The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The fault for that lay with Arthur Percival. Percival was a thinker, a planner, and he had displayed great intellect while serving under Dill as a staff officer in the 1930s. Yet, like Admiral Tom Phillips, he lacked field experience. Staff officers fight their battles in map rooms. In ordering Percival to Singapore, Dill broke ranks with those in the British military—and there were many—who traditionally gave more credence to a general’s character than his intellect, often with disastrous results. British generals, wrote T. E. Lawrence, “often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.” But here was an instance where character and courage would have trumped a superior, methodical mind. Following the Great War, Percival served as the intelligence officer for the Essex Regiment in Ireland, where his penchant for torturing suspected Irish rebels resulted in the partisans putting a price on his head. The Irish Republican Army had put prices on a great many heads, including Churchill’s, but Percival’s case was different; it was personal. The man was despised not only because he had tortured Irish rebels but also because he had enjoyed it. The defense of Singapore would require planning, which Percival had done, and character, of which Percival had none.

  But for the British colonial buildings, Englishmen’s clubs and polo fields, and Raffles Hotel, Singapore was no paradigm of orderliness or cleanliness. The British called it the city of “Chinks, drinks, and stinks.” Most of its 750,000 Malay and Chinese citizens lived in nineteenth-century squalor. Monkeys roasted in open-air markets, where the blood of pig carcasses hanging from meat hooks flowed slowly into shallow gutters. With a blackout on since mid-December, the sounds of the city after sunset consisted in large part of the creaking of oxcarts hauling night soil out of town and the occasional blind firing of anti-aircraft batteries. Yet Singapore’s citizens, especially the Chinese among them, got along secure in the knowledge that the British would at the very least protect them. In fact, by mid-January most British officials had left, including Duff Cooper, who Churchill had appointed resident minister after the early December attacks. With the city’s fate in the hands of the army, Cooper and his wife, Diana, left for London on January 13. Lady Diana had a final gin sling before leaving for the airport, which helped fortify her when Japanese bombers appeared overhead just as they arrived. Chinese friends hustled the Coopers into the air-raid shelter. It was made entirely of glass. “It seemed a suitable end,” Cooper later wrote, “to our mission to Singapore.”133

  By February 1 the Japanese were within twelve miles of the city, but the citizens of Singapore did not know this due to British censorship. For a week the British fought a holding action, but by late on the seventh, the last British troops fled the mainland across the causeway, blowing it up just after they reached the island. The demolition was no more effective than the scorched-earth policy; it took only a few hours for the Japanese to repair the causeway. Soon thereafter, the first of Yamashita’s troops, skinny apparitions in tattered uniforms and helmets covered in twigs and banana leaves, crossed over to Singapore. Churchill, trying to inspire the defenders, cabled Wavell in Batavia: “The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history” (that would be the 18th Division originally destined for Egypt and rerouted by Churchill). He tried to shame the defenders: “The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.” Attempting, too late, to plan a coherent defense, Churchill drew up for the Combined Chiefs a ten-point plan to convert Singapore into a “citadel,” which included the conscription of all able-bodied males to dig anti-tank ditches and build barricades and gun emplacements. He directed again that the city was to be defended to the death and no surrender entertained. “Commanders, Staffs, and principal officers are expected to perish at their posts.” The chiefs sent these orders to Wavell—less the order that everyone perish at his post. Not to be denied, Churchill got his message through in a private telegram: “The fight should continue to the bitter end in the ruins of Singapore. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops.”134

  Then, too late, Churchill and the chiefs ordered as many troops as possible evacuated to Rangoon. But by then Percival and his army (he outnumbered the Japanese by three to one) were fully engaged with the enemy. Percival’s air cover had dwindled to just two dozen old fighter planes; the Japanese had more than five hundred modern aircraft available. The 18th Division landed at Singapore just in time to be captured. The Japanese sealed the city’s fate when they captured the outlying reservoirs and cut off drinking water. Yet Japanese supply lines were stretched to breaking. An all-out assault by Percival of the sort Churchill demanded might have turned the tide, but Percival, his communications in total disarray, declined the fight. The British still possessed enough anti-tank guns and ammunition to kill every Japanese tank twice over, but the top commanders lacked the resolve to carry the fight to the Japanese. Some of Percival’s men—including the war artist Philip Meninsky—wanted to continue the fight but were dismayed to find that the maps they had been issued were of the Isle of Wight. The 8th Australian Division, its four brigades strung along the northern part of the island, briefly pushed the enemy back into the sea, until, that is, the Australians’ communication broke down and their commanding general elected to not perish at his post but to flee homeward in a small boat, leaving his troops stranded, and doomed.

  Singapore fell on February 15. It was a death foretold—too few defenses, a weak commanding general, a demoralized garrison, and too savvy an enemy. Churchill had known since early January that defeat was inevitable, though he thought the inevitable would arrive in a matter of months, not weeks. Percival and a contingent of six officers met Yamashita at the Ford Motor factory late in the morning. The Japanese general, by then hailed in Tokyo as “The Tiger of Malaya,” demanded unconditional surrender by 8:30 that night. It was a bluff; Yamashita knew that his forces were outgunned and in the minority. Yet Percival, with no fight in his belly, decided he had no choice; not only had the commander of the Australian 8th Division fled, but the Indian and Malay troops were deserting and the city was almost out of potable water. Thus, for the defenders of Singapore, it was hands up, guns down.

  A Japanese newsman reported watching a group of Scottish Highlanders marching off to a POW camp while their bagpipers piped. To the reporter’s amazement, the Scots displayed no sadness and, given their surrender, no shame. Such behavior was beyond understanding to the Yamoto people. For a short while after the surrender, Union Jacks still fluttered above Singapore’s municipal buildings like artifacts from the distant past. Then the Japanese yanked them down. Intending no irony, the victors renamed the city Shonan—Light of the South. Night fell on a chaotic scene. Two nights earlier, the conquerors had massacred scores of doctors, nurses, and patients in a hospital just outside the city. Now the victors set to massacring Chinese residents, more than five thousand in all, whose severed heads soon adorned pikes throughout the island. Apprised of the debacle, Brooke jotted in his diary: “If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire!” Churchill had no need to resort to hyperbole when days later he informed Roosevelt that the fall of Singapore was “the greatest disaster in our history.”135

  So confident were the Japanese that they would keep the city in perpetuity that they rigged the big Vickers naval guns for transport to other Pacific conquests. They already knew the mechanics of the guns; the British and Vickers—the Krupp Works of England—had supplied the Japanese navy with fourteen-inch guns since 1910. Japan had built its latest naval weapons on the Vickers design, and rightly so, for Vickers produced the finest naval gun of the era. The fast and deadly Japanese battle cruiser Kongo, which had covered the December landings north of Singapore, was armed with Vickers guns. The British had built Kongo for Japan in 1913. The Royal Navy had instructed a generation of Japanese officers in the art of gunnery. “Uncle Sam and Britannia were the godparents of the new Japan,” Churchill later wrote, adding that in fewer than two generations the Japanese had gone from the sa
murai sword to the battleship. The British had taught the Japanese well, as Tommies and tars were now learning from Java to Singapore.136

  Singapore, which the British over the previous 123 years had nurtured from fishing village to trading post to financial capital of South Asia, had been lost in just seven days. The British and Australian prisoners were soon marched and transported north, to the banks of the River Kwai, in Thailand, where as slave laborers, they began building a 250-mile railroad to Thanbyuzayat, in Burma. More than 13,000 died during the next three years by Japanese bullet and bayonet, as well as from malnutrition and a host of hideous tropical diseases. The survivors dubbed their works project the Death Railroad. Most of the Indian troops, on the other hand, did not share that fate. More than 30,000 mostly Hindu prisoners—they called themselves the Indian National Army—declared their allegiance to the mesmeric Hindu nationalist and Fascist Subhash Chandra Bose, and to Tokyo, which bankrolled Bose. They took up arms against London, and joined the Japanese on the march to the next objective: Burma. Percival survived his captivity. When he returned home after the war, he became a “nonperson,” excluded from all victory celebrations and shunned, wrote Sir John Keegan, “for his catastrophic mismanagement of the Malay campaign.” Churchill never forgave him.137

  The Japanese were making Hell while the sun shone, which propelled Joseph Goebbels to flights of celebratory fancy. “If I were an Englishman,” he declared to his diary, “I would tremble for the fate of the Empire…. There was a time we considered the existence of the British world empire a necessity for the welfare of Europe. This time is past…. Churchill gambled away the chance we gave England. England will have to pay dearly for this statesman.” As for Churchill’s political future, both Goebbels and Hitler agreed that “his fall may possibly be expected.”138

  Many in London agreed. Most believed that any further defeats of such magnitude would spell the end for Churchill. Then again, there weren’t that many more pieces of the Empire to lose.

  Churchill had known since his outward passage to America that Singapore was in serious trouble. The Japanese, he told his Canadian hosts in December, had inflicted upon the British a “cataract of ruin.” He had warned of more pain to come, and come it had. Churchill announced the loss of Singapore on February 15 in a broadcast carried around the world. Harold Nicolson wrote that Churchill appealed “for national unity and not criticism, in a manner which recalls Neville Chamberlain.” Britons, “too nervous and irritable to be fobbed off with fine phrases,” found the speech wanting. Yet, Nicolson asked, “What else could he have said?” Two days later, Churchill took his case to the House and promptly closed it with the announcement that there would be no official investigation into the fall of Singapore (such as had been convened for most of the military disasters since 1939) lest “we were drawn into agitated or excited recriminations at a time when all our minds are oppressed with a sense of tragedy and with the sorrow of so lamentable a misfortune.” No such official inquiry ever took place. Recriminations were indeed making the rounds, in the streets and in pubs, and in the Commons, where Churchill that day, in response to questions of the how and why of Singapore, “became irritable and rather reckless.” Harold Nicolson feared “a slump in public opinion which will deprive Winston of his legend.”139

  Britons, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, though openly criticizing Churchill—unthinkable a year earlier—“don’t intend to lose Mr. Churchill, but they don’t intend to lose the war, either.” Britons were fed up with the BBC and the newspapers for having touted successes in the Western Desert and Singapore, when only failures came to pass. They were fed up with increased rationing—two pints of milk per adult per week, strict limitations on cereals and dried fruits. They had been shocked that week when the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, along with Prinz Eugen, slipped out of Brest and made a successful daylight dash right up the mine-choked English Channel, past British radar (the Germans had jammed it), and past the big coastal guns (they could not aim in the gathering mist). All three of the ships suffered minor damage from mines, but not enough to keep them from reaching Germany’s North Sea ports that afternoon. Torpedo bombers that might have stopped the ships had been sent to Alexandria to prevent further Italian frogman depredations. Six Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers sent aloft to halt the ships were all lost, along with four Hampden medium bombers. Contrary to rumor, the Admiralty had not been caught entirely flat-footed but had long suspected the German ships might make a break for it. Churchill said he pointed this out to the Commons in order to reassure Britons “that our affairs are not conducted entirely by simpletons and dunderheads.” Yet the escape of the German ships and the fall of Singapore led Britons to conclude that a fresh start was needed by way of a cabinet shake-up that, to be effective, must include Sir Stafford Cripps, whose “straight talking,” Panter-Downes wrote, was of the sort “people have long and in vain hoped to hear from the Prime Minister.”140

  Cripps had been biding his time for a month, waiting for just such a popular summons, but he was still wary of serving under Beaverbrook.

  The January vote of support for Churchill’s government may have appeared overwhelming, but the military disasters of February and rising tensions in political circles moved Churchill by mid-February to restructure the cabinet and the War Cabinet. In so doing he reduced the War Cabinet from the supreme nine to the supreme eight, thus further consolidating his power. Secretary of State for War David Margesson was among the first to go. Churchill’s treatment of this loyal Tory was less than laudatory, recalled Lord Geoffrey Lloyd: “I must tell you that I could never quite forgive Churchill the way in which he dismissed my old friend Lord Margesson, who was a great friend of his.” In fact, Margesson was loyal to Churchill but no great friend. Margesson, as Chamberlain’s imperious chief whip before the war, had been ruthless in suppressing Tory dissent over Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and was instrumental in keeping Churchill out of the government and more or less in exiled opposition. Yet, though Margesson had been a dedicated Chamberlain enforcer, he helped ease both Tory and Labour fears during the transition from Chamberlain to Churchill. He had since served Churchill loyally, and since early 1941, as secretary of state for war, a position he neither sought nor desired but could not refuse when Churchill offered it. The War Office—the name notwithstanding—was administrative, less about strategy and more about updating regulations and keeping records of the whereabouts of men and matériel. With Churchill acting as his own minister of defence, Margesson’s job was almost symbolic and consisted more in catching javelins than throwing them, and often Churchill’s javelins, as many of his curt, often dismissive memos to Margesson suggest. In one of his last memos to Margesson, written as Singapore tottered, Churchill bemoaned the willingness of British officers in that city to openly discuss—aye, confess to—the collapse of resistance: “They seem to be giving everything away about themselves in the blandest manner,” he wrote. “After all, they are defending a fortress and not conducting a Buchmanite* revival.”141

  That was a clever (and petty) way of putting things. Margesson’s skills had never been administrative; under Chamberlain he had excelled as a whip in keeping the party in line. For more than a year now he had served Churchill loyally, only to be sacked, Lord Lloyd recalled, when Churchill “needed a scapegoat for all the disasters in the western deserts, but he couldn’t face up to doing it personally.” Churchill, in his memoirs, simply states that Margesson “ceased to be Secretary of State for War.” In fact, Margesson first learned his fate from his own permanent under secretary, Percy James Grigg, who had served as Churchill’s private secretary when Churchill was at the Exchequer. Churchill asked Grigg to take Margesson’s job, but the career civil servant was hesitant to do so, for the jump from civil service to Crown minister meant a loss of all accrued pension benefits. Churchill pushed. Grigg took the job “as an act of patriotism,” recalled Malcolm Muggeridge, even though Grigg suspected that “Winston wanted a Sec
retary of War who would be a pure stooge.” Grigg proved anything but. Brooke later wrote, “Providence was indeed kind to me during the war to have placed P.J. [Grigg] at the helm of the W.O.” Grigg served until the war’s end. When Grigg retired, recalled Muggeridge, his finances were “wiped out… finished,” and Churchill “never again communicated with him in any way.”142

  As Churchill shuffled his cabinet, he waited for Beaverbrook’s decision on the Ministry of Production post, which, when it arrived in mid-February was, to his delight, in the affirmative. But less than two weeks later, Beaverbrook again offered his resignation. He was an ill man. He had long suffered from asthma; now it had worsened to the point where he contemplated ordering an RAF plane to fly him around at high altitude to clear his lungs and allow him some sleep. His breathing became so labored that Churchill, during a meeting, mistook the wheezing for a cat’s meow and ordered, “someone stop that cat mewing.” Beaverbrook was on the cusp of what Churchill later rather unnecessarily termed “a nervous breakdown.” Clementine took the occasion to advise her husband by letter: “My darling—Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood—Exorcise this bottle imp & see if the air is not clearer & purer—you will miss his drive & genius, but in Cripps you may have new accessions of strength.” Churchill accepted her advice, and Beaverbrook’s resignation. And with that, Cripps was in, lord privy seal and leader of the House of Commons.143