Descent into Hell: The fall of Singapore - Pudu and Changi - the Thai Burma railway

by Peter Brune

  On 18 June he wrote again to Gavin Long in response to a number of Wigmore’s draft chapters:

  I CAN NOW UNDERSTAND MORE THAN EVERY [sic ‘ever’] WHY ARMY HEADQUARTERS LOST MY DIARY, as it had the complete record of Brigadier Taylor’s refusal to obey orders, and the difficulties which the G.O.C. encountered with his own staff officers; the difficulties the A.I.F. encountered with Malaya Command and with the lack of knowledge of their own Army Command in Australia; the refusal of the Australian authorities to let us purchase webbing equipment which could have been obtained months ahead of what we ultimately received; the fight we had with Malaya Command to maintain our 16 ounce meat ration, and on and on and on far into the night.

  If there are no records of these matters, surely the historian would go to General Bennett or the man who was head of the administrative side for all but two or three months of the time we were in Malaya before the battle began, namely myself. Nobody has ever at any time asked me for any information whatsoever. Colonel Broadbent went back to Australia, I think on duty, once, and another time in order to have a medical test, as a result of which he actually did very little administrative work in Malaya until about October, when I was promoted to A.A. & Q.M.G. Admin. Headquarters. Up to this time I had written every administration order, bar one, in Malaya. Major Kappe, who was G.2 until Thyer took over, would know the G. side in the early days, but Colonel Rourke arrived very late and did little G. work before he arranged his own transfer to the Middle East because he was determined not to work with the G.O.C. He said so himself in the Mess the night before the General arrived at Rosebery Racecourse camp. I do not for one minute suggest all these personal grudges and childlike idiosyncrasies should be included in a war history, but the fact remains that they had a very big influence on the difficulties which the G.O.C. had to face in Malaya before the war.45

  On 3 September 1953, Kent Hughes wrote to the Minister for Defence, Sir Philip McBride:

  Dear Mr. Minister,

  This morning I had a discussion with the Official Historian concerning the War History of the Malayan Campaign. In the course of the discussion he informed me that he has been authorized to allow Lt. Gen. Gordon Bennett to have a copy of the document written by Col. Thyer on the narrative originally written by Brigadier (then Lt. Col.) Kappe. This document was roneoed and issued by the Army on ‘Restricted’ circulation. It is not marked ‘Confidential’ or ‘secret’.

  About eighteen months ago I wrote asking who had authorised the circulation of this document and asked to be informed as to who had been the recipients. It is included in a cartridge cover entitled ‘Operations of the 8th Division in Malaya’ and has all the appearance of being an official document when actually it is only one individual’s opinion. The author states this very clearly in the introduction.

  I now find that a copy has been given to the official British Historian and another copy is to be included in the official archives. I have had one copy in my safe for over a year as I considered it so inflamatory that if left lying about it would start a conflagration which would burn an untold number of reputations. If a copy is sent to General Bennett I do not have to be a thought reader to know what his reactions will be as in some respects his mind and mine work on parallel lines. The first thing that will happen will be an explosion, compared to which the H-bomb would be a Chinese cracker, and this will be followed by a chain reaction of several libel suits which I think he would have a very good chance of winning.

  My own suggestion is that there should be a conference between yourself, the Minister for the Army and myself as to what is the best course to take. If the document is to be preserved in the official archives, every person concerning whom defammatory [sic] statements are made in the document, must have an opportunity of putting his point of view and having this also included in the archives. I feel that it is absolutely outrageous that the British Official Historian should have been given an unabridged and uncensored copy of this document as it must, even if only subconsciously, affect what he will write with regard to certain persons. It is written by an officer who is a very great personal friend of mine and I have no desire whatsoever to upset that friendship, but if you ask me for a general comment it is this: ‘It is written by a permanent officer with the unfortunate usual bias against a C.M.F. officer and against C.M.F. troops. It is written by an officer who never saw any service prior to Malaya and therefore had no opportunity to compare the reactions of troops in the atmosphere of a retreat and a defeat as compared to the reactions of the same troops in a successful engagement. He admits that he is biased but it is so biased that it is definitely libellous and, furthermore, so lacking in perspective that it is literally untrue in its general comments.

  I have therefore retained the document which I obtained from the Official Historian, and have not allowed it to be forwarded to the G.O.C. Unless the Army is prepared to recall every copy it has issued and rectify the damage already done to the individuals concerned, I shall feel I have no course of action open to me but to forward the copy that I hold direct to General Bennett.46

  It would seem that Army HQ not only experienced difficulties in storing diaries, but also in keeping records of cables between Bennett and the Chief of the General Staff (Sturdee). Kent Hughes tried assiduously to find the cables, and the War Memorial tried equally hard—but also in vain. After his return to Australia in January 1946, General Rowell had ordered the destruction of papers concerning General Gordon Bennett and the campaign in Malaya, because they were ‘politically embarrassing’.47 The truth is that Army HQ would have figured very prominently in such ‘political embarrassment’.

  The pressure upon Lionel Wigmore and Gavin Long can be imagined. However, the voluminous correspondence between them and the participants shows a scholarly and open-minded persistence in balanced research and an equally fair and balanced Official History. Few, if any, of the senior officers of the 8th Division would have agreed with every stance taken by Wigmore, but there would seem to be no major criticisms of the final work. Lodge in The Fall of General Gordon Bennett has claimed that by the time the Official History was published Wigmore had developed a dislike for Bennett ‘and had little respect for him’, but that there was no foundation for an accusation that this dislike had affected his writing. He has also pointed out that ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan—amongst others—had accused Wigmore of being ‘anti-Bennett’.48

  The impression that Bennett regarded the final Official History as biased is simply not accurate. Some testimony to the final quality of Wigmore’s work—and Long’s support of him—is surely the final reaction of their most bitter initial protagonist. On 19 November 1957, Bennett wrote to Kent Hughes:

  Dear Bill,

  At last our war history is published and I have had the opportunity to glance through it. It is not recognizable with the original interpretations of the happenings in Malaya. Our protests evidently had some effect—especially the last ones. There are one or two minor inaccuracies but the story seems to be fairly accurate. We seem to have removed the ugly inferences and prejudices.49

  The controversy surrounding the fall of Singapore has never really stopped. From an Indian Army perspective, there is the issue of its large scale defection to join the ‘Indian National Army’. According to Alan Warren, 55 000 Indians were taken prisoner either on the mainland or in Singapore, and of those around 20 000 joined the INA. In the second half of 1942, a further 20 000 enlisted, leaving 15 000 as POWs. Some who joined were sent to fight in Burma, while many of the POWs were deployed as labourers across Japan’s Pacific conquests.50

  From an Australian perspective, the release by the British Public Records Office in 1993 of a secret report signed by General Wavell caused shock waves of indignation. In his book, Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress, Peter Elphick took to Wavell’s report with some relish. He cites an appendix to Wavell’s report which states that ‘for the fall of Singapore itself, the Australians are held responsible’.51 Elphick also claimed that ‘th
e shortness of the siege of Singapore was caused by desertion, desertion on a scale never before known in the annals of British history’.52

  In their book, Did Singapore Have to Fall?, Hack and Blackburn have stated that:

  The report contained the sort of retrospective opinions from survivors that one might have expected a commander to forward to his superiors. Unfortunately, much of the opinion made for uncomfortable reading in Canberra and Melbourne. In comments that appeared to reveal the dark side of the Australian self-image as individualistic diggers, who disdained pointless authority, it evoked a picture of indiscipline, desertion and even rape.53

  The point that a report might have contained such ‘retrospective opinions’ is fair, but such a report might have included the behaviour of the Indians, or indeed the British. In a letter to Gavin Long on 14 February 1954, General Gordon Bennett wrote that:

  Indian stragglers in the city numbered thousands and they looked ugly at one stage. I personally was bailed up at the point of the bayonet on the outskirts of the city by some stragglers of Gordon Highlanders . . .

  The AIF Provost appeared to be the only ones working on the straggler problems. The Indian units had none. In fact they would have needed an army of Provosts to handle their stragglers. So many Indian units stormed out of battle in panic that it seemed impossible to check them. Their own officers did not appear to attempt it.54

  In the end, any account of ‘stragglers’ or ‘deserters’ on Singapore Island during the last days before the capitulation comes down to claims and counter claims depending on which nationality of troops are being defended or criticised. The truth is that those last days were ones of confusion, despair and, in some instances, of drunkenness, of intimidation to board ships and, possibly, of rape.

  It is fascinating to observe that Elphick makes questionable mathematical calculations in an attempt to trace the whereabouts of the Australians during the last days of Singapore’s demise. His calculations make no attempt to trace the numbers or whereabouts of the substantial number of Indians and British stragglers on the island, nor the behaviour of either nationality.

  Elphick’s claim that ‘the shortness of the siege of Singapore was caused by desertion’ is a shallow argument. We have discussed the impossible task given Brigadier Taylor’s 22nd Brigade on the north-west coast of the Island; the total failure of General Simmons—the ‘Fortress Commander’—to prepare the northern coast defences and the Kranji–Jurong Line; the appalling decision not to employ the expertise of the Chief Engineer, because ‘defences were bad for morale’; and the critical decision not to create a ‘fortress’ reserve worthy of the name. To then claim, as Elphick has done, that desertions on the Island were the cause of the failure to defend it verges on the comical.

  In the end, Elphick might have chosen to analyse what percentage of the final defenders of Singapore were base personnel, untrained Indian and Australian reinforcements, or unacclimatised British troops who had just arrived. When such soldiers are deployed against experienced troops such as the Japanese; when they are manning threadbare defensive lines; when they are facing an artillery bombardment such as that experienced by the 22nd Brigade on the north-west shore; and when, throughout their time in the campaign, have been subjected to an intense enemy air superiority, the end result will be mass confusion and no small number of stragglers. And, in fairness, amongst all the talk of Singapore’s stragglers, it should be stated that no small number of trained—and untrained—soldiers of all nationalities stood and fought, and made the supreme sacrifice during those last days on the Island.

  The postwar fate of a few of our central characters are of interest.

  General Percival’s biographer has recorded the ‘icy silence’ given Percival by the British Government and the Chiefs of Staff after his repatriation. When Percival later attended Buckingham Palace to receive the CB awarded him earlier during the war, King George ‘was sensitive and understanding enough to have a private conversation with him after the ceremony . . .’.55 The ‘understanding and sensitivity’ ended there: there was no knighthood, ‘the normal reward for the services of an officer of his rank’, and despite the fact Percival had borne the title and responsibilities of a lieutenant-general, this rank was not confirmed after his return home, and he was retired with the rank of major-general and his pension paid accordingly.56

  Percival ran into more trouble when it came time to write his despatch. The RAF was sensitive as to what he had to say ‘about the way pre-war decisions that had been taken over the siting of airfields in Malaya’, and their foolhardy claim that 40 per cent casualties would be inflicted by them upon any Japanese invasion force. The Colonial Office was also sensitive to the issues of Shenton Thomas and his colonial government’s cooperation with the services and ‘its actions in the civil defence field’.57 In the end, Percival’s despatch very much anticipated his later book, The War In Malaya: he was diplomatic and essentially loyal to his subordinates and superiors.

  Although this work has identified the extent of Percival’s command failures, in a very real sense he was, as his biographer has claimed, a scapegoat for a multitude of government and individual sins which made his task of defending Malaya and Singapore nigh on impossible with the resources at his disposal. His postwar years were devoted to the welfare of his fellow POWs, as President of the Hertfordshire Red Cross, and as Colonel of his old unit, the 22nd Cheshire Regiment. Percival died on 31 January 1966, aged 79.

  Lieutenant-General Gordon Bennett remains one of the most controversial soldiers in Australian history. After a Great War career of such distinction, few would have then guessed at the controversial nature of his interwar and Second World War service. His open and forthright prewar criticisms of the Staff Corps and the Military Board, and his insistence that only citizen soldiers were suited to field commands, merely served to make him powerful enemies. As a consequence, when tensions had already existed between regular and citizen soldiers, Bennett could never have been entrusted with the command of the Australian Military Forces. Those rifts, already serious, would have turned into irreparable wartime divisions between the two.

  That said, this work has shown that the difficulties Bennett experienced in Malaya both before the outbreak of hostilities, and during the campaign, were not all of his own making. We have examined the intransigence of a number of Staff Corps officers both on his 8th Division Staff and in Australia; the difficulties Bennett experienced with regards to the implementation of his charter; the behaviour of a number of Staff Corps officers in suppressing evidence that properly belonged in the hands of the Official Historian and, in the long term, the nation’s archives; and the poisonous and vindictive manner in which Blamey sought Bennett’s demise.

  In the end, Bennett’s controversial escape from Singapore, which was surely driven equally by ambition and self-interest as it was by a sense of patriotism and the desire to serve, constituted—rightly or wrongly—the final and all-consuming end of his career. Lieutenant-General Gordon Bennett died in Dural NSW on 1 August 1962, aged 75.

  Colonel Wilfred Kent Hughes served on the Liberal Government’s front bench until 1955 when Menzies dropped him from the ministry. He was knighted in 1957 for his work as chairman of the organising committee for the Melbourne Olympic Games of 1956. He died—still as a federal member—on 31 July 1970, aged 75.

  We have recorded Captain Reg Newton’s exploits in Pudu Prison and on the Thai–Burma Railway as the CO of ‘U’ Battalion, ‘D’ Force. It will be recalled that Newton had procured a Bank of New South Wales cheque book from Sergeant John French’s (2/20th Battalion) haversack while lightening a number of his troops’ haversacks, just prior to leaving Kanchanaburi for work on the Railway. Newton had crossed out the Wahroonga Branch on each cheque and promptly labelled them all ‘Head Office Sydney’ where he (Newton) had an account. It will be also recalled that Boon Pong had agreed to hold the cheques until after the war when ‘Head Office’ Sydney would redeem them from Newton’s a
ccount. Newton would later write that:

  . . . it did not take Boon Pong long to place the cheques into his bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, in Kanchanaburi for collection on 9th September 1945 and the cheques were paid and cleared at the Bank of Wales Head Office in Sydney in February 1946.

  Newton then applied to the Australian Army to be reimbursed and was refused on the grounds that he was not authorised to operate an imprest account for local purchase.58

  After some time, Newton decided to take legal action against the government. It was not until, by chance, a Sydney journalist and former war correspondent named David McNicoll published a series of articles in the Sydney Daily Telegraph that the issue was resolved. The Red Cross paid Newton back his £770 and Captain Westbrook £120 (a fellow officer also able to sign the cheques), and the matter was closed.59

  In summing up the 8th Australian Division’s experience in Malaya and Singapore, Alan Warren has left us with a thoughtful beginning: ‘. . . their battalions dominated the known casualty list. Losses are an indication of fighting spirit; at least up to the point at which a unit disintegrates, when the Australian story at Singapore had its share of dark moments.’60

  The soldiers of the 8th Division in Malaya and Singapore were soldiers first and POWs second. Their fighting exploits at Bakri, at Gemas, and during numerous other fighting withdrawals along the Malay Peninsula—and the casualties they took—bear ample testament to their prowess as soldiers. The Australians were well placed to succeed in their early battles, as they had been well trained in Australia before their arrival and had embarked on a comprehensive training program in Malaya before the outbreak of hostilities.

  After its heavy casualties in Malaya, the division was reinforced by nearly 2000 poorly trained soldiers. During the Japanese landings on Singapore’s north-west coast, the Australian effort literally disintegrated during the confused and bloody fighting against an enemy easily able to infiltrate its woefully thin and exposed perimeter, which caused—along with other units on the Island—the destruction of many of its soldiers’ morale. While the campaign was over in 70 days, the remainder of the war constituted a very different fight. The rules changed, and the heroes of the campaign were not necessarily the heroes in captivity. A very different form of bravery was required for a very different fight, and, in the end, despite the hardships and the despicable cruelty and the unrelenting labour, that war was won.