Battle Story by Chris Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

very little of any value had been done to prepare Singapore for a siege. Claims that Singapore was an ‘impregnable fortress’ bore no relation to reality. There were a number of defensive installations dating from the construction of the Singapore naval base. A dozen batteries had been erected and equipped with 6in or 9.2in guns, but they had all been located on the southern coast of the island, on the assumption that any threat to Singapore would come from the sea, not overland from Malaya. By good fortune it transpired that most of the guns would be able to fire to the north, but there was a severe shortage of suitable ammunition. The majority of the supply available consisted of armour-piercing shells that would be effective against ships; there was very few of the high-explosive shells required to break up attacks on land.

    20. Pre-war concrete emplacement for a 9.2in gun. (Author’s collection)
    In the last weeks of the campaign on the mainland some effort was made to provide defences on the northern shore, but little progress was made. It was difficult to procure labour since the civil authorities would not allow Percival to pay an adequate wage. An attempt was made to keep the preparations secret from the community for fear that there would be a decline in morale, though it was obviously impractical to maintain security with so many people working on defences. Such work as was undertaken was increasingly at risk from Japanese air attacks. When the bombers came into view, the labourers would scatter and it was very difficult to persuade them to go back to work if there was not going to be any friendly air cover. A number of concrete machine-gun positions had been built in the 1930s and a few more once the campaign started, but they were few in number and far too widely scattered.
    Much more could have been done to protect the island; mines and barbed wire were available in the sense that there were extensive stocks of both, but poor record keeping meant that no one knew where they were stored and a general lack of urgency meant that no one tried very hard to find them. In the final days before the battle there was a little more urgency, but some of the arrangements and propositions smacked of fantasy. There were not enough searchlights to cover all the likely landing areas and there were plans to use car headlights. Providing power for headlights other than by leaving them mounted on cars with the engines running would obviously be a challenge, but the illumination would have been marginal anyway.
    The civil defence arrangements were equally poor. During the first air raid on the city all the lights were left on because no-one knew how to swtich them off, aircraft were not scrambled for fear of friendly fire and there was a general lack of night-fighter training. There was very little in the way of an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) system and very few shelters. The latter was, admittedly, something of a challenge given the very low water table: the floors of even relatively shallow slit trenches tended to become a soggy quagmire in no time at all.
    The appointment of a resident minister to ensure all was being done that could be done did not help. Sir Alfred ‘Duff’ Cooper arrived in 1941 but found he was obstructed at every turn by the governor, Sir Shenton Thomas. Cooper probably did not have the relevant skills or experience to make a great impression on the situation, and he certainly did not have the powers to do so. Although he did manage to secure the appointment of one person to co-ordinate all civil defence efforts in Singapore and Johore, Shenton Thomas ensured that the appointee – Brigadier Simpson – was denied the powers to do the job. Other than a desire to preserve his own authority as governor in all matters, it is impossible to see why Thomas should have been so obstructive; however, he did not get on well with Cooper and may have acted out of nothing more than resentment.
The Japanese Army
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