Dan Snow's History Hit - The Fall of Singapore: 80th Anniversary

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

The Fall of Singapore to the Japanese Army took place in the South-East Asian theatre of the Pacific War, with fighting in Singapore lasting through 8 to 15 February 1942. Nicknamed the “Gibraltar of the East,” Singapore was the foremost British military base and economic port in South-East Asia and was important to British interwar defence planning for the region. The British stronghold was captured by the Empire of Japan in what is considered one of the greatest defeats in the history of the British Army, and arguably Britain’s worst defeat in the Second World War. In the largest British surrender in history, sixty-two thousand Allied soldiers were taken prisoner, and more than half eventually died as prisoners of war.Dan tells the story, explainer style, to mark this 80 year anniversary. This episode also features archive from Dan’s interview with the late Dr Bill Frankland (19 March 1912 - 2 April 2020), a veteran of World War II who lived through a Japanese prisoner of war camp and who also made important contributions to our understanding of allergies. You can go back and listen to the full episode here.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Eighty years ago, on the 15th of February 1942, General Percival surrendered Singapore to the Japanese army. A British crown colony had fallen in Asia. Winston Churchill called it the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British military history. When he broadcast the news to the British people and the world, he said, I speak to you under the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat. Singapore has fallen. Churchill's doctor, said the the fall of Singapore stupefied the Prime

Minister. He felt it was a disgrace. It left a scar on his mind. He describes him months later, unable to dry himself after coming out of a bath, sitting in a funk, and he simply said, I cannot get over Singapore. In some ways, Churchill was right. Singapore was the largest British military disaster in history. It dwarfed, for example, the forces that surrendered at Yorktown to George Washington and the French. Whenever I'm reading about Singapore, it occurs to me that people often think that the British Empire died slowly and in a kind of organised fashion in the late 1940s, 1950s and 60s. It didn't have that moment of military collapse and defeat that you see with other imperial powers, but in a way it did. In 1941-1942 in Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, Borneo,

yes, although the British returned to these places at the end of the war, they were driven out of their colonies, catastrophically defeated, and it was a blow from which I think the British never really recovered. This podcast is broadcast on the 80th anniversary of the guns falling silent at Singapore as the British garrison entered captivity. I'm going to tell you the story. I'm going to do one of my explainer episodes telling the story, but I'm also lucky enough to play some clips from an interview I did with Dr. William Franklin. Dr. Bill Franklin, he is simply one of the best, one of the best and most remarkable people I've ever interviewed. He died of COVID, sadly, in early 2020. He was 108 years old. He survived Japanese captivity. He worked on

penicillin after the war with Fleming. He got flown to Iraq to tell Saddam Hussein to stop smoking. He published his final peer-reviewed scientific paper in 2016 at the age of 104. As you'll hear him talking you may hear the noise of my daughter who was then about five or six years old colouring at my feet dropping her pens and pencils on the floor and one of the proudest things in my house a picture of my daughter, who was then about five or six years old, colouring at my feet, dropping her pens and pencils on the floor. And one of the proudest things in my house, a picture of my daughter with Dr. Bill Franklin. You can watch the interview I filmed and recorded with him on History Hit TV. You simply follow the link in the description of this podcast. You click on that, it'll take you through, you get two weeks free. And then for a very small subscription, less than a smart cappuccino every month you get the world's best history channel

all the documentaries like one of bill franklin and you also get thousands of podcasts all without the ads as well so check out history hit tv i'm currently in the southern ocean on the way to antarctica for another series of documentaries that you'll see on History Hit TV, and check out our social channels as well for all our exciting Shackleton stuff. In the meantime, folks, this is the story of the fall of Singapore with me, and more importantly, Dr. Bill Franklin. Enjoy. Singapore is now one of the world's richest, most glittering cities, but it's a very, very recent creation. Singapore is a small island.

It's separated by a small stretch of water from the southern tip of Southeast Asia. In fact, the most southerly point of the whole of Asia. All ships have to go round Singapore to get from the South China Sea, to get from the east into the Indian Ocean and the west. It is the great artery of global shipping. Now in the early 19th century, the British needed a base in this part of the world. They needed to break the Dutch stranglehold on the area. They had a slightly rubbish base on Sumatra on the Indian Ocean coast there, but they were scouting about for a place where they could build a safe haven on this vital artery.

And a man called Sir Stamford Raffles landed on the island of Singapore in 1818 and established a trading post there. At the time, there was a small fishing village there, really nothing much bigger, of 150 Malayan Chinese people living on the island. Singapore is an island up 27 miles at its widest points of a vaguely diamond shape. To the north is the Strait of Johor. At its narrowest point to mainland Asia, 600 metres, at its widest around five. Back in the 1940s, there was a causeway at that narrowest point. The coast of Singapore is dotted with mangrove swamps and creeks. Much of the island was covered in jungle. There were reservoirs in the high ground in the centre of the island.

They would be important. 17 million gallons daily were provided for a population in 1941, about half a million people. Why does Singapore matter? Why do we hear so much about Singapore? Well, it was, as I said, an essential stop-off point on the traditional trading route between East and West. But Singapore had taken on increased importance after the First World War. Singapore represents a kind of unusual moment in British naval strategy, a moment that shows that

British naval power was finally declining after centuries of predominance. Japan was on the rise in Asia. The Royal Navy could not afford its traditional policy of keeping battle fleets in all the world's oceans, which would outnumber and prove capable of defeating any regional competitor. It simply wasn't realistic, particularly now that Germany and Italy were rearming in Europe. The Royal Navy had to focus on the European theatre. So rather than build battleships to dominate Asia, the British decided to invest in Singapore to build immovable concrete rather than battleships and aircraft carriers. The idea was you'd build this powerful

naval base, a fortress, which you could then surge ships into in the emergency. It might take up to 90 days to send a fleet to Singapore, so Singapore would have to protect itself with its big guns until the fleet could be sent out. It sounded vaguely feasible on paper. The problem was that by 1940, no big fleet was available to be sent out to Asia. There was no way around the fundamental problem, which is you either pay for lots of naval assets, aircraft carriers, battleships, submarines, to defeat your enemy, or you have to deal with the consequences. But a gigantic fortress isn't really a lasting solution to this problem. And in 1940, Britain has got its worst case scenario. Germany has

captured France, the Low Countries. The Channel ports are in German hands. Britain faces cross channel invasion. Italy then declared war on Britain as well. The Italian fleet now threatened the British grip in the Mediterranean, threatening to interrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East and the all-important artery of empire, the Suez Canal as well. So Britain was very hard-pressed. German U-boats, of course, as well, scouring the Atlantic. So the British Navy was kept busy keeping the trade routes open, keeping the country fed and supplied by keeping the submarine threat down in the Atlantic, stopping the Germans invading the home island, and also dealing with the Italians in the

Mediterranean. So big naval base in Singapore or no big naval base there were simply not the ships to send out to deal with the imperial Japanese navy in the Pacific Ocean. The fall of France had another disastrous effect on British power in Asia. Indochina was a French colony basically Vietnam today was a French colony, basically Vietnam today was a French colony, and the Vichy French government, the French government, allowed Japan to use those bases in Indochina. So Japanese forces, ground troops, were able to move into Vietnam and their air forces would be able to use bases in Vietnam, bringing them into range of Singapore itself. There was a lively debate back in the UK about Asia. How

serious was Japan about taking on the Europeans and the Americans in Asia? Well, back in December, I recorded an 80th anniversary explainer pod of Pearl Harbour, so you might want to go back and listen to that. That tells you about Japanese decision-making at this vital point of the war. But it's fair to say that in the UK, well, we think it's fair that Churchill, on the whole, was in favour of starving the east of resources. Local commanders were begging for more aircraft, trained men, tanks, armoured vehicles. On the whole, Churchill was probably more interested in North Africa and the European theatre at this point. As a result, the British in Malaya and Singapore had no tanks. They had two divisions of Indian army troops, one division of Australian troops. They did not have enough big heavy guns.

There were other forces there in Malaya and Singapore, around 90,000 men of which 20,000 were British, the others mostly Indians and Australians. These units hadn't trained together, they hadn't been in Malaya for very long, but they didn't know the jungle, they weren't used to fighting the jungle, they weren't trained jungle warfare. The Indian troops particularly were very recently recruited and very poorly trained indeed. There was very little training for anti-tank work and so these units were just not combat ready. More troops would arrive during the fighting. One British division for example had been trained for desert combat in North Africa and had changed course at sea and been sent east. Sadly, all their anti-tank gear had been sunk. The Japanese had successfully sunk a ship it was

being carried in. So that's the kind of mad scramble that we're talking about to assemble the forces required. The forces defending Singapore, known as the Malaya Command, said they needed around 550 aircraft. Instead, they had 215 aircraft, and these were outdated. They were slower, and they were less maneuverable than the Japanese aircraft they would come up against. They'd only, again, just very recently arrived. They were dealing with humidity, difficulties of operating in that climate, and some units were barely operational. In charge of this British effort to protect their possessions in Southeast

Asia was a man called Lieutenant General Arthur Percival. Now, I don't want to be judgmental. I don't want to be body shaming. But just picture, if you will, the kind of granite-jawed, square-shouldered legend who could lead a force like this in a tough jungle fight and deal with the battle-trained veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army. Just picture that guy and now think of the opposite. Arthur Percival looks like a scrawny kid who would get his snack money stolen when he goes to scouts in the evening. He'd been a great staff officer, he was a great organiser, he'd got organised logistics and things, and one of his jobs in fact had been to make a very scholarly study of Singapore's vulnerability to an attack over land down the Malay Peninsula. But he'd never held high

command before April 1941. He was now the officer in charge of British forces in Malaya and Singapore. He didn't have a glittering list of subordinates, so every time I read that in history books I'm always struck by the fact that, you know, victory has a thousand fathers, everyone's a genius in victory, defeat's an orphan, everyone was incompetent and foolish. That always strikes me as people writing with such hindsight. Of course, no one emerges from this campaign with reputation intact. There are examples of people like Major General Keith Simmons, who was in charge of the fortress Singapore, the actual fortress itself. And he said that no landward defences should be built as it would impact morale. So maybe some of them do deserve a little bit of the criticism they get.

On the other side, the Japanese forces that were massing in French Indochina, they're led by Lieutenant General Yamashita Tomoyuki. Now he was charismatic, brave, decisive. He was audacious. He made a very simple judgment that would sometimes be correct. He believed that the quality of the British and the British Indian troops in Malaya, in Singapore, were poor. And he later said, our battle for Malaya was successful because we took the enemy lightly. They always say, don't underestimate your enemy, but you shouldn't overestimate them either. And he correctly worked out that the troops he was facing were inferior to his own. The Japanese force that was gathered for this lunge down the Malay

Peninsula towards Singapore was outnumbered, but they were veteran infantrymen. Their training and morale was superior to the British forces they'd faced. And they were veteran infantrymen, their training and morale was superior to the British forces they'd face, and they had a doctrine which was, get close, use the bayonet, use their own weapons. Don't let a preponderance of British artillery mow you down at range. Move in fast, get as close as you can to the units, infiltrate, get up close and personal, and rely on your own physical powers, your aggression, and your greater hunger for it to break the enemy. They were taught to search for weak points in units, strike deep, keep going, encircle any machine gunners, for example, that

were holding out. Doesn't matter, keep going, push deep into rear areas. They had around 160 tanks with them. The British thought that the bridges in Malaya were too weak for tanks, but the Japanese correctly thought they'll be absolutely fine. They had about 350 aircrafts, they had more aircraft, and these aircraft were better than the ones the British could deploy. So that's the lay of the land in terms of forces facing each other. Singapore is at the very bottom, as I said, of the Malay Peninsula. It's the long bit that comes off the bottom of Thailand,

if you can picture it. It's a very long, thin peninsula. The 400 miles to the south of that peninsula is today Malaysia and was Malaya in 1941. It gets the Straits of Johor at the bottom, and then Singapore, 60 to 200 miles wide maximum. There's a mountain range down the middle, so the action had to be on the coastal plains on either side of this mountain range. And there are many rivers crossing those plains, there are mangrove swamps at the mouth of those rivers, thick jungle, very hot, very humid, giant thunderstorms, flying conditions, very difficult as well. So Britain's investment in Singapore had created a classic military conundrum. You create a fortress somewhere, or you create a sort of essential piece of infrastructure like the Suez Canal,

or like Singapore, and you then realise it's not that simple. Because to defend that very valuable thing you've created, you have to seize territory and push out defences either side of it. And so the whole point of building Singapore was this as a kind of impregnable island. But really, all the military planners knew that to defend it you had to build defences way up this Malay peninsula because clearly with modern artillery aircraft you couldn't allow the Japanese to occupy the whole of the Malay peninsula and then just besiege the island itself they could spatter it with artillery and aircraft so really by creating the Singapore Fortress to protect it,

the British pushed their airfields, their bases, their fortifications, way up the Malay Peninsula, right up towards the border with Thailand. So in fact, when Churchill discovered that Singapore didn't really have any landward defences, he was a little bit unfair on the British Army, because the landward defences had been created. They'd been created hundreds of miles away, up the Malay Peninsula. So by the end of 1941, the British had built themselves a real house of cards. They had a hugely powerful and expensive naval base

without an adequate fleet to be sent to it. To protect that naval base, they built a series of airfields which contained planes that were largely obsolete. And to guard those airfields they positioned huge numbers of troops way up the Mei Peninsula of insufficient quality. The stage was set for catastrophe. As I explained in the Pearl Harbor podcast back in December of last year, the Japanese had a strategy encompassing the whole of the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. This was one important theatre of it. Their plan was to violate Thailand's neutrality, land on this long peninsula, then cross the border into Malaya.

They thought about training jungles. They wanted the jungle to be an ally. They trained some of their infantry in jungle warfare. Their plan was to move fast down the peninsula. They knew their greatest advantage was that their plan was so bold that the British never thought that they would try it. So on the 4th of December, days before the outbreak of hostilities, days before Pearl Harbor, a 19-ship convoy left French Indochina. They were heading across the Gulf of Thailand. On the 6th of December, the Brits spotted it just south of Cambodia. Now they didn't know if it was heading for Bangkok, whether it was heading for Malaya, then bad weather obscured its movements.

The Brits then had this decision. Did they themselves violate Thai neutrality, move their forces across the border, and seize the key airfields and defences on the Thai side of that Malay border? They opted not to. On the 8th of December, at 45 minutes past midnight, this was hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese showed no such scruples. They landed in Thailand and they also landed on the very northern tip of Malaya, right next to the Thai border. British aircraft did manage to sink one Japanese ship and damage two

others, but on the whole the Japanese conducted a very impressive amphibious landing. They stormed ashore. Singapore itself was bombed that day as well. The landings went well for the Japanese. There was some tough resistance in the early hours, but by daybreak they pushed inland and they secured airfields on the Thailand side of the border as well. As soon as they could, they moved their own aircraft there, and within two days, the Japanese had managed to secure air superiority in the skies above northern Malaya. Now, Bill Franklin was in Singapore at the time,

and he told me how mid-20th century Brits, confident of their own racial superiority, badly underestimated the Japanese. You can tell that the Japanese were small people, all wore spectacles and so on, and we didn't know anything about their aeroplanes. And our aeroplanes went up. Theirs were better than ours,

and we thought we'd got some really good ones. But to begin with, defending Singapore was an old-fashioned aeroplane which they'd stopped using in England a few months previously, To begin with, defending Singapore was an old-fashioned aeroplane, which they'd stopped using in England a few months previously. And they were training ones in England. Got to Singapore and you found that was the first defence, as it were. Planes which were too old. So your commanding officers sort of dismissed the Japanese.

They just said they were inferior and there's nothing to worry about. Yes, to begin with. And you learnt within a few days that this was, well, you learnt on the day that war was declared. And when you saw their fighter planes, they just were so good. And shooting down the defence of Singapore, it wasn't impediment, you see, it was very much the same. But the RAF, the Air Force that we had defending Singapore was just awful. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More coming up.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. Just like the USA, Britain was now involved in a great war in Asia against the Japanese Empire, and Britain typically looked to the Royal Navy to strike a blow. There had been, as I mentioned, a great fight in Whitehall. At the end of 1941, it had become clear that there was a Japanese threat to Singapore and Malaya. The admirals had wanted to send a big mixed force, a fleet aircraft carrier, seven big powerful ships capable of fighting the line of battle, 24 little destroyers. But that would take a while to get out there. Meanwhile, the Australians

were very, very nervous about the situation in Asia, and they asked the British to hurry up. So in October 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor and the attack on Malaya, the Prince of Wales was sent out, the newest battleship in the Navy, a veteran of the Bismarck campaign. If you want to go back and listen to my, I've done a lot of these podcasts. I did explain a podcast all about Bismarck and the fight against Bismarck. Prince of Wales plays a very important part in that battle. And she was then sent out to Singapore. She was joined by Repulse, a lightly armored, fast battle cruiser built in 1916, first World War vintage. She had big had big guns she was quick but she had rubbish given when she'd been built rubbish anti-aircraft capability and poor deck armor

she'd never been built to withstand the threat of dive bombers or torpedo bombers they had arrived in singapore on the 2nd of december days before the attack started. So there is a British naval presence in Asia. It's a small fleet, a much, much smaller fleet than planners between the wars had envisaged. It was designated Force Z. And by simply attacking Malaya, advancing towards Singapore, the Japanese had destroyed all British plans because Force Z had failed in its basic primary purpose. It was meant to be a deterrent. All of it was meant to deter the Japanese from fighting the British Empire in Asia. The Japanese had started that battle. So what do you do with Force Z now? It had failed to stop the war beginning. It was now too small and ill-equipped to actually play

a decisive role in the fighting. However, what else are you going to do? Admiral Phillips, in charge of Forshead, took matters into his own hands. In the great tradition of the Royal Navy, he slipped his moorings on the 8th of December, straight away, as soon as he heard about the attack, slipped out of port, and did what Royal Navy officers do, advance towards the sound of the guns. Now, the plan was, hopefully, they were going to interdict, they were going to other guns. Now, the plan was, hopefully, they were going to interdict, they were going to stop the entire invasion force. They could sink it at sea. They did know they'd be vulnerable to Japanese aircraft, but they thought they'd coped fairly well in Europe with German-Italian airstrikes. They knew they'd be 400 miles away from Japanese bases in Indochina, so they thought they'd basically be out of range. They terribly underestimated the skill and quality of Japanese

aviators, particularly in anti-ship role. Phillips was unable to find and destroy Japanese ships, supplies, fleet taking forces to northern Malaya. He received a false report of landings off Kuantan. He went there to investigate. He didn't request air cover. He assumed that the British force in Singapore would arrange ground-based fighters to provide air cover for his ships. They didn't. At Kwantan, there was nothing to see, but on the 10th of December at 10.15, the British naval ship spotted a Japanese plane. At 11.13, the Japanese arrived and launched their attack. Now the Prince of Wales had a very advanced anti-aircraft fire control system, but it was unusable in hot humid conditions, it just wasn't working yet.

And so they were both terribly vulnerable to attack from the sky. Eight Japanese planes released their bombs. Only one got a hit, a fire on the Repulse that was quickly put out. Five planes were damaged in return then 17 torpedo bombers of the type that you'll remember describing in the pearl harbour documentary type 96 torpedo bombers dropped to wave top height the prince of wales was struck twice by torpedoes one buckled the propeller shaft and she could now only limp along at 15 knots her flooded compartments meant that she was listing over she wasting, which put many of her anti-aircraft guns out of action. Repulse was

attacked again and again, but used her speed to weave and turn this giant steel monster, twisting away from these little gnat-like aircraft attacking her. All 15 aircraft missed the repulse. A third wave of torpedo bombers was also avoided, but then repulse was struck by a wave of 20 aircraft who attacked from both sides in a pincer. She was hit four times along her starboard side and sank almost instantly. The limping Prince of Wales was hit again and again, and at 13.20 she healed to port and capsized. It's such a gigantic moment in British and naval history. It really has come to symbolise the end of the era of big gun battleships, the end of the era that begins in the 16th century when the King of Scotland or Henry VIII put guns on wooden ships,

and ships go from being convenient platforms for men to fight each other at sea, to artillery platforms at sea. This moment in December 1941 is the end of that era. It's the first time two powerful battleships, one of them pretty much the newest battleship launched in the world, steaming in the open sea, were destroyed by aircraft. It was the end of British sea power in Asia, and actually it was the beginning of the end of Singapore itself. The navy had failed to protect Singapore. The air force had been terribly depleted already. It was now up to the army to protect Singapore, and it was going badly. The best defended position in northern Malaya was a place called Jitra. On the 12th of December,

one battalion, so maybe 800 men say, of Japanese infantry attacked several times their number of British and Indian troops in terrible rain, awful conditions. The Japanese flanked the force, they turned the flanks, they found ways around the defences and attacked from behind. The entire Indian 11th Division panicked and dashed south. It was one of the worst defeats for a British force in the whole of the Second World War. You won't have heard of it, and that's why folks. The Japanese kept their heels. They knew they could not give them time to recover. They kept going. They battered them every time they tried to stop. I asked Bill Franklin when he thought he might be in big trouble. They were coming down all the time. I thought, even in the very early days,

I'm going to not get out of this. Oh, really? Oh, yes. We didn't know then some of the processes that were happening and so on, but even so, everyone was defending. And a lot of civilians were coming down to Singapore. I was offered a lovely car for a nice girl and she said you can have it for £100.

I said, no, it's no use at all. I'm not going to buy it. So I was not gloomy, but factual. I just came down and never stopped them. General Percival now had to make a decision whether he should deploy all his air power, desperately try

and stabilise the situation in the north of this peninsula, in Malaya, or bring it south, husband his aircraft, and try and protect Singapore itself, and protect the convoys that he hoped would bring in reinforcements and supplies. He decided on the latter. New formations of troops were arriving. They were too little too late. The British ones lacking jungle preparation the Indian troops also not trained properly and so the troops that were fighting in the north were had to do so without air cover to protect reinforcements coming in who would arrive too late and be unable to make any decisive impact on the fighting it was a fiasco

on the 7th of January 30 Japanese tanks destroyed the better part of two Indian brigades on the Slim River. Despite the Indians having dug in defences, anti-tank guns, etc, the Japanese surprised them at 3.30 in the morning. They took 3,000 British and Indian prisoners in the space of six hours and basically destroyed a British division. Central Malaya was lost, and with it, again, just the chance to buy time, to build defences for the south, to stabilise a line that could be defended. On the 15th of January, very confident Australians did manage to repulse several Japanese attacks, but even they were then outflanked, and they were forced to retreat,

abandoning much equipment. New RAF fighters were arriving, hurricanes that had proved so useful during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, but even they weren't sufficiently superior to the Japanese planes they faced. They had trouble with the climate getting ready, they were thrown into the battle piecemeal, and they were not able to wrest control of the air from Japanese aviators. By the end of January, troops had retreated all the way down this Malay peninsula and they were evacuating onto the island of Singapore itself. The RAF was down to around 28 fighters. The Japanese had 150 available to them. I want to make it absolutely clear,

Churchill wrote to his commander, that I expect every inch of ground to be defended, every scrap of material defences to be blown to pieces to prevent capture by the enemy, and no question of surrender to be entertained until after protracted fighting among the ruins of Singapore City. I guess it's easy to write that in London when you're not in a rain-soaked bivy with no news of where your units are,

surrounded by Japanese troops, information coming in in drips and drabs, panicked reports of other units retreating, and exhausted from days and weeks of trudging south with the Japanese on your heels. On the 31st of January 1942, at 8.15, the last British unit crossed the causeway, crossed the narrows from the mainland to Singapore Island, it was then blown up. The battle for Malaya, this long peninsula of Malaya, had lasted 55 days and it had been a complete disaster. There were now a million people on Singapore itself. The fortress, this vaunted fortress, would now experience a siege, but as I've said before,

it had already lost, effectively had lost its landward defences as the Japanese captured the Malayan Peninsula. On the island of Singapore, there were very few defences on the North Shore. It was mangrove swamps, boggy, there was very, very scattered defences. But the whole point of defending Malaya had been to fend from landward attack. That had now failed. So the fate of Singapore was sealed. There were two defence lines, two stop lines had been surveyed across the island, very preliminary work had been started but not much had been completed. In fact Singapore was no fortress. On paper there were 70,000 defenders but they were under trained, some had recently arrived, they were mixed up, it was counted they were poorly equipped and they

were demoralised. Percival had to protect 70 miles of the north coast from Japanese amphibious assault. Now, there's a great myth of Singapore, which there were five big guns installed between the walls, huge 15-inch guns, and they were capable of sinking any approaching naval vessels coming to attack it by sea. And there's a big myth that, in fact, those guns were unable to be swung round

and attack targets coming from the landward direction. That myth is actually not true. Four of the big guns were able to swing round, all six nine-inch guns, nearly all six-inch guns. They could all engage some targets to the north. The problem was that no one really thought this scenario through. There was not proper fire control coordination. It wasn't a way of calling down that fire where it was most needed. And there was also a lack of the kind of anti-infantry shells, highantry shells, high explosive shells, shells that detonate in the air and can destroy attacking infantry. There was a lack of those kind of shells. There were lots of armour-piercing shells to deal with enemy ships

approaching, but not the right kind of shells for Japanese infantry swarming across the beach. The Japanese had to make a decision. Where would they land on the north coast? They wanted to keep going before the Brits could rebalance themselves and create proper defences. They wanted to attack. After the fighting was over, Bill, in captivity, met a Japanese officer who told him all about the decision where to strike on the island. When there was actually a prison of war, a Japanese officer came along and he talked to him. And the day before they had come over from the mainland on to Singapore Island, he himself had come over to Singapore to see whether they should land where they were intended to. And he came back again. There were all these sort of little things you learnt afterwards.

And he said, it was just swamps. And he met quite a few drunken troops. But then he said, this is the place we're going to go and land. They did that, the British blew up the bridge and so on, but the Japanese, and amazingly, I think it was three or four days, they mended it and they just came over with tanks. This is another thing, you see, they used tanks even in the north of Bermondale. There was one very good road from the north right

to the south and that's what they used, bicycles and tanks. We said we couldn't do it. There's an assumption in military circles in this period that to attack successfully, you need a superiority of around three to one over the defenders. What's amazing about this campaign is that Yamashita, the Japanese, actually were outnumbered by the British. They had around 30,000 troops

available at this point, which is half what the British had. The key thing is, of course, of that 30,000, a very high proportion were hugely effective. And the same was not true for both British and Imperial forces. The Japanese chose a five-mile stretch of coast to land on. They took Percival by surprise, he was expecting to land somewhere else, and they were going to throw 16 battalions, each with 800 or so men, with another five in reserves into that five-mile stretch. Facing them were three Australian battalions. Yamashita had hidden those troops, he brought them up at the very last minute so the Brits wouldn't see them preparing. He'd built dummy camps elsewhere. He went to great lengths

to disguise where he was going to land. So on the morning of the 8th of February, it was the start of a day of terrible artillery strikes, airstrikes on these Aussies on this short stretch of coast. At sunset, the battering intensified. At 8.30, the Australians spotted landing craft approaching. The Australians fought very hard, but they didn't have proper artillery support. Again, Japanese troops were able to infiltrate. They found gaps between units, between defensive positions. So all too often, the Australians would hear of Japanese troops behind them. Nothing terrified soldiers, like their potential withdrawal routes getting cut off. The Aussies slowly were pushed back in the early hours. Some battalions got only a quarter of their men back.

The second landing took place the following night. A Japanese division of Imperial Guards crossed to Singapore. The desperate British plan was now to try and hold a line across the middle of the island. In fact the battle for this defensive position was over before Percival even knew it started. Units were falling back without orders. There was no coordination. Yamashita sensed chaos. He was right to sense chaos, and he pushed very, very hard. They sliced through British units. At six o'clock on the 11th, the mighty naval base, the whole point of the operation, had to be abandoned. Facilities were blown up. On the 12th of the operation had to be abandoned facilities were blown up on the 12th the Japanese occupied the big reservoirs in the middle of the island and Percival decided to withdraw to a perimeter around the city itself around 28 miles long British morale was completely

unraveling some units like the Australian 22nd brigade definitely did hold their ground others just withdrew time and again the governor governor burned the treasury. British forces blew up the broadcasting station. There were reports of armed deserters that were starting to loot shops and houses. Some people were seizing boats and trying to escape. Factories were destroyed. Bill Franklin remembers vividly when the fighting arrived close to the hospital in which he was serving. But all I knew was that they were very successful having landed in Singapore and doing very, very well. And finally, they had a long-distance mortars, and I was at the Tangier Ministry Hospital,

and the mortars could reach us. So the front line of the Japanese was very close to me. And I finally left there, but I was in the last lorry that actually left, where the lorry came from. But I still remember the driver. He was a local driver and he didn't have shoes or socks. And, of course, the mortars were arriving, were coming on the road that we were on.

And you saw just in front of you a hole appear in the road with smoke and this was one of the mortars. We hoped we wouldn't get hit, so he said, instead of going slowly, I was going fast. And the most terrifying journey I've ever been on, I still remember seeing his big toe

on the accelerator went down as far as it would go, and I finished up on the far side of Singapore Island and had my own hospital there. It was called Full of the Thirte. It was very like a theatre you would see in London, and it was empty. So that's where my patients, the very sick patients,

went in the best seats, as it were. And it's interesting because my colonel, who was simply marvellous and a regular doctor and so on, he actually just as I was leaving was hit in the office, he wasn't going to move, he'd got in a military cross previously but he literally lost his head. What was uppermost I thought this was the most horrible road journey I've ever done, going at nearly six miles an hour through all these potholes. And you were very much personally involved.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. On the 13th of February, Percival held a conference with his principal staff and all agreed there was no point going on. On the 14th, he was told that the collapse of the water supply was imminent, his whole city was being shelled being bombed there were terrible civilian casualties it was clear what the outcome was going to be people were dying for no reason on the 15th Percival was told that the water would now last 24 hours he was short of ammunition so at 5 15 he and his chief of staff went to the Ford factory to meet his Japanese counterparts they They talked for 55 minutes. Percival argued, but in the end, the Japanese gave him their choice. It was unconditional surrender. Percival agreed. The firing stopped at 8.30 that night. It was the end of the greatest

catastrophe in British military history. The whole thing had lasted 70 days. Bill told me about those last desperate hours and how he went into captivity. Well, Sir Edward was on the 15th of February 1942, but by Black Friday, Friday the 13th of February 1942, they were well through into the building of Singapore City, and they had been charged with the reservoirs and the water, so water was getting extremely scarce and got more scarce later on. And it's very annoying when you've only got what was in your water bottle,

and that had to last you for two or three days. You could wash your face, and then you thought, no, that must stop. With your hands, no, you drink what is there but anyhow friday the 13th things were more or less all over but on the 15th the british capitulated and so on i have to say that was the day that i was officially to a prison of war i didn't see a japanese for 15 days they were quickly they went on to samaritan's Jail and so on. And they had no plans that they could take 120,000 soldiers and what they were going to do with them. So they had to

make plans there and then. And I was in my Fulton buildings and didn't go out to the main camp, which were the Indians, Australians and the British were at Changi until the 14th or 15th day, it was 17 miles. I don't know where it came from but I was in a lorry with some sick people. But earlier on the so-called fighting people had to march these 17 miles and that wasn't at all present. I was lucky that I got to Changi and so on and immediately were given a job to

look after the sick and so on and of course we had a lot of very good physicians and surgeons at Changi. Japan now controlled the riches of Malaya. The Dutch East Indies lay across the Malacca Straits it was there to take as well.

The road to Burma and India beckoned. The precious natural resources, the rubber of Malaya, the oil in the Indies, was essential to Japanese war effort and would keep them going through years of coming fighting. 139,000 British troops were lost, of which 130,000 went into captivity. British troops were lost, of which 130,000 went into captivity. Japan had lost around 10,000 men. As soon as they captured Singapore, the Japanese separated out all the Chinese men aged between 18 and 50, and any judge to be anti-Japanese, I'm not sure how they worked that one out, were driven off and machine-gunned. People talk about 5,000, perhaps 10,000 men. They bayoneted the wounded in Alexandra Hospital. Captivity was horrifying for the prisoners of war. They were treated very brutally. Japanese military officers

regarded people who surrendered as worthy of nothing but contempt, and so they despised their prisoners. Many of them were sent north to build a railway from Thailand into Burma, the infamous Burma Railway, that would supply a Japanese push up through Burma into India. Of the 60,000 men who were sent to work on that railway, 16,000 perished. In all, around a quarter of servicemen captured by the Japanese died in captivity, and around a third of the 270,000 European civilians died in captivity. Let's finish off by hearing again from Dr. Bill Franklin as he describes some of those monstrous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The main thing that happened in the early days and certainly subsequently, we had a very, very poor diet. And the main thing that you thought about when you're starving, and this happened very, very quickly, food, food, food, food, and what was going to happen to you and so on. And we didn't hear about all the atrocities on the railway, the death railway, which that's another thing.

I was, in fact, down to go on, was it 4-4? They all had letters, and 3,000 people who had to suddenly leave and go on this sterile journey up towards Thailand. But it's only when the people came back down from the railway when it was all given up, we heard about all the atrocities. The other thing is, if you tried to escape, they said you'd be shot. Although we were in prison, there was nothing to stop you trying to escape. First off, five people tried to escape.

Where were you going to go? You had to cross the sea into Jehovah's Room with jungle and tigers and things. How could you live? Anyhow, they were all shot. And then about six months later, another five people came. Three of them were shot and they got through onto the mainland. But two of them were trying to get back to safety in the British war camp. And one of them was slashed by a Japanese sword. The officer's always had the family sword.

by a Japanese sword. The officers always had the family sword and it left his arm hanging useless with a little bit of skin and he actually got back and another one, how he got back to safety I don't know, but the Japanese looked upon him as someone that was very, very lucky and he'd done the impossible thing, tried to escape, and there was only one answer to that, shoot him. So I treated him, when I got him, he couldn't walk, he couldn't do anything, he was just a skeleton. But after two months, I finally said, in three days time you can go back to your unit, because he could walk then and so on. But what happened? Completely awful Japanese police. One man came along, and he came along, two of me, as it were, and this man,

as I was the officer, and he got hold of the man, and he said, go outside and dig your own grave. Well, he was too weak to do that, but they had brought with him a sick. There were six or seven, six little colonels of the Japanese. They were made to dig it. And then the next thing, the only thing that was granted was that he could have the powdery for his horse for days.

So how we knew what was happening. The policeman said, he got seven Sikhs and said, no, you can shoot this man. And there was only one bullet in fact, which involved his leg, and all the others were missing. And they were asked to shoot their ex-friends and so on. So they came and defeated the man, and he came up and just shot him in the back of the head with a pistol and pushed him into the grave. And the Sikhs had to fill up the grave and things.

So that was very personal as far as I was concerned, because when you've been with a man every day for two months, you get to know them so well. And just when he's taken from you and just very, very near you, he's shot, these things are not very pleasant. That was Dr Bill Franklin. As I mentioned at the beginning, he passed away at the very start of the COVID pandemic in 2020 it was an extraordinary privilege to have met him and particularly

as I say to have taken along my my young daughter as well I'm sure she'll be able to tell people when she's 106 that she met someone who was at the fall of Singapore thank you very much for listening to this anniversary Explainer podcast. There'll be more coming up through the year. See you next time. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I tell you all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval

podcast, Gone Medieval with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods