In November 1941, Yates McDaniel knew that Singapore was not prepared for an invasion. As an American representative of the Associated Press, he was well acquainted with the island’s defenses and their shortcomings. For one thing, he knew that the Royal Air Force’s Brewster Buffalo fighter planes were slow and obsolete—RAF Fighter Command, in fact, had given up on them before the Battle of Britain a year and a half earlier. Yet all of the RAF’s Spitfire units, which were a match for the Japanese and their vaunted Zero fighters, were either allocated against the Germans in North Africa or were in Britain to defend the homeland. But that was not the worst of it.
McDaniel was also aware that the British had no tanks at all in Malaya; that all of Singapore’s renowned coastal artillery pointed out to sea, with no guns defending the landward side of the island; and that none of the British troops in Malaya had any training in jungle warfare. Great Britain was now at war with Japan, but, as McDaniel fully realized, the defenders of British Malaya and its trading capital, Singapore, were totally unprepared.