By John Brown

Hours after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese troops landed in northern Malaya and began moving south toward Singapore.

In Singapore, Captain Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, an intelligence officer at British Army headquarters, was ordered to the Dutch East Indies island of Sumatra to organize a route across the island that could be used by the military, the idea being that if “impregnable” Singapore came under prolonged siege by the Japanese, troops from India could be landed on the west coast of Sumatra at Padang and take the route laid out by Lyon to the east coast where they would be close to Singapore to mount relief operations. In the event, however, Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942, and refugees escaping from Malaya and Singapore used the route in the reverse direction across the island.

Operation Jaywick: Planning the Raid on Singapore

Bill Reynolds was an Australian who had served aboard destroyers in World War I and had lived in Burma, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies for the past 20 years. Nearly 50 years old, he volunteered his services at British naval headquarters in Singapore and was given command of the Kofuku Maru, a narrow-gutted 70-foot-long Japanese fishing boat seized by the British when the war began. He found half a dozen Chinese willing to crew her and began picking up refugees—British, Chinese, Malays and others—from the islands around Singapore where they had been stranded when the ships in which they had been attempting to escape had been bombed and strafed by Japanese aircraft.

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