Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 267 - The Fall of Singapore Part 1: The Kiwi Weeb

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Joe, Tom, and Nate talk about the most embarrasing allied defeat of WWII Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Pre Order Your Shirt Now! https://llbdmerch.com/ Sources: Lindsey Murdoch. The Day the Empire Died in Shame. Janet Urh. Against The Sun. The AIF in Malaya. Kirby Woodburn. Et Al. History of the Second World War United Kingdom Military Series. Vol. I Brian Farrell. The Defense and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942. Allen Parfitt. Bicycle Blitzkrieg: The Japanese Conquest of Malaya and Singapore.

Hey everybody, it's Joe. I'm just dropping in to tell you we currently have our first ever pre-order for shirts ongoing in our new merch store LLBDmerch.com. You'll find the link in the show notes and you can go and grab one We currently are doing a pre-order for our Hong Christ t-shirt live fast eat grass You can check it out at LLBDmerch.com and now back to the show hey everybody welcome back to lines up by donkey's podcast i'm joe and with me today is tom and nate how you doing boys hot i am currently in the mixed media sweat and content cube i'm also in that but it's also called my living room because god damn is it hot the trash is your studio building that we got uh you know before we we moved in had previously

been a printmaker's shop and then just like wasn't wasn't occupied for a long time and because it's on a corner in direct sun pretty much all the time the insane owner who had uh who had basically burglar proofed it with with what looks like prison bars, also had a big early 2000s air conditioner unit installed. So we have it upstairs. You don't really need it downstairs as long as you're not running a marathon session. But there are times when I'm like, we should have gotten it installed downstairs because it's just like a part of me that just thinks like, God, it's going to be like the inside of a human mouth in here

if you do two podcasts in a row like it's just it's just it's like you remember that commercial joe from the 90s uh what was it like it was like uh one of the like spearmint chewing gum things yeah you know what i mean and it's like it's a whopping it's a sweltering 98.6 degrees inside your mouth and like a person opens their mouth and it's like like that's hotter than a jungle and like they open their mouth and like this gross 90 cgi it's like it's like like fucking palm trees and birds and shit flying around inside their mouth and like that's the that metaphor of like it's like living inside a human mouth like yeah well kind of it's 100 humidity and like you know but what's what's the normal body temperature your temperature

in centigrade tom i only know 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. 34 degrees. 34 degrees. Okay, yeah, exactly. So it actually got hotter than a human mouth in London last year. It got hotter than a normal human asshole. I mean, a human asshole is the normal baseline of London. I have one of those shitty Euro wall-mounted ACs which has less power than a normal car AC.

So it's like if I put an ice cube in the middle of my living room and was hoping it would cool down my entire apartment. It's great. But to be honest, obviously Ireland isn't a particularly warm country. We do have a joke over there that Ireland would be the perfect country in the world if we could put a roof on it. Like obviously I love the summer. Like this time of year, like right before it starts to get like super hot is like ideal

for me. I got off the overground. I got a lime bike. I had an iced coffee. I was like cycling down the street. I was listening to the Venga Boys. I was like, life is good. You know, this is the dichotomy. It's,'s you know that meme of the two guys sitting on the bus yeah it's like

that's what that's what it's like being irish with the weather living in london also living in london yeah um speaking of things that are kind of british boys i was gonna say speaking about places that are unbearably hot also yes yeah also yes um i think this is the first time uh there's been more than two people because uh during a this isn't necessarily a series it's a duology yeah it's a two-parter it's it's the duplex of podcasts yeah and much much like the duplex of podcasts you will hate your neighbor at the end of it um because we are talking about the fall of singapore british singapore to be more specifically uh be more specific um uh and that's because one it has been requested quite a bit i've always wanted to do it um and because oftentimes in world war ii and the history

of warfare in general whenever there's a catastrophic fuck up it's always generally spun to be something positive like we've talked about this before during the diep raid failure where like oh no you don't understand we learned all of these things about beach landings that we didn't know before, when in reality, they absolutely did. All my losses are lessons. Yeah, and most of the time, that is bullshit. And this is probably one of the most catastrophic fuck-ups on the side of the Allies in World War II, to the point that nobody tries to spin it positively. in world war ii to the point that nobody tries to spin it positively and that is when british singapore thought to be an impregnable fortress and jewel of the allied crown in the pacific fell at the hands of japanese soldiers who were out of food water ammunition and riding at them

with the revolutionary warfare weapon of bicycles but most importantly and obviously uh bicycles are coming up like the tannenberg series most importantly did they have water no no no no so we're we're breaking the trend of people not having any water but still you know winning the battle that's one of the things that stands out and as uh our listeners and you guys will kind of figure out is the Japanese commander, General Yamashita, effectively won by bluffing. We love to see it.

So I have an interesting connection to this because one of my great uncles on my mom's side, the British side, the English side, was captured in Malaya. I don't know if he was captured in the fall of Singapore or just in the Japanese capture of what's now Malaysia. Um, but he, he was a POW and, um, that is a bad time. Yeah. And so my, I grew up hearing stories, you know, sort of secondhand from relatives about stuff that my great uncle had experienced or that he saw people experience in the pow camps and um like it's it's to the point where i can give you the sanitized

version um without necessarily needing the world's greatest content warning but this is the podcast that did three parts on man king two things number one obviously water torture it's just a thing like not waterboarding but doing stuff like to fuck with people's minds like putting them in a darkened room and dripping water on them and like having someone whose job it is to drop water on you at weird irregular intervals so that you go insane um but then also in a dark but also very hot room but also um this is really gross so just just just cover your ears for the, let's say, 15 seconds if body horror is going to bother you. Cutting people's skin and putting growing bamboo shoots into it so it grows up through their skin because bamboo grows so fast.

Then yanking it out and doing that over and over and over again. Apparently, my great uncle had weird scars on his legs because they did it on his thigh muscles and stuff. So what you're saying is your great uncle was British Rambobo i mean basically i'll put it this way uh i bring it up not to be like wow the horrible horrible shit like everything was there are a lot of fucking horrible crimes committed but the point i'm trying to make though is that we're going to talk about this but also that like this didn't have to happen it's the british fucked it in a big way it did not have to happen at all never in a million years. The Japanese basically conquered Southeast Asia

all the way to the southern tip of the Papuan Peninsula in New Guinea and were fully planning on invading Australia, but didn't quite make it that far. They bombed Darwin, but really the southernmost point that they captured in terms of getting through the colonial possessions in Southeast Asia

and the South Pacific was they got to Port Moresby, New Guinea, which is not very far on a map from Darwin, Australia. Part of that moving downward, destroying the Dutch and the British,

et cetera, was that the colonial armies were just not prepared for what was coming. And maybe someday we'll do a series on the Papuan campaign. Oh, it'll happen at some point for sure. Yeah. When I was in the captain's career course, I had to write a paper. And so I wrote about the allied capture of Buna.

But Jesus Christ, dude, the stuff that went on, there's a reason why there's very little like valorizing stuff about any of these in like our entertainment and sort of collective memory of the war, at least for the Americans and British. I know that the Australians do a lot about the Kokoda track and I've been corrected on this in the past. And Singapore is another example of this. Singapore is an example of like, it's very hard to make a sort of a heroic Dunkirk movie about something that fucking sucked that bad. And the aftermath of all those POWs being taken and there's like yeah there's really no there's no there's no way to spin singapore into looking heroic at all unless there's there's a few bright spots which we will i mean if you want to call them that because obviously they end horribly at part two but it's almost specifically at the hands of uh

local malaysian fighters uh so like of course, the British are not going to spin that. The Australians are not going to spin that. And this happens in 1941. So it's 1941 into 1942. So it's also important to know that the British absolutely knew what the Japanese were capable of when it came to what happens when civilians and POWs fall into their hands. And we've talked about this at length for hours on the show,

I feel like at this point, where the massive amount of brutality that the Japanese were bringing to bear should probably get more attention outside of Asia. And there was nobody who was fighting them at the time that did not know what was going to happen. And still, this occurs. Now, Singapore. I'm not going to go too much

into the history of British Malaya in Singapore, but Singapore was founded by the British in the 1800s as a part of greater British Malaya. This included both the federated and unfederated states of Malaya. Kind of unimportant to our story,

but they were both British under British control in one way or another through a complex web of direct governance, proxies, protectorates, normal colonial shit. Yeah. The Straits of Malacca were super important to British imperialism just because they were,

they are, were and are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Because people often forget how densely populated that part of the world is. But most people, if you ask them, hey, what do you think the most populous Muslim country in the world is? They would guess either somewhere in the Gulf or they would guess Pakistan, but actually it's Indonesia. Indonesia has like 280 million people who live there. Malaysia is not that many by any means, but that whole area of South Asia, Southeast Asia is massively populated. And the trade networks there have been there forever. I mean, one of the reasons why, if I understand my history correctly, one of the reasons why there's such a significant Muslim population is because traders from basically from the Arab states and then also from the precursors to the Arab states and then also from India when it was ruled by Muslims traded

so much there that people basically converted populations there. So it's massively important. You know, Raffles sets it up knowing that like this is going to be a very very key thing for them and so it is like for better or worse it is like next to the entirety of india it is a very very significant jewel in the crown of like of britain you know getting sunburned on every grid coordinate on this planet. And it was really important. It eventually would turn in very important for wealth extraction. 60% of the world's rubber and 58% of the world's tin would come from Malaya. So you could see why the British, of course, wanted it. You could see why when war became inevitable in this region, the Japanese would want it because Japan,

not exactly known for being a resource-rich island, hence the whole point of their invasion. We talked a little bit more about their racial and imperial ideology in our Nanking series, if you want to go listen to that. But yeah, it was the Japanese version of Manifest Destiny on top of, oh dear God, if we want to be an empire, we need resources. It had a population of about 4 million, a wide array of different ethnicities, all controlled through the normal colonial web that we just talked about. And it was administered by maybe 20,000 British people. For a long time, Malaya was a little more than a gold mine for the British. For a long time, Malaya was a little more than a gold mine for the British. But as the Japanese empire began to spread through the Pacific, namely after the Russo-Japanese War, which we II because it opened things up for Japan to be

the dominant power in the Pacific. And it became pretty clear that between the British and the United States, which also at the time had colonial holdings in the Pacific and still do, that Japan would become a regional enemy. So Singapore's importance began to change, forming the basis of what became known as the Singapore Strategy. And it's important to remember that this is during the era of the Washington Naval Treaty, which we've talked about a bit in the past. Long story short, it limited the world's navies in an effort to stop a naval arms race. And it also forbade the fortification of Pacific Islands, with the exception of Singapore. And small weird side note of what could have been

in history, for a long time, the British were actually allied with Japan. This is via an expiring treaty. And there was a lot of debate within the walls of the British government, both in London and throughout the colonies, that if they should renew it or not. But by the 1920s, people were pretty goddamn sure that the US and Japan would eventually come to blows for one reason or another. The British government officials in the Pacific colonies, namely Australia, New Zealand, and others, favored renewing it with Japan because they're in their backyard and risked a future war with the United States, while everyone else, specifically London and Canada, wanted to take

the citizens of the United States. So history could have been much, much different if London took a different turn on that one. Now, the Singapore strategy boiled down to making it a linchpin of British defense in the greater Pacific region, I should say. However, how exactly they were meant to do it was kind of never really decided upon in a way that made any sense. And this comes down to both colonial governments, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army all absolutely hating one another. And that will become a constant throughout the next episode or between the next two episodes. Nobody could agree on anything, and it was pretty clear the further away people got

from London, the less they were likely to work together. And that's not to say that the British government ever truly functions, but in comparison, I should say. For instance, this is obviously a naval-heavy theater. You got islands

everywhere. Everybody knows any kind of future war, Japan is going to look much like the Russo Japanese, where the decisive blows were landed at sea. And this is also the era where the Royal Navy is one of the most powerful navies on earth. So they believed that this should be a base for a large fleet. However, that's easier said than done. The Royal Navy was all over the place and getting a fleet to such a faraway place such as Singapore was a logistical nightmare. So they'd have to build a ton of refueling points along the way, as well as a large enough naval base on the island in order to support any incoming fleet, which they did not have at the time. This in turn would require a way to defend said shipyard. This is where a massive argument over doctrine would come into play and

almost certainly set the stage for the fall of Singapore. They were only worried about attack of some kind coming from the sea, a naval-born force. And tradition dictated they would do so right up the gates of Singapore. So they decided that we have to defend this with massive batteries of shore guns to chase off the Japanese Navy. However, there was a development that changed all that in the name of torpedo bombers uh land-based torpedo bombers uh because you know air forces were becoming a part an integral part of any kind of military at the time especially when it came to naval support close to shore the army and the all-powerful royal navy both favored the shore batteries while the royal air force wanted ground-based torpedo bombers but wait so how do how does ground-based torpedo bombers.

Wait, so how does ground-based torpedoes work? Aren't they meant to be in the water? Well, ground-based torpedo bombers, what I mean is bombers that drop torpedoes. So basically like an airfield. Yeah, you take off, planes fly around, drop torpedoes from their carriers one way or the other, whether it's on their wings or in their hold. And then those torpedoes then target ships.

Yeah, and the British were not the only people going through this argument before. The Japanese Imperial Navy and various other branches of the Japanese military, because Japanese military politics in World War II are deeply interesting to me because they all kept trying to kill one another. They had the same argument where like, is the future of naval combat with big stupid battleships or aircraft carriers? I mean, that's why the Yamato was built and was quickly proven right that, nope, aircraft carriers were the right way to go. Big up the Yamato. Yeah.

And political wins blew in the favor of the Navy and the Army, which are much more important to the British at the time. Soon, huge shore-based batteries were installed for the sole purpose of fighting enemy ships, with little thought given for any other purpose they might be used for, such as anti-aircraft fire or ground support. Which is why they were only supplied with solid-shot armor-piercing rounds, completely useless for anything other than shooting at boats. It turned out that this was not the only thing that the various branches of the British military wouldn't agree upon. The army was only really worried about a seaborne invasion into Singapore, like I said, as was the navy,

but once again, the air force was much more practical. That's because there was a study done by General Sir William Dobby that said guys, look at the north of Malaya. It's wide the fuck open. Someone could cut through Thailand and invade from the north or land at one of

northern Malaya's many ports because it exists as a trade hub. There's plenty of places they could come and they could simply go south. Oh, I'm just imagining being invaded by loads of Australians on mushrooms that have just left a full moon party in Thailand. Well, you know, at the end of the day, like, you can definitely take enough mushrooms to think that you two fought on the Kokoda track and walked all the way from Port Moresby to Bunagona. You know what? And then actually you just wind up in a surprisingly clean hospital in Laos with a cracked skull where everyone's like, God, I fucking hate Australians

so much. Look, that is the most innocent reason a large group of white men could be going to Thailand. That is very true. I think we've talked about this before where you and i we made some joke about becoming traffickers and and joe said to me yeah nate well then just get a flight to thailand they fly straight from london and i was like honestly joe a guy of my age my complexion and my passport that's the most innocent reason i could be flying solo to thailand and uh yeah it's not wrong it's like all that that thing that was going around the other day of uh all those uh retirement age men in america that are retiring to vietnam for cheaper costs of living i'm like yeah sure and the philippines don't forget the philippines yeah philippines

is one too so you see them in central america but those ones are a little bit a little bit bolder because central america is just very easy to get robbed. I mean, obviously, you can definitely get robbed in the fucking Philippines, but it's less likely. But I encountered some American guys living off their whatever pensions, living in Honduras, and they were pretty open about the reason why they were there, to fuck Honduran women. Yeah, yeah.

I didn't ask about age. I didn't want to know. Yeah, it's best to not know certain things. Say that again, Tom. Oh, yeah, you can move to the Philippines if you want to set up a neo-Nazi forum as well. I mean, Serbia is also open for that. And Russia.

Now, so like the north of British Malaya is completely undefended. It's mostly jungle. However, the Brits just assume nobody would invade through here, right? So the Air Force decided, fuck the Navy and the Army, and they began building airfields in the north without any support from the other two branches. However, even through all of this, Singapore was thought to be so easily defendable that any attempts

invading it would not only be incredibly stupid, but fucking bloodbath of course a huge amount of what brought this kind of thinking into being was simple british hubris enter the commander of the british forces in the area and maybe arguably the dumbest guy that's going to command this until the next guy it's just it's a chain of dumb guys Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke Popham because of course that's his name great name, name alert huge name alert there's a lot of name alerts in this one I will say

a lot of Percivals are floating around, there's an Archibald you know, you get some solid Brit guy names in here Popham was like a G6. I'm not going to call a Brooke Popham because that's too much for me. I'm just going to call him Popham from this point on. Popham was an idiot.

And I said, normally I give an explanation of why I call someone an idiot. He's a fucking dumbass. Popham was a dumbass and he was made incredibly unimportant by his own incompetence. And he's not usually thought of as being the commander of the British defense, because the next guy we will talk about is where I'm not going to say unfairly, where most of the blame falls, but we'll get to that point. During the lead up of World War II in the Pacific, Popham constantly sent reports back to London that discounted any

real threat to Singapore. And when he attended war games and research presentations about the, hey, what about the north of Malaya problem? He fell asleep. Now, the commander of the army and directly under Popham is a guy where most of the blame of what we're going to talk about falls. Sometimes people say it's unfair. I strongly disagree. And that is a guy named Lieutenant General Arthur Percival. Now, you will be able to pick him out of a lineup

because he is the man with the most enormous buck teeth to ever live. And Percival, he's very much a type of guy that would exist in the British colonial sphere, which we've talked about. His soldiers fucking hated him and insulted him behind his back, mostly because he insisted on wearing a pith helmet everywhere he went, like it was still the 1800s. Oh, for fuck's sake. Like, to be fair, isn't it just implied that every soldier makes fun of their officers?

Sorry, Nate. I mean, yeah. Oh, I mean. Basically. But like. Soldiers hate their officers. That is a tradition. Yeah.

Yeah. So from we need to get the critical soldier perspective since Joe was junior enlisted. I obviously was an officer. Look, all officers are going to get made fun of no matter what. But like there are gradations depending on how much of a dumbass you are and you can definitely find yourself um looking good by comparison if you have a real real honker in your unit um you know in your company in your battalion like people will know people will find out so it's one of those things where nate aren't you are so lucky that you you weren't an officer now because you'd be getting roasted and people be calling you ed

sheeran uh yeah ed sheeran had to become popular but i mean i'm trying to think if they're i mean i just looked so young and i had to have my hair cut so short that it was always a comparison to like looking like a baby or looking like a cupid all or something like that uh looking like a precious moment yeah yeah yeah yeah someone put someone put battle rattle on a precious moments figurine? 100%. That's what people have described me as. It's just Precious Moments figurine. And so it's just like, I, yeah.

If I was getting made fun of, it was for my looks and not being good at DNC and stuff like that. But I didn't lose a shadow, the drone shadow, like one of our company commanders did. They threw up at a drone without doing any of our company commanders did um you know i didn't like just fully like they threw up at a drone without doing any of the the restricted operating zone clearance but the problem is is that you can't have two of them operating at the same time because they all their default setting is to operate on the same frequency and if one operates the then it shorts out the other it loses signal so they they just threw one up not realizing that one of the other

companies had already fucking done the ros and cleared theirs and when that company put theirs up it just shorted the drone they lost it at ntc it's 300 grand it's okay it's just like from i guess from a soldier's perspective when it comes to how you because like at a baseline everybody hates their officers because they control every facet of your existence they have control over you in an arbitrary thing and and frankly like like you know when it comes down to it, I never really saw much of the class system. That was an individual officer thing. If that was their personality,

that's a different reason to hate them. But there is, I hate this guy for controlling my life. And then there's, I fucking hate this guy because he's going to get me killed. And Percival is a glowing example of the second

kind because he did not rise through the ranks through combat leadership. He was a good administrator. Seriously. He went to staff college like anybody who eventually becomes a general officer. And he was noted for the only positive thing during

that point was he was good at paperwork. So people, soldiers, officers alike, hate doing paperwork. So they kept him around because people loved him. And Percival knew what he was good at. So that's what he did. He did everybody's paperwork. And so up the ranks he went. And when World War II popped off in Europe and Africa, because it would take a little bit more time to pop off in the Pacific, he demanded a field command. And they stuck him directly in Singapore to his great disappointment. Now, he did command a powerful army on paper. 86,000 men from 31 different battalions. Now, numbers are not that important when the people filling those uniforms have no idea what they're doing. It was full of men who had no idea what

the hell being a soldier was, led by men who also had no idea what being an officer or an NCO was, for instance. So it's 1941. Okay, let's jump ahead a bit. The British are already fighting in World War II in Europe and Africa. And this of world war ii is not going well for the british military they are losing badly pretty much everywhere so the units stationed in singapore at one point were quite like quite good they were quality units of the british army including the British Indian Army. However, as the British were getting their shit kicked in across Europe and Africa, the Brits had to look around for experienced officers and NCOs, not only to replace their losses, but train the next batch of officers and NCOs. So they plucked them from Singapore and then plugged in incredibly inexperienced men at random. and then plugged in incredibly inexperienced men at random. For instance, the British Indian Forces station in Singapore had all their Indian officers and NCOs taken from them for the most part,

not 100%, but a large number, sent back to India to start training the next batch of British Indian officers and NCOs and then replaced by British officers and NCOs of virtually no experience, who, by the way, could not speak any of the various languages that these Indian army units spoke. For fuck's sake. That's going to become a problem. Now, soon the very important part of the era, the northern jungle, was then defended by the federated melee states volunteers. And this is not to say anything of their desire to defend their territory or their homeland, but the British treated them like

not even a second thought, like a third or a fourth thought. They were a little more than levied militia with no training and they were given British weapon hand-me-downs. So all their equipment is seriously out of date. Other elements of the army were from Australia, and they were probably even worse off. They had just been mustered and shipped out, and an officer joked that his soldiers had enlisted on Friday and shipped out on Monday. And the idea was, oh, they'll get to Malaysia, and they'll get more training. But they didn't. It's the classic, you'll get more training, but they didn't. It's the classic.

You'll get the rest at your unit. Yeah. Like I've had that before. Like, Oh, you'll learn this downrange for people who don't know. Downrange generally means the war zone. Um,

and I did not, uh, like you'll get this training when you get to Afghanistan. Nope. Uh, he's just gone to the gym. Is there someone upstairs? Okay.

Give me a second. So it also seemed like the officers in charge of training just didn't care. You think, for example, Malaya is jungle, that these soldiers would need jungle training and learn how to survive and fight in it. They just didn't give that training. The one unit that did, I believe, is like the Argyle unit, the Argyle infantry. unit, the Argyle infantry, they did do jungle training and other officers like chastise the commanders for being too mean to their men for making them train in the jungle that they were going to have to fight in. Now, none of these soldiers had any anti-tank training. Most had never seen a tank at all. And the British army simply handed out paper leaflets with a picture

of a tank on it and what to do if they ever came across one. Not that it mattered, because they were not supplied with any anti-tank weapons, at least for now, and they didn't have any training in building any anti-tank defenses. Speaking of tanks, this bullet point is quite short, because they didn't have any. The end. They did not station a single motherfucking tank in all of Malaya.

A bit like you in Afghanistan. Well, that at least makes sense. So it's basically... Panker without a tank. It's basically like in Civilization VI, where if you have a tank and they don't, you can just use one tank to run rampant and fuck all their shit up. You may not necessarily be able to capture their city with just one tank unit, but you might also.

Especially Japanese tanks in World War II, which were pretty much the worst. They were effectively armored cars with turrets on them. But speaking of armored cars, that is something the British had, as well as Bren carriers. Not exactly what you want when you talk about

armor. They have the protection of tinfoil. Now, previously I said the Air Force had been the practical ones of this group, but that is a low bar that they're crossing. Remember, they are led by Popham. Now, one of his memos back to London was him turning down newer aircraft like the famed Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane, saying that the planes that they had were perfectly fine. They were actually armed with the worst plane in the Allied arsenal of World War II, the F-2A Brewster Buffalo,

which also has a very stupid name for an airplane. I feel like this and this podcast, this show in general, can be very much subbed up by the adage, hubris is the downfall of man. Yes. Now, this is probably one of the few compliments I will pay Popham.

If he would have begged and pleaded London for new planes, he probably wouldn't have gotten them anyway. They simply didn't have any to spare. But rather than telegram how serious the situation was to London, he just kept telling them everything was fine. Now, I'm not going to go too much into the specs of the Buffalo, but it was obsolete before World War II even began. And it was used in Singapore because that's just what they had available. They were slower. brewster's buffalo sounds like the worst tv show you've ever seen yes it does yeah it also could be like a shitty indie band um even yeah even worse than the tv

show we're brewster buffalo uh we could they call us a montana grunge uh we're brewster's buffalo we're all addicted to cocaine so they're an italian house band oh did you see the um the uh escort raiding site in italy paid tribute to silvio berlusconi and at his funeral laid a wreath on his grave that that would be the only group of people that mourn his passing is is is creepy old men and those that employ that are employed by them um now the buffalo is slower and badly armed uh worse so than the japanese zero um and that's because so there's a really weird part of the buffalo's production so they're assembled in a factory right they're they're mostly built in the united states they're assembled in a factory but had to be disassembled in order

to get them out of said factory. So this led to all kinds of mechanical problems, the worst of which was a sudden and unexplained drop in oil pressure that nobody could figure out how to fix. That simply made the fucking thing fall out of the sky. Now, the other

planes they had weren't any better. This includes the, again, great name, Victor's Vildebeest, which is a bomber that flew at the incredibly high speed of 90 miles an hour. And because it was a biplane that was nearly 20 years old, it also did not have a closed cockpit. It looked like it came from World War I. It looked like it came from World War I. 90 miles an hour is, if I remember correctly, it's 90 knots is the max, the cruising speed or the typical speed for doing drops on a UH-1 Huey. So I'm just imagining a plane, a bomber, a biplane,

no protection, no closed cockpit, flying at the speed of a Huey. I feel as though if you're a Japanese machine gunner, that's just sort of like, oh, it's level one of duck hunt again. Yes. Yeah. What is this dastardly and motley bullshit? The fucking Vildebeest flies at the speed of smell.

And you can smell the baked beans off the bridge. You can smell the baked beans off the bridge. Now, this could possibly be remedied with like a well-trained and experienced air crew. They didn't have that either. They were supposed to have over 500 in operation planes. They barely had 200. And speaking of the people flying those planes, the vast majority had come straight out of flight school and barely had any time behind the sticks. Now, for the Navy, probably the most important part of the Singapore defense strategy.

It, too, was a complete and utter shitshow. It was mostly light cruisers from World War I, as well as an old battle cruiser, the HMS Repulse, and a dreadnought, the HMS Prince of Wales. And Winston Churchill was kind of understood. I mean, not that he was a great person in charge of the Admiralty, but he did know something about naval warfare, even if most of what he knew was fucking bad. But he looked at the Singapore fleet and was like, oh, this is bad. We have to reinforce them.

So he attempted to send them an aircraft carrier, which then quickly ran aground on its way there and had to go back for repairs and never showed up and if to make all of this worse every british commander and leader from the military side to the civilian side all hated one another though probably the dumbest was a guy named sir shenton Thomas. Shenton Thomas. That is a name that his parents came up with after spilling a bowl

of spaghetti, alphabety spaghetti on the table. Like, what the fuck? I will say rarely is there like a British guy name that comes up that I've literally never heard before. Like Archibald. We're laughing, but it's like an old-timey name i assume there's you'll still see some kids named archie or something but like prince harry's son is archibald but shenton no shenton yeah shenton thomas sounds like the name that even the even the statue protector baz guys know like oh no we don't

want to defend that statue too many historical allegations oh yes you'll have to go to fight world war ii you'll be like daddy you know your father survived shell shock in the psalm shenton thomas was the civilian leader of malaya and as japanese forces were rampaging through china and the pacific for years at this point generally a red flag if you happen to be a British colony in the region, instead of doing anything to prepare for this, he insisted that business go on as usual. And he demanded that the military did not interfere with imports and exports for the sake of military readiness or defensive preparedness. Somehow it gets dumber than this because we have to talk about how the Commonwealth military worked at the time. As Australian forces fell under British commanders, the Australians led by an Aussie named H. Gordon Bennett and another guy

named Lewis Heath. It meant if, say, a British superior officer gave them an order, they were well within the rights to disagree. And instead of immediately disobeying it, they could ring up the Australian government and get permission to ignore that order. Now he's giving us these fucking orders. This fucking dog can't. Yeah. And Heath absolutely hated Percival.

He hated the British military in general, which we're not going to fault him for. And he was superior to Percival. He hated the British military in general, which we're not going to fault him for. And he was superior to Percival in rank, but got passed up for command position because Percival was British. So Bennett and Heath purposefully would grind things down to a halt whenever they wanted, just to fuck over Percival.

That is a level of pettiness I aspire to. I can absolutely respect it. I get it. So you have a barely armed and barely trained force led by a bunch of bickering British and Aussies who were occasionally harassed by the government for being useless but never replaced.

In fact, Popham was having constant nervous breakdowns since World War II had begun, and that only got worse when London sent out a cabinet minister named Duff Cooper. That's his last name, Duff Cooper, whose only job was it to seemingly scream at Popham at every occurrence. Whenever anything went wrong, Duff Cooper, who I assume is just a monocle wearing a pith helmet, just would kick open his office door and start screaming at pop at popham and i'm gonna shit talk duff cooper a lot and he deserves it but he did tell the government

multiple times that he need like popham needed to be replaced and they would ignore him all the way up until duff cooper was giving given enough power to do so himself which would not happen for months like as a general rule i feel like i've learned on this show that if there is a guy in charge with a really dumb or like weird name things are gonna go bad you have like popham duff cooper we talked archibald percival yeah the other week we talked about francisco crispy like if you can laugh at someone's name when they're introduced you do not put them in command of a military unit that's my general rule rule of thumb is like this guy sounds like he should be like a breakfast cereal mascot we shouldn't put him in charge of an army oh yeah so i'm introducing you to your new commanding officer is captain kellogg he he just

got promoted um now with the british background of the coming invasion covered let's jump over to japan now malaya may have been one of the most penetrated overseas colonies when it came to spies in the entire war it didn't seem like like the British really attempted to not let this happen. It had a large Japanese population, of course, but many of them were put in place purposefully by the imperial government for that exact purpose. They had very specific professional day jobs, which wouldn't raise suspicion, but did sew themselves into colonial life and colonial administration.

They had even gotten into British defenses. For example, the official naval base photographer for the British government was a Japanese spy. So he could just hang out taking pictures of their fleet at all times.

That rules. How did they turn him? Was he just a British weeb? he had no he's a japanese guy oh okay yeah the so because remember during the 20s they were allies uh so the japanese just kept kicking people over to singapore like no this guy is actually a very good photographer And here's all these doctors that are going to train your medics and all these other things. I'm just imagining a British World War II weeb. Just like a guy with a camera and like... Hold that thought. Do I got something for you guys? I mean, imagine a guy who's a weeb and he's just like British 1940s weeb. And he's like, no, I really just love Ukiyo-e prints. I really love it. And actually what he's saying is,

I really love the horny ones. I love like just the weird improbable sex with sea creatures ones don't worry it's fine this print uh she's actually a thousand year old wizard it's totally normal he just has like an entire stack of like hawkisai prints where like the boobs are like anatomically impossible okay so this so this is where I get to deliver the news to you. Enter the British weeb, Captain Patrick Heenan, who's actually a Kiwi, but you know, whatever. Technically part of Britain at the time. Captain Patrick Heenan was attached

to the British Royal Air Force from New Zealand and he was the main Japanese spy in all of Malaya. Come on. He was stationed in the northern airfields and directly fed the Japanese all of this intelligence through a secret radio set disguised as a communion kit. That's kind of based. I'm not going to lie. That's kind of funny. He gave them everything.

He was eventually found out because he was really bad at his job. Like, when the bombing begins, he's never where the bombs happen to fall because he knows when they're coming. And at one point, a chaplain asked to use his communion kit and opens it and finds a fucking radio in it. I mean, like, I feel like

when he was eating dinner with all the soldiers, the fact that he opened it was like, itakemasu, like probably get him away. Cheering for Emperor Hirohito for a thousand years. Like, I mean, good day. I'm just, I need this radio in my communion kit because I've got to make sure that the transubstantiation signal was received. Okay. Like we are a very advanced culture.

And we've got a radio that lets us talk with God. I'm only using it for good purposes. I understand it's all in the Japanese language. But God loves the pillows. Why is God Japanese? Yeah. It's really funny Joe. Because that is such a specific reference for a specific generation.

That people our age who grew up watching any anime. absolutely know the pillows and love the pillows whereas i'm not sure because i don't watch anime i didn't really watch it as much as my brother did and my brother lived in japan go figure the like the watching fucking whatever the the anime is about the the girl with the bass guitar that hits the dude on the head i can't remember what it's called anymore yeah to becoming a fan of a couple of the pillows albums it's like such a pipeline and it's like but i i genuinely think that this would be like people talking about like fucking you know one of don henley's bad spin-off post eagles bands to anyone who is in our age yeah it's true like welcome to the middle-aged guy history podcast and tom Tom who has the musical taste

of a middle aged man I'm literally going to a gig later on tonight where it's going to be full of a room full of people who look exactly like sharks who are going to give themselves life changing injuries in the pit so eventually of course when this

guy gets found out I'm telling all this now out of order because so much shit is going to happen during the Battle of Singapore. I had to put it up front. Patrick Heenan is captured after the radio set incident, and he's just kind of like chucked in a cell and everything happens so quickly. They never actually try him and find him guilty of espionage. It's clear that singapore is falling and heenan is like uh is like mocking them he's like yeah that like like the scene from uh like 40 days of night where the vampire guy is like oh soon i'm gonna be free like heenan's doing the same thing

and then the british military police just take him out back and shoot him and dump him in the ocean i mean i wish we could i wish we could do this with uh all the people who post like pictures of oscar from evangelion in like imperial japanese garb i'm gonna move on from that one i just kind of leave that one hanging i i i i too dislike the ideology with every fiber of my being but i'm not necessarily sure if i want to grant the powers for summary executions for anime related crimes i just feel as though that's just that's just too broad and too sweeping no i mean it's more so just the crossover of like people who are obsessed with anime and people who love waifus and people who are obsessed with like imperial japanese or nazi imagery the amount of like there is a strange amount of crossover yes that is true the amount of

characters i've seen of like from ava in like nazi garb imperial japanese garb and not because i intentionally seek it out this is just a thing when you're into anime that you see on the internet you sure do i'm beginning to think the internet was a mistake that it was the network of spies in malaya were so dense and varied that the amount of intelligence they collected was insane for example the maps they created of malaya's road system were more in depth than the and detail than the ones that the british had speaking of road systems that dense jungle in the north was stitched through with an extensive paved road system, making them perfect for an invasion. The British didn't think it was very important to worry about that for some reason.

And if that wasn't bad enough, a German ship raided a British one in the Pacific, and it just so happened to contain all of the secret mail and military plans for Singapore, which was then promptly turned over to the Japanese. The letters had everything down to troop strength and disposition, equipment rosters, everything. See, if you used Linux, this wouldn't happen. This is very easy. You see, you do the opposite version of like the Code Talker scheme that the US did and just

have them write it all in Welsh no one will be able to fucking read that shit Welsh is a beautiful language I will defend Welsh this is like the commander of Singapore unrolls the order and it's just three pages of one word now like this was a step

by step guide of how to absolutely wreck their shit and it was so complete that the Japanese literally thought it was fake. This is too good. There's no way this is real. But then they compared it to all their spy reports and be like, nope, no, they're just dumb. This is all good. I was just laughing, Joe, and I don't mean to interrupt you. So I'm glad you finished that segment about a version of Code Talkers, but it's all of the members of super furry animals and they have to go around embedded with allied units just speaking to each other in welsh i i would like to i would like to think that there could be so many different units

of british code talkers and they're all just speaking different incomprehensible uh like accents from throughout the island like i don't know get like a cockney rhyming slang guy get a welsh yeah like yeah exactly you have you have you have cockney guy and then all of a sudden they're like fuck i didn't load my radio phil and now i'm only getting talked to by guys with geordie accents and i can't understand a word joe he has to cut that because the guy jumped out apparently drove his car to a bridge in cardiff and jumped off it they They never found his body. So we don't want to make a suicide joke. But yeah, in 1995, the primary songwriter and guitarist of Manic Street Preachers vanished and most likely killed himself because he was a very, very, very unwell man. Now, the job that would fall to taking

Singapore was given to the 25th Army under the command of Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, a man who will go down in history for a reason he is probably not happy with, which we'll talk about at the end of part two. Now, he was formerly a commander within the Kwantung Army, which anybody who's familiar with the episodes we've done about the Kwantung Army, it means he's kind of a monster. I mean, he was a general in the Japanese Imperial Army. he's kind of a monster i mean he was a general in the japanese imperial army it's kind of a baseline um he was like most officers of the japanese military at the time a political beast and he had taken part in several coups to the point that uh prime minister hideki tojo did not fucking trust him and wanted to keep him away from japan in general which is again super fucking

common within the japanese military of the day um now he didn't know a single thing about jungle warfare he had fought in china um and uh unlike the british he was like i should probably learn how to do this so he knew a guy who did know how to fight in the jungle colonel masanobu shuji who uh had the headed the it was known as the Taiwan Research Army, which sounds like a very boring name, but literally their entire job was to put soldiers in the jungle and figure out how to best

fight and survive in it. Shuji actually wrote the Imperial Japanese Army's Jungle Warfare Survival Guide. He was literally the best guy for this job. Say what you will about the Japanese, and I'm not patting them on the back because they did a lot of really bad things, but they did at least have this thing about like, we might want to learn stuff because knowing things might help us a bit.

And they had their own huge blind spots. Don't get me wrong. It's not like they were just super soldiers. But when you compare it to some of these stories that you recount about the british military at the time it is very striking the degree to which the brits just like it'll be it'll be just like i was trying to think of that place whatever it is in what is it in somerset the place where they uh they love taking them out to train and uh i don't know maybe you know it tom but um it's just like if i know yeah well fuck me it's it's it's i'm pretty sure uh i'm pretty sure rugged kipling referenced it in in poems i just don't remember because i wasn't in the british military but it's just basically that kind of a thing it's like it'll be like that we'll muddle through we'll be all right and it's like and then yeah like

going on through the pacific war people constantly note how good the japanese were at jungle fighting and this guy is literally the reason why um and like so one of the things that yamashita did was ask suji like how would you invade malaya he immediately said invade from the north uh he like they should come ashore at singora and patani in thailand and drive south through the highways on the West Coast, attacking Singapore from the rear, which is exactly what the Dabi study said would happen. So Tokyo offered Yamashita five divisions to do the job, and Yamashita said he could do it with three or 36,000 combat soldiers, which is less than half of the British force. This is literally like what if Thermopylae had a huge neon sign that said, hey guys, this

is the back entrance that lets you skip our defenses. And the Brits were just like, no, but that wouldn't be cricket. That wouldn't be sporting. It's not very sporting, mate. We can't defend all our sports. It's not particularly cricket, is it? I don't suppose the Japanese would do that.

We can't defend the North. There's young nubile boys in the South. The Japanese could never function in the S would do that. You see, we can't defend the North. There's young, nubile boys in the South. The Japanese could never function in the Surtatic Zone. Only we can do that. I do not like the man from the Far East, but I must admire him for his curation of young boys. Now, rather than bragging, Yamashita wasn't like, I could do this with 36,000 men.

I don't need 20,000 more. He's a practical guy. Now, weird thing about the Japanese military, despite steamrolling through half of the Pacific, they were kind of doctrinally against the concept of a functioning logistic system. And Yamashita knew

if I take 60,000 70,000 soldiers with me, there's no fucking way I can properly supply them. There's a complete lack of sea transport as well. And if he was going to take all these men, there was no way he'd be able to transport them all. So the Japanese logistical system was so doctrinally fucked up. Their military was never fully mechanized. They relied, much likeany and a lot of other

allied armies specifically like the soviet union until late in the war on like literally dudes carrying boxes and horseback to pull supplies because per their doctrine they believed logistics and all this like support systems in general took away from combat power rather than added to, which is incredible to me. So he figured if I cut down on my invasion force, I'll at least be able to supply them adequately, which did end up not being true, but there was an attempt.

Now, unlike the British forces as well, the vast majority of the Japanese forces were battle-hardened, seasoned from their Pacific-wide genocide they'd been committing for several years at this point. Only one of the three divisions had no combat experience, which happened to be the worst one for political reason. were so up their own ass because of their status at the Imperial Japanese household, they refused to even train for the operation because they thought that someone insisting they didn't know what they were doing was

insulting to their honor. I like the idea that they took the Marine concept of every Marine and infantryman. They're like, no, literally every soldier is an infantryman. Just infantry. Nothing else. The dog meme. No artillery, no logistics, just infantry. They the the dog meme no artillery no logistics just infantry they did bring tanks the but the japanese tanks in world war ii were awful they brought one regiment

per division uh and the only kind of tanks that were so bad that they could be comparable to japanese tanks world tour like the italian. But like when you have shitty tanks. And you're fighting someone with no tanks. You have the superior tank force. Though the British had been given anti-tank rifles. To slap on top of their Bren carriers. So they did have something to counter them somewhat. Now the true secret weapon of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Was the humble bicycle. And they brought thousands of them. Now any mechanized forces that they did have say like transport trucks and they'd actually get most of their transport trucks from thailand they'd requisition them after the invasion but all those would be used to ferry the limited supplies they'd bring with them they wanted their infantry to move quickly, and because there is a massive network of hardball roads, like, pedal your happy asses down there. And it's something that nobody even thought

about countering at any point. See, this is why people who campaign for cycle lanes are the true fascists. You know who else liked bicycle lanes? Emperor Hirohito, you fucking monster. At one point, the British within the city began to get very, very nervous as the Japanese snatched up more Pacific

Islands and got closer to them. So they began to demand armor be sent to Singapore for the first time. However, Operation Barbarossa had just kicked off and pretty much every single extra American and British tank coming out of factories was being kicked over to the Soviet Union.

The Singapore defenders would get none. And the only good idea that he would have during the entire war, Popham came up with Operation Matador, which was the movement of British soldiers into the north, specifically Thailand, to counter what they thought would be a Japanese invasion, like move them in there first before the Japanese show up. Eventually, London agreed this is a good idea, but gave permission to launch the invasion to Popham. They gave this decision to the defenders of Singapore to launch on their own when they

thought it was ready and a good time. And more specifically, when they believed that a Japanese invasion was imminent. But also importantly, Japan and Britain are not at war yet. Okay. It's December 1941, and it's pretty clear that this war was coming after a Japanese fleet was sighted in the Gulf of Siam, and Popham did not act. So the British would declare war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and Popham was worried that launching Operation Metador would preemptively spark war against Japan, despite the fact everyone knew it was coming anyway.

They knew that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese started invading British colonies in the Pacific and other places. But they knew it was coming. For instance, the Straight Times ignore the name. It meant straight of water. The Straight Times. The Straight Times is basically your uncle's Facebook feed.

The Straight Times is like the New Statesman. Financial Times. The the new statesman. The fucking... Financial Times, the South China Morning Post. It's a huge newspaper in Singapore. Yeah, it's very big. It's the main newspaper. And remember, this is during a time of war.

Like, Britain is at war, just not with Japan yet. So censorship is already in place. And they published an article saying, like, the Japanese are going to invade any fucking day now that passed censorship like the british censors are like yep this is 100 true um and it's you know doesn't harm us in any way saying this popham actually went to the journalist's office that wrote it and yelled at them for overreacting again despite the fact that this article passed

the Straits Times censorship process. Leadership continued to be a nightmare. There was supposed to be a Far East War Council, which Singapore was a part of, and Duff Cooper was supposed to lead it. This covered not only Malaya and Singapore, but also India, Java, things of that nature. And this war council just constantly yelled at one another. Duff Cooper could not get along with local military leadership to the point he simply moved out of the building that they were supposed to work in together and set up his own office.

There was also the theater commander. Now the theater in this particular circumstance covers virtually every British holding from India to Malaya. So it's a huge fucking command. And it fell under Field Marshal Archibald Wavle. And he was not in Singapore either. He was in India. And he had no experience at all with Malaya.

He had never even been there before. When he was given command of the situation even he was like, this fucking sucks. Every command he'd had at this point, he had been in control of some British battles in Africa, I believe. He had lost every single one. Failing

upwards. It's failing upwards. Then a monsoon hit as the Japanese invasion force slowly got into position on december 8th 1941 um the waves were as high as six feet and they began to attempt to land their soldiers and almost immediately men began falling into the ocean and dying they tried to lower their landing boats into the water and uh like the boats were like swinging back and forth from the waves and men were getting trapped in the middle of them and being crushed.

Yeah, it's a bad sign. It's a real bad sign for the Japanese here. But that didn't slow them down. You can say of anything of the Japanese Imperial Army is casualties never really stopped them from doing anything. I mean, considering literally the day before they attacked Pearl Harbor. Well, and because of time zones,

this is actually occurring. Uh, like when they first show up, it's, this is occurring, uh, like before Pearl Harbor. Oh,

so it's like time travel. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also like one of those things that like people say, like some people will say that the Japanese did not surprise attack pearl harbor because they published a letter but it was post-dated and time zones changed it uh it's yeah listen it's like us trying to record this podcast and trying to organize in two different time zones yeah uh if only if you were invading me when i lived on the pacific

island yes you are imperial japan joe when you saying, oh, let's record it this time and then realize, oh no, we're an hour apart. We're like an hour wrong each way. That is the same as an amphibious landing. And much like that, when I was coming to my desk, I stepped on a landmine. But, you know, an hour long landing process and a lot of accidental deaths, the Japanese force hit the shore at Cote d'Ivoire, storming directly into a unit from the British Indian Army that had moved into position a few days before. Now, this is where things get kind of strange.

The invasion has begun. There is no questions about anything, any kind of waffling, or any other kind of putting it off or talking about it it's fucking over the Japanese have landed and at Fort Canning which is acting as Percival's command post Percival called the civilian governor of the colonies tell them

the invasion began they're coming and the governor told him quote well I guess you'll shove the little bit off then I whoops anyway how did how did that wind up happening how did it work out yeah uh nothing bad happens from here now again the governor of the colony is in command of a lot despite the fact this is a military situation and uh he after getting this call you you what do you think he would do next

i think well if you're the civilian governor of an island being invaded by the genocidal armies of the Imperial Japanese military, and they're now at your doorstep, or they're trying to kick open your front door, how do you react? I mean, I think I might be like, hey, guys down in Singapore or elsewhere, some dudes just showed up. They look like they might have some business not in this sleepy port town, but rather, it might be like hey guys down in singapore elsewhere um some dudes just showed up uh they look like they might uh they might have some business not in this sleepy port town but rather somewhere else nearby yeah maybe uh i don't know i mean we did have the telephone at this point we

also had you know telegraph carrier pigeons bicycle messengers i mean bicycles apparently fucking great in this terrain so yeah a number of things jump up and down wave your hands do something some kind of like emergency action right you'd think so i'm getting the impression you're setting up for that to be a big resounding no he doesn't do any of that um so what happened next was on him, most importantly, calling for a complete and total blackout of Singapore to make sure that they could not be used to guide in Japanese planes. For people who don't know, before the era of, say, like night vision and things of that nature, the lights of a city could guide in bombers. So like the first thing you should do is an immediate emergency blackout. You didn't do that. Turn on the neon sign.

Yeah. Turn off the giant neon sign about how to invade us. Or order civilian readiness, like get the shelters, you know, start rationing, which they already should have been doing something. Instead, he woke up. He went and woke his wife up and he woke his servants up he then went and sat on his balcony and began to read the newspaper and ordered a coffee only after finishing his coffee and and uh finishing his newspaper that he ordered the quote first degree of readiness

to come across singapore he did not order a blackout. He did not order any kind of emergency situation procedure that was supposed to be in place to occur. He finished his coffee. And that is when the bombing began. And that is what we'll pick up next time. I mean, do you know what? I kind of appreciate that level of, you know, peace and tranquility in your mind.

That's how I like to start my days. You know, my coffee, nice and slow. I had a smoothie this morning and some granola. I had a coffee, you know. And, you know, start as you mean to go on. If your head is too occupied with manic thoughts at the start of your day, then you won't make good decisions. He did the right thing. He basically practiced mindfulness.

He is the mental well-being king he and like look i could do all these things but having my coffee and reading my newspaper in the morning is my version of self-care as like the building erupts behind him and a fireball as a zero flies overhead like hmm i feel like i'm missing something seeing hundreds of thousands of singaporeans die in front of me is my you know method of self-care while i read my paper and sip sip my coffee i don't have the mental bandwidth for the for ordering the black out of singapore at the moment see he was abiding by the italian rule if you never have you know a cappuccino after 2 p.m so he was enjoying his cappuccino in the morning you know savoring the fact that you know he's having full fat milk gentlemen how do you feel about the defense of singapore here at the

end of part one it's gonna go great it's gonna go great things can go excellent i know nothing of history uh i have no family connection to it I was hit with the weird thing from Men in Black that erases your memories and then just for safekeeping the person who administered that to me also hit me with a brick so as I understand it it's all good, it's gravy as we say back home

I like that you went through all that process and I'm just stupid so I don't know anything about what's about to happen going into the NHS for memory care they're just like, well, we have this brick stupid so i don't know anything about that's about to happen going into the nhs for for like memory care they just like well we have this brick line yeah this is a rare situation where we have an alternate to the the big red button that says fuck off uh we do have a brick we can hit you with i kid but you know what honestly like i gotta be shouts out to the nhs in london for being better than nhs elsewhere in england

because my god i've heard some stories as a random aside about someone being like hey it's week 25 and i've been designated a high-risk pregnancy am i ever gonna see a midwife and it's like we have this brick would you like a brick i mean to be honest now you have availed of head trauma services from the nhs just in the reverse way rather than getting hit with the brick they treated you for being hit with a brick that is very true yeah exactly you know what it's a circle of life it's like elton john sang about on the lion king soundtrack and like everything on this podcast it all circles background are getting hit with a fucking brick yep every single one of us brick survivors that's what they call us they were the

brick squad we're bricked up I have no idea what that means. Please don't Google it. Getting bricked getting getting mad bricked with the boys that's got to mean something terrible. But what you don't realize is that Elton John actually wrote Candle in the Wind about the fall of Singapore. Like a

candle in the wind. Just like Candle in the Wind I'm going to pilot this podcast directly into the tunnel where it ends. Gentlemen. Oh, I hope this episode doesn't find it onto Facebook. You know what? I'm proud of that one, but you served it up to me.

Fuck you both. That's the end. Plug your shows. Listen to Trash Future. Listen to What a Hell of a Way to Die. Listen to Kill James Bond and support those podcasts by funneling

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And if you want to do that, or maybe you don't, consider leaving us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts um and try not to review us based on my last joke now uh everybody thank you again for so much uh fucking goddamn i can't talk thank you again so much for joining us here on the fall of singapore part one and join us next week for the conclusion to our very very stupid saga the title kind of gives it away joe do you know that the title gives it away but the brick the brick erased my memory i didn't know it was called the fall of singapore i forgot from the start of this episode what singapore what's that until next time hit your friend

in the head with a brick