8 - Singapore's Missing War

Summary

Walter Benjamin's angel of history is turned towards the past out of sympathy for time's victims, but the storm of progress drives him into the future. This image embodies the place of war in the life of a people. So it is with World War II and Singapore.

The main line of descent from then to now lies in the realm of defence. Total Defence Day falls on 15 February, marking the anniversary of the catastrophe in 1942 when Singapore faced a rout that was military, civil, economic, social and psychological: the five aspects of Total Defence. The date 15 February is a metaphorical re-enactment of the truth that a colony remains dispensable even in the mightiest of empires, that what is tactical for the imperial metropole is strategic for the colonized periphery. London lived, but Singapore fell. The motif of betrayal in turn structures a message both simple and powerful: the message being that those who do not take personal responsibility for their common security will soon have nothing left to secure. In making this point, Total Defence Day underscores the particular meaning of World War II for Singapore. It was a classic imperialist war, a gang-fight over turf between an empire that was relatively liberal and comfortable, but over-confident and overstretched; and a revisionist empire whose outriders bicycled down Malaya in the eager faith that their emperor was divine. But for the people of Singapore, caught between two imperia neither of which they were responsible for, their war began when the fighting stopped with the British surrender of 15 February 1942. For the next three-and-a-half years, the people of this island witnessed something that they had never known: the capricious sadism of a military dictatorship. The experience of being a part of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was so brutal that it shed almost divine light on the free-market policies of life and death that Britain had brought to Singapore.