Huge oil storage tanks had been set on fire by the shelling and bombing, and columns of thick smoke from the burning oil billowed skywards.
It started to rain, and the oily soot in the air mixed with the rain to turn people black and grimy. Soon nobody could tell whether a person was friend or foe.
The Australians, ordered to rendezvous at the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been given a compass course aimed at evading the encircling Japanese. They travelled on this until C Company’s Pioneer section believed they were too far south-east, and should be heading more south-west. The main force decided to follow the original course, but the men of C Company opted to go their own way.
The original reading proved to be correct when the main force came to the pipeline that supplied water from Johore to Singapore. Following it, they ran into a party of Japanese and a battle ensued, only ending when the Japanese officer was killed and his troops disappeared in the jungle. The officer had made the mistake of climbing onto the pipeline and calling on the Australians to surrender, whereupon they shot him.
The force moved on to the assembly point at the Botanical Gardens. On arrival there, they were told that the Pioneer section that had followed its own compass course was missing.
Months later, a prisoner-of-war work party from Changi found their bodies. Spent .303 shells lying around the area indicated that the men hadn’t died without a fight. When they had run out of ammunition, those who were still alive had been tied to trees and used for bayonet practice.
At the Botanical Gardens, the Australians were issued with a couple of tots of fiery Navy rum and ordered to attack a Japanese-held hill at Bukit Timah, on the outskirts of Singapore.
The Japanese were forced to retreat to a position behind another hill a short distance away across the valley. Though not far apart, neither side could see the other because of the hill in between. From close range, the Japanese laid down heavy shelling and mortaring.
The Australians dug in once more, two men to a slit trench. They had no artillery and could only reply to the fierce Japanese barrage with small-arms fire.
Japanese shells whined harmlessly over the Australian trenches, but mortar bombs were being lobbed over the hill with deadly accuracy.
The Australians were hungry. They hadn’t been issued with rations for days and their only food had been whatever they could find in houses deserted by British officers of the Singapore garrison. In their hurry to get away, the British had left behind most of their possessions.
In one shell-pocked Bukit Timah house, the men found a steak-and-kidney pie. It was in a refrigerator rendered useless after Singapore’s electricity supply was knocked out. Without refrigeration, it had turned green and its pastry was like a block of cement, but to hungry men, it represented food.
Peter Murphy, always the planner, decided to make a decent meal with the pie as the main course. For an entrée, he’d serve puftaloon scones, made from flour he’d found in the pantry. He remembered these doughy lumps of damper being a staple item in the hungry days of Australia’s Great Depression.
However, he struck trouble when he went to cook the scones and heat the pie. The gas stove in the house was as useless as the refrigerator. Gas, like electricity, was no longer available, so Peter lit a fire on the floor.
The smoke that rose from it was seen by the Japanese observation balloons, and their artillery opened up. The men ignored the shrapnel whistling around them as they ate their mouldy pie and doughy puftaloons.
For after-dinner drinks, the men had the finest Hennessy brandy. The British officer who had fled the house had left a cellar filled with cases of the best spirits and liquors. As they ate, Peter Murphy raised his mug and toasted the British army for looking after its garrison officers so well.
A search of the house revealed that it had been used for gambling parties. Peter confiscated a roulette wheel, which he said would make a change from poker to while away the time between shellings.
The gambling devices and well-furnished rooms were an indication of the life of luxury the British garrison officers had been living, confident in the belief that Singapore was safe from attack. Huge fifteen-inch naval guns capable of hurling one-ton projectiles miles out to sea, supported by batteries of nine-inch guns, were regarded as sufficient to repel any enemy intent on entering the harbour.
However, the wily Japanese didn’t come by sea. They knew Singapore’s guns faced seawards in fixed positions and could traverse only a hundred and eighty degrees. The harbour might be secure, but in the other direction, the Malayan mainland was an open back door. Hence, the Japanese came through the back door, and the British garrison forces were trapped.
When the water supply from Johore Bahru on the mainland was cut, the garrison was in desperate trouble. The Malayan Command ordered it to hold out a little longer, stating that relief was on the way. Large forces of Americans were coming, it said. Soon the skies would be black with Allied planes.
The planes did come, Spitfires and Hurricanes. One count put the figure at a hundred, but the planes never made it into the air. The fuselages arrived in Singapore, but the engines remained in Java, still in their crates.
‘What a cock-up that was’, Peter Murphy said now as the conversation changed from food to the desperate position they were in with shells whistling above their Bukit Timah slit trench, too shallow to offer much protection.
Peter brought out the roulette wheel he’d confiscated from the pie-and-puftaloons house. He couldn’t resist gambling, though when he bet he usually lost, and was always dead broke. ‘If it was raining five-pound notes, I’d pick up a summons’, he’d say.
In their current predicament, a shallow slit trench was no place for an unlucky gambler. When Jim saw Peter blowing air skywards as he toyed with the roulette wheel, he thought it was some strange gambling superstition.
Finally, he had to ask. ‘Peter, what are you doing?’
‘I’m creating an updraft.’
‘What for?’
‘It’s a known fact that the course of a shell can be changed if it hits an updraft of air.’ Peter continued to blow.
Jim shook his head in disbelief, but Peter’s method seemed to work because the shells kept passing overhead.
At about five o’clock the following afternoon the two men were still crouched in the trench when the shelling stopped, as did the mortar bombing. A strange silence settled over the scene.
From across the valley came frenzied Japanese shouting. ‘Banzai!Banzai!’
This is it, the Australians told each other, and prepared for a massive attack, but the attack didn’t come. At seven o’clock that night, 15 February 1942, they learned why.
The defenders of Singapore had surrendered.
CHAPTER TWO
CHANGI PRISON
THE Australians were told by their officers to lay down their arms and stay in their positions until morning. Then, they would be marched to a padang, a Malayan recreation ground, where they would become prisoners of the Japanese army.
The men were in a state of shock. They’d never imagined this could happen. The situation was desperate, but surrender was unthinkable. They couldn’t believe the Malayan Command had given in.
The rest of the night was spent speculating about what the future would hold as captives of the Japanese. They had no idea what to expect. Stories were rife of atrocities the Japanese had committed against civilians during their advance down the mainland. Word had not yet filtered through that by way of retribution for the cost of the Malayan campaign-the Japanese had lost more dead than the entire number of Allied troops defending the territory-they had murdered the doctors and nurses in a Singapore hospital and bayoneted the wounded as they lay helpless in their beds.