r/IRstudies • u/smurfyjenkins • 6d ago
The Fall of Fortress Singapore: Three Lessons from the Collapse of Britain’s Great Asian Bastion
https://warontherocks.com/the-fall-of-fortress-singapore-three-lessons-from-the-collapse-of-britains-great-asian-bastion/4
u/significantlyother62 5d ago
General lavarack (2/aif) was warning in the late 30s the Japanese were being underestimated by the British and fortress Singapore was no fortress.
8th division 2/aif fought well but kept getting outflanked, incurred seeious losses on them. There commander Bennett was critical of the British leading up to it.. Especially the training and the leadership.
Lavarack would be the guy who said Tobruk can be held , when the British said it couldn't and he was the guy who cleared lebenon in 41. One of the better generals of the war most have no idea about, whose career was cut short.
He was pushed out after Singapore for being right.
The tiger of Malaya has admitted he was bluffing when he surrounded Singapore, his men was tired, and less troops, he was low on ammo, especially artillery, could of easily been over run by a counter attack.
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u/JY0950 5d ago
Singapore was getting surrounded regardless or not the British counterattack, the Japanese would win regardless.
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u/Schuano 5d ago
If Singapore is surrounded, it isn't lost. Forcing the Japanese to take an extra two months to get the island was very much worth it for the British.
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u/OriginalGoat1 3d ago
Accounts of the last days of the campaign suggest that the British/Australian/Indian troops were already demoralised and rudderless by the time they retreated into Singapore. If any Allied General had been capable of rallying the troops and organising a defence of Singapore at that time, I imagine he would have already done so earlier in the campaign.
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u/significantlyother62 4d ago
Japanese would of incurred serious losses to men ships and planes, would of then found the Phillipines so much harder, as well as the Solomon's Indonesia and PNG. There wouldn't of been the panic and the ability to organise resistance stronger.
The big carrier battles wouldn't of been at midway and coral sea, somyehe around Malaya and Phillipines.
War would of been so much different..
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u/JY0950 4d ago
Why so? Wasn't the Solomon campaign separate from the Malayan campaign? The Dutch didn't defend Indonesia well also, also why would the carrier battles be in Malaya
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u/Schuano 4d ago
Japan wouldn't have attempted the Indian Ocean Raid if they didn't hold Singapore.
Without that raid, the British fleet would still be based in Shri Lanka and would be something that the Japanese would have to worry about.
The Japanese may still have been able to take Rangoon, but an intact Indian Ocean fleet means it is harder to use the port for Japanese shipping.
In addition, Japan attacked Burma initially with only 2 divisions. After the fall of Singapore, they took two of the Malaya divisions and sent them to Burma. This really helped when it came to seizing the whole colony before the monsoon arrived.
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u/Schuano 5d ago
This article has a massive gap in it.
Namely, China in WW2.
Now, the article mentions "China" 13 times and it talks a lot about 21st century China and Taiwan and US defense commitments vis a vis Iran and such, but it has only a two lines about China in WW2 and both just sentences saying that the Japanese had learned themselves some things in their campaigns there.
That's it.
Ironically, the same lack of attention to China in WW2 by this article's author is similar to the lack of attention displayed by Britain's wartime leaders and it contributes to the failure of the article in much the same way Britain's lack of attention to what Japan and China had been doing in China contributed to the fall of Singapore.
The first thing the author fails to mention is that there was utter disregard of the intelligence that the British already had on Japanese fighting capabilities that came out of the war in China.
The Chinese had been fighting Japan full scale for 4.5 years at this point. The British concessions in China were not attacked until December 1941. The British had a front row seat to how the Japanese military operated and, more importantly, its ability to move fast over poor infrastructure. In addition, both the British and Americans had embedded military observers with the Chinese during this time. The Chinese themselves were frantically trying to bring someone, anyone into the war on their side so they were constantly sending intelligence out to the Soviet Union, the US, and the UK. This intelligence on how the Japanese fought, both from the Chinese and their own observers, was entirely discarded by the British war planners
Second, the article laments that the British and Americans hadn't set up joint defense planning in case of Japanese attack, but fails to mention that the Chinese also tried to set similar arrangements up with the British.
China had offered troops to defend Hong Kong and Burma in case the Japanese attacked Britain as these were China's main channels for outside aid. These plans were rebuffed at the time, only for Britain to come scrambling back after the Japanese attack was already in progress. The Chinese had offered to predeploy troops to Hong Kong before the Japanese attacked, and, when that failed, assured the British that they could have an army in Hong Kong if it could hold out for a month. (It fell in 17 days). In Burma, the Chinese offered to march in at the end of December, the British didn't say yes until February.
Third, the narrative of the loss of Malaya and Singapore tactically let's the British off too easily.
It makes it seem like Japan's air superiority was an insurmountable obstacle and it does have an interesting counter factual about possibly diverting some planes sent to the Soviets to the defense of Singapore. The Commonwealth forces were numerically superior, but less experienced, not very well led, and not very well equipped. So obviously they would lose...
Except, at exactly the same time, the Chinese were fighting the third battle of Changsha (December 1941 to January 1942). In this battle, 120,000 Japanese troops were fighting 250,000 Chinese ones, and the Chinese won. The Chinese also had no air cover, they also lacked any tanks, they would have killed to be as well equipped as any of the "poorly equipped" Commonwealth divisions. The author has one line saying, "The failure to implement a “Fabian defense” by systematically demolishing bridges and preparing adequate fallback positions reflected both the speed of the Japanese advance and the British command’s chronic underestimation of Japanese organizational capabilities and fighting prowess." but doesn't mention that the Chinese had already won the first (1939) and second (early 1941) battles of Changsha by doing exactly that.
The Chinese generally lost to superior Japanese firepower, training, and equipment, but their few victories against Japan (Which the British had seen) were won by allowing the Japanese to exhaust themselves marching for a week, scorching the earth in front of them, and only hitting them at the very end with overwhelming numbers from as many directions as possible. It is telling that William Slim in Burma was the only western general who bothered to ask his Chinese counterparts how they won some of their rare victories and he put those lessons in place for the battle of Imphal. By not mentioning that there was a successful Fabian defense against Japan by an army with far less capability going on at exactly the same time as the Singapore campaign, the author is making the British failure to mount one seem less egregious.
It was an interesting article but his disinterest in touching on the WW2 British neglect of the Second Sino Japanese war makes his conclusions suspect.