Why were there no defences? It's complicated. Some of it was part of a particular branch of the military theories, right in the first world war, to this idea that defenses are bad for morale. Troops get accustomed to the safety of living behind trench walls or fortifications and then you need em to go on the aggressive, they're soft. Another reason, some of the generals in malaya said that they didn't want defenses. They was bad for the morale of the civilians that the troops were protecting. And i should point out interesting as, if you actually like delve into each of these situations, you'll find that in almost every case, the soldiers on the ground believed that