respect that was denied to them by the European powers.
As well as persuading the Malays of their common interests,
the Japanese had set up a spy network before the war.
There had been a sizeable Japanese community living in Singapore
and Malaya for years
and many had been feeding information back to their homeland.
During the weekends, the Japanese
barbers, dentists, doctors,
all would go to the countryside,
saying they were visiting the Malaysian countryside,
not knowing they were really photographing all the shortcuts.
So much so that, when they attacked our country, they were using bicycles
to bypass the British, who were waiting on the main roads.
The bicycle brigades were a vital asset of the Japanese army,
and their routes were planned long before they invaded,
using information supplied by Japanese spy networks.
With the Japanese now in Malaya, the British rooted out the spies
and dealt with them brutally.
Oh, you wouldn't believe. No matter where you turned - spies.
The Japanese planted them there.
Our hairdresser was a spy.
People go up there and have a haircut and say so and so
and, in two seconds, the Japanese knew about it.
So they shot him, on the spot. Bang.
See you later.
By 11th December, 1941,
the Japanese, advancing from Singora in Thailand,
had reached Jitra in Northern Malaya.
Here, they came face to face with a large Empire force
of mainly Indian troops.
Many of the Indians were poorly trained
and the Japanese had little regard for them.
The Japanese invaded Malaya already assuming that the Indian army
would not put up much of a fight.
They took a contemptuous attitude towards it,
on the grounds that it was a servile army, thus probably inefficient.
They broke through the Indian regiments
and there was casualties flying in all directions.
And that forced the powers-that-be to pull us back out of there
otherwise the Japs would have crossed there.
We would have been cut off in the first week.
The British-Indian army was faltering under fire.
But the unexpected potency of the Japanese soldiers
was only partly to blame.
Something was eating away at their resolve
and it had its roots in their homeland.
Seeds of anti-British dissent had been growing in India for decades,
under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Ghandi.
With the rise of the Indian Independence Movement,
Britain's hold on imperial power was becoming tenuous.
It was a pretty scary reality for the British that, for much of
the Second World War, they had to
deploy 50 battalions of infantry for internal security duties in India.
Many Indian Nationalists were on record then as saying, "Why should
"we be asked to fight for freedom,
"when that freedom is being denied to us?"
Nearly 3,000 British Indian Army soldiers surrendered at Jitra.
The Japanese, aware of the growing discontent,
believed they could persuade them to change sides
and fight against the British.
Intelligence Officer Fujiwara Iwachi targeted one of their leaders,
Captain Mohan Singh.
Mohan was a diehard anti-imperialist who wanted to drive the British
out of India as soon as possible, by whatever means available.
Fujiwara begins to share his ideas,
that maybe we can set up some kind of force,
maybe if you get the Indian troops
to move away from fighting the Japanese, and this
is where really some notion of the Indian National Army begins to form.
Singh agreed to become Commander of this new Indian National Army
and help recruit amongst his fellow Indian soldiers
from those who the Japanese were able to capture in Malaya.
Mohan Singh chose the flag of the Indian Independence Movement
for his new revolutionary army that would fight alongside the Japanese,
flying colours that would one day become the national flag of India.
At first, the Japanese gave the Indians menial duties,
carrying supplies.
The unprecedented union of the two forces did cause some confusion.
As they moved southward,
the Japanese captured British airfields and destroyed aircraft.
With total freedom in the air,
Japanese bombers headed for the island of Penang.
Penang was home to a population of mainly Chinese and Eurasians
who'd been born and bred on the island
and were fiercely loyal to the crown.
On the 11th of December, 41 Japanese bombers blasted the island,
and the British could do nothing.
Oh, terrible. Terrible.
Nearly 2,000 casualties in the first day of bombing,
and the other days that followed.
There were dead bodies, so what we could pick up we picked up.
That was really the beginning of the bombing of Penang, ruthless bombing.
After four days of constant bombing, with Japanese forces advancing,
Penang's local commanders gave the order to evacuate white women
and children, and British military personnel.
All the Europeans got out. There were all panic stricken, there's no doubt about it.
They started running and didn't stop running, I will tell you that.
Evacuation was very, very fast.
Halt!
Some local Eurasians also tried to escape.
Well, when I went to the jetty,
I think the last ferry that was going across, I was stopped.
So I went up, the ferry was half empty.
I said, can I go across? "No, no, no, you're not British.
"You can't go across."
The British very quickly made it plain that escape
was something that was reserved for white people,
that what happened to Malayan people or Chinese people or Indian people,
the British by their actions showed they simply did not care.
And this destroyed, in a matter of weeks,
centuries of instinctive respect by colonial subjects
towards the British Imperial power and so it deserved it.
As well as the locals,
the British left behind soldiers from the Straits Settlements Volunteer Forces
made up of Chinese, Indians, Malays and Eurasians.
Left in the lurch, they had no choice
but to throw off their British uniforms.
The Japanese are very ruthless.
If you are in uniform, they will shoot you.
So I took off my shirt, and even my pants.
I was only with my shorts
and we were running.
That was the end, I think, and we knew the end was coming.
On December 17th, 1941, after more than a century
of British colonial rule, Penang fell, unopposed, to the Japanese.
In their haste, the British left behind a functioning radio station.
The Japanese soon had Radio Penang back on air,
feeding propaganda to Singapore.
'Hello, Singapore. This is Radio Penang calling.
'How do you like our bombing?'
As the British withdrew through the ravaged Malayan countryside,
stunned locals tried to comprehend the sight of British Empire soldiers
on the run from an Asian army.
We saw troops moving, British troops going in the north and less than
a week later, we saw them returning the other way, going back south.
They stopped their van and asked for water to drink.
Their beards were not shaven, and then we knew something was wrong.
They looked weary, they were bloodstained, they were dirty.
They looked like warriors from another world to me,
but they were spattered with mud,
and they wanted some food.
As his army took flight, General Percival was forced
to abandon headquarters, supplies, ammunition and equipment.
He was struggling to counter the speed of the Japanese onslaught.
In just over three weeks,
General Yamashita had captured all of northern Malaya.
By the end of 1941, the battle reached Kampar,
where the Royal Artillery made a stand.
Oh, the artillery was so powerful we were evacuated to the hills.
My father used to bring some cotton wool and stuff into the ears.
The whole ground was shaking.
For four days and four nights, my God,
how many thousand rounds were fired...
We were in there as a regiment, with roughly over 24 guns there
and we were just pelting at them.
It was New Year's Eve, our colonel says, "Right boys, give them it,"
and every shell that went into the breech
of every gun had "Happy new year to you, you bastards."
And every gun fired five rounds rapid fire, open sights,
and you could just see them flying through the air like little bits of butterflies.
The Royal Artillery delayed the Japanese at Kampar for four days
before they were encircled by Japanese troops
and forced to retreat.
In Australia, news of the deteriorating situation
in Malaya was greeted with mounting concern.
With the best Australian troops fighting in Europe,
Prime Minister John Curtin felt exposed.
Curtin's a very worried man
in the summer of 1941-42, rightly,
because the Japanese don't seem to be able to be stopped.
In a move that saw Australia for the first time question
its 150-year-old ties with the mother country,
Curtin looked to America.
We feel that our fate,
and that of the United States of America are unbreakably linked.
We know that our destinies go forward hand in hand
and that we will stand or fall together.
Churchill regarded Curtin's pronouncement as gross disloyalty.
'I am deeply shocked by Curtin's insulting speech.'
Curtin's New Year's Day message
really drew a line in the sand with Britain.
He realised that the British were not going to help us, that we were
not going to receive the troops, the hoped-for resources, military
resources that would help us defend our nation at its hour of peril.
By the 7th of January 1942, the Japanese reached Slim River,
less than 300 miles from Singapore.
Here, they launched a heavy attack on the British Empire forces.
A tank column broke through the defending Indian troops.
The Argylls were the last line of defence.
I was sent forward to find out what was happening.
Suddenly, my platoon sergeant, who was in the rear,
said, "Come back at once!"
Get back!
MACHINE GUN FIRE
And I fell into this ditch with the sergeant who'd been beside me.
I said, "I'm afraid I've been hit."
And he said, "So have I."
And with that, they started shooting us like mad.
Every one missed me.
But I was absolutely pouring with blood.
I could see the blood pouring,
jets pouring out of my arm.
So I picked up some mud from the bottom of the ditch
and made a sort of poultice over it.
I think I must have passed out a bit,
but when I recovered, nobody was near me at all.
So I nipped out of the ditch and ran for the jungle, for several weeks.
Eventually, I met a group of Indian soldiers,
but the Japanese came across a paddy field and saw us there,
and there was nothing we could do.
So we all had to hold up our hands and say, "We surrender."
At battle's end, there were less than a hundred Argylls who
hadn't been killed or captured.
They acted as a rearguard for the defeated British
and Indian troops who were making their way southwards,
abandoning the capital of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.
Along with the troops, civilians fled in their thousands
towards the sanctuary of Singapore, just three days' march away.
There were a lot of refugees, Europeans,
there were Chinese, Indians.
Everybody was getting out.
People were rushing away, and we couldn't find a carriage.
And the train was starting to move, so Dad said,
"Jump onto the fender behind the engine."
So there we were, hanging on for dear life,
my father's one arm around me, my face buried in his neck,
eyes closed, praying that we wouldn't fall off.
I was scared, I was really scared.
I didn't know what was going on. It was dark.
The shadows of the trees looked pretty ghostly.
The thought in everybody's mind was that Singapore was the place to be
where you would be safe.
Ha! How wrong we were.
As the advancing Japanese army relentlessly pushed
the multinational British Empire forces back towards
Singapore, General Percival resorted to desperate measures.
Before the war, fearing the spread of Communism,
the British had rounded up
and imprisoned the leaders of the emergent Malayan Communist Party.
Many British people, and some of the rulers of Britain,
had been much more frightened of Communism
than they had been of Fascism and Nazism. It was very striking,
one of the reasons that some of the British aristocracy
were not unenthusiastic about making friends with Hitler.
Kneeling positions!
Percival now released the Communists and trained them
as guerrilla fighters.
Enemies became friends, united against a common foe.
Ground position!
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, then Britain was allied
to the Soviet Union as a result,
and because of that alliance,
you couldn't keep on imprisoning Communists.
Fire!
Communism suddenly became, at least for a season, respectful again
and we were making friends with them and letting them out of jails
all over the Empire.
By mid-January, 1942, Yamashita's army had reached the southern
Malayan state of Johor, just two days' march from Singapore.
Here, they faced Australian troops in combat for the first time.
The Australians, still believing the Japanese to be inferior,
were full of confidence
and expected to stop them in their tracks.
The Commander of the 10,000 Australian troops,
Major General Gordon Bennett,
had made his reputation in World War I
as a fearless front line soldier. But he had one weakness.
One of the skills of generalship is getting on
with your superiors and your allies,
and Gordon Bennett was absolutely incapable of working with anyone.
He was abrasive, he was abrupt, he was arrogant.
He believed he knew better than anybody else, and in the end,
he proved to be the worst choice for a very delicate
situation for Australian commanders.
At Gemas, Bennett planned a decisive first strike.
He wanted to blow up a bridge and ambush a Japanese tank column,
led by infantry on bicycles.
TROOPS SING IN JAPANESE
I don't know why the Japanese didn't twig that there was something wrong.
Any rate, they were riding down on their push bikes.
They've got push bikes by the dozen.
As his infantry trained their weapons on the bicycle brigade,
Bennett had artillery waiting for the signal
to fire on the tanks following behind.
They were so keen to get the push bikes on the bridge
that they let too many go past the front.
EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE
The bridge was blown, but the Japanese already across
cut the communication lines to the Australian artillery.
And we're incommunicado then.
We're down at 2,000 metres back, waiting to fire,
and nothing happened.
As the artillery waited for orders to fire,
the Japanese tanks reached the Australians.
Coming under heavy attack, they were forced to withdraw.
It had been another missed opportunity in a campaign
that was becoming a shambles.
Japanese engineers quickly repaired the bridge,
and the military machine kept rolling towards Singapore.
For the Australians, one of the few small victories
in the Malayan campaign unfolded on the peninsula's west coast,
near the Muar River.
On the 15th of January, the Japanese launched
an attack on 4,000 untried Indian troops Bennett had placed there.
Now, the Indians were very much all young men, untrained,
and they just went through them like butter.
When Bennett got word, he rushed 2,000 Australian
reinforcements to Muar, to back up the Indians.
In what was one of the few Japanese mistakes in the campaign,
they sent a tank column straight down the main road
towards the Australians.
Japanese tanks had proved decisive in the campaign,
because the British brought none,
thinking they would be ineffective in the jungles.
But on a bend in the road,
the tanks ran into two Australian anti-tank guns.
EXPLOSIONS
The anti-tank inflicted heavy casualties on their tanks.
They took them out, one went up in smoke,
the other one started to circle round and they got hit.
Our two guns knocked out the eight tanks,
and they immediately rushed us up to the front line.
So, when I got there, and our gun was set up,
the tanks were still on fire.
All the ammunition, the small arms ammunition that they had
started to go off.
And then the smell of hamburgers.
That was the crew of the tank being burnt.
They'd all been killed, either killed in the tank,
or some had got out of the tanks and the infantry had shot them.
War is a terrible, stinking, horrible, shocking state of affairs.
You're asked to kill a man you've never met,
and if you don't kill him, he'll kill you.
And we were in the middle of a battle,
and this was the result of the battle.
The victory was short-lived.
The Japanese sent 5,000 troops to outflank the Australians.
We realised we had been cut off.
So the order was given to withdraw,
so we withdrew down the road to a place called Parit Sulong.
Unfortunately the Japanese got there first,
and they had heavily fortified the bridge.
We are running out of supplies.
Our Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anderson,
seeing that the situation was hopeless,
ordered every man for himself.
Anderson made the painful decision to abandon
the most seriously wounded, assuming they would be cared for.
115 Australians and 35 Indians were left behind on the bridge.
The Japanese moved them from the road to behind this building.
And they were all wounded, some very badly,
and we were hoping they'd be treated humanely.
The Japanese shot or bayoneted them, poured petrol over them
and set them on fire.
My views of what they did, the Japanese, it was an act of war.
We did the same in similar situations.
Up towards Muar, the Japanese wounded there,
they were lying in a trench but they were also about to
pull out the pins of grenades
and blast the advancing troops with them.
Our men were told to kill them, shoot them.
We were shooting their wounded, and they,
when we got back to the bridge, the Japanese shot our wounded,
because what could they do with them?
In just 55 days, the Japanese Imperial Army had pushed the
British Empire forces over 600 miles southward
down the Malay peninsula.
They'd killed or captured over 20,000 Empire troops
and were within striking distance of Singapore.
On the 27th of January, 1942, Percival received a signal
from high command, permitting him to withdraw to Singapore island.
Most of the surviving units managed to scramble across the causeway
connecting the island to the mainland.
The last to cross were the Royal Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
As an act of defiance,
and inspiration to their Empire comrades,
they piped themselves across.
They struck up the pipes,
and we were going across the causeway into Singapore itself.
And the tunes that were getting played...
Highland Laddie.
# Where have you been all the day
# Highland laddie
# Bonnie laddie... #
I don't know much more.
And once these drums get up and the pipes are playing...
oh, they're something.
That kind of defiant,
in your face gesture on the part of the Argylls,
that sort of stiff upper lip,
well, that's the response to adversity that wins you empires.
And it's the kind of response to adversity that an empire at bay,
backed into a corner, would be prone to show.
Fighting spirit. We're not done yet.
Come and get us.
And so it had come.
The prized British colony of Malaya had fallen
and over one million people were bailed up in the supposedly
impregnable fortress of Singapore.
As the Japanese prepared to lay siege to the island,
the realisation dawned:
If Singapore were to fall, the British Empire
could fall with it, and South East Asia would never be the same again.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd