City Facing the Sea

Like Hong Kong and Manila before it, Singapore awaited its fate. Its tree-covered oval island, 27 miles long and 14 miles wide, is separated from the giraffe-like neck of the Malay Peninsula and the oncoming Jap by the mile-wide Strait of Johore. Around the big island on the sea side are scores of tiny islands, on most of which lie camouflaged coastal artillery positions.

Singapore has been an Asiatic paradise for Occidentals and it was built to withstand attack from the sea. Singapore Harbor on the seaward side is protected by the strongly fortified islands of Brani, Blakang Mati, East St. John. Heavy and light guns perch atop the island's 1,000 hills. Location of the biggest guns of all, the 18-inchers, is a secret, but they are probably at the Changi entrance to Johore Strait. Around the entire island on all the beaches there are barbed-wire entanglements with concrete pillboxes at intervals.

But for attack and siege by land, Singapore is not so well prepared. Most of its big guns are concentrated on the seaward side, not opposite the Malay Peninsula. Its main reservoir of water is across the Strait in Johore and although there are emergency reservoirs on the island itself, the Jap might be able to thirst out the city's 600,000 inhabitants. This week the enemy was within 40 miles of the main water supply.

The Jap has already bombed the city. Heavier raids are yet to come and Singapore is not ready for them. Its clammy soil is too wet for underground shelters, so, if raids get too bad, plans have been made to evacuate 200,000 Chinese and Malays to crudely built dormitory huts in the uninhabited wooded spaces of the island. For those who cannot be evacuated, there are some private concrete shelters and modern buildings, which can offer protection. For those who can find nothing better, there are the city's two-to 20-feet-deep concrete drainage ditches.

The great naval base itself, which took 17 years to build and cost $170,000,000, lies along the northern shore of Singapore Island on the far side of the island from the city but on the near side for the Japs-- just across the Strait from Johore. By last week, it was already growing worthless as a base to British and American ships in the Far East. But if it is valueless to them, the British want it to remain valueless to the Jap, too.

It is better prepared to withstand siege than the city itself. In its bombproof underground vaults are vast quantities of fuel, mines, shells. In the cold-storage sheds there is enough food for all the officers and men of the British Far Eastern Fleet for several months. All the buildings are solidly constructed and every workshop is safe against bomb blast and splinters.

Unless reinforcements--particularly airplanes--arrived soon from the U.S., the great naval base seemed doomed, if not to fall, at least to undergo a disastrous siege. In Tokyo, over his short-wave radio, the Jap announced that the fall of Singapore was scheduled for Feb. 10.

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