Reflection in the Fire
“I prayed. I prayed and I cried as I switched between looking at the canopy of my parachute and the sea below me. I could see other parachutes; some on fire, some with lifeless bodies hanging from them, some of them ours and others theirs. Though it was night, there was enough light from seachlights and fire for me to see much more than I wished to.
Bombers and fighters smashing each other to pieces between Borneo and Singapore; Bombers with nowhere to go but down even if they did make it to their target. They would not have the fuel to return to Japanese held territory and were under orders to find and crash the aircraft into any enemy ship they could find.
One would think that aircraft such as bombers were to valuable for such practices, but the truth was we could barely support them anymore. We were running on hastily and poorly refined fuel that was drastically shortening engine life. We knew from experience, that flying the aircraft from Thailand to Singapore on such poor fuel would render the engines almost unuseable after.
It had been decided that this was likely the last massive bombing raid we could stage and the aircraft were better destroyed than captured.
I remember the pre mission breifing, when we were told that our mission was simply to deny Singapore to our enemy by flattening it outright. In spite of the fact that we had so certainly lost the war, the fanaticism of our leaders was still strong.
As the wind pushed my parachute in the direction of Sumatra, I prayed as I had never done so in my life.
I prayed that someone, someday, could find a way to forgive me for being part of this particular mission.”
So went a passage from a partially finished book manuscript found by the family of a former Japanese bomber crewman shortly after he passed away in the early 1970s in his home in a remote area of the island of Hokaido.
A book left unpublished, bearing a recollection of an event that very few of the handfull of known Japanese survivors of the raid over Singapore were ever willing to speak of.
The Dragon’s Last Breath
The mission to crush Singapore was unorthodox not only because it was known to be one of no return, but also because it employed a tactic of using the infamous Black Dragon bomber in a very conventional, en masse, fashion.
Typically, the bombers were used individually or in small formations against very specific and well defined targets. Forming up in large groups was not something their crews were accustomed to. It was the aircrafts’ range and payload that was the deciding factor in using them.
The bombers were joined by fighters from Borneo over the island and made the turn for Singapore there. Enroute to Singapore, the bombers broke into two formations, one targeting Singapore’s harbour and port areas while the other targeted inland sections of the city.
The bombers were joined by carrier based IJN fighters partway to Singapore. This was fortuitous for them as they still had the Borneo based fighters with them as well when they were jumped by Allied fighters.
The particular variant of the bomber was much changed from earlier versions. It was able to fly higher and had the dorsal turret removed in favour of more armor over the crew area. The hope was that between a higher operating hieght and more armour that attacks from above would be difficult and unappealing to attackers and that escort fighters could concentrate on protecting the undersides of the formation.
To a degree, this thinking worked. Corsairs, armed only with machine guns, were some of the first Allied fighters to attack the bombers and found that they needed to take very precise aim at either the cockpit and bombardier sections or the engines if they wanted to have the greatest effect on the bombers from above. Any time spent firing at the upper fuselage aft of the cockpit to just aft of the wing trailing edge was a waste of ammunition.
When news of this reached Allied fighter units, several squadrons of Yararas were diverted from the surface attack missions they’d been tasked with and were refitted to a bomber killer role. Fitted with the standard four Hispano 20mm cannons plus two extra 20mm cannons in pods under the wings; the first Yararas equiped as such launched from the Brazilian carrier Amazonas under an escort of Culpeos and Corsairs.
Similarly armed Yararas launched from the Rio Negro shortly after to head off the bombers before they reached Singapore.
The Yararas successfully got above the bombers and bore down on them, breaking the bombers’ dorsal armor with relative ease compared to the corsairs’ machine guns.
While the Yararas sent several bombers down, several of their own were lost to Japanese heavy fighters in the process.
The Dragon’s Ashes
“We had stemmed the tide, but we had not turned it” One Amazonas based Yarara pilot recalled shortly after the war.
“The remaining bombers were still heading to Singapore when we had to break off our attacks on them, we’d done what we could on the fuel and weapons we had and could only hope that the Rio Negro squadrons could finish the rest.”
The attack as recalled by a Black Dragon pilot:
“We could see Singapore straight ahead as well as Yararas and Corsairs coming straight for us from the Argentine and British carriers on the other side of the peninsula as well as land based fighters coming at us from Sumatra. The Corsairs flew out ahead of the Yararas as our own fighters flew out ahead of us to clash with them.
Our bomb bay doors were open and the order was given to drop the bombs. My plane was assigned to the formations attacking the port and harbour; our bomb load was primarily heavy fragmentation bombs set for aerial detonation to puncture ship hulls and any large tanks of fuel or flamable liquids. Bombers hauling loads of incendiaries were following close behind us.
As our bomb doors closed and I put the aircraft on a heading to the sea further ahead of us, I spared a glance to the city side of the cockpit and saw vast sections of the city consumed in the flames.
I heard a horrible punching noise from further back in the aircraft and the whole of the machine shuddered. We were hit, but not fatally; one of our fighters had quickly taken care of the attacker.
My crew were all still alive, but we were too low for bailing out with parachutes. I spotted a relatively open patch of sea and belly landed the plane. We quickly escaped the plane and waited in a life raft for whoever it might be who came to claim us.
As it turned out, ours was one of only two bombers to make it over the peninsula. The rest had either not made it to Singapore at all or had been destroyed during or shortly after their attacks.”
Cold Dawn
The first rays of the next day’s sun revealed a smoldering, shattered Singapore. The port and harbour were completely underwater and the sea was threatening to take some of the fragile adjoining areas out with the tide.
Twisted in with the remnants of the city were countless broken aircraft of both Japanese and Allied origin. What few survivors remained were found in the remnants of the city’s most far flung outskirts, the only parts of the city left standing.
All Black Dragon bombers involved in the mission were destroyed and more than 90% of their crewmen confirmed dead or presumed so.
Entire squadrons of fighters, both Japanese and Allied were lost in the battle; very few of those aircrafts’ crews survived the night.
Some of the most telling testimony of the aftermath came from those on the ground; both the Allied and Japanese soldiers who dared to venture into what was left.
A retired New Zealand army officer, and one of the first to enter Singapore after the bombing, recalled some years after the war:
“We couldn’t get close to the heart of the city for nearly 48 hours as the flames kept burning so intensely.
We could tell from the looks on the Japanese soldiers’ faces that they were as shocked and dumbfounded as we were. They truly didn’t know that this was coming and whatever fight they had the night before was gone from most of them. Most laid their weapons down and surrendered to us willingly.
We did what we could for the few survivors of the city we could find, and they were very few.
The bombing of Singapore is forever in my memory the most complete state of destruction in one place that I personally saw during the war.”
These words from a retired Japanese officer:
“The bombing of Singapore was one of the very few things our superiors ordered during the war that came close to surprizing me. By that point in the war, I thought very little could shock me.
The level of destruction was staggering to take in. It was an attack of pure spite and denial; our commanders had decided to clear it off the map with the last little bit of might they had left to display to our adversaries.
We knew we were expendable to those above us, but few of us that day had the will to die defending wreckage.
We surrendered. There was nothing else for us to do that day.”
Singapore remained in a forsaken state through the remainder of the war. In the late 1940s, the land the city had stood on was razed and allowed to be overgrown.
No attempt was ever made to rebuild Singapore and a permanent monument was erected off the coast in the mid 1980s.