Flight From Fury

Plans for the escape were made on a Thursday: the grim little group of officers had agreed that Singapore could not hold. On the Sunday of Singapore's collapse, an aide-de-camp swam out to a Chinese sampan and sculled it back to shore. Aboard went the officers, headed by Major General Henry Gordon Bennett, Commander of the Australian Imperial Forces in Malaya. After nightfall the sampan slipped out of the harbor.

There had been friction between General Gordon Bennett and the British High Command. The Australian's dislike for Air Chief Marshal Sir General Robert Brooke-Popham was embarrassingly obvious. But Henry Gordon Bennett was a valuable soldier, and his supposed capture, obligingly confirmed by the Japanese, was a blow to the Allies.

But that Sunday night General Gordon Bennett's sampan had bumped into a seagoing junk carrying six British officers. The General's party switched to the larger vessel, set an uncertain course for Sumatra. The torn page of an atlas was their only chart. Dawn found them in waters a scant half-mile from a Japanese-held island. Their food and water were nearly gone when an Allied launch picked them up.

In Batavia last week, before returning home to Australia to report for further duty, tough, brusque Henry Gordon Bennett told a story that was anything but pretty. He and his men held out "until the last moment," were no match for "lack of water, incessant bombing and greatly superior numbers." Two hospitals had only enough water to last another 24 hours. Bombings were so violent that of one group of 400 Australians only 14 men were left after a three-day attack. The enemy's numerical superiority needed no amplification. No matter how often told, or by whom related, the fall of Singapore could never be anything but an unpretty story.

But when General Gordon Bennett flew home, only his family and a few brother officers greeted him in Sydney. In Melbourne the War Cabinet coldly awaited his report. General Gordon Bennett could --and did-- sayfor himself that he had endured his men's hell to the last, that he did not leave until after the surrender. It was still not a pretty story.

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