A Visit to Battlebox with the BBC’s The Travel Show

I had the privilege of showing the BBC’s Carmen Roberts around the Battlebox in August. This was for a segment of ‘The Travel Show’ for which she came back to Singapore—the country of her birth for an episode related to Singapore’s 60th anniversary of Independence and the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

The Battlebox, an underground command bunker located in Fort Canning Hill, was where the Malaya Command made the decision to surrender Singapore at a conference that was called at 9.30 am on 15. February 1942. It was a decision that just two months prior, when the first bombs fell on Singapore on 8 December 1941, seemed unthinkable. Singapore’s defenders were left with little choice and any Imperial Japanese Army assault on the urban centre with its large civilian population, would certainly have had disastrous consequences. The decision would however result in 3 1/2 years of pain and suffering for both the local population and also Singapore’s defenders.

The decision was made to surrender at a meeting held inside the Battlebox on the morning of 15 February 1942 at which twelve commanders, including Lt Gen Arthur Percival, were present.

It did not take long for unspeakable horrors to be unleashed, particularly on members of the Chinese community. Just days after the surrender, Sook Ching—a purge targeting the Chinese population, commenced. The operation went on for three weeks and saw tens of thousands of Chinese men between the ages of 18 to 50, report to screening centres. While some men returned home, others were put on lorries, never to be heard from again as loved ones waited in vain for their return. Carmen’s great uncle, Ee Tian Chian, was one of the men who were never seen again.

Inside the Battlebox with Carmen Roberts

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0m6jf8x/the-mystery-of-a-singaporean-soldier-s-ww2-disappearance

The horrors that these men were subjected to would later emerge. Ferried to remote locations, a large number were lined up with hands tied behind their backs and fired at with machine guns. Bayonets would then be used to finish up. There were a handful of men who quite remarkably lived to tell the tale, saved by the bodies of comrades that had fallen over them. One survivor told of how the ropes that bound him were miraculously loosened as he and those he was tied together with were made to wade into the sea before being shot at. He escaped by submerging himself and swimming underwater before surfacing and making a desperate swim to freedom. Accounts of Prisoners of War who were tasked to clear massacre sites, civilians, who witnessed the atrocities or were made to dig pits for burial, shed light on sites of massacres.

It would only be in the 1960s, that the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce organised the effort to identify sites of mass graves and to recover victims’ remains. This coincided with the effort to have a memorial to victims built, leading to the construction of the Civilian War Memorial. It is at the memorial that the remains that were recovered from over 50 mass graves have been reinterred.

A wallet belonging to a victim, Dr J C Chen, recovered from a mass grave.

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About the Battlebox
https://battlebox.sg/about/

Built in 1936 and completed in 1939, the Battlebox served as the headquarters for the defending Allied forces against the invading Japanese army in the final days of the Malayan Campaign (8 Dec 1941 — 15 Feb 1942).

It was here that Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival and 11 other commanders made the decision to surrender Singapore to the Japanese, resulting in possibly the greatest defeat of a British army ever in battle and the beginning of 3 ½ years of the Japanese Occupation of Singapore.

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This full episode of the The Travel Show can be viewed on YouTube:

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