After landing in Thailand and Malaya on December 8, 1941, the Japanese moved swiftly southwards and on January the causeway linking Singapore island with the mainland was blown by British engineers. On the night of February 8, the Japanese crossed the Johore Strait, and made good progress against a disorganized defense. Although Churchill had ordered that the battle should be fought “to the bitter end,” the loss of much of the city’s water supply persuaded Lieutenant General Arthur Percival to surrender. Churchill called the surrender, of some 85,000 men, “the worst disaster… in British military history.”
Singapore’s coast defense guns, like this one, became the topic of ill-informed postwar criticism. They were designed to engage warships, and so they naturally pointed out to sea — though some could also fire inland. From 1937, British planners recognized that the main threat to Singapore came from landings to it’s North.
Some women, children, and key specialists were evacuated. The decision as to whether wives and children should be evacuated was an agonizing one, and for many families this grim parting in Singapore’s bomb-ravaged docks was the last.
Surrender negotiations began at 11:30 on the morning of Sunday, February 15th, when a ceasefire was arranged. There was a surrender ceremony in the Ford factory at Bukit Timah that afternoon: the British delegation was kept waiting outside before it began.
The fall of Malaya and Singapore left the Japanese free to turn their attention to Burma, where the British were to wage their longest Second World War campaign. Yet it was certainly not an exclusively British campaign, for Indian and African troops, along with combatants from many of Burma's indigenous peoples, fought in it, and American aircraft and special forces played their own distinguished part. Invasion proper began on January 19, 1942, the Japanese cut the land route between India and China in April, and by May the surviving defenders, now commanded by Lieutenant General “Bill” Slim, had reached the borders of India after a gruelling retreat. The photograph above, which just predates the Japanese invasion, shows Indian troops, upon whom the defence of Burma largely depended, marching past a pagoda.
The British destroyed much equipment m order to prevent it from falling into Japanese hands. Here the task of demolition goes on.
Although photographs like this were useful for propaganda purposes, this shot of Japanese entry into the southern Burmese town of Tavoy makes the point that many Burmese regarded Japanese invasion as an opportunity to escape British rule.
