SINGAPORE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 4, 7 September 1945, Page 4

SINGAPORE

THE capitulation of the Japanese garrison in Singapore and the re-capture of the famous fortress town of the Malay Peninsula, will be greeted with mixed feelings by the peoples of Empire. Memories of the fall of this once fabled stronghold are not pleasan£. No Britisher likes to be reminded of the fact that Singapore with a combined population of one and a half millions,, fell to what can be described as a Japanese operational force of 40,000 men. Granted the invaders were all picked troops, skilled in the then unknown arts of 'jungle warfare' but the stark fact remains that vv mston Churchill after perusing it, refused to make public findings of the Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate the reasons for the incomprehensible state of affairs which existed on Singapore Island. Ugly rumours have gained currency since the city's investment, made uglier too by the apparent sympathetic encouragement afforded the invading Japanese by the Malay population. The world read of 'whisky-swilling rubber planters' whose interest was never anything but the exploitation of the cheap native labour in order to reap fabulous fortunes from the rubber markets of the world. In the eyes of the Malayan population we, the lmaculate and superior white race, which ever since btamtoid Raffles pioneered the founding of the gayest/ city oi. the Orient, has been in the habit of lording it over them w ha e this time been caught flat-footed. We deserted them ™ time of emergency; we showed poor fighting and atrocious sense of strategy. However excusable these things may have been, we must realise that we stand accused, and it will take generations for the white man to rehabilita. himself if ever, in the Malayan States. It would become the British Empire to re-enter its second phase a °£ with wider and greater tolerance and with new and ad justed views as far as the native population is concerned.