Tag Archive for: Singapore

The fall of Singapore: the lessons of alliance failure

Most of us would agree that the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 remains the biggest strategic shock Australia has ever received, but we pay too little attention to why it was such a shock, and what we can learn from it.

The humiliatingly easy defeat of the island’s defences by the Japanese was of course a catastrophic military failure, with grave consequences for those whom it engulfed. But the island and its base had little strategic significance to Australia when there were pitifully few ships and aircraft to operate from it. The real strategic shock was not that Singapore fell, but that it was useless because Britain could not commit forces to operate from it strong enough to have any chance of contesting Japan’s ability to project power around the Western Pacific.

This was a quintessential failure of an alliance, and of a strategic policy based on alliances. It marked a whole generation of Australians and profoundly shaped our strategic thinking for decades. And it carries important lessons for us today.

The seeds of the disaster were planted long before 1942. The British naval power in Asia which had guaranteed Australia’s security since the First Fleet was already falling sharply before the First World War, and fell even further after it. Unable to maintain a major battle fleet in the Pacific, Whitehall planned to meet any threat by sending the main fleet from Britain to the base at Singapore.

But it was always obvious that this would not be possible if Britain faced a simultaneous threat in Europe, and though the 1930s the risk of simultaneous crises with Germany and Japan plainly grew.  Nonetheless, Australians persuaded themselves to depend for their defence from Japan on Britain’s ability to send massive air and naval forces to Singapore if and when they were needed.

When the time came, Britain’s air and naval forces were utterly committed to defending Britain itself, and to an intense maritime struggle for control of the Mediterranean on which its entire strategy for holding Germany depended. No one can blame British leaders for giving these commitments priority. They made the right decision for Britain.

The blame lies with Australian leaders for erecting Australia’s strategic policy on such flimsy foundations. In their defence they could cite Whitehall’s frequent assurances that the fleet would be sent if it were needed, but they knew those assurances meant nothing if there was war in Europe. And yet they clung to them as the danger of concurrent wars in Europe and Asia quite plainly grew. This was a massive failure of strategic policy.

At the heart of this failure was an inability to recognise and accept fundamental shifts in the distribution of wealth and power which were transforming both the global and the regional strategic orders, and undercutting Britain’s place in them. Britain with its world-wide commitments simply could not match Japan’s strategic weight in Asia any more.

These shifts had been underway for decades, and had been perfectly well understood by an earlier generation of leaders like Alfred Deakin. But the men of the 1930s lacked the insight and perhaps the courage to see what was happening and what should be done about it. In part no doubt that was because they simply couldn’t imagine what the alternatives might be. What else could Australia have done except rely on the Royal Navy?

It is a question which even now deserves attention. Was there a policy Australia could have adopted that would have lessened our dependence on Britain and allowed us to defend ourselves against Japan? John Curtin thought there might: as Labor leader in the late 1930s he suggested that an independent force of aircraft and submarines might be able to keep Japanese forces from our shores.

He may have been right, but this kind of independent strategic posture would have required not just massive investments but a shift in national outlook and even identity which most Australians could not encompass, and which most leaders were not prepared to consider. Perhaps by the late 1930s it was already too late anyway.

Of course as prime minister in late 1941 Curtin did find another alternative—turning to America, which thankfully worked well for a while. But the experience of alliance failure haunted those who had lived through 1942. The lesson that no ally, no matter how deeply connected by shared values and history, can be relied upon when the crunch comes shaped both the Forward Defence posture of the post-war decades and the Self-Reliance policy which followed.

Only in the last twenty years has that lesson been forgotten. Since about 1996, and especially since the mid-2000s, Australian political leaders on both sides of the aisle have become sublimely confident that Australia’s security can be entrusted to the care of our principal ally. Few now suggest that Australia might need to defend itself and its most vital interests independently.

And this is despite the fact, so obvious but so seldom acknowledged, that that the fundamental distribution of wealth and power has been shifting rapidly against the United States. Today, relative to its Asian rivals, America is weaker economically, diplomatically and militarily than it has been since World War Two, and yet we rely on it more. The parallels with the years before Singapore are all too obvious.

So the Fall of Singapore holds a vital lesson for us: that alliances can and do fail, and that any strategic policy that does not give that reality due weight is likely to fail too. The question, of course, as it was in the 1930s, is: what’s the alternative? That is the question we should be addressing much more seriously. There are answers to be found, but they are not easy ones.

The fall of Singapore: the land campaign

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Nothing in history is inevitable but the fall of Singapore Island after the defeat of British forces in Malaya came close to it.

In December 1941 the Japanese established complete air and naval dominance in the region, sinking the British capital ships the Prince of Wales and the Repulse on 8 December and capturing all British air bases in northern Malaya by 20 December. Then, in January 1942, the Japanese armies under the command of Tomoyuki Yamashita advanced down the west and east coasts of the Malayan peninsula, smashing two brigades of the 11th Indian Division at Slim River and overcoming a force of Australian and Indian troops in Johore.

With the freedom to launch amphibious landings behind the British troops, the Japanese benefited from personality clashes and rapid changes within the British command, and their poor operational decisions. The Australian Major General Gordon Bennett, for instance, concentrated three-quarters of his forces on the trunk road through Johore, leaving a practically untrained Indian brigade to face the Imperial Guards Division on the important coastal road. The dramatic ambush of the Japanese 5th Division by the Australian 2/30th Battalion at Gemas, though it killed over a thousand Japanese (for fewer than fifty Australian deaths) did nothing to halt the Japanese advance down the Malayan peninsula.

When the British retreated to Singapore Island on 30-31 January 1942, the ‘Singapore strategy’ was in tatters, but could Singapore have held out longer?  Perhaps. The Japanese were outnumbered and Yamashita was anxious about their supply position. Most of the naval guns on the island could turn landwards (pace popular mythology). But since they were designed to attack ships not ground targets, their ammunition was primarily armour-piercing not high explosive or fragmentation shells.

Furthermore, the British commander, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, who lacked recent experience in operational command, misjudged the Japanese intentions, thinking that they would attack from the northeast. The Japanese instead attacked the north-west of the island, where three half-strength Australian battalions were deployed too far forward and too thinly. Overcoming the Australian resistance, the Japanese drove through the centre of the island towards Singapore Town and Keppel Harbour, but Percival’s deployments did not allow a counterattack. More prudent than willing to take risks, Percival hesitated to commit his reserves from other parts of the islands. Bennett, meanwhile, losing his cool, prematurely issued orders for a withdrawal which meant that the defensive Jurong Line was lost when it might have been held longer. By 15 February, with Singapore’s water supply in enemy hands, ammunition perilously low and civilian casualties mounting, Percival decided to surrender.

Defeats always lead to bitter recrimination. Bennett blamed the British command, the Indian troops and the British 18th Division. But although Australians are fond of seeing themselves as victims of British incompetence, the performance of Australian troops in Singapore was not faultless. Rather contemporary reports claimed that Australians were guilty of looting, left their lines too early, and crowded the wharves of Singapore in a desperate effort to escape. Sometimes Australians were described as daffodils: beautiful to look at but yellow all through. There were even reports of rapes by Australians in Malaya.

A secret British report documenting this purported indiscipline was released in 1993, and many came to the Anzacs’ defence:  the Second Australian Imperial Force’s (Second AIF) 8th Division, it was argued, suffered disproportionately high casualties (10% dead); by February 1942 its units included several thousand barely trained reinforcements; and Australians lacked air cover and were subjected to heavy artillery bombardment in the final battle for Singapore.

However, the sheer number of reports criticising the performance of Australians make them difficult to dismiss. A balanced judgement is that some Australians behaved poorly in the last days at Singapore but they were not alone in this. Moreover, their lack of discipline was a symptom of the British defeat, not its cause.

For all the failures at various levels, it is hard to imagine Singapore surviving a long siege, as did Tobruk, Sebastopol or Leningrad. In early 1942 Singapore Island was simply beyond the reach of Allied logistics. Its survival had always depended on the successful defence of Malaya. This, in turn, was contingent upon the British reinforcing Malaya rather than, as Churchill decided to do in 1940-41, giving priority to the Middle East and aid to Russia (though almost none of aircraft and tanks promised to the Russians were actually sent in 1941).

The Australian Government chose in late January 1942 to warn Churchill that the evacuation of Singapore would be regarded as ‘an inexcusable betrayal’. But Churchill’s relegation of Malaya to a low priority reflected an implacable strategic reality. After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain could not hope to wage war simultaneously against Germany, Italy and Japan. The British Chiefs of Staff had known this since the mid 1930s. Australia’s political and military leaders also should have known this; but they lacked the will to confront this strategic nightmare. Three of the four divisions of the Second AIF raised in 1939-40, after all, were deployed not to Malaya and Singapore but to the Middle East.

With the surrender of Singapore at least 80,000 Allied troops were captured, including nearly 15,000 Australians. Many of them would die in captivity. Among the prisoners was Percival who spent a miserable three years in Formosa (Taiwan) and Manchuria. Bennett, however, chose to escape, purportedly because his expertise in fighting the Japanese was needed in Australia! He never held command in the field again.

Singapore and Oz: mismatched mates

Partnership

Singapore and Australia have nothing in common but share much. No similarities, yet multiple places where interests and attitudes touch or chime.

Geographically, they are mismatched mates: the nation with a continent to itself shares a chinwag with Asia’s city state. It shouldn’t work—but often, it does.

I’ve lived and worked in Singapore and have been visiting for decades so this view may merely reflect my comfort levels. Love the heat. Know the people. Enjoy the place—although I’m always amazed at how they constantly demolish and rebuild.

The mateship is defined by the mismatch, but it can still be analysed as a long-term relationship. After Lee Kuan Yew died in March, this column argued that a useful history of Australia’s apprehensions and aspirations in Southeast Asia over the last 75 years could be written using LKY as actor and commentator. A previous column looked at Singapore on its 50th birthday this month, which leads to these thoughts on the strange mates.

What do they have in common? Some traces of colonial experience—political and legal forms—but mostly English as the shared international/regional language. After that…zip. Well, zero common characteristics which are natural or obvious. The contrasts between the continent and the city state can confound.

What Singapore and Oz share aren’t characteristics so much as attitudes. And a strategic cast of mind emphatically expressed in the approach to the United States. Who loves the US hegemon more? It’s impossible to separate the mates in their affection for the US and the 7th Fleet.

A shared obsession with Indonesia matters as much. This isn’t a mirror of the US fixation because the colours are so different. With Indonesia, the apprehension is shaded by differences and tinged by fear. Indonesia always gives Singapore and Australia something to talk about.

The odd couple obsess constantly about China, but Singapore brings a Confucian cast of mind that Australia hardly grasps. China is a stark example of the mates staring at the same thing using the same data but different understandings.

The political cultures of Singapore and Oz are worlds apart, yet one single, shared element throbs strongly. These are two intensely pragmatic operators. Rely on Australia to call a spade a bloody shovel, while Singapore will know the cost of the digging implement and the necessary size of the hole required.

For a taste of the Singapore style, see the Shedden lecture in Canberra by Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large, Bilahari Kausikan:

  • Don’t deny strategic ambiguity, embrace it
  • To be forced to choose is to have failed
  • US–China competition gives the rest of us room to move—especially because Washington and Beijing don’t really know what they want

For Singapore, ASEAN is core business and a vital element of its existence; Australia’s interest in ASEAN is nearly as heartfelt. Australia says Southeast Asia is currently more important than at any time since the Vietnam War. The small mate responds that its region is as important as ever and growing fast—sometimes, Singapore thinks, the big mate is a bit slow or takes his eye off the main game.

The pragmatism of the language between Australia and Singapore is a constant. The arguments are forceful rather than emotional. Very forceful in the clash—ego and intellect—between LKY and Gough Whitlam.

Mostly, though, it’s about the usefulness of the shovel. Singapore kicked to death Kevin Rudd’s proposal for an Asia Pacific Community.

And having won, Singapore rushed to reassure Canberra that it was only business, nothing personal.

The pragmatism and the shared interests throbbed in every line of the joint presser when Tony Abbott and Lee Hsien Loong met in Singapore in June to announce a Comprehensive Strategic Relationship.

Partly, the Comprehensive and the Strategic stuff was about rebadging and pushing much that already exists, as Lee made clear:

Beyond interest, there is also a special warmth in the relationship because of our temperaments of our national ethos, because of our preference to be direct and straight and candid and to the point, and informal, and that applies whether between our politicians, our institutions and our peoples. And so with our strategic convergence and our many complementarities, it is not surprising that there are many ways we can work more closely together.

The backslapping and glad-handing which must accompany such performances—the ‘transformational’ agreement etc.—rests on the mate base. Perhaps Abbott and Lee could share a private moment discussing the problems a leader has in moving beyond the shadow of a strong political mentor/father predecessor.

The tone of the Lee-Abbott presser, though, could be replicated in previous conversations between LKY and Malcolm Fraser or Bob Hawke. The same for Goh Chok Tong with Paul Keating or John Howard. The Lees, father and son, and Goh are three markedly different personalities. Say the same, emphatically, for Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard.

History offers evidence that the mates usually talk directly and openly. For Oz, however, that isn’t always the case with Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand. An Oz conversation with the Philippines puts the ‘free’ into free-wheeling, but the ups-and-downs of Manila are an American-tinged contrast to the political predictability of a one-party city state.

In Singapore, the guy in power last year is the guy in power today, and will be the one in power next year. Three leaders from the one party in 50 years delivers a certain comfort. In the strategic realm, that translates as continuity. Pragmatists value predictability.

The Oz–Singapore history makes it uncontroversial for Abbott to aim to turn friendship into ‘a family relationship’—to see beyond mateship to a form of kinship.

Abbott is stretching for the same work and residency rights with Singapore as have long existed with New Zealand. The Kiwi analogy fits on the level of ‘bloody shovel’ pragmatism—we’ll just have to create some Singapore jokes to match the mould.

Lee Kuan Yew and Oz: white trash or white tribe of Asia (1)

Australia: white tribe or white trash?

Pinning down great quotes can be an experience as ephemeral and exasperating as hunting the snark.

Lee Kuan Yew’s warning that Australia could become ‘the white trash of Asia’ has snark-like qualities. Yet having tracked the trash line through several decades, this column is ready to do pin-down duty.

My previous piece on LKY and Oz ended with some thoughts on the white trash quote. And, as with earlier writings on this subject, I got several inquiries about dating and even accurate attribution.

My short answer to the question is that the starting point for the white trash thought process was Lee’s first visit to Oz in 1965, a reference mark he often used in talking about Australia. Some of the old Asia hands (journalist genus) had LKY making the white trash prediction in private in the early 1970s. And in an interview with me decades later, Lee himself dated the quote from 1978 or 1979 and asserted his ownership.

Snark caught, case closed? Up to a point. Part of the problem is that through much of the 1980s, LKY disowned white trash. Asked about it at the National Press Club in Canberra on 16 April 1986, Lee denied the trash thrust, saying he was sure he could not be so rude. The hacks gathered there thought he certainly could. And, further, hacks tend to work to the rule that nothing is to be believed until it has been denied.

Over the decades, LKY’s white trash cogitation went through several phases and he put it to different uses. The denial phase in 80s marks a period when it was too explosive an idea, too close to Australia’s own fears. That’s why when some Federal Parliamentary researchers went looking for authorship of white trash, the earliest attribution they could find was to Rod Carnegie, the Australian mining executive. Here is Carnegie doing trash talk in 1982.

Bob Hawke’s dating of it as an LKY utterance is 1980—a bit late. White trash became part of the Oz chattering class zeitgeist through the later years of the 1970s. In discussing the quote quest, the journalist Nate Cochrane pointed me to this promo for a six-part ABC radio series in July 1979:

Australia’s Asian Future: Will Australia become the ‘poor white trash of Asia?’ Can Australia increase investment in Asia and accept more Asian imports without further disruption at home? Will increased trade in the Pacific Basin benefit the poor masses of Asia and the Australian workforce or will it simply benefit small elites and multi-national corporations? Will coming changes in the region restore our prosperity, or turn us in the ‘poor white trash of Asia?

As an exercise in snarking and quote pinning, I’ve trekked through the archives to trace Lee Kuan Yew’s tracks. LKY’s conception of Australia changed markedly over the decades, demonstrating how politicians can shape shift so that an attitude or even a phrase can take on different shades and meanings. In the Lee Kuan Yew telling:

  • The 1960s is the White Australia experience that’s eventually flipped to become Lee’s white trash thrust. Lee took a lot from Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country but with plenty of shape shifting to make it fit for Singaporean purpose.
  • The 1970s is the period when wrangling over race gave way to ASEAN arguments with Australia over trade barriers and Oz protectionism, plus some mighty individual battles between LKY and Gough Whitlam.
  • In the 1980s, white trash had gone mainstream—so potent an image that LKY was afraid to touch it.
  • By the 1990s, a decade of reform had shifted Australia a long way from trashdom. LKY could reclaim authorship, but he shifted the critique so it became part of his ‘Asian values’ argument. Australia could still fail the Asian test.
  • In the first decade of the 21st century, the Asian financial crisis had torched ‘Asian values’ exceptionalism. LKY’s worry was that Australia wasn’t trashy enough, and too many Singaporeans wanted to leave home for the lotus land of Oz.

The next column will track the quotes.

Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew

LKY cropThe world’s media and international leaders have responded to the passing of Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew by recounting his eventful life and lauding his remarkable achievements. There is no need—or space—to enumerate them here; the coverage has been ample.

I’ll focus on whether key elements of the Singapore he constructed, and which have served Singapore well in its rise, will suffice in meeting the challenges faced by the country now that his guiding hand is no longer there.

One can be reasonably confident that Singapore will continue to be an economic success story. The economy developed under his tutelage is diverse, with strengths in finance, electronics and information technology, pharmaceuticals, transport, select heavy industry, international education and tourism, a breadth of capabilities which equip it to weather pressures from abroad in any particular sector. Economic policy is in the hands of some very smart people in the economic ministries, central bank and regulatory authorities. Read more

Reader response: Singapore’s relations with the US and China

Jason Lim responds to Tim Huxley’s post on Singapore–US relations:

The relationship between China, the United States and Singapore is a complex one. Singapore has always seen itself as an ally of the United States since the days of the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, with Singapore combating what it saw as the twin evils of communism and Chinese chauvinism, China was regarded as a major proponent for the destabilising of non-communist Asian regimes. Even after China launched its ‘reform and opening up’ policy in 1982, the official policy in Singapore has been to monitor the progress of Chinese economic reforms while maintaining a diplomatic distance from it. Passports issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs in Singapore list China as one of the countries the passport holder is not expected to visit unless permission has been given by the Singapore government.

Singapore still pursues a policy of ‘non-alignment’, with China replacing the position of the Soviet Union. Singapore recognises the economic and military value of having the United States as an ally but it does not place China in the same position. Singapore has taken a soft approach towards China, training its political leaders, provincial officials and civil servants in financial management and public administration. It is hoped that this approach will cement Sino-Singapore ties. Singapore has always maintained a position that it does not pursue any position that will be detrimental to the interests of Southeast Asia, chiefly its neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore established diplomatic ties with China only in 1991, after Indonesia and Malaysia had done so. The recent dispute in the South China Sea between China and some Southeast Asian nations (Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines and Vietnam) has revealed that Singapore’s position has not radically changed with the rise of China. Just last week, Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said, ‘Whether we like it or not, after the 45th AMM [ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in July 2012], the South China Sea will remain a test case of ASEAN’s ability to forge consensus on difficult problems and act in the region’s broader interests’. China is seen to be a potential threat, even if the Singapore government does not explicitly say so.

Jason Lim is a lecturer in Asian history at the University of Wollongong.

Singapore and the US: not quite allies

Singapore and the United States are linked not only by important economic relations, but also by a burgeoning defence relationship. Most recently in June 2012 the US announced that it would deploy as many as four littoral combat ships to the city-state from 2013, as part of the Pentagon’s much-publicised ‘rebalance to the Asia-Pacific’.

Their security links date back to the late 1960s, when Singapore actively supported Washington’s war effort in Vietnam. While this continuity, and the closeness and depth of their defence links today, might give the impression that Singapore is a US ally, the city-state’s government has nevertheless pointedly eschewed that status, preferring the strategic autonomy deriving from a less formal—if still intense—defence nexus. Nevertheless, the relationship could pose dilemmas for Singapore.

Singapore’s support for the US’ regional security role and military presence originated in the appreciation of Singapore’s elite, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam and Defence Minister Goh Keng Swee, that the interests of their small island state, sandwiched between much larger and potentially aggressive neighbours, as well as apparently endangered by communist North Vietnam and China, would be best served by preventing the regional dominance of any power. As Lee Kuan Yew said in 1966, it was vital for Singapore to have ‘overwhelming power on its side’. Singapore has built up its own armed forces primarily to prevent Indonesia and Malaysia from dominating its immediate locale; but at the grand regional level, Singapore’s small size and relatively limited diplomatic influence and military capacity have forced it to base its balance-of-power strategy on borrowing political and military strength from extra-regional powers, principally the US. Read more