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  • The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942
  • Peter Dennis
The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942. By Brian P. Farrell. Stroud, U.K.: Tempus, 2005. ISBN 0-7524-2311-8. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Sources. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 447. £25.00.

Churchill called it the worst disaster of British arms since the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. He was not far wrong. The fall of Singapore not only had profound implications for the role and status of the British in Southeast Asia, and indeed in the world, it gave rise to a controversy that persists to this day. Brian Farrell is the latest in a long line of historians to study this extraordinary event. His account is easily the best we have. It is authoritative, wide-ranging, trenchant in its criticisms and insightful in its conclusions, and, perhaps most important, deeply contextualized. Not only does he explain how Singapore fell, but why the manner of its falling was so important: why defeat turned into disaster.

Farrell argues that the Singapore disaster can be explained on the broader level by the failures of central imperial defense planning. The so-called "Singapore strategy" was based on a set of assumptions that steadily became less tenable, but the political and military will was not there to grasp the nettle and make the changes—or concessions—that were necessary. The resources of the Empire were simply not sufficient to maintain a military posture in the Far East when Britain was simultaneously engaged in a war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Nevertheless successive British governments readily gave assurances that all would be well, and successive Australian governments readily accepted those assurances, neither party being willing to face up to the alternatives. If the British Empire was an illusory reality, nowhere was this more manifest than in the depiction of Singapore as the "impregnable fortress."

In analyzing the course of the campaign, Farrell spares no one. Military commanders "dithered"; Admiral Phillips was incompetent when it mattered most; actions are variously described as "disgraceful," "humiliating," and a "farce"; commanders are described as defeatist, guilty of "malfeasance," or [End Page 1161] simply "feeble." The Australian general, Gordon Bennett, given to criticizing everyone except himself, is rightly found to have been wanting, not only in his battlefield performance but for his escape to Australia and his abandonment of his troops, who, Farrell comments, perversely championed their former commander after the war as a means of deflecting criticism directed against their own performance.

Farrell's dissection of the course of the final campaign is convincing, although it must be said that there will always be room for disagreement on the details. His judgments are sound, and the reader can have confidence that here is a historian who knows the ground and what it means, as anyone who has had Professor Farrell as a guide to the battlefields will attest. What makes this book outstanding, is the very sure handling of the broader context in which the fall of Singapore sits. In terms of the narrative (before, during, and after), the continuing controversy surrounding it, the gradual release of archival material, and the significance of the disaster in imperial and regional history, this book is an indispensable guide to one of one of military history's most intriguing puzzles.

Peter Dennis
University of New South Wales at the
Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, Australia
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