In February 1942, the fortress the British Empire had spent years building in Singapore fell in a matter of days to a Japanese force roughly one third the size of its 85,000-man garrison. This episode examines how it happened: the oil embargoes that put Japan on a countdown, the British assumption that the Malayan jungle was an impenetrable wall, and General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s troops advancing down the peninsula on bicycles, riding on bare rims when their tires blew and sounding like approaching tanks in the dark.

We look at the intelligence disaster of captured British documents passed from a German raider to Japan, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, and the myth of coastal guns that supposedly could not turn inland, which in reality could traverse but fired armor-piercing shells that buried themselves in mud. Then comes the fatal miscalculation of February 8, when Lieutenant General Arthur Percival stacked his best troops in the northeast while 88,000 shells fell on exhausted Australians in the northwest, the collapse of the city’s water supply, Churchill’s demand to fight to the end, the Alexandra Hospital massacre, and the surrender at the Ford factory to a commander who was almost out of ammunition.

• Why bicycles beat mechanized transport in the Malayan jungle
• How a paper army of 85,000 evaporated into raw recruits, non-combat staff, and fractured command
• The real story behind the Singapore guns and their useless armor-piercing shells
• Yamashita’s bluff: the empty gun held to Percival’s head
• The aftermath: POWs on the Death Railway, 30,000 Indian soldiers switching sides, and the Sook Ching massacres