My Goodness gracious! Can you believe it?
Why weren’t the Japanese terrified by Percival?
Singapore fell seventy five years ago. It’s uncanny. It seems like yesterday. And every now and again the little thought, “What if Singapore hadn’t fallen’? Would Percival have pulled through? Would Bennett not have done a bunk?
And what of the troops? They would’ve just enjoyed a tropical interlude and written Evelyn Waugh type novels of an eternal imperial sunset.
Would all those nurses not have been slaughtered on the beach? Would the ships not have been bombed? The sick and injured not bayonetted in their beds. And would have the Brewsters, the Wapiti’s and Wildebeeste’s been able to defend the skies above? And finally and most emphatically, would’ve the mighty guns fired in real anger and sunk dozens of big Japanese capital ships?. And rather than go down in scarcely fifteen minutes to an inglorious end, would’ve the Prince of Wales and Repulse shooed those pesky naval forces away? Imagine if it never happened? And Singapore, still a colony, would be a popular stoping off point for Malaya, Ceylon and the jewel in the crown India. All gone now, and nowadays the closest the old empire gets in showing its might is when a cruiser gets stuck on a reef somewhere off Lord Howe Island. Captain Cook would turn in his grave.
An aliance you can rely on, and great ironing skills.
But what have we learnt from Singapore?
Tons!!
We’ve learnt not to rely solely on one big ally for protection! We’ve learnt unlike the brief experiment of ABDA alliance, (the American, British, Dutch and Australian alliance to sweep the Japanese navy from Java) not to rely on flimsy alliances with near neighbours. And most of all we’ve learnt not to be seduced by the promise of paying vast sums of money for equipment that is either obscenely over-priced or hopelessly out of date.
No longer will Australia be seduced by the requirement for Big Navy, Big Airforce and the contemporary equivalent of Brewster Buffaloes, (the F35) as the very best thing in aviation technology. And never again will thousands of young Australians to be ensnared by global geo politics. That’s the lesson learnt from Singapore.
What the end of Empire looks like from the air. HMS Prince of Wales going under.
Well, the truth be known.
What have we really learnt?
We can tell you, and it’s quite rude.
We’ve learnt Fuck all!!
Brewsters, Up there with the F35 as an expensive excercise in scrap metal recycling.
Australia still doesn’t posses a foreign policy beyond a supine forelock tugging to our big brother somewhere on the other side of the Pacific. We’re tied lock stock and smoking barrel to the next act of international lunacy, and our military brass hope that by purchasing a fleet of outmoded froggy subs, we’ll be at the forefront. The forefront of what??
But it does prove one thing. It keeps the military brass busy, and that’s a good thing. Without an obscenely huge defence budget they may turn their attention to something even more obscenely absurd, the process of Australian government. That would be real tragedy. The lesson of Singapore, a lesson unlearnt, and Lee Kwan Yue told us what our future would be: ‘the white trash’, perhaps contributing in our now special way to global stability in the early twenty first century with our staunch ally ,(whats his name? Trunbull?) .
Or as Hollywood would call it; not ANZUS but ‘Dumb and Dumber’.