Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Australians put up a stout resistance but were vastly outnumbered and out of communication with the rest of the force. More Japanese landed, following the first wave, the defenders fell back and at 2200 hours on 9 February the Imperial Guards Division began to cross in the Causeway area; engineers immediately began to repair the damage done by British demolitions and were soon able to begin transporting tanks and more troops across it. The defenders fell back and by evening on 9 February the Japanese were firmly on the island and were not going to be dislodged. In the confusion one Australian brigade withdrew when it should not have done, allowing the Japanese to outflank and force the withdrawal of the rest of the division. On 10 February, General Wavell flew in from Java, was unhappy at what he saw, ordered immediate counter-attacks on the Japanese lodgements and, after instructing Percival that his men were to fight on to the last, flew out again. With him went the last of the Hurricanes and the one surviving Buffalo – their airstrips were increasingly under fire and fifth columnists had even managed to pour rubber latex into some fuel tanks. In fact, none of the units in the line was capable of carrying out a counter-attack: only fresh troops could have done it and there were none. The Australian division, with some honourable exceptions, was not far off collective insubordination and, when General Bennett tried to organize a counter-attack, faulty communications and the obvious hopelessness of the task only made matters worse. Percival ordered a withdrawal to a last-stand position around Singapore City and the remaining airfield. By the morning of 12 February, despite stubborn resistance by 2/9 Gurkhas and Australian anti-tank gunners, Japanese tanks had penetrated as far as Bukit Timah, where they captured large stocks of British ammunition, rations and fuel and were now only five miles from Singapore City. By this time discipline in some units was beginning to break down, and gangs of deserters were reported in the town, hiding out in abandoned buildings and looting houses whose occupants had fled, forcing themselves on board ships leaving for safer harbours or locking themselves in liquor stores for one last gigantic beano. The Australian prime minister, John Curtin, hearing from his civilian representatives in Singapore that large numbers of deserters had forced themselves on to ships leaving for Sumatra and well aware of the punishment laid down by military law for the offence of desertion in the face of the enemy, sent a telegram to Wavell insisting that no Australian soldiers were to be executed without the agreement of the government of Australia. None was. There were far too many miscreants for the Royal Military Police to control and the matter has rather been skated over in post-war official accounts, but it would appear that the rot started with men of the 1,900 individual reinforcements who arrived from Australia on 24 January, some with only two weeks’ training and some with none at all, and with members of British and Australian administrative units based around the docks and in the city. It is, of course, a lot easier to desert from a stores depot or a reinforcement camp than from an infantry battalion in the field.

  By the morning of 13 February it was clear to Percival that, despite the rantings of the prime minister in London, any prolonged resistance was out of the question. His reserve ammunition was in Japanese hands; the water-pumping station had been put out of action; fires were raging throughout the city; the Australian troops were convinced that they could do no more; swollen by refugees, the population in a three-mile radius from the town was over a million and civilian casualties had reached a stage where they could not be properly cared for. That day and the next the Japanese made further gains and on the morning of the 15thGeneral Percival sent a deputation of the brigadier administration, the colonial secretary and an interpreter who walked through the British and Japanese lines with a white flag. They returned saying that the Japanese were prepared to discuss terms and that they would do so with General Percival at 1630 hours at the Ford Factory at Bukit Timah. During the interval Major-General Gordon Bennett brusquely informed a startled Brigadier Cecil Callaghan, his Commander Royal Artillery, that he was now in command of the Australian Imperial Force, departed for the docks, commandeered a junk and arrived in Australia twelve days later. He claimed that it was essential to take the lessons of Singapore and Malaya back to Australia to be incorporated in future training; his men considered that he had ratted on them. He never held a field command again.

  Even today, sixty-seven years later, no Briton can look at the photograph of Percival’s party walking to meet General Yamashita without a feeling of shame. It was not Percival’s fault that he looked liked a frightened rabbit, with his buck teeth and knobbly knees, but he, accompanied by one officer carrying a Union Flag and another a white flag, all three exhausted, defeated, hopeless and helpless, broadcast an image from which the British Empire in the East never recovered. Percival signed the terms of unconditional surrender of all British troops in Malay and Singapore and, at 2200 hours on 14 February 1942, the fighting stopped. It was the biggest surrender of British troops in the whole of that nation’s long military history, and it had been achieved in just thirty days – a third of the time that General Yamashita thought would be the minimum needed. In the whole campaign, including the fighting on the mainland, the British and Empire forces lost around 7,500 killed while eight of their generals, thirty-four brigadiers and around 120,000 others became prisoners of war. Japanese losses were said to be 3,500 killed.

  At the time and subsequently it was easy to blame General Percival for the disaster. He was not an attractive figure and by making him the scapegoat no mud could stick to the politicians or the Chiefs of Staff. In fact, Percival was a competent and efficient soldier, by no means the desk-bound staff officer that his detractors claimed (he had won an MC in the first war and the IRA had put a bounty of £1,000 on his head, a huge sum in 1920); before the war he had protested that the defences of Singapore were inadequate and nobody listened. Once the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sent out without carrier escort and as a direct result sunk before they could interfere with the Japanese invasion fleet in any way, the campaign was lost. In the fight for the Malayan peninsula the Japanese were just too good: experienced and battle-hardened, they easily outfought the raw recruits and the garrison troops that the British could put against them – reinforcements arrived too late and had no time to acclimatize or train for the conditions; the Japanese used tanks to great effect as mobile gun platforms, while the British had not a single tank; British aircraft were markedly inferior to those of the Japanese and, when some Hurricanes did arrive, it was far too late. Only by holding Johore could Singapore be defended, and there were insufficient shelters, a civil defence organization that did not work and faulty communications on the island. It is doubtful whether any other general could have done better: you simply cannot repair years of neglect, parsimony, overconfidence and lack of interest in a few months. The loss of Malaya and Singapore was and is a national disgrace and there is no point in pretending otherwise.*

  * * *

  With the fall of Hong Kong, good progress in the Philippines and the Malayan campaign well under way, the Japanese high command could now turn its attention to the Netherlands East Indies, that rich treasure house of raw materials desperately needed by Japanese industry. The task of capturing the vast archipelago was given to Lieutenant-General Hitoshi Imamura and his Sixteenth Army based in Saigon, in French Indo-China. His plan was to ‘island hop’ through Mindanao, the east coast of Dutch Borneo, the Celebes and Timor on one flank and Sumatra on the other, until the main island, Java, could be attacked. Despite heroic actions by the British, American, Australian and Dutch navies, Imamuru’s plan proceeded much as he intended: the first landings on the east coast of Dutch Borneo and the Celebes took place on 11 January 1942 and by 20 February the Japanese were on Sumatra and Bali and it was obvious that an invasion was imminent. The Dutch had 25,000 regular troops on Java, but their equipment was antiquated and they were short of heavy weapons. The British contingent wasBSquadron 3 Hussars with twenty-five light tanks, two experienced and well-trained Australian infantry battal
ions fresh from the Middle East and three anti-aircraft artillery regiments. In addition, there was an American field artillery regiment.

  On 27 February a combined British, American, Dutch and Australian striking force of two heavy and three light cruisers and nine destroyers under the command of the Dutch Admiral Doorman met the Japanese Admiral Takagi’s two heavy and two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. In the Battle of the Java Sea the Allies were convincingly defeated, with only four American destroyers, sent off to rearm in Australia, surviving. Admiral Doorman went down with his ship, and for all the loss of men and ships the Japanese invasion was delayed by only twenty-four hours. The next night the first Japanese landings took place on the east and west of Java. On 8 March the Dutch governor and commander-in-chief surrendered all Dutch forces in the Netherlands East Indies. The commanders of the British and American troops had little choice but to surrender too, which they did on 12 March.

  * * *

  By 6 May 1942 the Japanese had captured Hong Kong, Wake Island, all of Malaya and Singapore, the British colonies on Borneo, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. They were occupying Indo-China and Siam, had caused huge damage to the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, had undertaken raids far into the Indian Ocean, sinking two British heavy cruisers and a light carrier off Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and had killed, wounded or captured over a quarter of a million British and Empire, Dutch, American and Filipino soldiers, sailors and airmen and huge numbers of civilians and non-combatants, and they had done it all in a mere five months. Now the only place where Allied troops were still fighting the Japanese on land was in Burma, which had been invaded on 11 December 1941, and things there were not going at all well for the British.

  10

  THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR

  AUGUST 1942–MAY 1943

  On 3 August 1942, Churchill landed in Cairo to see at first hand what was happening in the North African theatre. With the prime minister were General Sir Alan Brooke, CIGS since December 1941, travelling in a different aircraft, and to confer with him at various meetings were Generals Wavell, who had flown in from India, and Auchinleck, who had come back from the Libyan Front, Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet, Mr Richard Casey, Minister of State for the Middle East, and Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa. Harwood, although only a junior rear admiral, had been promoted to vice-admiral and appointed to take over in the Mediterranean from Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who had been sent off to Washington as the British naval representative at the Anglo-American staff talks. Harwood was a favourite of Churchill’s who knew him from his time as Assistant Chief of Naval Staff at the Admiralty, and like so many of Churchill’s personal appointments was not a success and would be removed in January 1943, when Cunningham again took up the command. Smuts was another chum of the British prime minister’s. Originally a Boer leader, after the South African War he realized what side his bread was buttered on and became a staunch (and, to be fair, probably genuine) ally of the British. He first came to the attention of David Lloyd George, British prime minister during the First World War from December 1916. Lloyd George had been one of the most vociferous of the pro-Boer faction during the South African War and after it he took to Smuts as a fellow amateur strategist, using him as an alternative source of military advice and bringing him into the War Cabinet in 1917. Churchill too was attracted by Smuts, who had been South African prime minister from 1919 to 1924 and again since 1939; he had him made a field marshal in May 1941 and frequently sought the advice of this crafty politician. Considering that Smuts’s military experience was limited to guerrilla skirmishes and German East Africa, he had an influence over British government thinking far beyond his abilities or experience, but this was all part of Churchill’s method of running the war by kitchen cabinet, instead of leaving it to people who knew what they were about.

  Politically, Churchill was in trouble. The Russians and the Americans were pressing for a second front and there was a strong lobby within the Labour Party that felt not enough was being done to help the USSR. The performance of British arms in Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong contrasted unfavourably with the American performance in Bataan, which, while also a defeat, had a considerable tinge of glory and none of disgrace attached to it. In Burma the British were in headlong retreat, and the Indian Congress Party was demanding independence now. There had been a motion of no confidence in the running of the war in the House of Commons, and, although it was easily defeated, the fact that the subject had been debated at all was a worrying sign. Even Conservative MPs were muttering that the government was in trouble and would not survive another defeat or the defeat of the USSR. Churchill desperately needed a victory – any victory – and in North Africa, in the one theatre where one might be possible, the general in command was saying that no offensive action could be taken at this time. If Auchinleck would not budge, then he had to go and another general be found who would give Churchill what he wanted and needed.

  Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff had managed to persuade the Americans that an invasion of Fortress Europe in 1942 was not remotely possible: there were not enough men, not enough landing craft and no indication that the landing of four British divisions at Cherbourg, one option being canvassed, would lead to anything other than their annihilation. A cross-Channel raid in force against the port of Dieppe was being planned for later in August, but the British cannot have had much faith in its success, other than to show the Russians that they were doing something and reinforcing the impossibility of invasion in 1942 to the Americans. Instead Churchill had pressed hard for the Mediterranean to be the main focus of Allied efforts. Here would be the second front, here could Churchill’s favourite ploy of attacking the ‘soft under-belly’ be implemented in the form of clearing the Axis forces from North Africa, and then invading Italy via Sicily. The Americans, still at this stage willing to accede to British experience, reluctantly agreed to go along with the Mediterranean option and the result was a plan named Operation Torch – Allied landings in French North Africa which, combined with an offensive along the Libyan coast, would squeeze the Germans and Italians into Tunisia and defeat them.

  Torch could not happen, however, without the guarantee of an attack from Libya, one which should happen as soon as possible, but Auchinleck and his staff, backed up by the cold logic of ration strengths, ammunition returns, vehicle states and movement tables, insisted that an attack could not be mounted for at least six weeks, despite the prime minister’s pleading. Churchill having decided that Auchinleck must go, Brooke acquiescing, the discussions centred around possible replacements. Auchinleck had sacked Ritchie and was commanding Eighth Army himself, as well as being Commander-in-Chief Middle East, and this situation could not continue – as Auchinleck readily accepted. To command the army, the obvious successor was ‘Strafer’ Gott, who had gone from command of a battalion to that of a corps in three years and had a reputation throughout Eighth Army for competence and originality. Brooke was unsure: he said that Gott was tired – he had been in the Western Desert since 1940 – and advanced the merits of his own protégé, Montgomery, who had been a fellow instructor at Staff College and had commanded a division under Brooke in the Battle of France, and was now in England as the commander designate of the British contingent for Operation Torch. Churchill, sure that a man with a nickname like‘Strafer’*. must be just the chap to command an army and give him a victory, insisted and Gott was duly sent for. After talking to Gott on 5 August, Churchill was convinced and Gott was duly appointed. Gott looked at the ground, identified the Alam Halfa position as critical in the coming battles, embarked on an aircraft to fly back to Cairo, was shot down by the Luftwaffe and died. Brooke now got his way and Montgomery was sent for from England. We can discard Montgomery’s typically ungenerous comments about Gott in his memoirs published in 1958,56 in which he says that Gott’s appointment would have been a disaster and that Gott was tired, worn out and needed a rest, a vie
w supported by Brooke,57 who thought Gott’s death was ‘the hand of God’. In fact, Gott was a man of great ability and perspicacity, humane and humorous and having the confidence of the whole army. Tired he may well have been, but with his desert experience he would surely have avoided making the mistakes in the use of armour that marked Montgomery’s handling of the Second Battle of Alamein and would have established far better relations with the Americans than Montgomery ever could.

  In discussions with Brooke, Auchinleck was agreeable to Montgomery taking over Eighth Army rather than Gott (or at least Brooke claimed he was – Auchinleck wrote no memoirs and published no diary) but Brooke claimed that he thought the two could not work together, and it seems very likely that Brooke’s agreement to Churchill’s sacking of the Auk (as Auchinleck was known) was to ensure a clear run for Montgomery. After toying with the notion of putting Brooke in as C-in-C Middle East, it was decided that Auchinleck’s replacement was to be General the Honourable Sir Harold Alexander, who was, like Montgomery, of Irish extraction but, unlike Montgomery, a gentleman, a Guardsman, an Old Harrovian, as was Churchill, and, at fifty, one of the younger full generals in the British Army at that time.*. That Brooke agreed so readily to Auchinleck’s dismissal, egged on by Montgomery, who having got the job proceeded to blacken the Auk in every way he could, was fuelled largely by Brooke’s propensity to advance the careers of his inner circle – those who had served with him or under him – but also by British Army resentment of their Indian Army contemporaries.

  To be accepted for the Indian Army, an officer had to pass out of the Royal Military College Sandhurst in the top twenty or thirty in the order of merit, depending upon how many officers the Indian Army needed in a particular year. The Indian Army had no recruiting problems, was not plagued by the regular run of petty disciplinary offences to which the British soldier was prone and was almost continually on active service on the frontiers of India. An officer could live very well on his pay in India, and, as there were far fewer British officers in an Indian unit than in a British one, responsibility came much earlier than it would at home. Although it was perfectly normal for an officer of the British service to command an Indian division or corps, or even, like Wavell, to be Commander-in-Chief India, many British officers objected when the tables were turned and an Indian Army officer – such as Auchinleck – was appointed to a senior command that included British formations. Montgomery had desperately wanted to be commissioned into the Indian Army, but had not done well enough at Sandhurst (where he was back-termed for bullying) and had to settle for the Royal Warwickshire Regiment instead.