4. Battle of Bukit Timah

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Nestled within the peaceful serenity of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve is a war marker dedicated to the Battle for Bukit Timah, which took place over two days, 10 and 11 February 1942. It is traditionally described as one of the bloodiest battles in the whole campaign.

There are several, mostly geographical, reasons why Bukit Timah was of interest to the advancing Japanese forces. The first is by virtue of its location at the centre of Singapore. As the marker describes, Bukit Timah Road and Dunearn Road were - and still are - major trunk roads leading into the city and as such natural targets for the Japanese forces on their advance into the centre of Singapore city.

Another reason given by some historians is that General Yamashita wanted to capture Bukit Timah to fly the Japanese flag from Singapore’s highest point on Kigensetsu (Japanese National Foundation Day), which fell on February 11.

Peter Thompson gives an account of part of the battle in his book The Battle for Singapore, where he describes how the Japanese 18th Division set fire to a petrol dump, and then bayoneted the Australian soldiers of the X Battalion and destroyed two other units of the supporting 22nd Brigade (The Battle for Singapore, pp.448-449).

As the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve is currently closed for upgrading works, our group is left with no choice but to take a picture outside the hoardings. But based on our prior visits to the area and some searching on the Internet, we pinpoint the location of the NHB war marker to be around 20 metres behind us just outside the Visitor's Centre.

From the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, our group travelled a few kilometres away in search of Bukit Timah Village. This village is briefly mentioned in some of the books that we consulted - for example, in The Battle for Singapore and Mary Turnbull’s A History of Modern Singapore. However, what is curious is that the WW2 Database (ww2db.com) goes further in describing the aftermath of the Battle of Bukit Timah, where ‘to avenge their casualties, the Japanese troops massacred Chinese civilians living in a nearby village’.

We can perhaps get some recollections about Japanese soldiers killing civilians around this area from an oral history account of a Mr Tan Wah Meng, who spoke about living in Bukit Timah Village at the 6 1/2th mile at the time of the invasion. In his recollections, Mr Tan mentioned that because ‘they (the Japanese forces) were pushed back by the British army and the volunteers’, that was why they ‘killed a lot of people in Bukit Timah 6th mile and 5th mile’. 

This may fit into what Turnbull describes as the ‘ill-armed but determined members of Dalforce and other Chinese irregulars fought alongside the Commonwealth troops, many units fighting to the last man’ (A History of Modern Singapore, p.188). This may be a possible link to the supposed massacre of the civilians, although Mr Tan’s recollections seem to indicate less of a widespread massacre, since his village seemed to have been left alone. It also seemed to be a collection of villages along the main road rather than just one large village.

Sources:

Oral History Interview of Tan Wah Meng, Reel 5 of 17 (National Archives, 1983)

Personal reflections on site: Our decision to include this site is because of just how little information we have on this massacre. It is not mentioned on the Battle of Bukit Timah marker. In our books, they take up just under a sentence; the WW2 database also does not provide its sources so there was no way of checking up on this. It was only through some luck with the National Archives that I stumbled upon the Mr Tan’s oral history account.

The lack of available sources to corroborate this story - in contrast to the evidence we can find for many of the other sites - made this an interesting point in our trail. It’s a shame that this episode of our history is gone from our memory. Looking around the Bukit Timah area, we see HDB blocks and construction sites as far as the eye can see, but no ways of remembering that ordinary civilians died on this spot.