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At the end of December, 1940, I was summoned to the Air Ministry yet again. Air Marshal Joubert told me that there was a need for radar defences in the Far East and three of us were to go there. Squadron Leader C.F.Pearce, who was then commanding the Radio Installation and Maintenance Unit in Egypt, was to go to Air Headquarters, Far East, as Command Radio Officer, a Wing Commander's post. I was to form a Radio Installation and Maintenance Unit for the Far East, at Seletar, Singapore; it was to be a Squadron Leader's post. And a civilian from the Ministry of Aircraft Production, Mr H.T.Roberts, was to be commissioned as a Squadron Leader and based at AHQ, Far East; he would be responsible for choosing the sites for radar stations in the Far East. Roberts and I left Liverpool by sea on 31st Dec 1940. Our first stop was at Freetown, Sierra Leone, where we chose sites for two radar stations to form part of the defence of Freetown against the Vichy French, whose aircraft from Senegal were being too inquisitive. We then went on by sea to Takoradi, in what was then the Gold Coast, where numerous aircraft delivered by sea in crates were being assembled for ferrying across Africa to the Middle East. We chose two more sites for radar stations, at Takoradi and Sekondi. We then flew as passengers in a Lockheed 10A aircraft east to Accra and Lagos, then north through Nigeria to Kano, east through Fort Lamy in Chad and El Obeid and El Fasher in the Sudan, and north again to Khartoum and Cairo, where we spent a few days picking brains at Air Headquarters and were issued by the Consul General with passports describing us as government officials. There Pearce joined us and we flew in an Imperial Airways Empire flying boat via Lake Galilee, Lake Habbaniya and Basra (both in neutral Iraq, whence the need for passports), Shaiba, Karachi, Indore, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok (passports again) and Penang to Singapore, where we arrived on 15 Feb 1941 at Kallang, a combined civil aerodrome and marine aircraft base on the south shore of Singapore Island.

Singapore Island is often likened in size and shape to the Isle of Wight; it is separated from the mainland of Malaya by the Johore Strait, about a mile wide. Singapore City and the commercial harbour are in the middle of the south shore; Kallang was immediately to the east of the city. Fort Canning, the Army headquarters, was near the harbour; Government House, the governor's residence, was on the north side of the city. Air Headquarters was at Sime Road, in the centre of the island. Changi, at the east end, was a garrison settlement. Near the west end was Tengah, a new RAF aerodrome. In the middle of the north shore was Seletar, the original RAF aerodrome and home of the Aircraft Depot Far East, an RAF maintenance unit. Along the north coast to the west of Seletar were Sembawang, another new aerodrome, the Naval Base, and the causeway joining Singapore Island by road and rail to the mainland of Malaya.

With the outbreak of war in Europe routine RAF ‘trooping’ had been halted: no longer could a married man expect to be replaced after three years in the Far East, or a bachelor after four years. We were the first RAF officers to arrive in Singapore since the outbreak of war in the West. What we found was a country still in the grip of peace-time routine. We soon learnt that the dominant forces in Singapore and Malaya were the big commercial houses - the main raison d'etre for the British being there - and the Governor and his civil servants. The job of Malaya, we were told, was to earn hard currency for the Empire by exporting tin and rubber, especially to the United States; nothing must be allowed to interfere with that. There were also, we were told, administrative complications due to accidents of history. The Governor was Governor only of the Straits Settlements, i.e. Singapore, Malacca, Penang, and Labuan in North Borneo. The rest of Malaya consisted of Federated and Unfederated Malay States, and to them he was only High Commissioner. They had their own rulers, the Sultans, whose powers were somewhat constrained in the case of the Federated States and almost unconstrained in the case of the Unfederated States.

Within Singapore there were at least eight populations which appeared to mix very little. The most numerous were the Chinese, who had made Singapore their home though they still retained ties with China. There was a large Indian minority, mainly Tamils who had gone to Singapore as indentured labour. There were few Malays. The European population had two main divisions, civilians and the armed services, each subdivided; none of them intended to make Singapore a permanent home. The civilians were the officials - civil servants, police, Harbour Board officers and so on - and the unofficials, mainly in commerce; these expected to spend the greater part of their working lives in the East. As they were paid locally their income tax was the local version, then newly introduced and very small. Members of the armed services were almost all on the UK establishment and expected to spend no more than a few years in the Far East; their pay originated in the UK, so they were liable for income tax at the wartime UK rate of 50 per cent. This difference ensured that officers of the Services could not afford to join the clubs that the civilians belonged to, so they did not meet socially. The impression received by a newly arrived RAF officer was that the Services were tolerated by the European civilians, but certainly not welcomed. The separation of the Service headquarters, in different parts of the island, ensured that there was little contact between officers of the different services; there was no ‘old-boy network’.

The area for which Far East Command, RAF, was responsible was enormous. In addition to all of Malaya (480 miles long, further than from London to Inverness) it included Burma, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, Ceylon, numerous islands in the Indian Ocean, Mombasa and Durban in Africa, British North Borneo and Hong Kong. From Durban to Hong Kong is about 6500 miles. To cover this area there were, when we arrived, about 100 aircraft. They were obviously those that no other command would want: two squadrons of Vickers Vildebeeste biplane torpedo-bombers, that looked like Avro Tutors and had a similar performance; a few Fairey Swordfish and Blackburn Shark biplanes, which were much the same; a few Short Singapore biplane flying boats; and some Bristol Blenheims of the earliest mark. There were no communications or transport aircraft. There were no fighters, but we understood that some had been promised; when they arrived they proved to be Brewster Buffaloes that the Americans, who made them, did not want for their own services. There was no VHF ground-to-air radiotelephony, which in the UK was considered essential for the successful ground-control of fighters. By the time war broke out in the Far East, nine months after our arrival, fifteen Lockheed Hudsons of the Royal Australian Air Force had arrived, and the Singapore flying boats had been replaced by Consolidated Catalinas.

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