Singapore Burning by Colin Smith

Author:Colin Smith [Smith, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2005-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

20

As he stared into his alfresco shaving mirror, artfully arranged to avoid providing their aerial tormentors with a giveaway flash, Captain James Wilson-Stephens became aware of something in the glass that was rather more pressing than his freshly lathered cheek. First one, then two, then three. He turned, razor in hand, and counted no less than six Japanese tanks advancing resolutely towards the headquarters of Ray Selby’s all-Gurkha 28th Brigade as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be almost 10 miles behind the British front line at eight o’clock in the morning. Then the shooting started.

The Japanese victory at Slim River was pure blitzkrieg and had precious little to do with jungle fighting. The jungle was where the losers went, usually to waste away of starvation and fever until, if they were lucky, they were captured. At Kampar it had been at best difficult and mostly impossible to use tanks. At Slim, Yamashita’s armour, with a full supporting cast of engineers, infantry, aircraft and artillery, won him the day, although for one chaotic hour it had been a close run thing.

The river lies about 50 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. Its source is somewhere beyond the mountain resort of Fraser’s Hill, from where it meanders westwards to the coast and its estuary at the little port of Melintang. It is a good anti-tank obstacle, for its brown waters are rarely less than 200 yards across, often more, but the British did not have enough troops to picket its length. This being the case, they decided that the next delaying action would have to be fought at a bottleneck almost 9 miles north of the Slim.

Even in daylight it was a gloomy place. It started with the north–south metalled trunk road and the railway running about 400 yards apart through a 4-mile tunnel of exceptionally thick jungle that really was impenetrable unless you had the machinery and labour to clear it and keep it cleared. Over the last 5 miles to the river, starting at the village of Trolak, this forbidding green wall gave way to rubber estates which had been accommodated by hacking back the extravagantly knitted forest for a mile or more. These places were marginally lighter, though not much. At the river there was a rail bridge, but the road followed the Slim’s easterly upstream course for another 6 miles along its northern bank before it came to its own crossing. Ten miles south of this bridge lay the market town of Tanjong Malim where, after his success at Kampar, Acting Major-General Archie Paris had established the latest headquarters of 11th Indian Division.

Originally Paris had expected to hold the bottleneck north of Slim with all three of his brigades. But Heath had felt it necessary to deprive him of Moorhead’s 6/15th, ‘the heroes of Kampar’, and moved them to a coastal position 50 miles to the south in case Japanese landings threatened Kuala Lumpur. This left Paris with Stewart’s 12th and Selby’s 28th

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