One afternoon in late January, I sat through a comedy at Cathay cinema. In one scene a bomb that was supposed to explode fell apart with a small plop. It was a dud. As the casing broke open, a sign was revealed – “Made in Japan”. It was bizarre. For the past two months Singapore had experienced the devastating power of their bombs and their shells, yet here I was watching this film making fun of the Japanese – they were supposed to be bow-legged, cross-eyed, incapable of shooting straight or building ships that would stay afloat in a storm, able to make only dud weapons. The unhappy truth was that in the two months since 8 December they had proved they had the daring, the power and the military skills to stage the most spectacular successes against British forces. Many years later, Winston Churchill, the war-time British prime minister, was to write of the fall of Singapore, “it was the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.
— The Singapore Story (Lee Kuan Yew), Loc. 693–700