After a brief stop at Colombo, the main port of Ceylon, we sailed eastwards, suspecting that we knew what our mysterious ‘tropical’ destination was but in fact kept properly in the dark. On 6th November, green hills, jungle-clad from their summits to the sea, appeared to starboard, our southern side, and we could make out a similar coast to the north. We were clearly sailing through a bight between substantial masses of land: the Straits of Malacca. Singapore it had to be.
The Orion docked at Keppel Harbour, in the south of Singapore Island. If our journey had been a secret, our arrival certainly was not. A band of the Manchester Regiment was waiting on the quayside playing ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ and other tunes with gusto, the trumpets and tubas and cymbals making their huge summery brass noise. It was triumphant and joyful. A crowd of dignitaries was there: port officers, civil servants, officers. Someone pointed out Lieutenant-General A.E. Percival, the General Officer Commanding Malaya. He was the man in charge of The Fortress, and we had come to help him defend it.
A month later I was living in a khaki canvas tent in a camp by the edge of a road on the east coast of Malaya. It was a pleasant sandy area full of coconut palms, half a mile from the beach. Behind the camp stretched endless regular acres of rubber trees with their thick glossy leaves.
The fine rain was constant in the warm heat, and almost soothing. This cluster of guarded tents was our Regimental HQ, and the thirty signalmen were the heart of the camp. We had our radios set up, their low hum a constant background noise. A man was always sitting in front of each set, headphones to hand, ready to receive or transmit. We were at work. The place was called Kuantan.
We were waiting for an assault by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, which we knew were out there on the sea over the horizon, for we were now formally at war with them.
Early on the morning of 8th December I was sleeping in a trench when a messenger woke me to show me a message with the ominous priority ‘O & U’. This was the code for the highest possible priority signal. The Japanese had attacked all over the Far East; a dreadful attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, all the US battleships destroyed, an air raid on Singapore, and at Kota Bharu two hundred miles to our north, near the border of Malaya and Siam, they had stormed ashore from small boats and landing craft.
The scramble was immediate. Messengers and radio signals went out to all the gun positions, extra men were sent to the observation and guard posts. The urgency and tension were extraordinary, and yet the war still seemed a long way away from this deceptively peaceful tropical camp. It was as though it was taking one last breather before finally pouncing, after all those false starts and premonitions.
I could not see any guns from the camp. They were scattered around the area, among the paw-paws with their heavy yellow gourds and the flame-of-the-forest trees, a mile between each gun so as not to be vulnerable to a massed Japanese naval barrage. I could go out of my tent and walk for a mile, or ride a motorbike even further, and almost forget our deadly business, enjoying the illusion that I was alone in this beautiful place, surrounded by the splendour of its plant life. Then you would come on a single howitzer with sandbags around it standing silently in the forest, the men edgily fingering their rifles.
We kept in touch with them as best we could. Like much else in warfare, signals theory was one thing, jungle practice another. Those cumbersome radios didn’t generate a lot of wattage, when it came to it, and a lot of energy was lost in the surrounding trees, electromagnetic waves soaking into the trunks and leaves, distorting voices, drowning messages in static. We resorted to sending wireless signals down the phone lines, an ingenious improvisation which we christened Line Assisted Wireless, by setting up our aerials a few feet below the overhead wires: the outgoing signals were attracted to the wires and another radio further down the line of wire could capture the signals. We were discovering that our army was part of a connected system, that machines had only limited power. They still needed our voices and our eyes to give them intelligence.
We were forced to rely more and more on our land lines.
There were telephone wires strung around the area, to talk clearly to each other. Our old-fashioned switchboard lent a touch of civilian absurdity to a command centre from which a terrible artillery bombardment could be called down on an enemy; with its plugs and jacks it looked as though it should be in some provincial hotel.
Our troops were mostly Indian: Sikhs to the west of us, Garhwalis to the east. We were halfway up the peninsula of Malaya, which dangles the island of Singapore from its foot, and Singapore was the only reason for our presence on this coast. The island was the ‘Fortress’, the ‘impregnable fortress’ as it was always called in official descriptions, on which the defence of the Empire in Asia depended. The citadel of the fortress was the celebrated naval base in the north of the island, from where the great ships of the Royal Navy could sail out to dominate the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam. Huge 15-inch guns looked out from the southern shore, for that was the way the enemy would come: from the sea. We hoped that our battleships would now be moving out from their base to search for and destroy a Japanese invasion fleet. We were merely guarding an airfield a few miles inland which was part of a chain of defences on the landward side of the island. It had finally dawned on our leaders that the Japanese might attack Singapore from the rear, and perhaps not at night, and from the rear it was anything but impregnable.
I remember precisely, only hours after I arrived in Singapore, a Signals staff officer, some hopeless decent man, telling me that the Japanese could not attack through Malaya. He said ‘there is nothing there. It’s just solid jungle, all the way up. They will not come that way.’
Now it must have been obvious to the staff in Singapore and certainly to my colonel and to every private soldier, that we were, despite the tranquility of our surroundings, trapped and desperate. We had seen a lot of Malaya since we disembarked in Singapore, from Ipoh in the west and right across the waist of the country to where we now were, and it was not solid jungle. It was intensively cultivated, rich land, with good and plentiful roads for traders – or for soldiers.
The one place in the country that lacked roads was Kuantan. If the Japanese drove down on us from the north, there was only one road out for us, to Jerantut, which was about sixty miles inland behind us. East of that town was the river Pahang, a wide fast stream crossed by a ferry. This obstacle course was bad enough, but Kuantan too had its river, a mile west of the town, and it was a horrible sight to military eyes. The river was wide and brown and sluggish, its ferry made up of two rusty barges fastened together, which were moved by winching a cable that stretched from shore to shore: a primitive watery version of the system that worked the old Edinburgh trams would have to rescue us if things went wrong. It spelled massacre and disaster; bad ground and bad water. It was hard for us to imagine who had chosen this spot for us to make a stand, and what good we could do except to die at our posts. Our orders were, indeed, more or less to do just that: to defend the airfield to the last man. The Garhwali troops had to defend eleven miles of beaches and the little town of Kuantan with a pitiful total of four companies. The Sikhs had equally few men. There were no troops at all to defend the coast to our south; and none for the main road out of the trap.
But we were soldiers, part of a great tradition, so we tried not to think about our leaders’ vision and prepared to fight. Besides, the Japanese did not seem a formidable enemy. They had surprised the Americans, we thought, but we were forewarned.