How Empires Fall

FORTRESS (243 pp.)--Kenneth Attiwill --Doubleday ($4.50).

Singapore was a fortress of paper--endless reams of paper that issued from British information offices assuring the world that Singapore was invincible. Confident that a constant boast of strength would impress the Japanese, the British encouraged "a complacency more impenetrable than the Malayan jungle." So writes Author Attiwill, who was there as a British soldier when Singapore fell in 1942 and vowed one day to tell the whole story.

It is a sobering story, about the leukemia of the will that precedes the death of empires. The British acquired Singapore in 1819, when that great buccaneer of the East India Co., Sir Stamford Raffles, dickered the island away from the Sultan of Johore's heir. A little over 100 years later, Singapore still had the Raffles instinct for a deal, but it had lost his daring and his sense of destiny.

A City Divided. Expecting to stop the Japanese at the frontiers of Siam, British commanders in Malaya had never seen fit to fortify the island city of Singapore. Only when the Japanese began their inexorable push down the Malay Peninsula did Winston Churchill learn to his amazement that the island was barely defended to its north, and later bitterly recalled: "I ought to have known, and I ought to have been told, and I ought to have asked."

Pictured in the popular mind as a bastion of Empire comparable to Gibraltar and Malta, Singapore was in reality a defenseless, polyglot commercial town of Chinese. Japanese, Indians, Jews and British who were as divided on their feelings about the war as they were in their peacetime pursuits: "East was East, and West was West, and the twain did not meet except to exchange dollars or back horses." While guns boomed within earshot up the peninsula, life went on in Singapore much as before, with bars, brothels and theaters thriving. In typical shrewd Singapore fashion, people turned the war to their own advantage; fishermen rowed out before dawn to gather fish that had been stunned by high explosives.

The seven-day siege of Singapore was a classic anticlimax. Cheerful communiques kept the people from knowing that the enemy was on top of them. Only by scanning the latest banking news ("The undermentioned branches will be closed until further notice") had some been able to follow the Japanese advance. With much fanfare, the retreating British blew up the causeway linking Singapore Island to the mainland. "That should stop the little bastards," muttered one officer, who neglected to notice, as the Japanese did not, that the water at low tide was only four feet deep.

The Larger Weakness. Some of the soldiers on the British side were as resourceful as only years in Singapore could teach: an Australian sergeant combed the streets with a ventriloquist whose many voices caused the Japanese to pop their heads out from their trees while the sergeant picked them off. But most of the troops were too poorly trained, too disorganized to have the stomach to fight to save Singapore.

During 3 2/3 harrowing years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, Attiwill had good reason to mull over the errors that led to the debacle in Singapore, and he documents them with damning precision. Occasionally he overwrites as well as overstates his case. Even if there had been fewer errors about Singapore's defense, and greater courage, the fortress would eventually have fallen, because its weakness was only part of a larger, more general weakening throughout the Empire. Outclassed and outnumbered by the enemy, the people of Singapore had reason to be demoralized.

But for all their pursuit of self-interest, they showed a kind of courage peculiar to their locale. About to escape by boat as Japanese were overrunning the island, one Singapore matron acidly commented on a ruling against taking jewelry: "What am I supposed to do with my diamond bracelet, throw it away? I'm jolly well going to push all I can in a pot of face cream and to hell with them."

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