Thanks. That’s a very cool slice of history I had no idea about.

The guns that cannot fire towards land is just a detail in overall land combat that went to the Japanese in Malaysia despite no obvious superiority.

Colonial armies tend to get the mindset of police forces; to change that is usually very difficult.

Guess they got schooled. Prewar foolishness and it put commanders like Percival in difficult positions. That doesn’t take anything away from Kirk’s analysis though- there’s always the difference between being in a tough to manage, maybe irretrievable situation, and not doing all you can to maximize performance in that situation.

The distinction occurs all the time in everyday life, too. I’m a self-taught scholar of both creating untenable situations and then underperforming in response. They are both sobering.

So the Australians had the right to remark on this abysmal performance. “Betrayal” always seemed a bit much, though. Getting your ass handed to you through weakness and poor handling is embarrassing, but it’s not a deliberate act of betrayal. I’m sure the British would have preferred not to lose at Singapore.

The stuff the British did after the war was more hypocritical, reflective of their moralizing and gutlessness. If they had had any nerve they would have just made entry exception for the Australians and Kiwis, excluded everyone else, and defended their position by also excluding white South Africans and daring anyone to complain it wasn’t a neutral policy. As though they had such an obligation. South Africans took part disproportionately in the war too, but by the 1960s they were out of the Commonwealth.

Sure, everyone would have seen through that, but it should have been enough.

Anyway, as a Canadian I always try to have some sympathy for the Aussies.

We were culturally pulling away from the Brits, especially at the level of our WASP governing elites, already in the interwar years at a much faster clip than the Aussies were. Those leaders still disdained the US, but the US was exerting a huge pull on us, and geography, defence and economics had started to pull us that way. Our leaders hoped for a middle course, but they definitely spoke and wrote ambivalently about the british empire. Still some pro-empire rhetoric, but a lot more language about the League and about steering our own course. Usually pushing for things like the Statute of Westminster, disdaining imperial military cooperation in peacetime, and so on. Even in 1939 aiming for a low-manpower contribution to the war effort. Mackenzie King hoped the air training plan would be the bulk of our contribution although a division was equipped to go to the UK and arrived summer 1940. Only the fall of France changed the game for us.

So I can see where the Aussies would feel more alarmed than us, what with having been a good deal more loyal and a great deal more out on the geographic limb. But still, Singapore’s loss a “betrayal”? No.

The weakness of the British fleet sent east certainly reflected Eurocentric priorities, and this concern was already apparent even in prewar planning and the Australian governments had an idea it could play out this way. There was no getting around the idea that in a second European war, Britain would again be fighting for its life and probably incapable of seriously opposing Japan as well. Certainly not capable of defeating Japan.

Considering what ultimately proved necessary to defeat Japan, I’m not sure all Britain’s power in 1939 could have managed it, if Germany had stayed at peace.

Japan got lucky in all too many ways–MacArthur in the Philippines, for example? That silly bastard did so much stupid crap that it’s not even funny. Had he actually had the sense he was attributed to have, most of his supplies and ammunition wouldn’t have still been on docks in Manila when the Japanese took the place, and his defense plans for the Philippines wouldn’t have looked like some fantastic mirage, which was what they really looked like, in retrospect. That whole thing was an exercise in sycophancy and incompetence, with MacArthur keeping men like Brereton in command, after their incompetence lost them the Army Air Corps assets they’d been entrusted with. Same with Sutherland, who should have been fired, but since he was a “yes man”, he stayed on, to cost God knows how many lives.

Percival was not the man they needed in Singapore. Had someone like Slim been in command, I suspect that the Japanese would have found Malaya a much harder nut to crack. As it was, his lack of energy and command discipline over his subordinate division commanders lost the battle before it properly began.

Percival had over a month to prepare Singapore for defense; when the Japanese arrived, so little had been done that they didn’t even have enough water to last out a short siege. I honestly don’t think the man deserves the least credit for anything, aside from inadvertently giving a massive assist to the Japanese Army in their conquest of Asia.

Had they put someone like Montgomery or Slim into command, I think things would have at least had a bit more spine to them…

2. Percival perhaps that # 1 officer most qualified to command in Singapore. Had been Chief of Staff for the garrison before the war and was highly regarded.

All the prominent English and Australian leadership at Singapore seem to have given a poor performance. Then too, it was probably a case of the Japanese were good more than the British forces [including British Indian army units and Australians] were so bad.

Yeah, pretty standard slap at Arthur Percival there.

Percival got handed command at the last moment, long after anything useful could be done. The idiots who had mounted all the naval guns had bricked them in so they couldn’t be turned to face the city; the Japanese simply landed on the other side and marched in while the engineers were trying to modify the gun emplacements.

Percival’s direct orders from Churchill were to fight to the last man. Which he disobeyed, since it would only result in the deaths of both his command and the civilians he was supposed to be protecting.

Type “surrender signing Missouri” into your favorite search engine. Find one of the pictures of MacArthur signing the surrender documents.

In front, there are the Japanese. Standing on either side behind him, there are two men. One of them is Arthur Percival, who surrendered Singapore. The other is Jonathan Wainwright, who surrendered at Bataan, against Roosevelt’s direct orders.

They’d spent the war in Japanese prison camps. And the liberators found them, hosed them off, put uniforms on them, and flew them to the ceremony, where they stand behind Dugout Doug like exemplars of Death in medieval paintings.

A lot of people know how badly they had been shafted, and it took a fair amount of organization to get them the ship in time, and then to juggle the entire ceremony to put them in that photo. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill were in power by then, but Percival and Wainwright were there to show that the new bosses that the officer corps knew what had happened and didn’t like it at all.

In Taiwan there’s a train whose name can be translated as the Toughen Up Express. It came into existence shortly after the Taipei government lost out to Beijing for international recognition. The sense was the, uh, country needed to look out for itself because no one else really had their back. An overreaction, given the strong US support, but an understandable one.