What was the fall of Singapore?

The fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 was one of the most catastrophic defeats in British military history and a particular shock to Australia. About 130,000 Allied troops, including 14,972 Australians of the 8th Division, surrendered to a smaller Japanese force of about 36,000 troops under General Tomoyuki Yamashita. The Australian POWs taken at Singapore would spend more than three years in Japanese captivity, with about one third dying before liberation.

Singapore had been considered an impregnable British fortress, the keystone of Britain's Asian defence strategy. The fall came after a rapid Japanese campaign down the Malay Peninsula that began with the 8 December 1941 landings at Kota Bharu (just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor). The Japanese advance through Malaya took just 55 days, with the defending British, Australian, and Indian forces unable to stop the better-trained and better-led Japanese troops. The Australian 8th Division under Major General Henry Gordon Bennett fought particularly hard at Gemas (14 January 1942) and Bakri (18 to 22 January 1942) before the final withdrawal to Singapore Island.

The Japanese landed on Singapore Island on 8 February 1942 and captured the island in a week. Major General Bennett controversially escaped to Australia on the night of 12 February 1942 (an action that was the subject of a 1945 inquiry and remains debated by historians). British commander Lieutenant General Arthur Percival surrendered the Allied forces on 15 February 1942. Winston Churchill called the fall of Singapore 'the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history'.

The Australian POWs faced particularly harsh treatment. About 22,000 Australians became Japanese POWs in total (most from Singapore and the subsequent Java and Sumatra campaigns), with about 8,000 dying in captivity (a death rate of about 36 per cent, compared with about 2 per cent for Australian POWs of Germany). Australian POWs were used as slave labour on the Burma-Thailand Railway (the so-called Death Railway, where about 2,800 Australians died between 1942 and 1943), in the Sandakan death marches in Borneo (where of about 2,400 Australian and British POWs only 6 survived), in the coal mines of Japan, and in many other camps across the Japanese empire. The Australian War Memorial now extensively documents the POW experience. The Hellfire Pass memorial on the former Burma-Thailand Railway in Thailand and the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore commemorate Australian POWs.