On 15 February 1942 Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival surrendered Singapore to the Japanese commander, Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, at the Ford factory in Bukit Timah, after a week of fighting on the island. Churchill called it the worst disaster in British history. On the same date in 1945, Germany launched Operation Solstice in Pomerania.
The fall of Singapore
Ten weeks after Japan opened the Pacific War, its troops crossed from the Malay peninsula and landed on the north-western coast of Singapore Island. In a week of heavy fighting they drove the British, Indian and Australian defenders back toward the city. By 15 February water, food and ammunition were running short in a city crowded with civilians and refugees.1
That evening Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival and his staff went to the Japanese headquarters in the Ford Motor Factory on Upper Bukit Timah Road. Yamashita demanded an immediate, unconditional surrender, and Percival signed it in the factory's boardroom and ordered his troops to lay down their arms.2
The Australian War Memorial counts it among the largest and most dramatic reverses in modern British history, and the defenders went into a captivity that many did not survive. Churchill described the surrender as "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history". Singapore was renamed Syonan-to and lived under Japanese occupation until 1945.3
Operation Solstice
15 February 1945 · 81 years ago
Operation Solstice, 1945
Three years later to the day, on the Eastern Front, Germany began one of its last armored counterattacks. By early February 1945 Marshal Georgy Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front had reached the Oder and won a bridgehead near Küstrin (Kostrzyn), on the direct road to Berlin, but its long northern flank faced German forces gathering in Pomerania. The Germans planned a counterblow from Pomerania into that flank, an idea pressed by General Heinz Guderian, and Army Group Vistula, under Heinrich Himmler, was to strike from the area of Stargard.4
The attack toward Arnswalde
The attack aimed first at Arnswalde, today Choszczno, where Soviet troops had surrounded a German garrison and many civilians since early February. A single division struck toward the town on 15 February, and the German command then ordered the whole operation, code-named Sonnenwende (Solstice). The sources differ on when the attackers broke through: Ziemke has the spearhead reaching the town on the afternoon of 15 February, while the Polish historian Grzegorz Baziur has the Nordland division breaking the ring on 17 February.5
The offensive failed. Ziemke records that it was halted on the night of 18 February after gains of two to three miles at most, and Baziur that Arnswalde, cut off again, fell to the Soviet 61st Army on 23 February.6
Why it mattered
Ziemke judges the operation a complete failure on the ground that nonetheless struck the most fragile point of the Soviet plan: on 17 February the Stavka ordered Zhukov to turn north against Pomerania. Zhukov himself wrote that the threat from East Pomerania was real and had to be removed before Berlin could be attacked; his front attacked in Pomerania on 1 March. The final Soviet offensive on Berlin began only on 16 April 1945. It is told in our article on the Battle of Berlin, and the Soviet commander's career in our portrait of Georgy Zhukov.7
