Ukraine's Grim Choice: Why Surrender May be the Honorable Option

"In central Singapore there’s a small hill with a locked door in one side.  A guide will open it and take you into the darkness of an underground  passage which leads eventually into a dimly-lit set of twenty-six subterranean rooms.   This was once the bunker which formed the command-and-control centre from which British generals organized the defense of the strategic colony in the weeks after Pearl Harbor.

They expected a naval assault by the Japanese from the open sea but they got it wrong.  Japanese forces came down the Malayan peninsula through jungle terrain which the British thought was impassable.   Triumphantly the Japanese commander called on the startled British to surrender unconditionally.  Churchill ordered Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival to fight to the last man, but Percival defied his orders and on February 15 1942, barely a week since the Japanese established their first beachhead on the island, he capitulated.

Some 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops were taken prisoner.   It was then, and remains to this day, the biggest surrender in British military history. The table round which Percival and his colleagues sat as they discussed the hopelessness of their plight and agonized over what to do remains in the bunker today along with waxwork effigies of the grim-faced British team.

As you reflect on the pathetic scene nothing can lessen its humiliation.   But was it shameful?   There’s a difference between humiliation and shame.   All depends on context and intent.  Had they only been trying to save their own skins, albeit knowing they would be put in prisoner-of-war camps, Percival and his fellow-officers would rightly be condemned as cowards.  But they had an honourable purpose.  By surrendering Percival saved the one million civilians who were living on the island from being caught in the cross-fire of British resistance and massive Japanese bombing and artillery strikes, all of which would have caused widespread destruction and thousands of deaths."

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Ukraine's Grim Choice: Why Surrender May be the Honorable Option - CounterPunch.org