Cablegram 86 SINGAPORE, 28 January 1942, 8.11 p.m.
PERSONAL FOR EVATT FROM BOWDEN
Your telegram No. 55 [1] last two sentences.
Please be assured that in the absence of any instructions from you I have regarded my function on the War Council as being strictly limited to providing you with information and have carefully abstained from taking up an attitude on the Commonwealth Government’s behalf on any matter of policy.
My remark to Rear-Admiral Malaya [2] quoted in my 81 [3] para. 2 was made purely to elicit information because Scott [4] had raised the question of the possibility of holding Singapore and had quoted a Dutch official as saying that the official belief in the Netherlands East Indies was that Singapore ‘would be a Dunkirk and not a Hong Kong’ to which no one had replied. The discussion in any case was entirely unofficial and unrecorded.
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1 Document 309.
2 Rear-Admiral E. J. Spooner.
3 Document 306.
4 Director-General of Publicity, Singapore.
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[AA:A981, WAR 42]