The ferry was a nightmare. The bottleneck was even worse than we had predicted: a line of vehicles a mile long waited to cross it. Relays of men tugged and strained on the old cables, floating artillery pieces two by two across the turgid brown stream. I sat on a motorbike at the back of this line, hoping the truck in front would move; I remember the mortal fear that a passing Japanese bomber would sight this dense column of targets.
At three in the morning, on the first day of 1942, in a darkness lit by oil lamps and electric lights run from truck batteries, the last of the Kuantan garrison crossed the river.
We had a roll call as soon as we had completed the crossing; I was horrified to find that one of my sections of three men in a radio truck was missing. We searched for the men, hoping that they had come over in another truck, but they were not to be found on our side of the river. A sergeant called Watson and I went back across the ferry on motorbikes to look for them. Once on the far side, we started the motors. Without lights we drove back towards Kuantan, Watson keeping 200 yards behind me, the growling engines sounding shatteringly loud in the moonlight. I hoped that Japanese hearing didn’t compensate for their poor night vision. In the clearings to the side of the road, in the huge rubber plantations beyond them, there wasn’t a sound, no sign that we had ever been there except for the odd wrecked vehicle and the tracks of our tyres in the dark clay beside the tarmac. I could sense rather than hear the sea as we roared through this abandoned landscape. I knew that just ahead of us the enemy was moving with his tanks and bicycles. I had still not seen a Japanese soldier, alive or dead. That night I was lucky, and although I failed to find a truck in working order or my missing men, I also failed to meet the Japanese.
We went back and were pulled across the ferry for the last time. Some hours later the missing section appeared, having assembled in the wrong place; they expected the worst, but words failed me. We withdrew to the airfield, about six miles away, after blowing up the winches and pontoons. Two hours later the Japanese were at the ferry, and two days later the airfield was under fierce attack from all sides. By then I was on the road to Jerantut, part of a slow-moving column of tractors, guns and trucks. Behind us we could hear relentless firing and shelling. The outnumbered Frontier Force Regiment, under their commander Lieutenant-Colonel A.E. Gumming, was fighting a heroic rearguard action to allow us to get away.
The retreat was confused, three-or four-day marches followed by a sudden halt, an order to emplace the guns, to fire in support of an infantry counter-attack somewhere off behind us, and then the regiment would move on again. We knew that we were heading out of one trap into another, a gigantic plug-hole, and we knew that the big guns, where we were going, pointed out to sea, away from our enemy.
Once I was in a truck, driving down a long straight road through a rubber plantation, reflecting that when you have seen one rubber tree you have seen them all, and feeling how depressing acres of them looked to a retreating soldier. Ahead of us there appeared a plane, coming in our direction, flying very low. It looked silver against the sun. We pulled over and jumped down into a gouge in the stiff black mud beside the rubber trees. He dropped a few bombs, one nearly on top of us. Again I felt the violent invisible blast of the shock. This was my second infinitesimally close shave, and I was saved this time by geology: the nearest bomb sank deep into the mud before exploding. Harder soil would have killed us.
We reached Singapore a week before the causeway linking it to Malaya was blown up. We had to press through crowds of frightened Malay and Chinese villagers who the Japanese had driven in front of them, and on the island the streets and roads were full of these refugees. They lived in tents, under trees, in the fields. No-one knew how many of them there were: someone told me half a million. Soldiers lived in the vehicles they had driven down the peninsula. There was a pervasive smell of decay, ordure, anxiety: the smell of defeat.
Yet there were nearly a hundred thousand of us, well-armed and ready to fight. For my part I was sent to Fort Canning, General Percival’s headquarters in Singapore City, in the south of the island, where they needed signals officers. This was the ‘Battlebox’. I went in and didn’t come out for three weeks. The siege of Singapore for me was a series of clipped shouts for help over the radio and terse bulletins of disaster.
I spent most of my time underground in the Battlebox, hearing and relaying orders, passing on information, sending out instructions for desperate recombinations of units to try to stop the collapse. On 8th February the Japanese guns opened up all along the Straits of Johore; at dawn on the 9th I heard that they were ashore in the north west. Most of our troops were in the east. Within three days the Japanese had pushed down through the island and taken the village around the big hill of Bukit Timah, ten miles to the north west of us. Up around the naval base on the north coast there were huge supplies of oil, and for the last couple of days of the battle the hill, which dominated the island, was overhung by black clouds of smoke. It looked as though it had erupted.
Not that I saw daylight much: we worked eighteen hours a day, and slept on the floor of the command centre among the radios and phones. Our offices were a series of connecting rooms, so that runners and despatch riders were always coming through and stepping over tired bodies. We saw nothing until the very end, and what we heard was confused. We knew that the Japanese had taken the reservoirs and turned off the taps; we could hear their unchallenged planes bombing and strafing every day. The big ships were leaving Keppel Harbour with civilians; troops were deserting and wandering around the city. Towards the end the commanders couldn’t even give sensible orders because there was so little information coming in. I saw General Percival a few times, walking in a corridor of the Fort or through our signals centre, a gaunt, tall figure looking utterly dejected and crushed; he was already a broken man. He was about to have his name attached to the worst defeat in the British Army’s history.
On Sunday 15th February 1942 I was told by another officer that he had heard we were about to surrender. Early that evening a dead silence enveloped the old fort. In the signals rooms everybody went to sleep, depression and exhaustion flooding in, as we collapsed on mattresses laid on top of cables and land lines. The spring of tension that had kept us going for weeks had been broken.
I slept for ten hours. The following morning I stepped outside and saw four cars moving slowly up the hill, small rising sun pennants fluttering on their wings. Their occupants sat bolt upright, arms stiff by their sides. They drew up outside the main entrance and a group of Japanese officers got out, long swords in black scabbards hanging from their dark green uniforms. They were the first Japanese troops I had ever seen. They strode confidently into the Fort.
These people now ruled Malaya, dominated the seas from India to Polynesia and had broken the power of at least three European empires in Asia. I was their prisoner.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DAY AFTER I saw our conquerors, the British forces left in the city were ordered to walk to Changi, site of a prison and a settlement around it, in the extreme east of the island. Changi was fifteen miles away.
We set off from Fort Canning, carrying whatever we could in backpacks and the few vehicles we were allowed. Our long column stretched for more than half a mile and as we walked out into the open we could see other lines of soldiers, marching in strict step, converging from side roads on to the only main route into Changi. Soon we were a dense mass of jostling overloaded men, trying to keep good order and dignity. This was the British Army marching to its humiliation.