Cruiser (48 page)

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.

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
:

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:

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:

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:

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.