War and Remembrance Read online

  “But will the Japanese come in those few days? That’s what I’m wondering.”

  “Do you think I’d abandon you to face that? They’re three hundred miles away, and advancing only a few miles a day.”

  “Well, good. Given the choice, I’d rather not be raped by platoons of slavering Orientals.”

  “See here, do you feel I’m treating you badly?”

  “Oh, Talky, on your way! Merry Christmas.”

  “That’s my girl. Cheerio.”

  Major Shairpe had told the plain truth. Fortress Singapore was a phantom. What the Tudsburys had seen from the arriving aircraft was the simple fact. It wasn’t there.

  When an empire dies, it dies like a cloudy day, without a visible moment of sunset. The demise is not announced on the radio, nor does one read of it in the morning paper. The British Empire had fatally depleted itself in the great if laggard repulse of Hitler, and the British people had long since willed the end of the Empire, by electing pacifist leaders to gut the military budgets. Still when the end was upon them, it was hard to face. Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality. Such an illusion was Fortress Singapore.

  It was not a bluff Nothing is clearer from Churchill’s memoirs than that he himself believed that there was a fortress at Singapore. Of all the people on the spot — army officers, naval officers, colonial administrators, all the way up the grand chain of command — there was not one man to tell the Prime Minister that Fortress Singapore did not exist. And the British belief in the “bastion of Empire” was infectious, at least for Europeans. Hermann Goring warned a visiting Japanese general, months before Japan struck, that Fortress Singapore would hold out for a year and a half. This same general later captured Singapore in seventy days.

  Nor was the illusion generated out of thin air. Singapore did command the main eastern trade routes, at the water passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. In the lean pacifist years, many millions in military funds had been poured into it, for the Japanese threat had been anticipated. Early in the century the English had themselves built Japan’s modern navy, with great profit to British shipyards. The quaint feudal Japanese had caught on fast, defeating Czarist Russia’s navy to the warm applause of the British press. But when the smoke of the First World War cleared away, the shift in world forces made it conceivable that those same quaint Nipponese might one day try to vex the Empire. Accordingly, the gigantic naval base at Singapore, capable of servicing the whole Royal Navy, had been constructed. The plan was that if ever trouble from Japan threatened, the main fleet would steam to Singapore, to end the trouble by awe or by force. That the Germans might make trouble at the same time, requiring the main fleet to stay at home, seems to have been overlooked.

  So Singapore was stocked with food, fuel, and ammunition for a siege of seventy days. That was the time the fleet would need to muster up and get there. Great fixed cannon pointed seaward, to hold off any attempted assault by the Japanese fleet before help came. All this did give the feeling of a fortress.

  Yet the sea did not entirely moat Singapore. An attack could come by land from the north, down the wild Malayan peninsula and across the narrow Johore strait. But the planners judged that four hundred miles of jungle made a stouter barrier than fortress walls. Moreover, actual walls on the island’s north side, they felt, would suggest a fear that the Japanese might come from the north one day, and that the British army might not be able to stop them. The British ruled in Asia by an aura of invincibility. With the main fleet seventy days away, what pressing need was there for such a mortifying precaution? The walls were not built. Instead, to make assurance doubly sure, Singapore Island’s stockpile was doubled to last one hundred forty days.

  Thus the “Fortress Singapore” image arose. The years of planning, the outpouring of treasure, the rivers of ink in newspapers and journals, the resounding political and military debates, fostered an all but universal fantasy, reaching to Britain’s highest leaders, and all over the Western world, that a fortress was there. The lifeblood of the British working class went into a naval base twenty miles square, with the largest docks in the world, with cranes, repair shops, every conceivable spare part and machine, elaborate housing and recreation facilities; and with enough ammunition, food, and oil to supply the whole fleet for many months, squirrelled away in the giant concrete caverns sunk in the swamps. In its way it was as striking an engineering feat as the Maginot Line.

  But to the last, to the moment when the last retreating Scots brigade crossed the causeway in February with bagpipes playing, and demolition charges blew a hole in the one link to the mainland swarming with oncoming Japanese soldiers, the north side of Singapore remained without defenses: defenses that Churchill always assumed were there, as — in his own words — he assumed that “a battleship could not be launched without a bottom.”

  In the event, the fleet never came. It was too busy fighting the Germans in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in home waters. The vast facilities stood empty until, with the Japanese army a mile away, the British did their best to blow up or burn the base. But it fell in usable condition, a staggering military haul. Churchill’s insistence on trying a ragged remnant of the seventy-day plan, by dispatching the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, only doomed them.

  Airfields had also been laid out in Malaya and heavily stocked up — except with planes. The RAF never came in force. It had lost too many planes saving England from the Luftwaffe, and had shipped hundreds more to the Soviet Union; though of those a large number never flew, sunk in the sea by German torpedoes. The few aircraft on hand in Malaya were shot from the sky fast. The Japanese planes “made of bamboo shoots and rice paper” turned out to be Zeroes, the most advanced fighter aircraft then on the planet. The Japanese seized the splendid airstrips, which they called “Churchill aerodromes”; and from these richly supplied fields their planes helped batter Singapore into surrender.

  So the confused Singapore record now reads. Congress investigated Pearl Harbor, but Parliament did not investigate Singapore. Churchill shouldered the blame, stooped an inch or two lower, and went on with the fight.

  The confusion still extends to the very name. What was “Singapore”? Singapore was the city; Singapore was the island; Singapore was the naval base; Singapore was “the bastion of Empire.” But at bottom “Singapore” was a narcotic myth, which dulled the pain while the gripping hand of white Europe on Asia was amputated.

  The unused strategy of General Dobbie — so it turned out after the war — had been absolutely sound, for the invaders did arrive at Singapore at their last gasp, greatly outnumbered by the defenders, their fuel and bullets almost spent. In one final assault, they daringly burned up and shot off everything they had left. The Singapore command caved in, and the colored Malayans had new masters with colored skins.

  Alistair Tudsbury made his broadcast from Australia. Pamela heard him in the McMahons’ guest cottage, where Philip Rule, arm in a sling, was bedridden. The hand had been lanced again, and he had to rest for a week. The McMahons and their dinner guests down at the main house had shown little interest in listening to her father. After a copious pahit and a big meal with several wines, they were singing carols around a piano. Through the darkness, over the drumming of the rain and the bass croaking of bullfrogs from nearby mangroves, their voices dimly floated to the cottage, where Pamela sat under a large slowly turning fan that stirred her hair and fluttered her thin long skirt. Perhaps half as bright as a candle, the radio dial diffused a faint orange glow in the room. Through the open window came sprays of rain and wisps of frangipani scent.

  The reception was good, the script almost intact. The fictitious colonel no longer asserted that the island’s north shore was undefended; it needed “some dashed double-quick stiffening.” The charge that the RAF had put down airfields without regard for their defensibility was gone; and Tuds-bury’s closing disclaimer was more strongly phrased.

  “Was it worth it, Phil?�
� Pamela asked, turning down the sound but leaving the dial to glow.

  He drew on a cigarette, his face shadowed with deep lines of bitter irony. He was looking better. Rule was very strong, and a few days of rest pulled him out of most distempers. “A wee bit too clever. The dotty old crank came off quite lifelike. It won’t be taken seriously, not by anybody who counts.”

  “How else could Talky have done it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m amazed it got by, even so.”

  “Phil, will Singapore fall?”

  Rule harshly laughed. “Darling, I fear so. But blaming the governor, or Brooke-Popham, or Duff Cooper, or even Churchill is pointless. There’s just a general collapse. Nothing’s working. The system’s just rotten-ripe to fall apart. Up-country there’s simply no leadership. The men want to fight. They try to fight, even the Indian troops do. But again and again come these pusillanimous orders from Singapore — fall back, pull out, retreat. I’ve seen the men crying over their orders. These Tanglin Club overlords down here have bad consciences, Pam. They’re played-out funks. They fear the Japs, and they fear our own Asiatics. When you think about it, this domination of Asia by white Europeans has always been damned silly. It was bound to be temporary. Why grieve at its passing?”

  “How do I get out of Singapore?”

  “Oh, you’ll get out. The Japs are still far off. There are vessels waiting to evacuate the white women and children. That’s what they did at Penang, you know. They got out the Europeans — soldiers and all — and left the Asiatics with their women and children to face the Japs. Do you know that? And then Duff Cooper went on the air and announced that all the inhabitants of Penang had been rescued! He really meant it, Pamela. To Duff Cooper, the Asiatics were part of the animal life of Penang. It’s causing an uproar now — what happened, and what he said. I don’t think the Asiatics care anymore who’s top dog here. Maybe we’re gentler than the Japanese, but at least they’re colored. The Asian endures brutality better than contempt.”

  “You don’t believe in the American rescue expedition everyone’s talking about?”

  “Wishful fantasy. The Americans have no fleet. It was all sunk at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Nobody knows what happened at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Denton Shairpe does. They lost all eight of their battleships. The Americans are finished for two years in the Pacific, if not forever. A rescue expedition for Singapore is as likely to come from Switzerland, but — what the hell’s the matter with you?” Pamela Tudsbury was burying her face in an arm on the back of the chair. “Pamela! What is it?” She did not answer. “Oh, Christ, you’re thinking of your Yank! Sorry, old girl. When Denton first told me, I thought of him myself. Pam, I know nothing about the casualties. There’s every chance your man’s all right. They were sunk inside a harbor, in shallow water.”

  Still she said nothing and did not move. Outside, the rain, the bullfrogs, and a distant chorus —

  God rest ye merry, gentlemen,

  Let nothing you dismay —

  Suddenly a wild gibbering and giggling just outside the window, as by a frightened lunatic, made Pamela sit up with a shriek. “Oh! My God! What’s that?”

  “Easy now. That’s our apricot monkey. He comes and goes in the trees. Sounds dreadful, but he’s harmless.”

  “God Almighty, I hate Singapore! I would have hated it in peacetime.” Pamela stumbled to her feet, wiping her moist brow. “Let the Japanese have it, and good riddance! I’m going back to the house. Are you all right? Do you want anything?”

  “I’ll be lonely, but that’s no reason for you to miss the fun. Run along.”

  “Fun! I just don’t want to be rude to my hosts. They’ll be thinking I’ve gotten into bed with a sick man.”

  “Well, why don’t you, Pam?” She stared at him. “Truly, wouldn’t it be charming? Christmas Eve and all that? Remember Christmas Eve in Montmartre? When Slote and Natalie had that monumental fight at dawn, and we went sneaking off to Les Halles for onion soup?” The mustache twisted in a slow beguiling well-remembered smile, shadowy in the orange radio glow. He held out his good arm. “Come, Tudsbury.”

  “You’re a swine, Philip, an unchanging swine” — Pam’s voice trembled — “and everything else I called you in our little Bastille Day chat.”

  “Darling, I was born in a rotting system, and so perhaps I’m a rotter, if the word has any meaning. Let’s not have that old quarrel again, but aren’t you the inconsistent one? When everything’s breaking up, there’s nothing but pleasure. You believe that yourself. I take my pleasures lightly, you insist on drama. That won’t change, I grant you. I do love you.”

  “And your wife? I’m just curious. In Paris you had no wife, at least.”

  “Sweetie, I don’t know if she’s alive. If she is, I hope she’s screwing the brains out of some nice deserving Russian fighting man on leave. Though I doubt it, she’s a worse prig than most Englishwomen are nowadays.”

  Pamela plunged out the door.

  “You’ll need the umbrella,” he called after her.

  She returned, snatched the umbrella, and darted outside. She had not gone ten steps in the blackness, when, almost at her ear, the monkey set up its blood-freezing cry. With a little scream Pamela sprinted forward and ran into a tree. The bark scratched her face. The branches swept the umbrella from her hand and showered her. She caught it up and stood paralyzed, soaking wet. Almost straight ahead she could hear the singing —

  There’ll always be an England,

  While there’s a country lane —

  but the night was pitch-black. She had come by starlight, in an interval between showers. She had no clear idea of how to proceed. The path twisted steeply through the banks of oleanders and bougainvillea.

  It was a bad moment for Pamela. Her father’s broadcast had sunk her spirits. The familiar voice, coming from so far away, had intensified her nervous sense of being alone and unprotected. In recent days, threatening Japanese broadcasts in broken English had scared her. The guttural alien voices had sounded so close, so horrible! She had almost felt callused hands with tough nails ripping at her underwear and forcing her thighs apart. More than most threatened females she knew how weak Singapore was.

  And now Rule had Shairpe’s word that Victor Henry’s ship had been sunk! Even if Henry had survived, he would be reassigned. Even if she got out of Singapore, she would probably never see him again. And if she should, by some bizarre chance, then what? Did he not have a wife? She had set out on a wild goose chase around the world, and here she was, wet and lost in the hot black night, under an umbrella in the garden of strangers in a downpour, on Christmas Eve, perhaps her last.

  There’ll always be an England,

  And England shall be free—

  She did not want to join these drunken Singapore British in their songs. This cheap ditty unbearably brought back the first days of the war, the brilliant summer of the Battle of Britain, and the best moment of her life, when Commander Henry had come back from the flight over Berlin and she had flung herself into his arms. All that glory was crumbled now. She liked the McMahons, but their friends were dullards from the club crowd and the army. Two young staff lieutenants had been paying court to her, from the pahit drinking onward; both crashing bores but handsome animals, especially a long-fined blond lieutenant with a languid Leslie Howard air. They would be after her again, as soon as she returned to the house — if she could find her way without falling on her face in muck. Obviously they both were intent on sleeping with her; if not tonight, another night.

  How wrong were they? What did it matter? What was her spell of continence, vaguely for Victor Henry’s sake, but a stupid out-of-character joke, after all the damned screwing she had done in her life?

  Behind her, the open window of the guest cottage was a faint orange oblong in the dark. To someone who did not know it was really there, it would have seemed an optical illusion. In the all-encompassing blackness and rain, it was the only hint of light, the only way
to go.

  10

  BYRON had never heard a depth charge detonate under water; nor had anybody else on the Devilfish. A hideous ear-splitting BONG shuddered through the whole vessel, like the blow of a sledgehammer on a giant bell. The control room tumbled in nauseating earthquake motions; glass smashed, loose objects flew, and the lights blinked scarily, all in the roaring reverberation of a thunderclap. While the planesmen managed to cling to their control wheels, the plotting party went staggering, Chief Derringer falling to his hands and knees, the others toppling against bulkheads. Byron felt such sharp stabbing pains in his ankles that he feared they were broken. An instrument box sprang off the overhead and dangled on an electric cable, emitting blue sparks and the stinking smoke of burning rubber. Confused yells echoed through the vessel.

  BONG!

  This second metallic thunderbolt blacked out the lights and flung the deck bow-upward. In the darkness the blue sparks kept flaring, terrified groans and shouts arose over the thunderous roaring outside the hull, and a heavy body with flailing arms fetched up against Byron, crushing his back agonizingly against the ladder to the conning tower.

  This time it truly felt like the end, with the submarine on a horrible up-slant, sounds of breakage all around, Derringer weighing him down like a warm corpse — he could smell the tobacco breath — and the Japanese sonar baying loud, fast, and triumphant on short scale: peeng-peeng-peeng-peeng! Another explosion made the tortured hull scream and ring. A squirt of cold water struck Byron’s face.

  Except for the lancing death in its torpedoes, the Devilfish was very weak and very slow. Even on the surface it could go only half as fast as the destroyer overhead. Underwater its sprint was eleven knots, its usual crawl three knots. The destroyer could run circles around it, probing for it with sonar; and the tumbling depth charges did not even have to hit. Water transmits an explosion in a shock wave. A miss thirty feet off could finish the Devilfish. It was just a tube of nine long narrow cylinders joined together, a habitable section of sewer pipe. Its pressure hull was less than an inch thick.