Twilight

I N the predawn blackness of Decem- ber 8, 1941, hours ahead of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor 3,000 miles away on the other side of the Inter- national Date Line, Japanese troops landed in northern British Malaya. That afternoon Britain’s two most powerful warships in the region, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, left Singapore to try to stop them. On December 10, Japanese torpedo bomb- ers quickly sent both to the bottom; on the 11th, planes attacked defenseless Penang. A doctor remembered the panicked inhab- itants running away as if in a scene from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Aweek or two later, the Japanese were steadily advancing down the Malay peninsula to Singapore, the supposedly invincible for- tress of British Asia. On January 27, 1942, the British rear guard blew up the cause- way connecting Singapore to the mainland. A local English teacher heard it and asked some passing boys what the noise was. One of them, young Lee Kuan Yew, answered: “That is the end of the British Empire.”

He was right. In less than three weeks, Singapore’s 130,000 British soldiers would surrender to a Japanese force less than half their size—the largest surrender

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

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I N the predawn blackness of Decem- ber 8, 1941, hours ahead of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor 3,000 miles away on the other side of the Inter- national Date Line, Japanese troops landed in northern British Malaya. That afternoon Britain’s two most powerful warships in the region, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, left Singapore to try to stop them. On December 10, Japanese torpedo bomb- ers quickly sent both to the bottom; on the 11th, planes attacked defenseless Penang. A doctor remembered the panicked inhab- itants running away as if in a scene from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Aweek or two later, the Japanese were steadily advancing down the Malay peninsula to Singapore, the supposedly invincible for- tress of British Asia. On January 27, 1942, the British rear guard blew up the cause- way connecting Singapore to the mainland. A local English teacher heard it and asked some passing boys what the noise was. One of them, young Lee Kuan Yew, answered: “That is the end of the British Empire.”

He was right. In less than three weeks, Singapore’s 130,000 British soldiers would surrender to a Japanese force less than half their size—the largest surrender

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.