More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured. In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that the fall of Singapore was the ‘worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.įor Australia too, the fall of Singapore was a disaster. The Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita had achieved a remarkable feat of arms. More than 130,000 Allied troops were taken prisoner. With one million citizens trapped in the city and water supplies at critical levels British commander Lieutenant General Arthur Percival surrendered on 15 February 1942. Allied air cover had been almost completely destroyed in the opening days of the campaign and so the city was being bombed at will.ĭespite being heavily outnumbered, the Japanese moved quickly across the island. The defence of the island was poorly planned and executed.Īllied forces were spread too thin to resist the Japanese when they landed on the north-west of the island on 8 February. On 31 January Allied forces withdrew across the causeway linking Malaya and Singapore. The Japanese had fought the 700 kilometres from their northern landings to the southern tip of the peninsula in less than two months. Kuala Lumpur was taken on 11 January and Johore, capital of Malaya’s southern state, fell on 14 January. The Japanese were battle-hardened, well-organised and well-supported by air and armour the inexperienced Allied forces could offer little resistance and the Japanese moved with incredible speed south along the peninsula. The Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Malay Peninsula on 8 December 1941, landing in the north at Khota Bharu in Malaya and Pattani and Songkhla in Thailand. Japanese troops take cover behind steam engines in Johore, Malaya In February 1941, with the threat of an impending war with Japan, Australia dispatched the Eighth Division, four RAAF squadrons and eight warships to Singapore and Malaya.Īustralian pilots were some of the first to engage with the Japanese when the Imperial Army invaded Malaya on 8 December 1941. In 1936 the leader of the Labor Opposition, John Curtin, presciently stated that Japan was only likely to attack Singapore when Britain was preoccupied with a war in Europe.Īt the start of the Second World War, Australia deployed most of its forces to assist British forces in Europe and North Africa. Throughout the 1930s the Labor Party and some defence analysts opposed the scheme, saying that Australia should itself be building a larger navy rather than investing in a single base 6,000 kilometres from Sydney or Melbourne. In Australia, the conservative Nationalist Party government of Stanley Bruce latched onto the Singapore Strategy as a way to reduce military spending.
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