In the original dust cover. Maroon cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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“The worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” Churchill’s description of the fall of Singapore in 1942, which led to over 100,000 British, Australian and Indian troops being captured by the Japanese, was no wartime exaggeration. The Japanese had promised that there would be no Dunkirk in Singapore and that was so – no one was spared and its fall led to imprisonment, torture and death for thousands of allied men and women. In this extraordinary book, using much new material from British, Australian, Indian and Japanese sources, Colin Smith has woven together the full and terrifying story of the fall of Singapore and its aftermath. Here, alongside cowardice and incompetence, are forgotten acts of enormous heroism; treachery yet heart-rending loyalty; Japanese compassion as well as brutality from the bravest and most capricious enemy the British ever had to face.”

Review: Colin Smith has produced an excellent, extremely readable account of what Churchill described as ‘ the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British History’. Always interesting, beautifully written, with, at its core, a compelling narrative based on individual, first-hand accounts of the impact on ‘ordinary’ (though many are most extraordinary) people, this book is hard to put down. As regards the behavior of the Japanese, once again we are left struggling to understand how an enemy, often courageous in the extreme, could also display such heartless cruelty towards those captured. In the Author’s own words, ‘perhaps even the Japanese do not know the answer to this’. Although the book does contain a significant amount of ‘behind the scenes’ detail related both to contemporary political machinations and to military strategy, the account is never boring, and is always enlivened by frequent reference to the relevance of such data to subsequent events in Singapore. This is, in essence, the compelling story of a unique period in our Colonial history, and of the individual men and women involved. The tale is all the more remarkable when one considers that these events took place a mere 63 years ago. A superb read.

About the Author: Colin Smith is a historian, novelist and former war correspondent. In 1972, at the age of twenty-three, he became the Observer‘s chief roving reporter and spent the next thirty years covering the world’s trouble spots for the Observer and the Sunday Times – from Phnom Penh to the Golan Heights, from Saigon to Sarajevo, from Nicosia to Port-au-Prince. He was named International Reporter of the Year in the 1974 and 1984 British Press Awards. Today he is best known for his military histories of Britain’s campaigns against the Vichy French, the 1942 surrender of Singapore and The Battle of Alamein, which was recently reissued in condensed form as part of Penguin’s eBook Shorts series.

Smith lives in Nicosia with his wife Sylvia and several cats. Readers wishing to contact him or find out more about his work should visit www.colin-smith.info