The Men Who Lost Singapore, 1938-1942'

H-War Yip on McCrum, 'The Men Who Lost Singapore, 1938-1942'

Review published on Thursday, October 22, 2020

Ronald McCrum. The Men Who Lost Singapore, 1938-1942. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2017. xiii + 265 pp. Ill. $34.00 (paper),ISBN 978-981-4722-39-1.

Reviewed by Jennifer Yip (University of Pennsylvania)Published on H-War (October, 2020) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55230

While the fall of Singapore in February 1942 has enjoyed much scholarly attention, Colonel Ronald McCrum zeroes in on an oft-neglected aspect: the role of the civilian administration in the disaster. Using rich archival material from Singapore and the United Kingdom, McCrum illustrates how petty rivalries with military counterparts, and an aversion to recognizing the gravity of the situation, rendered the Singapore colonial government impotent in the face of the Japanese advance. Overall, he delivers a damning indictment of the civilian authorities, exposing their failure to implement the most basic of civil defense policies.

McCrum contextualizes his study within the evolution of British strategic thinking about Singapore. After World War I, the British committed to the construction of a base on the island from which a fleet could operate in the Far East. Plans to protect this base at first hinged on the deployment of a relieving fleet, based on the assumption that major assaults would be by sea. However, by 1936, Major-General W. G. S. Dobbie had penned a prescient Appreciation envisioning a Japanese assault on Singapore via the Malay Peninsula. Moreover, by 1941, the Allies were well aware of Japanese intentions to commandeer Southeast Asian resources. Thus, as McCrum shows, the Singapore administration had ample warning about precisely the type of threat they would face in February 1942. Yet it failed to determine a coherent defense strategy or make civil emergency plans.

McCrum identifies two main reasons for this failure: an unwieldly colonial infrastructure, and incompetent and uncommitted personnel. The administration was saddled with the diffusion of political power across the Straits Settlements and Federated and Unfederated Malay States. The “glaring answer,” McCrum points out, was to create a supreme command (p. 168). Regrettably, “internal bickering and individual hubris” precluded such an establishment. Toxic civil-military relations debilitated the government: Secretary of Defense C. A. Vlieland had an “abrasive” relationship with the military (p. 63), disagreeing “to the point of obstruction” (p. 69) with Lionel Bond, then General Officer Commanding (Malaya), about defense plans for Singapore in 1940. Individual civilian appointees were unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of governance in Malaya. Minister Resident Alfred Duff Cooper’s contributions were “at best minimal” (p. 228); Commander-in- Chief (Far East) Sir Robert Brooke-Popham was “old-fashioned” and “unsure” (p. 69). McCrum reserves particular blame for Governor Shenton Thomas. Unwilling to damage morale or jeopardize the production of rubber and tin, he consistently ignored the direness of the strategic situation. Given the wealth of intelligence about Japanese expansionism, his insistence that the Japanese would not

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Yip on McCrum, 'The Men Who Lost Singapore, 1938-1942'. H-War. 10-22-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/6623594/yip-mccrum-men-who-lost-singapore-1938-1942 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War threaten Malaya was inexplicable.

The consequence of such ineptitude was rapid British capitulation. McCrum describes bureaucratic lethargy incongruent with the swift Japanese approach, and then chaos as refugees and soldiers poured into the island. Information about the impending danger was willfully withheld from the population, which was unprepared for the invasion and influx of refugees. Thus, McCrum concludes, the civilian authorities must be held accountable alongside the military for the disastrous defense of Singapore. In fairness, he acknowledges the difficulty of their situation. Thomas was pressured by clashing directives from the Colonial and War Offices: he could hardly produce war resources while also mobilizing to defend the naval base. General Officer Commanding (Malaya) Arthur Percival also received contradictory instructions from an incensed Churchill to implement a scorched-earth policy while fighting to the end. Yet these conundrums do not excuse their poor showings.

Here McCrum walks a fine line between arguing that more robust leadership would have made some difference, and endorsing the prevailing consensus that the British were “powerless” to avert defeat (p. 3). He declares that “the outcome of the campaign was virtually determined” (p. 145) by mid- December 1941—in fact, that “Singapore was a lost cause from the day the construction of the naval base was complete” (p. 237). However, he also claims that the construction of defenses in southern Johor and northern Singapore “could have imposed a delay of some consequence on the Japanese advance” (p. 240). McCrum does not state what these consequences might have been, only that if reinforcements had arrived, they “might have turned the tide of events” (p. 9). Was Singapore’s fate in fact “determined,” or can the Thomas administration be held liable for squandering a yet salvageable situation? Certainly, it could have saved civilian lives by evacuating residents, running emergency services, and building bomb shelters, and McCrum rightly indicts its failure to do so. But it is unclear whether he is further suggesting that a more lucid administration would have improved Singapore’s overall strategic outlook.

There is also little engagement with the rich historiographies on the fall of Singapore and colonial workings in British Malaya. Many works listed as “Secondary Sources” in the bibliography are primary material, including publications by the men who appear in McCrum’s account—for instance, Duff Cooper’s autobiography, Old Men Forget (1953), and Commander of the 8th Australian Division H. Gordon Bennett’s Why Singapore Fell (1944).

Nonetheless, McCrum convincingly demonstrates that the defense of Singapore cannot be understood through a military lens alone. Equally important was the Singapore civil authorities’ relations with the military and the Colonial and War Offices in London. For its focus on civil governance and civil defense, elements often overshadowed by grand strategy, this book is critical reading for any student of the fall of the “Impregnable Fortress.”

Citation: Jennifer Yip. Review of McCrum, Ronald, The Men Who Lost Singapore, 1938-1942. H-War, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55230

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.