Cruiser (49 page)

On the ground, the burden of the fight fell upon Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest Percival, who had been appointed General Officer Commanding (GOC) Malaya in April 1941. He had survived the horrors of the Somme in 1916, been wounded four times and won a Military Cross. In the inter-war years, he was seen as a solid if unimaginative staff officer. In Malaya, promoted beyond his abilities, that lack of imagination was his undoing. Urged by his staff to strengthen the northern approach to Singapore, where the Japanese would eventually land on the island, he announced that ‘defences are bad for morale, for both troops and civilians'.
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And there was one other unfortunate flaw: Percival looked distinctly odd. Tall and lanky, with buck teeth and very little chin, sloping shoulders, a sunken chest and knobbly knees, he was a caricature of the pukka British staff wallah. Even a sympathetic biographer has said that he was ‘condemned by photography'.
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This should not have mattered, but neither his figure nor his diffident manner naturally commanded loyalty or obedience, most crucially from the unruly generals who were his immediate subordinates. These included the Australian Gordon Bennett.

Of all the officers who might have been sent to command the AIF and its 8th Division in Malaya, Major-General Henry Gordon Bennett was the worst possible choice. A braggart with a colonial chip on his shoulder, his dislike of the British was not a good start. In fact, he didn't like anybody very much. Quarrelsome, suspicious to the point of paranoia, Bennett was a poisonous cauldron of frustrated ambition. He had fought well at Gallipoli and in France in the First World War, finishing with the acting rank of brigadier-general and then returning to civilian life, but, as a part-time militia soldier, he had developed a fierce contempt for the army's senior career officers. He believed they were conspiring to keep him from the top commands, and he nurtured a particular loathing for
General Blamey, who, he sneered, was snatching all the glory in the Middle East – laurels that rightfully should have been his. Bennett was convinced that he should be commanding the entire Australian Army, not merely a division. He feared that his own staff officers were plotting against him – the ‘whispering gallery', he called them – and he played favourites and bullied others mercilessly. He believed in astrology. Some of his senior officers, colonels and brigadiers, thought their commander was not right in the head.

The reality of Singapore is that Percival and his senior commanders, Bennett included, were out-generalled by Yamashita at almost every turn. Brooke-Popham was the first to fail. When he telephoned the Governor to report that the Japanese had landed at Kota Bharu, Thomas loftily retorted, ‘Well, I suppose you'll shove the little men off.'
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Sadly, Brooke-Popham did not. Although he had in place a plan, Operation MATADOR, designed to counter just such a landing, he shrank from activating it without approval from London. Hesitating, Brooke-Popham was lost. Time and General Yamashita beat him. Close to a nervous breakdown, he was recalled home two days after Christmas.

The Japanese, most of them experienced troops blooded in the war in China, swarmed south down the Malayan Peninsula. Individual British, Australian and Indian Army formations made brave but hopeless stands to stem the tide, only to fall back as the enemy outflanked them through the jungle or leapfrogged down the coast in flotillas of small craft. In the skies, the lumpy Brewster Buffalo fighter – ‘the Flying Barrel' – was no match for the Japanese Zero, and airfield after airfield was overrun. Communications were chaotic; one fighter squadron was reduced to receiving its orders from Singapore passed on by the local railway stationmaster. Bennett himself bungled a crucial battle at Muar just north-west of Singapore in mid-January by placing a raw Indian brigade under his command in a suicidal position, which allowed the Japanese to surge through. Lieutenant-Colonel
Charles Anderson of the AIF's 2/19th Battalion won a Victoria Cross in the fighting retreat that followed, but 110 Australian wounded were left behind to be murdered in scenes of unspeakable savagery by the Japanese Imperial Guards Division at nearby Parit Sulong. Typically, Bennett blamed the wretched Indians, but he had demonstrated that he was no better than the British generals he had so arrogantly disparaged.

In Canberra, Curtin and the War Cabinet were beginning to think the unthinkable: that the British would abandon Singapore. On 23 January 1942, the Cabinet sent to Churchill a cable in Curtin's name, although it was almost certainly written by the fiery External Affairs Minister, Herbert ‘Doc' Evatt. The language was acid:

As January drew to a close, Vivian Bowden's reports to the Department of External Affairs painted an ever more depressing picture. Percival, he wrote on the 26th, was simply not up to the job:

It was all for naught. The disaster rolled on like lava from a volcano. On 31 January, the Allies abandoned the Malayan Peninsula and withdrew pell-mell to Singapore. The Japanese
landed on the island on 8 February, scything through the defences – mostly the Australians – that Percival had spread too thinly across a front of 180 kilometres. Churchill sent the Supreme Commander, Wavell, another of his blood-and-thunder herograms:

Wavell flew into Singapore on 10 February. After a round of conferences, during one of which he was nearly killed by a Japanese bomb, he privately concluded that all was lost. Nonetheless, he issued his own ringing do-or-die exhortation for Percival to pass on to his commanders:

That done, he flew back to Java, abandoning Singapore and its people to their fate. There were fine words and flag-waving sentiments in abundance, but they would not stop the Japanese rampage through the island. Bowden suggested to Canberra that he and his two Australian staff – the Assistant Trade Commissioner, Norman Wootton, and his political secretary, John Quinn – should leave on a ship about to sail for Sumatra, but he was told in a reply from Evatt that his departure would be bad for morale. Whose morale was not explained. ‘Anyway there it is,' Bowden wrote to his wife. ‘Naturally I am very disappointed, for the opportunity seemed God-sent, but if my staying upholds national prestige I'm not going to complain.'
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Two days later, recognising that the end was only days away, he cabled again:

On Sunday 15 February, it was all over, in an epic final act. Japanese aircraft were bombing and strafing at will. The great naval base had been abandoned in flames and everywhere across the island there were fires burning beneath a shroud of oily smoke. Rotting corpses lay in gutters and drains. Water and gun ammunition were running low. Government House was in ruins, forcing Shenton Thomas and his wife to doss down in two rooms at the Cricket Club. At Raffles Hotel, where Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham had stayed, the Chinese staff buried the restaurant silver in the garden. Gunfire cracked around Colonial Tudor bungalows whose facades were spattered with bullet holes and where slit trenches had been dug into the once-manicured lawns. European civilians thronged the docks at Collyer Quay, some stoically stiff upper lip, others weeping and begging for a place on the few ships left to make an escape. British and Australian deserters roamed the streets, drunk and violent. Scandalously, some of the Australians had been rushed to Singapore as reinforcements only a fortnight before; barely trained and poorly officered, many unable even to load a rifle, they broke and ran, and one panicked group of perhaps a hundred men forced their way at gunpoint on board a departing tramp steamer, the
Empire Star
, to the disgust of its captain and the women civilians on board. Japanese soldiers stormed into the Alexandra Military Hospital and bayoneted 200 patients, doctors and nursing staff, including one man about to undergo surgery on an operating table. In the Battle
Box, Percival's dank and gloomy command bunker buried in the hill of Fort Canning in the heart of the city, the GOC took the decision to surrender.

Late that afternoon, a sombre quartet of British officers plodded along the road to General Yamashita's headquarters at the offices of the Ford Motor Company at Bukit Timah, just north of the city. Percival was to the fore, still wearing his tin helmet, with a brigadier beside him carrying the Union Flag on a pole. The Tiger of Malaya was waiting for them, seated impassively at a plain wooden table in the Ford boardroom. Head bowed, Percival signed a document of unconditional surrender. With nothing left but their dignity, he and Shenton Thomas went into captivity. The eclipse had taken just 70 days.

Gordon Bennett, with different notions of dignity, had no intention of joining his British colleagues. Unknown to Percival, he had been planning his escape from Singapore since the beginning of February. On the evening of the capitulation – having ordered his own troops to stand fast – Bennett deserted them and fled. With two of his staff – Major Charles Moses and Lieutenant Gordon Walker – he escaped on a sampan that Walker found in the harbour. A British soldier, an accountant in civilian life, noted what he saw:

Bennett made it back to Australia, explaining to anyone who would listen that he had left because his first-hand knowledge of Japanese tactics would be vital in the battles ahead. The true reason was despicable: Bennett still nursed his febrile ambition to eclipse Blamey and command the entire army. Surrender would have ended all hope of that.

At first, he was hailed as a hero, but the army brass spurned him and he was never employed to lead fighting troops again. After the war, a Royal Commission found Bennett ‘was not justified' in relinquishing his command.
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Vivian Bowden's last cable, on the morning before the surrender, was sent from a small handset plugged directly into the telegraph line on the waterfront. It was to the point:

With Wootton and Quinn, he found space on a motor launch, the
Mary Rose
, heading for Sumatra. On 17 February, two Japanese patrol boats stopped them and landed them on Bangka Island in the straits south of Singapore, where they were held in a cinema. Bowden had been told by Canberra to demand diplomatic protection if he was taken, but his Japanese captors were not impressed and he was badly beaten. When he argued with a soldier who demanded his gold watch, he was taken out of the cinema and led away.

‘He drew himself up, squared his shoulders and marched out of the hall between the two guards, who were carrying their rifles with bayonets fixed,' Wootton reported after the war. ‘That was the last that I saw of Mr Bowden, but about half an hour later I heard the sound of two shots being fired, and shortly afterwards the guards returned to the hall and were observed cleaning their rifles.'
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Vivian Gordon Bowden had been made to dig his own grave and was executed as he stood beside it. Almost forgotten now, he merits the approval of history.
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He was not the only Australian to die bravely on Bangka. At an isolated beach, Japanese soldiers marched 22 nurses and a civilian woman into the sea and machine-gunned them. Only one, Sister Vivienne Bullwinkel, survived. Badly wounded, she played dead in the water until the troops departed.