Whose Fault?

All the way, from the very first day when things went badly at Kota Bahru Airdrome (TIME, Dec. 22), the end had seemed as inevitable as death from an incurable disease. And so, toward the end, Singapore's society, like a dying person already long acquainted with death, went mechanically on with the trivia of daily habit.

Along the main roads, trolleys, automobiles and rickshas carried people home from work, off for shopping, to friends for a drink. Cars drew up to the Raffles Hotel and disgorged their passengers in time for the daily tea dance. Outside a cinema people lined up to see Joel McCrea and Ellen Drew in Reaching for the Sun. Eric Davis, director of the Malayan Broadcasting Corp., cracked open a letter from a gramophone concern, read that a certain tune "is unavailable for broadcast without special permission of Messrs. Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, Inc."

And all the while the British Empire was falling apart.

The people of Singapore were not especially blameworthy, though they were universally blamed. They were behaving pretty much as the people of Paris did when France fell, as those of Los Angeles doubtless would if their city were in danger.

Just because the British people of Singapore acted like people, there was no reason to lay on their heads the exclusive blame for the rout in Malaya and the loss of Singapore. And yet all across the U.S. this week ran the disgusted whisper: Those British!

It was easy to blame them. They had made mistakes.

Cecil Brown, CBS correspondent who survived the sinking of the Repulse and had been thrown out of Singapore for criticizing British complacency, sounded off sensationally from Sydney, Australia:

"Only three weeks before the outbreak of the war did the British military discover that Bren gun carriers and small tanks could negotiate water-covered rice fields. That required a change in defensive tactics. . . .

"The troops were not adequately trained for jungle fighting and could not adapt themselves in a few weeks.

"An amazing fifth-column organization had been established in Malaya. One officer said he gave the fifth columnists 35% of the credit for the Japanese success. . . .

"Vast storehouses of food were left untouched for the Japanese. Sampans, boats, barges, and even steamers were undamaged. At Penang the British military authorities ordered the evacuation without consulting the Government. They refused to evacuate anyone except Europeans. All Chinese, Malays and Indians were left to their fate. That was the beginning of considerable difficulties with the natives in Malaya.

"At Penang the treasury was left intact with more than a quarter of a million dollars, and when the Japanese walked into Penang they simply threw a switch in the radio station and began broadcasting.

"While it was stated that the British were destroying everything in the path of their retreat, facts told a different story. To give one instance, it was announced they destroyed everything at Kuantan Airdrome on the east coast. Two days later the R.A.F. was sent over to bomb the undamaged hangars and the Japanese aircraft already using the field."

Refugees arrived in the U.S. from Malaya and immediately began cursing the British. Principal complaint: "The British ordered the evacuation of British women and children in Penang on Dec. 14 without notifying the 40 Americans there . . . that they were doing it."

News dispatches contained evidence of incredible complacency. Five days before Singapore fell, the local authorities announced their intention to build air-raid shelters. A.P. Correspondent C. Yates McDaniel overheard a telephone conversation in which the manager of the Singapore radio asked permission of Governor General Sir Shenton Thomas to blow up the station because the Japanese were so close. Sir Shenton demurred; the situation was not so bad, he said. So the station went on broadcasting. Very soon, he wrote, in the midst of an admonition to keep fighting, the station went ominously dead.

But for U.S. citizens to conclude from these recriminations that the fall of Singapore was due solely to British complacency, incompetence and inefficiency was just as complacent. Keeping the Japanese from expanding in the Pacific has for the last five years been considered, rightly or wrongly, the responsibility of the U.S., not of Britain. It was in the Pacific, not the Atlantic, that the U.S. Fleet lay. No responsible U.S. spokesman challenged Winston Churchill when, in several of his recent speeches, he clearly placed leadership in the Pacific on the shoulders of the U.S.

And if it had not been for U.S. complacency at Pearl Harbor, Allied planes might still be fighting in Malaya. All through the Indies last week, Allied pilots were complaining that they were always outnumbered 50-and 100-to-one.

Cecil Brown himself, who had so little good to say for the British, had this to say for backbiting: "An honest report of what preceded the war against Singapore, how it was fought and how the Japanese got there must contain recriminations, but recriminations will not win this war. Once the mistakes are known, faultfinding deters the job of getting on to victory."

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