Word: causeway
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with outnumbered manpower, was Singapore's chief hope of salvation. After nightfall enemy fire knocked out the searchlights that had fingered the shoreline, alert for infiltration. From then until late moonrise the enemy landed secretly and crept silently through shoreline marshes, headed for the Singapore end of the Causeway. They came in increasing numbers, careless of casualties. Machine gun bullets struck sparks on steel landing craft the Japs were using to cross from Johore. The defending troops fell back and fell back again...
Britain's spindling Army commander, Lieut. General Arthur Ernest Percival, mindful of the hazard of trying to defend southern Johore with no avenue of escape but the Causeway, had decided to run for it, to get across the Causeway before Japanese bombers blew...
...they crossed the Causeway that night they did not know that help had already reached them, that a convoy of troops and planes and guns, miraculously shielded by a sudden storm from 60 attacking Japanese planes, had safely made port at Singapore...
...motley column on the Causeway dwindled off. Finally, with a touch of ceremony such as only the British could devise in such circumstances, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who had been the first Britons to meet the Japanese up Thailand way, marched across, the last to leave Malaya. They marched to the defiant skirl of an Argyll bagpipe...
...soon as the last Scot was across, mines which sappers had placed under the Causeway were touched off. Great chunks of the narrow strip jumped into the night sky. Its 510-foot dock and its rolling lift bridge were blown...