"This remembrance ceremony honors the sacrifice and suffering of many during the dark years of World War II," Information Minister Lee Boon Yang said in a speech at the Kranji War Cemetery close to the Malaysian border.

"For those who lived through the war, the wounds have taken a long time to heal and the memories will not be forgotten," he added.

Japanese ambassador Takaaki Kojima joined envoys of Allied nations in laying a wreath and bowing his head before a memorial as some 800 guests including British Minister of State for the Armed Forces Adam Ingram and visiting former prisoners of war in wheelchairs watched from the sidelines.

Historians and survivors say as many as 50,000 ethnic Chinese men between 18 and 50 years of age were massacred in Singapore after Japan's lightning victory over British-led forces who were defending what was then thought to be an impregnable fortress island.

The Sook Ching (wiping out) exercise was believed to have been ordered as vengeance for Singaporeans' support for China's resistance against Japan, and to prevent able-bodied men from posing a threat to the occupation forces.

Singapore's independence leader Lee Kuan Yew, who was 19 when the Japanese invaded the island and narrowly escaped being rounded up for the massacre, said in his memoirs that "after seeing them at close quarters, I was sure that for sheer fighting spirit, (the Japanese) were among the world's finest.

"But they also showed a meanness and viciousness towards their enemies equal to the Huns'. Genghis Khan and his hordes could not have been more merciless," he wrote.

"I have no doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore, and millions in Japan itself, would have perished."

The fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942 dealt a severe blow to imperial Britain, whose wartime leader Winston Churchill described it as the "worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history".

Some 100,000 British Commonwealth troops surrendered to an invading force of 30,000 men commanded by Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who became known as the "Tiger of Malaya" and was believed to have approved the Singapore massacres, some of them carried out on beaches by machine-gunners.

Singapore was renamed Syonan or Light of the South and turned into a hub for Japanese military operations.

After the atom bombs finally forced Japan to surrender on August 15, 1945, its forces in Singapore gave themselves up to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia, on September 12.

Yamashita was captured in the Philippines and executed by the US military after a war-crimes trial.

Information Minister Lee warned at Monday's ceremony about the fragility of peace and said Singapore, which now boasts the best-armed military in Southeast Asia, would remain vigilant against all threats including terrorism.

"History reminds us that even vast empires which survive for hundreds of years cannot presume to be able to last forever. Much less small city-states which face a precarious existence," he said.

Lee also noted that newly reelected Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had formally apologized for the war, most recently on August 15, the 60th anniversary of the main Japanese surrender.

"We must face history squarely so that we can move on to build a new chapter," Lee said.

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