Episode 2 Singapore 1942: End of Empire

On the 8th of December, 1941, with World War II raging in Europe,

Japan seized the opportunity to launch a brutal campaign

to expand its empire and expel the white colonials from Asia.

The Japanese despised the Anglo-Saxon powers that had

occupied most of Asia.

The propaganda at the time is all about ridding Asia of the white man.

They bombed the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor,

landed infantry in British Malaya

and blasted the British fortress of Singapore.

In just 55 days, the Japanese Imperial Army pushed the British Empire forces over 600 miles southward down the Malay Peninsula.

After all these years in which colonial subjects

had genuinely grown up to believe that the Empire was invincible,

they see the Empire and its troops collapsing like a house of cards.

One of the few units to fight the Japanese at their own game

was the jungle-trained Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

Get back!

Despite heavy casualties, they guarded the approaches to Singapore

as thousands of troops and refugees retreated to the stricken city.

The thought in everybody's mind was that Singapore was the place to be,

where you could be safe.

Ha. How wrong we were.

The Japanese invasion ignited smouldering ethnic tensions

among the local Chinese, Malay and Indian communities.

I saw with my own eyes their reign of terror...really change us.

The fall of Singapore was not only Britain's most humiliating defeat of World War II,

but the tipping point that changed South East Asia for ever,

and heralded the beginning of the end of the British Empire.

For nearly 150 years,

Singapore, on the southern tip of the Malay peninsula,

was the jewel in the crown of Britain's East Asian colonies.

In early 1942, with the Japanese on the doorstep,

the colonial population on the besieged island appeared to be in denial.

The ballroom at Raffles Hotel was shrouded in black curtains,

but the orchestra still played from eight till midnight.

Of course, there were people who seemed to ignore what was going on.

There were parties in the Raffles Hotel and places like that,

among the colonial elite.

But I think it was...

they were just fooling themselves by their own propaganda

of Singapore being an impregnable fortress.

There was a very long tradition throughout the British Empire

of putting on a dinner jacket

before you go out to face a mob of screaming natives

who would chop you to pieces with their pangas or whatever it may be.

This is how the British maintained the illusion of Empire for all those years.

We heard that the Japanese were getting nearer

and my father wrote this letter to my mother saying,

"Don't worry, darling, you and Catherine will be all right.

"I think the old Jap is bluffing and we're cornering him all roads.

"Is there much doing round Singapore?

"I expect there's quite a stir on.

"Well, darling, remember what I say. Don't worry and keep your chin up."

Really, the whole attitude in Singapore at the time

was that Singapore was impenetrable, they had big guns

facing out to sea, and a fine aerodrome.

And they didn't think for one moment that the Japanese

would have the temerity to attack.

MEN SPEAK JAPANESE

Having driven the Empire forces back to Singapore,

General Tomuyuki Yamashita, the Commander of the Japanese Imperial Army,

was massing his troops in Johore,

just across the causeway linking the mainland to Singapore Island.

The Battle of Singapore has started.

Lieutenant General Arthur Percival,

the Commander of the British Empire forces,

was confident his defences would hold, but needed to secure the island.

PIPERS PLAY

On the 31st of January, after the last troops,

the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, had crossed the causeway,

he ordered it to be blown up.

We were stationed just over the causeway,

about 200 yards down the road, and we watched them piping across

the last of the Argylls, then the blowing up of the causeway.

It was as if you'd burst a little balloon. And we said to them...

After it died down we said to the officers,

"Look at that bloody little hole. That's not much good."

He says, "Oh, that's only temporary because we'll be advancing."

Just across the causeway stood the Sultan of Johore's palace.

The Sultan, now siding with the Japanese,

allowed General Yamashita to set up his headquarters there.

From the top of its five-storey tower, Yamashita could clearly see

the displacement of Empire troops on the north of the island.

The General was quite safe.

Constrained by colonial decorum, the British had promised the Sultan

his palace would not be shelled in the battle.

We reckoned that we saw Yamashita up in the tower at the Sultan's palace.

We saw binoculars at a certain angle, and we said,

"They're spying on us."

And I said, "We can fix that.

"We can blow that down with one six-gun salvo."

And the officer said, "You're not allowed to do that."

I said, "What do you mean we're..."

He said, "You're not allowed to upset the Sultan of Johore."

The British said, "He might get upset after the war."

Now trapped on the island, Percival pinned his hopes on

18,000 British reinforcements on their way to Singapore.

But as the Malayan campaign had rapidly turned into a rout,

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill began to view Singapore as a lost cause

and threatened to turn the ships around and start evacuating the island:

"Obviously the decision depends on

"how long the defence of Singapore Island can be maintained.

"If it is only for a few weeks,

"it is certainly not worth losing all our reinforcements and aircraft."

Australian Prime Minister John Curtin

saw Singapore as Australia's front line and weighed in:

"After all the assurances we have been given,

"the evacuation of Singapore would be regarded, here and elsewhere,

"as an inexcusable betrayal."

Curtin's pressure worked.

Churchill gave up all ideas of abandoning Singapore

and the 18,000 British reinforcements proceeded to the island.

We rushed pell-mell into Singapore.

There was a line of trucks right up close to the vessel on the quayside,

and we were just told to jump to it,

chuck our stuff on board, and, as soon as we were in, off we went.

For his part, Curtin feared Japanese invasion so much

that he rushed nearly 2,000, mostly untrained,

Australian reinforcements to Singapore.

The new arrivals joined the loose mix of British, Malay, Eurasian,

Indian and other Australian troops who had survived the rigours of

the Malayan campaign, and were now licking their wounds and regrouping.

Of all the Empire troops preparing to defend the island,

some of the best equipped were the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

Their Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart,

had trained them in jungle warfare.

They'd fought bravely in Malaya,

but had been reduced to just 250 battle-ready men.

The Argylls were reinforced with 210 British Royal Marines.

To get to know each other,

they played a game of football outside the barracks.

Most of the Argylls came from the Glasgow side

and there was always rivalry, the same as the football teams.

So it just carried on in the army.

We marched into the Argylls' barracks, formed up on parade,

Colonel Stewart of the Argylls - great man - welcomed us on parade.

About two hours later there were insults being hurled in the NAAFI

and we were at fighting stations with the Argylls.

It was just a wee argument. It wasnae a big battle.

It was all over in no time, just a bit of rivalry.

At the start it wasn't very friendly,

but after that we got together quite well.

The Marines won the game, but together, the new unit,

the Plymouth Argylls, became a formidable fighting force.

MEN SHOUT AGGRESSIVELY

In desperation,

the British issued arms to local Chinese civilians,

creating a new unit, called Dalforce, that would fight alongside the Empire soldiers.

It was an unprecedented move that reversed a century of colonial superiority.

Britain's position in Malaya rested more than anything else

on British prestige,

and if British authorities admitted to the Chinese civilian leaders

that they needed help, that would raise troubling questions about

British prestige and the British ability to protect Singapore.

Only the threat of defeat by the Japanese really dispelled

that kind of reluctance.

The Chinese in Singapore had a longstanding hatred of the Japanese,

stretching back to Japan's brutal invasion of China,

and the men of Dalforce were prepared to die fighting them.

There would be Chinese Nationalists, Communists,

and of course there would be mixed motives.

There were some local Chinese who had affinities with this place,

those who were born here. Some had been here for centuries, perhaps.

But I would say the majority of them counted China as their homeland,

and China was of course engaged in this life-and-death struggle with Japanese forces, since 1937.

Percival's ragtag multinational army amounted to 85,000 troops.

It comprised a core of experienced

but weary soldiers who'd retreated from the fighting in Malaya,

supported by untrained or unmotivated new recruits.

There were those soldiers left over from fighting,

they were the remnants, with reinforcements.

Some who couldn't even put a bullet in a rifle.

Honest to goodness, that was right.

Although outnumbered, with just 36,000 troops,

Yamashita's men were all battle-hardened and single-minded.

In early February, Yamashita began his assault on Singapore's defences.

He launched a devastating artillery bombardment,

and relentless air attacks.

My father decided that we should sleep in the air raid shelter

because the bombing and the shelling was getting really bad.

Bombs were bursting overhead and all that, so he said we should go

to the air raid shelter under the house, and that's where we stayed.

We had to stay under the billiard table

because there was nowhere else to go.

And then this tremendous explosion, the building seemed to shake.

LOUD EXPLOSION

And Amah got a mattress, put it on top of me,

and then she lay on top of that to protect me with her body.

And I shouted out, "Goodbye Mummy, I'll see you in heaven."

But luckily, it must have been a very near miss.

And of course the next morning when I went up to my room,

and that's what I discovered.

This shrapnel, right in the middle of the pillow where my head would have been.

So I had a lucky escape.

With the Japanese launching two and often three air raids a day,

nearly a thousand civilians were killed during January

and early February of 1942.

MAN: I saw people dying on the road, people injured,

and buildings on fire and crumbling.

The bombing was shattering the long-held faith in the British Empire among the locals.

At 8am that morning, I went to school to sit my final exam

and the paper was history about the British Empire.

So I thought of the irony.

Here we have the bombs falling and we're talking about British Empire.

The modern Japanese Air Force

had all but destroyed the Commonwealth's mainly obsolete fighter planes,

and the skies now belonged to the Japanese.

Percival concentrated on Singapore's land defences.

The British pride and joy were Singapore's 15-inch naval guns.

But they were pointing the wrong way.

In a growing list of defensive errors, British planners assumed

any attack on the island would come from the sea to the south.

The British made lots of assumptions about the Japanese that weren't true.

They assumed that the Japanese couldn't fight, that their equipment was rubbish,

that they'd come from the sea and attack Singapore island directly.

So the British really lost out because they made assumptions,

both racial and technological and tactical and strategic,

and almost every single one of those assumptions proved to be false.

Percival managed to hurriedly swing some of the guns around,

to fire on the Japanese massing at Johore.

But they had the wrong ammunition.

It was designed to fire at ships,

and inflicted little damage on the troops.

Guessing Yamashita would attack to the east of the causeway,

Percival moved 12,000 British and Indian troops towards Serangoon to face them.

When we got to Serangoon, something had strung some wire up,

but very little else.

Wouldn't stop a bloody fox terrier!

Percival hadn't built any beach defences,

thinking it would be bad for the locals' morale to see

the British even contemplating a Japanese landing on the island.

There were a few wild pigs running about,

which made you a bit nervous at night.

And so we strung empty tin cans on the barbed wire, you know,

to make more noise.

In case Yamashita had a different plan, Percival asked

the Commander of the Australian forces, Major General Gordon Bennett,

to send 6,000 of his troops to the other side of the island.

The Australians were to defend

a 12-mile-wide stretch of mangrove swamps to the west of the causeway.

2,000 of Bennett's men were the untrained new recruits.

Defending this expanse of coastline would be a near impossible task.

It was hopeless.

We had about...oh, crikey,

a mile of coastline that we were supposed to look after.

It had nothing.

No barbed wire, no slit trenches, no nothing, and it was just

an open invitation for the Japanese to come and take the island.

I think that's our strongest defensive position.

The normally abrasive Bennett could have objected to

the Australians' vulnerable position

but by now the relationship between the two generals was strained,

and Bennett remained silent.

The 1,000 Chinese volunteers of Dalforce

joined the Australians on the beach head.

They'd completed their training just three days earlier.

Their baptism of fire would be fighting alongside Australians in an exposed position

against the crack troops of the Japanese Imperial Army.

From his vantage point on the mainland,

General Yamashita had a clear view of the Empire forces' positions.

The master strategist readied his troops to land on Singapore Island.

He chose the sparsely defended Australian and Dalforce position,

where the Straits were at the narrowest.

Two Australians swam out into the straits there between it,

and came back with the information that Japanese were preparing boats in that area.

And the British went and said,

"No, no, they're going to land up at the other end.

"They've got a lot of traffic running up and down there."

There was a lot of traffic heading towards the north east,

but it was part of General Yamashita's plan to fool Percival

into believing he would attack the large British force positioned there.

To further confuse Percival about his invasion plans,

on February the 6th, Yamashita ordered the shelling

of both the north east and north west defences.

Oh hell, some people who had been in World War I said it was worse

than the shelling by the Germans in World War I.

I know in my platoon area,

I counted 100 shells landing in five minutes.

It was endless.

The Commonwealth artillery responded resolutely.

Frontline gunners abandoned any concerns

about offending the Sultan in his palace.

We were firing into Johor Bahru, hammering right, left and centre

and were told not to be firing there.

We said, "Sod 'em, give em it!"

Very unfortunately, we were in between the guns behind us

and on the other side,

the Japanese fire was just passing our house with a whizzing sound.

And this side, they're firing and it's landing on the other side,

also on top of our heads.

On the 7th of February, Yamashita sent troops on a diversionary attack

to fire across the water at the main British position

to further convince Percival he was going to land there.

Indian soldiers fought alongside the Japanese in this attack.

These were men who'd deserted the British Empire forces in Malaya

to form a new unit - the Indian National Army.

Some of them did it because their mates were doing it.

Some because they were furious with the Brits, who they thought had let them down.

Some of them did it because they were diehard anti-imperialists

who wanted to drive the British out of India as soon as possible,

by whatever means available.

Their Commander was the anti-British Nationalist

Captain Mohan Singh.

In this action, Indian soldiers, for the first time in the campaign,

fired on their former colonial masters.

The next night, 13,000 Japanese soldiers embarked

on the six minute crossing of the Straits of Johor.

With Percival still convinced the attack would in the north east,

the Japanese quietly headed towards the Australian and Dalforce troops

spread thinly along the west coast.

They landed exactly where the British didn't think

they were going to land - opposite the Australians.

The Australians had little chance of stopping

the huge numbers of Japanese pouring in.

The Dalforce soldiers fought bravely,

but some were armed with only machetes or shotguns.

Most would die here on the beaches.

Frankly, they were absolutely no match whatsoever

for the combat-hardened Japanese infantry that came at them,

and come at them they did.

The Japanese brushed them aside.

These were brave men who were going up against some of the toughest

combat infantrymen in the world, deserve our respect,

but they were never going to be anything more than a speed bump.

Outnumbered two to one, the pressure became far too much.

The Japanese broke through, gaining a foothold on Singapore Island,

forcing the Australians into a hasty retreat.

Morale and discipline had gone to pieces amongst

the freshly arrived troops, and many deserted under fire.

I think we have to be quite honest here

and confront the shortcomings of Australians in battle at this time.

We have to be very sympathetic to them,

they're young men new to war,

fighting the Japanese Imperial Guard at night in a swamp,

but a lot of them decide they don't want to be there and become stragglers.

So there's a lot of men leaving the frontline,

making their way back, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not,

and it weakens the Australian defence.

The so-called impregnable fortress had been breached.

In just over a day, the Commonwealth forces had lost

control of the causeway, and the entire western side of the island.

On the 9th of February, General Yamashita felt confident

enough to cross onto the island, setting up his headquarters

in time to see the first prisoners taken in the siege.

Sir, there's a cable here.

The next day, a cable from Winston Churchill revealed

the cold-hearted self interest of British colonialism.

"There must, at this stage,

"be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population.

"The battle must be fought till the bitter end, at all costs.

"The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake."

The survival of the civilian population,

the native population, the troops in Singapore were secondary

really to the point of honour at stake here,

which was the preservation of the British citadel in Asia.

And its loss would gravely damage British respect,

British sense of honour in the world.

Churchill was quite prepared to sacrifice some million people

on the island of Singapore to Japanese artillery and Japanese invasion.

He did explicitly say, "fight to the last man,"

meaning the last civilian, as well as the last soldier.

Percival left more than half his army sitting idle

on the north east coast while the Australian and Dalforce troops

took the brunt of the attack.

After three full days, he finally realised he'd been tricked,

and ordered them across the island to support

the retreating Australians, who were now being driven back

towards Singapore town.

The Australians were coming back through the jungle.

It was throwing down with rain, and I'm standing under a palm tree

with a gas cape, one of the waterproof capes on me.

And the Australians were saying, you know, "Get out.

"You want to get out, because the Japs are right behind us."

And in the finish, we found out we were in the front line.

At Bukit Timah, the bruised and battered British Empire Army,

plagued by desertions and riven with discontent, made a determined stand.

As the battle wore on into the night,

the fanaticism of the Japanese soldiers shocked the Empire troops.

It was a pretty fearsome thing

to see a load of charging Japs,

screaming and yelling and wielding swords.

It's an appalling sight.

In the end, the Empire forces at Bukit Timah

had to yield to the fanatical Japanese soldier.

It finally dawned on them that they were fighting an enemy

who was at least their equal.

We were told, "They can't see, they can't fight.

"They're all 'paddy wallopers'", we called them.

The biggest surprise of our life I think when it...

And then especially when we were immediately told

we were going to withdraw.

By 14th of February, the Japanese were overlooking the city.

One million people were trapped within a radius of three miles.

Singapore's very fabric was being torn apart.

I would not have wanted to be in Singapore town.

That must have been the worst place on the planet to be at that time.

The Japanese were terror bombing and bombarding the town,

to try and provoke mass civilian panic and buckle the defences.

They were bombing from the air and shelling with heavy artillery,

and all indiscriminately.

Well over half the city's water supply was going to waste through broken pipes.

I remember my father saying to my mother,

"We're going to lose this war.

"If it's the last thing I do, I've got to get you off the island."

Unfortunately, in the middle of all this,

he went down with malaria and was transferred

to the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore.

Alexandra Hospital was the British military hospital,

and lay in the path of the Japanese advance.

The hospital, built to accommodate 550 patients,

was packed with 900 sick and wounded soldiers.

I saw these soldiers, blood oozing from their bandages.

Many had head wounds, I think.

At 2.30pm on the 14th of February,

retreating Indian troops used the hospital as cover

to fire on the Japanese as they advanced towards the city.

My father said, "Go home,

"pack a box, and be ready to leave, I'm taking my discharge from hospital."

So my mother went home, she got a little box,

packed it with her dance dresses and garden party hats.

Of course, they were reminiscent of a lovely life she'd led in the tropics,

and then a truck took us down to the docks,

and my father was there to meet us.

The ship was packed with women and children.

The ship finally managed to get away from the harbour,

and I can remember waving to my father, who, by this time,

seemed to be all alone on the dock.

As the ship was leaving, a Japanese company in full battle gear

charged into the hospital, looking for the Indian troops.

Finding them gone, they rampaged through the wards,

killing at least 100 defenceless patients.

They went in and bayoneted and slaughtered

doctors, nurses, patients - even patients on the operating table.

As the final moments approached, the Japanese bombing and shelling

took its toll on the civilian population.

It was horrifying to think there were so many bits and pieces.

There were still people dying, some of them were already dead,

there were a lot of broken limbs about.

It was the smell of blood, I think, and smoke that really got to me.

And I just couldn't believe that all this could happen.

With their world crumbling around them,

the British were desperate to escape.

As women and children were crowding onto the ships,

there were accusations that Australian soldiers

were trying to force their way on board.

The British said the Australians were deserters.

That I will confirm.

I will confirm that, in as much as some of us Marines,

we were put in charge of the security of Singapore Harbour.

And I know that there was quite a stand off of Australians

getting aboard the liners that were taking civilian evacuees away.

I think most of the things that were said about misbehaviour

and failures by Australian troops were true,

but it ill-became the British to make them

because there wasn't a shred of evidence the British Army was behaving any better.

Nobody wanted to do this. Nobody wanted to fight.

They were deeply imbued with the European ethic,

"Well, we've given it a go, we've got rotten Generals,

"nobody seems to know what they're doing, the Japanese are bloody good.

"Stuff this for a row of soldiers, we'll chuck it in."

The evacuation of Singapore revealed damning evidence

of the British view of their Asian subjects.

In addition to the soldiers who deserted,

10,000 women and children were evacuated.

7,000 of them were white.

The Europeans are declaring, if you like,

that they really don't belong here by their conduct.

And that leaves the Singaporeans on the quayside,

looking at the ships leaving, scratching their heads

and thinking, "Who really has a stake in this country?"

And the answer is, they do.

Those left stranded on the wharf were condemned to face

the fearsome occupying force now at the gates of their city.

By the 14th of February,

the Japanese had captured most of the Empire force's

ammunition and fuel, and had control of Singapore's main water supplies.

That night, the Japanese entered the outskirts of the city.

Hand-to-hand street fighting in the midst of the civilian population

became a terrifying possibility.

General Percival cabled High Command,

seeking permission to surrender.

Churchill realised the time for public bravado was over,

and the next morning cabled Percival,

permitting him to be the sole judge of the moment.

On Sunday the 15th of February, 1942,

more than 100 years after the British had raised the flag over Singapore,

Percival surrendered unconditionally.

Incredible.

We couldn't understand why and how, or anything else.

It was just impossible to comprehend.

Surrender was terrible.

To think that here was the great British Empire,

and they had just surrendered to these so and sos.

I was near broken...hearted.

We couldn't believe it.

When the surrender came,

we just put a shell up each end of the gun, blew it to pieces.

We thought the British would fight to the end,

and still protect this country, but we were disappointed.

That really gave us a very poor opinion of the British.

In Japan, the victory was seen as the first step in banishing

the colonial powers from the region

and confirming Japan as the rightful steward of Asia.

It's impossible to overrate the shock

that the fall of Singapore inflected on the British people.

They'd been told it was a fortress.

There was this great British Army there,

up against a load of pathetic little Japanese midgets,

and it was going to be defended to the last man.

This was going to be a heroic Imperial saga.

But suddenly they see this huge Imperial army surrendering

to these despised Orientals, to the Japanese,

and they were stunned.

The news of the fall of Singapore shocks the western world.

It's headline news, of course, in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

And it's headline news because it's psychologically disturbing, as well.

Because for 50 years Europeans had invested a huge amount

in building up this bastion of European supremacy in Asia,

and in a stroke it's gone.

In limbo between surrender and capture,

pockets of British troops,

struggling to accept the colony had fallen,

tried to put on a brave face.

# Rule Britannia... #

A soldier came along and said, "It's all over, we've given up."

And we had a bit of a singsong, a lot of British patriotic songs.

# Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves... #

Just something to keep our mind off

from what we're not sure was going to happen to us.

I was only 17.

Would the Japanese take me away from my parents?

Would they shoot me?

I was brought up in a convent to love one another,

to live peacefully with each other, and here we are,

fighting with each other and killing each other, for what?

Why? What was wrong with the world?

While the Japanese rounded up prisoners

and secured the city, Major General Gordon Bennett,

the Commanding Officer of the Australian forces,

paid a few hundred pounds to the skipper of a fishing boat

and escaped to Australia to pass on his supposed expert knowledge of jungle warfare.

Bennett's wilful abandonment of his men,

while he himself escaped to go back to Australia,

is always going to be controversial in Australian military history.

On the one hand, he ordered his unit to stand fast and not move

and make no attempt to escape.

On the other hand, he absconded himself.

You ask yourself about the greater moral

and ethical responsibility of a commander.

Is it not to stand with his men,

and to try to do whatever he could to shield them from what was coming?

Bennett never commanded in battle again.

The soldier who really did know about jungle warfare,

the Argyll's Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart,

was unwillingly evacuated by High Command in the final days.

He was debriefed by Australian commanders, who used his tactics

to defeat the Japanese in the jungles of New Guinea.

For those who surrendered in Singapore,

what lay ahead was over three years in captivity.

30,000 British, 15,000 Australian and 40,000 Indian troops

joined the 30,000 POWs already taken in Malaya.

Unlike Bennett, General Percival stuck by his men,

and went with them into the hell of the prison camps.

Even though he'd led his army to a humiliating defeat,

Percival would retain the respect of his men.

But among the local Singaporeans, what little respect remained

for the Empire forces would quickly be dispelled.

The Japanese marched the defeated Commonwealth troops

through the centre of Singapore towards Changi Prison.

It was to really impress on the local population,

"Don't mess with us.

"Look at your previous masters.

"They have been defeated by us and they are of no use at all.

"They couldn't protect you."

With the former colonial masters gone,

many of the locals saw the Japanese as liberators.

But under the Japanese occupation, the fate of the three main

ethnic groups in Singapore and Malaya would be very different.

The Japanese knew the Indians wanted the British out of India,

so on February the 17th, they assembled 40,000 Indian soldiers

from the Empire forces at Farrer Park Race Course in Singapore.

Mohan Singh, the Indian National Army leader, set about

persuading them to join the Japanese to fight for independence in India.

In an extraordinary display of anti-colonial zeal,

some 20,000 Indians turned their backs on over 200 years of history

and abandoned loyalty to their British king.

That moment at the race course,

when so many Indian soldiers declared for the Japanese,

is a sign that European empires in Asia have numbered days.

The Indians who had deserted the British now became

the jailors of their former masters.

50% percent of them, I think, deserted

and swapped straight over and were kowtowing down to the Japanese.

In fact, it was those unmentionables that the Japanese

put in charge of Changi, the main prisoner-of-war camp.

And if they didn't like you,

they just lashed out with the butt of a rifle.

Any expectations the prisoners of war had that they would be

humanely treated by the Japanese were soon shattered.

Well, if you got out of the road, you were OK, put it that way,

if you understand what I mean.

But they would slap you,

and I remember being hit with one of these.

A clout with a stick.

And I brought one of these home after the war.

I gave it to my mother, and she says to me, "What's this stick for?"

I says, "Mother, that's the sort of stick they used to hit us with."

She says, "A stick like that?"

I says, "Yes, it was a stick like that."

It wasn't just the prisoners who received beatings.

The Japanese inflicted them on each other.

One of the reasons for the brutality of Japanese troops is

the corporal punishment amongst the Japanese troops.

The beating, hitting. It's quite normal for everyday exercise.

So if you were a rank-and-file soldier,

you had to prepare that you be beaten every day by senior officers.

That was habit and custom in the Japanese forces.

So if you were rank-and-file soldiers who, you know,

most suffered from this kind of brutality amongst the Japanese forces,

and then somehow you want a release from your frustration,

you want to beat somebody else.

But the most horrific brutality of the Japanese military system

was reserved for the Chinese in Singapore.

Three days after the surrender,

they rounded up any they considered hostile.

In scenes recalling the brutality of the invasion of China,

an estimated 50,000 Chinese Singaporeans were executed by the Japanese.

There was a real massacre.

There was this infamous Sook Ching purification, you know.

It meant really... kind of a purification campaign.

You think of the more recent ethnic cleansing.

For three years after the fall of Singapore, war raged in the Pacific.

At its peak in 1942,

the Japanese Empire extended over 20 million square miles.

Its land conquests were a third greater than Germany's.

In Malaya and Singapore, the Japanese had a local population

of nearly five million under their control.

But the occupation was driving a wedge between the local Chinese

and Malay communities.

The Second World War overlays an existing tension

between Chinese and Malayans.

The war brings different things to those two groups.

It brings immense suffering to the Chinese.

And for the Malays, although they do suffer from the starvation

and hardship, they manage to evade many of the imposts of the Japanese.

So, in a sense, the war sharpens conflict between those two great ethnic groups.

The Japanese had promised the Malays independence, but it never came.

Instead, they increasingly behaved like a harsh new colonial power.

Every time you saw a Japanese soldier,

you have to bow down properly.

If not done properly, you were beaten up.

The ill-treatment and brutality extended to the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war,

who, by mid-1945, were languishing in the camps,

reduced to a pitiful state by enforced labour.

Some POWs were taken to prison camps in the south of Japan to work in coalmines.

When we got to Japan, I was the soup cook in the prison camp.

We were in the kitchen.

We had to cook a meal for 400 men

and have it ready at 0830 hours.

Now, Bert Kelly, a Welshman, was the rice cook, and all at once,

the most beautiful white light seemed to come in like stage smoke, float up

Bert's body, met at the top of his head and formed into a silver halo.

And I thought, "We're dead," cos you don't get your halo down here.

Then we looked up, and just rising above the horizon

was this odd-shaped, mushroom-shaped cloud.

Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima,

a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Emperor Hirohito surrendered unconditionally.

In the Philippines, Lieutenant General Percival,

who'd survived the horrors of the prison camps,

met up with General Yamashita one more time when he surrendered.

Yamashita would be tried for war crimes and hanged.

On the 12th of September, 1945, the British returned to Singapore.

It was the Japanese turn to be marched through the streets in front of the locals.

As soon as the people saw the Japanese, went around the corner

of High Street towards city hall, in one word, they shouted, "Bagaro!

"Bagaro!" Bagaro means "bloody fool".

The Japanese used to call us bagaro before beating us, you know.

There was a great crowd from the Chinese community.

They wanted to get to them but they were held back.

We were allowed to dance and sing and we went out in the street

when the Japanese were taken away, and we let our hair down.

That was when I realised that we were really free.

Well, that's what we thought, anyway.

One by one, all the old colonial powers returned to reclaim

their colonies - the British to Singapore, Malaya and Burma,

the French to Indochina, the Dutch to Indonesia

and the Americans to the Philippines.

But for the people of South East Asia, things had changed.

Now this time, the attitude towards the British was not like before the war.

There were no more big masters.

We thought it was high time that we ruled our own country.

So this spirit of independence was in everyone's heart.

The British, too, seemed to have had a change of heart.

With independence in the wind,

they were losing their appetite for empire.

Thoughtful British people recognised

that certainly India was bound to go,

that it wasn't sustainable,

and probably that the Asian empire had to go too.

A new generation of British people were much more realistic.

They realised that the day of empires was done.

Singapore and Malaya would take separate paths to independence.

In Malaya, the British feared that underlying ethnic tensions

between the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities

could lead to violence, and wanted unity before they would let go.

The British were trying to sell the idea

that to achieve independence, the races have to, by hook or by crook, work together.

A united party, made up of the three main ethnic groups in Malaya,

started to take shape.

If you're thinking of an alternative to violent revolution,

that was the best solution - to have a party which was broadly

representative of the Malays, and the Chinese, and the Indians.

The three ethnic groups formed an alliance

under the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman and demanded their freedom.

Britain finally granted Malaya independence

on the 31st of August, 1957.

In Singapore, the Chinese were well in the majority,

so here, ideology was a bigger issue than race.

Communists and capitalists clashed.

Both wanted control of the post-colonial government.

For us in Singapore, it was a battle of the minds.

We wanted to form a more equal society.

No-one should be given special rights based on race, language and religion.

No-one is above the other, and we thought it was good for Singapore.

In 1959, Cambridge law graduate and right-wing political leader,

Lee Kuan Yew, won the ideological battle

and became Singapore's first native-born Prime Minister.

Seeking security for his tiny nation,

Lee Kuan Yew held a vision to unite with Malaya.

Merger, stability, security, economic development.

In 1963, he persuaded Tunku Abdul Rahman

to form a new composite state - Malaysia.

But the merger of the two nations

meant that the Chinese were now the biggest ethnic group.

Malays felt threatened,

and in 1964, Singapore saw the worst race riots in its history.

The atmosphere was charged, very tense.

The crowd shouted, "Kill Lee Kuan Yew! Kill Lee Kuan Yew!"

Then I saw suddenly a Malay youth coming in, beating the Chinese.

Eventually, the political tensions and ethnic violence became too much,

and in August 1965, both leaders decided to call it quits.

The two nations split once and for all.

By now, all the old South East Asian colonies had been set free.

The Philippines, India, Burma, Indonesia and Indochina

had all gained independence since the Japanese lit the fuse in 1942.

Some Japanese claimed that this was the intention from the very start,

that Japan would be the...

that Japan was the light of Asia, would be the liberator of Asia.

You treat human beings like human beings, whether they're yellow,

brown, black or white, they deserve to be treated as such.

And the colonials that I have met in the process in Malaya gave me the answer.

And that's why we don't have any empire now.

Once the essential hollowness of the Empire,

the great illusion on which it was founded, this great wedding cake

which collapsed so readily when it was pushed,

then the people of Asia saw that they had a different destiny

and that their imperial masters were not

what they had for so long supposed them to be.

And maybe that did the British a favour

as well as the peoples of Asia.

The fall of Singapore has become a shorthand symbol for a huge swathe of history.

In the battle for Singapore and Malaya, 15,000 soldiers

and 60,000 civilians from more than ten nationalities gave their lives.

It was not only Britain's most humiliating defeat,

it was the tipping point that changed South East Asia forever,

and led to the end of colonialism throughout the world.

The withdrawal of Britain from Singapore,

the withdrawal of France from Indochina,

the withdrawal of the European powers throughout Asia

led to a void that would be filled with something better, with something that would be their own.

And so Singapore then became a symbol for a new kind of Asia.

If the age of European imperialism began with Columbus's voyage in 1492 to America,

then it ended in 1942 with the fall of Singapore.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd