Placing floral tributes around the Memorial

Recently, on Tuesday, 4^th September 2007, to be exact, the Australian Government dedicated a Memorial to all those who had fought and given their lives in what is known as “The Battle of Muar” in the small town of Parit Sulong.

Its Department of Veterans’ Affairs published a booklet entitled The Battle of Muar – January 1942 written by Dr Mark Johnston, Head of History, Scotch College, Melbourne in commemoration of the occasion. It provides a summarized account of the epic battles that the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) fought in northern Johore during the final phases of the Japanese conquest of Singapore.

The only other British forces fighting beside them were various remnants of Indian troops who had been retreating from the north and were in a highly demoralized state of mind. As the Japanese had deployed their elite Imperial Guards to the action in Johore, the fighting was extremely vicious and the Australians wrought heavy casualties among the enemy.

Even General Yamashita, the Japanese supreme commander, later admitted that they had not met such stern resistance and suffered such devastating losses of men earlier on. Looking back now, it is obvious that the Australians and the Indian stragglers were deployed to delay the Japanese advance while the British forces retreated to Singapore and hundreds of the Allied troops lost their lives in hand-to-hand combats with enemy soldiers.

Some of the veterans present at the Memorial dedication ceremony

Those critical hours and days between the 19^th to 22^nd January 1942 when Lt Col Charles Anderson held back the Imperial Guards at Bakri and Parit Sulong undoubtedly saved the lives of several hundreds of retreating AIF troops. The price that his men, the wounded who could not be moved, paid was being massacred at Parit Sulong behind the PWD barracks and their bodies burned by the Japanese who apparently wanted to avenge the loss of their young and able-bodied officers and men of the Imperial Guard.

The building in which the victims of the Parit Sulong Massacre were incarcerated before they were killed ought to be considered as a heritage conservation project in relation to the newly launched Memorial. Although the PWD barracks are on the opposite side of the road from where the new Parit Sulong Memorial is sited, visitors would be able to get information on the events of January 1942 in the restored parts of those historic premises.

In fact, the commander of the Imperial Guards, Lt Gen Takuma Nishimura, visited the site to view the state of the Australian and Indian wounded before they were brutally killed. He himself was tried and hanged as a war criminal in the Philippines in 1951.

Now that there is a distinct Memorial in Parit Sulong it will no doubt attract many visitors as, hitherto, there had only been a small brass plaque at the western end of the bridge that had been placed there by the veterans of the 2/19^th Battalion of the Australian forces.

Please click here for more information on Parit Sulong Memorial.