West wind, clear

As Japanese aircraft carriers laid waste to the United States navy in Pearl Harbor, the 18th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army landed at Khota Baru in Malaya. Within hours, Khota Baru was in total Japanese control. Troops also landed in Thailand. To avert war, the Thai government quickly cut a deal with Japan, signing a treaty allowing the Japanese free passage. Later that day — still the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack — Japanese bombers flew over Singapore, dropping bombs on the island city. There were also air raids against Guam, a small Pacific Island occupied by the United States. The following day, Japanese troops landed on the beaches of Guam. The governor surrendered quickly, but not before the signals station there had destroyed all its equipment. They did such a thorough job that the occupying Japanese forces never realised that the installation had existed.

Immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack and the various other military operations across Asia and the Pacific, Australia, Britain, and the United States declared war on Japan. In turn, Japan activated the Tripartite Pact, and by the following weekend Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States. In hindsight, this was a mistake, as it meant they were now fighting on too many fronts. But most of Europe was now under Axis control, and the German army had advanced into Russia, and was only ten miles from Moscow. For the Axis nations, victory seemed within reach.

The British command in Singapore received reports of a possible impending invasion. To stop the invasion force before it reached the Malayan coast, they sent out a fleet of five ships, known as Force Z, from Singapore to intercept the Japanese. It has been sometimes claimed that the commander of Force Z, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, made the rather foolish decision to proceed in radio silence, rather than call for air support.1 The reality is that low cloud-cover and unfavourable weather made flying difficult, and support from the local air force bases was not supplied. Two days later, when it seemed that Phillips was going to get his air force support, he was informed that the air base at Khota Baru had been abandoned, and that the northern airfields were quickly slipping out of British control.2

The fleet was located by the approaching Japanese forces. Japanese bombers moved in, dropping torpedo bombs and following them with surface bombing. They sank two of the ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Eight hundred British sailors on the two ships died, most of them by drowning.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, Singapore command had suffered from a torpor of complacency. Now, with a powerful enemy force approaching faster than anyone had thought possible, complacency was replaced by panic.

The Japanese advance toward the Malayan peninsula was rapid, in part due to high-quality espionage before the start of the war. They knew where all the British airstrips were, and they knew the roads, the towns, the locations of British troops, and the details of Singapore’s defences. British military planners believed that the Japanese could not possibly invade Singapore by land, in part because the jungles and the poor state of the roads meant that they would not be able to drive there. The Japanese army arrived with bicycles.

Within ten hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, air raids had begun on United States military bases in the Philippines. Two weeks later, the invasion of the Philippines began in earnest, with the Japanese army landing in the north of the island of Luzon and pushing south toward the capital, Manila.

Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day. On 31 December, the Japanese army seized Manila. Singapore, the vaunted bastion of the British Empire, surrendered on 15 February 1942.

Australia’s new prime minister, John Curtin, made a request to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, for Britain to come to Australia’s aid in accordance with agreements made years earlier. But those plans had been drawn up in peacetime, and Britain was currently embroiled in a full-scale war across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East with the Axis nations.

From 1940 to the middle of 1941, the Luftwaffe — the German air force — had engaged in a prolonged series of air raids on Britain known as ‘The Blitz’, (named after the German word for the operation, Blitzkrieg, meaning lightning). The German Blitz had killed over 40,000 civilians, turning swathes of London and other British cites into wastelands of rubble. British troops were spread across Africa, while German U-boats were patrolling the Atlantic, sinking British naval and merchant ships. And the nations of Finland, Hungary, and Romania were now all under the umbrella of the Axis, and Britain was at war with them as well.

Churchill refused Curtin’s request.

With no aid from Britain, Curtin decided to recall Australian troops fighting in Africa and the Middle East back to Australia. Curtin’s relationship with Churchill was strained as the two argued in fractious telegram exchanges. Churchill was particularly angered by an article by Curtin published in the Melbourne Herald, in which he said, ‘Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’3

Curtin recalled Australia’s 6th and 7th Divisions to Australia. As they returned in troop ships across the Atlantic, Churchill tried unsuccessfully to have the 7th Division diverted to Burma to assist British forces there. As it later turned out, they would have been lost if he had succeeded.

Moving the Far East Combined Bureau out of Singapore was a priority for the British. It was imperative that the Japanese not learn how far advanced the Allied code-breaking efforts had gone, particularly on JN-25.

They sent an urgent request to Australia asking Jack Newman, the head of naval signals intelligence now working with Eric Nave, if he would be able to house the FECB in Melbourne, and if they would be able to commandeer all of Australia’s intercept stations for their own use. Newman had no intention of letting the British arrive and run the show, and wrote back telling them that, regretfully, there was no room for them.

Newman did not tell Eric Nave about the request or his response, but Nave discovered a copy of the exchange in paperwork that was left about the office. Emotionally connected to Singapore and oblivious to the politics, he was mystified as to why Newman would refuse to allow his former workmates to come and join them.

Rebuffed by the Australians, the Far East Combined Bureau FECB relocated to Colombo, boarding a ship at Selatar naval base in such a hurry that important equipment — including a replica ‘Magic’ cipher machine — were left on the docks.

In the chaos of evacuation, many people were left stranded and without assistance. Anyone not directly on the FECB payroll was left behind and had to find their own way out of Singapore. As a result, several British sigint experts followed Nave’s footsteps to Melbourne.