Free Battle Story by Chris Brown Page B

(villages) the length and breadth of Malaya and Singapore. (Author’s collection)

    36. Typical pre-war shop-houses of the kind found throughout Malaya and Singapore. (Author’s collection)
    On the night of 7/8th, patrols from 22nd Australian Brigade had managed to cross the strait and reconnoitred about 5 miles of coastline between Sungei Malayu and Sungei Pendas. They had identified a considerable concentration of Japanese infantry units, but little in the way of artillery and no landing craft at all; however, they had not been able to move much more than a mile inland and had been unable to penetrate as far north as Sungei Skudai. The landing craft were certainly being prepared for the assault, but not in the areas to which the patrols could penetrate.
    By the morning of 8 February Malaya Command intelligence was confident that a major Japanese attack on the north-western coast between Sungei Berih and Kranji was imminent, but their conclusions were not shared with Bennett’s headquarters until sometime after 1500hrs. Bennett made an immediate and urgent request for an aerial reconnaissance of what he assumed – rightly – to be the Japanese forming-up area, but there were simply no aircraft to be had, and even if there had been there was very little chance that a reconnaissance mission would have been successfulin the face of Japanese air superiority. The best that could be done was to fire a number of speculative concentrations based on the information obtained by the patrols and reasonable deductions. None of this had any discernible impact on Japanese preparations.

THE BATTLEFIELD:
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?
    Failure to stop Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army in Malaya did not mean they were undamaged by the campaign. Casualties among the infantry particularly had been considerable, though many of the tanks that had been put out of action had been repaired and returned to units by 8 February. The Japanese lines of communication had stretched beyond capacity despite use of captured vehicles. General Yamashita was forced to pause for a week in Johore to stockpile materials, get engineering equipment to the front and reorganise his units before making an attack.
    His plans had to include a role for Guards Division. The division had not acquitted itself especially well in the campaign so far, and Yamashita’s main assault would be conducted by the 5th and 18th Divisions, but the prestige of the Guards Division and the influence of their commanding officer at home obliged Yamashita to put them into the fight, so he decided to use them in an assault on the eastern aspect of the battle as well as the west. The attack was not redundant in that it would help to prevent the Allies from reinforcing the defenders in the Western Area, where the main attack would be pressed, but it would also reduce the availability of landing craft and other resources to support the 5th and 18th Divisions. In total, Yamashita had a force of about 30,000 men. He was heavily outnumbered, short of food and ammunition, and wasnot absolutely confident about the attitude of the commander of the Guards Division, Major General Nishimura.
A Desperate Situation
    At first glance, Percival appears to have been in a relatively strong position. A wide stretch of water lay between him and the enemy, quite a lot of the coast was covered with mangrove swamp which would be virtually impassable to tanks or transport, and each passing day was an opportunity to add to the pillboxes and gun positions around the island, as well as giving a little more time to rest and reorganise his forces. In reality, his position was already desperate. His force of thirty-eight infantry battalions, three machine-gun battalions and nine field artillery regiments was much less than the sum of its parts. Huge amounts of equipment were lost in the campaign – not just materiel destroyed in combat, but large quantities that had been abandoned due to premature blowing of bridges, failures of