Battle Story by Chris Brown

Author:Chris Brown [Brown, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752481326
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-08-13T14:00:00+00:00

35. Typical pre-war ‘atap’ house of the kind found in kampongs (villages) the length and breadth of Malaya and Singapore. (Author’s collection)

36. Typical pre-war shop-houses of the kind found throughout Malaya and Singapore. (Author’s collection)

On the night of 7/8th, patrols from 22nd Australian Brigade had managed to cross the strait and reconnoitred about 5 miles of coastline between Sungei Malayu and Sungei Pendas. They had identified a considerable concentration of Japanese infantry units, but little in the way of artillery and no landing craft at all; however, they had not been able to move much more than a mile inland and had been unable to penetrate as far north as Sungei Skudai. The landing craft were certainly being prepared for the assault, but not in the areas to which the patrols could penetrate.

By the morning of 8 February Malaya Command intelligence was confident that a major Japanese attack on the north-western coast between Sungei Berih and Kranji was imminent, but their conclusions were not shared with Bennett’s headquarters until sometime after 1500hrs. Bennett made an immediate and urgent request for an aerial reconnaissance of what he assumed – rightly – to be the Japanese forming-up area, but there were simply no aircraft to be had, and even if there had been there was very little chance that a reconnaissance mission would have been successful in the face of Japanese air superiority. The best that could be done was to fire a number of speculative concentrations based on the information obtained by the patrols and reasonable deductions. None of this had any discernible impact on Japanese preparations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.