By Ron Unz - March 30, 2026

The World War II chapters of my introductory history textbooks always devoted a great deal of space to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought our country into the conflict. But they only spent a couple of paragraphs on the major military victories of Japan that had soon followed. Perhaps a single sentence was devoted to the fall of Singapore to a Japanese army, yet that event actually had major world importance.

For many years, the British had relied upon Singapore as the central military pillar of their East Asian holdings, a fortress-city that they often called “the Gibraltar of the East.” Garrisoned by a large British army of 85,000, it was regarded as totally impregnable. Yet just a few weeks after the destruction of most of the American fleet in distant Hawaii, a Japanese general attacked it from the landward side, marching his men through what the British had regarded as totally impassable Malayan jungle. With “the guns of Singapore” all famously pointing in the wrong direction, the British garrison was caught completely flat-footed when he invested the city and began his attack. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered his troops to fight to the last man, but instead they all surrendered after just a single week of combat, taken into captivity by a Japanese force little more than one-third their own size. This represented a total national humiliation for the mighty British Empire.

When Churchill later wrote his six volume history of the war, he described the fall of Singapore as “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history,” and the aftermath had major geopolitical significance. Asians across the entire region were stunned by such a massive British defeat at the hands of a much smaller Asian force. Everyone saw the photographs of huge numbers of British troops being marched into POW camps with the top British generals at the head of those endless columns.

Whereas the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor could be ascribed to a treacherous surprise attack, no such excuse existed for the crushing British defeat at Singapore, so the long-standing bubble of perceived European military invincibility had been permanently punctured. Many have argued that the dramatic resulting changes in local Asian psychology played a major role in the postwar collapse of all the European colonial empires in that part of the world. Yet despite those resounding geopolitical consequences of the Fall of Singapore, I doubt whether even two Americans in one hundred are currently familiar with that important history.

Probably far more present-day Americans are . . .

[SNIP]