Descent into Hell: The fall of Singapore - Pudu and Changi - the Thai Burma railway

by Peter Brune

  Britain, still recovering from the First World War’s drain upon its wealth, could neither financially afford to participate in this race, nor strategically afford to lose it. The British now embarked upon a capital ship-building program that demanded larger, faster and more heavily armed capital ships that could compete in a global war.

  After the First World War, Britain was faced with a further problem. British governments had long maintained a strong relationship with Japan, which had been strengthened by the Anglo–Japanese Alliance of 1902. That union had delivered British neutrality for Japan during the Russo–Japanese War; it had committed either signatory to go to the assistance of the other in defence of their interests in the Far East or India if attacked by any other power; and as a consequence, in 1917, it had seen Japan provide much-needed convoy protection for British ships in both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. As a result of the alliance, and the desire to increase their European fleet, the British were also able to reduce their China Squadron fleet based at Hong Kong. In return for this assistance, Japan had occupied the German concession of Tsingtao on the Shantung Peninsula in China, and had occupied the German Pacific possessions of the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands, which were retained as mandated territories after Versailles. A continuance of the Anglo–Japanese Alliance would place Britain in an invidious position, since potential antipathy between the US and Japan over the balance of power in China and conflicting interests in the western Pacific could harm its relationship with the United States. The problem was how to end the alliance without antagonising the Japanese.

  It is ironic that the United States was the first major power to offer a solution to the then current runaway naval arms race, and also the answer to Britain’s alliance with Japan. In 1921, the United States Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, called a conference to be convened in Washington during November of that year, for the prime purpose of a capping of the construction of capital ships.

  On 6 February 1922, the United States, Great Britain and its empire, Japan, France and Italy agreed to the following tonnage of capital ships: the United States 525 000 tons; Great Britain and her empire 525 000 tons; Japan 315 000 tons; France 175 000 tons; and Italy 175 000 tons. The provision of aircraft carriers was broadly on the same ratio and all replacements of capital ships were restricted to prescribed tonnages. Under Article 14 of the Washington Naval Agreement, the three major powers in the Pacific region—the United States, Britain and Japan—agreed to confine their spheres of influence to specific areas and not build any new bases or facilities outside them.

  For Britain, this meant ‘Hong Kong and any limited possessions east of the meridian 110° E, except those adjacent to Canada, Australia and New Zealand’.4 This undertaking maintained British assets in the Far East and the integrity of her sea routes to them, but meant that Britain could not build naval bases east of Singapore.

  The United States was restricted to ‘the insular possessions in the Pacific, except those adjacent to the coasts of the USA, Alaska (not including the Aleutian Islands), the Panama Canal zone and Hawaii (Pearl Harbor)’.5 The United States could henceforth not build bases west of Hawaii. The Japanese retained ‘the insular territories and possessions of Japan in the Pacific Ocean, to wit the Kurele, Bonin, Ryukyu Islands, Formosa and the Pescadores’.6 But Japan’s great gains were the mandated Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands—granted by the League of Nations—which were not mentioned in this treaty. By retaining those islands, Japan had potential bases across the American lines of communication to Guam and the Philippines, and therefore critical control over the north-west Pacific region. It was agreed by the signatories that the Washington Naval Treaty was to remain in force until December 1936.

  This treaty was followed quite quickly by two further agreements. The first was the Four-Power Treaty, signed by the USA, Britain, France and Japan, which provided for the ‘status quo in the Pacific’,7 and the determination to solve each of the signatories’ disputes, instigated from within or by an outside power, by peaceful means. The second was the Nine-Power Treaty where ‘the nine signatory powers agreed to respect the sovereignty, the rights and interests and the integrity of China’.8

  Within four years of the end of the ‘war to end all wars’, the victorious Western Allies could look to a recently defeated and militarily defunct Germany, which, by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, could not rebuild or maintain armed forces capable of any significant military action on the Continent or on the high seas; they could look to reparation payments as compensation for their crippling war costs; they had created the League of Nations as an instrument of collective international security; and in the Pacific, they saw the Washington Naval Treaty as a timely handbrake upon the costly and runaway naval arms race, and a recognition of each signatory’s interests and spheres of influence.

  As a consequence of the Treaty, the Royal Navy was bound to scrap 22 capital ships and four partly constructed battle cruisers, while the United States pledged the scrapping of four existing capital ships and a further seventeen under construction. From an Australian perspective the treaty was particularly ruthless. The fledgling Royal Australian Navy was considered a part of the British Navy and under the ratio of Britain and its empire to the US and to Japan of 5:5:3 in capital ships, Australia was duly forced to scuttle her battle cruiser HMAS Australia off Sydney Heads in April 1924. That battle cruiser was Australia’s only capital ship.

  Amongst all the idealism and optimism of the Washington Naval Treaty, in the end it was Britain who stood as the colossal loser. During the later part of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy had been capable of defeating any two of the world’s next great sea powers. ‘The sun never sets on the British Empire’ were not idle words—Britain had a far-flung empire across the globe, and the industrial, political and military might to protect its interests. But after the First World War and then the Washington Naval Treaty, the Royal Navy’s influence had to now encompass the Pacific as well as the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Britain’s considerable Far Eastern commercial interests lay fairly and squarely in that now exposed eastern hemisphere. Its commercial sea power and trade routes still existed, but the naval might required to protect them was in decline.

  In Europe, further feelings of security were established by the signing of the Locarno Treaties, negotiated in Locarno, Switzerland between 5 and 16 October 1925, and signed on 1 December of that year in London. Its purpose was to maintain the integrity of the postwar territorial settlements and an eventual diplomatic return of the German Weimar Republic to western European affairs and membership of the League of Nations.

  Procedures and time had now been created to mend the physical and economic wounds of the First World War but the psychological impact of that conflict lingered. It remained to be seen whether each of the victors would have the resolve to make the League of Nations work by enforcing its charter, and further, whether they would have the determination to provide for their own defence capabilities upon which the idealism of the League of Nations depended. But in the end the victors got off to a feeble start.

  President Woodrow Wilson had been the guiding hand in the agenda for the Versailles Treaty. He had delivered his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ address to the US Congress on 8 January 1918, in which he proclaimed amongst his framework, the abolition of secret treaties, free trade, disarmament, freedom of the seas, the establishment of Poland with access to the sea, and critically, the formation of the League of Nations. However, Britain questioned his assertion of freedom of the seas, France desired colossal reparation payments from Germany, and his own Congress was wary of the League’s potential to interfere in the jurisdiction of Congress to act in time of war. In the end, a number of the Fourteen Points were not accepted by the European powers and the United States Congress did not vote to join the League. Therefore, arguably the world’s greatest power had failed to join that organisation at its inception, a grave handicap to both its potency and therefore
its credibility.

  The United States now withdrew into a period of isolationism. This policy had two broad precepts. The first was that the US would henceforth avoid all foreign alliances, and therefore potential wars, that did not relate directly to its own territorial security. The second was that the US believed that it could operate as an independent, self-reliant economic power, lying behind a wall of protectionist tariffs. Three consecutive Republican presidents—Harding, Coolidge and Hoover—stuck rigidly to this doctrine. Perhaps President Calvin Coolidge best summed up the plan: ‘the chief business of the American people is business.’ After a period of economic turmoil, the United States entered into a period of unparalleled wealth. The business of business was booming. The United States had, for all intents and purposes, turned its back on the rest of the world.

  2

  THE FAR EAST AND NEAR NORTH

  In 1921, believing that a major war was unlikely for a period of at least ten years, the British Government decided that maintaining a fleet in both the western and eastern hemispheres was too costly, and in the end, unnecessary. Further, there was no naval base in the Far East capable of servicing a modern fleet, that is, a fleet still dominated by the massive Dreadnought class (and now further advanced) battleships of the time. Hong Kong was not an option, since it lacked the docking and repair facilities needed, and was also seen as being indefensible because of its isolation and close proximity to Formosa, a Japanese base. It was therefore decided that a central fleet would be held in European waters, from which the Far East could be reinforced in time of war, and that a new base would be built in that region to accommodate it.

  In selecting the location of a new Far Eastern naval base five factors were of paramount importance. The first was the need to be able to protect the enormous commercial maritime traffic which ran from Britain, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and then on to Ceylon, before diverging on two paths: one going south-east to Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and on to New Zealand; and the other through the Strait of Malacca, to Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Indo-China, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The second factor was the potential to deploy a capital ship-dominated navy quickly in the sea lanes described. In other words, the British fleet should be in reasonable proximity to the potential area of operations. The third factor was a consequence of the second: the fleet would have to be close enough to an existing network of refuelling points and oil production. The fourth was the need for a skilled pool of labour for the repair facilities provided. But it was the fifth factor that was most critical. Given that the first four factors were satisfied, ‘there would be an undesirable lapse of time between the moment that an emergency necessitated the despatch of a part of the fleet to the Far East and its arrival there’.1

  This final factor became known as the ‘Period before Relief ’, and it described the period during which any British or empire army or air force stationed at the new base had to be able to withstand an attack until well after the relieving naval force could engage its adversary. When the Committee of Imperial Defence applied these five prerequisites to possible base venues, two locations became worthy of close examination: Sydney and Singapore.

  Sydney possessed three advantages. The first was a more than satisfactory supply of skilled labour; the second was that it seemed at the time to be almost invulnerable to a Japanese attack—in 1921 the full potential of carrier-borne aircraft operations had not been fully appreciated nor developed; and third, that it possessed a suitable climate. But Sydney was judged to be too far from the sea lanes it would need to protect, and also too distant from the necessary oil fuel stocks needed to sustain its fleet.

  At the time the very criticisms of Sydney’s case were perceived as Singapore’s chief advantages. A naval base at Singapore would sit neatly near the fork on the Indian Ocean, where on the one hand, the commercial sea lanes veered away through the South China Sea to Indo-China and Shanghai, or south-eastwards to Australia and New Zealand. Singapore also lay close to its supplies of fuel oil. However, Singapore did not possess Sydney’s skilled labour pool, and it was nowhere near as secure as that Australian location. It also possessed a far more enervating climate.

  In the end, the committee decided on Singapore, as it was considered that a land-based assault upon that island via the jungle terrain in Malaya was unlikely. Further, it perceived that the rich deposits of Malayan rubber and tin, the Dutch East Indies oil supplies and the security of the sea lanes themselves were far too distant from a proposed Sydney naval base. But there were dissenting voices.2 Writing in the London Daily Telegraph in July 1923, Colonel Repington, a respected British military commentator, said:

  It is of little importance where ships are distributed in peace. The only test is war. It is the tradition of Japan to seize the initiative, and begin when the flag falls or a little before. We must expect the loss of Singapore and Hong Kong before our Grand Fleet sails out there. We must also expect the appearance of Japanese submarines in the Sea of Malacca. It is useless to send a battalion to Singapore when Japan has shown herself capable of capturing a first class fortress like Port Arthur, defended by 45,000 men.3

  Few took note of Repington’s critique in those first heady years after Versailles.

  With the successful negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty completed late in 1921, plans began for the new base at Singapore. A fundamental question was its location on that island. Two venues were considered. The first was the already established commercial site at Keppel Harbour on the south-eastern point of the island, while the second was to the northern side at the Johore Strait. The latter location was chosen, and reflected the current thought that any Japanese assault on Singapore was liable to come from the sea. The decision was finalised in February 1923.

  No sooner had this decision been taken than a Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald replaced the Baldwin Conservative Government in January 1924. And with that change of government in the United Kingdom came a radical foreign policy shift: there was an immediate suspension of funding for the Singapore naval base. G. Hermon Gill, Royal Australian Navy 1939–1942:

  . . . the decision not to proceed with the Singapore Base was on the grounds that to do so would be inconsistent with its policy of international cooperation through a strengthened and enlarged League of Nations, the settlement of disputes by conciliation and judicial arbitration, and the creation of conditions which would make a comprehensive agreement on limitation of armaments possible.4

  This policy reflected two thought processes. The first was a lofty, idealistic aspiration towards a world community where war was to be virtually outlawed by negotiation, collective security and disarmament. But surely the widespread optimism of the period was underpinned by the still lingering psychological wounds incurred during the First World War: the cost in young lives and a crippling economic burden that must be avoided at almost any cost.

  Reflecting this idealism and hope, severe cuts were taken to British defence spending. In 1921–22 the Royal Navy had received funds for expenditure of £95 000 000 which was reduced to £52 000 000 in 1923–24; in 1921–22 the British Army had received £80 000 000 which was cut to £50 000 000 in 1923–24; and for the same period, the Royal Air Force funding had been slashed from £13 000 000 to £9 000 000.5 Therefore, the total defence budget reduction amounted to £77 000 000 or 41 per cent in two short years. This critical funding blunder was compounded by a political mechanism to maintain limited defence spending for the forseeable future. A ‘ten year rule’ had been introduced in August 1919 which had, as its cornerstone, the assertion that Britain would not be involved in a major war for a ten-year period. In the event the forecast was proven accurate, but the damage done to Britain’s long-term ability to protect its empire, and critically, to maintain its industrial infrastructure in the event of a future war, was severely impaired. In the end, ‘the ten year rule’ was nothing more than a concerted political ploy for successive governments to abstain from adequate m
ilitary funding.

  However, the MacDonald Labour Government had a short period in office when, in November 1924, Stanley Baldwin led the Conservatives to a resounding victory. The new government immediately announced a continuance of funding for the Singapore Base. A subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence reaffirmed the site of the Johore Strait as the location of the base and then proceeded to examine the best means of defending it. The decision came down to an ongoing and spirited argument as to whether the emphasis should be on fixed guns or aircraft cover. Kirby, in The War Against Japan:

  The Royal Air Force was the worst offender in this respect, for, having seen their wartime strength waste away after 1918, they tended, under the leadership of Sir Hugh, later Lord, Trenchard, to make claims they could not substantiate, claims which brought them into head-on clashes with the other two services.6

  The Royal Air Force argument was based on the belief that heavy coastal guns were obsolete and that torpedo bombers, guided by reconnaissance planes and protected by fighters, were capable of a much greater range and were both a greater deterrent and a more potent offensive weapon. Further they argued, unlike the option of fixed guns, aircraft could be deployed elsewhere in times of peace and moved to Singapore as the need arose.

  The army and navy took the view that torpedo planes were yet to prove their ability to sink capital ships, that there was no established reinforcement route to Singapore, and critically, that the Royal Air Force did not possess the logistical capability to deploy the necessary ground crews at short notice.

  At the time of these deliberations, Singapore had five 9.2-inch guns to protect Keppel Harbour, which were predominantly located to the south on two islands. In the end, the subcommittee placed an each way bet. In July 1926, it recommended the installation of a number of close and medium guns and three 15-inch heavy guns, and that the issue of torpedo planes should be examined in the future. These decisions caused ongoing animosity between the British Army and the Royal Air Force and were to prove an impediment to the long-term defence of Singapore.