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 ...