“On this first day of the new year, I breathe the air of the South,” Tomoyuki Yamashita wrote in his diary as the pivotal year of 1942 opened on an IJA in motion across Southeast Asia. “I was up at 5 am and it was already hot. I must put away recollections of the past. My duty is half done, although success is still a problem. The future of my country is now as safe as if we were based on a great mountain. However, I would like to achieve my plan without killing too many of the enemy.”
Writing of the Japanese tactical plan in the Malay Peninsula as 1942 began, Masanobu Tsuji could have been speaking of the Japanese strategic perspective on the entire operation from Sumatra to Luzon when he observed that “the 5th Division pushed southward as fast as possible in order to give the enemy no time to develop new defensive positions.”
However, on New Year’s Eve, it was Tsuji who was scrambling for a defensive position. As the bridge work on the Perak River was ongoing, the spearhead of Japanese 5th Division infantry troops, specifically Major General Saubro Kawamura’s 9th Brigade, including the 41st Infantry Regiment, continued cycling southward on the highway. They had penetrated another 40 miles southward toward the capital of British Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, and had reached a point north of the city of Kampar by December 30. Tsuji and a couple of aides had “requisitioned” an automobile in Ipoh and had decided to drive south “to share a glass of wine with the troops in the line to celebrate the New Year on the battlefield.”
As they approached Kampar, they came under fire from British artillery in the surrounding hills. The 11th Indian Infantry Division, temporarily commanded by Major General Archie Paris (of the 12th Indian Infantry Brigade), had chosen Kampar to erect the sort of defensive barrier the defenders should probably have established on the Perak. Tsuji arrived just as the battle was being joined, and apparently he left shortly thereafter, as Kawamura’s troops undertook a bloody fixed battle that halted the Japanese advance for four days.
At exactly the same time that the battle of Kampar was taking place, Tsuji’s boss, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the commander of the 25th Army, was implementing a daring tactical move with which his planning officer, Tsuji, fervently disagreed. Indeed, it would result in a brief tantrum of gekokujo from Tsuji that threatened to mar the amazing precision and achievement of the operation thus far.
Yamashita’s plan – brilliant in retrospect as are all unorthodox plans that succeed – was to circle behind the British defenses. This plan, conceived before the battle of Kampar, was to outflank Archie Paris’s 11th Division line, which ran for roughly 30 miles, from Kampar to Telok Anson (now Teluk Intan), where the meandering Perak River flows into the Straits of Malacca. Using the motorized landing boats from the Singora landings that had been brought up for the Perak River crossing, as well as others captured along the way, Yamashita would land 1,500 men, mainly from the 5th Division’s 11th Regiment, behind the enemy’s lines, south of the mouth of the Perak.
Tsuji complained that he was sure the men would be intercepted by British air or naval assets, and not only the men, but vessels necessary for the eventual landings on Singapore’s fortress island, would be lost. In his memoirs, Tsuji writes dramatically that as he watched the regimental commander walk away to undertake the operation, “I could see the shadow of death on his back.”
The contingent put to sea late on December 30 from Lumut, and landed on January 4 near Sungkai. While en route, they were strafed once, but only once, by British aircraft. Realizing that they were sitting ducks for a determined air attack, they expected to be finished off at any moment, but the British never returned. The “shadow of death” that Tsuji had seen was merely an apparition. Yamashita’s plan worked.
In the meantime, Kawamura’s spearhead, reinforced by replacements rushing south from the Perak River crossing, were able to claw their way through the 11th Indian Division positions in Kampar and the surrounding hills. The 11th suffered severe casualties in the battle, but Japanese 5th Army’s 41st Infantry Regiment, which bore the brunt of the unexpectedly difficult fight, had to be withdrawn from combat to regroup.
Despite the damage inflicted to the Japanese at Kampar, this battle had been conceived as a delaying action, not as a counterattack, and in the aftermath, the British executed a further withdrawal, this time to the town of Slim River (now Sungai Slim), near the river of the same name. Meanwhile, any small measure of satisfaction that might have been gained from the successful holding action was offset for the British by the discovery of Japanese troops in their rear along the coast. This only served to hasten the withdrawal and add to the confusion.
The 11th Indian Division defensive position began 4 miles north of Slim River at Trolak, because farther south, the dense jungle gives way to open terrain, which is less easily defended. The total distance from Trolak to the road and rail bridges across the Slim River was about 16 miles.
The 5th Division spearhead, now Colonel Tadao Ando’s 42rd Infantry Regiment, reached Trolak on January 5, and exchanged fire with the defenders. The following day, a detachment of more than a dozen tanks under the command of Major Toyosaku Shimada caught up to the 42nd. While Ando favored a flanking operation through the jungle, Shimada insisted that his tanks would get bogged down in this terrain, and successfully argued for their use in a frontal attack along the highway.
This assault began under cover of darkness at about 3:30 am on January 7 with Shimada’s tanks leading the way. However, when the first three tanks were taken out by antitank defenses, the attack stalled because the thick forest crowded the edges of the road and there was no way for the following tanks to immediately bypass the burning tanks. This left a traffic jam which, like the Japanese troops at sea a few days earlier, left the Japanese as sitting ducks for an air or artillery attack. However, as in the case of the contingent in the boats, luck was with the Japanese, and an attack never came.
At first light, Shimada’s men were able to find a bypass road though the jungle, and by 6:00 am they and the 42nd Regiment infantry had managed to break through the first enemy defensive position. From here on, the vanguard of Shimada’s force, tanks under the command of Lieutenant Sadanobu Watanabe, executed a dash through British defenses that would have been worthy both of the axiom of a hot knife through butter, and of praise from the most audacious of the Panzer unit commanders of the Wehrmacht.
The next strong point, in and around the town of Trolak, was manned by the 2nd Battalion of the British Army’s Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regiment (ASHR), a recently arrived unit which had been trained specifically for jungle warfare and attached to the 11th Indian Division. They were caught largely by surprise, having not yet prepared their defensive positions. Watanabe’s tanks managed to break through quickly, splitting the Highlander force, and penetrating the positions of the 28th Gurkha Brigade, while inflicting heavy casualties among the defenders.
This done, Watanabe raced the retreating enemy toward the road and rail bridges across the Slim River, which lay several miles ahead. Indeed, having cut through lines of combat troops, guns blazing, the tanks dashed straight through rear echelon and headquarters units as the British officers stood by slack-jawed.
By mid-morning, Watanabe had slashed through the 11th Indian Division headquarters and had reached the Slim River highway bridge before the British engineers could destroy it. Indeed, much of the 11th Division force was still north of the bridge.
At this point, Watanabe dismounted and dramatically cut the wires leading to the demolition charges with his samurai sword. In his memoirs, Masanobu Tsuji writes that when the 42nd Regiment infantry arrived to secure the bridge, Watanabe led ten tanks and a contingent of infantry across the bridge and secured three additional bridges across other streams in rapid succession. The British resisted at the next bridge, and Watanabe, though now wounded, was able to capture this one as well before halting for the day.
In his book Singapore Burning, Colin Smith quotes Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Harrison, a British artillery commander who was at the battle, as paying a respectful comment to Watanabe. “Heedless of danger and of their isolation they had shattered the [11th Indian Division],” Harrison admits. “They had captured the Slim Bridge by their reckless and gallant determination.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ian Stewart, commanding the 12th Indian Brigade, meanwhile, accepted the blame for having not destroyed the line of tanks at the beginning of the battle when it might have made a huge difference in the outcome. As he wrote to the British Army’s official historian after the war, “I am rightly criticized for … not using the Field Artillery in an anti-tank role … It is no excuse, but I had never taken part in an exercise embodying a coordinated anti-tank defence or this type of attack. The use of tanks on a road at night was a surprise.” “Surprise” had been the purpose of the night attack, and this gamble, which might have failed, worked splendidly for the vanguard of Yamashita 25th Army.
If the time it took his engineers to rebuild the Perak River bridge is an indication, capturing the Slim River bridges intact shaved a week off Yamashita’s timetable. Meanwhile, the battle of Slim River devastated the 11th Indian Division. Its 12th and 28th Brigades were so badly mauled that they were practically erased, as was the 2nd Argylls. As many as 500 men were killed, and more than 3,000 were captured. Of those who were unable to retreat southward along the main road, a few managed to escape into the jungle. Some were captured and others simply disappeared. One man was found alive, still living off the land, in 1949.
As the morale of the IJA soared with every victory, that of the Allied defenders plummeted. Kenneth Attiwill later wrote:
brooding above all, adding weakness to morale as well as to military efficiency, lies the jungle itself – a terrifying morass of tangled vegetation, steamy heat, nerve-racking noises and the discomfort of insects; mosquitoes by the myriad, moths, beetles, insects of all kinds, biting, buzzing, irritating and debilitating. Rubber, too, with its gloom, dampness and sound-deadening effect breeds a feeling of isolation. The enemy may be anywhere – everywhere – in front or behind to left or to right. Noise is difficult to pinpoint; men appear and disappear like wraiths. Rumor begins to spread. In the monsoonal season there is the added handicap of torrential rain, hissing down incessantly upon the greenery, dripping dankly on heads and bodies, humid, sweaty, destructive.
Speaking of himself, Attiwill went on to say that:
it was like this for the young and inexperienced troops who took up their places for the first defensive battle of the Malayan campaign, a battle which was noteworthy for two reasons – it was Britain’s first defeat in the jungle; it was the pattern of future defeat in all the attempted defensive actions down the Malayan peninsula.
Masanobu Tsuji recalls debriefing an unnamed British brigade commander who was among the large army of prisoners that had been captured, asking, “Why did your men raise their hands so quickly?”
“For what reason did you attack only on the front where we had not prepared to meet you?” replied the British officer. “When we defend the coast, you come from the dense jungle. When we defend the land, you come from the sea. Is it not war for enemies to face each other? This is not war. There will be no other way than retreat, I assure you.”
As Tsuji comments, “this criticism was characteristic of the British attitude throughout the whole period of operations, and was common to every front.”
The stunning British defeat at the Slim River and the equally surprising Japanese amphibious landings along the coast were met with great consternation by the British. The initial outflanking maneuver along the coast had worked so well that Yamashita conducted more of these using troops of General Takuma Nishimura’s Imperial Guards Division.
On January 22, having learned of this turn of events, Winston Churchill penned a scathing memo to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, complaining that:
we have been absolutely outmanoeuvred and apparently outfought on the west coast of Malaya by an enemy who has no warship in the neighbourhood. Consequently our forces are made to retire from successive positions, precious time is gained by the enemy, and a general state of insecurity engendered in our fighting troops. The shortcomings are only too evident. Why were the enemy allowed to obtain all these craft? We apparently have none or very few, although these were waters we, until recently, controlled… This command of the western shores of Malaya by the Japanese without the possession of a single ship of war must be reckoned as one of the most astonishing British lapses recorded in naval history.
As the Imperial Guards Division leapfrogged down the Malacca Coast, the 5th Division continued south on the main highway where the next major milepost was Kuala Lumpur, the capital and, with a population of 80,000, the largest city in British Malaya. It was an objective long on symbolism, but short on defense. Arriving on January 11, the Japanese troops were met with only sporadic gunfire, and swept through the city easily. The British Army had abandoned the city.
The RAF base at Kuala Lumpur was occupied and prepared for Japanese aircraft operations. All of the government buildings were taken over and made ready for the subsequent Japanese occupation administration, and the infamous, Victorian-era Pudu Prison was transformed into a POW holding facility. The prison complex, designed by the British to include a caning area on the grounds, went on to be used by the Japanese as a torture chamber.
In the railyard at Kuala Lumpur, the Japanese found more than a dozen entire trains which had simply been abandoned because the single-track main line between there and Singapore was so heavily clogged with southbound traffic. In one car, they discovered stacks of boxes of highly detailed maps of Singapore, which had just been printed in Kuala Lumpur and were awaiting shipment to Percival’s garrison. For Yamashita, it was an incredible gift.
The disasters of early January resulted in a rethinking of British strategy and a decision to regroup south of Kuala Lumpur, and stop the Japanese advance at a place barely 70 miles north of Singapore where the broad Muar River and its swampy flood plain were nearly a mile wide. For this action, Wavell and Percival pulled the badly beaten 11th Indian Division out of the fray entirely, replacing it with the Australian 8th Infantry Division under the command of Major General Gordon Bennett.
When World War II had begun in September 1939, Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies had decided to augment Australia’s small peacetime militia by mobilizing the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (AIF). As with the 1st AIF, which had been formed in World War I, the primary mission was in support of Great Britain, to which Australia was tied as a member of the British Empire. The 2nd AIF was comprised ultimately of four infantry divisions (6th through 9th) and the 1st Armoured Division. However, all but the 8th Division and the 1st Armoured had been deployed to help the British fight the German Afrika Korps in North Africa. The 8th Division, less the 23rd Brigade, was sent to help the British defend Malaya.
The British and Australians constructed their stand on the Muar River around two strongpoints, both part of an amalgam of units known as Westforce. A smaller contingent, known as Eastforce, was assigned the task of slowing the progress of the Japanese 18th Division on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula.
The westernmost components of Westforce included elements of the 53rd Infantry Brigade of the British Army, and the fresh, but not fully trained 45th Indian Brigade. They faced the Japanese Imperial Guards Division at the mouth of the Muar River, overlooking the Johor Strait, south of the Straits of Malacca at the city of Muar.
The inland component of Westforce faced the Japanese 5th Division along the main highway near the town of Gemas. The units involved included elements of the 8th Indian Brigade and the 27th Australian Brigade, a component of the 8th Australian Division.
Churchill had ordered that the 5th Army should be ambushed, and the ambush site chosen was the Gemenchah (or Gemensah) Bridge, which crossed the small Kelemah River, north of the main crossing of the Muar River. The unit picked to execute the ambush was the Australian 2/30th Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Frederick “Black Jack” Gelleghan.
At about 4:00 pm on December 14, the first bicycles of the 5th Division arrived and were allowed to pass. As the motorized vehicles and tanks arrived and began crossing the bridge, 2/30th Battalion’s Company B detonated explosives under the bridge and began raking the bicycle troops with machine gun fire. The Japanese troops, exposed on the road with their rifles tied to their handle bars, suffered heavy losses. The Japanese managed to cut the Australian field telephone line so they could not call for artillery support, but Japanese artillery fell along the road, inadvertently hitting the Japanese troops.
All but a handful of the Company B men managed to slip away to join the remainder of their battalion on the road between Gemas and Tampin. The following day, after Japanese airpower raked the Australians in and around Gemas, and Japanese engineers repaired the Gemenchah Bridge, the 5th Division resumed its offensive.
The Australians of 2/30th Battalion met them with antitank guns, inflicting a disproportional level of damage before withdrawing. The “Diggers” as the Australian troops had referred to themselves since before World War I, had made a good account of themselves in a difficult campaign in which the momentum was against them.
Hearing of the successes of his troops, General Bennett, who was in Singapore, bragged to the media that his men had stopped the Japanese and would soon be pushing them back. Perhaps, if only for a moment, he actually believed his own hyperbole.
On the coast at the mouth of the Muar River, it was the opposite story. The Japanese Imperial Guards arrived late on January 15, and as there was no bridge, they commandeered ferries and sampans, and attempted to cross the following morning. Turned back by Australian artillery, the Japanese moved upstream and crossed successfully at the city of Muar.
Here, the Japanese artillery barrage fortuitously caught the headquarters of the 45th Indian Infantry Brigade, injuring its commander, Brigadier Henry Duncan, while killing or injuring his staff officers, and the battalion commanders. Ill-prepared to begin with, the 45th was now largely leaderless and easy prey for the Japanese, who outflanked and nearly destroyed it. The few survivors fell into a headlong retreat toward the town of Bakri about a dozen miles to the south.
Also on January 16, the heroic Australian 2/30th Battalion successfully withdrew from their increasingly untenable position on the highway at Gemas. They had fought bravely, and they had cost Yamashita’s 25th Army around 1,000 casualties, but had delayed his offensive by only two days.
On January 17, Brigadier Duncan was ordered to pull together what remained of his brigade and recapture Muar. However, the battered troops were attacked before they could get underway, and found themselves back on the defensive.
By this time, the Imperial Guards had barged their tanks across the Muar River, and the following morning they used them to assault the position in Bakri held by the 45th Brigade, and now supported by the Australian 2/29th Battalion.
Taking a page from the playbook of Sadanobu Watanabe in the Slim River battle, the commander of the Imperial Guards spearhead tank detachment, Captain Shiegeo Gotanda, rushed the entrenched troops without infantry support. This had worked for Watanabe because he had been slicing through unprepared troops caught suddenly in unprepared positions. Gotanda was attacking troops who had been preparing all night to resist his attack. As a result, all of Gotanda’s tanks were knocked out by Australian antitank gunners.
Having suffered an unanticipated setback on January 18, Tomoyuki Yamashita ordered the Imperial Guards to undertake an encirclement of the 45th at Bakri, as well as of elements of the British 53rd Brigade farther south at Yong Ping, who were to cover the withdrawal of the 45th. This movement also included another seaborne assault, with the fleet of landing boats delivering a sizable contingent behind the lines of the defenders.
After some skirmishing against the 53rd on January 19, Nishimura closed the jaws of the beartrap of encirclement on January 20, albeit after the 45th had begun its withdrawal. Many of the troops managed to slip through the net, although Brigadier Duncan, who had recovered from the concussion suffered in the Muar bombardment, was killed leading a fixed bayonet counterattack.
Now led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anderson, the battered 45th headed south toward Batu Pahat, where a last stand took shape at the Batu Pahat Bridge. By now, it was a retreat under fire, as the Japanese were nipping at their heels and harassing them from the air and with ambushes. On January 22, realizing that they could not escape as a unit, Anderson ordered his survivors to disperse into the jungle, leaving the wounded behind at the mercy of the Japanese. According to historian Colin Smith, the 45th Brigade and the supporting Australians had begun the week with 4,000 men, but only about 900 managed to make it through to British lines north of Singapore. John Deane Potter puts the respective figures at 4,500 and 850.
The wounded, and the medics with them, were taken to Parit Sulong, confined as prisoners, and later murdered under orders from Takuma Nishimura. Based on the eyewitness account of Australian Lieutenant Ben Hackney, one of two men who managed to crawl away, Colin Smith writes that:
Some of the prisoners were let out of the bungalow to find their captors waiting for them with water and cigarettes which they held just out of reach while a party of Japanese war correspondents took pictures of the captives, about to receive them. When the correspondents had gone, the water was poured away, the cigarettes pocketed and the men bundled back inside … While most of the Australians, the majority roped together like a chain gang, were first shot, some of the Japanese officers decided it was time the samurai swords they carried – often family heirlooms – tasted blood, and practiced their skills on the Indians.
So much for the “Asia for Asiatics” doctrine.
The Japanese had paid a high price for their crossings of the Muar River at Gemas and the stubborn resistance between Bakri and Batu Pahat, but by the last week of January they were within 40 miles of the Johor Strait separating Malaya from Singapore.
Meanwhile, the 18th Division, moving down the east coast of the Peninsula, had met a British Eastforce roadblock after capturing the city of Endau on January 21. In the meantime, the men and materiel intended to bring the 18th up to full strength were en route from Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, escorted by the IJN cruiser Sendai, with six destroyers and five minesweepers.
In January 26, as the reinforcements were being landed at Endau, the invasion fleet was intercepted by two destroyers, HMS Thanet and HMAS Vampire, as well as two waves of British and Australian bombers, all dispatched from Singapore. In the ensuing battle, no ships were lost to air attack, but both of the Japanese transports were damaged by gunfire from the two Allied destroyers. In turn, the Japanese destroyers sunk the Thanet, but the Australian destroyer escaped. Once ashore, the Japanese troops found that the order had already been given for Eastforce to disengage and withdraw toward Singapore.
Though the Japanese momentum was no longer threatened on the ground, the RAF now intervened with renewed vigor, encouraged by the recent arrival of an additional 48 Hawker Hurricanes. Because the airfields on Singapore Island were under constant attack, and many of the first batch delivered on January 3 had been destroyed on the ground, these fighter planes were delivered by the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable to airfields near Palembang on Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. While the Hurricanes had been shown to do no better than to hold their own against the Japanese fighters, at least they could do that, and it boosted British morale to see Hurricanes involved in air-to-ground strafing missions against Japanese ground troops. However, the ground war in Malaya was all but over, and these were another installment in the checklist of measures that were too little, too late.
By January 31, the three Japanese divisions were converging on Johor Bharu, the capital of the Sultanate of Johor, one of the British client states in Malaya. Here, General Yamashita was met cordially by Sultan Ibrahim II, one of the world’s richest men and a long-time friend of Britain, who had made a personal gift of £250,000 sterling to King George VI when he visited the United Kingdom in 1939.
Ibrahim was also no fool. He had had seven weeks to get used to the idea of Japan as a victorious presence in the land and, if only for self preservation, he readily accepted that the Japanese, not the British, were the new colonial masters of Malaya. Masanobu Tsuji reports that the first time he saw Ibrahim’s palace, called Istana Bukit Serene, high on a hill overlooking the Johor Strait, it was flying a Japanese flag.
The sultan was later named as a consultant to the Japanese occupation, and his palace became Yamashita’s headquarters for the invasion of Singapore. Indeed, from the tower at Ibrahim’s residence, the Japanese general could look out and see Singapore Island spread out before him like a map.
In the space of 54 days from the initial landings, the three divisions of the Japanese 25th Army had traveled nearly 700 miles under fire, despite often problematic terrain, and had conquered British Malaya, a task which many prognosticators on both sides believed would take 12 to 18 months. In his report to Tokyo, penned in the comfortable surroundings of the sultan’s palace, Yamashita reckoned that his army had taken 8,000 prisoners, killed 5,000 enemy troops in battle, captured 280 vehicles and rebuilt more than 250 bridges. Yamashita’s men had defeated a force which outnumbered them two to one.
Like many postwar historians, Tsuji cites the lowly bicycle as the single most important weapon in the campaign:
The British Army formations were almost completely equipped with motor cars and trucks, and whenever we were able to steal a march on them and seize bridges in front of them, or destroy their vehicles by shell fire or aeroplane bombing, their soldiers had to abandon their cars and trucks and continue their retreat on foot. Even the long-legged Englishmen could not escape our troops on bicycles. This was the reason why they were continually driven off the road into the jungle, where, with their retreat cut off, they were forced to surrender. Thanks to Britain’s dear money, spent on the excellent paved roads, and to the cheap Japanese bicycles, the assault on Malaya was easy.