Just 2 more reflections on the Japanese Occupation...

I just want to include here two more reflections on the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 before I move on. One (excerpted) is from a Westerner now living in Singapore (Straits Times, 16 Feb) and the other is from a local historian (TODAY, 17 Feb).

The fall of S'pore casts its shadow -- by Jane A. Peterson

Seventy years ago this week, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival marched a white flag to the Ford factory [in Upper Bukit Timah Road] where he surrendered Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita... For many Westerners, this British defeat remains a footnote. But when you live here, you come to understand that it’s more than that....

Singapore looked like a sitting duck in February 1942. Japan had bombed the island and British Malaya within hours of bombing Pearl Harbour. Japanese tanks then rolled towards Singapore, ramming through British defence lines....

Westerners believed what locals believed: Singapore was Britain’s “impregnable fortress” of superior military might. Percival must have known better. The Japanese had sunk the HMS Repulse and the [HMS] Prince of Wales in December due to a lack of air cover; Churchill needed the Royal Air Force in Europe. In the last week of January, retreating British troops from Malaya poured over the Causeway into Singapore....

[Percival] blew a hole in the Causeway [thereby cutting off Singapore's mainland water supply as well!], though he left Johore's lookout tower intact, giving the enemy a bird’s-eye view of Singapore’s defences.The Japanese picked the narrowest portion of the Strait and attacked, blowing through a thin line of inexperienced Australian recruits. They rolled on....

Percival made the call to surrender after losing the reservoirs....

Three years of horrendous Japanese occupation followed. Captors staged the Sook Ching massacre straight away, lining up Chinese males deemed “anti-Japanese” and shooting them. Meanwhile, Westerners and some locals were jammed into Changi Prison, the island’s first prisoner-of-war camp.

“I was 11 when I went into this prison,” Ms Louise Branson, 81, [a Eurasian] told me when we met at Changi last week. “We could smell bacon and eggs for the Japanese, but we were starving. At night I could hear the ‘boots’ coming for women. ‘They’re coming, change places!’ My sisters and I would lie over my mum to hide her.” Like many Singaporeans, she grew to hate the Japanese, and lost respect for the British who had actually bombed her family home by mistake while trying to defend the island.

Disillusionment with Britain continued after the war. I asked a retired teacher how she felt when the British returned: “We renamed the Royal Air Force ‘run away fellas’.” Her comment seems to sum up one reason why Asia decolonised, and why the fall of Singapore still casts a shadow today.

So what shadow do Westerners see? Vigilant security tops the list: officials paid well to keep the “tiny red dot” on secure footing; missiles capable of hitting enemy aircraft 24/7; a nation keen on alliances [actually, security pacts short of formal alliances; Singapore has no military alliances], including the deal to bring United States Navy [littoral] combat ships here....

Relations with Japan appear amicable... But hard feelings linger. I once asked a taxi driver to take me to a Japanese gravesite near the Old Sime Road camp. He abruptly stopped the taxi and told me to get out. (The writer is a freelance journalist who has lived in Singapore since 2007.)

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Keep lessons true to history -- by Dr John Kwok Jung Yun

I refer to Mr Gopinath Menon's letter "Lessons from 70 years ago" (Feb 15). We all should learn from history so long as we do well not to change history to fit the lesson.

Years ago, I saw a painting by a student depicting Singapore in World War II, featuring the modern flag of Singapore beside the Union Jack. That is anachronistic. Singapore was a British colony during the war.

[Mr Menon's] letter and the [student's] painting suggest that Singaporeans see the war here in an ahistorical way.

Mr Menon wrote that Singapore was "entangled unwittingly" in someone else's war and that when the war came, the British "forsook the friendship" with Singapore, which suggests a bilateral type of relationship between nations, and left.

The Pacific War was between empires. The war started, and ended, with Singapore on the British Empire's side as a colony. Friendship mattered little between the colonial British and local subjects. The colony was on the Empire's periphery.

As far as the British were concerned, Singapore, like Australia and Hong Kong, were the "Far East" in every sense of the expression.

As we remember the suffering of the locals during the Japanese Occupation, let us not forget the Indian, Australian, British, Gurkha and local volunteers who fought bravely but vainly to defend Singapore. They were marched off to three-and-a-half years of brutal life as prisoners of war. Many never returned home.

When WWII was declared in 1939, all of the British Empire was at war. The people of Singapore immediately donated money towards the colony's ambition of funding a bomber squadron for Britain, no small feat for a colony at the time.

Imperial loyalty was a powerful sentiment in the days of empires. For the Chinese here, there was imperial loyalty of a different kind: Ethnic kinship. From the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, many Chinese here condemned Japan's aggression towards China. They boycotted Japanese goods and raised funds for China's war effort. Many cheered when war was declared between Britain and Japan.

After the Fall of Singapore, it mattered not if one was a Singapore-born Chinese or a Chinese immigrant, or whether one supported the local anti-Japanese campaigns or not: The Japanese singled out the entire Singapore Chinese community for punishment.

Only the Chinese population were screened; many were massacred.

The Japanese demanded from them a S$50-million donation for loyalty and obedience to their new masters. Singapore was anything but a bystander unwittingly caught in the maelstrom of war.

There are lessons from the events 70 years ago. But when we remember the past to learn from it, history must be able to bear the weight of the lessons we put on them. (The writer is a social military historian.)

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Friends with benefits


I had meant to write a blog entry that would touch on the special and still evolving"military and strategic" relationship Singapore has with the United States since it began to host limited US military facilities and deployment of forces since the pullout of American forces from their Philippine bases in the early 1990s.

Formally, Singapore still refers to itself as non-aligned and it does not have formal military pacts a la NATO with any nation. But I was going to liken the current state of Singapore-US military and strategic ties with that of "friends with benefits".

I felt pretty smug about having thought of using that phrase in that intended context.

Then I read a commentary piece by my colleague William Choong in today's ST (17 Feb, "A deliberate denial of choice", page A35) in which he credited British academic Tim Huxley, the author of Defending The Lion City: The Armed Forces Of Singapore, as having recently used that phrase in the manner I meant (but had not got round to putting it online or in print).

Ah well, great minds think alike, eh?