Whenever reading about the incredible Japanese victory over the British in Malaya, one cannot help but wonder how the British military can ever have been so inept in not having a defense plan for the peninsula that considered a flanking land invasion up the coast. Also, the British had a massive advantage over the Japanese in terms of men and equipment irrespective of the so-called deficiencies of Singapore (no landward facing guns, etc, lask of inter war investment). Why then did the British constantly retreat at every skirmish and surrender to a numerically inferior force prior to any full engagement and battle? Had Monty been there would he have surrendered?

Good thread. But I don't see Monty fighting in the jungle... [img]graemlins/no.gif[/img]
You needed someone more impetous there. Someone like Slim...

And the British surrendered when they had to. They retreated very fast because they were outmatched. Yamashita's troops may have been numerically inferior to those of Percival, but Yamashita was implacable and didn't care about the losses. The Japanesse had complete armour, aerial and naval superiority and Japanese soldiers managed the extreme natural conditions far better than the Commonwealth troops.

No one had ever thought that 1.000 kilometres of thick jungle could be overpassed and even less that it could be overpassed in less than three weeks as Yamashita did! If you add to this that the Commonwealth troops didn't have a strong cohesion nor strong leadership... add the low moral, the apawling conditions, the privations...

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"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

The British suffered from much the same thinking that MacAuthur had in the Philippines: That a solid front with secure rear and flanks was an absolute necessity. Given the Japanese use of flanking maneuvers and the superiority of their infantry's mobility in primative terrain the British found themselves repeatedly outmaneuvered.
They lacked the numbers to provide either a continious front or to secure their LoC and rear against this type of maneuver. They, as the US did, learned from their early disasters and changed tactics later in the war to counter the Japanese (see the British Burma campaign in 1944 for example).
In Malaysia it was simply a matter of the British tactics being ineffective against the Japanese. The result was as much a moral collapse as a material one.