Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 5 Part 1 - Storm Clouds Over Paradise
Chapter V of “Singapore: Unlikely Power” is where things start going very wrong. Perry titled it “Clouds, Thunder, and Storm” and that really nails it. Everything we’ve been reading about in previous chapters, the trade, the empire, the comfy colonial life, it’s all about to get smashed. But nobody in Singapore seems to notice.
This first half covers the interwar years, roughly 1918 to the eve of World War II. And honestly, it reads like watching someone sleepwalk toward a cliff.
Oil Changes Everything
The big shift after World War I was the switch from coal to oil. This sounds boring. It was not boring. It changed everything about global power.
Britain had coal. Lots of it. Coal powered their ships, their factories, their entire empire. But here’s the thing: oil was better. It took less space, loaded faster, and made life aboard ships way more pleasant. No more sweating workers hauling coal in baskets. Perry includes a great quote from a sailor thrilled to finally take a shower alone instead of sharing a bucket with two other guys, “never sure whose leg I was washing.”
But Britain had very little oil. The Americans had loads of it. So the energy shift that made life nicer for sailors was slowly draining British power. The US came out of World War I with the world’s second-largest merchant fleet and a navy that could challenge Britain’s.
Singapore, though, stumbled into a sweet spot. It sat close to the oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra. It started becoming a petro port. Oil companies loved the deep water, the lack of regulations and taxes, and the cheap labor. Today Singapore is one of the world’s biggest petroleum hubs, and it started right here in the 1920s.
Cocktails and Complacency
Perry paints an incredible picture of European colonial life in Singapore between the wars. And look, it was pretty ridiculous.
The British lived in their own bubble. Most never visited the Malayan mainland just across the water. They barely spoke the local languages beyond basic pidgin Malay. News from home traveled at the speed of a mail steamer, which meant full information took weeks to arrive. Journalists sometimes just made stuff up to fill the gap.
But here’s what really got me. Cheap servants were everywhere. Even the lowliest businessman could afford a private houseboy. The women played golf and bridge and worried about having nothing to do. The men knocked off early for drinks: gin with bitters in a wine glass, which someone helpfully noted was “a cleaner and less harmful drink than the American cocktail.” Dinner ran multiple courses with wine for each. Then dancing. Nobody seemed interested in ideas. Comfort was the whole game.
During the Great Depression, some Europeans actually lost their jobs. Two Englishmen tried to set up a shoeshine stand. The authorities shut it down immediately. “Shoes were not to be shined by white men in the Orient.” Think about that for a second. Even broke, the colonial system wouldn’t let white people do manual labor. The performance of racial superiority had to be maintained at all costs.
A few people saw the cracks. Journalist and spy R.H. Bruce Lockhart warned that white prestige across Asia was collapsing. He noted that Singapore’s thin layer of Western civilization was maintained only by British sea power. Take that away, and it could all revert to jungle. He was more right than he knew.
The Japanese Are Coming
While the British were sipping pahits and dancing at the Raffles Hotel, Japan was quietly becoming the biggest threat in the region.
It started as a commercial problem. Japanese goods were cheap, well-marketed, and catered to local tastes. British products were expensive, poorly marketed, and slow to deliver. World War I had opened doors for Japanese trade, and the Japanese kept those doors open after the war ended.
But here’s the problem: it wasn’t just commerce. The Japanese Consul General’s office in Singapore functioned as an intelligence agency. Japanese travelers took notes, sketched maps, snapped photos. All of it funneled through local clubs and associations back to Tokyo. The British noticed the photography habit but didn’t connect the dots. This intelligence would prove extremely useful when Japan eventually invaded Malaya.
There were even rumors about Japan funding a canal through the Kra Isthmus in Thailand, which would have bypassed Singapore entirely. The Dutch governor of the East Indies warned a British journalist: point at the Kra Isthmus on a map and “that’s where Siam will one day cede territory for a canal to Japan… and then goodbye to Singapore.”
Building a Fortress Without a Fleet
Faced with growing Japanese power, the British decided Singapore needed to become a major naval base. The logic was sound: great harbor, strategic location, typhoon-free waters. In 1921, they started building at Sembawang on the north side of the island.
It was a massive project. Jungle clearing, swamp draining, dry docks, wharves, cranes, fuel storage, hospitals, barracks, power stations, ammunition depots, railways, and defensive guns. The naval barracks, named HMS Terror, came with a swimming pool, cinema, and sports grounds. Basically a country club that happened to have fifteen-inch guns.
Back in London, the Labour prime minister called it “a wild and wanton escapade.” Others opposed it as costly and provocative. One MP pleaded for the money to be spent on “things that are going to make our lives a little brighter and happier.” Pensions. Health care. Housing. Same debate countries have today: welfare versus military spending.
Perry busts an important myth here. People always say Singapore’s guns could only fire out to sea and were useless against a land attack. Not true. Almost all the guns had 360-degree range. They could fire northward toward the mainland. The real problem was ammunition. They had armor-piercing shells designed for shooting at ships, not high-explosive rounds for hitting ground troops. The guns actually did their job as deterrents: Japan chose not to attack from the sea precisely because of them.
But here’s the crushing irony that Perry highlights. In Jellicoe’s time after World War I, Britain had a fleet but no base. By the 1930s, they had the base but no fleet. As Perry puts it: “a fleet without a base became a base without a fleet.” Singapore was a symbol of empire, not an instrument of empire.
Two Days Before the Bombs
Perry closes this section with a scene that’s almost too perfect. On December 6, 1941, the Governor walked into a code clerk’s office and announced they were at war. When she assumed he meant Japan, he laughed. No, Finland. He thought it was hilarious. She mentioned Japanese bombs. He replied firmly: “You can take it from me there will never be a Japanese bomb dropped in Singapore.”
Two days later, at 4 a.m., bombs began to fall.
The British had put Japanese military capability on the same level as the Italians: brave but incompetent, unable to handle modern weapons. They thought their clunky Brewster Buffalo fighters could stand up to the Japanese Zero. They overestimated themselves and underestimated their enemy. And everyone in Singapore kept dancing.
This chapter really drove home something for me. It’s not that people didn’t have warning signs. Bruce Lockhart saw it. The Dutch governor saw it. The code clerk saw it. But the people in charge had built their entire worldview on assumptions of superiority that made it impossible to take the threat seriously. The fortress had the guns. It had the base. It had the location. What it didn’t have was the willingness to believe that everything could fall apart.
And that’s exactly what happened next.
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