“The worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s un-mincing pronouncement prefaces not a few accounts of the fall of Malaya and Singapore to a relentless Japanese invasion from December 1941 to January 1942. While no expert on the Malayan Campaign at all, it seems to me that the spectacular fall of the British Naval Base in Singapore – and British grand imperial defence strategy along with it, and conversely the ruthless efficiency and capability of the Japanese military machine have too often been the organizing tropes for extant works written on the Malayan Campaign.

Should this chapter of Singapore military history be resigned to being a tale of foreigners slugging it out on Malayan soil without taking into consideration that as a conflict fought in Malaya and Singapore, local communities and groups were inevitably implicated and involved in the violence and chaos?

Dr Lim Choo Hoon’s “The Battle of Pasir Panjang Revisited” [Pointer, 28(1), 2002] in highlighting the “courage, bravery, and sacrifice” demonstrated by the Malay Regiment in the forty-eight hours of battle at Pasir Panjang, an engagement which he admits had little significance from a “purely military operational perspective” [p. 8], is a welcome reminder of local participation in the fierce fighting.

The first Malay Regiment was formed on 1 March 1933 under the auspices of the government of the Federated Malay States, ostensibly to defray the high costs of using Indian battalions. A Major G. McI S. Bruce was appointed the first Commanding Officer of an Experimental Company of twenty-five carefully selected Malay recruits. By 1935, the unit grew to the strength of a hundred and fifty and by October 1938, boasted of a battalion of three rifle companies with a machine-gun support company and a battalion headquarters.

If anything, it is interesting that relations between the Malay soldiers and their British officers were rosy, unmarked by racism or other tensions conceivable in a colonial master-subject relationship. The soldiers’ needs and welfare were well-taken care of, while Major Bruce and his British colleagues in the Regiment learnt Malay and aspects of Malay customs and religion. Furthermore, the former took pains to ensure that the regiment’s uniform, badge and colours retained a Malay character.

The Malay Regiment underwent extensive training, which involved not only operational training but the inculcation of patriotism and loyalty to their country in the Malay soldiers. Correspondingly, the Malay Regiment was ready to be deployed in the defence of the Malay Peninsula when the Japanese invaded Malaya from the north, although a second battalion was formed and added only on 1 December 1941, a week before the Japanese onslaught began. Yet, as Dr Lim also reveals, it was only until the desperate fight to defend Singapore Island that the Malay Regiment engaged in actual combat with the enemy.

The Battle of Pasir Panjang has been largely ignored or scarcely treated by Japanese and Western accounts of the Malayan Campaign and it is only a few local historians who have deemed it as “one of the fiercest battles fought before Singapore fell” [p. 1]. The battle took place in the closing stages of the Malayan Campaign, where the British had withdrawn to the final defence line they had sought to defend while awaiting reinforcements.

On 13 February 1942, the 1^st Malay Brigade, comprising the two Malay Regiments, supported by a few British 18^th Division companies and an British-Indian engineer battalion were defending the British defence perimeter along the junction of West Coast Road and Pasir Panjang Road when they came under attack by the Japanese 18^th Division and 56^th Infantry Regiment.

After heavy fighting and casualties on both sides, the remnants of the 1^st Malay Brigade, namely the ‘C’ Coy (Company) was forced to withdraw to Opium Hill or Bukit Chandu. There, they made their final heroic stand, a desperate and gallant struggle which won the affirmation of General A.E. Percival, GOC Malayan Command [p. 1]. In that battle, one hundred and fifty-nine officers and men of the Malay Regiment were killed and several others wounded. General Percival was to surrender two days later, on 15 February, to render the Malay Regiment’s sacrifice wasted and thinly appreciated except for state-sponsored commemorative efforts – in particular, the opening of “Reflections at Bukit Chandu”, the World War II Interpretative Site opened at Pepys Road in 2002 to commemorate specifically “the gallantry and sacrifice of men of the 1^st and 2^nd Battalion Malay Regiment who defended the western sector of Singapore in February 1942.[i]

Unsurprisingly, Dr Lim’s article pays due attention to 2LT Adnan Saidi who led the 7^th platoon of ‘C’ Coy in the Malay Regiment, a figure that “has since come to personify the meaning of patriotism and dying for one’s country.” [p. 3] A brief account of his life is presented, leading up to his much-lauded display of heroism in the bloodshed on Bukit Chandu, where he refused to retreat despite suffering severe injuries, consequently spurring the gallantry of his company. The drama was to heighten, by the gruesomeness of his execution by the Japanese. According to eye witnesses, he was captured, pushed into a gunnysack and hung by his legs on a cherry tree, bayoneted several times and had his throat slit repeatedly.

Dr Lim’s article, which complements the commemorative effort at “Reflections at Bukit Chandu”, is welcomed indeed. A Google search shows his article being cited appreciatively by local interested individuals, including blogger “Otterman” N. Sivasothi, a Research Officer with the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, NUS.[ii]

Unfortunately, in being written for Pointer, the journal of the Singapore Armed Forces, his emphasis rests largely on illuminating how the last stand of the Malay Regiment “manifested the acme of the fighting spirit in battle”, limiting the broadness and depth he could have presented. Nevertheless, for those interested in finding out more about the Malay Regiment, he cites in his references an academic exercise done for the History Department in the University of Malaya in 1955 by Dol Ramli, demonstrating that within the holdings of the University’s theses collection are hidden gems waiting to be appreciated.

It would also be interesting to intensify research on local participation in resistance efforts against the Japanese, especially those which were galvanized or organized in an unofficial capacity, in contrast to the Malay Regiments which were units within the larger British military set-up in Malaya, and thus suffer from the ignominy of having their roles undocumented.

By way of conclusion, it would be fitting to follow Dr Lim in quoting Noel Barber, author of Sinister Twillight, a classic account of the fall of Singapore and one of the few Western books that do mention the Malay Regiment appreciatively. Barber writes that the performance of the Malay Regiment was ‘a living and dying illustration of the folly of not having raised more such local forces before the war in which men could defend what was their homeland..’[iii]

The soldiers in the Malay Regiment were by no means ‘Singaporean’, but rather ‘Malayan’ heroes, since they were largely born in the Malay states on the Peninsula; 2LT Adnan was from Selangor. Still, the contemporary relevance of remembering the exploits of the Malay Regiment remains in underlining the importance of raising and maintaining local forces who would fight to their utmost as the Malay Regiment had done largely because they were defending their ‘homeland’. As much as the Singapore Armed Forces receive doubts from some quarters with regards to its size and directions, the historical precedent of the Malay Regiment demonstrates that when another time comes when Singapore needs to be defended, it cannot become just a foreigner’s war.

The author has recently graduated with honours from the Department of History at NUS, and is eagerly waiting to ORD in August. Dr Lim’s article can be accessed from Pointer (the Journal of the Singapore Armed Forces), Vol. 28 No. 1 (Jan – Mar 2002) at:
http://www.mindef.gov.sg/safti/pointer/back/journals/2002/Vol28_1/1.htm

[i] Homepage of Reflections at Bukit Chandu.
(http://www.s1942.org.sg/s1942/bukit_chandu/homepage.htm)

[ii] Otterman blogged about it at
(http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~sivasothi/blog/index.php?date=20060212).

[iii] Noel Barber, Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore (Great Britain: William Collins Sons & Co 1968), p. 303, quoted by Dr Lim (p. 8).