The US Empire is likely to endure a similar defeat soon at the hands of China.
Is it time that Australia reassessed it security and foreign policy?
The day the empire died in shame
Grim fate ... British officers, including Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, are escorted to the formal surrender of Singapore.
The historian Dr Peter Stanley says there are several misconceptions about the Allied attempts to repel the Japanese during their nine-week, 1000-kilometre advance from Thailand to Singapore between December 1941 and February 1942...
...Stanley, who was principal historian at the Australian War Memorial for 20 years, says the full story of Australia's troop involvement in Singapore has not been told.
"Stories of Australian deserters circulate but no one has nailed down the numbers. But there is evidence that up to a third of the Australian force became stragglers [deserters]," Stanley says. "Australians will probably continue to be sensitive about it until well after the last veterans are dead and possibly even after their children are dead...
...Claims of cowardice and desertion by Australian troops in Singapore surfaced in 1993 when a secret report by the British general Sir Archibald Wavell was discovered in London. It baldly said: "For the fall of Singapore itself the Australians are responsible."
The report, withheld from Australia by the British government for 50 years, concluded that the behaviour of the Australians in the days before Singapore fell set a very bad example...
...the ignominy was compounded by the British historian Peter Elphick, who wrote in his 1995 book Pregnable Fortress that official files refer to damning indictments of the Australians, including "mass desertion, looting, rape and murder".
"There is no doubt that some Australians fought well but overall they performed badly and there is substantial evidence in these files to prove it," Elphick said at the time...
...By February 14, the records say, the Japanese had captured Singapore's reservoirs and pumping stations. As bombing, fighting and shelling continued, many Allied troops "wandered around aimlessly and the hospitals were crowded and overflowing".
"Some troops were deserting and others had become separated from their units," records say.
On February 15, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, the British commander in Singapore, called for a ceasefire and decided to surrender. Australia's commanding officer, Lieutenant-General Gordon Bennett, had by then escaped the island, for which he was later severely criticised.
More than 130,000 Allied troops became prisoners of the Japanese. Little was known of the fate of more than 15,000 captured Australians until late in the war when some prisoners, sunk in a ship on the way to Japan, were rescued by US Navy submarines.
Australians at home then learnt of the slave labour conditions the men endured, including on the Thai-Burma railway and the Sandakan death march in Borneo. By the end of the war, one third of the Australian prisoners were dead.
Lachlan Grant, historian at the Australian War Memorial, says the fall of Singapore woke Australia up to its responsibilities as an independent nation in the British commonwealth. "[it] certainly led the Australian government to be more assertive in looking after its own interests," he says.
Grant says that by the time Singapore fell, some of the Australians who had entered Malaya from February 1941 were questioning their place in the empire they had volunteered to defend. He says members of the Eighth Division, the largest single group of Australians to enter Asia up to that point, identified equally as Australian and British, patriotic both to the nation and the empire.
"However, they were entering a region with strong racial and social hierarchies," Grant says. "Class divisions meant that ordinary soldiers - the non-commissioned officers and the rank and file - were barred from the prestigious clubs and hotels such as Raffles in Singapore."
"This was a great affront to the Australian soldiers, who were not used to this kind of discrimination … they had come to defend the British Empire but the representatives of the empire - the white European community - did not want to know them socially."
Grant says the Australians were forced to socialise in the Indian and Chinese clubs. "Such actions, as well as some of the merrymaking and larrikin behaviour of the troops, led the white colonial community to accuse the men of the AIF of lowering white prestige," he says.
Grant says that while the Allied troops defending Singapore were poorly led, the Japanese were ''decisive, well-organised and mobile".
"They attacked aggressively and were able to punch through the ill-prepared lines of defenders, often outflanking them," he says. "This caused panic and confusion and resulted in the series of Allied withdrawals down the peninsula to Singapore."...
...Stanley, who wrote the 2008 book Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, says the attempted defence of Malaya and Singapore heralded seismic changes in white Australia's relationship with Asia, because it was the first time thousands of Australian had interacted with Asians. "...in the long term it brought Australia into a new relationship with the peoples and polities of a new Asia. Tragic in the short term, but not all bad after that."...
...Only five days after the fall of Singapore, Japanese planes bombed Darwin, an event to be remembered at services in the Top End on Sunday, and which the federal and Northern Territory governments want to elevate in the consciousness of Australians to the level of Gallipoli and Kokoda..."The Japanese wanted the resources of the region and got them over 1941 to 1942," Stanley says...
...Stanley says in the 70 years since the fall of Singapore many Australians have come to affectionately know Japan, its people and its culture...
Grant says that while the battle has been recognised as a symbolic moment in Australian national history..."It was Britain's greatest military defeat, the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
"For Singapore and Malaysia it is seen as a departure point on the road towards independence."
http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-day-the-empire-died-in-shame-20120214-1t462.html
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