Number of words: 520

Europe was a long way off and although it had been overrun by Hitler’s armies, nobody believed for a moment that England would be successfully invaded, particularly as the battle of Britain had ended in defeat for the luftwaffe. 

As far as the Japanese were concerned, although they were obviously in an aggressive mode, nobody took the threat of a Jap attack from water very seriously. We were repeatedly told, and believed it, that the Singapore fortress along with its naval base was impregnable and that if the little yellow men ever dared to show their noses in the area they could easily be seen off. Nobody worried at all that the Japanese were bursting out of their country with a population of about 68 million, the most densely populated country in the world and a problem as to where to put all their people, how to feed them and support a reasonable standard of living. A great deal of Japan is mountainous and unfit for cultivation and they desperately needed someplace to expand into. 

Even in military circles there was quite an astonishing ignorance of Japan’s military capability – this in spite of their extensive campaigns in China and the extension of their control in Indo China in 1941. 
British army officers in those days considered it slightly not done to be too efficient and their cavalier attitude to their profession at times became exaggerated to the point of farce. It was quite seriously suggested that Japanese soldiers and their men could not use a bomb sight due to their slit eyes and that the physical makeup of their bodies, with long torso and short legs, would prevent a Japanese soldier from being able to endure active service for any length of time. 

The Japanese war capability was underestimated to quite a scandalous extent and even held in contempt and the British, in their usual complacent way, refused to take any threat from the quarter seriously.
There was a rather ominously perhaps, the defence security officer who wrote what in military parlance is called an ‘Appreciation of the defence of Malaya’ in which he said that there would be invaded from the sea on the east coast and after the initial landings, the enemy would infiltrate through the Jungle westwards – the poor man was sent home: the heat and humidity had obviously effected him as everybody knew the Jungle was impenetrable!

Nobody paid much attention when General Tojo, the arch-militarist, became prime minister of Japan and more was heard of the ‘Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’.
It is of course probably fair to say that the propaganda promoting complacency was quite deliberate and the colossal bluff – the British at that time stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany and were fully streteched in the defence of Great Britain, they simply could not afford the men or the materials for the defence of Malaya, so the next best thing was to pretend that everything that was needed was available and there was no reason for anybody to worry.

Excerpted from Pg 12-13 of ‘Guest of an Emperor’ by Arthur Cransie