Torrance: Escape from Singapore Read online

  The two grenades detonated in rapid succession, illuminating the figures wearing Brodie helmets behind the sandbags for the blink of an eye. Shimura got no more than an impression of a face distorted in agony, heard a crack and a short scream, and the machine gun fell silent.

  Shimura and Toriyama crawled forward until they could touch the sandbags, then lunged over them, the butts of their rifles braced against their shoulders. The only occupants of the weapon pit were dead.

  A burst of machine-gun fire crackled, too close for comfort. Shimura saw the muzzle flash, had an impression of a figure behind scrim netting. He started to raise his rifle, but Toriyama was faster, swinging his Arisaka around, loosing off a snapshot from the hip. The man dropped his sub-machine gun and fell forward until his utility pouches caught on the scrim netting, holding him up grotesquely.

  The netting concealed the entrance to a tented dugout. Toriyama took out another grenade, primed it as he had the last, and lobbed it through the entrance. The flash of the blast lit up the doorway. Shimura and Toriyama went through one after the other, guns blazing.

  They need not have bothered: everyone inside was already dead, had probably been dead even before Toriyama lobbed the grenade in. Shimura snapped on a torch to check. The beam picked out the bright blood splashed on the inside of the tattered canvas. The corpses wore the iconic British Brodie helmets, but their shoulder flashes said ‘AIF’. ‘Australians,’ Shimura said to Toriyama, who nodded.

  One of the dead men had a lieutenant’s pips on the epaulettes of his bush shirt, a map case fixed to his belt. Crouching by his corpse, Shimura took the man’s Thompson sub-machine gun and pulled back the cocking handle. The Nagoya Arsenal produced many fine weapons for the Imperial Japanese Army, but its attempts to produce a satisfactory sub-machine gun had until now failed to bear fruit. Shimura had heard they were working on one; until it was in production, he and his men would have to make do with whatever sub-machine guns they could take from the corpses of their enemies.

  Shimura tossed the Thompson to Toriyama, who caught it. The corporal grinned, and struck a pose. ‘Like Jemezu Cagney!’

  Shimura indicated the dead officer’s knapsack. ‘Take plenty of magazines.’ Taking the map case, he moved away from the corpse, but none of the maps he studied by the light of the torch provided any new information that would be of any use to him or his battalion’s intelligence officer.

  He stepped out of the tented dugout, into the darkness of the night. The corpse still dangled from the scrim netting. Shimura took the dead man’s Thompson, slinging it over his own shoulder this time, and stuffed his pack with magazines from the corpse’s utility pouches. Toriyama emerged from the dugout after him. The two of them followed a trail through the undergrowth until they came to a clearing where something else was concealed beneath scrim. Pulling the netting back, Shimura revealed a searchlight. Stepping up onto the platform on which the light was fixed, he turned and saw he had a fine view over the intervening undergrowth to the beach where he had come ashore, and the waters of the strait beyond.

  ‘If they’d fixed our boats in this beam of this, their artillery would’ve blown us out of the water,’ he remarked to Toriyama.

  ‘Why didn’t they, then?’

  ‘No power, I expect.’ To demonstrate, Shimura threw one of the levers on the searchlight, and to his astonishment and horror the whole unit began to hum noisily, the bulb quickly lighting up and sending a dazzling beam across the strait. Shimura quickly cut the power again before the light drew fire from the Japanese artillery, who would assume the searchlight was being operated by British soldiers trying to direct their own artillery on the Japanese assault boats.

  ‘So why didn’t they use it?’ wondered Toriyama.

  ‘The same reason nine out of ten things happen in battle, I expect,’ said Shimura. ‘Some idiot made an annoying mess of things.’

  They made their way back to the beach. Fifty yards away, tracer fire still came from where a handful of Australians – one of them armed with a Bren gun – still held out in a weapon pit.

  Ordering Toriyama and three other men to follow, Shimura led the way through the mangroves, wading through cold, waist-deep water until they were in position behind the weapon pit. Picking their way through the tangled roots in the dark, they got close enough to prime two more grenades and lob them into the weapon pit, before charging the last few yards and firing bursts from their Thompsons at the men within.

  But the pit was deserted. ‘Chikusho!’ cursed Shimura. While he and his squad had been working their way around the Bren-gunners’ flank, the Australians had slipped away in the darkness. Had it been luck, or cunning? The Australians could not have gone far, and the thought of some cunning enemy soldiers in the vicinity made Shimura nervous.

  Toriyama’s thoughts must have been working along similar lines. ‘Should we go after them?’

  Shimura shook his head. ‘Let them go. Our orders are clear: we must make for Tengah Airfield.’

  General Yamashita had anticipated there would be much confusion when the Fifth and Eighteenth Infantry Divisions landed in the mangrove swamps at the western end of the island. Men would become separated from their units in the dark. So the general had made sure that whatever else happened, everyone knew what to do. Their orders were simple: head for Tengah Airfield; if you meet with men from another unit, stick with them; you can look for your own unit after the airfield is in our hands. Every officer and NCO was issued with a wrist-compass with a glow-in-the-dark dial so he could find his way: the Fifth Division had to march south-south-east from their landing zone on the north-west side of the island while the Eighteenth Division – of which Shimura’s battalion was a part – were to head east-south-east. If their boats had put them ashore in the right place – and with such a narrow strait to cross, it seemed unlikely they could have gone far wrong – they had only three and a half miles to march, as the crow flew. If all went well, both divisions would rally at Tengah tomorrow evening. With the airfield in Japanese hands, they could start bringing in reinforcements, supplies and ammunition. And from Tengah to Singapore Town was a mere nine miles.

  Little more than a dozen miles from where he now stood to Singapore Town! After a march of over four hundred miles from where they had landed at Khota Baru two months earlier, now they were less than a day’s march from their final objective. In three days it would be Kigensetsu: the anniversary of the coronation of the Emperor Jimmu, the founder of the Chrysanthemum Dynasty. What a great tribute it would be to his descendant, the Emperor Hirohito, if they could conquer Singapore on Kigensetsu!

  Shimura snorted. He was getting ahead of himself. They might only be twelve and a half miles from Singapore Town, but those miles would be the most bitterly contested of all. The British would not give up their island fortress without a fight, and no doubt there would be many hard battles to fight before the Rising Sun was flying over the city.

  So take it one step at a time, Shimura told himself. Get these men to Tengah. Do that, and then you can start thinking about conquering Singapore in time for Kigensetsu.

  Two

  Monday 0200 – 0402

  ‘There are guards on the gate!’ growled MacRae.

  ‘Of course there are guards on the gate,’ said Torrance. ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘Ye said there widnae be any!’ MacRae was nicknamed ‘Smiler’ on account of his ‘Glasgow smile’, two deep scars running from the corners of his mouth where his cheeks had once been slashed open almost as far as his ears, a souvenir of his time in the Brigton Billy Boys, one of Glasgow’s notorious razor gangs. According to some legends current in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, MacRae being given a Glasgow smile was only poetic justice, for some said he was the man responsible for three out of four such ‘smiles’ seen walking the streets of the Gorbals.

  ‘I said the storeroom was unguarded.’ Like MacRae, Torrance wore a khaki-drab Balmoral bonnet with the silver badge of the Argyll and Suther
land Highlanders pinned above his left ear. Although his father – who had died at the Somme before Torrance was born – had been a Highlander, Torrance himself had been raised in London and spoke with a cockney accent. ‘I never said the base wasn’t guarded.’

  ‘I thought ye said the place was abandoned?’

  ‘Abandoned by the navy. Now the army’s moved in to blow up the dockside equipment, so Tojo won’t get his sticky mitts on it. You know what the army’s like: if there are gates, they’ve got to ’ave sentries on ’em.’

  The sentries were Gurkhas, Lee–Enfields at the slope, the broad brims of their slouch hats casting shadows across their faces from the glare of the flames of the naval base’s burning oil tanks. Gurkhas were a cheerful, good-humoured, easy-going bunch, but Torrance had served alongside them in India and he knew it was no lie that their kukris, once drawn, could not be returned to the scabbard without drawing blood.

  A sergeant emerged from the shadows, standing in the middle of the tarmac, a raised palm commanding the Morris three-tonne lorry to halt. MacRae eased on the brakes. ‘Now what?’ he asked Torrance.

  ‘Stay calm and let me do the talking.’

  He wound down the window on his side, taking a folded slip of paper from the breast pocket of his sweat-stained khaki drill shirt and leaning down to hand it to the sergeant. The Gurkha produced a torch and read the order in the light of its beam before handing it back to Torrance. He barked a command at the sentries in Nepalese and they hurried to open the gates. The sergeant waved the lorry through. Changing gear, MacRae shifted his foot from brake to accelerator, easing the Morris forward.

  Torrance folded the order and tucked it back inside his pocket.

  ‘Where d’ye get that?’ asked MacRae, steering the Morris along the long drive through the naval base.

  ‘Typed it myself, didn’t I? All you need is five minutes alone in the orderly room.’

  ‘Who signed the order?’

  ‘Busty.’

  ‘Ye forged Colonel Stewart’s signature?’

  ‘Depends on your definition of “forged”, I s’pose. I mean, I dare say if you compared it to one of Busty’s real signatures the two would look nothing alike, but how’s a Gurkha on sentry-go at a naval base gonna know that?’

  Torrance doffed his bonnet and took out the sketch map of the naval base Corporal Baxter had literally scrawled on the back of an envelope for him. Baxter worked for the quartermaster and had been at the naval base earlier in the week, looking for food stores he could requisition for the battalion.

  Looking for the first turning, Torrance gazed at the facilities all around them, bathed in the glow of the blazing fuel tanks: the floating dock, the graving dock, the cranes, the workshops, the warehouses for stores and supplies. The naval base covered hundreds of acres. Behind the dockyards were administrative buildings, barracks for naval personnel, married officers’ bungalows, shops, cinemas, public houses, tennis courts and football pitches. A seaman stationed here might have spent weeks at a time without ever once needing to set foot outside of the gates if his orders did not require it.

  ‘Sixty million quid,’ breathed Torrance.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s how much this place cost the British taxpayer. Now if I was gonna spend that much on building a massive naval base in the Far East, I might have used some of the money on building defences for it, but what do I know? I’m just an ignorant bloody squaddie.’

  ‘What about that battery o’ naval guns at Changi? The ones that have been lobbing fifteen-inch shells over our heids at the Japs on the mainland for the past week?’

  ‘A gunner I met down the Union Jack Club the other night reckoned those shells probably aren’t doing much good at all,’ said Torrance.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Wrong kind of shells, aren’t they? Armour-piercing. Designed for firing at ships. You hit an armoured cruiser with a fifteen-inch armour-piercing shell, you’ll send it straight to Davy Jones’s locker. Fire an armour-piercing shell at troops ashore, it’ll bury itself so deep underground before it explodes, the ground absorbs all the blast.’

  ‘Jesus.’ MacRae shook his head in disgust. ‘The wrong bloody kind o’ shells!’

  There was something unreal about the abandoned and largely deserted naval base, but then there had been something unreal about everything since the Argylls had retreated across the Causeway a week ago, the last unit to do so. In fact, things had got pretty unreal the moment Japanese bombs started falling on Singapore and news came through of an attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. It seemed to Torrance he had spent most of the intervening two months dodging the Japanese in the jungles of Malaya.

  Part of the barrack block to their right exploded, hurling debris across the tarmac ahead. MacRae had to swerve to avoid it. ‘Christ! What the hell was that?’

  ‘Jap 5.9-inch howitzer shell, I ’spect,’ Torrance said with a calmness he did not feel.

  ‘A howitzer shell! Ye didnae tell me the Japs were shelling the place!’

  ‘Must’ve slipped my mind. Anyway, I thought it would’ve been bleedin’ obvious. Why d’you think the navy pulled out? Because they didn’t like the food? Don’t tell me you’re scared of a little light shelling!’

  MacRae said nothing, just set his jaw and drove on. Torrance smiled. Blokes like MacRae were easy enough to manipulate, you just had to know which buttons to press.

  They came to a junction. ‘Left or right?’ asked MacRae.

  Torrance checked Corporal Baxter’s map. ‘Left,’ he said. ‘Then right, then left again.’

  Many of the buildings had already been damaged by the shelling, or perhaps by the Royal Bombay Sappers and Miners trying to make sure the facilities would be unusable if the Japanese took over. After the second left turn, a warehouse came into view. ‘Pull up there,’ said Torrance.

  MacRae parked and they both climbed down from the cab. The Glaswegian tried the wicket gate set into the larger double doors of the warehouse. ‘Locked.’

  Torrance was pleased to see the padlock still on the wicket: it made it more likely that what they had come for was still inside. He attacked the hasp of the padlock with the crowbar he had brought with him.

  ‘That’s damage to naval property,’ MacRae growled as the wood splintered.

  They heard the distant thud of a howitzer firing, and a shell screaming towards them. Both of them froze, trying to gauge where the shell would land. It seemed to scream directly overhead before exploding somewhere out of sight.

  ‘Between the army blowing up the dockyard facilities and the Jap artillery lobbing shells,’ said Torrance, ‘I hardly think anyone’s gonna fuss about one bleedin’ padlock.’

  The two of them stepped through the gate and Torrance flicked on a torch, directing the beam about until it picked out a stack of crates that reached up to the ceiling, high above them in the cavernous depths of the warehouse. There were lanes between the stacks, some wide enough for a car, others scarcely broad enough for a man to slip through.

  The main lights flickered on, dazzling Torrance. He turned and saw MacRae standing with one finger on a light switch. Hurrying across, he flicked the switch, plunging them both back into darkness. ‘For Christ’s sake, Smiler! Use your bleedin’ loaf! The Japs will see the light through the skylights. That’s asking for them to drop a shell right on our noggins.’

  ‘Sorry, Slugger. I wisnae thinking.’

  Torrance directed the torch beam about. ‘What we need is a sack truck.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know… one of those trolleys with two wheels, two handles and a ledge down at the bottom, like you see railway porters use.’ The torch beam picked one out. ‘Like that, in fact.’

  MacRae sauntered across to fetch the sack truck and the two of them made their way along one of the broader lanes, Torrance counting off stacks as they went. ‘So how come ye didnae ask yer pal Lefty to help ye?’ asked MacRae.

  ‘Five… Lefty’s
all right… six… but he’s a bit too… seven… what’s the word?’

  ‘Honest?’ suggested MacRae.

  ‘Eight… that’s the one… nine. Here we are.’ They had reached a stack of cardboard cartons. Torrance handed the torch to MacRae. ‘Hold this, point it there.’ In the light of the beam, Torrance took down one of the cartons and tore open the flaps at the top to reveal the contents.

  ‘Stockings, nylon, white, Wrens for the use of. All right, stack ’em up, four cartons at a time.’

  ‘What are ye doin’?’

  ‘I’m holding the torch, aren’t I?’

  ‘How’s that a fair division of labour?’

  ‘Who said anything about a fair division of labour? Don’t you go getting any ideas, Smiler. I’m management on this little venture, you’re labour.’

  ‘And suppose I decide I want to renegotiate the terms of our contract? What’s to stop me frae taking all these nylons for myself and leaving ye here to make yer own way back to our barracks?’

  ‘And what you gonna do with five thousand nylons? Knock ’em out to the lads? Don’t talk wet.’ Torrance could not respond so dismissively to MacRae without getting a dry mouth and sweaty palms, but effete gentlemen had been ordering thugs like MacRae around for generations. Torrance figured it was like dealing with a barking dog: the trick was to show no fear. ‘I’ve got a buyer lined up. That’s why we’re getting eight hundred Malayan dollars.’

  ‘Eight hundred! I thought ye said four.’

  ‘Four hundred? When did I say that?’

  ‘Well, ye said two hundred for me, I just assumed it would be a fifty–fifty split.’

  ‘You’re having a laugh, in’tcher? Eighty-twenty, more like, and that’s me being generous. I’m the one that found them stockings—’

  ‘I thought ye said Baxter was?’