The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Virtually every stop on her tour, from Rangoon to Singapore to Borneo, had now been or soon would be attacked by the Japanese. From Singapore Clementine had suggested to Winston that he procure from the Admiralty a map of the new British naval base, located between Singapore Island and the mainland. Had he done so he would have learned that no fixed defenses were planned for the Malay mainland, an oversight Wavell brought to his attention only weeks before the final battle for Singapore. Clementine had also visited Komodo, where indeed she took part in a “dragon” hunt. Distances across the Pacific and Indian oceans defied imagination, including Churchill’s—14,000 miles and fifty-five days sailing from London to Calcutta via Cape Town, 8,000 miles and three weeks from San Francisco to Bombay. Churchill simply referred to “vast expanses” without quite understanding just how vast the expanses were in that watery part of the world. The entire European and North African theaters and much of the eastern Atlantic war zone fell within a 1,300-mile radius extending from Berlin, within which the newest British and German bombers could depart a base at sunset, cruise halfway across the theater, and arrive home again in time for breakfast. Railroads, which had shuttled troops to the trenches in 1914, could now carry entire armies across the Continent. Modern technology had made Europe a smaller place, but not so the Pacific. All of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the entirety of North Africa could disappear into the Pacific Ocean several times over.24

  In this vastness Churchill expected Prince of Wales and Repulse to impart to the Japanese a lesson in sea power as practiced by the world’s greatest sea power, perfected long before Captain A. T. Mahan, U.S.N., set about putting his thoughts on that subject to paper.* The Japanese understood, as did the British, Mahan’s maxim that in distant seas—where colonial fortresses and naval bases were separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles—the destruction of an enemy’s fleet must precede any attempt to take a fortress or anchorage. This was in essence a waterborne version of Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum that the destruction of enemy armies, not the capture of real estate, should be a commander’s first objective. Mahan believed that the destruction of an enemy fleet virtually guaranteed the success of any land-based assault that followed. Churchill wrote of that very circumstance in History of the English-Speaking Peoples, where he attributed Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown to the inability of the Royal Navy to prevent the French fleet from getting between Cornwallis and his seaborne reinforcements: “Sea-power had once more decided the issue, and but for the French blockade the British war of attrition might well have succeeded.” The rebel American army in the meantime had marched overland four hundred miles to trap Cornwallis, who, encamped and besieged at Yorktown, at the foot of the Virginia Peninsula, realized that he was at the end of his rope. Singapore was now in an identical position. The Japanese forces that had landed four hundred miles to the north were moving smartly down the Malay Peninsula. Unless Prince of Wales found and killed the enemy’s warships, Yamashita could reinforce at will.25

  For almost two centuries the security of the British Empire had been guaranteed by great ships, wooden before the late nineteenth century, weighing in at several hundred tons, driven by wind, armed with smooth-bore cannons capable of splintering enemy ships, and with a range of a mile or so inland, just far enough to dissuade native troublemakers from harassing British coastal trading posts. In the mid–nineteenth century, James Brooke, a Lord Jim sort of fellow and the self-made Rajah of Sarawak on the northern coast of Borneo, wrote to London that with “a frigate… a slight military force and the English Union Jack,” he could “control all the neighboring evildoers.” He was correct. Nineteenth-century warships carried all the power necessary to dissuade competing colonial powers and unfriendly natives from harassing the British in their territorial waters.

  By 1942 a pair of battleships displaced almost as many tons as Nelson’s entire main battle fleet at Trafalgar. Twentieth-century British war wagons were encased by more than a foot of steel, and by 1942 they were equipped with radar and driven by huge motors that could generate enough electricity to light a small city. Most sailed armed with fourteen- and fifteen-inch guns that could loft 1,500-pound projectiles more than twenty miles. Nelson and Rodney were armed with sixteen-inch guns. These great ships, Prince of Wales foremost among them, were the steel needles and iron threads that stitched together the quilt of the Empire, and secured the sea lanes that bound the Empire to London. When Churchill contemplated the Pacific and Indian oceans, he did so only in terms of the sea routes from London to India and, to a lesser extent, British Malaya, Australia, and New Zealand. Churchill and the Admiralty had for two decades paid scant attention to the outlying archipelagos snatched from Germany after World War One—New Britain, northeastern New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Buka and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. The remainder of the Solomon Islands, a British protectorate since 1893, had for decades gone largely ignored by London.

  But not by Tokyo. The Solomons stretched away into the South Pacific like a fleet of derelict ghost ships, forgotten and undefended. Other than machete-wielding natives and a few remaining British coconut planters, all other Britons had been evacuated to Australia. Other western Pacific archipelagos—the Marshall Islands and the Mariana Islands—had been German territories until they were handed to Japan (then an ally) following the Great War. Japan also ruled the Caroline Islands, which together with the Marshalls and Marianas, formed a buffer midway between Tokyo and New Guinea. These island chains offered jump-off points for further advances in the Pacific. The Japanese had long understood the importance of the Solomons. Their capture would isolate Australia, a scenario now grasped with fear in Canberra but not yet fully appreciated in London. One of these long-ignored Crown possessions, a mostly uncharted mountainous jumble of rivers, malarial swamps, and thick jungle, was virtually unknown to Londoners—Guadalcanal, located at the southern end of the Solomons. Churchill took note of these far-flung places, not because the entire southern Pacific might soon become a furnace in which the antipodal Dominions could perish, but because the sea routes from those regions were vital to transporting reinforcements to the theater of war he most cared about: North Africa. “I wouldn’t have thought the Pacific was something which had much troubled Churchill,” recalled Mark Bonham Carter, the son of Churchill’s old friend Violet Bonham Carter: “He thought in rather continental terms.”26

  That is why Churchill took umbrage at increasing Australian resistance to his demand for more Australian troops. If Londoners had not complained while being slaughtered, he asked his doctor, why should Australians, who had yet to see a single enemy bomb fall? Yet Australia, with just three army divisions stationed at home, feared now for its safety, its survival even. Churchill reassured Australia’s new prime minister, John Curtin, that Prince of Wales would keep Australia safe from Japanese depredations.

  When he first proposed sending Prince of Wales to Singapore, the Admiralty, fearing Tirpitz might emerge in the Atlantic, “expressed their dissent.” Churchill thought likewise, but in reverse, recalled Sir Ian Jacob: “He was thinking in terms of the annoyance caused us by the Bismarck, and thought Prince of Wales would cause the Japanese a great deal of trouble.” Yet “the parallel was not a good one because the Japanese hadn’t a vital lifeline, as we had across the Atlantic, which could be threatened and which required constant protection.” Churchill was so sure of Prince of Wales’s deterrent threat, so enthused at the prospect of his great battleship mixing it up with the Japanese navy, and so positive of the outcome that he instructed the ship’s arrival at Cape Town to be “reported to the enemy” via radio broadcast. The Japanese duly noted the news. Repulse was by then on station at Singapore. With no destroyers available for escort, Prince of Wales made the journey to Singapore alone. Too late, having insisted the venture proceed, Churchill told the Admiralty that he regretted the lack of a destroyer escort. “This is a case where I am for ‘Safety First.’ ” The m
ission itself belied that claim. Churchill discussed the mission in several telegrams, including a message reassuring Curtin, and another to Stalin, which employed the same phrase he had used when he told Roosevelt of Prince of Wales’s departure: “It is grand to have something that can catch and kill any Japanese ship.”27

  Admiral Tom S. V. Phillips, in command of Prince of Wales, agreed with Churchill’s assessment of his battleship’s prowess, with one caveat. The Japanese fleet, Phillips told the War Cabinet, consisted of a mix of newer and older ships, as did the British fleet, but Britain’s newest and best ships, such as Prince of Wales, operating near British Asian possessions “under cover of shore based aircraft,” would prove more than a match for the Japanese (italics added). No such land-based air cover was available anywhere near Singapore on December 8. Months earlier Churchill had dissuaded his military chiefs from sending “very great diversions” of aircraft to the Far East. “The political situation in the Far East does not seem to require,” he told the chiefs, “and the strength of our Air Force by no means warrants, the maintenance of such large forces in the Far East at this time.” Churchill’s Far East strategy, recalled Ian Jacob, was based on the premise that “if the Japanese came into the war, it will bring in the Americans and we shall win the war and then, anything we lose we shall get back; that was his simple view of the matter, yet in many ways it was a sensible view.” Thus, as the political situation in the Far East wobbled and then collapsed, Churchill chose to keep his aircraft close to home. Had he kept rigidly to his strategy of not reinforcing the Far East with men, planes, or ships, Prince of Wales would not have sailed. But he had sent the ship, and now it sailed without air cover. Churchill had suggested to the Admiralty that an aircraft carrier accompany Prince of Wales to the Far East. Yet when it became clear that no carrier could be spared, Churchill and the Admiralty sent the battleship anyway, alone.28

  Foretold by Britain of its coming, the Japanese were waiting for Prince of Wales somewhere in the South China Sea, waiting not only with ships, which the powerful British man-of-war might catch and kill, but with airplanes. Late on December 8, Prince of Wales, Repulse, and four old destroyers ventured together from Singapore and down the Strait of Johore in search of the Japanese transports that had landed troops far up the Malay Peninsula. Absent air cover, Phillips was sailing into a deluge without an umbrella. He knew this, and although the Admiralty had not ordered him to depart Singapore, implicit in the orders that sent him there was the understanding that he behave like an English admiral, that is, that he fight.

  Max Beaverbrook and his lieutenant, George Malcolm Thomson,* considered the mission of Prince of Wales to be “pure rubbish.” The Beaver had begun to think a great many of Churchill’s schemes—Greece, Crete, and now the sojourn of the battleships—were rubbish, and had begun to fancy himself a suitable replacement as prime minister should Churchill not survive a vote of confidence or an errant German bomb. Beaverbrook differed with Churchill on North Africa, where Max would abandon the shifty sands in order to establish a second front on the Continent. He differed with just about every Allied military man on the prospects for Russia when he claimed soon after Barbarossa began that with prodigious British and American help, Stalin could last far longer than several weeks, maybe even win. By November, Beaverbrook had helped deliver the first installments of that aid to Moscow. But Max harbored doubts about Churchill. He “had not so much respect for Winston’s intelligence” and strategic acumen, recalled Thomson, but respected Churchill “as the godsend leader that we had to have.” Churchill’s dispatch of Prince of Wales to the Pacific only reinforced Beaverbrook’s uncertainty. Sir Ian Jacob agreed: “Churchill was much too ardent and active a man. He thought something should be going on all the time” and “was so desperately keen for us to have the biggest part in whatever was going on.” He was “not at all a theoretical strategist” who “considered the best thing to do and then made quite certain nothing detracted from it, and that the proper forces were concentrated in the proper place.”29

  Admiral Tom Phillips was a theoretical strategist, and that was the problem. He was a desk admiral, vice chief of the Admiralty staff, a thinker who was considered by many to be the brains of the Admiralty. He shared four traits with Churchill: he was prone to anger; he was given to meddling in operational plans; he thought Britain’s seagoing admirals lacked aggressiveness; and he worshipped battleships. The Far East venture was to be his first fleet command, and although the previous year he had objected when Churchill divided Wavell’s Middle Eastern forces between Greece and Egypt, he embraced the Singapore adventure with alacrity. Knowing of the absence of air cover in Malaya, Phillips might have better served Churchill (and improved his own chances for survival) by pointing out the potential folly in the Singapore gambit. But here was Phillips’s chance for glory. Physically, the admiral was a wee man—he had to stand on a box to see from his bridge—who possessed an oversize ego; Admiral James Somerville called him “the Pocket Napoleon.” Phillips was well aware of the damage inflicted on capital ships at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, yet those ships had been riding at anchor; Prince of Wales, under his command, could zig and zag at speeds of almost thirty-five miles per hour, all the while shredding the sky and everything in it with its vast array of armaments. Yet, any gardener who has ever fled a swarm of wasps knows that size and maneuverability do not always carry the day.30

  The Japanese, like Churchill and Phillips, were not burdened with any doubts whatsoever of their military talents. They had demonstrated at Pearl Harbor the means to deal with the battleships of the world’s most powerful navies. When it came to airborne torpedo and bomb attacks against great warships, the Japanese understood what the blasé British and Americans still, incredibly, did not: the Taranto raid and the sinking by aircraft of Southampton (a cruiser) had marked late afternoon in the era of battleships. December 7 marked the end of that era.31

  On the ninth, Churchill outlined to the cabinet his plan for the Prince of Wales and Repulse, already at sea, to “vanish into the ocean wastes and exercise a vague menace” akin to the behavior of “rogue elephants.” By then, the Prince of Wales, flying Phillips’s flag, and captained by John Leach (whom Churchill had wanted to court-martial the previous May), was steaming up the Malay coast escorted by the four old destroyers and the HMS Repulse. Repulse’s captain, William Tennant, offered to Cecil Brown, an American reporter who was on board: “We are off to look for trouble. I expect we’ll find it.”32

  Near Saigon, more than four hundred miles away, Japanese ground crews were arming two dozen long-range Mitsubishi “Nell” bombers and several dozen “Betty” torpedo-bombers. Churchill and the Admiralty knew that the Japanese were reinforcing the Indochina airfields, but, Churchill later wrote, “sound reasons”—the distance, four hundred miles—implied that Prince of Wales “would be outside the effective range of enemy, shore-based torpedo bombers.” Here was an astounding case of errant reasoning, given that two days earlier, Japanese airmen had flown almost three hundred miles to Pearl Harbor from aircraft carriers. What was another hundred miles to the best fliers in the world? Churchill—who had once denigrated the Japanese as “the Wops of the Pacific”—later wrote that “the efficiency of the Japanese in air warfare was at this time greatly underestimated both by ourselves and by the Americans.”33

  Tars aboard the two British battlewagons certainly underestimated the Japanese. When late on the ninth word came down to Cecil Brown that a Japanese battleship, three cruisers, and at least four destroyers were thought to be somewhere close ahead, Brown joked that he’d like to get a taxi back to Singapore. “Oh, but they are Japanese,” an officer replied, “there’s nothing to worry about.” Another officer chimed in: “Those Japs can’t fly,” he said, “they can’t see at night, and they’re not well trained.” Churchill happened to feel the same way: he had told luncheon guests months earlier that as far as Japanese airplanes were concerned, “We are of the opinion that they are not very good.�
�� On board the Repulse, yet another officer claimed that the Japanese “have rather good ships but they can’t shoot straight.” The Japanese had in fact been shooting pretty smartly all over the Pacific, while the men on board Repulse had yet to fire a single shot in anger during the first twenty-seven months of war.34

  The next morning, the tenth, at 11:07 in Malaya—3:07 A.M. in London—Brown jotted in his notebook: “Enemy aircraft approaching… action stations.” At 11:14 he spied nine Japanese planes at an altitude of around 12,000 feet. “And here they come,” he wrote. A wave of torpedo bombers came in low. The Repulse dodged nineteen torpedoes “thanks to Providence,” the captain signaled to Admiral Phillips. The very next torpedo hit Repulse near midships, throwing Brown to the deck. Immediately the ship heeled sharply to one side. Within a minute, from the loudspeakers came the captain’s final order: “Prepare to abandon ship.” A pause: “God be with you.”35

  A half mile ahead, the Prince of Wales, the victim of two torpedo hits, rode low in the water, its steering smashed. Fires burned along its length. On the Repulse, Brown slumped to the deck and watched as a dozen Royal Marines dove overboard; all were swept into the still-churning propellers. A sailor leapt from the radio tower and straight down the smokestack. Three dozen tars climbed from belowdecks up the inside of the decoy funnel only to find themselves fatally trapped by a steel grate at the top, locked from the outside. Brown watched, stunned, as hundreds of men scrambled over the sides and into the sea, yet he could not bring himself to join them. Finally, he took a last look at his watch—smashed at 12:35—and jumped. He landed in a mess of debris and heavy oil discharged from the ship, in which he and Captain Tennant and hundreds of sailors struggled to get themselves away from Repulse before it went down. Bloodied and soaked by the thick oil, they watched in silence minutes later as the ship, its bow stabbing “straight into the air like a church steeple,” heeled over and plunged under the swells with more than half the crew of 1,300 still on board. But the Repulse wanted a larger ship’s company on its final journey, and Brown, who felt his legs were being pulled from his hips, watched in horror as several nearby sailors were sucked back aboard as the ship went under. Prince of Wales followed an hour or so later, with Admiral Phillips and Captain Leach still on the bridge. They were last seen bidding God bless to the crew, of whom more than five hundred joined them at the bottom of the South China Sea. British destroyers arrived later in the day to pluck Brown and the other survivors from the water.36