Late last week, exactly five days after Secretary of State Cordell Hull had categorically denied that there was any written or implied agreement of any sort between the British and U. S. fleets (TIME, Feb. 14), three modern U. S. cruisers, Trenton, Milwaukee and Memphis, steamed into narrow Singapore Strait and dropped anchor to the boom of welcoming salutes from British shore batteries.
One of the hottest and most humid ports in the world is equatorial Singapore, where sallow white skins seldom stop perspiring, never suntan. To make the welcome as warm and damp as possible, the messes of every British ship prepared long pink rows of Singapore Gin Slings for U. S. officers.* The city of Singapore and the British Government voted 2,000 Straits dollars ($1,200) for the entertainment of the U. S. crews. Wrote the Singapore Free Press: "The most casual observer can see that the decision to send three American cruisers to Singapore was actuated by more than a desire to repeat those goodwill visits which have featured Singapore's naval life in recent years."
It was not in the cards, the citizens of Singapore thought, that three Yankee cruisers had come 4,500 miles just to watch a squad of British officials break the ribbon stretched across the entrance to the island's huge new naval dockyard. Singapore and Britons the world over preferred to believe they were there to show Japan that at least two Western nations vitally interested in the Pacific were reaching the end of their patience with Japanese aggression in the Far East, to hint gravely that in the event of a general war in the Pacific the navies of Britain and the U. S. will be able to make use of Singapore, now the greatest naval base, greatest fortress in the East.
Crossroads of Empire. All shipping from the Mediterranean and India to the Far East, all shipping from Britain to Australia must pass through the narrow Strait of Malacca, which was controlled by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and finally by the British after 1824. But the island of Singapore (in Malayan "Lion City''), a feverish mush of mangrove roots and black mud 27 miles long by 14 broad, was practically uninhabited until far-sighted Sir Stamford Raffles set up a trading settlement on the island in 1819. had the whole island ceded to the East India Co. five years later.
Talk of fortifying Singapore started almost as soon as Britain gained control of the island, but it came to little until the breakdown of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921. Almost simultaneously Prime Minister David Lloyd George announced that a major naval base would be built at Singapore, years of puttering about with surveyors and dredging machines followed, but not until 1928 did work really begin. Later Australia and New Zealand, the Federated Malay States and the swarthy Sultan of Johore, whose land lies just beyond Singapore island, became sufficiently alarmed at Japanese imperialism to come through with contributions. Work progressed rapidly, 14 miles away from the city of Singapore on the opposite side of the island.