ON THE AFTERNOON of Sunday, Feb. 15, 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival left his command HQ just outside Singapore city. Accompanied by an officer with a white flag he went to the HQ of his adversary General Tomoyuki Yamashita where after some negotiation he signed a surrender document.
Percival’s Indian, Malaysian, Australian and British troops had been in retreat for two months under a relentless and fast-paced Japanese advance that at every point out-performed his troops. Photos of a British general with a force of about 100,000 men surrendering to a resolute Japanese commander with troops of about one quarter that number went around the world. Nothing symbolised the collapse of British power in Asia more clearly. And it was the largest surrender in British history. No one could hide a sense of shame including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who later said that the fall of Singapore was “the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records.”
