Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  But one of his Australian mates was not so fortunate. Robert ‘Bob’ Davies, a slight, fair-haired boy, had turned 18 just three weeks before Force Z left Singapore. He ignored the order to leave, strapped himself to a 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun and was last seen still firing at the diving enemy as the ship went down. He ‘seemed as happy as a sand-boy’, said a lieutenant who saw him go.12 A year later, his grieving parents, Tom and Mabel Davies, of suburban Greenwich in Sydney, learned that their only son had been awarded a Mention in Despatches and were paid a ‘war gratuity’ of £93 and 15 shillings. It should have been a Victoria Cross.

  Prince of Wales now had only minutes to live. As Repulse laboured in her death throes, the flagship took another spread of torpedoes and then one last bomb, which left her little more than a wreck marked by a soaring plume of black smoke. She too began to capsize. Those of her crew still alive jumped from her, stick figures struggling in the sunlight. Phillips and Prince of Wales’s Captain, John Leach, went down with the ship.

  Mission accomplished, with the loss of only three of their own, the Japanese aircraft wheeled off back towards Saigon, mercifully making no attempt to interfere with the destroyers rescuing the survivors. Vampire alone picked up 225 men, including Captain Tennant, many of them shaking from shock and exhaustion, some unrecognisable from cruel burns, four to die of their wounds. Yet, in the final act of the tragedy, there was one more scene to play. Eleven Brewster Buffalo fighters of the RAF appeared on the horizon as Prince of Wales slipped below the surface. They had answered Tennant’s call for help, the one Phillips should have made two hours earlier. By the time they got there, the enemy had vanished. A week later, one of the Japanese pilots, Lieutenant Haruki Iki, flew his Betty bomber back over the scene and dropped two wreaths onto the water, one for his fallen comrades and one for the British.

  Force Z lost 837 men. The loss to British power and prestige was incalculable. Churchill was working in bed at 10 Downing Street when he was given the news in a phone call from the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound. ‘I was thankful to be alone. In all the war I never received a more direct shock,’ he wrote later.13 Within days, the entire balance of force in the Pacific had swung decisively to the enemy. The US Pacific Fleet lay shattered in Pearl Harbor. The Commonwealth navies, principally those of the British and the Australians, with their Dutch allies, had no capital ships to counter what was now the alarming mastery of the Imperial Japanese Navy. And the Japanese Army was advancing steadily down the Malay Peninsula towards Fortress Singapore, which was now being bombed each day.

  On 19 December, Yamashita’s troops occupied the Malayan island of Penang, after days of heavy bombing that killed thousands of local people. The Europeans fled in panic, leaving behind millions of dollars in local banks and deserting the mostly Straits Chinese population who, well aware of the Japanese rape of their ancestral homeland, feared the worst. There was no room for Chinese refugees in Singapore, it was decided by the authorities on the island. An Indian newspaper editor was left to haul down the British flag at Fort Cornwallis.

  Three days later, across the South China Sea, Japan’s invasion of the Philippines began in force. Lieutenant-General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army surged ashore in the Lingayen Gulf north of Manila, and by Christmas Eve General MacArthur was beginning his headlong retreat to make a fighting stand on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island in Manila Bay. On Christmas Day itself, Imperial Japan drove another nail into the coffin of Imperial Britain when the Governor of Hong Kong surrendered the colony after a bloody siege of just over two weeks. The censor kept this dire news from the Australian people for a few days to avoid adding to the gloom. As the rising-sun flag of Japan swept onwards, newspaper readers and radio listeners were told not of retreat and rout but of Allied forces making strategic withdrawals to prepared positions after inflicting heavy losses on the enemy.

  At least there was some good news that December. In North Africa, the British 8th Army relieved the garrison at Tobruk, and, again on Christmas Day, Rommel’s Afrikakorps was sent packing from Benghazi. In Russia, the winter snows and heroic resistance from the Red Army stalled the German advance on Moscow, prompting another bout of fury from the Führer, who sacked some generals and took personal command of BARBAROSSA. But, for Australians, these Allied successes were faraway happenings that gave little consolation. Their eyes were turned north. All would depend on Fortress Singapore.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE FALL OF FORTRESS SINGAPORE

  For Perth’s ship’s company, that Christmas of 1941 was tinged with foreboding. They spent the day in Sydney Harbour on the No. 1 Buoy in Farm Cove. Decorations went up in the mess decks, and the officers served dinner to their sailors in the traditional navy way, but the festive mood was subdued. Overlying everything was the knowledge that sooner or later they would be off to fight the Japanese. ‘A Jerry Christmas and a Jappy New Year’, they told each other.

  Sailors with homes ashore got leave, but those from interstate had to content themselves with trying to make long-distance phone calls over crackling lines – almost an impossibility in wartime. Reg Whiting and his family – Allie and the two boys – shared Christmas dinner with some neighbours at Chatswood, the adults doing their best to be festive in paper party hats. He farewelled his family on Boxing Day with a heavy heart, to return to the ship with the rest of her crew. Perhaps the wives and sweethearts were consoled by a fiery editorial in the Christmas edition of the Women’s Weekly:

  Be Steadfast!

  In the moving and dramatic words of our Prime Minister, ‘Australia is at battle stations.’ Not the far flung fight of other wars, but war in the Pacific, with the yellow men, earth hungry, driven hard, laying lean hands on our outposts and coastlines.

  To the women of Australia in this terrible emergency, in humble duty we say:

  BE STEADFAST AND ALL WILL BE WELL.

  John Curtin spent his Christmas at The Lodge in Canberra, sending a loving telegram to Elsie at home in Perth and inviting a group of RAAF airmen from Western Australia to join him at lunch. Great matters weighed heavily upon him. For all the public talk of strategic withdrawals, Australia’s Prime Minister had been warned of the disaster to come. Just two days earlier, on 23 December, the Australian representative in Singapore, V. G. Bowden, an ambassador in all but name, had outlined the gathering menace in a chilling cable to the Department of External Affairs. It bears repeating in full:

  Referring to my recent messages I feel that I must emphasize that the deterioration of the air position in the Malayan defence is assuming landslide proportions and in my firm belief is likely to cause a collapse in the whole defence system. Expected arrival of modern fighter planes in boxes requiring weeks to assemble under the danger of destruction by bombing cannot save the position. The arrival of military reinforcements expected will be absorbed in relieving the tired front line troops and will create little difference. British defence policy now concentrates greater companies of fighter and anti-aircraft defence on Singapore island to protect the naval base, depriving the forward troops of such defence including the AIF.

  Present measures for the reinforcement of Malayan defences can from a practical viewpoint be regarded as little more than gestures. In my belief the only thing that might save Singapore would be the immediate despatch from the Middle East by air of powerful reinforcements, large numbers of the latest fighter aircraft with ample operationally trained personnel. Reinforcements of troops should be not in brigades but in divisions and to be of use they must arrive urgently. Anything that is not powerful, modern and immediate is futile.

  As things stand at present fall of Singapore is to my mind only a matter of weeks. If Singapore and the AIF in Malaya are to be saved there must be very radical and effective action immediately.

  Doubtful whether the visit of an Australian Minister can now have any effect as the plain fact is that without immediate air reinforcements Singapore must fall. Need for decision and action is a matter of hou
rs not days.1

  Bowden’s cable landed in Canberra like the crack of doom. The AIF’s 8th Division would have to meet the Japanese thrust down the Malay Peninsula. RAAF squadrons were fighting there, and the RAN had ships in the Far Eastern Fleet. As Curtin entertained his guests to plum pudding at The Lodge, he contemplated the possibility of a disaster for Australian arms that would dwarf the defeats in Greece and Crete – that is, if Bowden’s assessment was accurate. There was every reason to believe it was.

  Among the wretched crew who took centre stage in the tragedy of Singapore, Vivian Gordon Bowden comes shining through. He kept his head when all around him were losing theirs. His reports to the government were measured and prescient. Born at Stanmore in Sydney, educated at Shore, the Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and in Britain, Bowden had spent most of his working life as a businessman, first in Japan and then in China, based in Shanghai. During the First World War, he had served with the Royal Engineers, was mentioned in despatches and discharged with the rank of major. Tall, elegant and cultured, he spoke Chinese and some Japanese and was as well informed on Asian affairs as any European could be. In late 1941, at the age of 57, he was asked by the fledgling Australian External Affairs Department to be its eyes and ears in Singapore, where he took a seat on the Far East War Council of the colony’s civil and military pro-consuls. The British, with lofty arrogance, dismissed him as a lightweight colonial ‘of no account’.2 He was anything but.

  Compounding Curtin’s worries was the knowledge that Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting again to take decisions that would intimately affect Australia’s security, but without any Australian input. Churchill and his service chiefs had made a hazardous journey across the Atlantic in the battleship Duke of York to spend Christmas at the White House for a conference code-named ARCADIA, intent on convincing the President that the defeat of Germany must take priority. Arrangements would have to be made for the conduct of the war in the Pacific, but, to the British Prime Minister, beating Hitler was paramount. On 23 December, Curtin sent the Australian Minister in Washington, Richard Casey, a message that he was instructed to place before both men:

  The fall of Singapore would mean the isolation of Philippines, the fall of NEI [the Netherlands East Indies] and attempts to smother all other bases. This would also sever our communications between the Indian and Pacific Oceans in this region. The set back would be as serious to USA interests as to our own.

  The reinforcements earmarked by United Kingdom Government for despatch seem to us to be utterly inadequate especially in relation to aircraft, particularly fighters.

  At this time, small reinforcements are of little avail. In truth the amount of resistance to Japan in Malaya will depend directly on the amount of assistance provided by Governments of United Kingdom and United States.3

  Churchill was irritated by Curtin’s insistence, and on Christmas Day from his room in the White House he fired back a frosty reply, saying that much was being done to reinforce Singapore and that ‘you may count on me doing everything possible to strengthen the whole front from Rangoon to Port Darwin. I am finding co-operation from our American allies. I shall wire more definitely in a day or two.’4

  But Curtin had already planned his next move, and this time it would be public. He laid down what has since become the enduring cornerstone of Australian foreign policy. Writing a New Year’s message to the nation in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December, he reached across the Pacific to seek a partnership with the United States. It was a radical realignment of Australia’s reliance on the protection of powerful friends:

  We look for a solid and impregnable barrier of the Democracies against the three Axis Powers, and we refuse to accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict. By that it is not meant that any one of the other theatres of war is of less importance than the Pacific, but that Australia asks for a concerted plan evoking the greatest strength at the Democracies’ disposal, determined upon hurling Japan back.

  The Australian Government, therefore, regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan.

  Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

  We know the problems that the United Kingdom faces. We know the constant threat of invasion. We know the dangers of dispersal of strength, but we know too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on.

  We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go, and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its keystone, which will give to our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy.5

  Its effect was explosive, almost certainly more than Curtin had intended. Australian conservatives led by the new opposition leader, Billy Hughes, feared it meant a turning away from the British Empire. Churchill was insulted, believing that it could only encourage the enemy, and Roosevelt reportedly thought Curtin’s words reeked of ‘disloyalty’. But Curtin had correctly called the course of the war and the construction of the great American–Australian alliance that would see it won.

  Churchill’s persuasive powers at the ARCADIA conference swung Roosevelt to the ‘Hitler first’ strategy – no mean achievement. America’s arsenals, its factories, its money, its men, would be directed primarily across the Atlantic to the liberation of Europe. As for the theatre of war in South East Asia, it would come under a new joint command to be known as ABDA, the initials standing for America, Britain, the Dutch and Australia. On 29 December, Churchill informed Curtin that the Supreme Commander of ABDA would be none other than General Wavell, the man who had presided over the disasters of Greece and Crete. Wavell ‘would receive his orders from an appropriate joint body who will be responsible to me as the Minister of Defence and to the President of the United States who is also Commander-in-Chief of all United States Forces,’ Churchill wrote.6

  Curtin’s fears were borne out. Australia, a junior partner, would have no say in the direction of ABDA. Nor, for that matter, would the Dutch, even though their empire formed a vast part of the ABDA theatre. More steely telegrams passed between Curtin and Churchill, but the British Prime Minister remained unmoved. So did Roosevelt. Control would remain in the hands of Washington and London.

  The cast of characters who presided over the fall of Singapore could have come from Gilbert and Sullivan, with a dash of P. G. Wodehouse. With their pith helmets and voluminous ‘Bombay Bloomer’ shorts, their clipped moustaches and well-cut white dinner jackets, their English public-school manners and an ingrained belief in the superiority of the British race, they were equipped as needs be to maintain dominion over palm and pine in times of peace. The demands of war stripped them bare, revealing a tragicomic Second Eleven with feet of clay. Civil and military, they fought endless bureaucratic turf wars, each doggedly protecting his own patch and privileges.

  At the apex of this fragile imperial pyramid stood the gilded figure of Sir Thomas Shenton Whitelegge Thomas KCMG, Governor of the Straits Settlements, which included Singapore, since 1934. At the age of 62, this son of a country vicar was drawing to the end of a lifelong career of blameless mediocrity administering the outposts of the King Emperor’s realm. Sir Shenton, as he preferred to be known, was notorious in the colony for avoiding difficult decisions and for agreeing with the opinion of the last person he had spoken to. Not without physical courage, he issued daily proclamations urging the populace to stand firm and, even as the bombs were dropping, he dressed for dinner each night with his ailing wife, Daisy.

  The Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, came from a similar mould. A product of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, who had first fought in the Boer War, he had gained a reputation in the RAF for his
trenchant opposition to enclosed cockpits in fighter aircraft. The Japanese, he thought, were ‘sub-human specimens’ incapable of forming ‘an intelligent fighting force’.7 In the heavy Singapore heat, he frequently fell asleep in meetings.

  Thomas fumed that Brooke-Popham trespassed on his domain. Depending on who had his ear at any given moment, the Governor protested either that the military were provoking the Japanese by their presence or that they were not doing enough to bolster the island’s defences. Brooke-Popham found the Governor irritating and studiously ignored him. Churchill, exasperated by the infighting, sent a Cabinet minister, Alfred Duff Cooper, to bang Singapore heads together. Cooper, an exquisite figure in London society, reported back that Brooke-Popham was ‘damned near gaga’ and that Thomas had done little or nothing to prepare the civilian population for war. He attempted, between elegant dinner parties, to prod the Governor into action but made sure that he and his wife, the even more exquisite Lady Diana Cooper, were safely back home when the siege of Singapore began.

  On the ground, the burden of the fight fell upon Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest Percival, who had been appointed General Officer Commanding (GOC) Malaya in April 1941. He had survived the horrors of the Somme in 1916, been wounded four times and won a Military Cross. In the inter-war years, he was seen as a solid if unimaginative staff officer. In Malaya, promoted beyond his abilities, that lack of imagination was his undoing. Urged by his staff to strengthen the northern approach to Singapore, where the Japanese would eventually land on the island, he announced that ‘defences are bad for morale, for both troops and civilians’.8 And there was one other unfortunate flaw: Percival looked distinctly odd. Tall and lanky, with buck teeth and very little chin, sloping shoulders, a sunken chest and knobbly knees, he was a caricature of the pukka British staff wallah. Even a sympathetic biographer has said that he was ‘condemned by photography’.9 This should not have mattered, but neither his figure nor his diffident manner naturally commanded loyalty or obedience, most crucially from the unruly generals who were his immediate subordinates. These included the Australian Gordon Bennett.