On Sunday February 15, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita tightened his stranglehold on Singapore city, blasting it with artillery and incessant air assault. He demanded surrender. Malaya Command, with no air support, short of water and petrol and with its force thrust back into a congested city without any effective counter to the enemy battering from the air, capitulated. Singapore’s fall gave Japan her first major victory in the whole campaign just Sixty-nine days after Pearl Harbor.

Nowhere was the magnitude of this disaster realised so quickly and completely as in Australia. Its suddenness came with the force of a thunderclap.

“Just as Dunkirk began the Battle for Britain, so does Singapore open the Battle for Australia” declared the Prime Minister (Mr Curtin). “It is now work or fight as we have never worked or fought before. On what we do now depends everything we hope to do when this bloody test has been survived.”