The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and The Echo and The Sun. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1945. BACK IN SINGAPORE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 210, 5 September 1945, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and The Echo and The Sun. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1945. BACK IN SINGAPORE

gINGAPORE is back in British hands. The surrender of the base marks the final phase cf the Japanese collapse, and though the news of the return is overshadowed by the earlier scenes of surrender in Tokyo Bay it nevertheless has high dramatic significance to us in this corner of the Pacific, at the end of what was to have been the* Japanese "lifeline" southwards. The fall of Singapore was the greatest single disaster which had marked Britain's military history. The complete surrender of 73,000 men, many of whom had never had a chance to fight, the loss of a base which had cost £60,000,000 to build, of a floating dock which could accommodate 45,000-ton battleships, of a graving dock big enough to hold the Queen Elizabeth, of workshops for the repair of machinery and guns, of the most powerful transmitting station in the world, of huge underground oil and armament depots, of the great air base at Seletar, of enough tanks for an armoured division, of 14,000 lorries, of hundreds of big weapons which the Japanese used against us both in the Pacific and in Burma, the tremendous loss of prestige among the nations of the East, all these combined to make the loss of Singapore a terrific body-blow to the defence of the outer Empire, New Zealand included. The fall was inevitable, because Japan had the third largest navy in the world, and it was almost unopposed, to screen the landing of its troops on the Malayan peninsula, where the fate of Singapore was really settled.

The base, costly as it was, was a bluff waiting to be called because it had no fleet to defend it, and its aerial defences were pitiful. So when the same infiltration tactics which the Germans had used in France two years before were successfully exploited in Malaya, Singapore became a trap in which many thousands of men were caged, while others fought in vain to stem the enemy's march through what was believed to be impenetrable jungle. The guns pointed to sea; it apparently had not occurred to anybody that the attack could come from the land, not even when the French handed over Indo-China. Long before the final fight the fate of Singapore was sealed; bad initial planning had given it no chance. But just as Singapore was lost in the jungles of Malaya its return, if not actually made possible, was at least resoundingly aided by the magnificent achievement of the British forces in the jungles of Burma. When the base fell Japan refused to regard its fall as anything but a stepping stone to Calcutta, Bombay and Ceylon, which "ought to pass economically and militarily under our absolute control if the capture of Singapore is not to be a half-measure. Our right wing in the war stretches logically as far as Aden." The British Navy and aerial forces closed the seaway, in spite of their numerical inferiority, because Japan could not use her navy as a unit of attack; the high command still had to keep lip its strength in home waters as America swiftly recovered from the Pearl Harbour disaster. On the landward side, however, the invader over-ran Siam and Burma, obtained temporary control of the Bay of Bengal and threatened the very frontier of India, while the fleet threatened to cut both the sea routes via the Cape and Aden to India. It could not fulfil the threat, and in the jungles of Burma was begun a campaign which held the border, slowly but inexorably pushed back the foe, made enormous inroads into his reserves of men and munitions, and eventually laid one of the most solid of all the foundations of ultimate victory. It was an army of specialists which Mountbatten trained and led, men who beat the Japanese at their own game, who fought victoriously, not only in the jungle, but through the monsoon, overcoming engineering and other technical difficulties with a success that only genius could have achieved; fighting disease, building up an air force, chiefly American, which hounded the enemy out of the skies and supplied its own ground forces with their every requirement, and steadily defeating a well-equipped army of over a quarter of a million. The surf-ender came when Lord Mountbatten was completing the arrangements for a great. amphibious and concentric campaign in Burma, Siam, Sumatra, Malaya and the South China Sea. His victory would have been just as inevitable as was that of the Japanese when they took the base, but a bloody and costly campaign was averted by the enemy's abject surrender. There will be much research now into the causes of the original disaster. General Bennett summed up most of them when he said that the job of the Army was "above all, attack," and that was not possible to a force inferior in air power, untrained in jungle warfare, and altogether inadequately equipped for the kind of fighting which developed.