Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (18 page)

If this is the case then the
Automedon
did play a part in the sinking of Force Z. Tom Phillips left Singapore with a ‘puny’ force, the possibility of air support was thrown into chaos as was, possibly, communication between his ships and Singapore because the speed of the Japanese advance meant that the British, Indian and Australian forces opposing them were permanently on the back foot.

In what might seem an odd link, there is a connection here between the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
and the British failure to sink the German battle-cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
and the heavy cruiser
Prince Eugen
in the Channel Dash of February 1942. Operation Cerberus, as it was codenamed by the Germans, involved the three ships and their escorts sailing straight past England’s front door to reach their home ports. Hitler gambled that the British would simply not be quick enough on their feet to cope, and a master stroke was to have the ships leave at night, when the Admiralty – who knew a great deal about the operation not least of all because they had a French naval officer feeding them information – had decided that the ships would use the darkness to traverse the narrowest and hence most dangerous part of the Channel. A series of mechanical and human errors meant that the ships were not spotted for twelve hours, and when they were it was a question of too little, too late. The confusion and even chaos surrounding the attacks on the German ships by aircraft and light surface ships is chillingly reminiscent of some of the action taken against the Japanese at Singapore. Perhaps no army, navy or air force responds well to surprises, but British armed forces in the Second World War did seem to have a weakness in this area, particularly if the operation in question required co-operation between Army, Navy and RAF.

Chapter 9

Aircraft

A
ircraft dominate any discussion of the sinking of Force Z. One area that has not commanded much discussion is what has hitherto been the accepted fact that the new carrier
Indomitable
was intended to accompany Force Z. In November 1941
Indomitable
carried twelve Fulmar aircraft, twenty-four Albacores and nine Sea Hurricanes, but ran aground whilst working up in the West Indies. Repairs in Norfolk, Virginia, took only twelve days, but this was too late for the ship to join Force Z. Discussion has tended to focus on the difference
Indomitable
might have made to Force Z.

The Fairey Fulmar, designed for carrier work, carried a crew of two because it was envisaged that it would be involved in long oversea flights. It was not expected to meet fighter opposition, so it prioritized long range and heavy armament over manoeuvrability and speed. It would certainly have been a useful addition to Force Z’s defences, as there were no fighters accompanying the aircraft that bombed Force Z. In many respects Force Z faced exactly the threats the slow and rather cumbersome Fulmar had been designed to cope with. The Sea Hurricane’s performance suffered somewhat from the design changes needed to render it fit for flying from carriers, but was a useful fighter. The Fairey Albacore, more usually known as the ‘Applecore’, was an improved Swordfish with an enclosed cockpit and a design that allowed it to act as a dive bomber. It would have had no obvious role in defending in the attacks launched against
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.

Indomitable
herself was a very useful design. Essentially an improved
Illustrious
class, the improvement centred on remedying one of the major defects of British carriers with their armoured flight decks, namely the small number of aircraft they were able to carry.
Indomitable
carried an extra half hangar, achieved by reducing the thickness of her side armour, and hence carried significantly more aircraft than
Illustrious,
though accurate figures are very difficult to give. To state the obvious, some aircraft are bigger than others. Figures for aircraft carried are significantly affected by whether the aircraft have folding wings, whether or not fire curtains are down and whether or not the navy in question is using ‘deck parks’ for aircraft. Thus one source gives aircraft number for
Illustrious
as thirty-three in 1940, but fifty-seven in 1944. It is probably safe to use as a comparator forty-five aircraft as the number
Indomitable
could comfortably launch, as distinct from thirty-three for the
Illustrious.
She was also designed with a heavy anti-aircraft barrage of her own, though it is not clear how much of this was fitted by November 1941. Her armoured flight deck allowed her to survive a direct hit from a Stuka and Kamikaze attacks later in the war, and though a tough nut to crack there is no reason to think she was capable of surviving the concentrated Japanese air attack on Force Z, particularly as one assumes she would have been the priority target. Her defensive strength was in the armoured flight deck that protected her from bombs. Her hull was vulnerable still to torpedoes, more so than
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.

However, theoretical war-games played years after the event cannot distinguish between the notional power of an air group and its effectiveness in battle. Firstly, the effective operation of a CAP (Combat Air Patrol) requires considerable skill from the controllers. It was fighters chasing after low-level US torpedo bombers and hence ignoring incoming high-altitude dive bombers that were partly responsible for the Japanese losing three carriers as the Battle of Midway, and there were no more experienced practitioners in carrier warfare than the Japanese. Inasmuch as one can judge, any CAP from
Indomitable
would have gone after the bombers which launched the first attack, rather than the torpedo bombers which caused the crucial damage. Secondly, it requires considerable training for surface ships to exercise the self-discipline not to blast its own aircraft out of the sky when those aircraft are offering close support. As with any carrier engagement, success or failure for
Indomitable’s
aircraft would have depended on the ship’s ability to launch enough aircraft of the right type to meet in time the incoming threat, and to direct those aircraft on to the right targets. But yet again we would have had the
Prince of Wales
scenario, of a ship given an inadequate time to work up to full efficiency because of the exigencies of wartime, with even less experience of a shooting war than
Prince of Wales
, inexperienced pilots and no training as part of an integrated battle group. Most commentators believe that had
Indomitable
joined Force Z it would simply have joined them at the bottom of the sea, and in this instance most commentators are right.

But the question of whether or not
Indomitable
would have made a difference may be even more academic than that. One of the few things that up until now has been a more or less accepted truth about the sinking of Force Z is that it was planned that
Indomitable
should join it. The carrier was working up in the West Indies, it is usually said, and was only stopped from joining Force Z because it ran aground on 3 November and had to sail to the USA to have a new bow fitted. It has taken a good many years for a historian to spot that there is no actual record of this decision having been taken: ‘The
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
were simply not going to have an aircraft carrier at any time in the near future, but they were sent on to Singapore anyway.’
¹

The situation at the time regarding carriers was dire.
Victorious
was needed for the Home Fleet
. Ark Royal
was sunk on 14 November.
Illustrious
and
Formidable
were under repair in USA until 12 December.
Eagle
and
Furious
started long refits in October. It is easy to see why sending Britain’s most modern carrier to a deterrent mission in the Far East, particularly when she was not fully worked-up, might have seemed a less than brilliant idea. There may have been an intention or understanding that
Indomitable
would be sent, but there seems no contemporary record of it as a certainty, and Nicholson argues that the idea was dropped almost immediately.
²

I have been unable to trace any order to
Indomitable
to proceed to join with Force Z prior to the ship grounding on 3 November, and even if she had been ordered to Singapore then it would have been virtually impossible for her to get there in time. Churchill and the Admiralty appear to have been covering their backs in suggesting, publically and vociferously after the event, that it had always been intended to provide Tom Phillips with a fleet carrier, something that shows how much the living can influence the stories around the dead. Certainly on 3 November when she grounded,
Indomitable
was proceeding from Bermuda to Jamaica, with none of the signs of what one might expect for a new ship ordered to a combat zone, such as increased training or the fairly frantic resupply of ammunition and stores that precedes a long cruise. It does seem that what, post-event, was trumpeted as a certainty was in fact nothing more than an intention which never materialized other than as a form of post-mortem justification. Onepiece of evidence that suggests Phillips at least never did believe he was going to get
Indomitable
is his complete silence on the issue. Given the fuss he made over the need for air cover before Force Z sailed surely there would be some form of protest from Phillips about its absence from his force if he had ever expected it to be there? On the surface the only reasonable explanation as to why Phillips never complained about the loss of
Indomitable
is that he never expected to have it in the first place and, of course, that he did not really expect his ships to have to fight.

If one follows the issue of aircraft and the loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
chronologically, there is the issue of why
Hermes
was left in Simonstown when Force Z virtually passed it on its way to Singapore.
Hermes
was the first ship to be designed and built as an aircraft carrier, though not the first to be commissioned. Actually begun during the First World War, she was not commissioned until 1927, partly because of a series of design changes ordered in the light of experience with the existing ships that had been converted to carriers. By 1938 she had been placed in reserve and was used as a training ship, and was called out of retirement for the war. Slow (her maximum speed when new was twenty-five knots), lightly armed and armoured and carrying only a handful of aircraft (a design maximum of twenty that realistically was nearer fifteen), she could neither have kept up with
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
nor defended them. In any event her capabilities were irrelevant. She was in Simonstown with condenser problems, and was in no fit state to travel. What was in effect a refit was to last from November 1941 to February 1942.
Hermes
would have been a complete liability for Force Z, would have robbed it of the speed that was one of its few advantages and in any event was mechanically disqualified.
Hermes
was never going to replace
Indomitable
or indeed any modern fleet carrier.

The next issue was the ability of the RAF in Singapore to do its job. Discussion has tended to focus on the quality of the aircraft the RAF had in Singapore, and the failure – bitterly resented by Tom Phillips among others – to send modern fighters to Singapore. Yet the RAF’s problems in Singapore went deeper than issues of
materiel.
Long before the arrival of Force Z there were problems of plain bull-headedness:

‘All of the new Malayan airfields were vulnerable to attack by a force landing on the sandy beaches dotted along the east coast, yet the Air Force had insisted on these sites – despite objections from the Army whose job was to protect them … This was the origin of a serious rift between the two services.’
³

One questions whether this was the origin of a rift or merely a symbol. In effect, the RAF chose to go its own way because it wanted the increased range the siting of its airfields would give, and be damned to whether or not they were defensible. There was no coordinated air defence policy for Singapore, and the defence of the city when it was first raided by Japanese aircraft was left to searchlights and guns. If these decisions suggest failings on the part of the leadership of the RAF, events lower down the food chain suggest there were problems there too.

The first landings at Kota Bharu airfield preceded Pearl Harbor by seventy minutes. They were not the RAF’s finest hour. RAF personnel, disheartened by Japanese strafing and land attacks, set fire to buildings and lorries, and then abandoned base by truck despite no orders having been given to do so. Similarly, when Kuantan Air Base was attacked it was given up and withdrawal ordered by Air HQ Singapore. The Blenheims left in the early morning, the Hudsons and Vildebeests by 4.00pm. Panic evacuation then followed by mostly Australian ground staff, an affair that was the subject of a Court of Enquiry after the war. An Australian Squadron Leader arriving in Singapore in August 1940 wrote:

‘Right up until hostilities broke out RAF units, with the exception of one maintenance unit, worked only from 0730 to 1230 each day, with 15 minutes break during the morning … The evident lack of control exercised by senior officers at stations and units, in my opinion, resulted in the disinterested attitude which permeated the whole of the RAF in Malaya.’
⁴

An additional problem was rivalry and conflict between the RAF contingent in Malaya, and the RAAF, between whom there was no love lost. When all this is added to poor training of at least some pilots, it is clear that in many respects the RAF in Singapore in late 1941 was a dysfunctional organization. Its capacity to carry out its duties, and even to define what those duties were, was not helped by the hierarchy of government in Singapore and the individuals in power. Sir Shenton Thomas was the last Governor of the Straits Settlements and British High Commissioner for Malaysia: ‘Both Pulford and Rear Admiral Jackie Spooner later blamed Sir Shenton Thomas for the absence of air protection provided for Force Z. They were adamant that as soon as Thomas knew of the possibility that fighter aircraft might be diverted from the air defence of Singapore to provide air cover for Force Z, he had protested most vehemently against their use for this purpose.’
⁵

Through no fault of his own, Phillips’s need for air cover was at risk from the outset:

‘… the Navy would have to request any support from an RAF which had always taken pleasure in thumbing its nose at the senior service. When that pleasure could be justified by a very real shortage of aircraft, the Navy’s chances of achieving operational co-operation were not good.’
⁶

It is clear that Admiral Sir Tom Phillips did everything in his power, verbally and in writing, to get air cover for Force Z. He had been offered fighter cover only if he agreed for his ships not to go more than 100 miles north of Kota Bharu, and no more than sixty miles from coast at any time, a requirement that was about as sensible as building airfields exactly where the Japanese would find it easiest to capture them and the Army hardest to defend them. In simple operational terms it was an impossibility to tie a raiding force down in this manner.

This brings us back to the question as to why Phillips did not call for air cover. Knowledge of the chaos that was the RAF in Singapore in December 1941 only adds to the obvious answer:
Tom Phillips and everyone who could read a signal on Force Z had absolutely no reason to think that air cover was available.
If it was, why had no one told them? One of the most ill-advised comments on the loss of Force Z is: ‘… It is reasonable to assume that he [Phillips] knew there were some fighter aircraft available should he call for them.’
⁷