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Singapore British Military Involvement, 1819-1942
In the years preceding the founding of Singapore in
1819,
neither the British government nor the British East India
Company
was eager to risk the establishment of new settlements in
Southeast
Asia. From 1803 to 1815, London was preoccupied with war
with
France and, after Napoleon's abdication in October 1815,
with
establishing a stable peace in Europe. Britain
administered the
Dutch colonies in Malaya and Indonesia from 1795 to 1815
when the
Netherlands was under French occupation. The British
government
returned control of these territories to the Dutch in 1816
over the
objections of a small minority of British East India
Company
officials, including Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. Raffles,
in
London from 1816 to 1818, failed to convince the directors
of the
British East India Company to support a plan to challenge
Dutch
supremacy in the Malay Archipelago and Malaya. Enroute
from London
to Malaya, however, Raffles stopped in India and gained
the support
of Lord Hastings, the British East India Company's
governor general
of India, for a less ambitious plan. They agreed to
establish a
trading post south of Britain's settlement in Penang,
Malaya.
From 1819 to 1867, when Singapore was administered by
the
British East India Company, Britain relied on its navy to
protect
its interests there and in Malaya. The Netherlands was the
only
European country to challenge the establishment of
Singapore. In
1824, however, the Dutch ceded Malacca on the Malay
Peninsula to
Britain and recognized the former's claim to Singapore in
exchange
for British recognition of Amsterdam's sovereignty over
territories
south of the Singapore Strait. Two years later, the
British East
India Company united Singapore with Malacca and Penang to
form the
Presidency of the
Straits Settlements (see Glossary). With no
threat to its interests, the British employed the policy
of allowing Singapore to assume responsibility for its own
defense,
although British naval vessels called in Singapore to show
the flag
and to protect shipping in the Singapore Strait
(see
fig. 3). By
the mid-nineteenth century, London was recognized as the
supreme
naval power in the region, despite the fact that it
deployed only
about twenty-four warships to patrol an area extending
east from
Singapore as far as Hong Kong and west from Singapore as
far as
India.
Between 1867 and 1914, London contributed little to the
establishment of permanent armed forces in Singapore.
Units of the
British Army's Fifth Light Infantry Regiment, which
included
infantry units brought from India, were stationed on the
island.
More often than not, however, these forces were deployed
in the
Malay states to protect British citizens there during
periods of
domestic violence. In 1867 when the strategic value of
Singapore
influenced London's decision to make the Straits
Settlements a
crown colony, the local governments were required to pay
90 percent
of their own defense expenditures. The issue of collecting
taxes
from the residents of Singapore for defense remained
controversial
until 1933, when the Colonial Office finally agreed that
the city
should not be required to pay more than 20 percent of its
revenue
for defense costs.
Following World War I (1914-18), London attempted to
integrate
Singapore into a unified defense plan for all of the
Straits
Settlements and Malay states under British control. London
had
replaced the Indian elements of the Fifth Light Infantry
Regiment
with regular British Army units following the mutiny of
Singapore's
Indian troops in February 1915
(see Crown Colony, 1867-1918
, ch.
1). As late as 1937, London had not deployed more than a
few
hundred British army regulars in the Straits Settlements
and
Federated Malay States. As there was no overt threat from
neighboring countries or Britain's European rivals, the
War Office
believed that these units, aided by local militias trained
by the
British army, could adequately protect British interests
on the
Malay Peninsula. Singapore's militia, known as the
Volunteer Rifle
Corps, comprised infantry, artillery, and support units
with a
total personnel strength of about 1,000. The Volunteer
Rifle Corps
was integrated into the newly established Straits
Settlements
Volunteer Force in 1922. London believed that in the
unlikely event
that the Straits Settlements were attacked, regular and
militia
forces could hold out until reinforcements arrived from
Hong Kong,
India, and other British outposts in Asia.
In June 1937, Britain began to prepare for the
possibility of
war with Japan. Three British army battalions stationed in
Singapore, one Indian battalion at Penang, and one Malay
regiment
at Port Dickson in the Malayan state of Negri Sembilan
were the
only regular forces available at the time for the defense
of
Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. Although the British
military
leaders had warned London in 1937 that the defense of
Singapore was
tied to the defense of Malaya and that any Japanese attack
on the
island would likely be made from the Malay Peninsula,
their
assessment was rejected by the British War Office, which
was
convinced that the impenetrable rain forests of the
peninsula would
discourage any landward invasion. Air bases were
established in
northern Malaya but were never adequately fortified. A new
naval
base was constructed on the northern coast of the island,
but few
ships were deployed there. Military strategists in London
believed
that the Singapore garrison could defend the island for
about two
months, or the time it would take for a relief naval force
to
arrive from Britain.
In December 1941, British and Commonwealth forces
committed to
the defense of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore comprised
four
army divisions supported by small numbers of aircraft and
naval
vessels that had been sent from other war zones to provide
token
support to the ground forces. Lieutenant General Arthur E.
Percival, commander of these forces, deployed most units
in the
northern Malayan states of Kedah, Perak, Kelantan, and
Terengganu.
Fortified defensive positions were established to protect
cities
and the main roads leading south to Kuala Lumpur, Malacca,
and
Singapore. The British had no armor and very little
artillery,
however, and air bases that had been constructed in the
Malayan
states of Kelantan, Pahang, and Johore and in Singapore at
Tengah,
Sembawang, and Seletar were not well fortified. The
attention of
the War Office was focused on the fighting in Europe, and
appeals
to London for more aircraft went largely unanswered.
A small fleet, comprising the aircraft carrier
Unsinkable, the battleship Prince of Wales,
the
battle cruiser Repulse, and four destroyers,
represented the
only naval force deployed to Singapore before the outbreak
of war
in the Pacific. The Unsinkable ran aground in the
West
Indies enroute to Singapore, leaving the fleet without any
air
protection.
Data as of December 1989
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