From Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance"

...Shairpe explained that this campaign had all been foreseen. He had himself helped to plan General Dobbie’s staff exercises. Years ago they had predicted where the Japs would probably land for an invasion, and how they would advance. Dobbie had even staged a mock invasion during the monsoon, to prove its feasibility. But nobody in the present Malaya Command seemed aware of the Dobbie studies. Indian and British troops in the north, caught off guard in a wild night storm, had retreated pell-mell from the Japanese beachhead. The Japs had come on fast. Fixed fall-back positions around Jitra, built and stocked to hold out for a month, had fallen in hours. Since then the army had been stumbling backward without a plan.

Moreover, the troops were weakly dispersed over the peninsula — Shairpe flicked the stick here and there — to protect airfields foolishly sited by the RAF without consulting the army. Their defense could not be coordinated, and several fields had already fallen. So the Japs had taken control of the air. Furthermore, they had tanks. There was not one British tank in Malaya. The War Office in London had decided that tanks would be useless in jungle warfare. Unfortunately, Shairpe said in dry high nasal tones, the Japanese had not been informed of this piece of wisdom. Though their tanks were poor stuff, they were punching along unopposed, panicking the Asiatic troops. Antitank obstacles were piled in Singapore, but nobody was putting them in place.

With all this the defenders still had the edge, Shairpe insisted. Three Jap divisions had landed. The British could muster five, with plenty of air and ground reinforcements on the way. The Japs were well trained for jungle war — lightly dressed, able to live on fruits and roots, equipped with thousands of bicycles for fast movement down captured roads — but Japan was attacking all over the Pacific; and most likely this landing force had to live and fight on whatever supplies it had brought or could seize. If the defenders would scorch the earth, and force the invaders with delaying actions to use up their food, fuel, and bullets on the long march south, the attrition in time would halt them. They could then be destroyed.

Shairpe showed on the map where strong fall-back defenses ought to exist. General Dobbie’s report had called for building these in peacetime. It hadn’t been done — a major folly — but there was still time. The material lay ready in warehouses. A labor pool of two million Chinese and Malayans, who all hated and dreaded the Japs, was available. They could do the work in a week or ten days. Two very strong lines were needed, close in: one in Johore on the other side of the strait, the other along the north shore of Singapore Island itself, with underwater obstacles, petroleum pipes, searchlights, pillboxes, barbed wire, machine gun nests...

...Major Shairpe had told the plain truth. Fortress Singapore was a phantom...

Nothing is clearer from Churchill’s memoirs than that he himself believed that there was a fortress at Singapore. Of all the people on the spot — army officers, naval officers, colonial administrators, all the way up the grand chain of command — there was not one man to tell the Prime Minister that Fortress Singapore did not exist. And the British belief in the “bastion of Empire” was infectious, at least for Europeans. Hermann Goring warned a visiting Japanese general, months before Japan struck, that Fortress Singapore would hold out for a year and a half. This same general later captured Singapore in seventy days...

In the lean pacifist years, many millions in military funds had been poured into it, for the Japanese threat had been anticipated... Accordingly, the gigantic naval base at Singapore, capable of servicing the whole Royal Navy, had been constructed. The plan was that if ever trouble from Japan threatened, the main fleet would steam to Singapore, to end the trouble by awe or by force. That the Germans might make trouble at the same time, requiring the main fleet to stay at home, seems to have been overlooked.

So Singapore was stocked with food, fuel, and ammunition for a siege of seventy days. That was the time the fleet would need to muster up and get there. Great fixed cannon pointed seaward, to hold off any attempted assault by the Japanese fleet before help came. All this did give the feeling of a fortress.

Yet the sea did not entirely moat Singapore. An attack could come by land from the north, down the wild Malayan peninsula and across the narrow Johore strait. But the planners judged that four hundred miles of jungle made a stouter barrier than fortress walls. Moreover, actual walls on the island’s north side, they felt, would suggest a fear that the Japanese might come from the north one day, and that the British army might not be able to stop them. The British ruled in Asia by an aura of invincibility. With the main fleet seventy days away, what pressing need was there for such a mortifying precaution? The walls were not built. Instead, to make assurance doubly sure, Singapore Island’s stockpile was doubled to last one hundred forty days.

Thus the “Fortress Singapore” image arose. The years of planning, the outpouring of treasure, the rivers of ink in newspapers and journals, the resounding political and military debates, fostered an all but universal fantasy, reaching to Britain’s highest leaders, and all over the Western world, that a fortress was there. The lifeblood of the British working class went into a naval base twenty miles square, with the largest docks in the world, with cranes, repair shops, every conceivable spare part and machine, elaborate housing and recreation facilities; and with enough ammunition, food, and oil to supply the whole fleet for many months, squirrelled away in the giant concrete caverns sunk in the swamps. In its way it was as striking an engineering feat as the Maginot Line.

But to the last, to the moment when the last retreating Scots brigade crossed the causeway in February with bagpipes playing, and demolition charges blew a hole in the one link to the mainland swarming with oncoming Japanese soldiers, the north side of Singapore remained without defenses: defenses that Churchill always assumed were there, as — in his own words — he assumed that “a battleship could not be launched without a bottom.”

In the event, the fleet never came. It was too busy fighting the Germans in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in home waters. The vast facilities stood empty until, with the Japanese army a mile away, the British did their best to blow up or burn the base. But it fell in usable condition, a staggering military haul. Churchill’s insistence on trying a ragged remnant of the seventy-day plan, by dispatching the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, only doomed them.

Airfields had also been laid out in Malaya and heavily stocked up — except with planes. The RAF never came in force. It had lost too many planes saving England from the Luftwaffe, and had shipped hundreds more to the Soviet Union; though of those a large number never flew, sunk in the sea by German torpedoes. The few aircraft on hand in Malaya were shot from the sky fast. The Japanese planes “made of bamboo shoots and rice paper” turned out to be Zeroes, the most advanced fighter aircraft then on the planet. The Japanese seized the splendid airstrips, which they called “Churchill aerodromes”; and from these richly supplied fields their planes helped batter Singapore into surrender.

So the confused Singapore record now reads. Congress investigated Pearl Harbor, but Parliament did not investigate Singapore. Churchill shouldered the blame, stooped an inch or two lower, and went on with the fight...

The unused strategy of General Dobbie — so it turned out after the war — had been absolutely sound, for the invaders did arrive at Singapore at their last gasp, greatly outnumbered by the defenders, their fuel and bullets almost spent. In one final assault, they daringly burned up and shot off everything they had left. The Singapore command caved in, and the colored Malayans had new masters...