I know a fair bit about WW2 -- my dad served in the USN in Pacific and I grew up watching Victory at Sea. Over and over. Lately, I've been reading about the loss of Singapore and then the slow counter in the China-Burma Theater. Closest that Marines might have come to Malaya might have been when USS Saratoga (CV-3) was sent to train with the British Eastern Fleet in 1944. If there were any Marines aboard Saratoga.
If anything like this ever happened, it would have been British, Indian, or Australian troops holding off the Japanese.
This mess appears to have begun as a script about a company of the US Army bravely defending a fort against human-wave attacks of Indians, standing their ground in the stockade walls and hoping to hear the bugles of a cavalry regiment sent to their rescue. Of course, western forts did not have stockades, while they did have cannons, and western Indians did attack forts, and, even more, Indians did not attack in human waves.
Or, perhaps, the director got the script from John Ford's "Drums Along the Mohawk", 1939, and, randomly picked out a war and signed up some unknown actors to replace Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda.
