by John Keegan
The strike on Pearl Harbor
Yet Pearl Harbor was protected by radar; in the disregard for the warning it offered lies the principal condemnation of American preparedness for war in the Pacific in December 1941. A British radar set had been installed on the northern coast of Oahu in August and regularly monitored movements in the sea area it covered. Soon after seven o’clock on the morning of 7 December, just as it was about to shut down its morning watch, its operator detected the approach of the largest concentration of aircraft he had ever seen on its screen. However, the naval duty officer at Pearl Harbor, when alerted, instructed him ‘not to worry about it’ and the radar operator, a private in the Army Signal Corps, did as he was told. The duty officer had wrongly concluded that the echo on the screen represented a flight of Flying Fortresses which were scheduled to land shortly at Hickam Field from California. There was much aerial reinforcement in progress around Hawaii in December 1941; Lexington and Enterprise, the Pacific Fleet’s two carriers (Saratoga was Stateside for a refit), were currently delivering aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. The radar blip seemed part of an innocuous pattern.
In fact it represented the first flight of Nagumo’s air striking force, released 200 miles from Oahu and detected 137 miles – less than one hour’s flying time – from its target at Battleship Row. It totalled 183 torpedo- and dive-bombers, with their escort of Zeros – then and for two years to come the best shipborne fighters in the world – all of whose crews had been relentlessly trained in mock attacks on an exact model of the Pearl Harbor complex for months beforehand. A meticulous espionage programme had established where each battleship and cruiser lay; to each target a group of pilots had been assigned. All that remained was for the attackers to evade the defences and send their bombs and torpedoes home.
There were no defences. Such Sundaying servicemen as were topside when the first Japanese aircraft appeared over Battleship Row and the associated airfield targets at Hickam, Bellows and Wheeler Fields assumed their appearance to be ‘part of a routine air-raid drill’. Three-quarters of the 780 antiaircraft guns on the ships in Pearl Harbor were unmanned, and only four of the army’s thirty-one batteries were operational. Many of the guns were without ammunition, which had been returned to store for safekeeping. At 7.49 am the Japanese began their attacks; by 8.12, when the ancient battleship Utah was mistakenly sunk, the Pacific Fleet was devastated. Arizona had blown up, Oklahoma had capsized, California was sinking; four other battleships were all heavily damaged. The destruction was completed by the second wave of 168 Japanese aircraft which arrived at nine o’clock. When they left, West Virginia had been added to the score of destroyed battleships, Nevada was aground – saved by the quick thinking of the junior officer who temporarily commanded her – and Maryland, Tennessee and Pennsylvania were badly damaged. Another eleven smaller ships had also been hit, and 188 aircraft destroyed, most set ablaze on the ground where they had been parked wing-to-wing as a precaution against sabotage. It was a humiliation without precedent in American history and a Japanese strategic triumph apparently as complete as Tsushima, which had driven Russian naval power from the Pacific in a single morning and established Togo as his country’s Nelson.
But Pearl Harbor was no Trafalgar. Even as the Japanese carriers began to recover their aircraft, the first pilots to return confronted the Strike Force commander, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, with the demand that they be launched again to complete their devastation of Pearl Harbor. It was a disappointment and anxiety to all of them that they had not found the American carriers at anchor. Failing strikes against them, the next best thing they could achieve was the destruction of the naval dockyards and oil storage tanks, which would at least ensure that the port could not be used as a forward base for a counter-offensive against the Japanese invasions of the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Genda too lent his weight to their urgings. Nagumo, a doughty warrior but no Nelson, heard them out and then signified his disagreement. ‘Operation Z’ had succeeded beyond his and Yamamoto’s wildest dreams. The rational course now was to withdraw the fleet from danger – who knew where the American carriers might be steering? – and hold it at safety and in readiness for the next stage of the offensive to the south. The rest of the Japanese navy and naval air force, and one-fifth of the Japanese army, was even then risking itself in perilous initiatives against the British, Dutch and American empires in the south-west Pacific. Who could say when and where the Combined Fleet would next be needed?
The tide of Japanese conquest
The ‘southern’ operation was already in full swing and the Royal Navy was about to feel the weight of Japanese maritime airpower. British plans to defend its scattered possessions in south-east Asia and the Pacific depended on the timely dispatch of capital ships, with carrier support, to the strongly fortified naval base of Singapore, at the tip of the Malayan peninsula between the two largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, Sumatra and Borneo. As a precautionary measure, the new battleship Prince of Wales and the old battlecruiser Repulse had been sailed to Singapore at the beginning of December. A carrier should have accompanied them, but casualties among those in home waters and the need to keep the only other uncommitted carrier to watch the German battleship Tirpitz in its Norwegian fiord meant that they had to sail unescorted. On 8 December, prompted by news that the Japanese had begun to land troops off the Kra isthmus, which joins southern Thailand to Malaya, Prince of Wales and Repulse with their small escort of destroyers sailed from Singapore to intercept. The Japanese landing troops had already occupied the airfield from which the two capital ships might have been afforded fighter cover, but although their commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, was warned that strong Japanese torpedo-bomber forces were stationed in southern Indo-China he held his course. Early on the morning of 10 December the Japanese bombers found him, and both his capital ships were sunk in two hours of relentless attack. The loss of a brand-new battleship and a famous battlecruiser to Japanese shore-based aircraft was a disaster for which no one in Britain was prepared. Not only did it upset all preconceptions about Britain’s ability to command distant waters through naval power; it struck cruelly at the nation’s maritime pride. ‘In all the war’, wrote Winston Churchill, who heard the news by telephone from the Chief of the Naval Staff, ‘I never received a more direct shock.’
News quite as bad was on its way; on 8 and 10 December the islands of Wake and Guam, American outposts within the great chain of former German islands on which the Japanese were to base their south-western Pacific defensive perimeter, were attacked. Guam fell at once; Wake, heroically defended by its small Marine garrison, succumbed to a second assault on 23 December, after an American relief sortie had timorously retreated. The British territory of Hong Kong resisted siege, which began on 8 December, but although its Anglo-Canadian garrison fought to the bitter end it capitulated on Christmas Day. The atolls of Tarawa and Makin in the British Gilbert archipelago were captured in December. And on 10 December the Japanese opened amphibious offensives designed to overrun both Malaya and the Philippines.
The collapse of the British defence of Malaya has rightly come to be regarded as one of the most shameful Allied defeats of the war. The Japanese were outnumbered two to one throughout the campaign, which they initiated with only one division and parts of two others against three British divisions and parts of three others. The British were admittedly outnumbered and outclassed in the air, and had no tanks, whereas the Japanese invasion force included fifty-seven tanks. Superior equipment did not, however, explain the whirlwind Japanese success. That victory resulted from the flexibility and dynamism of their methods, akin to those that had characterised the German Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. The British were put off their stroke from the outset. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, the commander-in-chief, and Percival, his senior general, had intended to forestall a Japanese attack by moving forward across the Thai border to seize the potential landing places in the Kra isthmus, but the same s
ort of confused warnings that bedevilled American responses to Japan’s surprise attacks prevented them from making that move. When the Japanese appeared in their forward defensive zone, they did not contest the advance but fell back to what were deemed better defensive positions further to the rear. The retreat surrendered valuable ground, including the sites of the three northernmost airfields in Malaya, none of which was put out of action and which were soon in use by the Japanese. Much else was left behind which the invaders put to use, including motor vehicles and seagoing vessels. Long columns of Japanese infantrymen with the scent of victory in their nostrils took to the roads in captured cars and trucks, followed by others pedalling southward on commandeered bicycles. Seaborne units embarked in fishing craft began to descend on the coast behind British lines, which were abandoned as rapidly as word of the Japanese appearance in their rear was received. By 14 December northern Malaya had been lost; by 7 January 1942 the Japanese had overrun the Slim river position in central Malaya and were driving the defenders southward to Singapore.
The units which collapsed so easily before the Japanese onrush were mostly Indian. They were not the first-line regiments of the pre-war Indian army which were currently winning victories against the Italians in the Western Desert, but war-raised units manned by recently enlisted recruits and led by inexperienced British officers most of whom had not learned Urdu, the command language by which the Indian army worked. There was therefore a lack of confidence between ranks, and orders for retreat were too often taken as a pretext for pell-mell withdrawal. However, poor morale was not the only explanation of Malaya Command’s collapse. Few of its units had been trained in jungle warfare or had made the effort to train themselves. Even the resolute 8th Australian Division was bewildered and disorganised by the appearance of Japanese infiltrators far to the rear of the positions where they were expected. Yet one unit, the British 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, showed what might have been achieved in defence. In the months before the war its commanding officer had practised his soldiers in extending their flanks into the jungle beyond the roads running through its defensive positions and demonstrated that the enemy’s outflanking tactics might thus be nullified. It fought with great success, though at heavy loss, in central Malaya. Had all its fellow units adopted this practice, the Japanese invasion would certainly have been slowed, perhaps checked, before Singapore was brought under threat.
By 15 January, however, the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army, having advanced 400 miles in five weeks, was only a hundred miles from the island fortress and in heavy fighting over the next ten days drove the Australians and Indians from Singapore’s covering positions. On 31 January their rearguards, piped out of Malaya by the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland’s two remaining pipers, crossed the causeway linking Singapore to the mainland and retreated to lines covering the naval base against attack from the northern shore.
The tragedy of the Malaya campaign was now reaching its climax. Singapore had just been reinforced by the British 18th Division, brought from the Middle East, so that despite the toll of units lost in the retreat from the north Percival commanded forty-five battalions to oppose thirty-one in General Tomoyuku Yamashita’s Twenty-Fifth Army. General Sir Archibald Wavell, the victor of the war against Italy in the Middle East and now commander-in-chief in India, also counted on the arrival of air and sea reinforcements to support the troops on the ground and believed that the much-bruited strength of the Singapore naval base defences would assure its resistance for several months. As the most casual reader of the history of the Second World War now knows, however, Singapore’s defences ‘faced the wrong way’. This legend is false. The island’s strongpoints and heavy guns had been positioned to repel an attack from the mainland; but the guns had been supplied with the wrong ammunition, unsuitable for engaging troops. Singapore is separated from Johore by a channel less than a mile wide at its narrowest. The northern shore of the island, moreover, was over thirty miles long, requiring Percival to disperse his battalions – when some had been concentrated in central reserve – at one to the mile. ‘Who defends everything’, Frederick the Great had written, ‘defends nothing.’ It is a harsh truth of war. Yamashita concentrated his forces (now reinforced by the Imperial Guards Division) against six Australian battalions on the north-west corner of the island and on 8 February launched them across the narrow waters of the Johore Strait. Under this overwhelming attack the Australian 22nd and 27th Brigades rapidly crumbled. Counter-attacks by the central reserve failed to throw the Japanese back from their footholds into the water. By 15 February the reservoirs in the middle of the island which supplied Singapore city, the population of which had been swollen by the influx of refugees to over a million, had fallen into Japanese hands. Percival faced the prospect of an urban disaster. Late that evening he marched into Japanese lines to offer surrender. He was photographed carrying the Union Jack beside a white flag borne by a staff officer. According to the historian Basil Collier, it was for ‘the British the greatest military disaster in their history’, entailing the capitulation of more than 130,000 British, Indian, Australian and local volunteer troops to a Japanese force half their number. Most of the captured Indians, seduced by the appeals of the mesmeric Hindu nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose, would shortly go over to the Japanese to form an Indian National Army which would fight on Japan’s side against the British in Burma in the cause of Indian independence. The Indian defection and the white flag incident were two of many reasons why Percival was never forgiven by Churchill’s government or its successor for his catastrophic mismanagement of the Malaya campaign. After liberation in 1945 he became a ‘non-person’, shunned by all in official life and excluded from every commemoration of Britain’s belated Asian victory.
Admiral H. E. Kimmel, the Pearl Harbor commander, was to suffer much the same official oblivion, though with less justification. As the coming turn of events in the Dutch East Indies was to demonstrate, no Western commander who stood in the path of Japan’s surprise attack of December 1941 could preserve his professional honour, in a theatre hopelessly unprepared for the conduct of modern war, except by death in the face of the enemy. Admiral Karel Doorman, the senior Dutch naval officer in the East Indies, has gone down in history a hero – but only because he died on the bridge of his sinking cruiser in battle against fearful odds with the Japanese fleet. The Dutch East Indies were even less ready to resist attack than Hawaii or Pearl Harbor; Doorman may have regarded death as a merciful release from catastrophe, for which he bore no more responsibility in his sector of the ‘Southern Area’ than Percival and Kimmel in theirs.
Unlocking the East Indies treasure-house
Japanese attacks against the East Indies had opened on the British enclave in Borneo on 16 December. It was clear that they would shortly be extended to the whole of the island chain which stretches eastward from Malaya through New Guinea to the northern coast of Australia. In 1941 Australia was almost without defences, since the bulk of its army had been shipped overseas to fight with the British in the Middle East and south-east Asia. A frantic effort ensued to concentrate such Australian, Dutch, British and American forces as existed in the region into a coherent command. It was dubbed ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian) and placed under the authority of General Wavell. The strength at his disposal consisted of the small United States Asiatic Fleet, the Royal Australian Navy and the home defence elements of the Australian army, the remnants of the British Eastern Fleet, the units of the Dutch navy in East Indian waters and the Dutch East Indies Army. The latter numbered some 140,000, the vast majority locals, unequipped and untrained for modern war; unlike the best of Britain’s highly professional Indian army, it had never even fought a war. ABDA’s naval force included eleven cruisers, twenty-seven destroyers and forty submarines. The United States hastily rushed a hundred modern aircraft to Java; the Dutch had only obsolescent models, and the British air component was wholly engaged in – and did not survive – the fighting in Malaya.
The
Japanese strategy for the conquest of the East Indies – for them a treasure-house of oil, rubber and non-ferrous metal production, as well as rice and timber – was excellently conceived. They planned to use their plentiful naval and amphibious forces to attack in close succession at widely separated points across the 2000-mile length of the archipelago: Borneo and the Celebes in January, Timor and Sumatra in February, Java in March. An important subordinate aim of the attack on Timor, which lies only 300 miles from Australia’s northernmost port of Darwin, was to cut the air link between Australia and Java. All forces were eventually to combine for the capture of Batavia (today Jakarta) on Java, the capital of the East Indies.
