Singapore ‘surrender’ tableau upsets British

Press, 18 March 1981, Page 21

Singapore ‘surrender’ tableau upsets British

By

DAVID WATTS,

“The Times,”

from Singapore

Singapore is quietly going ahead with a controversial plan to build a wax tableau depicting the British surrender to the Japanese 39 years ago. There is already a “surrender chamber,” with waxwork figures showing Lord Louis Mountbatten taking the Japanese surrender at the end of the war. The new tableau is to be built, like the present, one, on the island of Sentosa, off Singapore. The island, which has a comprehensive collection of Second World War attracts Japanese tourists and busL nessmen, many of whom visit the war museum.

The Japanese “surrender chamber” has two rows of light oak tables at which lifesize wax models of the participants are seated: the allies on one side, the Japanese on the other. Lord Mountbatten, who liked to visit the chamber, is flanked by LieutenantGeneral R. A. Wheeler, of the United States, and General Sir William Slim, all looking suitably triumphant. On the Japanese side, General Seishiro Itagaki. commander of the seventh area army, is flanked by Lieuten-ant-General Heitaro Kimura, commander of the Burma area army, and LieutenantGeneral Nakamura, commander of the eighteenth area army, looking rather unshaven and downcast. The tableau is set inside an area surrounded, by

smoked glass through which tourists view the proceedings to the accompaniment of a commentary which does its best to make up for the humiliation of LieutenantGeneral Arthur Percival, the Allied commander at the time Singapore fell. In the background, the strains of “Land of Hope and Glory” ensure that the point is not lost. Nearby, photographs retell that story: Japanese troops pedalling cheap bicycles along expensive, Britishmade roads down the Malay peninsula . towards the fabled guns of Singapore—pointing in the wrong direction.

The Sentosa Development Corporation wants to build the new tableau in the interests. of historical balance and, no doubt, with an eye to all those Japanese tourists. It is part of a plan to exploit the island’s military history which began when the British developed it as a fortified dump to protect stocks of coal for its wide-ranging merchant fleet

Accordingly, the corporation has been looking for photographs and detailed information on which to model its layout. There is more than one photograph of General Percival, who was frail even before his years in Japanese prison camps,

marching to the surrender ceremony with General Tomoyuki Yamashita, “the tiger of Malaya.” accompanied by British troops carrying the union jack and ’a white flag. The only photographs of the actual signing ceremony show the British party from the rear seated at a table with General Yamashita glaring from the other side. The corporation believes the photograph was. taken from that angle to spare General Percival’s blushes. It has been trying to find one showing the general’s expression, but it has received little

help in. its efforts to commemorate what Sir Winston Churchill called: “The worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history.” A corporation spokesman says that the British High Commission is “not very happy about the project; they do not want to give any help.” The British Museum was, according to the spokesman, “tight-lipped” when an emissary went to research the project. “We were surprised at the sensitivity of the British,” one of the corporation staff says. “We do not want in any sense to shame the British. We just want to make the museum ' complete. The Japanese seem to have accepted events during the war

as fact, whereas the British have not” ■ , Opinion ~in Singapore seems to be divided between those who feel the projected tableau will record an objective historical fact and those who feel it will be a monu-

ment to aggression. Many older Chinese still remember with horror the years of Japanese occupation. Others, who have lived so long now with a large post-war Japanese community, have come to see the difference between today’s • salary-man and the kempei tai (secret police) officer who ran Singapore during the war. ' < ...... ’ .'J

One Briton was unequivocal about celebrating British ignominy in wax: “It is like putting up a tableau showing Hitler dancing a jig at Ver-j sailles.” J If the idea comes to fru-j ition, however, it might! prompt wider knowledge of 1 the role of the unfortunate? General Percival, who took command in Singapore only months before the Japanese invasion and ..found training and inadequate. i No general could have turned, the situation round in the time available. General Percival was retired soon after he returned to England at the end of the war and was still regarded by the army and the establishment: with disfavour when he died in 1966.