SOOK CHING MASSACRE
The Sook Ching Massacre
“Sook Ching” is actually Chinese for “a purge through cleansing”. And that’s exactly what it was—a purge. Sook Ching took place from February 18 to March 4 1942, and was carried out at many places, one of them being the Punggol beach.Soon after occupying Singapore, the Japanese realized that the ethnic Chinese were very loyal to either the United Kingdom or China, and wealthy Chinese in Singapore were even financing China to help their home country to resist the Japanese after they had invaded China in July 1937.
The military authorities, led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, decided they had to get rid of the anti-Japanese elements.Sook Ching was the systematic killing of Chinese in Singapore whom the Japanese believed to be “hostile” or “undesirables”. Such people included people who had been actively contributing to the China Relief Fund, which was used to help China’s war effort against the
Japanese, and the Hainanese, whom the Japanese believed to be Communist. The Japanese also targeted men with tattoos, whom the Japanese believed to be members of secret societies, and people who had fought against the Japanese alongside the British. People who were likely to be pro-British and those who possessed guns were also singled out. Basically, all whom the Japanese believed to be a threat to them were taken to be exterminated.
The Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, played a key role in the massacre. Singapore was separated into different sections, each controlled by a Kempeitai officer. “Screening centres” were established all over the island, to gather and “examine” the Chinese men aged 18 to 50. Sometimes, women and children were sent to be screened. The people who passed the “screening” would be given a slip of paper with the word “Examined” stamped on it, or they would have a square mark of ink stamped on their arms or their shirts. But as for those who did not pass the screening, they would be given a triangular stamp. Then, they would be sent by truck to remote places like Changi and Punggol, where they would be executed—they were thrown off boats to drown, stabbed with bayonets, or simply shot to death.
The executions at this particular site—Punggol Beach—took place on the 28th of February, 1942, and 300 to 400 Chinese were killed. The screenings were unfair and non-selective, and thus many innocent people’s lives were wasted for no reason at all.But there were still survivors of this atrocity. One such man is none other than the founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. At the time, he was just a young man, still in his early twenties. He was singled out and asked to join a group of people that had been “selected” to be taken to one of the killing sites, though he was obviously not told this. He instinctively felt he was in trouble, and thus asked to go back to the collection centre to retrieve his “other important things”. He was allowed to go. Those who were collected never came back. Mr Lee said that it was his “good luck to be allowed to go back to collect his things.” Another man, Chua Choon Guan, had been held at the Jalan Besar Football stadium concentration centre. They selected him to be executed because of his physique. "They had a liking for those who were well built and they took us all out," Choon Guan said later. At Tanah Merah Besar, he was pushed up to the water’s edge, where the Japanese opened fire. As he had been knocked unconscious during the shooting, he collapsed with machinegun wounds to the side and legs. His fellow prisoners, who had not been so fortunate as to survive, fell on his body and concealed him from the Japanese soldiers who were finishing off any survivors with bayonets. When he finally awoke, it was dark. He crawled out from under the corpses, cut his bonds on a sharp rock, and escaped safely.But these were just the fortunate minority. Many more innocents were still killed. The Japanese state that the total death toll was less than 500, but the Chinese community of Singapore claims that about 100,000 people were brutally slaughtered. The accurate number is more likely to be around 25000 to 50000.Now, Punggol Beach is being preserved as a National Heritage site.
SOOK CHING MASSACRE
We must never forget our forefathers, who died at the hands of Japanese in this terrible massacre. Those who survived, emerged stronger and more resilient. More importantly, we can learn a valuable lesson from this—we must never depend on another country to defend us.
Adapted from -18 feb 2013
OPINION:The Sook Ching Masscre was a terrible time mostly for the Chinese.It was not fair for them to die sadisticly under the hands of the Japanese.In my opinion,the meaning of Sook Ching Massacre is to clean up a mess like the way you would clean up all the rotten bodys after a war.An example would be Singapore World War 2 but the body can either be dead or alive.The people who were capture were tortured and was suffering fom the abusement by the Japanese people.The Chinese were targeted because the Japanese assumed that the Chinese were anti Japanese.I could literally imagine just the local have suffered
KEY BATTLES IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA
Battle of Singapore - Background:
On December 8, 1941, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita's Japanese 25th Army began invading British Malaya from Indochina and later from Thailand. Though outnumbered by the British defenders, the Japanese concentrated their forces and utilized combined arms skills learned in earlier campaigns to repeatedly flank and drive back the enemy. Quickly gaining air superiority, they inflicted a demoralizing blow on December 10 when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales. Utilizing light tanks and bicycles, the Japanese swiftly moved through the peninsula's jungles.
Defending Singapore:
Though reinforced, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival's command was unable to halt the Japanese and on January 31 withdrew from the peninsula to the island of Singapore. Destroying the causeway between the island and Johore, he prepared to repel the anticipated Japanese landings. Considered a bastion of British strength in the Far East, it was anticipated that Singapore could hold or at least offer protracted resistance to the Japanese. To defend Singapore, Percival deployed three brigades of Major General Gordon Bennett's 8th Australian division to hold the western part of the island.
Lieutenant General Sir Lewis Heath's Indian III Corps was assigned to cover the northeastern part of the island while the southern areas were defended by a mixed force of local troops led by Major General Frank K. Simmons (Map). Advancing to Johore, Yamashita established his headquarters at the Sultan of Johore's palace. Though a prominent target, he correctly anticipated that the British would not attack it for fear of angering the sultan. Utilizing aerial reconnaissance and intelligence gathered from agents that infiltrated the island, he began to form a clear picture of Percival's defensive positions.The Battle of Singapore Begins:
On February 3, Japanese artillery began hammering targets on Singapore and air attacks against the garrison intensified. British guns, including the city's heavy coastal guns, responded but in the latter case their armor-piercing rounds proved largely ineffective. On February 8, the first Japanese landings began on Singapore's northwest coast. Elements of the Japanese 5th and 18th Divisions came ashore at Sarimbun Beach and met fierce resistance from Australian troops. By midnight, they had overwhelmed the Australians and forced them to retreat.
Believing that future Japanese landings would come in the northeast, Percival elected not to reinforce the battered Australians. Widening the battle, Yamashita conducted landings in the southwest on February 9. Encountering the 44th Indian Brigade, the Japanese were able to drive them back. Retreating east, Bennett formed a defensive line just east of Tengah airfield at Belim. To the north, Brigadier Duncan Maxwell's 27th Australian Brigade inflicted heavy losses on Japanese forces as they attempted to land west of the causeway. Maintaining control of the situation, they held the enemy to a small beachhead.
Adapted from
-18 feb 2013
Key Battles of Malaya
Adapted from-18 feb 2013Adapted from
-18 feb 2013
Key Battles of Malaya
The invasion of Malaya began shortly after midnight on 8 December 1941. Two hours later, No 1 Squadron RAAF, based at Kota Bahru, in north-east Malaya, was airborne. Soon, two of the Hudson bombers were shot down, and Flying Officer John Dowie, the only survivor of the two crews, became the first Australian prisoner of war captured in Malaya. That same morning, an Australian corvette, HMAS Maryborough, patrolling off south-east Malaya, intercepted a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuyu Maru, the first Japanese vessel captured by an Allied warship. On the west coast of Malaya, No 21 Squadron RAAF at Sungei Patani suffered devastating air raids and by the evening of 8 December both Sungei Patani and Kota Bharu airfields had been evacuated.
On 9 December, No 8 Squadron, which also had gone into action, was evacuated from Kuantan airfield. On 10 December, the destroyer HMAS Vampire became the first Australian ship in action against the Japanese when HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk off the east coast of Malaya by enemy aircraft. Vampire and the three other escorting destroyers were able to rescue over 2000 survivors from the two British ships.
On the ground, British and Indian troops were also pushed back during December and early January. Some Australian transport and ambulance drivers saw early action alongside Indian troops, but the first major Australian battle was not until 14-15 January 1942. A company of the 2/30th Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Galleghan, mounted an ambush which cut down hundreds of Japanese soldiers riding bicycles through a cutting and over a bridge on the Sungei Gemencheh river. Their plan was to withdraw and let the main battalion group at Gemas fight the main battle. As the ambush party withdrew, they found themselves encircled by Japanese patrols but most managed to get through. The battle for Gemas raged that night and next day and on the afternoon of 15 January the Japanese called in aircraft and tanks and the Australians withdrew.
On 15 January 1942, the 45th Indian Brigade on the west coast, defending the line of the Muar River, was also involved in a battle with the veteran Japanese Imperial Guards Division. Two battalions from the 8th Australian Division were despatched as reinforcements: the 2/29th and the 2/19th Battalions. The Indian brigade was pushed back towards Bakri where, north of the village, the 2/29th and some gunners of the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment provided blocking action. Japanese forces penetrated between the 2/29th and the 2/19th at Bakri. The 2/29th had to fight their way back to Bakri. The Australians held on to enable some Indian troops to also reach them, but they came under heavy ground and air attacks. Nearly all staff at the 45th Indian Brigade's Headquarters were wounded or killed when a bomb hit their headquarters. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Anderson, Commanding Officer of the 2/19th Battalion, took command of all troops and decided to withdraw towards Parit Sulong. While he waited for a missing Indian unit, the Australians became heavily engaged front and rear, and on 20 January they had to start fighting their way south through Japanese positions. Anderson's men attacked to re-open their escape route, and by the early morning of 22 January they had reached the village of Parit Sulong, but were in a parlous situation. A strong enemy force blocked their escape route, many of the Australian and Indian troops had been killed or wounded, and a British relief force was blocked. Anderson was forced to order his men to escape in small parties through the countryside, first destroying all guns and vehicles, and had to leave the wounded behind. Just 271 members of the 2/19th and 130 of the 2/29th - less than a quarter of the Australians at the start of the battle - escaped. For his valour and leadership, Lieutenant-Colonel Anderson was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for valour.
HMAS Vampire, seen here before the application of wartime camouflage, saw more action during the Malayan campaign than any other warship.
[AWM 044791]
The 110 wounded Australians and 40 wounded Indians left behind at Parit Sulong were brutally stabbed and incinerated by the Japanese with just one man, badly hurt, surviving to tell the story at war's end.
Over on the west coast, on the night of 26-27 January, the Australian 2/18th Battalion successfully ambushed a Japanese force at Jemaluang, south of Mersing. Under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Varley, supported by two batteries of the 2/10th Field Regiment, the 2/18th sprang their ambush between 2 am and 3 am. Brigade headquarters ordered Varley to withdraw after first light, after they encountered heavier attacks from the enemy. Nevertheless, the Australian action was a stunning success which turned the Japanese force inland, rather than continue pushing south along the west coast. The 2/18th lost 98 troops killed or missing, but Japanese losses were heavier.
Air and naval forces also continued to be heavily engaged. Hudson bombers of Nos 1 and 8 Squadrons RAAF bombed enemy positions, and patrolled out to sea, and Nos 21 and 453 Squadrons RAAF with Buffalo fighters, outclassed by Japanese 'Zero' fighters, fought on. Other Australians flew in British squadrons, some in outdated Vildebeest biplane torpedo-bombers that lost heavily. On 27 January, HMAS Vampire, together with HMS Thanet, took part in an attack on a superior Japanese surface force off Endau on the east coast. The British ship was lost during the battle and HMAS Vampire only narrowly escaped being sunk. Australian corvettes endured many air attacks escorting incoming convoys, one of which included the cruiser HMAS Hobart.
By 30 January 1942, the Japanese XXV Army had advanced to the Strait of Johore at the southern tip of Malaya. The weary British, Australian and Indian troops made their way over the Causeway to Singapore Island and on 1 February, after the last man had crossed, engineers blew up sections of the Causeway to isolate the island.
BATTLE OF SINGAPORE AND MALAYA
| |
OPINION:The Japanese people start a war with Malaya to occupy the resources Malaya have to the extent where people would not easily beat them in a war such as their weapons,armor,planes,etc.In my opinion,i think that the Japanese are too violent with their methods to get those resourcesMany Locals who tried to fight back were still capture and were made to be the Prisoners of War(POW).Many have tried to defend their homeland but thier attemptes were in vain.
HOW AND WHEN DID THE BRITISH SURRENDERED
How could this happen? How could the British be defeated in this way?
Well, the roots of this military disaster lie to a large extent in British complacency about the Japanese threat – a complacency that was born of racism. ‘The [attitude was that the] British were superior to everyone,’ says Anthony Hewitt, a British officer serving in South East Asia at the time, ‘and it was ridiculous for anyone to say that the Japanese were so good – some little nation like Japan couldn’t possibly be better.’
But Hewitt learnt first hand the inaccuracy of this view when he visited Japan himself in the late 1930s. ‘I saw a Japanese force carrying out an exercise and I realized that, from a military point of view, they were very advanced… They had excellent weapons, their soldiers were very highly trained, and they were really outstanding.’ When he returned to Hong Kong, where he was stationed at the time, he reported this news to his superiors, but received the response that he was ‘probably exaggerating the problem.’
This belief that the Japanese were a third rate military power was also expressed by the commander-in-chief of British forces in the Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. ‘I had a good close up, across the barbed wire [of the border],’ he wrote in 1940 to the Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff, ‘of various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers. If these represent the average of the Japanese army, the problems of their food and accommodation would be simple, but I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force.’i
It was to prove a devastating misjudgement of Japanese capability. The reality was, as Professor Geoffrey Wawro says: ‘The Japanese military had defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War, defeated the Chinese in the first Sino-Japanese War and they’d performed credibly in the First World War when they evicted the Germans from a lot of their colonial concessions and archipelagos. They also invested heavily in the army and the navy during the inter-war period, modeling themselves very much on the old Prussians, having a War Minister who was responsible only to the Emperor with no parliamentary oversight. So they built this heavily funded, efficient, motivated army and navy and it had no shortage of funds and equipment.
‘The army and the navy that they took into action in 1941-42 were quite strong. 51 divisions, 1.7 million troops, well armed, well equipped, there was some element of mechanization, there with a decent airforce. And what happens is that they overwhelm these US or Dutch or French or British contingents wherever they find them as they are relatively demoralised and distracted by events in Europe and have had their numbers and equipment drawn down because of the demands of the war in Europe.’It is easy to understand why the British military and political leaders underestimated the threat from Japan. The direct threat to immediate British interests – and, indeed, to the territory of Great Britain – came from Nazi Germany. And Japan, after all, was on the other side of the world. As a result, British defences in South East Asia had not received priority during the build up to war. The British plan had always been that a strong naval force would act as the prime deterrent to Japanese aggression, rather than extensive land forces. But here too, British arrogance would prove costly.The tragic symbol of this refusal of the British to take the Japanese seriously as a military power was the sinking on 10 December of two major battleships - HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse. These two ships had been dispatched to Singapore in the autumn of 1941 in order to deter the Japanese. But allowing them to sail in hostile waters without adequate air support was a catastrophic error of military judgement, and they were both destroyed by Japanese warplanes. Typically, one Royal Navy officer on HMS Repulse had said the day before the fatal attack, after being told that the Japanese were in the area, ‘Oh, but they’re Japanese. There’s nothing to worry about.’ii
‘They [the Japanese] had been preparing for war in South East Asia since about 1936,’ says Professor Akira Iriye, ‘and so my understanding is that the naval strategic thinking, even before they thought about going against the United States, had been preparing for a war against the British. They must have further refined that when the European war came, and must have planned for an assault on Singapore and prepared for the attack against the British warships if they should come that way.’
On 8 December 1941 – which, because of the time difference with Hawaii, was actually the same day the Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbour – Japanese troops under the command of Lt General Yamashita attacked Malaya. Japanese forces – including units battle-hardened by years of campaigning in China – managed to push the British army back down the Malay Peninsula, with Penang falling to the Japanese on 11 January. By the end of the month the British had retreated across the narrow stretch of water separating Singapore Island from the Malayan mainland.
But the problem now was that Singapore lacked adequate land defences on the northern shore, opposite Malaya. The British assumption had always been that any attack would most likely come from the south or west, against the sea-facing coast of Singapore.Faced with this unpleasant new military reality, the British commander, Lt-General Arthur Percival, spread his available defence forces across the whole coastline of Singapore. This meant that though Percival’s soldiers outnumbered the attacking Japanese nearly two to one, the Japanese were stronger at their chosen point of attack. And so it proved, with units of Yamashita’s 25th Japanese Imperial Army landing on the north-west coast of Singapore on the night of 8 February 1941.
Just seven days later, on 15 February, Percival surrendered the island of Singapore, and all the inhabitants, to the Japanese invaders. ‘At Singapore the Japanese had a brilliant general and a terrific army up against one of the most incompetent range of commanders that the British army has ever put in the field,’ says Sir Max Hastings. ‘The truth is, I’ve written somewhere rather brutally, that I think if the British, Indian and Australian soldiers who fought in Malaya had had any inkling of the treatment they would receive in Japanese captivity they might have fought a good deal harder. That sounds a rather brutal thing to say but I think it’s true.’Hastings also believes that that attitude of British forces in Singapore was not unique in the context of the Second World War: ‘The other thing that seems to me pivotal all through the war is that the British in particular convinced themselves that if the other side had air superiority then they were entitled to expect to lose the ground battle.
‘Well, the Germans and the Japanese didn’t think like that in 1944 and 45. When the Allies had overwhelming air superiority the Germans and the Japanese still fought brilliantly, but to this day you still hear people saying, well, how can you possible expect the British army in Malaya to put up much of a show when the Japanese had all those aeroplanes? Well, what’s changed of course is that it’s not very nice being dive bombed by Japanese Zero, but the fact remained that the British army just put up an unbelievably poor performance against a vastly more determined and skilful Japanese enemy. One fundamental problem all through the war, and even British training manuals dwelt on this by '43-'44, was that British forces had this frightful habit that if they found their flanks turned, whether this was in Italy or in North Africa or in Burma, their instinct was, ‘oh well chaps, we’re surrounded, it’s all over and we’d better surrender’. And its not me making this up, Ian Jacobs of the war cabinet secretariat writing in August 1942 from the desert, said that after talking at length to senior officers in Cairo one has to face the fact that again and again British forces were surrendering to inferior numbers of the enemy who, in Jacob’s words, in the First World War ‘would have stuck it out’ and ‘fought it out’.
SINGAPORE CAPTURED BY JAPANESE
‘The British Army was just not very good. I was talking the other day to a very distinguished military historian, who also fought with distinction in Italy, and he said to me ‘when I came back from the war I always promised myself that I would never tell anybody just how bad the British army was.’’As for the Japanese, they reveled in their victory. A Japanese newsreel shows the humiliation of the British forces captured at Singapore, ordered to pay homage to their conqueror – and in the process, reveals the rampant racism that the Japanese possessed themselves: ‘60,000 prisoners were lined up along the road so they could have the honour of seeing the great commander General Yamashita. The prisoners consisted of soldiers from the British mainland, Malaya, Australia, Scotland and India. A parade of mongrel troops.’iii
Altogether the Japanese would capture around 350,000 Allied prisoners during this war. One in four of them would die in Japanese captivity.Adapted from-18 feb 2013
OPINION:
The British had a defensive position with around 80 000 troops while the Japanese deployed a mere
35 000 .They were defeated by a lack of tanks, losing air superiority and a series of Japanese flanking movements along the coast (the Royal Navy in the area having been effectively destroyed by air attacks). Even the big guns in Singapore were unable to effectively support their troops having too few high explosive rounds, they were supplied with plenty of armour piercing ammunition which is less effective against infantry.
HOW DID THE JAPANESE TREATED YOU
Straits Times
15 March – Home
‘I was chopped, I fell and fainted’
WWII survivor’s near-beheading tale adds to history of Japanese Occupation
Mr Yew and eight others were taken from their dorm at night
to be beheaded one by one the next day. He survived.
Story by K. C. VIJAYAN
IN EARLY 1942, Mr Yew Kian Chang and eight other men in their 20s were roused by a squad of Japanese military police from their dormitory in Bukit Timah. They were marched, hands tied, to a nearby railway track and made to squat there. The next day, they were beheaded one by one. Mr Yew was the last. When the metre-long blade struck his neck, he fainted and was left for dead.
But the Singaporean, now 93, survived the horror, which he recounted last month to oral archivists seeking to preserve the remnants of stories about the Japanese Occupation during World War II. The National Archives of Singapore's Oral History Centre has collected more than 870 hours of testimony from 261 survivors. But Mr Yew's is one of a kind. He is the only one to have lived to tell about being nearly beheaded.
The closest parallel is an account by Washington-based Barbara Scharnhorst, now 77, whose father had been with the Royal Army Medical Corps inSingapore and was beheaded by the Japanese in Bahau, Malaya .
Oral History Specialist Lye Soo Choon said the centre had embarked on collecting accounts for several years, but time was running out to get to the whole truth of the Occupation. The Japanese Military Administration that ruledSingapore left almost no written records behind in Singapore
The Straits Times visited the nonagenarian in a four-room flat in Bukit Batok where he lives with his wife, not far from the railway tracks in Bukit Gombak where his life had hung on the edge of a sword more than 60 years ago.
But the Singaporean, now 93, survived the horror, which he recounted last month to oral archivists seeking to preserve the remnants of stories about the Japanese Occupation during World War II. The National Archives of Singapore's Oral History Centre has collected more than 870 hours of testimony from 261 survivors. But Mr Yew's is one of a kind. He is the only one to have lived to tell about being nearly beheaded.
The closest parallel is an account by Washington-based Barbara Scharnhorst, now 77, whose father had been with the Royal Army Medical Corps in
Oral History Specialist Lye Soo Choon said the centre had embarked on collecting accounts for several years, but time was running out to get to the whole truth of the Occupation. The Japanese Military Administration that ruled
The Straits Times visited the nonagenarian in a four-room flat in Bukit Batok where he lives with his wife, not far from the railway tracks in Bukit Gombak where his life had hung on the edge of a sword more than 60 years ago.
Mr Yew's unlucky compatriots were all single, like him. The married men, who lived in another block nearby, were not taken. As he marched, the Fujian
In 1942, when Singapore was under Japanese occupation, Mr Yew, then in his 20s, was lined up with eight other young men.
A Japanese soldier wielding a metre-long sword then beheaded the group one by one.
Mr Yew was the last in line, but the blade did not go deep enough to kill him.
Today, he still bears the scar at the back of his neck.
A Japanese soldier wielding a metre-long sword then beheaded the group one by one.
Mr Yew was the last in line, but the blade did not go deep enough to kill him.
Today, he still bears the scar at the back of his neck.
Clad in a singlet, shorts and China-made cloth-shoes, he walked to the spot where he was to die, and knelt down. "When I was chopped, I fell and fainted," he said. It is believed he fell as soon as the blade hit him just below the neck and the downward slide of the blade missed the vital areas. The Japanese left him for dead.
Mr Yew believes he lay unconscious for more than a day, "then I heard the voice of my grandfather as if in a dream, calling me to get up and run". With his hands still tied, he got up and fled to a friend who treated the wound on his neck with herbs. But maggots appeared in the gaping flesh after some days. "My friend told me there was nothing more he could do and I had to seek medical help." Mr Yew found help at the Nanyang Clinic in theNorth Bridge Road Malaya , where he remained till the end of the war. Till this day, a deep scar is visible on the back of his neck.
Mr Yew believes he lay unconscious for more than a day, "then I heard the voice of my grandfather as if in a dream, calling me to get up and run". With his hands still tied, he got up and fled to a friend who treated the wound on his neck with herbs. But maggots appeared in the gaping flesh after some days. "My friend told me there was nothing more he could do and I had to seek medical help." Mr Yew found help at the Nanyang Clinic in the
When the war ended, he returned to
Long ago, he had made peace with the unspeakable. "I have no ill-feelings towards the Japanese soldiers who chopped me at that time. I thought they were just following instructions," he said.
JAPANESE OCCUPATION IN SINGAPORE
A Japanese group of peace activists, whose aim is to promote better understanding among the Japanese about the atrocities that took place in the region, visited Mr Yew last month. Its spokesman Yoshiyuki Onogi told The Straits Times in an e-mail yesterday: "To directly hear the story from someone like Mr Yew is rare, valuable and momentous to let ordinary Japanese people learn historical facts related to
(Taken from Straits Times, 15 March 2010)
Adapted from-18 feb 2013
Prisoners-of-war were checked by medical officers and arrangements were made to send them home.On 15 August, Japan announced its surrender. The formal signing of the surrender instrument was held at City Hall, Singapore, then known as "Municipal Hall", on 12 September. This was followed by a celebration at the Padang, which included a victory parade. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, came to Singapore to receive the formal surrender of the Japanese forces in the region from General SeishirÅ Itagaki on behalf of General Hisaichi Terauchi.
A British military administration utilizing surrendered Japanese troops as security forces was formed to govern the island until March 1946.After the Japanese surrendered, there was a state of anomie in Singapore, as the British had not yet arrived to take control. The Japanese occupiers had a considerably weakened hold over the populace.
There were widespread incidents of looting and revenge-killing. Much of the infrastructure had been wrecked, including the harbour facilities and electricity, water supply, and telephone services. It took four or five years for the economy to return to pre-war levels. When British troops finally arrived they met with cheering and fanfare.
Banana money became worthless after the occupation ended. Many individuals who had acquired their wealth through banana currency were rendered penniless overnight.JAPANESE SURRENDER
Adapted from-18 FEB 2013
OPINION:I think that its such a relief that the Japanese finaly surrendered after all the suffering the British people and Locals faced.What the USA did was,they create a bomb.It's not just any ordinary bomb but it is like a nuclear bomb which releases radio active gases,acids which will kill thousands of people in Japan.I think that the Japanese learn their lesson and would understand that we are also doing all this for their good in the future as we would not want any more war to continue for the rest of our entire life.
