1 – The most Manoeuvrist Approach campaign the Australian Army has ever fought.

Is this not the most manoeuvrist campaign that the Australian Army has ever fought?  Our first campaign that we will look at is Malaya 1941-42.  In just 1 month and 23 days, Malaya fell.  Singapore had been the Centre of Gravity of the Australian Defence Strategy, without Fortress Singapore.  This shaped Government thinking and its fall was a complete shock.

These are the show notes for this episode. For the full story, listen to the episode on your iPhone or Android

What is the Manoeuvrist Approach?

The manoeuvrist approach seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a series of actions orchestrated towards a single purpose, creating a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope.

Starting with the initial surprise of the landings in northern Malaya and Thailand, the Imperial Japanese Army reinforced the shock of the initial landings by trading sustainment for speed to get inside the Allied High Command’s OODA loop (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act).  This created analysis paralysis.

This episode examines some of the key people in the Malaya Campaign:

• LTGEN Percival
• AVM Pulford
• LTGEN Heath
• MAJ Gen Gordon Bennett
• LTGEN Yamashita

These are the points discussed on the podcast, looking at the factors that made this the most manoeuvrist campaign the Australian Army has ever fought.

• We look at the force ratios for both sides.  Yamashita was fighting significantly outnumbered, so what force multipliers did he use?
• Armoured warfare – who had the advantage with tanks?
• In late 1941 the war is going quite badly for the Allies, the Germans are at the gates of Moscow.  How did this strategic situation impact Allied thinking and actions?
• The Royal Navy sent Prince of Wales and Repulse to defend Singapore and Malaya.  After Japanese landings, Force Z moves out to defeat the Japanese only to be sunk.  Churchill describes it as the greatest naval disaster ever in the history of the Royal Navy.
• The Japanese fight at Jitra and win.  Within the first 100 hours, they have achieved control of the air, control of the sea and started to dominate on the land.
• Yamashita pushes aggressively south down Malaya.  A series of major withdrawals continue for the Allies.  He leapfrogs down the Western coast of Malaya outflanking the Allies out of prepared defences.
• Wavell takes command of the ABDA command and he orders a 150-mile retreat.
• We look at COL Tsuji, the ‘God of Operations’ and how he prepared the strategy for the Japanese attack.
• Wavell meets MAJGEN Bennett and likes the aggressive spirit that he displays.  An inexperienced divisional staff takes over command of 3 divisions.
• The Battle of Muar is fought and the Allies suffer significant casualties.
• The situation is so bad in the air that unarmed flying club planes are used for recon.
• The Japanese advanced 740 km in one month and 1 month and 23 days with a force ratio of 1:2, not the expected 3:1.  How did they manage such a marked victory?

This is part of our Malaya Campaign Podcast series.  We produced 15 episodes looking at the Principles of War, Terrain and Leadership and how they applied to the Malaya Campaign.

If your in Singapore, visit the Battle Box, the HQ where LTGEN Percival planned the defence of the island.

Transcript

The most Manoeuvrist campaign the Australian Army has ever fought.

This is the principles of war, professional military education for junior officers and senior NCOs.  

Manoeuvre warfare seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a series of actions orchestrated to a single purpose, creating a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope. I cannot think of a better example of manoeuvre warfare that Australia has participated in than the Malaya and Singapore campaigns. The tragedy of this is that it is us who is being outmanoeuvred. It is us who are in a turbulent situation that is rapidly deteriorating and with which we cannot cope. Now, as I said in the first podcast, victory is a poor teacher for military officers. It teaches hubris and inflexibility. There are so many great lessons that will come out of Malaya, which is why I’ve actually started with this, the podcast, by looking at Malaya. It has everything. There are issues with command structures, there are issues tactically, training, leadership, joint operations.  

There are problems everywhere for the Allies, and there are so many things that we can learn about how things can be done in a better way. Now, I suspect that most people won’t know a lot about the Malaya campaign, and I have a bit of a shocking confession to make. For probably five years, I’ve had on my bookshelf, the Malaya book by Brian Farrell and Garth Pratten, and I hadn’t read it because I thought it was about the Malayan emergency. I didn’t actually realise that it was about the campaign in Malaya in World War II. It was only when I started, over the holidays, we spent some time in Singapore and I wanted to do a little bit of research about what we should be looking at there.  

And so I bought a book, the Road To Changi, and when I got three quarters of the way through the book, I thought, well, hang on a sec, we’re not even in Singapore yet. And yet I’ve read three quarters of the book. A lot of that was spent looking at what happened in Malaya. Malaya and Singapore are very closely related, but it’s something that I. I think very few people have got really good understanding of, which is really sad, because the Malaya campaign and Singapore, it’s got everything. There’s desertions by Australian troops, desertions at the highest level, incredibly dysfunctional command structures and relationships, and some really poor examples of leadership, which all makes for some fantastic learnings.  

One of the reasons why I’m so keen to do this series of podcasts on Malaya, though, is that there are Also some stories of incredible bravery, incredible stories of soldiers and commanders enduring incredible adversity and an incredibly tenacious enemy. And they’re trying to do their duty in the best traditions of the army. For the troops of 8th Division, a lot of what they did in Malaya has been forgotten, and I think that’s for a couple of reasons. The Malaya campaign has been overshadowed by what happened in Singapore, and Singapore, the fighting that occurred in Singapore has been overshadowed by their time in the Changi prisoner of war camp and the various places that they went to. So we’re going to look at all of the things that went wrong in the Malaya campaign and all of the people who made the mistakes.  

But I’m really keen to shine a light on some of the really incredible examples of outstanding leadership, as well as bring to light the stories of the individual battalions as they did something that I think is really quite common within the history of the Australian Army. You’ve got troops who are sent overseas with varying levels of training, trying their best to overcome against an enemy, learning on the job as quickly as they can how to prevail on the battlefield. So there are some really amazing stories in here which I want to shed some light on. I think that’s going to be quite exciting. Malaya tends to get forgotten because it is such a big disaster for Australia, some of which is of our own making.  

From a grand strategic and strategic level, the lower down you get, when you start looking at, from a tactical level, you can see that there are some really good stories of what the troops have done, and they were just let down at a strategic point of view. So the troops from 8th Division, they fought from about the 13th of January 1942 through to the 30th of January. We’re going to cover the entire Malaya campaign because we’re eventually in another series of podcasts. We’ll get to Singapore and you’ve got to look a fair way back to work out how we got into this situation. So this podcast is going to look at the sequence of events. Next we’re going to look at the center of gravity. And this is a really fascinating story.  

I know it sounds doctrinally a bit dry and boring, but this is the perfect example of what happens when you get your center of gravity wrong. Now, the generals won’t have been sitting there working out what the centers of gravity were, but in their thinking, their centres of gravity were dictating the actions that they could and couldn’t take. So they are a fundamental part of the story. We’re then going to look at the terrain, both human and physical because that had a large part to play on both of the armies and the way that they dealt with it.  

We’re then going to go through the principles one by one and we’re going to try and look at it from an Allied and Japanese perspective because I think it’s the interplay between each of the principles within that principle from an enemy and friendly side as well as the interplay of the principles. And so we’re going to try and tease out some of those relationships. And lastly we’re going to look at some of the examples of leadership from the Malaya campaign. We’re going to look at Lt. Gen. Percival, who was the General officer commanding of Malaya Command. Lieutenant Colonel Galligan, probably Australia’s most famous battalion commander of World War II and a very interesting character. We’re going to look at a Lt. Mercure, anti tank gunner. He has got a, I think textbook example of moral courage over physical courage.  

Not that he was short of physical courage, but an outstanding example of moral courage. And we’re going to finish off with Lt. Col. Anderson, VC. Yes, that’s right. A lieutenant colonel was awarded a VC in Malaya. I bet you didn’t know that. And he has got an amazing story to tell as well. So the references for this the Malaya book, Australian Army Campaign Series number five. Brian Farrell and Garth Pratten. This is the textbook which I’ve lifted a lot of this from. It’s an outstanding read. I highly recommend that you get a copy of it and flick through it. These two guys are the experts when it comes to malaria and Singapore. Brian Farrell wrote the Fall of Singapore which is a much more in depth book.  

And Garth Bratton wrote Battalion Commanders of World War II which is a fascinating read and looks at some of the issues that you have in Battalion command. The Long Road to Changi by Peter Ewer. That was the book that started all of this and I just bought it in a bookstore. It’s got some very interesting personal anecdotes and looks at it from slightly different point of view. Lastly, and I’ll include this in the show notes, we’ve got some. I listened to some interviews from the Australian War memorial in about 1985. They did some research where they went and interviewed a lot of these people. And there’s an interview which is particularly interesting. Well, fascinating and that’s of Lieutenant Russell McCuar from the 2nd 4th Anti Tank Regiment and his story is really amazing.  

So some of the players in the Malaya campaign starting right at the top We’ve got the commander in chief of the British Far East Command, who was Air Chief Marshal Robert Brook Popham. So he was in overall command. He’s the first Air Force commander of a joint command, which is quite interesting because he didn’t have the Royal Navy under his command. He started off as commander in chief. He was replaced. He didn’t do too well. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Pownall on 23 December 1941. Lieutenant General Percival, General officer commanding Malaya Command, nicknamed Rabbit. And we’ll spend a bit of time looking at Percival and his command style. Very smart guy. Had a lot of foresight when it came to Malaya and its defence. Air Vice Marshal Pulford, he was the air officer commanding the RAF Far East Air force.  

You’ve got Lieutenant General Heath, he was the commander of the 3rd Indian Corps. Major General Gordon Bennett, the commander of the Australian 8th Division. He’s a really interesting guy and we’re going to look at his impact on the campaign. And lastly, we’re going to look at Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commanding the 25th Army. A really interesting guy. I think there’s a lot we can learn for him. A convicted war criminal, he was hanged by the Allies at the end of the war. Nonetheless, I think that he’s been a little bit hard done by. By history, and I think that there’s a lot that we can learn from him. So very quickly, the forces employed, so troops on the Allied side, we’ve got 140,000 troops, the Japanese have got 70,000. So in the attack, we’re obviously looking for a force ratio of three to one.  

These guys have got a ratio of one to two. So they are out by a factor of six. Effectively. They’ve got 16% of the troops that you would require to doctrinally conduct this attack. How do you think it would go in an exercise if you said, I’m going to assault with 16% of the troops that I require to follow in doctrine to make this assault now? So in an exercise, that probably wouldn’t go too well, but in real life, this went swimmingly well. It was a huge victory and it was a very quick victory for the Japanese. So what was it that Yamashita used to make up the numbers? What were the force multipliers that he used? And I think this is the big thing that we need to look at aircraft. We’ve got 253 allied aircraft against 568.  

So here we start to make up the numbers. There are two aircraft that the Japanese have for every one that the British have now. Interestingly enough, not all aircraft are created the same. This was very much the case and the Allies were shocked at the effectiveness of the Japanese aircraft. They were a lot better than anything that they could put in the sky. Artillery pieces 2 to 1 in favour of the Allies. 800 guns to Japanese 400. The Japanese doctrine wasn’t strong in artillery, as opposed to the British, which was very much a hold and destroy with artillery. Tanks, 200 Japanese tanks versus zero British tanks. That’s probably an issue because the best way to kill a tank is with another tank. And when you don’t have tanks, that makes it kind of hard. Armoured fighting vehicles. 

The British had quite a few Bren gun carriers and Indian pattern armoured personnel carriers. They weren’t much good. The armour on them was pretty thin. But they did help with mobility and they were used in some cases for protected mobility. Japanese had none of those. And trucks, 15,500 trucks for the Allies against 3,000 for the Japanese. Interesting. So now we’re going to kick off on the sequence of events. So 1941, and to set the scenes, you’ve really got the Germans knocking on the door of Moscow at around this time, late 1941. The war is going quite badly for the Allies and at this stage there are still people who are unsure if the Russians were going to be able to survive. So we’re right. At the end of November 30th of November, Yamashita receives a message from Tokyo. X Day. December 8th.  

Proceed with plan. Now, to give you an idea of the plan, some planning had gone into this and some thinking about it, but like a lot of military operations, there were some areas that still could have been improved upon at this point. At this point. And we are, we’re only nine days before the invasion. He’s got no maps and he’s actually planning from school atlases. December 2, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse arrive into Singapore, which is super exciting for everyone because this is the fundamental part of British strategy. The Royal Navy is going to come in and defend Singapore from all comers. And this is what the Royal Navy has sent, which is really. And so morale is lifted significantly because finally the major port in Singapore has got a couple of decent Royal Navy ships in there.  

Two days later, the Japanese invasion fleet sets sail. December 6, Percival receives reports of the approaching fleet. So he now knows that the invasion, which for so long they didn’t think was going to happen, is finally happening December 8th. So two days later, December 8th, just after midnight, the 5th Japanese Division lands at Singora and Pattani. Now, these are in Thailand. So Thailand up until now has been neutral. They’re violating Thai neutrality and they are moving in to seize ports as well as airfields. 18th Division faces stiff resistance at Kota Bharu. Now, this is on the east coast of Malaysia, right up the top, right up the north. Air raids in northern Malayan airfields and Force Z. So Prince of Wales and Repulse, along with a few destroyers, leaves the Singapore naval base. So Force Z is moving out to destroy the landing fleet.  

Now, December 8th was quite a busy day for the Japanese. Everyone thinks December 7th, a day that will live with infamy. Remember, you’ve got the international date Line, so that we’re actually. The landing in Malaya and Thailand are actually a couple of hours before the strike on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had a lot of other things that they were doing on that day as well. December 10th. So Force Z, Prince of Wales and Repulse is sunk. Churchill describes this as the greatest ever naval disaster. And he says that. So two capital ships are gone. That’s part of the disaster. The other part of the disaster, of course, is that there is no British fleet in the Indian Ocean or anywhere protecting the Commonwealth countries. So India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, stretching all the way down.  

You’ve got Dutch dependencies as well in Java, and coming down to Australia and New Zealand, nothing. No Royal Navy whatsoever, and no prospects of sending any Royal Navy either. This is why he calls it the greatest ever naval disaster. December 11, the Battle of Jitra starts. So this is on the UP north of Malaya, just south of the border with Thailand. The air force pulls back to Singapore, so they invade on the 8th. On the 11th, the Air Force pulls back to Singapore, acknowledging that they can only defend Singapore installations after the mauling they get from the Japanese who have moved their air force into Thailand. So the first 100 hours of this campaign has seen the Japanese achieve air superiority and domination of the sea. That’s the first 100 hours.  

Now, we look at some of the modern campaigns and we look at what happens in the first 100 hours and you think, wow, for the Japanese to have done this in 100 hours, that’s no mean feat. December 12, 2000 civilian casualties and an air raid on Penang. So Penang is an island off the coast of Malaya, a significant commercial hub, and the Japanese conduct a significant air raid on it. The next day, there’s a full retreat from Jitra. The Japanese, mounted on bicycles, are streaming south, and they start disguising Themselves as locals, and some of the locals are quite unhappy to see them, particularly the Chinese. Some of them, though, are actually quite welcoming of them. December 14th. Now there’s an air base at Aloor Star, which is virtually taken. So this is in northern Malaya and it’s taken virtually intact and well supplied.  

There is porridge still hot on the tables in the office’s message with the silver cutlery still laid out. That’s what the Japanese find when they get to Alo’s store by evening. The Japanese are flying from that airbase now, and this is a scary thing. They’re flying with planes that were fuelled with British fuel and they’re flying with bombs supplied by the British as well. So the destruction before departure did not go too well for the RAF there. December 15th. Lieutenant General Yamashita moves his headquarters to Al or Star. Now, he’s only just taken it the day before and yet he’s already moving up. This is the kind of fight that he has. He’s very aggressive and he likes to be as close as possible. December 16th, Heath’s front line, so he’s the commander of the 3rd Indian Corps.  
 
His entire front line is in complete disarray. The 11th Indian Division has taken heavy casualties and has almost been scattered to the four winds. December 17, Penang Falls. December 18. The brigades in the 11th Indian Division are amalgamated. So the amount of casualties that have taken are so significant that they’re actually putting two brigades together to try and make one adequate force over. December 20 and 21, the Japanese start infiltrating by raft on the Perak river, and this triggers another major withdrawal for the 11th Indian division. Things are not going well for the allies on the 22nd. So only a couple of weeks after the start of the war, the Imperial Guards Division arrives for the Japanese after securing Bangkok. So they moved into Thailand and they secured Bangkok. They’ve then moved down and they start relieving some of the forces.  
 
And this is one of the things that General Yamashit is able to do. He’s able to give his troops a rest because he is pushing them really hard. On the 27th, Yamashita has a planning conference with his senior staff and he plans amphibious landings. What he’s intending on doing is leapfrogging down the east coast, continually getting into the rear of the Allies as they withdraw. This causes a huge amount of dissension amongst his senior staff. I’m going to talk about this just a little bit because in subsequent podcasts we’re going to talk a lot about the Command relationship issues amongst the British and they are legion, there’s a lot of problems there, a lot of issues around trust, a lot of issues around communication. 
 
So I want to paint a little bit of some of the issues that Yamashita has in his own headquarters because two of his div commanders effectively loathe him which makes it hard to get a harmonious command relationship going. After this you start to see the Battle of Kampar begins and this is a four day battle. Artillery inflicts heavy casualties on the Japanese. The Japanese start to move down the east coast as well, attacking at Kuantan which is further down. New Year’s Eve, Gurkhas with Kukris drawn repel the Japanese at kampar. And on the 2nd of January, that’s the last day of the Battle of Kampar. And what you find the Japanese do is they push really hard. 
 
When they meet an obstacle they try and go around the flanks and they do this at a tactical level and if that doesn’t work they do it at an operational level. So the British are forced to pull back or sorry, the Indians are forced to pull back with the MSR or the main supply route being threatened. Japanese amphibious landing at Burnham river which is within 100 kilometres of Kuala Lumpur. Now General Wavell is appointed the new commander in chief of Abda Command. So Abda is American, British, Dutch, Australian command. So all of these troops, all of these naval forces are put under one command and that is given to General Wavell. So he will shortly come out and do his inspection of the troops that he’s got. January 7th, the Battle of Slim River. The 12th and 28th Indian Brigades are virtually destroyed. 
 
3200 mostly Indian troops surrender. This is described as being the worst defeat that or defensive defeat that Indian troops have ever suffered. The next day Wavell meets the survivors of Slim River. Two brigades are reduced to 500 men in total. He is shocked by what he sees and he orders a 150 mile retreat. At IPO there’s a meeting for Yamashita and his senior staff. He wants a continuation of the seaborne infiltration. He gets a huge amount of pushback from his senior staff. And we’re going to talk about the Japanese culture because this is a not insignificant problem in a British command. What the boss says is kind of what goes doesn’t necessarily have to be like that within a Japanese command. And we’re going to talk about some of the concept of Gykokoju which I’ve probably horribly mispronounced a little bit later. 
 
Which is leading from below. He changes his plan slightly. So the Imperial Guards, they were the ones who did the first amphibious landing after the initial landings. And they had significant problems. And there was a couple of reasons for that. They’re a Guards division, so the Guards division recruit taller soldiers. So they’re more physically imposing because the Japanese traditionally are a little bit shorter. But they weren’t as battle tested as the 5th and 18th Divisions. And the 5th Infantry Division was especially trained for amphibious operations. So Yamashita decides that he’ll use the 5th Infantry Div moving forward to highlight some of the issues that he had within his own headquarters.  

Colonel Tsuji, who wrote a lot of the doctrine for the jungle fighting that was being used in Malaya, and his reputation was as the God of operations, very hard line, pro war with the United States. And he was pro war with the United States because he thought that they would be easier than the Soviet Union. He’d actually been involved with some of the Japanese fighting in the Soviet Union. And he understood the fundamental difference in doctrines. Where the Soviet army, even at this early stage in the war, was much more tank integrated. The Japanese weren’t. Tanks were a part of. Were infantry support vehicles. And he’d seen the. The Japanese army do very badly against the Soviet Army. So he was very keen to fight the Americans.  
 
Now he was so angry at the decision because what he wanted to do was he wanted to continue on with what they called these filleting attacks, where they would just punch through with tanks and they were going really well. The progress was ahead of schedule. Punch through with the tanks, follow on with the infantry where they met resistance that they couldn’t punch through that would go around the flanks. What he wanted to do was to continue on with that. He was very angry at the thought of these Seabourne infiltrations. He thought that they were a waste of time and effort. He was so angry that he didn’t talk to anyone for 48 hours. Wow. Just wow. That sounds like something a badly behaved child would do. Not a. Not a colonel on a. On an army staff. Which brings US to around January 9th.  
 
Wavell directs Percival to give Bennett a greater role. Wavell meets Bennett and Bennett. So the Australians hadn’t been in combat yet. Bennett had a lot of concerns about the way that the. Particularly the Indian units were fighting. He didn’t think that they were well led. He didn’t think that they were good troops. And of course, Bennett was going to save the day. Wavell was looking for something to help save the cause. He was looking for anything to help save the cause and the cause was going down the tubes very dramatically. So Bennett was a bright light in amongst a sea of darkness for him. So he directed Percival to give Bennett a bigger role to play. This gets quite interesting. He’s put in charge of Westforce.  
 
His div headquarters is given responsibility for a lot more troops, a fairly inexperienced divisional staff with not insignificant personality issues. So it really was a recipe for disaster. But Wavell doesn’t see that yet. On January 11th the Japanese forces enter Kuala Lumpur unopposed. So the British had already pulled back. On 13 January a convoy with 50 Hurricanes fighters arrives and with the British 53rd Infantry Division. So up until now the fighters have really been outclassed. They’re flying things like Brewster Buffaloes which is a short, squat, fat, slow fighter. A lot of courage to fly it, particularly when you’re up against Zeros, which was a lot faster, a lot more nimble. So everyone’s really excited to have some Hurricanes because it has a strong reputation built on the work that it had done in the Battle of Britain.  

The big problem is that they don’t have the pilots. They don’t have enough pilots. The pilots they do have aren’t hugely experienced. A lot of the experienced pilots because they didn’t have great planes had been rotated out of malaya and within two weeks all of these are destroyed. On the 14th Bennett assumes command of Westforce and he conducts or through Lt. Col. Galligan, the ambush at Gaminshi. And this is the first big contact that the Australian troops have a company sized ambush. There are some issues with it, we’ll talk about it a bit later. It doesn’t really slow down the Japanese very much. The next day there’s further amphibious landings further south down towards the Muaw River. The 45th Indian Brigade is defending the river supported by Australian gunners who are firing point blank into Japanese barges as they move up the river.  
 
They do well during the day. The Japanese end up crossing under the COVID of darkness and this is one of the areas where the Japanese have a significant advantage over the Indian, British and Australian troops is that they’re much more comfortable fighting at night. On January 18th Bennett realizes the desperate situation on the Mughher front and Percival agrees to withdrawal. Now on the 19th of January, elements of the Norfolk Battalion are driven from Bukit Pellendoc which was a critical supply route for Australian and Indian forces and all communications with this force, with the forces of Bakri are lost. On the 20th Bennett orders a general retreat. On the 21st, an attack to relieve the Australian and Indian forces who are trapped behind enemy lines, is scheduled to go in at 1430.  

It’s postponed until 1730 and then until the next day at 0930 and then it’s cancelled. A brigade’s worth of troops is stuck behind enemy lines and we’re going to. This is Lieutenant Colonel Anderson’s battle. We’re going to talk about this in depth because it’s a. It’s really quite a trag story. No one’s really sure why this attack ever went in. One of the issues that Bennett had was he separated the 22nd and 27th Brigades. Now, if it was an Aussie brigade that was meant to put that attack in to rescue another Aussie brigade, they probably would have pushed the point a lot more forcefully in defence of the Norfolks. They were fairly new in country, so they hadn’t acclimatized. Not long off the boat, however. Still no one really knows why it was cancelled.  

There was a couple of reasons with synchronization with artillery and a few other things, but just never happened. On the 24th, the 2nd 4th Machine Gun Battalion, along with 2,000 other reinforcements, arrives in Singapore. The 26th, further Japanese amphibious landings on the west coast. They just keep on doing this. They keep moving further south behind. They’re quite comfortable moving behind the Indian and British forces and just continuing to force them to retreat. On the 28th, Heath organises a schedule for hour by hour timings for the withdrawal onto the causeway into Singapore. So Malaya is connected to Singapore by a long causeway. Heath is organizing the withdrawal. It’s fairly important to get this done right. Bennett, who’s notionally in command of a lot of this force, lunches with the Sultan of Johor and exchanges gifts.  

Meanwhile, the air situation is so dire that unarmed flying club aircraft go looking for the missing 22nd Indian Brigade. On the 29th, the British 18th Division lands in Singapore. And on the 31st of January, at the Causeway, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders retreats across the causeway, accompanied by. He’s the last man across with two bagpipes. At 8:15, a 20 metre gap is blown in the causeway. Now, in one month and 23 days, the Japanese have captured all of Malaya. It’s a landmass of about 130,000 square kilometers. It’s an advance of 740 kilometers. They did all of this with a force ratio of 1 to 2, not 3 to 1. How did they do that? Well, that is the question that we’re going to hope to unravel in subsequent podcasts. So this is a really quick introduction into the Malaya campaign. 

We’ve gone through the sequence of events, we’ve looked at the forces involved, and we’ve given you a bit of an introduction into some of the main characters into the Malaya campaign. What we’re going to do is we’re going to unravel how the Principles of War played out across the campaign, across this 740 kilometer advance. The next episode is we’re going to look at the center of gravity constructs for both the British and for the Japanese. Hopefully you’ll have learned something out of the Malaya campaign to make you a better leader. Bye.  

 
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