The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Vast numbers of Japanese planes operating at first from southern Indo-China but subsequently from captured airfields in northern Malaya won the all-important air superiority. British intelligence reports proved inaccurate, and the two Indian divisions, one Australian division and smaller British units were ineffectually led. ‘Defence arrangements were fully in British hands, but affected by a series of contradictions and complications which, but for their tragic implications, could have been considered too far-fetched for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.’46 In a detailed War Office examination of what went wrong, compiled later that same year, and in subsequent historical estimations, Singapore fell because the Commonwealth leaders had underestimated the enemy, displayed lacklustre leadership, trained their troops badly, split divisions in battle, used reinforcements in a piecemeal manner, had a divided command structure, shown poor strategic grasp, had heavy commitments in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and had insufficient air cover. It was this last that caused the greatest maritime disaster of the war for the Royal Navy, when both the 35,000-ton HMS Prince of Wales and the 26,500-ton HMS Repulse were sunk on Wednesday, 10 December 1941, with the loss of 840 lives.

  Sailing southwards along the Malayan coast in the South China Sea without air cover, or even aerial reconnaissance, Z Force came under attack from eighty-eight Japanese planes from southern Indo-China. Less than two hours later the only two effective Allied battleships left in the Pacific were at the bottom. ‘The Prince of Wales is barely distinguishable in smoke and flame,’ recalled a survivor, ‘I can see one plane release a torpedo… It explodes against her bows. A couple of seconds later another explodes amidships and astern.’47 In his memoirs Churchill described his feelings when the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, reported the news to him over the telephone:

  In all the war I never received a more direct shock. The reader of these pages will realize how many efforts, hopes, and plans foundered with these two ships. As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the survivors of Pearl Harbor, who were hastening back to California. Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.48

  The collapse of morale among the defenders ashore was also shattering. Through January, the Commonwealth forces retreated steadily, with the Johore Line 25 miles from Singapore breached on the 15th. The Straits of Johore were only a mile wide, and the north coast of Singapore island was poorly defended. On 31 January, the remaining Commonwealth troops on the mainland, outfought and exhausted, crossed over to the island and destroyed as much of the causeway link as they could. It was another sign of poor British planning that no preparations had been made for a siege of the island itself.

  Without a pause, the Japanese assaulted the north of the island in armour-plated barges on the night of 8 February – a further indication of their excellent Staff work – rebuilt the causeway and sent tanks across it. Counter-attacks were broken up by Japanese dive-bombing. Accusations have been made that troops of the Australian 8th Division deserted in significant numbers, drank and looted before returning to try to find boats in the harbour on which to escape. ‘There were individual examples of cowardice,’ concludes an authoritative study, ‘but for the most part this is slander.’49 It was a slander repeated by a large number of British officers, despite the fact that the Japanese lost half their battle dead in the campaign on Singapore island in the final week, when the Australians provided most of the resistance. The official war diary of the 8th Australian Division Provost Company does use the word ‘panic’ to describe the confusion of 9 February and ‘stragglers’ two days later, ‘sullen’ on the 12th, troops ‘very reluctant to return to the line’ on the 13th, ‘All imaginable excuses being made to avoid returning to the line’ on the 14th, and on the 15th ‘Morale shocking. A lot of men hid themselves to prevent and avoid return to the line,’ although this was also true of British and Indian soldiers.50 ‘In some units the troops have not shown the fighting spirit which is to be expected of men of the British Empire,’ read Percival’s covering note to senior officers attached to the Order of the Day for 11 February. ‘It will be a lasting disgrace if we are defeated by an army of clever gangsters many times inferior in numbers to our own.’51 The Japanese were not gangsters for using little conventional transport, attacking without large-scale artillery support, and pushing as far and fast ahead as possible, but they were clever. They had learnt the central lesson of the war so far, that Blitzkrieg and boldness worked. Churchill meanwhile on 10 February cabled Wavell, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in the region, to say that since the Singapore garrison outnumbered the Japanese:

  in a well-contested battle they should destroy them. There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs. The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon [in the Philippines], the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved. It is expected that every unit will be brought into close contact with the enemy and fight it out.52

  Racial honour was one thing, the facts on the ground in Singapore quite another, but it is clear that Hitler was not the only leader of a great power to issue ‘Stand or die’ orders during the Second World War, although this was easily the harshest Churchill ever gave.

  Tragically, large numbers of reinforcements continued to be landed in Singapore harbour, almost up to the surrender. They went straight into captivity, instead of being deployed where they were desperately needed to defend India, Burma and Australia. Most of their stores and equipment was also captured before it could be destroyed.53 The 130,000 men who surrendered on 15 February included many local recruits, and refugees from the north who had lost the will to fight. The Malays meanwhile swiftly made their peace with the Japanese, who promised them independence and freedom within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet it was not long before the Japanese military police, the notorious Kempeitai, began executing on the beaches Malay Chinese they considered untrustworthy. A sign of how disillusioned the Indians were with the British can be seen in the fact that, of the 55,000 Indians taken prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore, 40,000 volunteered to fight for the India National Army, the pro-Japanese force commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose.54

  ‘This retreat seems fantastic,’ wrote the commander of the Australian troops, General Gordon Bennett, on his way back to Singapore. ‘Fancy 550 miles in 55 days – chased by a Jap army on stolen bikes, without artillery. It was a war of patrols. All that happened was that they patrolled outside our resistance [capabilities] and sat on a road behind us. Thinking we were cut off, we retreated… Never felt so sad and upset. Words fail me.’55 The Japanese suffered only 9,824 casualties during the whole campaign. A photograph was beamed around the world of Percival and other senior British officers in their shorts and long socks, flat tin hats and rolled-up sleeves walking beside two Japanese officers to surrender to Yamashita, one Briton with a flagpole over his shoulder from which hung a white flag, another with a limp Union Jack. Indeed everything about the defence had been limp. Percival had been bluffed by Yamashita, who had outrun his supplies and might have buckled before a determined counter-attack from forces twice his size, but such was the demoralization that that was never going to happen. (Had they known the fate that awaited them, however, they would doubtless have tried.) It was not solely the British who had underperformed. ‘Bennett and [Brigadier D. S.] Maxwell were unequivocal failures,’ records an Australian historian. ‘Although Australia and other Dominions were critical of British generalship in the world wars, they themselves had no mechanism for producing an
obviously better type of senior commander.’56

  Percival had lost only 7,500 casualties in the campaign, but when he surrendered to the much smaller force led by Yamashita he also lost the respect of the Japanese, who thought his soldiers cowards for having given up so easily. They would probably have been just as viciously ill-treated if they had held out for longer, but the lives of one million civilians were in jeopardy on the island, especially with water supplies in a critical state after the Japanese captured the reservoirs. A campaign that the Japanese General Staff had started planning for only in January 1941 had laid low an island fortress that had for decades and at immense cost been readied to withstand attack and siege. The German Staff had estimated that the capture of Singapore would take five and a half divisions and eighteen months; Yamashita had achieved it with two divisions in less than two months. In London on 10 February, accepting the likelihood of defeat in Singapore, Churchill had told the War Cabinet that Britain was ‘In for a rough time – Smashing blows – [but we shall] not come out bust – No gloom or disheartenment… Screw down rations – Eat into reserves of food – Army at home [must] brace themselves.’57 Yet Singapore was not about to become another Leningrad.

  From being a bandy-kneed, myopic, oriental midget in Western eyes, the Japanese soldier was suddenly transformed into an invincible, courageous superman. Of course neither racial stereotype was accurate, but events in the Philippines, Malaya and elsewhere did nothing to damage the new myth, even though General Douglas MacArthur’s 130,000-strong force in the Philippines fought much better and for much longer than Percival’s had. The colonial powers – American, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Australian – were woefully under-equipped to fight a modern war against a nearby major industrial power like Japan, which had already had ten years’ combat experience. Run for years on prestige, minimal military commitment, small budgets and an element of bluster, the colonial territories of South-East Asia also suffered from poor infrastructure, long lines of communication with the metropolitan centres, plenty of invadable beaches, and nationalist local independence movements. A powerfully aggressive militarist nation of seventy-three million, with bases in Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and Indo-China, was eager to wrest power from them. Nonetheless, the various sections of the new Japanese Empire had very little in common with one another, as was displayed with sublime irony in November 1943 when General Tojo presided over a conference in Tokyo of the prime ministers of all the puppet governments in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The leaders took it in turns to praise the freedom that Japan had promised their countries from the evil Western imperialists, but as there was only one language common to all of them, the proceedings had to be conducted in English.58

  Douglas MacArthur, a charismatic leader and former US Chief of Staff, had only ninety fighter aircraft, thirty-five Flying Fortress B-17 bombers and a hundred tanks to protect the Philippines on 8 December, and his army, though large on paper, was primarily made up of under-trained and under-equipped Filipinos, some of whom disappeared back to their barrios (villages) as soon as the Japanese invaded.59 In trying to pursue his original policy of meeting the invasion on the beaches of northern Luzon and the Lingayen Gulf, MacArthur was stymied by the successful bombing of the Clark Field air base north of Manila. Even though news of Pearl Harbor had been received at Clark at 02.30 hours on 8 December, and other bases in the Philippines had been attacked, and the head of the USAAF General H. H. ‘Hap’ Arnold had telephoned a warning to Major-General Lewis H. Brereton, the commander of US Far East Air Forces, American planes were still stationed unprotected on the ground at 12.15 when 108 twin-engined Japanese bombers and 34 fighters arrived from Formosa. American pilots were queuing for lunch in the mess when they struck. No fewer than eighteen of the B-17s were destroyed, as were fifty-six fighters and other aircraft, at a total cost of seven Japanese planes.60 Inter-service confusion at headquarters was blamed for the disaster, but, whatever caused it, by the eighth day of the campaign MacArthur had only fifty planes left and had therefore lost air superiority, a recurring feature in explaining defeats in the Second World War. The 22,400 US regular troops and many Filipino regulars, however, put up a sturdy resistance, especially once MacArthur had accepted on 23 December that he could not hold Manila, retreating into the jungles, mountains and swamps of the Bataan peninsula and eventually on to the island of Corregidor, fortified in the seventeenth century, which dominated the entrance to Manila Bay. There he faced a Japanese force of around 200,000.

  Lacking enough air cover, Admiral Thomas C. Hart therefore withdrew the US Asiatic Fleet to the Java Sea, where it joined powerful units of other allies. The original American plan had been for MacArthur to try to hold out on the Philippines for long enough to be relieved by the US Pacific Fleet. With the battleship part of that force now crippled at Pearl Harbor, the plan was moribund, but no alternative commended itself. Using captured air bases, the Japanese reinforced the initial invasion forces that had landed on 10 and 22 December. Soon outnumbered four to one and now completely blockaded in Bataan and Corregidor by the Japanese Navy, MacArthur was personally ordered by President Roosevelt to leave the Philippines, which he managed to do by a hair’s breadth – at one point his motor torpedo boat came ‘in the shadow of a Japanese battleship’ – on 11 March.61 ‘I have come through,’ he said on reaching Australia, ‘and I shall return.’

  Bataan surrendered on 9 April, whereupon the Japanese victors took 78,000 starving members of the US and Filipino forces on the notorious 65-mile ‘Bataan Death March’ to prison. Somehow the 2,000 who had made it to Corregidor managed to hold out for a further twenty-seven days, even though only its headquarters and hospital, located in caves, survived the fifty-three air raids directed against it. ‘The last regular US Army cavalry regiment would slaughter its mounts to feed the starving garrison, ending the cavalry era not with a bang but with a dinner bell.’62 With malaria rife, and only three days’ supply of water left, the garrison finally surrendered on 6 May. The defence of the Philippines had been an American epic – costing 2,000 US servicemen killed and wounded and 11,500 captured, against 4,000 Japanese casualties. Japanese brutality against the Filipinos, who unlike some other peoples had shown loyalty to their colonial masters, was horrific. ‘The use of military and civilian prisoners for bayonet practice and assorted other cruelties’, an historian wrote, ‘provided the people of Southeast Asia with a dramatic lesson on the new meaning of Bushido, the code of the Japanese warrior.’63

  With Malaya and the Philippines now closed down as bases for Allied counter-attack, the Japanese could embark on the second phase of their strategy. Sumatra and oil-rich Borneo were captured by mid-February, and Timor fell by the end of the month. Java was protected by a large Allied flotilla under the overall command of the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman in his flagship RNNS De Ruyter. His force of five cruisers and ten destroyers had not worked in tandem and had no tactical doctrine or common communications system, but it nonetheless attacked Rear-Admiral Takeo Takagi’s faster, larger, more modern force of four cruisers and thirteen destroyers.64 In the seven-hour battle of the Java Sea on the afternoon and evening of 27 February – the largest surface naval battle since Jutland in 1916 – and then in subsequent running fights over the next two days, the Allies were comprehensively defeated, with all their cruisers sunk and the enemy landings postponed by only one day. It was to be the last significant Japanese naval victory of the Second World War, but since no one knew that at the time the Dutch, British, Americans and Australians on Java surrendered on 8 March, the same day that the Japanese landed on the north-east coast of New Guinea, and Rangoon in Burma fell. Two days earlier Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) fell without much resistance and nearly 100,000 Dutch were marched off into a vicious captivity.65 Further easy Japanese victories in the Admiralty Islands and Northern Solomons and the capture of the superb Rabaul naval base in the Bismarck Archipelago on 23 January 1942 gave Japan the chance to
consolidate her Southern Defence Perimeter and possibly to threaten Australia herself.

  The strategic imperative that led to serious disagreements between London and Canberra can be summed up in the pre-war phrase of the Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, who pointed out that ‘What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.’ Although not a single Australian politician spoke against the declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, an increasing number came to resent what looked like Britain’s prioritizing of herself over Australia. New Zealand, which was not attacked by Japan as Australia was, nonetheless had a proportionately higher level of enlistment than any other Allied country except Russia and Britain.

  The Japanese, who had been fighting against China since 1937, had been planning the invasion of Burma for four years, and it was forced through with the same speed and resolve as elsewhere. As a springboard for the possible invasion of India, a means of keeping long-range enemy aircraft away from Malaya and especially of closing off the Allies’ Burma Road land route to China, thereby finally breaking the Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s land communications with the outside world, the conquest of Burma was a vital military objective for the Staff planners in Tokyo. Part of the British Empire since Winston Churchill’s father Lord Randolph had annexed it when he was secretary for India in 1886, Burma was also rich in oil and minerals, and would be an important staging post for the Allies in any attempted counter-attack.

  A two-division detachment of Lieutenant-General Shojiro Iida’s Fifteenth Army landed in Burma in the very south, Victoria Point, on 11 December 1941, and advanced northwards. It was not until after their Malayan and Philippines victories that the Japanese poured two more divisions, as well as tank, anti-aircraft, artillery and air units into Burma, overcoming Lieutenant-General Thomas Hutton’s 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division, some British units and the local Burma Defence Force. The Japanese were supported by Burmese nationalists under the command of U Aung San (the father of Aung San Suu Kyi), who sabotaged British lines of communication in the vain and naive expectation that Burma would receive genuine independence from Tokyo. By the end of January 1942, Iida had driven Hutton’s forces out of Tavoy and Moulmein, and between 18 and 23 February had comprehensively defeated him at the battle of Sittang River, where Hutton lost all his heavy equipment. As in Malaya, the British tended to concentrate on defending roads and cleared areas, and as a result were repeatedly outflanked by the Japanese.