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Soon after our arrival Wing Commander Pearce obtained a room at Air Headquarters for use by the Radio Branch and Squadron Leader Roberts departed in search of sites for radar stations; I obtained the use of one of the sheds of the Aircraft Depot at Seletar, for the Radio Installation and Maintenance Unit. Soon afterwards a mobile radar unit, No 250 AMES, arrived from the UK and was erected at Tanah Merah Besar, on the south-east of Singapore Island, where it watched the approaches to Singapore over a sector from N via E to SSE; it performed well and could plot a single Blenheim flying at 10000 feet at a range of more than 100 miles. A month later a transportable radio unit, No 243 AMES, was erected at Mersing, on the east coast of Malaya, 70 miles north of Singapore; it scanned a sector from NW via N to SE. After that progress became very slow. A consequence of the division of powers between the Governor and the Sultans, we were given to understand, was that there were severe limitations on what we could do. We could not just put an RAF unit in one of the Malay States; the Governor, as High Commissioner, had to ask the British Resident to persuade the Sultan to give permission, and that might take months. We could not hurry the East, we were told; we must be patient, and not rock the boat. It was a very frustrating and stressful state of affairs. Three COL radar stations, in crates, arrived from the UK. One was sent to Moulmein, in Burma, and later became part of the air defence of Kunming, in China; the others remained for the time at Seletar, in their crates.

About May, 1941, Air Vice-Marshal Pulford arrived from the UK to take over as Air Officer Commanding, Far East, and the pace of things began to improve. Soon after his arrival, however, Wing Commander Pearce was invalided back to the UK and I had to try to do his job, as well as my own, until Wing Commander Norman Cave arrived from the UK as his replacement in September, 1941. AVM Pulford decided that radar cover should be provided in the following order of priority: (a) Singapore Island, (b) the south of Malaya, both coastal and overland, (c) aerodromes in the rest of Malaya, (d) Moulmein and Rangoon in Burma, Trincomalee in Ceylon, and Hong Kong. When war broke out in the Far East, in December, (a) and (b) comprised four stations that were operational and three that were completed soon after; works services for (c) were under way but the radar equipment had not been installed; (d) had not been started, save for the COL station in Burma. A Filter Room had been built, and manned, at Kallang, to receive and assess reports from the radar stations in Singapore and the south of Malaya; it fed information to a Fighter Operations Room, also at Kallang, to the Army's Gun Operations Room, and, when it was manned, to the Air Raid Precautions Headquarters, a civilian organisation under the control of the Governor.

Radar stations are useless if they cannot pass their information to the filter room, and by June, 1941, it had become apparent that the telephone system in Malaya could not meet the requirements of the radar stations planned; in any case, lines on poles alongside hundreds of miles of unguarded country roads or railway lines presented an unacceptable security risk. Singapore Island, however, had a good telephone system. The problem of communication was solved by taking over the top floor of the one skyscraper then in Singapore, the Cathay Building, and installing in it VHF radiotelephony sets that were made and operated by an ad hoc communications unit under Flight Lieutenant T.K.White, who in peace-time had been an amateur radio enthusiast. It received reports from similar sets at the radar stations and fed them via the Singapore telephone system to the Filter Room. It worked faultlessly until the end.

I have no doubt that when AVM Pulford arrived in Singapore he believed that Japan intended to attack, and that he did everything in his power to prepare the air defences of the Far East. What he could do, however, was severely constrained by the higher priorities given by the War Cabinet to defence of the UK, supplies for the Middle East and, from June 1941, supplies to Russia. The Far East could have what was left, if anything. I also have no doubt that AVM Pulford's scope for action in Singapore and Malaya was limited by the Governor, who did not believe that the Japanese intended to attack. On 6 Dec 1941, thirty-six hours before the attack came, the Services were put onto First Degree War Readiness.

The Governor though is quoted on that same day as saying that there would be no Japanese bombs dropped on Singapore, or Japanese in Malaya, and in the light of this, it is hardly surprising that he had not seen to it that the ARP Headquarters was manned during the night of 7/8 Dec 1941 when, some time after O3OOh, the radar station at Mersing detected a large formation of aircraft over the South China Sea, 75 miles north-east of the station, flying south. It continued to do so, plotted later by the COL stations at Bukit Chunang, on the SE tip of Johore, and at Tanjong Kupang, on the SW tip, and the MRU near Changi. In the Filter Room the formation had to be labelled ‘unidentified’ because war had not been declared, but the Filter Officer was in no doubt that it was in fact hostile and telephoned his ‘customers’ to that effect.

When due east of Singapore, and still over the sea, the formation turned west, bombed Seletar, Tengah and the City, then turned north and flew over Malaya towards French Indo-China. In Singapore the sirens had not been sounded, except perhaps those of the Harbour Board, which had its own ARP system. During the approach of the hostile aircraft the Governor was absent from Government House, attending a meeting at the Naval Base called by Admiral Sir Tom Phillips to discuss the use of HMSs Prince of Wales and Repulse. Wing Commander Cave later told me that the Governor had given orders that the sirens were never to be sounded without his prior personal permission, but in any case they could not be sounded because the ARP Headquarters were not manned. AVM Pulford was present at the first part of the meeting at the Naval Base, but left to return to Air Headquarters. When he got there and learnt about the approaching raid, he telephoned the Governor, whose whereabouts he knew. The Governor telephoned first the Harbour Board and then his own ARP Headquarters, but failed to get a reply. Thus the radar stations succeeded brilliantly in providing warning of an unheralded strike at Singapore by the Japanese, but their warning was entirely wasted, with the result that war in the Far East started with a severe but wholly unnecessary blow to confidence in the defences, especially the RAF.

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