The boat had raced to the scene of the burning Empress of Asia, a ship commandeered for military transport as a Japanese army bore down on the island of Singapore in February 1942.

"We ... started to rescue as many as we could handle; eventually we had some 200 British soldiers lying every where on the mess decks and all over the upper deck," sailor Laurie Bower would recount in 1996 for the Naval Historical Society of Australia.

More news: Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute is turning 100

This is a story about the fall of Singapore in 1942, told in part through experience both of people on HMAS Bendigo and a sailor's diary preserved by Pall Mall's Soldiers Memorial Institute.

It is being published to coincide with the institute's centenary this Monday.

Singapore's capitulation was a disaster that directly threatened Australia.

British prime minister Winston Churchill had ordered Lieutenant General Arthur Percival to defend the city "to the last man" because its fall would give the Japanese a clear run south towards through every island on Australia's doorstep.

Percival would instead preside over one of the most humiliating defeats in British history, which even a month before he was publicly saying was unlikely.

One sailor whose diary sits in the Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute for safe keeping describes watching other top officials arriving at wharves in the weeks before the city collapsed.

"The higher the rank the quicker they beat it," Arthur Holley complained darkly in a diary entry that the Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute keeps a copy of.

One high ranking official's immediate underlings "just drove down to (the) ship in a car, left it there and (headed) off for their lives", the sailor wrote in an entry from late January, 1942.

Imagine all the cars and other bits and pieces that could have helped Australia's war effort if they had not been left at the port, Holley lamented.

That said, Holley's remark on the nature of military commanders may have been coloured by an unfortunate misunderstanding about sewing machines.

He was fuming about a commander accusing him and others of leaving the HMAS Hobart and stealing the Singer machines, then sending them back.

"(The) chap in charge (of the store) said they would only have have to be broken up or left for the Japs as this joint is going to be evacuated," Holley complained sorely in his diary.

Store and warehouse owners were giving what they could away to sailors and the last remaining soldiers before they were torched, bombed or looted.

Holley's superior does not appear to have the grace to return the confiscated sewing machines once that became clear, if the diary is anything to go by.

Holley never did get another Singer from Singapore, but he did go into great detail five days later about each and every thing he had scrounged from another trip through the wharves.

What the superior thought of that haul is not recorded.

Japan's operation to take the Malayan peninsula began just after midnight on December 8,1941.

By 4.15am people in Singapore CIty were waking to air raid sirens, including sailor Ley Jenkins. He had been sleeping on the deck of HMAS Bendigo.

"Yawningly, (we) watched the searchlight beams playing across the sky," he recounted in 1995 for a book on the ship's history.

"Soon they picked up a formation of ... planes and suddenly the shore based anti-aircraft batteries opened up. Shells began bursting in scarlet flames among the oncoming aircraft.

"We were staggered! 'Holy Smoke' yelled one of our signalmen, 'It IS dinkum'."

Like history stories? Here is the first from this special series: Nine harrowing days on World War Two battlefield with Bendigo soldier

Jenkins and other crew members scattered for cover as artillery batteries and gunboats began a barrage that "seemed to rock the very island of Singapore".

The situation was rapidly worsening.

On Christmas day, Churchill assured Australian prime minister John Curtin the city would not fall.

Some good that did.

Just over a month later, Japanese forces were marshalling at Johor Bahru, just across a strait dividing Singapore from Japanese territory.

Holley, the sailor from HMAS Hobart, described zipping along roads along wharves that were within range of Japanese guns.

His diary shows a picture from his ship looking back at Singapore city on February 3. The city had just been bombed yet again.

The photo in Holley's diary shows huge plumes of smoke rising into the sky.

On the back of the picture are the words "the last we saw of Singapore".

By the 15th, the city was running out of water and the Japanese army was demanding unconditional surrender.

Allied soldiers still in the city were being told that it was "every man for himself" according to some of those quoted in the 2002 book A Bitter Fate: Australians in Malaya & Singapore, December 1941 - February 1942.

Some got out.

Others decided to stay after Australian eight division major general Gordon Bennett ordered they remain for a staged transition into prisoners of war.

Bennett feared a major massacre without a large body of defenders present as Japanese soldiers rolled in.

Many of his soldiers made the selfless decision to stay.

Bennett, however, was not one of them.

"My decision was fortified by the resolve that I must at all costs return to Australia to tell our people the story of our conflict with the Japanese, to warn them of the danger to Australia, and to advise them of the best means of defeating Japanese tactics," he was quoted in A Bitter Fate.

Many of those he left behind would be forced to work on the infamous Burma-Thailand railway, which became a byword for courage and resilience in the face of extreme hardship and cruelty.

About 2800 Australians would died building it.

Bennett would never command Australian troops in a warzone again.

Percival, the overall commander, stayed with his captured troops.

This story is the latest in the Weekly's history series 'WHAT HAPPENED?' It is the second inspired by the Bendigo Soldier's Memorial Institute's centenary.

Our thanks to Peter Ball and Peter Swandale for their help on this story.

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