Why Britain’s 1942 Collapse in Singapore Still Resonates
Eighty years later, how the city-state chooses to remember the fall of what Winston Churchill called the Gibraltar of the East speaks to its objectives for the future.
The “worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,” frozen in time.
Photographer: The Asahi ShimbunFor a wartime atrocity that still scars Singaporean lore, the site at Changi Beach on the country’s east coast is innocuous. You have to look hard for the plaque, just outside a carpark, that marks the scene of a massacre of civilians by Japanese soldiers in early 1942. Passing joggers don’t pay much attention.
Across town, it’s a different story. Last month, the National Museum unveiled an exhibition devoted to the fall of Singapore 80 years ago and the three-year occupation that followed. Just prior to its opening came the decision to confer an enhanced level of heritage protection on Fort Siloso, an aging British citadel that featured in the doomed defense of the now city-state.
As Singapore marks the anniversary of its capitulation to Japan on Feb. 15, a shattering event in the darkest days of World War II, some memories, it seems, are more elevated than others.
Ruled by the People’s Action Party since independence in 1965, Singapore has sought to harness the legacy of war to fit the nation’s social, economic and political needs — imperatives that continue to evolve. That this year’s commemoration is proceeding at all amid the pandemic is significant. What’s played up about the conflict reveals a lot about the perspectives and priorities of a hub for finance and trade in a strategically vital part of the world: Domestic unity and resilience are in, lopsided dependence on external powers is out.
The rapid collapse of British-led forces — London considered the territory an impregnable fortress, and Winston Churchill called its loss the biggest defeat in the Empire’s history — still resonates. And not just in Singapore. The submission heralded the demise of U.K. power in East Asia and ushered in an era of American dominance, one that Beijing now challenges. It also shades the credibility of post-Brexit Britain’s apparently renewed ambitions to be an Asia-Pacific military power.
In Singapore, the fiasco and the hard years of occupation are used to underscore the importance of military service at home; ultimately, nobody other than its own citizens can be entrusted with the place’s defense. The tank parked on the front lawn of the National Museum to promote the new exhibition isn’t a Japanese or English relic, but on loan from the local army. The sign next to it touts the prowess of the army and the importance of national service, which is compulsory for male citizens and permanent residents upon turning 18. “The tank was a symbolic reminder of the need to defend ourselves,” Iskander Mydin, curatorial fellow at the museum, told the Straits Times. “The Japanese had a victory parade of tanks the day after the surrender.”
World War II has also been used to foster shared identity in a multi-racial society that assiduously manages communal relations. Diplomatically, reverberations of the fiasco can be found in the republic’s professed reluctance to be seen as getting too intimate with either of the two big powers vying for influence in Asia. China is a neighbor and the biggest trading partner. Meanwhile, Singapore’s armed forces buy much of their materiel from the West and conduct significant training in the U.S. and Australia.
Singapore has practice at treading carefully. In the years after it split from Malaysia in 1965, the young country needed investment and jobs. Japan, undergoing a burst of economic growth following reconstruction from the war, was a promising opportunity. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, saw no need to pile on the guilt. It would serve no practical purpose. Japan’s factories would soon dot Southeast Asia. Best to get in on the ground floor. This approach was flexible, however. By the early 1990s, Singapore had grown rich, and Japan entered a prolonged economic stagnation. Singapore began talking more about the war.
Making it easier for Lee to change tack were visits by Japanese leaders to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine honoring war criminals, and revisions to Japanese school textbooks that sanitized the conflict. “Ironically, then, the same Singapore whose government sought to dampen and control war memory in the 1960s, would enter the 21st century with a proliferation of museums, plaques, memoirs and media productions about the war,” wrote Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack in their book, “War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore.”