Descent into Hell

by Peter Brune

  The 15th Brigade emerged from the battle barely 600 strong, and the 1/Leicester alone of all its units had any carriers or mortars left. The 6th fared less badly, but had suffered serious losses in men and equipment. The 2/1st Gurkha had been reduced to one company, and other units of the 28th Brigade had suffered substantial casualties. Two commanding officers and twenty-five other officers had been killed or lost. Losses of guns, vehicles, and signalling equipment were heavy, and particularly serious in some instances owing to lack of sufficient reserves in Malaya from which to replace them. Many of the men who remained with or later rejoined the division were badly affected by their experiences and unfit for further action in the near future.32

  11

  THE DEFENCE OF GURUN

  By 13 December 1941, only five days after their landings at Singora, Patani and Kota Bharu, the Japanese had made substantial progress along all three axes of advance. It will be remembered that General Heath’s original purpose in visiting General Percival in Singapore had been to request permission for Brigadier Key and his 8th Indian Brigade—which had conducted the defence of Kota Bharu—to withdraw altogether from the State of Kelantan to the railhead at Kuala Lipis. Given that the main enemy thrust appeared to be in the west from Singora and Patani, that the three airfields which Key’s brigade had been protecting were now not in use by the RAF and, in view of events at Jitra, this request was granted on the 12th. After repulsing two heavy attacks near Machang on the 12th and 13th, Key was able to withdraw his brigade to Kuala Krai without much difficulty. All stores were evacuated by 15 December, bridges just south of that town were blown, and on the 19th the railhead was evacuated. The withdrawal also saw the despatch of the 4/19th Hyderabads to rejoin their 12th Brigade on the west coast. By 22 December Key’s movement had been completed and his 8th Brigade now occupied the area of Kuala Lipis–Jerantut.

  The operations conducted by the 8th Indian Brigade at Kota Bharu and subsequently at Machang deserve high praise. Although it had suffered casualties of 553 killed, wounded or missing, and had lost a number of vehicles, machine guns, mortars and anti-tank rifles, Key’s leadership and the efforts of his troops had preserved their formation intact and ready for further action. We now rejoin Krohcol on the Patani–Kroh Road.

  At midnight on 12 December, when General Heath had taken over command of Krohcol, General Percival had decided to reinforce the 11th Division with the 12th Indian Brigade: the 4/19th Hyderabads, the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the 5/2nd Punjab. With the Hyderabads still fighting under Brigadier Key’s command in Kelantan, and not destined to rejoin their brigade for some days, Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart’s Argylls arrived by rail at Kroh at 4.00 pm on 13 December, to be followed by the 5/2nd Punjab the day after.

  During the night 12–13 December, the Japanese continued their advance along the Patani–Kroh Road by making contact with the 5/14th Punjab. Kirby has recorded that:

  To avoid becoming too heavily engaged this battalion withdrew about noon on the 13th to Betong, from where, after destroying the road bridge, it moved to join 3/16th Punjab in the defensive position west of Kroh. This withdrawal uncovered the road running south from the village of Kroh through Grik to link with the main west coast road at Kuala Kangsar. North of Grik, it was little more than a narrow unmetalled track fit for use by light motor vehicles in dry weather.1

  During the afternoon of 13 December, General Heath ordered one company of the Argylls and some armoured cars to Grik to secure this road, while the remainder of the battalion was sent to Balang to form a defensive perimeter. It arrived at around 4.00 pm on the 14th. Command of Krohcol now passed to the 12th Brigade’s Brigadier Paris, who sent his 5/2nd Punjab to Merban Pulas to occupy and protect his left flank. Krohcol passed through the Argylls’ perimeter at 3.00 am on the 15th having blown parts of the road as they withdrew.

  After the 11th Division staged their fragmented and utterly weary withdrawal from the Jitra Line to the southern side of the River Kedah by mid-morning on 13 December, it immediately became clear to Major-General Murray-Lyon that, should the Japanese mount a concerted attack upon his troops, disaster might well result. He therefore ordered the division to continue its retirement to Gurun, which entailed a further 32-kilometre withdrawal. It was an astute decision. When the main bridge on the River Kedah was blown, Murray-Lyon was given a graphic demonstration of significant parts of his 11th Division’s mental and physical state. He would later recall that:

  When the bridge went up . . . the 1/8th Punjab which was sitting down in a palm grove about six hundred yards from the bridge rose as one man and started to run down the road in panic. Two companies of the 2/16th Punjab did the same . . . it was only by getting in my car and getting ahead of them that I managed to stop them and turn them back. In the case of the 2/16th Punjab Companies I actually had to threaten some men with my pistol before they would stop.2

  The dispirited withdrawal was staged in driving rain along a single congested road during the night of 14/15 December.

  When Murray-Lyon arrived at Gurun he was presented with a number of critical problems. The first was the now greatly reduced strength of his division. His 15th Brigade—now commanded again by Brigadier Garrett—was virtually worn out by their fighting at Jitra and numbered a mere 600: the Leicesters were reduced to about ten officers and 130 other ranks; the Jats to four officers and 187; and the 1/14th Punjabis could muster only two companies. Although the 6th Brigade had not been exposed to the same intensity of fighting at Jitra as had the 15th Brigade, it too was down on strength at Gurun. The Surreys had lost a company during the retreat and the 1/8th Punjab was reorganised into three rifle companies. The 2/16th Punjab Battalion was still missing after being shot up during their movement into a perimeter at Jitra and in the confusion of the withdrawal from it. After Garrett’s return to his 15th Brigade, Brigadier Carpendale resumed command of the 28th. Two of his battalions, the 2/2nd and 2/9th Gurkhas, had lost a little over a company between them, but the 2/1st had taken heavy casualties during its battle at Asun. Murray-Lyon’s 11th Indian Division was thus critically understrength.

  The extreme fatigue of his troops was his second problem. Severe casualties and exhaustion, followed by a testing and disjointed withdrawal, constitute a tough test for seasoned troops, but it must have been a shattering experience for the ill-trained 11th Division to arrive at Gurun to discover that there were no prepared defensive positions. General Percival, in The War in Malaya:

  Most of them had had no rest for a week and were to have none now, for the position had to be prepared for defence. As soon as war broke out, orders had been issued for a large civilian working party to be assembled to work on the Gurun position under the supervision of military officers, but no work had been done and there were no labourers there. Whether they had assembled and dispersed or never assembled at all I cannot say as reports on this point are conflicting.3

  This is an appalling piece of self-indictment. Given the fighting prowess of the 11th Indian Division, and their extreme fatigue at this time, to subject them to the immediate construction of their defences a second time within days was inexcusable. Percival had previously denied the division permission to withdraw on the grounds of the adverse effect upon the morale of the army as a whole and the civilian population. The lack of prepared positions at Jitra and Gurun was hardly good for morale for the personnel who really mattered: the 11th Division. But the most damning admission in Percival’s above quoted passage is surely that he waited for war to break out before ordering the construction of defensive positions. Further, the admission that orders for work had been issued, but no work had eventuated, constitutes nothing more than slack command. Also, Percival’s statement that the defences were to be undertaken ‘under the supervision of military officers’ is vague. The ‘military officers’ surely should have been engineers and, critically, all personnel should have been under the supervision of the Chief Engineer, Brigadier Simson, who had arrived at Singapore on 5 August
—four months before the war began. In the end, Percival must bear the ultimate responsibility for this failure. Given his twenty-month period of time as General Dobbie’s chief staff officer which ended in 1937, and Dobbie’s desire to build a defensive line in southern Johore, it is strange that Percival did not perceive the need for any form of fortifications along the Malay Peninsula. Stranger still that he employed schemes such as Matador, given the training of his Indians. And the 11th Division was about to pay for this sin a second time.

  Gurun was regarded by Percival as ‘perhaps the best natural defensive position in Malaya’.4 The village, nestled between rubber estates, lay where the Trunk Road and the railway converged. To the west of Gurun, through about one-and-a-half kilometres of rubber, stretched the formidable 1200-metre-high and thickly wooded Kedah Peak, which ran almost to the coast. Away to the east of the village, and through an extensive rubber belt containing numerous estate roads, lay the jungle-covered beginning of Malaya’s central mountain range. Chempedak Railway Station was found just north of Gurun. Here a lateral road ran to the west and just north of Kedah Peak to the coastal location of Yen. The ground to the north of the railway station consisted of rubber, rice paddy and swamp.

  Major-General Murray-Lyon deployed Brigadier Lay’s 6th Brigade where the Japanese might be expected to attack: astride the Trunk Road and railway line. The most northern part of the perimeter was around the Chempedak Railway Station and was manned by a company of the 2/16th Punjab and its HQ. The 2nd East Surreys, less one company and to the south-east of the Punjabis, occupied the roughly one-and-a-half kilometre gap between the railway and the Trunk Road. On their left flank and astride the Trunk Road were the 1/8th Punjab and one company of the Surreys. To the east of the railway Brigadier Carpendale’s 28th Brigade occupied the right flank. The 2/9th, 2/1st and 2/2nd Gurkhas occupied positions along an eastward rubber estate road. The 6th Brigade HQ was situated in a hut in the village and on the western side of the railway, while the 28th Brigade HQ was located in the village to the east of the rail. Murray-Lyon placed his worn and greatly diminished 15th Brigade just south of Gurun at around the 23-mile peg, astride the Trunk Road and railway.

  If Murray-Lyon had expected to buy some much-needed time for his exhausted troops by blowing up the bridges across the River Kedah and withdrawing virtually straight to Gurun, then a combination of very poor British demolition work and skilled repairs by the enemy engineers saw the 11th Indian Division followed up quite rapidly. By dawn on 14 December the enemy had secured heavy vehicle access across the River Kedah, and around noon Japanese patrols were in contact with the forward elements of the 11th Division at the intersection of the Chempedak–Yen and Trunk Roads. At 2.00 pm twelve Japanese trucks headed by three tanks approached the crossroads. When immediately engaged by artillery and one anti-tank gun, the Japanese column moved back with damage to the leading tank. The speedy arrival of enemy tanks came as a monumental shock, for it had been expected that the demolition of the bridges over the Kedah River would keep them out of the battle for a number of days. Clifford Kinvig, has stated that: ‘There was no natural tank obstacle at Gurun and there had been no time to construct one.’5 No troops are able to construct tank obstacles as they arrive on a battlefield with the enemy in hot pursuit—such endeavours are best undertaken with a degree of forward planning. The truth is that a number of the 11th Division units’ poor training, physical condition and morale had all conspired to reduce its slim chances of success, and these grave handicaps were dramatically compounded by an almost total lack of High Command forward planning and by unrealistic expectations.

  By 3.00 pm, within an hour of this first contact, the rearward Japanese infantry had sprung from their trucks and swept the Indians from their forward posts and caused their retirement back into the main perimeter. Kirby has recorded that within a further hour the now reinforced Japanese had ‘succeeded in penetrating the position held by the 1/8th Punjab whose morale was by this time shaky, and some retrograde movement began’.6 This is a terribly polite way of stating that the 1/8th Punjab panicked and began to ‘shoot through’ in much the same manner as they had done only hours before at the Alor Star bridge. And given their training and recent experience, who could blame them? The interesting question that might be asked is why that formation was deployed on the vital forward ground covering the Trunk Road. There may have been few alternatives, but it would seem that just about any other choice might have been a better one. Common sense suggests that a stiffer defence of the vital ground at both Jitra and Gurun might have occurred had the Surreys and Leicesters occupied such positions.

  When the 1/8th Punjab had begun its ‘withdrawal’ Brigadier Lay sent elements of the 3rd Cavalry to deal with the enemy penetration. They too were shot up and hastily withdrew. We now come to a piece of inspired leadership. Brigadier Lay hurriedly collected a group of about 50 soldiers and moved forward. Alan Warren has recorded that a lieutenant from the Surreys saw:

  The brigade Commander . . . pipe in his mouth, a cheery grin on his face, and he is waving his walking stick at us. He even has his battered old red hat on! As he goes by, he calls out to us: ‘Come along, you fellows, we’ve got to push them back, they say there’re hundreds of the blighters, all the more to kill!’7

  Lay, by his very presence and guile, directed his soldiers to ‘get around the bastards and push ’em out’.8 Although the post at the crossroads remained in enemy hands, the immediate perimeter was restored.

  During the afternoon of 14 December, General Heath visited Murray-Lyon at 11th Division HQ, about six-and-a-half kilometres south of Gurun. Kirby has recorded that Murray-Lyon ‘urged that the time had come to concentrate in order to avoid defeat in detail and explained that his troops were quite unfit for a series of dogfights at frequent intervals’.9 Two thoughts dominated his appreciation. The first was that, in essential terms, the fighting withdrawal was not working. The British were giving ground but not buying time. The enemy was, through poor demolition of key features and equally poor defences at the chosen sites, not being checked for acceptable periods of time. Further, as had occurred at Jitra and, he feared, would also happen at Gurun, a comprehensive mauling of his division would transpire. Murray-Lyon was now sensibly advocating a far more pronounced withdrawal by either road or rail or both to allow for a concentration of his force and time to prepare dispositions. His second assessment constituted the age-old commander’s fear when committed to a withdrawal along more than one axis: an enemy outflanking movement, encirclement and annihilation. He told Heath that he saw the present Japanese thrust down the Grik Road in this light.

  Heath told Murray-Lyon that he had sent the 12th Brigade to bolster the defence along the Kroh and Grik Roads, and pointed out that Kuala Kangsar—the main line of communication—should be safe for some time.

  He ordered Murray-Lyon to hold Gurun for as long as possible and then, when Kuala Kangsar was so threatened, he saw a withdrawal across the Perak River as the best option. When Heath contacted Percival that night, he told him that:

  . . . if the 11th Division was to be reconstituted, it would be wrong to fight at Gurun; the plan should be to go right back to the Perak River, the enemy’s advance being delayed by demolitions and a temporary stand on the Muda River in order to give time for Penang to be evacuated. Percival replied that III Corps was to continue to cover Penang and was not to withdraw further than the line of the Muda River without his permission.10

  When the three commanders’ perspectives are examined, the immediacy of Murray-Lyon’s dilemma—and its validity—is not hard to fathom. Heath’s response was realistic but was fortified by the anticipation of 12th Brigade being able to slow down the Japanese advance along the Kroh and Grik Roads. It also displays Heath’s ability to see the need for his III Corps to be given a chance to concentrate and, critically, to rest and construct, or at least gain, a realistic defensive position. Percival’s response was academic, in that there seems no evidence of a realistic gra
sp of 11th Division’s plight. It was fighting a first-class enemy who had displayed a masterly ability to concentrate his force, to employ tanks against few anti-tank weapons, to probe aggressively, to rapidly outflank and to maintain the initiative by keeping his line of communication intact, and moving at great speed. As a result, the 11th Indian Division was demoralised, exhausted, panic-stricken and a spent force. Another Jitra simply re-enacted at Gurun, followed by further failed demolitions, and another rushed, disorganised and exhausting flight to the next disaster, could only repeat the humiliation. And it began within hours of Murray-Lyon and Heath’s meeting.

  Brigadier Lay had planned a counterattack at around dawn on 15 December. The Japanese quite simply maintained the initiative by attacking at 1.30 am. Preceded by a concentrated mortaring of the Punjabis, they attacked straight down the Truck Road and managed to not only burst through that battalion’s right flank, but to overrun the Surreys’ depleted A Company and then Battalion HQ. The CO and five other officers were killed. But worse was to follow. Following up their success, the Japanese advance guard descended upon 6th Brigade HQ where a further slaughter took place. Fortunately, Brigadier Lay and his intelligence officer were on other business and escaped the fate of some of their colleagues. Lay then reported to Brigadier Carpendale that his HQ had been eliminated. When Brigadier Lay ran into the CO of the Leicesters on his way to report to Murray-Lyon, their short conversation aptly described the tragic chain of events at Gurun. Lay: ‘I’ve just lost my brigade.’ Lieutenant-Colonel Morrison: ‘And I, Sir, have just lost my battalion.’11

  During this mayhem, the CO of the forward Punjabis, believing that the Surreys on his right flank had been overrun, ordered a withdrawal of his battalion and the company of Surreys under his command to the west towards Yen, in the hope that his force could come around the coast and rejoin the division. With the Trunk Road and virtually the whole western side of the perimeter now in Japanese hands, it was left to Brigadier Carpendale and his 28th Brigade and elements of the 15th Brigade to attempt to hold the Japanese around Gurun.