The Fall of Singapore, Dien Bien Phu... and the Battle for Kharg Island?

The World War II chapters of my introductory history textbooks always devoted a great deal of space to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought our country into the conflict. But they only spent a couple of paragraphs on the major military victories of Japan that had soon followed. Perhaps a single sentence was devoted to the fall of Singapore to a Japanese army, yet that event actually had major world importance.

For many years, the British had relied upon Singapore as the central military pillar of their East Asian holdings, a fortress-city that they often called “the Gibraltar of the East.” Garrisoned by a large British army of 85,000, it was regarded as totally impregnable. Yet just a few weeks after the destruction of most of the American fleet in distant Hawaii, a Japanese general attacked it from the landward side, marching his men through what the British had regarded as totally impassable Malayan jungle. With “the guns of Singapore” all famously pointing in the wrong direction, the British garrison was caught completely flat-footed when he invested the city and began his attack. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered his troops to fight to the last man, but instead they all surrendered after just a single week of combat, taken into captivity by a Japanese force little more than one-third their own size. This represented a total national humiliation for the mighty British Empire. Perpetual War for Perp... Buy New $28.94 (as of 02:46 UTC - Details)

When Churchill later wrote his six volume history of the war, he described the fall of Singapore as “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history,” and the aftermath had major geopolitical significance. Asians across the entire region were stunned by such a massive British defeat at the hands of a much smaller Asian force. Everyone saw the photographs of huge numbers of British troops being marched into POW camps with the top British generals at the head of those endless columns.

Whereas the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor could be ascribed to a treacherous surprise attack, no such excuse existed for the crushing British defeat at Singapore, so the long-standing bubble of perceived European military invincibility had been permanently punctured. Many have argued that the dramatic resulting changes in local Asian psychology played a major role in the postwar collapse of all the European colonial empires in that part of the world. Yet despite those resounding geopolitical consequences of the Fall of Singapore, I doubt whether even two Americans in one hundred are currently familiar with that important history.

Probably far more present-day Americans are at least somewhat familiar with the name “Dien Bien Phu,” at least if we include those who vaguely assume that it is some sort of tasty Chinese culinary dish, perhaps related to “Egg Foo Young.” But that 1954 French military defeat in Vietnam also had major world importance.

Less than a year after the outbreak of World War II, France had unexpectedly suffered a stunning total military defeat at the hands of Germany and as a result, Germany’s Japanese allies soon seized control of Vietnam, France’s major colonial possession in Asia. The Allied victory in 1945 ultimately left France in the winner’s circle, so after the Japanese surrendered, the new French government reestablished its former rule over Vietnam, but was faced with strong Vietnamese nationalistic resistance led by Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh forces.

The resulting colonial war dragged on for nearly a decade, with the French gradually being worn down until they finally decided upon a bold military strategy intended to turn the tide and defeat the Vietnamese independence movement that they faced. They placed a large French army in the valley of Dien Bien Phu inviting a Vietnamese attack. Given the strong defensive positions they established, they felt confident they would be able to inflict very heavy losses upon Vietminh troops, perhaps winning the war as a result.

But contrary to all those French expectations, the Vietnamese managed to drag their artillery into the hills surrounding that valley, and the resulting bombardment they unleashed allowed them to defeat the entrenched defenders. In desperation at the looming disaster, the French even asked their American allies to launch tactical nuclear strikes to destroy the besieging Vietnamese, but President Dwight Eisenhower rejected that option and the result was a humiliating French surrender. The Debt Machine: How ... Keenan, Mark Gerard Buy New $12.99 (as of 03:06 UTC - Details)

Once again, many thousands of white Europeans were marched into bitter captivity by their Asian opponents, and this further debacle marked the end of most of the outright colonial control of the region. The Vietnamese forced the French to pay large financial reparations in order to get their POWs back, which further added to France’s national ignominy.

Few Americans today remember these historical incidents from three generations ago, and even those who do probably regard them as elements of the dead past. But they both came to my mind when the media began reporting that President Donald Trump had decided to dispatch ground forces to the Middle East, planning to deploy them against Iran.

I very much doubt that our ignorant president has ever heard of the European defeats at Singapore or Dien Bien Phu, and I’m sure that the same was also true of his equally ignorant subordinate Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “Secretary of War.” Perhaps partly as a consequence, they both entered into our current war against Iran just as supremely confident of victory as had been the British and French governments prior to those national disasters.

On its face, such extreme American confidence might have seemed fully warranted. In recent years, our annual military spending has been more than 100 times greater than that of Iran, the sort of absurd ratio only rarely found in any conventional conflicts. Moreover, we were being led into this war by our Israeli allies, who themselves possessed a powerful military and had also gained renown as probably the most ruthlessly effective assassins in all of recorded history. Adding even further to all our other advantages, we initiated the conflict with a massive surprise attack, successfully killing most of Iran’s top political and military leadership in the barrage of missile strikes that constituted our official declaration of war.

Given all those facts, anything other than a quick and decisive victory seemed almost inconceivable, and the overwhelming majority of outside observers and virtually all our media outlets initially took that position.

Yet the Iranians had long prepared for the possibility of such an American attack, even including a surprise strike against their leadership given that something rather similar had occurred just eight months earlier in June 2025. Iran’s decentralized military forces had apparently been prepared to take retaliatory steps even if their central command structure were eliminated, and this was exactly what happened, with waves of ballistic missiles and drones hitting our regional bases within hours of our own decapitating first-strike.

Even more importantly, the Iranians soon blocked the Strait of Hormuz, just as they had always threatened to do, and the sudden loss of some 20% of all oil shipments caused world prices to immediately rise, producing fears of a global economic disaster.

Roughly one-fifth of all natural gas exports also used that strategic waterway, and according to shipping brokers, half the world’s available LNG carriers were soon trapped within the Persian Gulf, with energy prices in Europe having already spiked by 60%. Around one-third of all fertilizer also came from those sources, and with the planting season soon to begin, experts feared that this sudden lack of fertilizer might produce a global famine. THORNE Creatine, Micro... Buy New $41.80 (as of 01:16 UTC - Details)

More than a week ago, the Wall Street Journal revealed that if the Iranians continued to interdict the transit of most shipping, the Saudis believed that oil prices would reach $180 per barrel by the end of April, nearly triple the price earlier this year, thereby plunging the world into a very severe global recession or worse. Such an estimate seemed quite plausible given that the price for Gulf oil not requiring that blocked transit route has already been bid up to $160 per barrel. In America, the retail cost of diesel fuel has increased by 40% over the last month, while our gasoline prices at the pump have climbed by a dollar a gallon during March and might rise another couple of dollars during April.

According to the CEO of United Airlines, jet fuel prices have now “more than doubled in the last three weeks” and experts warned that unless oil prices soon come down, some major US airlines may “not survive.”

For decades the enormously influential Israel Lobby had tried to persuade American presidents to attack Iran. But for decades our Pentagon and intelligence officials had dissuaded them from doing so by emphasizing that the likely Iranian response could devastate the world economy, just as has now been happening.

Although our naval forces were the most powerful in the world, Pentagon war games held in 2002 had suggested that if we deployed our fleet to try unblocking the waterway, the Iranians would sink most of our ships, resulting in a gigantic military defeat for our country. Indeed, that projected outcome had been established decades before the Iranians acquired the highly accurate ballistic missiles and powerful drones that are now their most formidable weapons.

Trump had been informed of all these huge risks, but he later claimed he hadn’t been, or more likely the warnings had just gone in one ear and out the other. Our president seemed to have assumed that the Iranians would surely surrender within a couple of days after he launched his remarkably naked war of aggression, so any loss of energy shipments would be temporary and insignificant. But when Iran instead fought back effectively, he and his advisors apparently had no Plan B at hand.

Trump repeatedly declared that he would send American warships to escort tankers, but such a mission would have been suicidal so he never followed through on those threats. We now apparently have no good options available in the global geopolitical crisis that we have unleashed.

Even aside from the potentially decisive strategic impact of the Iranian control over such a vital waterway, the tide of conventional battle has seemed far from favorable to our own side. Just before the war began, Pentagon leaks had disclosed that our top military leaders were very concerned about the serious problems that we would face, especially with regard to our supply of munitions, and those warnings seem to have been proven correct. Resilia Softgels with ... Check Amazon for Pricing.

We originally developed our Tomahawk cruise missile in the 1970s and it was first used in 1991. Although slow and rather elderly, it has remained the mainstay of our arsenal of stand-off weapons, and we’ve now burned through our inventory at a fearsome clip. According to a recent Washington Post article, we had somewhere between 3,000 to 4,500 available at the beginning of the war, and we’ve now fired 850 of those or 20-30% of that total stockpile accumulated over the decades. A Business Insider article mentioned that our annual production had been around 60-70 each year, so in just four weeks we’ve expended at least a dozen years’ worth of production. Although we have now greatly ramped up our annual Tomahawk orders, the missiles generally take two years to build so the new supply probably wouldn’t become available until 2028, and I doubt that we’ll still be at war with Iran at that date.

The British Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) has reported that within another month or less, our global stockpiles of ATACMS missiles and THAAD interceptors will be empty, while Israel has already exhausted its supply of Arrow interceptors. Meanwhile, the Iranians still apparently have vast stockpiles of ballistic missiles and drones, enough they claim to easily sustain six months of intense combat operations.

From the very first hours, the waves of Iranian retaliatory strikes had proven far more accurate and effective than military analysts had ever expected. Nearly all our regional bases came under devastating attacks, destroying most of our strategic radars, complex installations that would require billions of dollars and years of time to replace. After weeks of downplaying these military losses, a recent New York Times article finally acknowledged that Iranian missile strikes and drone attacks had rendered many of our 13 military bases across the Middle East “all but uninhabitable.”

As a result, we have been forced to base our planes elsewhere, and these other sites have now been targeted by the Iranians. Just in the last couple of days, the Prince Sultan Airbase of Saudi Arabia came under heavy attack, apparently destroying several of our airforce tankers based there and damaging many more. The loss of our land-based radars had required us to quickly rush 40% of all our AWACS planes to the region, and one of these had been destroyed, representing the loss of a $600 million aircraft that no longer could even be produced. Garden of Life Dr. For... Buy New $24.02 (as of 09:57 UTC - Details)

Our largest aircraft carrier is the USS Gerald R. Ford and it was recently pulled out of the region and sent away for repairs after a large fire injured some 200 sailors. The carrier strike group had been kept far from Iranian territory, and all the initial media reports claimed that the fires that disabled it had been accidental, starting in the laundry area. But yesterday, Trump seemingly contradicted his own Pentagon’s statements, saying that the damage had been inflicted by multiple Iranian attacks.

Meanwhile, our Israeli allies have used this opportunity to invade neighboring Lebanon, with their finance minister declaring that they should annex the southern portion of that country as part of their Greater Israel project.

But that military operation does not seem to be going well, and news reports claim that the Hezbollah resistance forces may have destroyed 21 Israeli Merkava tanks in just a 24 hour period, following their destruction of 8 others the previous day. According to the Jerusalem Post, the IDF chief of staff has warned that his military may soon be facing collapse for lack of manpower, and although that statement might be a wild exaggeration, it cannot be entirely ignored.

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