“Imperial tariffs” could not, Churchill realized, keep a failing economic network of colonies and Dominions alive unless, as in the nineteenth century, there was at its core a crusading moral zeal: exploratory, exploitive, even extortionate, but benevolent, too. As had become obvious even to Churchill, as a stalwart champion of colonial empire during the rise of the dictators in the 1930s, the moral zeal had gone—a reality epitomized in the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain and of the “Clivedon set” of mainly aristocratic Britons.
For his part, Churchill would embrace no accord with Hitler merely to preserve the fruits of the British Empire. By his own individual energy, imagination, and military leadership, he was certain he could reverse Britain’s moral decline—but he needed American help. By declaring war on the United States, the Axis powers had, to his abiding relief, brought the United States into the war not only on Britain’s side, but at Britain’s side. The British Empire would thus be saved by Professor Seeley’s emerging empires: the United States on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other. The British Empire would then act as a sort of middleman: rich still in military bases, in mineral resources, and in colonial and Dominion management-manpower.
The heart of this network of military bases in the Far East was Britain’s supposedly impregnable naval and military base at Singapore. Holding Singapore was, to Churchill, crucial: a symbol of British willingness to stand up for its imperial assets, in a war that would determine the shape of the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. “The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake,” he had cabled the new Allied supreme commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, on February 10, 19429—and he meant it.
To preserve that honor, Churchill had, in his own role as generalissimo, employed U.S. transport ships to convoy the British Eighteenth Division to Malaya via the Cape of Good Hope, as he’d informed the President with gratitude on December 12, 1941;10 then, in his tour d’horizon of grand strategy on his way to Washington on December 17, the Prime Minister had assured the President that the island of Singapore and its “fortress will stand an attack for at least six months,” since a “large Japanese army with its siege train and ample supplies of ammunition and engineering stores” would be required to take it.11
As the relatively small Japanese invasion army, comprising 33,000 troops, made its way down the Malayan peninsula in January 1942, however, Churchill’s assurances of stout resistance by the 130,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops had become less convincing. On February 7, 1942, the Prime Minister modified his predictions. “Seventy per cent of our forces which fought in Malaya got back to the [Singapore] Island,” he admitted, glossing over the helter-skelter British retreat toward Johore, in a new cable to the President. “Eleven convoys of stores and reinforcements including the whole 18th Division and other strong good A.A. and A/T [antiaircraft and antitank] units are now deployed making the equivalent of four divisions, a force very well proportioned to the area they have to defend. I look forward to severe battles on this front, where the Japanese have to cross a broad moat before attacking a strong fortified and still mobile force.”12
Churchill prided himself, as a former cavalry officer, on his command of military detail. Decades had passed, however, since he had served in the line in World War I—and even more decades since he had served in Asia. In his underground London bunker, not having traveled to India or the Far East since 1889, he seemed completely unaware of what was going on in the farther reaches of the empire he so doggedly represented. What had begun as a phased withdrawal by British imperial troops from the frontier with Indochina became, in reality, a helpless rout. Now, as Churchill looked forward to a glorious, medieval-style defense at Singapore, even those around the Prime Minister failed to share his optimism.
“News bad on all sides,” Churchill’s new chief of the general staff in London, General Alan Brooke, had already noted in his diary on January 30, 1942—for in Libya the German panzer commander, General Rommel, had replenished his forces and had struck back at General Auchinleck’s British Eighth Army with venomous daring. “Benghazi has been lost again and Singapore is in a bad way,” Brooke lamented. Churchill had told the President Singapore would hold out for six months; Brooke was dubious. “I doubt whether the island holds out very long,” he scribbled in his slashing green handwriting.13
Brooke was right. Three days later he was mauled by members of the cabinet “in connection with defeat of our forces!” he recorded that night. “As we had retreated into Singapore Island and lost [control?], besides being pushed back in Libya, I had a good deal to account for,”14 he noted—unaided by the head of the British Navy, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, who—suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor—was constantly falling asleep, in fact “looked like an old parrot on his perch!” the amateur ornithologist described.15
The British Chiefs of Staff Committee, chaired by Admiral Pound, certainly evinced little confidence among British cabinet members. Aware of this, but refusing outwardly to show signs of anxiety, the Prime Minister—having survived a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons by 464 votes to 1—was becoming hysterical behind the scenes. “He came out continually with remarks such as: ‘Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles, have none of them any ideas, must we continually lose battles in this way?’” Brooke later recounted.16 Singapore was to be “defended to the death,” and the “Commander, Staffs and principal officers are expected to perish at their posts,” Churchill had laid down on January 19, 1942: complete with a ten-point plan of defense.17 It was crucial, he felt, to show the Japanese—and the world—that British imperial troops believed in the British Empire, and would die for it.
To his chagrin, however, they refused to do so.
For his part, Brooke blamed the United States. By agreeing to the Combined Chiefs of Staff system based in the U.S. capital, he felt that the British chiefs of staff—harried, bullied, disparaged, and constantly overruled by their own prime minister—had lost imperial prestige and authority over their own forces.
“Ever since [Air Marshal] Portal and [Admiral] Pound came back from the USA I have told them that they have ‘sold the birthright for a plate of porridge’ while in Washington,” Brooke lamented on February 9, 1942. “They have, up to now, denied it flatly. However this morning they were at last beginning to realize that the Americans are rapidly snatching more and more power with the ultimate intention of running the war in Washington! I now have them on my side,” he congratulated himself.
Brooke’s satisfaction was short-lived. Several hours later he was summoned to face the wrath of his political masters. “An unpleasant Cabinet meeting,” he jotted in his diary—for the news from the Far East was terrible. Churchill’s “moat”—the Johore Strait, separating Malaya from Singapore—had been breached by the Japanese in a few hours.18
“The news had just arrived that the Japs had got onto Singapore Island,” Brooke recorded that night. “As a result nothing but abuse for the army. The Auk’s retreat in Cyrenaica is also making matters more sour! Finally this evening, at 10.45, I was sent for by PM to assist him in drafting a telegram to Wavell about the defense of Singapore, and the need,” once again, “for Staffs and Commanders to perish at their posts.”19
Churchill’s assurances to President Roosevelt of British stoutheartedness had so far proven empty, despite Brooke’s derision of the notion of a Combined Chiefs of Staff operating in Washington rather than London. “The news from Singapore goes from bad to worse,” Brooke confided to his diary on February 11. “PM sent for me this evening to discuss with him last wire from Wavell about Singapore from where he [Wavell] had just returned” with somber tidings. The British commander in chief, Lieutenant General Percival, had failed to erect defenses along the “moat”—even barbed wire—lest he be accused of being defeatist. This had allowed the Japanese to cross virtually at will. Some of Wavell’s subordinate commanders were already talking of surrender.
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“It was a very gloomy wire and a depressing wire as regards the fighting efficiency of the troops on Singapore Island. It is hard to see why a better defence is not being put up, but I presume there must be some good reason,” Brooke recorded, hopefully. “The losses on the island will be vast, not only in men but in material. I have during the last 10 years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and that we were on a slippery decline! I wonder if I was right? I certainly never expected we should fall to pieces as fast as we are, and to see Hong Kong and Singapore go in less than three months plus failure in the Western Desert is far from reassuring!”20
Next day, as if the gods were out to further humiliate the Prime Minister and his military chiefs, there was a new disgrace. For early on February 12, 1942, the German Kriegsmarine astonished the world. The 32,100-ton battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst—which had sunk the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious—accompanied by the 18,750-ton heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen—which had helped sink HMS Hood—succeeded “in running the gauntlet of the Channel yesterday without being destroyed,” Brooke noted in his diary:21 the three huge warships racing at almost thirty knots through the entirety of the English Channel from Brest to their naval base in Kiel without serious damage to any of them, despite hapless, even suicidal efforts by Royal Navy destroyers and torpedo boats, RAF bombers, and Swordfish torpedo planes (all of which were shot down), and even radar-directed coastal artillery, capable of covering the width of the Channel at Dover, unable even to “knock any paint” off them, as Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent secretary to the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, phrased the misfortune.22 Even the solitary British submarine detailed to stand guard outside the harbor at Brest, it appeared, had left station to recharge its batteries, with no replacement! “We are nothing but failure and inefficiency everywhere,” Cadogan noted in his diary on February 12, “and the Japs are murdering our men and raping our women in Hong Kong. . . . I am running out of whiskey and can get no more drink of any kind. But if things go on as they’re going, that won’t matter.”23
“These are black days!” General Brooke noted.24
The blackest of all, however, came on February 15, 1942.
Hoping to circumvent the eyes of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, Churchill had sent more and more hectoring, do-or-die cablegrams direct to General Wavell. Thanks to the new Allied command system, however, the supreme commander was, for his own part, duty bound to report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. This made it impossible for the Prime Minister to disguise from the President or the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff the impending British disaster at Singapore.
Wavell’s reports to Washington had been all too candid. One of the supreme commander’s staff officers later recorded how, on the way to the front, they had “passed groups of Australian troops streaming towards the harbor, shouting that the fighting was over and that they were clearing out.”25
Clearing out? Churchill’s orders to officers and men to fight and die where they stood seemed to fall on deaf ears. On February 14, 1942, Japanese forces, despite being heavily outnumbered and running out of ammunition, advanced across Singapore Island toward the city and harbor. The 130,000 defenders for the most part refused to fight; desertions were pandemic among Australian troops—even their commanding officer commandeering a boat and sailing away, leaving his men.
Among Indian troops, moreover, there was something more ominous still: a mass refusal to risk their lives for a British Empire that denied them self-government, independence, or even Dominion status, such as the Australians enjoyed.
Hushed up for decades and for the most part ignored by historians of the Malaya campaign and its ultimate debacle, the majority of Indian troops—some forty thousand out of forty-five thousand—captured by the Japanese at Singapore thus volunteered to join the Indian National Army (INA) and fight the British.26 And still more would do so over the following year.
Churchill, hearing at midday on February 15, 1942, that General Percival had surrendered an army of over a hundred thousand armed men to the Japanese, without fighting, went into shock.
To the White House the Prime Minister had, on February 11, cabled: “We have one hundred six thousand men in Singapore Island, of which nearly sixty thousand are British or Australian,” while forty thousand were Indian. “The battle must be fought to the bitter end,” he’d assured the President, adding, “Regardless of consequences to the city or its inhabitants.”27
Instead, four days later, they had surrendered to no more than a few thousand Japanese infantry troops. It was not only humiliating. It was a disgrace.
That night, the Prime Minister gave the saddest broadcast of his life, delivered from his official country residence, Chequers. In it the great orator of empire reached for every metaphor that might, by its brilliance, distract from his dismal sense of shame. Borrowing from the President’s State of the Union address, he titled his broadcast “On the State of the War”: beginning by spinning out the story of the entire conflict since 1939. How did matters now stand on February 15, 1942, the Prime Minister therefore asked his listeners? “Taking it all in all, are our chances of survival better or worse than in August, 1941? How is it with the British Empire, or Commonwealth of Nations—are we up or down?”28
“Commonwealth of Nations” sounded, to the President, as he listened to the speech in Washington, a great deal better than the “British Empire.” The President was therefore pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s alternative title for Britain’s imperial domains—especially when Churchill pointed to Britain’s alliance with the United States and repeated it, without mentioning “British Empire” at all, a minute later. “When I survey and compute the power of the United States, and its vast resources, and feel that they are now in it with us, the British Commonwealth of Nations, all together, however long it lasts, till death or victory, I cannot believe there is any other fact in the whole world which can compare with that,” Churchill declared. “That is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, and worked for, and now it has come to pass.”29
At this remark, sitting by the radiogram with Harry Hopkins in his study at the White House, the President shuddered—knowing immediately how it would be parsed and interpreted by former isolationists, anti-British citizens, and reluctant interventionists in America. Why, Hopkins wondered, did the Prime Minister have to mention his almost two-year campaign to entreat, and if necessary inveigle, the United States into entry into the war?
Worse still was to come, however. After a long explanation of how Britain’s resources had been stretched to breaking point in holding its “Commonwealth” lines of communication open, the Prime Minister began his announcement of the fall of Singapore by blaming America. By an “act of sudden violent surprise, long calculated, balanced and prepared, and delivered under the crafty cloak of negotiation,” the Japanese had “smashed the shield of sea power which protected the fair lands and islands of the Pacific Ocean,” in fact “dashed” it “to the ground”—at Pearl Harbor. “Into the gap thus opened rushed the invading armies of Japan. We were exposed to the assault of a warrior race of nearly eighty millions with a large outfit of modern weapons, whose war-lords had been planning and scheming for this day, and looking forward to it perhaps for twenty years—while all the time our good people on both sides of the Atlantic were prating about perpetual peace and cutting down each other’s navies in order to set a good example. The overthrow, for a while, of British and United States sea power in the Pacific was like the breaking of some mighty dam,” the Prime Minister narrated in his bewitching, metaphorical style. “The long-gathered pent-up waters rushed down the peaceful valley,” he continued, “carrying ruin and devastation on their foam and spreading their inundations far and wide.”30
Only at the very end of his extended broadcast did the Prime Minister finally get to the point. Britain’s great outpost in the Far East, its equivalent of Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, he at last confessed to the millions
listening, had surrendered.
Churchill’s voice dropped a whole register, as he continued his broadcast on a new note: one of sadness and misery. “Tonight I speak to you at home. I speak to you in Australia and New Zealand, for whose safety we will strain every nerve, to our loyal friends in India and Burma, to our gallant allies, the Dutch and the Chinese, and to our kith and kin in the United States. I speak to you all under the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat. It is a British and Imperial defeat,” the Prime Minister acknowledged. “Singapore has fallen. All the Malay Peninsula has been overrun.”
It was, Churchill nevertheless urged his British imperial listeners, “one of those moments” when the “British race and nation” could “show their quality and their genius”: a moment when “they can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory.”31
The President had good reason to take a deep breath. Blaming the fall of Singapore and the British Empire in the Far East on America’s defeat at Pearl Harbor was decidedly impolitic in terms of American public opinion. As the President remarked to Hopkins, however, “Winston had to say something.” 32
The President’s patient magnanimity was an endearing trait—certainly one that contrasted with the characters of the dictators wreaking mayhem and genocidal violence on the innocent. Churchill had called them, in his broadcast, “barbarous antagonists”33—and they were. At Singapore the Japanese promptly began murdering tens of thousands of Chinese civilians;34 and in the Philippines MacArthur had already passed back to Washington reports of Japanese atrocities and mistreatment of prisoners in Manila so disturbing that he recommended the President take a number of Japanese immigrants in America hostage, as a surety against further barbarity35—a suggestion that in part persuaded Roosevelt to authorize the removal and internment of over one hundred thousand members of Japanese immigrant families from the California area. It would be one of the most controversial decisions the President ever made—licensing paranoia and xenophobia over the very virtues the President claimed as the moral basis of the democracies.36
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