Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  Far away in Singapore the arrival of the great ships seemed no more than proper. The colony’s sense of security remained absolute. Malaya was strongly garrisoned, an assault from the sea was inconceivable, and when Churchill sent out Duff Cooper as his special representative in Singapore, the colonists much resented his presence, and called him ‘Tough Snooper’. No state of war was declared. There was no black-out. Life went on exactly as before, down to the daily tea-dance at Raffles. It accordingly came as a terrible psychological shock when in December 1941 the Japanese, the most Asian of all the Asians, who looked like monkeys, who could not see in the dark, who rode about on bicycles, who carried umbrellas, who talked in absurd high-pitched voices and were always comically bowing to one another, fell with a hideous efficiency upon the British possessions in Asia.1 It was only to be expected perhaps that Hong Kong, isolated off the Chinese mainland, should soon be captured—though two battalions of Canadian infantry were rushed there when the attack began, arriving just in time to surrender. It was inevitable no doubt that the long line of island possessions, stretching away from the East Indies towards Australia, should be overrun. But it was an almost unimaginable blow when the two great capital ships, sailing from Singapore with four destroyers to prevent Japanese landings on the Malayan coast, were both sunk by Japanese bombers in the China Sea.

  Even so, Singapore itself would surely stand. ‘I trust you’ll chase the little men off’, said the Governor of the island, Sir Shenton Thomas, when the general in command told him that the Japanese had landed in Malaya. Even as the enemy divisions stormed southwards through the Malay jungle, thirty miles a day towards the straits of Johore, life in Singapore proceeded placidly. They still had their Sunday sing-songs at the Seaview Hotel. They still played their cricket on the Padang. When a young army officer suggested to his superiors the organization of an underground resistance movement in Malaya, he was dismissed as alarmist. Even when, on January 28, 1942, General Tomoyuki Yamashita arrived with his command post on the north bank of the Johore Strait, and looked through his binoculars at the green mass of Singapore beyond, etched with the nets and stilted shelters of the fishermen, at the cranes of the naval base away to the left, at the road that led away from the causeway to the great port itself—even then the British colonists of Singapore could hardly believe what was about to happen. When it was decided to make a strong point on the Singapore Golf Course, the soldiers were told nothing could be done until the club committee had met.

  There were more than 100,000 soldiers on the island. The Malayan garrison, what was left of it, had retreated across the causeway, ineffectually blowing it up behind them, and British, Australian and Indian reinforcements had arrived by sea. But the muddle was terrible. Military clashed with civilian, commander with commander, outdated orders were scrupulously obeyed, initiatives were smothered in protocol and convention. The very word ‘siege’ was banned, in case it weakened British prestige among the Asians. General Arthur Ernest Percival, the commanding general, was a brave but uninspiring man, and the morale of the British in Singapore, falsely sustained for so long by myth and shibboleth, abruptly and disastrously collapsed. ‘The city of Singapore’, Churchill cabled, ‘must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death…. Our whole fighting reputation is at stake and the honour of the British Empire…. There must be no question or thought of surrender.’ But the battle was lost almost before it started.

  Presently the Japanese were shelling and bombing the port incessantly, while queues of women and children waited at the dockside for passage on the ships about to leave. On the night of February 8th the Japanese crossed the Johore Strait; on the 12th a note from Yamashita was dropped by air, paying tribute to ‘the honour of British warriorship’, and threatening ‘annihilating attacks’ on Singapore unless the garrison surrendered; on the evening of Sunday, February 15th, General Percival sued for peace. The convictions of two centuries were knocked topsy-turvy by this event, and Asians were never to look upon Englishmen in quite the same way again. The Royal Navy had failed; the British armies had been outclassed; white men had been seen in states of panic and humility; the legend had collapsed in pathos—or worse still, bathos, for the generals were second-rate, the songs were banal, the policies were ineffective and even the courage was less than universal.

  8

  It was not all dishonour. The British surrendered Singapore partly because they had lost the imperial touch, but partly because they did not want innocent inhabitants to be killed, and partly because, lacking now the missionary zeal or the romantic passion, they saw no point in trying to hold it. Even Churchill soon abandoned his heroic exhortations, when he realized that defending the fortress to the death would be a useless sacrifice. Though the Japanese themselves, as it happened, were almost out of ammunition, Singapore was almost out of water. Surrender was an abject dénouement indeed, to the brilliant tale of this most successful of colonies, but it was the realistic and humane course of action, and if it hastened the demise of Empire at least it saved a few thousand human lives.

  Nevertheless it was the worst reverse in the history of British arms, a disgrace and an ignominy. The surrender was signed in a drab place, the assembly plant of Ford Motors, three miles out of Singapore city on the Johore road. This was a dingy, brownish, single-storey building, fitted out in teak against woodworm, and its offices were dim-lit and glass-partitioned, and smelt slightly of india-rubber and typewriter ribbons. Here, soon after seven in the evening of February 15, 1942, the opposing generals met. Percival and his three staff officers, wan and exhausted, looked more like curates or schoolmasters than fighting soldiers: Yamashita looked bullish and aggressive in open-necked shirt and medal ribbons. Japanese war correspondents and military photographers jostled all around the table, Yamashita’s generals sat impassive behind him, the tired bloodshot eyes of the British flinched in the flare of the flash-bulbs.

  The proceedings were brief, for Yamashita simply demanded unconditioned surrender that evening. ‘All I want to know is, are our terms acceptable or not? Do you or do you not surrender unconditionally? Yes or no?’ Faintly, his head bowed, Percival agreed, and signed the document there and then, in a cramped schoolboyish hand. More than 120,000 soldiers and civilians were sent into captivity, and many ladies of the Seaview sing-song or Raffle’s tea-dances were last seen, clutching a few bundles of their possessions, trudging along the coast road towards Changi Jail, whose gates they entered, for three years of terrible imprisonment, singing a tawdry but beloved patriotic song of the day, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’.1

  9

  The next edition of Whitaker’s Almanack recorded Singapore as being ‘temporarily in hostile Japanese occupation’, and though before long the whole of the eastern Empire was taken by the Japanese, and even India was seriously threatened, still the British thought of these as ‘temporary’ setbacks. Though their war aims did not include any expansion of the Empire, they certainly did not include its abandonment either, and never for a moment were any of their territorial losses considered unredeemable. Throughout the war the Burmese Government solemnly sat in office in Simla, still listed in Whitaker’s (Governor, HE The Right Hon Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, PC, CBE, Rupees 10,000). Throughout the war colonial officials interned in Stanley Prison, Hong Kong, maintained that the British Government of Hong Kong was still in being, even if its writ ran no further than the prison walls, its officers still holding authority ‘in virtue of their appointments and their oaths and duty to His Majesty the King’. A powerful stream of propaganda was directed towards the occupied colonies, assuring their inhabitants that the British Empire would soon be returning;1 in most of them resistance movements were fostered or clandestine operations mounted. For many Britons these adventures, mostly organized by the Special Operations Executive, offered a fulfilment inadequately supplied by expeditions and colonial skirmishes before the war, and more akin to the imperial satisfactions of their grandfathers’ day.

  O
rde Wingate, for example, threw himself into adventures far more tremendous than his night patrols in Palestine, for with his Chindit guerillas he penetrated behind the enemy lines in occupied Burma for months at a time, until he was killed in an air crash in 1944. Other British forces in Burma, operating far beyond the Irrawaddy, got in touch with Aung San’s traitorous Burma Defence Army and helped to turn it against its Japanese sponsors—Aung San himself being transformed from a ‘traitor rebel leader’, as Churchill had called him, into a gallant ally. The imperial administrators of the Solomon Islands, when the Japanese landed there, took to the bush with their radio transmitters and stayed there for the rest of the war, protected by their former subjects, sending information to the American forces. In occupied Sarawak the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, dropped by parachute with two companions, mustered the inland tribes into guerilla units, and when the time came, turned himself into Officer Administering Interior, Borneo. Even within occupied Hong Kong, isolated far to the north, a resistance movement was active. When the colony capitulated some seventy-five men, mostly Australians, escaped by motor torpedo-boat from Hong Kong island to the mainland, and for the rest of the war maintained a link between the Chinese capital of Chungking and the occupied colony: they arranged escape routes, they extracted intelligence, and they were even able to smuggle drugs and radios to the prisoners at Stanley Gaol.1

  These were great adventures, terrifying and fulfilling, and conducted often with a revived panache. For one cameo of their spirit, let us imagine ourselves on an island beach off western Malaya on a summer evening in 1945, for there one of the archetypal imperial guerillas, Captain Freddy Spencer-Chapman, has an appointment with the Royal Navy. He has been in occupied Malaya for more than three years, organizing resistance teams and killing Japanese, and now he is to be withdrawn to Ceylon. The beach lies silver-sanded in the late morning, the surf rolls gently out of the bay: when Spencer-Chapman and a brother-officer appear, emerging cautiously from the thick jungle foliage behind, they look less like British soldiers than a couple of beggars—dressed in ragged Chinese clothes, heavily bearded, filthy, emaciated. They have with them a sheet of white parachute silk, attached to a wooden frame, and every quarter of an hour they hoist it above their heads for a few minutes, so that it can be seen between the headlands of the bay. Between times they swim, lie in the shade of the trees, or, propping themselves against palm trunks, search the horizon with their binoculars.

  Far away in England Spencer-Chapman is something of a celebrity, a mountaineer, an explorer, a writer, but he is really a compulsive adventurer of the neurotic kind, always seeking himself in danger and in discomfort. He was one of Watkins’ companions in Greenland, where he fathered a child by an Eskimo girl, and he has climbed in the Alps and the Himalaya, and even been to Lhasa with the British diplomatic mission. It is only now, though, in this desperate situation, three years hunted and disguised in enemy-held territory, that he has truly found himself. Now he is an authentic hero, and the ruthlessness he has so long been obliged to sublimate in exploration and alpinism has found its true outlet. In one recent fortnight he and his fighting patrol of Chinese and Britons have killed 1,000 Japanese and destroyed thirty bridges. He has kept perilous contact with the Chinese guerillas fighting the Japanese in northern Malaya; he has been captured and escaped; he has tried himself to the utmost, in exploits of astonishing courage and endurance, and stripped and scoured by the war, allowed to kill in a legal cause, he has, like many an imperialist of previous generations, found his metier.

  The afternoon draws on, and suddenly the Englishmen notice the periscope of a submarine in the bay, cautiously twirling, and swimming this way and that. As dusk falls, to a whistling, clicking and hooting of the jungle fauna, and rendezvous time approaches, they flash their red torch into the gathering darkness, first every quarter of an hour, then every five minutes, until at last, soon after nine o’clock, when the moon has set and the beach is all in darkness, they dimly see the hulk of the submarine rising from the sea. An English voice sounds out of the night. ‘How are your feet?’ is the password. ‘We are thirsty’, shouts Spencer-Chapman in reply: and so the two adventurers, pulling their packs on their backs, flounder into the warm water, swim the fifty yards to the submarine, and are hoisted up its wet and slippery flank, bumpy with barnacles, and into the conning-tower hatch.

  The engines start with a bellow, and with a spout of water HMS Statesman disappears once more into the night. The Royal Navy greets its jungly guests merrily, with whisky, for the ship’s officers are all very lively, very young, very large, very bearded, and dressed only in sarongs.1

  10

  One by one, as the war progressed, the imperial territories were repossessed. The British 14th Army, with 700,000 Indians and two African divisions, slogged its way back into Burma, finally defeating the Japanese in the greatest of all land battles against them—one of the fiercest hand-to-hand engagements was fought around the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow at Kohima in the Naga Hills.2 With a somewhat obvious symbolism the British returned to Singapore. Now it was the Japanese who awaited their conquerors, not in a gloomy factory, but outside the proud Government buildings in Empress Place; the Union Jack was the very flag beneath which Percival had marched to his surrender, among the watching crowds were thousands of emaciated soldiers released from Japanese prison camps, and when the imperial plenipotentiary arrived to accept the submission of the Japanese command, he turned out to be no less than a royal admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia and a cousin of King George VI.

  It was too late anyway. The return to the conquered territories might provide a transient satisfaction to the British, but it convinced nobody, least of all the subject inhabitants. The Empire could never be the same again. As the war proceeded the British had become progressively weaker than their gigantic allies, and more dependent upon American supplies and equipment. We see Churchill still sitting as an equal with Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, deciding the future of the world; we find Lord Wavell, Viceroy of India, deciding in 1944 that the British were ‘a very great nation, greater than the American, and would remain so’; but it was more force of habit, or hope, than political truth. There was pathos to Churchill’s insistence, after the collapse of Germany in 1945, that the American fleets in the Pacific should be joined by a British battle-fleet—so slow, so ill-equipped, so inexperienced in Pacific fighting, that it was an embarrassment to its American commanders. When it all ended the British were unmistakably junior partners in the Grand Alliance, and the grandeur of the reassembled Empire, as its Governors and District Commissioners resumed their plumes, privileges and responsibilities, was a somewhat hollow kind of consequence.

  Yet as the world generously recognized, it had been, all in all, a fine conclusion to all the struggles, honourable and iniquitous, victorious or disastrous, by which the British Empire had established its presence across the world. It had been a last glimpse of greatness for the British—through the muddle and the miseries, as Churchill said, ‘weary and worn, impoverished but undaunted, we had a moment that was sublime.’ For a year or two the British peoples everywhere, whatever their colour, shared in the triumph and the honour. Who could ever forget the dark days of 1940, the Colonial Chaplain of British Honduras asked his congregation at a victory thanksgiving service? Not, it seemed, the British Hondurans, several thousand miles though they were from the nearest bomb or shell. ‘It was with firm eyes and dry lips,’ the clergymen reminded his listeners, ‘and with a pregnant silence which surprised the world that we met those very dark days….’

  The full meaning of the Last War escaped the British at the time. They thought they were destroying a truly bestial enemy, but they were also destroying themselves and their heritage. Even their leaders, it seemed, seldom perceived this truth, and read in the story of the war only its heroic texts. Harold Macmillan, a future Prime Minister of Great Britain, was present at the victory parade in Tunis wh
ich marked the end of the campaigns in North Africa—the first in which American arms participated. The omens he read into the occasion were inspiring, but altogether false. First in the parade came the French and their colonial troops, brisk and colourful, then the Americans, young, tall and rather callow. A long pause followed, and Macmillan began to wonder if there had been a hitch in the arrangements. But no: faint, strange and magnificent over the crest of the road came the skirl of bagpipes, and then in a slow and steady pace the massed pipers of the British armies swung tremendously past the reviewing stand, followed by 14,000 bronzed and cocky British veterans of the desert war, each division led by its general. ‘These men seemed on that day’, Macmillan recorded, ‘masters of the world and heirs of the future.’

  In one sense they were. Even when the war ended, when Russian and American power was vastly greater than British, they controlled more territory than they ever had before. Not only was the whole of their Empire restored to them, not only did they share with their allies the governance of Germany, Austria and Italy, but to an unprecedented degree the Mediterranean was a British lake. It was an imperialist’s dream. The whole of the North African littoral, the whole of the Levant was held by British arms, southern Persia was occupied and even Greece was more or less a British sphere of influence. With imperial armies deployed across the world, with a Royal Navy of 3,500 fighting ships and a Royal Air Force of unparalleled prestige, in theory the British Empire was a Power as never before, and the ageing Churchill, intoxicated by the honour of it all, was determined to keep it so. Things had worked out pretty well, he told an exuberant London audience. ‘The British Commonwealth and Empire stands more united and more effectively powerful than at any time in its long romantic history.’