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Book Review: Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress

The fall of Singapore has many literatures: diplomatic, military, and imperial; British, Indian, Australian, Singaporean, and Japanese. Each sings a different tune, not surprisingly, as the event has many causes and consequences, but the result is cacophony. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn bring some harmony to the choir. Their work is the best study of the fall of Singapore, comparable in quality to any account of the military and imperial history of the Pacific War. It focuses on the tensions between the narratives of the ‘Many Falls’ of Singapore (pp. 186–87), a postmodern approach, which the authors apply with some effect. Did Singapore Have to Fall? rests on serious research in the archives of Australia, Britain, Singapore, and, to a lesser degree, Japan, and mastery of many literatures, with one great limit. This account of the diplomacy and strategy behind the Singapore base is 20 years out of date. The bibliography does not cite any works by Chris Bell, Greg Kennedy, or Joe Maiolo; Tony Best’s writings on intelligence are noted, but not those on diplomacy. Hence, Hack and Blackburn’s account of why between 1919 and 1939 Britain adopted a strategy that failed so badly in 1941–42 is thin and conventional. In every other area, however, Did Singapore Have to Fall? makes major advances, marked by a judicious weighing of evidence, a careful comparison between national narratives, and a thorough approach to argument and conclusion. Hack and Blackburn offer the clearest explanation on record of how and why the campaign went as it did. They contrast the professional Japanese attitude toward training with the lax British one, though more remains to be said on this issue, and on intelligence. Their account of the divergent conceptions about how to defend Malaya and Singapore stems from a powerful assessment of a large and fragmentary body of evidence and the views of every significant participant or scholar. They conclude that British plans to pre-empt or defeat an invasion in southern Thailand or northern Malaya were unworkable, and once the Japanese landed, any attempt to hold them above Singapore Island was bound to fail, at heavy cost. These arguments Book Reviews 417