Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

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  India was, of course, the jewel of the British Empire in the Far East, but the Empire also included Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, British North Borneo (now Sabah), Sarawak and Brunei, myriad Pacific islands among which Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were the more important, and, while not Asiatic but nevertheless in the area, the self-governing white Dominions of Australia and New Zealand. Japan’s economic ambitions in 1940 did not then include India or Australasia (although the Japanese would make use of anti-British feeling amongst some Indian would-be politicians) but they certainly did include Malaya – for its raw materials – and Singapore – for its naval base. That Malaya produced 38 per cent of the world’s rubber and 58 per cent of its tin makes British neglect of her defences all the more disgraceful. Successive governments had found other priorities and any excuse to avoid spending money in the Far East was eagerly seized upon, regardless of what, from the end of the Washington Naval Conference at least, was staring them in the face. In 1925 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, opposing the naval estimates, said that there was no possibility of a war with a first-class navy for at least twenty years, and that ‘It is inconceivable that in our lifetime and in that of our children, Japan could pose a threat to the security of the British Empire in the East.’43 Even as late as October 1939, when war had broken out in Europe and he was once more First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill wrote: ‘Consider how vain is the menace that Japan will send a fleet and army to conquer Singapore, which is as far from Japan as Southampton is from New York. . . do not let us worry about this bugbear… there will be no attack in any period which our foresight can measure.’44 So much for the far-sighted statesman.

  The population of British Malaya, which then included Singapore, was around 5.5 million. Just over half were Chinese who lived in the towns and ran the businesses, while the Malays provided the sultans and owned the land. In addition, there were 750,000 Indians of various races, who manned large parts of the civil service, and 100,000 ‘others’. The peacetime defences of the Malayan peninsula rested in the regular Malay Regiment, two battalions of native soldiers with British officers, and four battalions of part-time volunteers. The governance of Malaya was unwieldy, some said ramshackle. Technically it comprised the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, Malacca and Labuan (an island off North Borneo), which were ruled directly as colonies, and the Malay states, a patchwork of fiefdoms where the British had opted to rule indirectly through their sultans. The British had tried to persuade the rulers of these states to join together into one nation, but all they had managed to do was to create a loose federation of some, while others remained outside it. The Governor – properly the Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner to the Malay States – was an experienced colonial administrator, Sir Shenton Thomas. Known to the Malayan civil service as Tom-Tom because of his long service in Africa, he had been in post since 1934, and had the war in Europe not erupted would have retired in 1939 at the age of sixty. A perfectly decent man, he was faced with the near-impossible task of persuading the states to cooperate in defensive measures, but lacked the force of personality and the ruthlessness to achieve unanimity. He was the titular Chairman of the Defence Committee of which the three service chiefs were members and had little success in either gaining their respect or in preventing the all too common inter-service bickering.

  The Commander-in-Chief Far East from October 1940 was Air Chief Marshal Sir Henry Brooke-Popham. Originally an infantryman, a pioneer of military aviation and a former governor of Kenya, Brooke-Popham was responsible for the defence not only of Malaya but of Burma, Hong Kong and various obscure islands too. Despite his title, he did not command the Royal Navy, which reported direct to the First Sea Lord in London, and he could not order civilian administrators to do anything. They continued reporting to their ministers in London in a leisurely fashion, and in many cases cooperated only reluctantly with his requests for the construction of barracks, roads and defences. His pleas for reinforcement and money fell on the generally deaf ears of a home government far more concerned with what was happening in Europe, but by the summer of 1941 the garrison of Malaya and Singapore was augmented by Lieutenant-General Sir Lewis Heath’s III Indian Corps of two Indian divisions and one independent brigade, and an Australian division commanded by Major-General Gordon Bennett.

  In May 1941 Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival was appointed General Officer Commanding Malaya. Percival had served in Malaya as a colonel from 1936 to 1938 and had expressed concern then as to the vulnerability of the territory to attack by the Japanese, who, he thought, would land in Thailand and advance southward towards Singapore. His paper outlining the risk and asking for more funding for defence was lodged in the War Office, drawn to the attention of the minister and forgotten. After the first war, British admirals had wanted Singapore to be developed into a base for a Far East fleet – one which could defend the sea routes to India from the east and to Australia from the north, and deter any Japanese ambitions – but the navy had been starved of funding and in any case now had few ships in the area, most having been withdrawn for service in the North Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Defences on the landward side were inadequate, as it was considered in London that no military force of any size could advance for any distance through the Malayan jungle. Contrary to the accepted myth, however, the guns of the shore batteries could certainly be pointed inland: the problem was that the ammunition with which they were equipped was armour-piercing and designed for taking on ships, not targets on land.

  There was a plan for the defence of Malaya and Singapore. It presupposed that ships of the Royal Navy would intercept any Japanese convoy and destroy it. True, there were now not many ships, but in that case air power would suffice to stop any landing. Unfortunately, demands for more aircraft went unheeded and Malaya’s sole air power consisted not of the 500 Hurricanes and Spitfires which Brooke-Popham had asked for, but 158 obsolete Brewster Buffalo fighters and two squadrons of even more obsolete Vickers Vildebeest torpedo-bombers, no match for the Japanese navy’s Zero fighters and the army’s Oscars. There was not a single tank in the country. As the best landing places in the event of Japanese attack were over the border in Thailand, Operation Matador saw the British crossing the border and establishing defensive positions in Thailand. This would, of course, mean invading a neutral country, but needs must. When on 22 November 1941, certain that a Japanese offensive was on the way, Brooke-Popham asked London for permission to implement Matador, the Cabinet got frightfully worked up and, as politicians do, procrastinated. Eventually, on 5 December, permission was granted. By then, however, it was too late.

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  Hong Kong, the British trading post at the mouth of the Pearl River, was the last British possession on the mainland of China. The British had withdrawn their small garrison from Shanghai under Japanese pressure, but Shanghai was an international city, not British sovereign territory, like Hong Kong. Hong Kong was never going to be defensible. It was only 400 square miles in size, and but twenty miles from the border to the southern tip of Hong Kong Island. Since October 1938 the Japanese army had been just north of the Chinese border and British officers popping across to Shum Shun (now Shen Zen) for a drink might rub shoulders (literally) with Japanese officers patronizing the same crowded bars. It was impossible to prevent Japanese intelligence from finding out exactly where the British garrison was stationed, how big it was and what it might do if attacked. The Hong Kong Police Special Branch had ample warning that an attack was coming, but all that the Commander British Forces, Major-General Christopher Maltby of the Indian Army, could do if it came would be to hold on and delay the enemy as long as possible. That was what the British government had instructed the governor, Sir Mark Young, to do in the hope that a stout resistance in Hong Kong, albeit one which would ultimately end in defeat, would buy time for the rest of the Empire in the East and avoid the damage to British prestige that would inevitably be attached to a spee
dy, even if realistic, surrender. To carry out his mission, Maltby had two British, two Indian and two Canadian infantry battalions, the Hong Kong Chinese Regiment, an infantry regiment recruited locally, and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, a part-time unit of expatriate Britons unkindly referred to by many as a uniformed drinking club. In support were some Royal Engineers and the artillery of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Royal Artillery, a flotilla of one destroyer and a dozen motor torpedo and gunboats, and a tiny RAF contingent based at Kai Tak airport. One of the British infantry battalions, 2nd Royal Scots, had been diverted on its way home from India after seven years there and was in a state of near mutiny, and the other, 1 Middlesex, was actually a machine-gun battalion.* The two Canadian battalions, 1st Winnipeg Grenadiers and 1st Royal Rifles of Canada, had been rushed there in late 1941 and were scantily trained. Maltby’s plan was to defend along the twelve-mile ‘gin drinkers’ line’ in the New Territories, that part of the colony north of Kowloon leased to Britain in 1898, and then to withdraw back to the Island, making the attacker pay dearly for every inch gained. It was a perfectly practical, if in the event hopelessly optimistic, operational plan.

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  French Indo-China – Cambodia, Laos and what is now Vietnam but was then Annam, Tonkin and Cochin China – had a population of 25 million Buddhists and around 40,000 Europeans. Apart from Cochin China, which the French ruled directly as a colony, the imperial power governed through local kings, who were subject to the direction of a French governor general. By 1940 the garrison was around 100,000 strong, a mix of locally enlisted soldiers with French officers, Frenchmen of the Colonial Army and 20,000 of the French Foreign Legion. Once Hainan Island had been taken from China by the Japanese in February 1939, the threat to Indo-China was obvious, and, as it was the world’s third-largest producer of rice, it could not but be attractive to proponents of Japanese expansion. After the French surrender to the Germans in 1940, Japan demanded that the railway from Haiphong in north Vietnam to Yunnan province in China, a line that was a main supply route for Chiang Kaishek’s nationalist Chinese forces, be closed.* The French Governor General, General Georges Catroux, was inclined to surrender to force majeure but the Vichy French government thought otherwise and replaced Catroux with Vice-Admiral Jean Decoux. Decoux tried to maintain the independence of the French empire in the East without provoking the Japanese, and put down nationalist risings with great severity. In the end, however, he had to compromise: there were a number of skirmishes when Japanese troops ‘accidentally’ attacked the French Army and then said how sorry they were; the use of bases was granted and in July 1941 the Japanese occupied Saigon and sent troops into Cambodia. By the autumn of that year there were 35,000 Japanese in French Indo-China, which carried on under its French administration but was now effectively controlled by the Japanese.

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  At 262,000 square miles, Burma is the largest country on the South-East Asian mainland. Its terrain ranges from 20,000-foot-high mountains in the north to swamps, huge rivers and a dry central plain. It is malarial, subject to an annual monsoon, short of roads and generally difficult to fight over. One million of its population were mountain tribes, the Chins, Kachins and Nagas, 4 million were Karens and 2 million were Shan, all of whom were generally pro-British if only because the British had prevented the Burmans from persecuting them. A legacy from Burma being governed from India until 1937 was the presence of around a million Indians, who largely staffed the civil service. The rest, around 10 million Burmans, were better educated and more politically aware than the rest, and some of their leaders were liable to intrigue against British rule and to conspire with the Japanese in the hope that they might thereby obtain independence. In fact, there was a considerable amount of democracy in Burma, with a legislative council elected by a fairly wide franchise, although defence and foreign affairs remained the prerogative of the Governor General, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. As the world’s largest producer of teak and provider of 10 per cent of the world’s tungsten, as well as oil, rice and rubber, Burma was attractive to the Japanese while occupation would provide flank protection for an attack on Malaya and Singapore. A major irritant, from the Japanese point of view, was the existence of the Burma Road, which had been opened in 1938 and ran from the railhead at Lashio for 350 miles eastwards into China. Once the Japanese had browbeaten the administration of French Indo-China into closing the railway line to China and had persuaded Stalin to close his link, the Burma Road remained Chiang Kai-shek’s only supply route from the outside world. The Japanese protested to Britain and the British, somewhat cravenly, did close the road in July 1940 until, having screwed up a little more courage, they reopened it in October.

  The standing garrison in Burma consisted of the Burma Frontier Force of six infantry battalions formed from the old Burma Military Police and manned mainly by Gurkhas with some Sikhs and Punjabi Mussalmans, and four battalions of the Burma Rifles recruited from Chins, Karens and Cochins, with a stiffening of Gurkhas. All had British officers seconded from the Indian Army, and Burmans were not recruited, being viewed as unreliable and not soldier material. As the storm clouds gathered, these regiments were expanded: more battalions were raised and the ban on Burmans was relaxed. By 1941 there were eleven battalions or battalion-sized units of the Burma Frontier Force, and twelve battalions of Burma Rifles, all at various stages of training. There were no tanks and artillery support came from a part-time artillery regiment, while the Burma Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve manned a motley flotilla of river craft. In 1941 there was a hurried augmentation in the shape of the Indian 17 Division, a regular division which had been intended for North Africa but was diverted to Burma instead.

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  In Japan the militarists were firmly in the driving seat by 1941. Political parties, never very influential anyway, were abolished in 1940 and replaced in the Diet, the parliament, by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and from 1939 the army vice-minister and then minister was Lieutenant-General Hideki Tojo, a hardliner who had commanded the Kwantung Army’s Kempeitai or military police, one of the nastier parts of a nasty army. It was Tojo who pushed for troops to be sent into French Indo-China in July 1941, which led to the USA adding to its existing ban on the export of oil and scrap metal to Japan by a total trade embargo. In March 1941 the foreign minister, Matsuoka, went to Berlin, where both Hitler and Göring urged him to take Singapore. The minister was evasive; he still hoped to avoid widening the war, and, despite discouragement from Ribbentrop and a warning from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that Germany would soon attack Russia, he moved on to Moscow and signed a neutrality pact with Stalin. Germany’s attack on the USSR in June 1941 strengthened the war party in Tokyo – even if Stalin had no intention of keeping to the pact, Japan need not now fear attack from the rear if she expanded southwards. In September 1941, as relations with the Western powers deteriorated even further, an imperial conference decided, on Tojo’s recommendation, to go to war with the UK and the USA if the situation could not be resolved by October. The prime minister, Konoe, unable to repair relations with the West, resigned in October and the emperor asked Tojo to form a cabinet, which he did, becoming prime minister and also taking the posts of army minister and home minister. In November the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, delivered a note to the Japanese government saying that trade could only be resumed if Japan withdrew from China. There was no mention of Manchukuo or of Korea, but the Japanese chose to take the note as an ultimatum.

  Japanese war aims were partly racial – the white races had humiliated the Japanese and would now be chased out of Asia – and partly economic – the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that would make Japan self-sufficient. There was also the heady attraction of imperialist aggrandisement, pure and simple. The British were only just hanging on in the West, they could do little in the East, and the Dutch were already beaten. Because the Philippines could not be bypassed to leave a potential threat in the centre of t
he new empire, war with America could not be avoided. Yet opinion was still divided, even amongst Japan’s military leaders. The navy was wary about going to war with America. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the commander of the Combined Fleet upon which the burden of naval activity would fall, had been a student at Harvard and later a naval attaché in Washington, and he well knew the economic potential of the USA and had openly and stridently opposed going to war with her. Indeed, so vociferously had Yamamoto expressed his views as navy vice-minister that he ran the risk of assassination if he stayed on land, and his minister had given him a command, that of the fleet, at sea. The navy minister himself pointed out to the cabinet that America vastly out-produced Japan in steel and coal, and that she could build both more ships and more aircraft. Crucially, he emphasized, Japan was now subject to a total oil embargo and had stocks for only two years, or eighteen months of military consumption; he opposed war, but, if it was inevitable, then it had better be soon and it had better be over swiftly. Even the more warlike service, the army, did not speak with one voice. There were those who wanted to attack the USSR via Siberia now that Germany had launched Barbarossa, those who wanted to strike both north and south, and even those who would prefer not to go to war at all. Tojo, seen in hindsight as the prime mover of aggression and hanged for it in 1948, was particularly concerned that, if Japan did go to war, the normal courtesies should be observed – war should be formally declared: a surprise attack without warning would be dishonourable.