The Malayan campaign had an interesting result in that the commander of the Australian 8th Division escaped from Singapore after the surrender in rather questionable circumstances while leaving his troops to be captured.
His career suffered as a consequence - he was given a backwater command in Perth and never commanded fighting troops again. Australian overall commander Thomas Blamey, (possibly because Bennett's escape from Singapore resembled a little too much for comfort Blamey's own escape from Greece a year earlier, where Blamey controversially included his son among the very small party (of 8?) that departed with him on a Sunderland flying boat), really had it in for Bennett after Bennett's return to Australia.
However, Bennett provided what proved to be invaluable intelligence to both Australian and American commanders who were soon to face the (at that stage of the war, seemingly indefeatable) Japanese. He wrote a handbook that was widely distributed among Australian and American forces in the Pacific (and among the British forces in Burma too, I understand), where he came up with what then, was an enormously novel idea - the 'harbour', or all-round defence.
In Malaya, (as elsewhere), the Japanese specialised in sending small parties, sometimes of not more then ten men, with a machine gun behind the British front line, where they would set up on the British lines of communication and kill rear echelon troops supplying the front line. Invariably, in Malaya, this would cause the British leadership, schooled in the fixed line trench warfare of WW1 France, to call a retreat - (or for neighbouring units to do so, leaving the flanks exposed of units in contact with the Japanese who sometimes had successfully beaten off the Japanese).
A succession of such small unit penetration actions by the Japanese was the main reason for the succession of increasingly rapid retreats of the British towards Singapore in December/January 1941.
Bennett's handbook counselled not retreating, but 'harbouring', i.e., adopting all-round defence, if a unit found its lines of communication broken, then sending out strong patrols to deal with the Japanese penetrating parties. I've read of the Americans at Guadalcanal acknowledging the value of Bennett's booklet in teaching them tactics that would defeat the Japanese. It sounds utterly logical to someone today, but in 1942, it was a whole new concept, at least for the British army.