Eighty years in the past Australia suffered a catastrophic navy defeat when 15,000 of its troopers - a part of an enormous British-led military combating for Singapore - surrendered to Japanese forces.
Britain's World Warfare II chief, Winston Churchill, known as the autumn of Singapore "the worst catastrophe and the best capitulation in British historical past".
However for the Diggers and their comrades who made up a 120,000-strong British Empire power there was worse to return after the formal give up on February 15, 1942.
The defeat of Singapore additionally marked a turning level in Australia's historical past, with the bitter episode marking the origins of a protracted standing alliance with the US.
And it will likely be marked on Tuesday by commemoration companies throughout Australia attended by the dwindling variety of veterans who fought in Singapore and Malaysia 80 years in the past.
Why did Singapore fall?
The genesis of Japan's victory got here in December 1941 when its forces determined to assault Singapore from Malaysia and never the ocean on the identical day they launched their assault on the US naval base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Whereas British and Australian commanders ready for the Japanese to assault Singapore's northeast, the Japanese forces got here in from northwest, the place the British, Australian, Chinese language and Malays had few defences.
On February 8, 1942, Japanese forces superior in to Singapore throughout the slender Straits of Jahore.
The Allied military beneath British Lieutenant-Normal Arthur Percival turned quick on ammunition, meals and water.
At 9.45am on February 15, 1942, Normal Percival determined to give up the British Empire's forces, numbering greater than 120,000 in Malaysia and Singapore, to the Japanese, whose troops numbered beneath half that.
What occurred to the captured troopers?
The prisoners of conflict (POW) captured by Japan went on to endure years of brutality and hunger.
Within the days following the Singapore give up, the POWs had been marched to the Changi camp.
Later, after enduring starvation and illness, the POWs had been despatched to labour camps throughout Asia, together with the infamous Thai-Burma railway, also referred to as the 'Loss of life Railway'.
The POWs and about 250,000 Asian labourers endured harsh working circumstances and brutal remedy by the hands of their Japanese captors.
POWs additionally confronted fixed outbreaks of tropical illness, corresponding to beriberi, malaria and cholera, for which they'd few medicines to deal with.
Greater than 2800 Australians perished, whereas some 75,000 Asian labourers died.
How did the autumn of Singapore change Australia?
The humiliating defeat was thought to be a turning level in Australia's relationship with its colonial relationship with Britain.
From 1942, the Australian authorities beneath Prime Minister John Curtin regarded more and more in the direction of the US for its future safety.
Mr Curtin had signalled the change in a brand new yr radio deal with to Australians weeks earlier than Singapore fell.
"With none inhibitions of any variety, I make it clear that Australia appears to America, freed from any pangs to our conventional hyperlinks or kinship with the UK," he stated.
The necessity for American assist turned extra pressing when Japanese warplanes devastated Darwin on February 19, 1942.
By the top of World Warfare II in 1945, the US had began to turn out to be Australia's main safety accomplice, supplanting Britain.
It was a partnership that has continued to today, all through the Korean Warfare, the Vietnam Warfare, the Chilly Warfare, the 9/11 Warfare on Terror and the west's response to a robust China.
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- Reported with CNN, Australian Warfare Memorial