Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 267: The Fall of Singapore Part 2: Surrendering to a Bluff

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

The conclusion to the fall of singapore series! Correction: The repulse and prince of wales were not sunk by carrier based aircraft. Rather they were sunk by ground based aircraft. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

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 the lines led by donkeys podcast i'm joe and with me still is tom and nate how you doing fellas hello i'm very hungover joe i'm not i'm not hungover at all but i'm enjoying i'm i'm sun hungover in the sense that it's hot in Britain and we don't have air conditioning

so you get that sensation of you wake up in the morning, you have a healthy breakfast but it still feels like you pounded six beers the night before. That's how I've been. But rode my bike this morning to get in early and it was beautiful so I'm doing alright. Speaking of bikes I learned something very interesting last

night. You know the lime bikes where you have to rent a bike through an app and it has like a battery on it yeah yeah those the app has a drunk test capability that if you i think it's if if you like try to rent them after a certain time at night you have to pass a test for it to unlock what is the test it's like so it's on your screen it's like a bike cycling along cycling along and like a stop sign flashes and you have to press it within a certain window of time obviously to test your reaction times you know what's really funny i i've always wanted

to mention this and i think i've missed my opportunity because i think they changed the name but when i was uh the first time i spent any significant amount of time in the city of geneva last year there was a bike sharing app like what he's describing with e-bikes it was called donkey republic and i was just like i'm gonna sue them for copyright infringement steal steal one of those bikes from fucking switzerland and it'll be the first one that doesn't go to croatia instead it goes to armenia and you can ride it's the first e-bike in armenia as well we i think we have e-bikes i know we have e-sco think we have e-bikes. I know we have

e-scooters. E-bikes have been around for so long and the fact that Armenia is far closer to China than America is and there were e-bikes all over New York when I first moved to New York in 2014 and they were all over for the delivery restaurants and stuff. So they were illegal back then but they were still all over.

And so I'm sure you guys have them. i'll let you know as soon as i'm nearly smoked by one walking down the sidewalk as as i am with a scooter on a daily basis i i'm more mad that donkey republic is not some app based feature where you can rent a draft animal that's what i was hoping and now it's just called donkey that's the funny thing like you'd think if you didn't know better you're like i just i do i am i is a pack animal gonna come down here as a fucking is a weird the swiss i don't know like there's cynthia told me one time that like for a good she happened to be going out one day in the town she lived in in the german part and they were doing a good friday thing there was just a donkey

on the street and it's just like i guess donkeys are just a thing that they just do stuff with donkeys how many euros to get a donkey for a couple hours? Don't ask questions. I just need one really badly. Just imagining it's still 25 Swiss francs to rent the donkey. I thought this was supposed to be a cheaper option. Hey, old man, I got that donkey hookup. You looking for that donkey? Get a fat sack of donk. It's a slightly worse version of ketamine.

If there was going to be a guy who was a drug dealer for donkeys in continental europe he'd be irish like that's just a given that feels vaguely racist well i was just gonna say this is the show where we found out that there was an irish beheading squad in the taiping rebellion and you're gonna be like oh you're being discriminatory towards the irish anywhere on the planet where fucked stuff is happening there's gonna be an irish guy just doing it nate has a point more importantly there's gonna be an Irish guy just doing it Nate has a point more importantly there's gonna be an Irish guy that's making money out of us there was a training video of fucking guys

making basically building IEDs with Iraqi insurgents there was big muscly hairy hands and the guy was wearing a clodder ring like I'm dead serious they showed this shit to us we're everywhere what's interesting is the Islamic state had an Irish pub. So when we left you last time, the

Japanese Imperial... Oh, by the way, this is the Fall of Singapore Part 2, in case somebody didn't read the title of this episode before listening to it. Go back and listen to Part 1 for this to make sense. Or don't. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. When we left you last time the japanese imperial army had invaded the jewel of the british pacific empire

malaya with the goal of seizing the important fortress city of singapore and japanese troops had landed at kota baru in today would be northern malaysia on december 8th 1941 though small detail here since someone's probably going to notice the date because of time zones this begins before the attack on pearl harbor um which is my travel yeah it's very strange now koto i'm imagining the japanese being like oh well no one's going to notice they're not going to care the headlines about singapore will be so important no one will notice no one no one will ever remember december 7th in america that the secret second thing that's gonna happen soon uh well to be fair if there's one thing we know about americans is you never forget that's true that reminds me of like the the wildfires that are happening in canada or were happening in canada and like clouded uh new york

city pretty badly right like turned Turned it vibrant orange. Worst air quality on the planet for a couple of days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And someone's like, wow, this is the worst the air quality has been since 2001. And then someone commented, what happened in 2001? And someone's comment under that was like, always remember sometimes. Or never forget sometimes forget never forget yeah now i wouldn't have forgotten kotobaru was well defended as any place that the japanese could

have actually attacked elements of the british indian army were dug in and the royal air force airships were very nearby this meant that the japanese hit the beach they ran directly into machine gun nests which pinned them down and then they were bombed and strafed as they were trapped in the open. Japanese troop ships also came under attack by the RAF, though because they lacked torpedo bombers, they were really only able to strafe them and disable one troop ship, and the rest were only lightly damaged. Soon, three battalions of Japanese soldiers were on the beach by the end of the day. Now, the key part of this is that the British defenders were kind of defeating themselves, on the beach by the end of the day. Now, the key part of this is that the British defenders were kind of defeating themselves because the Japanese were getting pretty badly

mauled on the beach is what tends to happen during virtually every beach landing in human history. They suffered 15% total casualties within a very short amount of time. However, the British officers, remember we talked about the last episode, a lot of the officers and NCOs in the British Indian Army units can't actually communicate with their own soldiers. So a rumor began to go around between soldiers that the Japanese had actually broken through one of their flanks and it ran like wildfire through the ranks. Nobody could control it. The officers and N ncos really have no idea what's going on because they can't speak to their soldiers again they're like why is everybody panicking we're doing quite well um and then word managed to get back

to the royal air force and their airstrips nearby and they assumed this came from an officer like the commander of the indian army troops on the beach so they just immediately began blowing up their own airfields and supplies jumping in their planes and flying off in a different direction completely abandoning the troops on the beach their commanders just like watched in horror having no idea what the fuck was going on and then the soldiers at the beach began ditching their shit and running yeah they, they were definitely like fuck this shit, I'm out of here, I don't get paid enough for this. Like just some white dude named Archibald like, well,

alright boys, we should probably try to keep up with them. I don't know what's happening. Archibald Nutzak the Third of Scandering. Third Lord of the Taint. Tragedy that we can't speak to these people on the

radio it hasn't been invented yet meanwhile general yamashita's main force actually landed at singhora which is thailand um and it was completely undefended his soldiers and him marched in a parade formation directly over to the thai provincial governor's house and demanded that he let them through without resisting the thai authorities eventually were like yeah it seems like a good idea um we don't want none of that uh it took some like negotiations but of course the japanese eventually go back and all their promises such as we will not horrifically abuse your people um yeah now still hours after the fighting had begun singapore had still not been blacked out,

having its power turned off and therefore making it harder for bombers to locate it and attack it. Finally, the civilian authorities agreed to turn the power off, but then they realized that we don't know where the guy who has the keys that locks the, the literal giant lever that controls the electricity to Singapore. So they couldn't turn it off.

There's literally a one big on-off lever for the entire city and nobody knew who had the keys to it. Did fucking Hanna-Barbera design this city? I mean, literally, it's like the big smash, you know, the big red stop Brexit button, the big racism button that all the signage has been worn off it because people have smashed it so many times,

a big lever that controls all power to Singapore. I'm noticing a trend with British governance. All three of them are in the House of Commons. Yeah, exactly. It actually gets dumber than that because it's the 40s. This is the British colonial empire. I don't actually know what London would have looked like at the time, but their streetlights, which are the most prominent lights in the city,

obviously marking the grid of the entire city and how you could find it, were gas lamps. They weren't electrical. So turning off the power with the big on-off switch wouldn't have mattered. All the gas lamps have to be extinguished manually and one at a time so it's gonna take some fucking time singapore was truly getting gas lit over this boo uh so at 4 15 a.m when japanese bombers appeared over the city it was lit up like a fucking christmas tree anti-aircraft gunners on the ground were told to hold their fire so the raf could spin up their night fighters and

counter these bombers. But then the night fighters never actually took off. RAF commanders were worried about the inexperienced anti-aircraft gunners shooting down their own planes and refused to let them take to the skies. So the Japanese bombers just wrecked the living shit out of the city completely unimpeded by any means. Their bombing campaign then spread to the various RF bases. Remember, their exact location had been noted by their Kiwi spy, who had since been arrested. By day one, the Japanese had achieved complete and total air superiority,

and they would hold it for the entire battle. Going great. Yeah, this is not a great start to a battle. You know, yeah, our planes can't fly because the guys on the ground aren't a great shot. So, you know, you might shoot some Japanese zeros. You might hit your own guys. You know, it's a roll of the dice.

War is hell. Who's to know if these things are good or bad? It's impossible to tell. So you can tell. What would you do, Joe? Because, I mean, that's just one of those things where you're like, the Brits love doing this. You're like, I suppose we can't do anything. And it's like, I mean, what would you what would you do joe because i mean that's just one of those things where like the birch love doing this you're like i was supposed to do anything and it's like i mean what would you have done because i don't mean like literally shoot all of them until we give you the

call to stop shooting and then i think i think the most simple answer here is talk to your anti aircraft defense units yeah um and nobody was doing nobody was talking to one another. Cause remember every element of the Singaporean defense force, we could call it. I think they all hated one another and nobody talked to anybody. I mean, literally it's just one of the situations where there has to be a certain person who has the discretion, the authority to say this,

you'd be like, no, fuck that. Shoot. Everyone's for shooting. Like we will, we will tell you when to stop shooting and we'll tell you when we want you to start shooting again.

Like until you hear from us, either don't stop or don't start but like the idea of just being like no i suppose they're just going to bomb the fuck out of us like oh dear just it's not particularly crooked is it like that it rings so many bells like it's it's a familiar experience i've made the joke that living in this country sometimes feels like living in like your your your neighbor is just like i don't know i suppose it's and was worth the fuss to call the fire brigades there's just one room in the house that's on fire don't be dramatic and it's like but if we shoot down the japanese that's not good sporting old chap we have to we have to go fight them with our shitty brewster buffaloes exactly

yeah we have to we we absolutely have to fight them with a gun that sounds like it's named after like the worst farm team in the fucking minor leagues for for baseball you know i feel like pat benatar really made a point when she sang love is a battlefield because it seems like battle and relationships communication is important and it all falls apart without it yeah i fucking hate you so much job i quit the fucking podcast two and two weeks hell yeah now this is not going to be the worst mismanagement of resources because if you remember there's a naval force here at play as well. The British decided that they had to counter the Japanese fleet, and they had to chase them away

from Singora. So they decided to do it the dumbest possible way, which would lead to the death of nearly a thousand men. They would take their best ships, the HMS Prince of Wales and the HMS Repulse, and order them to go on a counter attack without any air

support whatsoever neither ship would get remotely close because the japanese fleet off the coast turned out had aircraft carriers and plenty of uh plenty of interceptors at hand so yeah it's like the one thing that we do know that you can just kind of say as an offhanded like you know uh inside of a candy bar fact about world war ii in the pacific that the Japanese just kind of have planes. Yeah. A lot of them. They tend to not run out of planes. This is December 10th. Pearl Harbor has happened and that task force has

since gone to fucking Singapore. So as soon as the Repulse and the Prince of Wales hit the open ocean, they get bombed and strafed to shit, sinking them both, killing nearly 1,000 men. It's just, imagine that you're out there completely unsupported and they're just blasting towards you like Steamboat Willie shit,

like the boat is actually smiling, the anthropomorphic aircraft is doing this weird chugging motion, pumping out steam, just laying into you with torpedoes. I'm just imagining if, who was it? That was the super racist cartoonist that worked for the US government during World War 2 was it Walt Disney?

Walt Disney but I'm thinking of someone else um Dr. Seuss he's making an incredibly racist Japanese aircraft carrier smiling and eating British ships well like I was thinking imagine being like some british 18 year old sitting on the deck of that ship eating the most miserable

soggy sandwich and all you hear is good news you're not gonna have to worry about that what that sandwich does to your insides because your insides are gonna be out your insides gonna be turned into outsides by a zero bullet blowing out your guts in a different way the japanese command completely broke down this time into more arguing arguing bickering and total civilian military divide as the civilian leadership of the war council who again remember had left the building tried to tell the military leaders on the ground what they should do all while the military leaders on the ground what they should do, all while the military leaders on the ground had no idea what was going on or how fast everything was falling apart around them. The Japanese in Sengora grabbed every single Thai cargo truck they'd get their hands on, packed it full of men, as well as remember the thousands of bicycle-borne infantry,

and began rapidly pedaling their little feet towards Jitra down the, again, paved roads and highway systems that the British had built, as well as the airfield of Alor Star. Somewhat hilariously, bicycles back then kind of sucked, specifically the quality of the tires used on them. So their tire, they were pedaling so much

and for so far, they were running their tires down to nothing, which would then would eventually pop. The Japanese would then just cut the rubber off and ride on the rims. They didn't bother to replace them. So the sounds of, again, thousands of bicycles riding on bare metal rims down the tarmac road kind of tricked the British into believing they sounded like tanks. Ah, I could see that. Remember, virtually none of these soldiers have ever seen or heard a tank before so they just hear like metal on pavement and they're like oh fuck tanks and they start running so they

literally get routed by the sound of japanese bicycle rims yeah well i was gonna say everyone talks about like imagine being like the first human to see like a tiger or like some freaky unnatural animal imagine being the first opposing soldier to see a tank it's not like tanks were a secret like they've been around since world war one those guys must have been fucking shocked uh you're just like why is it moving towards me what is that monster and what does it do and like also what's very important to remember is uh panic and fear within the ranks of a military unit is contagious um it rapidly spreads and then once parts of your unit start to break and run you're just gonna try to keep up even if you're not scared because you don't want to sit there alone and fucking die you're gonna try to stay with the group yeah

exactly so you know there's a lot of these guys you know that's it's like contagious firing contagious retreating one guy thinks he heard something different like what happened on the beachhead and everybody else like well he wouldn't be doing something so dumb if it wasn't an order we should probably try to keep up with him you know and i don't blame them for that and also but i will say maybe they have a very strange niche phobia of bicycles who knows well exactly the church vicar always rode the bicycle over before he either paddled you or did something worse so you know it's just the bicycle is constantly giving you fucking flashbacks i would say the thing about the japanese too it just feels like the brits at this point maybe they just hadn't paid attention to what had happened

elsewhere in Asia for the last near decade, but it's like they never really have a problem with violence of action or audacity. You know, I don't know which principles of war that comes from, if that's Clausewitz or Yeomany or any of these fucking things because I've forgotten all of that because it's been more than a decade since I was learning doctrine, but like

they do exploit an opportunity. That's a thing that you're just seeing happening learning doctrine but like they do exploit an opportunity that's a thing that you're just seeing happening and it's like like they like even in an organization as like rigidly hierarchical as the japanese military like they especially at the time like they exploit stuff when it comes up and that's it seems like the brits are just like no one would exploit this and not to mention we talked about this a little bit more again on our Nanking series of the culture of the Japanese Imperial Army, where it's like, you just obeyed. So if you're going to march 40 kilometers in a day and someone tells you to do that, you better fucking do it. If you're going to pedal your ass off on this Huffy, however many tens of kilometers a day on rims, beyond what a normal human body can do through exhaustion, hunger,

and thirst, you're going to fucking do it. And you're going to see the juxtaposition between what a Japanese soldier motivated either by the zeal of clearly winning a battle or respect for his commander or fear of brutal punishment can do compared to a military that has no command and control, no discipline, and the commander is just allowing it to fall apart. Without derailing too much, there's a film that I watched years ago. It's an insane documentary that I think I've mentioned on this show or on Hell of a Way. It's called The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. And it's basically a Japanese documentary about a guy who is basically a completely insane Japanese military veteran from World War II, who's decided to take personal revenge on his commanders for stuff that happened

in New Guinea at the end of the war, where soldiers were accused of cannibalism and people were ordered to perform summary executions of them, and people who refused were then also summarily executed, but at the point that this was happening, the war was actually already over. They'd already surrendered, but they were still executing their own soldiers, and so this guy's like, I will find you and make you account for this, and I will beat your ass, and at one point, at the end of the film, he

tries to kill a guy, but he misses his chance, so he just shoots his son instead. This is one of his commanders, and like, wounds him, and like, he had already previously been in prison for shooting at the emperor with like a pellet gun or something. But like this guy drives around in his insane car. It's like got all these slogans written all over in Japanese about like, you know, the betrayal of the troops and stuff like that.

And like our commanders were blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But it's like, I bring this up because this guy, like that's an example of just sort of like, I know you do exactly what you're told. Even if you're like, hey, the war is over. Doesn't matter. Kill that guy. You don't? Okay, then you're going to die.

Yeah, I mean, look at our episodes about the left behind soldiers who's like, I'm just going to continue the war for 30 fucking years. Now, that isn't to say everything was going great for the Japanese. While staff officers like Yamashita and others set up command posts equipped with the best maps, the Japanese had to offer, which remember were better than the maps of the British head of their own colony.

Frontline officers weren't so lucky. They instead had to steal local maps from nearby schools. Some of which came out of literal children's books and the Japanese logistic system was bad by design. Um, I don't, without going into in detail, And the Japanese logistic system was bad by design. Without going into in detail, their doctrine literally thought that frontline combat soldiers were really the only important thing. And the logistical system only had to exist as much to get them the bare necessities, which on paper sounds like every logistical system. But they were supposed to carry their own food and water. And they're again,

trained to subsist on virtually nothing, um, to train them. And you were saying that the previous episode that like, basically their job was to forage. And that's already, people were like in the very beginning of this saying, this is just too large of an element for them to forage.

There will not be enough available sustenance for them to take. Like this is going to cause problems. And that starts pretty much immediately. Within a day or so, most frontline soldiers had no food or water on them. And remember, they're advancing rapidly via either on foot or on a bicycle,

so they're burning through food and water quite quickly. And the Japanese are moving so fast that the British struggle to keep up with them, rushing in some British Indian soldiers towards Jitra to set up something that looked like a defense, but by the time they got there, the Japanese were pretty much already on top of them. The soldiers freaked out at the first sight of Japanese tanks, and many just turned around and booked it. Jitra was home to a bridge that had been wired to explode in order to halt the Japanese advance, but the soldiers

put in charge of doing so had run away so quickly that nobody had bothered to blow the goddamn thing up. Jitter was a complete and total disaster for the British. The soldiers didn't withdraw. They didn't even, like, rout. They sprinted in every direction, every man for themselves, leaving behind everything, including all of their heavy weapons, but also their maps, which had every British defensive position marked on it. They also left behind their food and water which the japanese then took men ran away so fast i didn't even bother to try to figure out where they were going and many got lost in the jungle with around 3 000 of them being taken prisoner general iwane matsui who if you've listened to the nan king series that name will

certainly ring a fucking bell, talked about after he captured these soldiers said, quote, the enemy troops had no fighting spirit. They're glad to surrender. They're relieved to be out of the war. Yeah, unfortunately they fell under the command of General Iwane Matsui, which means very few of these men probably survived.

Yeah, they were glad to be out of the war. I know that's a this german voice but you know same side i also find it very funny that it's like at every single unit flees and basically does like reverse break or manner where they're just dropping loot boxes of every bit of information the japanese could possibly need you know of this uh of this entire episode of jitra british historian arthur swinson said, seldom in the history of war can there have been such an unbroken skein of muddle, confusion, and stupidity.

You know what's crazy too, and I would say this as a quick aside, is that there have been numerous instances in which British historians have said they just will refuse to write about certain things in British military history, specifically World War II, until all of the principles involved were dead. John Keegan very much said this because of the reaction he got to his writing about Market Garden. It's like because the Brits wanted to cling to this idea that like, oh, nothing could have been done when it's like all analysis of this proof.

No, it was incompetence, stupidity, and intentional blindness. You guys fucked it. Well, look at the hate that we got after our Dieppe episode. Like we had actual historians of the, like one of the books that I used as a source, the author got mad at me for framing it as a catastrophic failure rather

than a lesson learned. That is the most rose-tinted glasses kind of way you can look at that episode of history. Canada's own historical society has proved multiple times that was not the case. But people have this tactic refusal

to accept that sometimes you just fucked up. Yeah. And I'm not going to say that Americans are better about this. Well, look, I'll put it this way. The American military, and by extension the american military like historiography because of the fact that fucking so much of it is interlinked with people who have military experience is really big on like we fucked up here's what we learned and we're going to do better next time and typically the u.s goes into war fucking everything up and then improving a lot over the course of the

time that it's at war. That's the history of Operation Torch in North Africa. That's certainly the history of the invasion of fucking Italy. By the time they got to Western Europe, by the time you had Overlord, they had improved a bit. But certainly, Jesus Christ, in the South Pacific, some of the first military actions of the US

in World War II were absolute fucking bloodbaths. They learned. Tarawa, fucking guadalcanal all of new guinea like basically a disaster but like as time went on they improved and with the brits it feels like you could make the argument that they came into it with more experience to some degree and certainly like they had been fighting for example in those climates longer but like the degree to which it feels like just constantly repeated that there'll be a tremendous colossal fuck up and instead they'll just try to find like dunkirk spirit that shit yep like milo's made this point about like

invoking the dunkirk spirit it's like when your entire military operation is rescued by blokes who fish that's not really a military success and yet and i really do think that's a point here it's like we're not trying to be like haha we hate the british and we do but like the point about this is not to say they pick out cherry pick things and say x y and z are all because the brits are fucking bad it's just more like this is an example of incredible human consequences because they're just a total lack of preparation a total lack of coordinating a total lack of preparation, a total lack of coordinating, a total lack of any kind of like, I don't know, like military, what's the right word? Cohesion at all, none whatsoever. And I think one of the things that people may or may not understand, and we've talked about it

before in other series, specifically about the Soviet military in Afghanistan, the French military when they invaded Russia, the Russian imperial military during that era, is like military culture is very important to how militaries see themselves. And I think understanding British military culture is very important to understanding the catastrophe that is Singapore and the disastrous consequences it has for the, of course, the POWs,

but specifically the fucking, the poor people of all of these areas that the British give up because of their incompetence. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are going to die because of this. Yes. And if Britain hadn't colonized what's now Malaysia, if Britain weren't sort of the, if they weren't the authority, if they weren't the government, who knows? Maybe the malays would have rolled over. Maybe they wouldn't have fought back. But I bet you, if they had fought back, they would at least spoken the same language. all virtually treated the exact same it would not have mattered um because ideologically the japanese considered any anyone uh specifically other asians to be subhuman to them um they

they saw them virtually the same as the nazis saw slavs they were there to be slaves and be murdered to get out of the way for japanese settlers. So, of course, the British could have defended their colony better because that was their job as the colonial administrators, and they failed disastrously at it. However, they're not to blame for what the Japanese brought upon all of these people. No, no, no. And I think one point that you made previously that I think is relevant, so I'm going back on my argument, is that the Thais were not colonized. No. And they made the decision to deal with the Japanese and let them have their way,

and they still were treated horrendously for it. But I would also say, I think the one point I'd just make is that there's a combination of the lack of preparation, the bad military culture, and what you previously noted also the total lack of willingness to fight because this is just, yeah,

this is too, there is a mentality I suppose of, well, fuck it. Like who cares? Retreat back, you know, like this isn't,

this isn't, this isn't our problem. And that then culminates in basically like at a certain point like you run out of land in the melee peninsula and then it is your problem because now you are fucking on a death march um you know it's like now you are going to a japanese pow camp in the jungle and some of the best soldiers we'll talk about here in a little bit were malaysian um they they fought harder than any british any australian anybody else there um and with you know obviously every pow as captured by the japanese is going to have in short a very bad time um but they at least took them prisoner they did not take malaysians

prisoner uh if if you were a malaysian caught with a weapon you were gonna die and you're gonna die really really badly uh so like it's it i i think it's like going back to how this started is it's important to understand that like by by shitting on the british military culture it's because that culture led us to this two-parter. And eventually, whenever we talk about Market Garden. And it's a continuing cascading failure of institutions as we go on. Because you have weak leaders, which is never a good sign. And you have soldiers who absolutely do not want to fight.

And even the ones that do want to fight because there are british forces that do fight like i believe that the argyles and not and some of the others put up one hell of a resistance but they just lack the ability to continue fighting because of the all the failures above them you know yeah like if you're you could be defending heroically or fighting heroically as you know crew of the what he said the the um uh repulse or the prince of wales but like with no air support and being two ships against a fucking armada like what are you actually going to accomplish exactly like the retreating troop like a good example retreating troops eventually came together um and they were immediately forced on dozens of miles

of forced marches through the monsoon soaked jungles never having time to sleep or eat and each time they came to a new place they were ordered to defend they found there's no defenses prepared for them so they were ordered after all of this to start digging their own defenses just enough time for the japanese attack again and this went on and on and on until the total evacuation of penang island was eventually ordered now Now, can I make a mean joke, but it's also funny? Of course. The worst, this sounds like the worst Tough Mudder in history. You're constantly fucking doing

jungle road racing and then it's like, oh, now for your fucking, for your task is dig a fighting position. Oh, wait, fuck! And then you have to run again. We could sell this. We could sell this to someone. Yeah, but like specifically target at like veteran children in the u.s there is probably like australian military veteran bro culture tour things like this i

swear to god because like like i mean going back to things we can use up the show like people reenact the baton death march like these things happen which is insane to me like people frame it as like oh it's to remember their sacrifice like man like i cannot people do the nimegan the nimegan hundred or whatever like where they do 100 miles of foot marching over four days and it's 25 miles a day it's you know from uh they're basically during market garden but it's like according to friends of mine who've done it it's like you march and then you have beers and shit and hang out after every night exactly it's like you know what they weren't doing? That.

At any point you're reenacting something called a death march, you should re-evaluate what brought you to that point. That's my opinion. During this evacuation, the British fucked up catastrophically. They left behind everything to include every piece of infrastructure intact.

They ditched all their heavy weapons, but most importantly, they abandoned the civilian population to the Japanese army. And we all know what happens after that. I don't need to go into it. I want to give you a quick note, though, because just as I told you before, having researched the Papuan campaign a lot,

there are a lot of Australian civilians who are missionaries who were caught by surprise when the Japanese invaded the northern coast of the Papuan Peninsula, and they basically all got beheaded with swords. Yeah, of course they did. These were Christian missionaries.

They had no military-government connection. It doesn't matter. Men, women, children, literally didn't matter. Like, yeah. Yeah, the brutality that the Japanese imperial military brought on anybody that fell in its wake is, honestly, it's one of the few subjects we've talked about on the show that even disturbed me.

And I studied genocides at an academic level. So, you know, it's bad. It's real bad. I just don't want to go into it too much here. That is a subject for a very content warning gated episode. The British military began to collapse and doctors and medics noted that a lot of people showing up for combat wounds were actually sporting self-inflicted wounds, as soldiers desperately tried to get pulled off the disintegrating front line by shooting and stabbing themselves. Duff Cooper, the Civilian War Council leader, got on a radio broadcast to tell everybody in Singapore and the greater Malayan area that, don't worry, they had retreated in good order and ensured the civilians and the military-like had evacuated the population of Penang, saving them from the arms of the Japanese.

He talked about stout defensive works that the soldiers were constructing, and the strategic withdrawals that would certainly protect the rest of the colony. The problem is, everybody knew he was completely and totally full of shit, and the local population kind of got pissed at him he did not bother to use the radio again after that um other examples of colonial bureaucratic fuckery were seen all over singapore city itself one man was told by authorities to dig up the local football pitch to stop the japanese aircraft from landing on them or like gliders using it as a landing pad so he got together a a large group of laborers

to do that however each time they finished like they're just going to carve like a line like a trench through it to make it unusable as a landing strip each time they they did that another person from a different government office would show up and tell them that they did it wrong they have to fill that in and dig up a trench in a different direction. This happened like four times until eventually So they're basically doing like boarding school prefect shit for their own defensive work. By the end

of it, another guy came up like, what are you doing? You need to fill all this in. So they did. This happened across the city which had the side effect of sapping the pool of laborers needed for other more important things like unloading supply ships because everybody's running low on everything needed to fight a battle. When people eventually got desperate and tried to literally anyone to come in and help unload these ships, like we need bodies, we need arms to unload these boxes.

But the colonial authorities simply couldn't agree on how much to pay them. So they just didn't. So the ships didn't get unloaded uh and this is genuinely amazing like i know that you get into granular detail you're going to find stuff like this but my god honestly the the piece de la resistance of this entire thing is a hospital unit was going to set up like a field triage center and they were going to fill, they're going to build it in a nearby rubber plantation. Cause it was close enough to the front line where, you know, they could pack all these people in here.

They wouldn't have to travel so far and far enough away from the city for, you know, sanitary reasons. Sure. But then the, the owner of said plantation came out on his front porch armed with a shotgun and telling them they need to fucking leave because they're trespassing a private property for a field hospital. The military itself couldn't get the civilian authorities to pull their head out of their asses.

The manager of the local golf club refused to let the army turn the golf course into defensive works. was to let the army turn the golf course into defensive works. Another guy wouldn't let them cut down trees to improve the line of sight for their machine gun unit until he got written permission from the government. This is literally everything in Britain ever when it comes to like, it's like, hey, we have to do

this thing to stop them from pumping, not that they would actually stop, but pumping shit into all the rivers and beaches and somebody's like, yes, but a tree might have a branch cut off. What if a homeowners association was in charge of like local defense? Yeah, I swam and shit as a child and it didn't mean no harm. Yeah, it's like yes but a tree might have a branch what if a homeowner's association was in charge of like local defense yeah i swam and shit as a child and it didn't mean no harm yeah it's like climate change isn't real it was hot in 1976 once so it can't ever be hot ever again yeah dude it's this is ringing some bells in a lot of ways um and it's just like you think you'd think that there might be the impetus for people to be like oh oh, well, yeah, but if we don't, then this group of people called the Japanese

that are famous for doing some kind of fucked shit are going to show up and be in charge. And you know what? They will not respect the fucking homeowners association. They will absolutely disrespect both the putting green and the sand traps and every element of this golf course. The Japanese Imperial Army are going to behead the bin men. Now, this

isn't to absolve the British military though. When engineer officers said they need to build anti-tank ditches, General Bennett, who remember is actually Australian, said they didn't need to dig anti-tank ditches. He preferred to simply destroy tanks with an anti-tank weapon.

Simple as. Do we have any? Do we have any? We've got a couple. No, you don't know how to use them. You haven't got any training on them, but we have them. Now, Duff Cooper was spitting wildly out of control and he was out of ideas. He began to fire everyone because Churchill had gifted him the power of a member of the British cabinet, which meant that nobody outranked him in Singapore anymore. He fired Colonial Secretary Stanley Jones, which probably a good call, as well as finally firing Popham,

again, a good call. Then to the confusion of everyone, he ordered the military to take time away from preparing the needed defenses to burn down every single gum tree on Singapore to deny the Japanese the important resource of rubber. Now, you're probably wondering, how many gum trees could there be on one island? Also, here's the problem here. Yeah, great. Knock out all the gum trees in the little,

you know, geographically speaking, a little tiny sliver at the bottom of the Malay Peninsula called Singapore. There's also all of Malaysia and Indonesia with lots of gum trees. Also, there's 300 million gum trees called Singapore. There's also all of Malaysia and Indonesia with lots of gum trees. Also, there's 300 million gum trees in Singapore. Fuck! Popham really

said, my bitchy choosy lover never fuck without a rubber. Yeah, exactly. I think Bun B would have put up a much better defense than this guy, honestly. Yeah, exactly. Bun B, get Bun B a time machine, send him back to the fall of singapore he defended port arthur he can defend singapore all right the most basic defenses a military could use

was trenches right they were not built in singapore either they were flatly forbidden because percival denied a request by one of his subordinates saying digging trenches was bad for morale while all this is going on within Singapore, the Japanese continued their march across Malaya. The British forces continued to melt at the first sign of combat, and this ended up being one of the main logistical points for the advancing Japanese, because each time they captured an airfield, shipping port, fighting position, anything, they'd find that the British had left behind everything for them to capture and reuse. No matter what problem the Japanese ran into, none of them seemed to be enough to truly slow them down. This included hundreds of their men

simply getting lost and drowning in a flooded swamp. Yamashita simply shrugged and was like, well, don't do that one again. Keep marching. And by the end of December, they were only 160 miles from Singapore itself. In Singapore, reinforcements finally began to arrive, and all of them were just as experienced as the original soldiers. These ones were even worse prepared, however, as they had been rushed into service for action in North Africa and were already on boats before changing direction mid-journey. Other reinforcements had come from Australia, and many had seven days of training at most, which was mostly learning how to march. The Australians were given a rifle and had never fired it before showing up to Singapore.

And remember, they're always under bomb attack. The Japanese- Yeah, because you said they had total air superiority the whole time. The city is being bombed to such an extent that hundreds of people are dying per day. I'm just imagining being an Australian draftee know seven days of military service placed in fucking combat in singapore getting bombed non-stop no one can talk to each other everything's fucked up people think that's like you know digging trenches makes you gay and what what word can i think of besides uh now well this is when field marshal wavel, I think it's Wavell, finally shows up in Singapore for the first time, he did two things immediately. He sent Duff Cooper away and asked Percival, why in the fuck haven't you built any trenches yet?

Percival suddenly realizing, oh man, I have truly shit the bed on this one, fumbled for an answer before finally landing on, well, sir, you see the men's morale is so low, they simply wouldn't do it. That doesn't sound like too good. I mean, that's grounds for being dismissed right there. Like, well, you clearly cannot lead this military force because they won't listen to you. Like, but he's not fired.

Elsewhere, Japanese tanks continued to shatter the british and indian defenders at this point many of them have been retreating non-stop for weeks and hadn't slept in days at slim river they did have some good luck when japanese tanks stormed in because the argyles had some anti-tank weapons there small problem though they didn't actually know how to use them. So while they did take out a couple of Japanese tanks, they like for like one of their anti-tank rifles jammed, um, and they weren't sure how to fix it. So they just like chucked it in a ditch and ran.

Uh, and once again, the British broke and retreated so quickly, they forgot to blow up another bridge. You would think that you would think all the success would put, you know, Yamashita at the top of the world, looking at his military success, but he was actually really pissed off.

He knew that Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who he fucking hated, and was likewise hated in return, was going to take all of the credit for his work. Secondly, his second command, Tsuji, had been writing letters home, denouncing him to Tojo. This is because they're in two different factions

of the Japanese imperial political machine. This eventually caused a group of staff officers, there's like five of them, to visit him from Tokyo for an inspection to see why his second command was being so angry with him. To which Yamashita wrote in his diary, quote, five officers have arrived from Tokyo. I hate them all.

It is very funny that in the face of this, like, just absolute, just resounding success, that basically all of them are acting like the hot-blooded, ill-tempered protagonists of a Yukio Mishima novel. Go hard. to the yuki omishi man god yeah like yamashita complained constantly about his subordinates either being really bad at their jobs or simply being incompetent and he could he still could not get the japanese imperial guard to obey his orders and simply left them to do whatever they wanted lest he piss off the imperial household this is important in yamashita's world because he had actually already done this before um he was a member of the imperial way faction which is without getting into japanese imperial government factions at the time because it's really interesting to me he had committed several coups um all against the wishes of the emperor and at one point one of the

guys who had taken an active part in one of the coups killed the guy. That's pretty important. Yamashita asked the emperor for leniency towards this guy, which caused the emperor himself to effectively denounce him, which is about as bad as it can get for a japanese imperial military officer for the emperor to personally denounce you and he was just really lucky that the emperor used his own like personal conjugation system of the japanese language for him and no one could understand and like on the spot was like i will resign you know i am like i am ashamed of literally commit commit seppuku right now and And the emperor told him no,

because he was obviously deathly loyal to the emperor, and he was very good at his job. So his relationship with the imperial household is tenuous at best, and he really doesn't want to bring them down on him again when it comes to the imperial guard. And of course, this is not the right answer, because the imperial guard go on to commit

some incredibly fucking awful war crimes, which will become very important at the end of our episode of when it comes to the fate of yamashita but like it's bad uh he effectively just like just fucking go leave me alone stop yelling at me like he he gives them an order and they just don't do it or they'll do their own thing so he just stops giving them orders after a while. By January 10th, the British had evacuated Kuala Lumpur and this turned into just an absolute convoy of madness. Soldiers piled into civilian cars on motorcycles, soldiers stole fire trucks,

and even a goddamn steamroller in order to get away. The original kill. There were some British victories. However, general Bennett and his Australians were dispatched finally at this point they were being held in reserve in the south bennett quickly figured out the japanese were sticking to the roads and you know his men didn't need to lie in wait and prepare prepared defensive positions they could just ambush them as they go down the road and they did they killed probably more japanese soldiers than anybody else

this way um ambushing entire battalions at once especially when their tanks rolled up they did the tried and true policy of hitting a tank as it drove down the road causing it to become a road block and then massacring the japanese soldiers that were trapped behind them i mean it didn't turn the tide of the campaign at all, but it is something. And Bennett is still a fucking asshole, though. In one situation, Indian troops were retreating without orders, which was not uncommon at this point for everyone of every background in the British military. And he ordered his soldiers to shoot at the truck that they were riding in to get them to stop. The Indian soldiers saying, fuck this shit, shot back and led to a full firefight between two different elements of the British military.

And when the Imperial Guard eventually overran British positions in the same area, the Australian units and the Indian army units had to retreat together so fast they had to leave behind all of their wounded. And you know what happened to those wounded next. I'm not going to go into it. And also, I point this out that it's not that much further on the highway now today from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore than it is from New York City to Boston.

And it's like, imagine that's the situation you're in right now. In terms of actual land distance, it's probably close to about the same. And so it's just like, imagine you're like, hey, you know what, maybe they're not here yet. But if the tidal wave of dudes who kill everything is fucking in boston and you're still arguing about the grass trimmings on the golf course in new york like it's not going to be long before some stuff you're gonna have a bad time now there there is another

pinpoint of victory in the sea of defeats and that is the insane exploits of the Royal Melee Regiment. Now, we need to ignore the insanely racist origins of this unit, namely the British wanting to see how Malaysians would, quote, react to military discipline, and this is only six years before this battle. And this unit fought better than anyone else, better than any British or any Australian unit during the same time frame. Where other units would retreat when they didn't have orders or ran out of ammo, the Royal Melees wouldn't. They'd be like, well, I guess we're standing here and fighting to the death. They would fix bayonets, charge directly at the Japanese.

In one case, there's a guy named Lieutenant Adnan Saidi, who his platoon was completely surrounded and cut off by an entire japanese brigade and he was like i guess this is our job now and fought them for fucking days without ammo he's they stabbed so many japanese soldiers to death that they broke their bayonets and then were reduced to beating them to death with tree branches and rocks look the possibly the melee language in Indonesian are basically court Javanese. There's a very similar culture between the two countries and Indonesia is a country that produced the film

The Raid. And listen, if that is any indication, the Malays are going to fucking scrap. I know they're not the same country. I'm just saying that somewhere down the line, there's common ancestry here. And it's like, I'm just imagining that if the Brits had just been a little more aware

of the general situation, what's the right word? The operating environment, that it might not have been such an easy ride for the Japanese to make. Because I mean, it's a big, long fucking travel from the Thai border. The simplest answer here is,

this is their backyard. They know how to survive in it. They know how to navigate it. They should know how to fight in it. And the Royal Melee units fought like fucking mad lads the entire time. The reason why these units kept getting surrendered is because everyone else would fucking retreat and they refused. Yeah. And it's like, we're not saying that every British soldier has to fight to the death. Like it's the Imperial Japanese army. But what we are saying is that like, you know, the situation you've described previously, it just feels as though some of this

is a lot of this terrible leadership and a lot of this is just terrible preparation too. It's like walking into a situation in which basically below a certain national law, none of your elements can communicate with one another. Like, what do you think is going to happen and the fact that they walked into that and no one thought hey this is potentially a disaster or rather this is an imminent disaster that is very telling to me yeah and hence why you had to send in a whole regiment of ip man basically like the and i and in a way i just feel like there's a part of me that I don't know if this is true or not maybe I'm just speculating but there's a part of me that feels as though another

reason for this is beyond the fact that these guys this is their home country they're defending but also I feel as though they probably understood better than the Brits what was coming 100% in the sense of like in the sense of like if you do not put up everything to stop these guys like it's not going to be

the fucking gentleman's agreement of war. Absolutely not. What they're going to do is atrocious, and that's what happened. After the Royal Melee units fought so hard, I mean, of course, they're eventually overran. In Lieutenant Saidi's unit, virtually everybody is wounded. He's killed. Nobody's actually sure if he was killed in battle or executed uh that detail is

unknown but uh the japanese simply refused to take them prisoner thinking that if they knew that they'd be massacred they would stop fighting but they didn't it just made them fight harder um and at one point a group of them are captured. And this happens frequently. We'll talk a little bit more with Indian Army units in a little bit. But they're like, join us and throw off the yoke of British colonialism. They're just like, fuck you. They all get massacred. Yeah, I don't know how you say suck my dick in melee, but I'm sure it was said.

Yeah. Do you know how? Right into the show. suck my dick in melee but like i'm sure it was said yeah do you know how right into the show um now the battle in malaya was so chaotic and badly planned that churchill had no idea what the hell was unfolding and why it was unfolding that way he had reportedly told wavel and percival that they were wasting resources trying to defend everything and instead need to pull back and defend singapore the most important part as well as hypothetically the easiest to defend and supply but they just didn't level eventually told church told Churchill, like, hey, I got here and Percival

has absolutely no plans in place for any kind of withdrawal at all. Churchill at this point probably knew all was lost and gave instructions as to what was to happen next. He said, quote, I want to make it absolutely clear that I expect every inch of ground to be defended, every scrap of material and defenses. He means Singapore itself. Yeah, I'm just laughing too. But sir, I mean, we have destroyed one one trillionth of the gum tree. We're really getting in hard here about making sure the golf course is good.

No, Churchill didn't actually know what he was talking about. Singapore was defendable from the sea, but not to the land to the north. If nobody is completely familiar with Singapore, it's not like it's separated from the mainland by some large ocean or body of water. It's really not. Major General Sir John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations for the War Office, pointed this out to Churchill. Singapore is only divided from the mainland by a small bit of water that is not very large. And all of its supplies within the city are very easily able to be hit by simple artillery across from it as i understand it it's about as big as the harlem river that separates the bronx from the north of manhattan and it's like imagine if you could just put like 155 millimeter batteries

in the bronx and be like oh but you know inwood and fucking like north of harlem is totally defensible like they can't hit us from here. It's like they can literally you're within small arms. Yeah. They literally were. Yeah. And like Kennedy, you said like, we need to evacuate the city,

not defend it. Um, so of course he's ignored. Um, this is when Percival finally comes up with a plan to withdraw everybody back to the city itself. Though the north side of the city had still yet to be fortified in any way, making all of this pretty much pointless.

The Japanese advance continues and actually speeds up. As they took over more of Malaya, they conquered more of the population. They pressed this population into slavery, forcing them to carry all of their supplies on their back, freeing up the soldiers to rest and not have to be burdened by so much weight. The British withdrawal went about as well as their defense had gone. Soldiers panicked and began blowing bridges as they went for the first time. However, they did it before other parts of the British military had crossed them, trapping them on the

other side to die at the hands of the Japanese. After being promised to be treated well, elements of the British Indian Army, looking around and seeing that everything was failing, chucked away their rifles and surrendered to join the Japanese. By January 31st, the causeway between the mainland and Singapore city was blown up, and Percival became the overall commander of the situation, as the British army was pretty much the only military element still functioning. He had no idea how many soldiers he had inside. They did have plenty of supplies, hypothetically. There was food for six months, hundreds of thousands of livestock, the island's reservoirs could supply tens of millions of gallons of water, until the Japanese would capture all of these things, of course.

Soon, the Japanese artillery joined in with the constant air attacks, and they began pounding the city. Percival had finally ordered his men to dig in, but all of the civilian labor was either dead or had long fled for their lives, you know, from the constant bombing. And the bombing forced the soldiers who had spent nearly the last month and a half running for their lives to start doing manual labor on top of their exhaustion. On top of all this, Percival then fell directly into Yamashita's plans. Yamashita planned a feint on the east side of the city, so Percival, thinking that's where the main attack was, ordered all of the defenses on the west side to move over and cover it.

So, of course, after a heavy bombardment with artillery and bombers, the landings, the very short landings on small boats, mind you, because it's a very small river, targeted the west side of the city. There were some units there to greet them, though. A beaten-up Aussie unit that ran into some problems of the city. There were some units there to greet them, though. A beaten up Aussie unit that ran into some problems of their own. It was 9.30pm and the sun was down, so they couldn't see shit. There were some spotlights

rigged up in the area for just this occasion, though when the Aussies asked for them to be turned on, they just weren't. The reason for all of this is the bombing and shelling of the city had blown up all of the telephone cables. So when they picked up their phone to call for the spotlights to be turned on, they didn't work. So as the landings are happening, they have to fire distress rockets into the air and hope whoever's seeing them gets the point and turns the lights on.

And they eventually do. So things are going great here in Singapore. The Aussies held back two waves of Japanese landing attempts, piling the water high with corpses to the point that their boats got stuck on them. But the third wave broke through. The Japanese charged directly at the Aussies. However, this time the Aussie machine gun positions ran out of ammo, and the Japanese forces were able to break through

as the Aussie units ran for their lives without orders. Other units, seeing them retreat, thinking they had just not received an order to retreat, ran to keep up. This started a chain reaction that turned the entire defensive sector from the main line of defense into a complete route as they all ran for their lives. In other places, British commanders passed wildly different orders, sometimes all at the same time, either to hold in place or sometimes to retreat, other times to move to a different place. Many Australian soldiers, possibly hundreds, as well as Brits, said, fuck this and deserted,

vanishing into the city under the covering of burning oil, smoke, and bombs. Yeah. Also, Sumatra is not necessarily close, but it's like you could reverse Dunkirk yourself the fuck out of there. so to understand the situation here it's like I can see that if you if you have eyes and ears or are sensitive to vibrations you can tell shit is not going well for the birds and it's like I don't feel as though they have done a very good job

so far of convincing anyone that they are going to do anything besides just like walk out into just like fully dialed in fields of fire with the ass flap of their old timey pajamas hanging open. And like I think what is pretty obvious here is Percival has no ability to command anything. He has lost total control over the situation. ability to command anything um he has lost total control over the situation there singapore quickly turns into like a collapsed city um like the japanese continue to advance but their tanks are out of fuel they have no shells um various units are running out of ammo they have no water they have no food so like the japanese are in really rough shape um and yamashita in this moment is like look at how badly the brits are reacting we have to keep advancing they're going to collapse like our best bet is to bluff like make them believe that

we have this inexhaustible supply and it's he's basing basing all of this on the incompetence of Percival. And that's because the city he's looking at is dying. The small city had been packed with nearly a million refugees running from the Japanese advance, all while being bombed and shelled. Wounded and dying were now overflowing every hospital and laying on the street. Running water was cut off so firefighters couldn't do anything but watch as everything burned to the ground. Though at one point, they did come up with a brilliant idea to go into an ice storage facility

and dump it on a fire. They tried. And there's now roving bands of armed deserters in the street from the British, Indian, and Australian forces who joined the refugees who were looting the city for all it's worth. One group of deserters broke into a

Ford showroom, stole a brand new car, got blackout drunk, and crashed into the side of a building at which point it exploded into a brilliant fireball like something out of a Michael Bay film. If you're gonna go out, go out in style. Now despite all of this,

Yamashita knew he's going to lose if the battle continues. Like, he has no supplies. He has manpower problems. From the very beginning, he's outnumbered three to one. If the British turn Singapore into the street-by-street, house-to-house, swirling mass of carnage, like Wavell and Churchill demanded that Percival do, Yamashita will lose this battle. And this is what Percival do, Yamashita will lose this battle. And this is what Percival keeps being told to do,

turn Singapore City into a cemetery and fight over the ruins. Specifically, at one point, Percival asked for more freedom of discretion. And Wavle knows he's talking about surrendering, and he's expressly forbidden from surrendering, period. He's the fight. So on the 14th, Percival asked one of his subordinates if they could get enough men together to launch a counterattack. Because at this point, they have lost their water supply.

They have lost their fuel reserves. The Japanese had taken them over. And he needed to capture these things, specifically water and fuel, to try to keep up the struggle as much as the struggle they were doing he was told by his subordinate look man i don't even actually know how many soldiers we have left too many people are deserting um like the city down there looks like night city from fucking cyberpunk 2027 or like 2077 like everything is going to shit at that point perseville decided he's going to surrender yamashita and Percival mended under a white flag in the middle of a Ford factory to discuss surrender. And this is when

Yamashita put on his best acting face. He had literally just run out of all of his artillery ammunition. He has nothing left for any of his artillery, right? But he needs to keep up his bluff, insisting that the British must surrender unconditionally and immediately, or he was going to continue shelling the city and advancing. Despite the fact he knew he couldn't. When Percival asked for a two-day ceasefire to think things over and talk to London, Yamashita started yelling at him, demanding he surrender immediately, now, or I will continue blowing you the fuck up with the ammo i do not have this is all a bluff he doesn't have shit he's outnumbered three to one his tanks are out of gas he has nothing for artillery and like the eyewitness statements are like percival is literally being shouted down to by this by yashita, and he just lets him run over him.

This goes in circles about three times until Percival finally agrees to surrender immediately and unconditionally on February 15th, 1942. Thousands of POWs are taken, of course, as well as the entire population of Malaya falls into Japanese hands. An occupation so brutal, it makes British colonialism seem quaint in comparison. Hundreds of thousands of locals are forced into slavery, many of whom would not survive. And again, we'll leave some details out of that one for all of our sakes. It's bad. It's really fucking bad. It's one of the worst occupations in the Pacific. Some weird things do happen at the end here.

The Japanese formed a proxy army called the Indian National Army made up of Indians who hated the British, or most likely just knew life in a Japanese POW camp was a really bad fucking idea, and switched sides. They then became camp guards over the other POWs.

Over guys they knew. Yeah. General Bennett, the Australian, given orders to remain with his army as he surrenders, said, fuck this shit, got on the last plane back to Australia and bounced. He was welcomed back home as a coward and a dickhead for leaving all of his men behind. And his career is ruined. He wrote a desk until retirement. Now, probably the weirdest part to happen in all this is what happens with

Yamashita. First of all, he's shuffled off into meaningless positions until eventually given a chunk of the Philippines to defend and with no hope of winning. Though at the end of World War II, his force still held land and was holding back the advance of the Americans. And he still had a command. He didn't surrender until Japan did. Then, of course, he's brought up on war crimes charges. In short, Yamashita's situation is so strange it formed an entirely new legal principle in regards to war crimes.

Can a commander who never specifically ordered war crimes to be carried out be held accountable for his subordinates who do? As Yamashita did not try, or politically could not, control his subordinate officers who freely and willingly Yamashita did not try or politically could not control his subordinate officers who freely and willingly ordered men to commit some of the worst crimes ever known to man. This became known as something that Nate and I are very familiar with, command responsibility, otherwise known as the Yamashita standard, which meant a commander can be held accountable before the law for crimes committed by his troops, even if he did not order them, did not allow them, or possibly did not even know about them

or have the means to stop them. Americans might know this a little bit better as the Medina Standard, named for Ernest Medina, the commanding officer who couldn't or wouldn't stop the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Now, Medina got away with his crimes. That's a subject for another episode, but Yamashita would not. He was executed by hanging on February 23rd, 1946, and lost Banyos Laguna Prison outside of Manila, the Philippines.

Banish to the lagoon. You know, I gotta be honest with you, that is hilarious to me because, like, fuck that guy, but also it's such a double standard because, like, that principle was just so not applied even to the germans yeah of course it wasn't and it wasn't applied for all the japanese either uh yamashita the thing is is yes awful things happen under yamashita's command and not saying he deserved to live of course i'm not he does command responsibility is 100 a real thing and he was held accountable for the actions he

allowed to he allowed to happen under his command but i think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that he embarrassed the living shit out of the british um now there is some bright note here at the end and that is a conspiracy theory that lives on to this day in the form of yamashita's gold have you ever heard about this i have not no so there's a conspiracy theory that all of the wealth that was looted through the Philippines through Malaya all of the places the Yamashita served in was put into a you know

I'm gonna assume a giant cartoonish treasure box of some kind and hidden somewhere in the Philippines and nobody is sure where this has led to probably thousands of people looking for it ever since the 40s. A lot of people have died looking for it. And it's even like another idea is like,

it was found by the, wait for it, Marcos family, which is why they're so rich. I'm just imagining this. It literally sounds like City Slickers 2, brackets British, the legend of Yamashita's gold. It's still a thing. People still look for it. It's a LucasArts PC point-and-click adventure. It needs to be said in case I have any

listeners in the Philippines or close nearby. There is no evidence this is a real thing. Please do not risk your life looking for this guy's gold. It probably doesn't exist. You know... Go ahead, Joe. I'm not sure. I'm sorry. Go ahead. You know what's funny man is that i was admittedly looking a little bit at the clock and i was like i guess

this episode is going to be a really long one i wonder if we're going to break it into a third part and then it's like no they just immediately surrender like that's the thing that's so crazy because i guess i know a bit about the history surrendering yeah but i didn't know that the timeline was that compressed honestly yep that's that that comes as a surprise to me. And that's just like, man, what a fucking disaster. Yep. Um,

and again, like if that didn't work and you know, Percival held on, they were still able to be resupplied. They were still getting reinforcements. They're still getting supplied. I mean, it was getting more,

it was getting harder and harder to do so, but they were by no means cut off. they, so, so I got to, what happens to Percival? He's kind of shuffled around a bit. His career is largely over. Wavle moves on. He kind of ends up getting a reputation for all of his

commands failing, because that was also his reputation before this. Can't say he's not consistent. Yeah, I mean, like, you would expect that everybody in here is immediately drummed out of the military or whatever, brought up on charges. And some people are, but nothing serious

because, you know, they need to be plugged into other positions as the war continues to unfold. But most of the fault rightfully, but not solely lands on the shoulders of Percival. There's a lot of other people that should be blamed along the way going back, you know,

a decade before the war started when no defenses were organized whatsoever. He's just the one at the bottom of the hill that eats the shit sandwich when it becomes like unfixable. But again, he does completely deserve the, the failure of command blame that he gets because I mean, lookixable. But again, he does completely deserve the failure of command blame that he gets because, I mean, look what happened. He is browbeaten into submission

by a Japanese general through a translator. I kind of also think that, like, yeah, I agree with your point because, what, 10 years prior, like, the Japanese invaded Manchuria, it's like you'd think that the brits would think well they are kind of near us yeah some shit's going on especially after they let the treaty expire with them uh instead take the sides of the united states so they fully know in any future war with the united states which everybody assumes is inevitable between the u.s and japan they're

going to be on america's side which means singapore is going to be directly in their their line of sight and a target. Instead, they're like, I'm going to go ahead and kick that can straight down the road here. It's pretty hot. This gin is fucking kicking right now. Now, gentlemen, we have a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to write us a question from the Legion, donate to the show, ask us on our Discord or Patreon, and we'll answer it.

Today, it could be interesting because we all have different podcasts, especially Nate. question legion donate to the show ask us on our discord or patreon and we'll answer it today i it could be interesting because we all have different podcasts especially nate you have like 20 uh that you work on what is the weirdest thing you've ever done for a podcast uh contractually there is loads of stuff i cannot say not for this but for other stuff i've worked getting it signing my nda for working on the mi6 podcast uh wow um that's a really good question i kind of want to think about it joe do you have do you have any ideas i have two for you i have two yeah go go for before the show was popular um we did a bonus episode where we ate a whole bunch of military rations from around the world. Steve and Maureen. I got fucking sick.

Me and Nick got violently ill. And we're not sure from what. We think it was the Russian military ration we bought from Wish.com. And yeah, it was bad. And that was for back with the show. Nobody was listening to this shit. um and that was for back with the show like nobody was listening to this shit you know um so yeah if you if you want to go uh listen to us be absolutely miserable you can catch that on our patreon uh and the second one is absolutely the t-rex fuck book without a doubt yeah that is i

mean um god so i've been podcasting since 2015 um Um, I've done corporate podcasts for people. Um, I've done like stuff in my job, uh, doing corporate communications before I quit to do this full time. Um, I've done client work here in the UK, some stuff I just,

it probably wouldn't be interesting or funny that I've had to like, um, you know, and I'll say probably can't disclose some things just because the way this shit works. But, uh, I would say,

um, I can't disclose some things just because the way this shit works. But I would say the weirdest thing I've ever done for podcasting is probably, I think, the moment that I looked up while performing live of Johannes Vonk and the Cloghead songs in a pub in London, and the packed room of people were singing along to the song Honk Ball Hoop Da Klaas on their radio tonight and they knew all the words. I mean the easiest way to preface this is you guys invented a whole fake but real band for a podcast for a bit

and for a bit for an intro bit for one of our episodes that then resulted in us kind of like memeing ourselves into becoming serious musicians um and i think maybe one of the other weirdest things i've done is uh um i having to call reception at a hotel in australia and be like sorry my my friend pooped himself do you have new sheets uh getting in a fight with an uber driver who was like your bags are too heavy and

it's going to weigh down my enormous seven-seater toyota and just driving off and leaving us and then the next uber driver when we told him the story being like what a poof and then fucking just went into the most offensive rant i've ever heard in my fucking life like both of these guys were like south asian australians and one was very like kind of like prissy and dickhead the other one was just like a fijian guy who every other every word out of his mouth either cunt or the f slur um like it genuinely wild he's just trying to assimilate to australia yeah absolutely yeah yeah and and to queensland in particular i actually have a third one i have to add we did a a charity stream for um i believe it was a gay and trans charity a couple years ago now. And it wasn't the weirdest thing that I did.

So we got a group of people from the Discord, all of whom are still around. They're great people. We played video games for like 12 hours. We raised thousands of dollars. It was awesome. And one of them joked on... Because our voice chat is being live streamed. If someone donates $ates 500 they would butt

chug a five-hour energy and they did i'm not gonna say who it was you know who you are we love you all butt chugging is not a one-person operation so that's a teamwork is important i i was thinking about this like i remember me and milo's ex-girlfriend carrying all of this kit to include this mixer up, like the world's steepest and wettest rainiest staircase in Edinburgh. While I was like fucking torrential rain dumped on us, like passing by all these really confused tourists is me. And like this,

like 120 pound girl or like carrying all this shit and just completely like comically soaked, like just stepped out of a pool soaked. And then having to immediately turn around and do a live show in a very, very packed hot room and just be like, well, the room's going to be steamier because I'm evaporating onto all of you. It's, I mean, basically getting over my, one of my iterations of post-traumatic stress disorder from being in car crashes as a passenger because i had to be in a car with hussein driving from edinburgh all the way back to london um like there's i honestly like that's just one show i mean like for me like i think the simple the simple weirdest thing is the fact that i work with you too to like the fact

that like i've listened to trash future and listened to lions and now that i work with you i just i find it really weird and surreal now like whenever i think about it it's like this is kind of fucking strange likewise i should point out that i mean like i was listening to nate stuff for probably two years before i started the show and it all started because i sent a random dm to hell of a way to die to shill my book. Yeah, I mean, it's weird. It's like that for me too. I mean, when Riley and Dan were doing Bottleman,

like you can imagine how strange it is for me, me and Milo rehearsing our stupid fake band songs for the real concert we're going to do for our fake band. And like the lead singer of one of my favorite bands from college, Wolf Parade, the guy Dan Beckner is in there helping us fucking prep and giving us tips on how to play our own songs. It's insane.

It's fucking weird. It's bizarre. Dan getting us backstage at Arcade Fire, partying backstage with Dan at the O2 after the Arcade Fire concert. This is just taking me some very strange places. My podcast tour in Australia, it's bizarre. All of it's bizarre, man.

I think at the end of the day this is like it's it's it's uh platitudes but i mean my wife and i met and got you know married before i was really serious in podcasting at all like i was a regular ass person like i you know i still am i just happen to do this stuff as a job and i mean regular look look there's like some qualifiers there but like it's just it's been a weird as someone who intentionally or not winds up doing a lot of things to kind of collect stories this has been a very strange experience so far

actually I have a very specific really strange thing so obviously like I am a co-host of my own show this is a great segue for ending the show but the fact that I get a co-host of my own show. This is a great segue for ending the show. But the fact that I get really specific hate mail about my voice, I'm like, literally, just listen to a different podcast.

Stop listening. And the same person has emailed me like three times saying, you should quit your own show that you do all of the production for so your co-host can host it. I'm like, yeah, but if my co-host tells it it's not going to exist because he doesn't know how to make a podcast I mean I'll say this and I guess we could call it a day

it's like Nate has gotten hate mail for me like he's my manager or something like you should tell Joe not to do this like Nate's in charge until very recently you just had to clean up my bullshit. Yeah. And that's Tom's job now.

Now I'm the co-host on the show. A friend of mine just DM'd me out of the blue and was like, I really like Lions Led by Donkeys, but man, Joe doesn't know how to do audio. You should help him out. And I was like, Joe's a nice guy. I'll DM him. And you said, yeah, man. And that was it. I think I picked up this job maybe two weeks before. I think the first time I edited the show, I was on a plane flying from New York to Indiana to see my parents right before Cynthia and I moved to London. So all of it just came

from happenstance and associations and things like that. And, and it's, it's been really cool. Um, and yeah, now I do this as a full-time job and, you know, people talk about there being a me extended universe and stuff like that, which is always a little strange, but you know, uh,

that's, that's life. Yeah. Getting recognized in public by your voice is never, is never going to be normal. That actually happened to me before anything besides hell of a way. I met through mutual friends in a bar in Brooklyn, and I was talking about podcasting. And this dude, he was an electrical engineer,

and he worked in Brooklyn. I was like, yeah, I have a show, and I talk about military. And he's like, it's not hell of a way, is it? And he's like, I'm a listener. I recognized your voice. And I was like, that's so weird. That has also happened to me in a foreign country. And I was just like, I feel like I need to escape. I feel so nervous. Yeah. I don't think I've ever been recognized on the street unless it was literally like walking down the street to carry Kit into the venue for a Trash Future show. But no one's ever

recognized me. Someone recognized me at a Trash Future show from Lions when I was ordering a pint. The Nateverse is complete in that moment. We just needed an Irishman. Exactly. You do have that dead giveaway don't you I'm a different

guy who looks like this and talks like this guys thanks so much for for joining me if you haven't plugged your show enough plug it again and yeah listen to hell of a way listen to get on the lines led by donkeys patreon once this goes out on

the fucking free feed listen to kill James Bond listen to trash future listen to hell of a way listen to uh get on the lines led by donkey's patreon once this goes out on the fucking free feed uh listen to kill james bond listen to trash future listen to beneath beneath the skin yeah listen to beneath the skin to show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing we have new merch out buy my merch buy my merch for my show and there's going to be lions merch it'll be out on the patreon when this comes out so uh you will look for it you will find a cool shirt with a cool theme about a funny moment in an episode recently. That's right. And everybody, again, thank you so much for listening. You make everything we do here possible. And until next time, oh boy, I don't even know. Dig trenches before you defend the structural integrity, the moral integrity of the golf course. Disregard your homeowners association.

Dig a trench in your front yard.