The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (81 page)

Although subsequently exaggerated, this squabble was an indication of how desperate Australians had become. Their mood was sensed by the State Department, which, in April 1941, ordered a powerful squadron of warships to undertake a cruise to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, in the hope that it would, in the words of the United States navy’s official history, ‘hearten our Antipodean friends, who felt forgotten and virtually abandoned by Mother England’.
19

Churchill too was anxious to dispel this mood of resentful isolation. In October, he promised Menzies’s successor, Curtin, that the battleship
Prince of Wales,
the battlecruiser
Repulse
and the aircraft carrier
Indomitable
would be immediately sent to Far Eastern waters. Australia and New Zealand had originally hoped for more, but there were only two capital ships to spare. It was a gesture of reassurance, but the aircraft carrier broke down, leaving the two capital ships to operate in a region where the enemy enjoyed air superiority.

Two warships could not obscure the frailty of imperial defences in the Far East. Duff Cooper, who visited Malaya in August and was appointed Minister for Far Eastern Affairs, reported to Churchill two months later that the colony’s defences were ramshackle. Many senior civil and military officials were insouciant about the dangers facing them, and the seventy-two-year-old governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Shenton Thomas, was a dithering blunderer who needed to be sacked.
20
It was Thomas who, when war broke out, refused to evacuate white women and children from a war zone for fear of upsetting Malay and Chinese opinion; perhaps the only time in the empire’s history that ‘women and children last’ was an official command. Cooper’s impression of dud officials and a general lassitude at the top was confirmed by New Zealand airmen who arrived in Malaya during 1941. They were astounded by the languid atmosphere; there was a half holiday every Wednesday, Sundays were off, and flight training was confined to seven hours a day. ‘To the New Zealanders, imbued with the vital need for haste in reaching operational efficiency, it seemed that far too much valuable time was wasted.’
21
The local high command was untroubled since it believed that Japanese air crews and machines were both of poor quality.
22
An American journalist described Singapore as ‘the City of Blimps’, which got him expelled by the authorities. Racial hubris infected the Blimps and their wives, and their arrogance towards Indians spawned ‘a good deal of bitterness’ among the men who came to defend their pampered existence.
23

What still remains astonishing in the light of the catastrophe which overtook Malaya is the ostrich-like outlook of those responsible for its safety. A joint-service assessment, compiled in October 1940, concluded that ‘our ability to hold Malaya beyond the immediate vicinity of Singapore in the face of a determined attack is very problematical. Moreover, in the event of a successful invasion, the survival of Singapore for more than a short period is very improbable.’
24
Nevertheless, a strong sense of racial superiority comforted everyone involved, including Churchill, who once rated the Japanese ‘the Wops [slang for Italians] of the East’; it was felt that they lacked the nerve, the wherewithal and the organisational skills to launch a successful invasion of British and Dutch possessions.
25
Even if they did attack, the local strength of the combined United States, British, Dutch and Australian navies more than matched the Japanese fleet, even though the former was far stronger in aircraft carriers. At the end of November, Churchill was assured by an intelligence assessment of the Far Eastern situation that the Japanese would stay out of the war until the spring, and then their first target would be a soft one, Siam.
26

The Japanese government did not behave as predicted. By early autumn, the new prime minister General Hideki Tojo and his cabinet had decided to attack British, Dutch and American colonies in the Far East if, as was likely, the three nations refused to lift an oil embargo imposed on Japan after the occupation of Indo-China. The oil blockade hurt, but what really swayed the Japanese ministers was the possibility that Germany would beat Russia and Britain during the following year, thereby making it easier for Japan to retain the former British, French and Dutch colonies which could fall into its hands. Tojo and his colleagues also naïvely imagined that, in time, America would accept the new imperial
status quo
in Asia.

Japan’s war plans were audacious and ambitious. On 7 December, carrier-borne aircraft attacked the United States navy’s anchorage at Pearl Harbor, knocking out several battleships and temporarily swinging the Pacific balance of naval power in Japan’s favour. Between 8 and 17 December, seaborne forces landed on the coasts of Siam (which immediately surrendered), Malaya, Borneo, Sarawak, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island. Conventional naval wisdom had hitherto ruled out the possibility of Japan undertaking so many operations simultaneously, and surprise was all but total.
27
After the war, mischievous allegations were made that Churchill had been informed by signals intelligence of the movement and destination of the Pearl Harbor force, but refused to alert Roosevelt so as to make certain America’s entry into the war. This is a
canard;
signals picked up by the Hong Kong listening post were believed, probably rightly, to be from a Japanese flotilla heading through the South China Sea for Malaya, not from the Pearl Harbor armada.
28

Britain’s Far Eastern empire fell with a swiftness which both astonished and dismayed everyone. Singapore’s uselessness as a base was demonstrated by air raids by bombers based in Indo-China on 8 December. Two days later, bombers flying from Saigon sank the
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales,
while RAF, RAAF and RNZAF aircraft were busy trying to stem the Japanese advance from the three bridgeheads they had established on the eastern shores of Malaya. On land, the Japanese advanced through the jungle with a deadly efficiency, and their aircraft systematically destroyed British airfields, nearly all of which were sited in the north of the colony. After three days of an unequal aerial contest, the local RAF commander warned that his forces could only last out for a fortnight.
29
By the end of the month, British, dominion and Indian ground troops were in full retreat towards Singapore, having fought gallantly against an enemy their commanders had so grossly underrated.

Hong Kong capitulated on Christmas Day. Its position had been precarious since the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war four years before. At the end of 1940 there had been a serious mutiny by Sikh artillerymen in the garrison, who, it appeared, had been subverted by Japanese propaganda.
30
White troops were needed to defend a white man’s empire so, during 1941, Canadian infantry were sent to the colony at Britain’s request. They were to all intents and purposes a forlorn hope, and after the war the local commander, Major-General Christopher Maltby, accused them of indiscipline and cowardice during the closing stages of the siege.
31

There were similar recriminations after the defences of Malaya had crumpled. General Sir Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief in South-East Asia, blamed Australian soldiers, alleging that they had run away from the front in disorder, pillaging, raping and even murdering as they went. The local Australian commander, Major-General Gordon Bennett, castigated the lacklustre leadership of British officers chosen by what he called ‘the “old school tie” method of selection’.
32
Not that this aptly-named general was particularly well-qualified to pronounce on leadership since he was ‘a rasping, bitter man who fell out with everyone including his own staff’.
33
Once it was clear that Singapore was about to fall, he set about finding himself a ship to escape in, claiming that he wanted to tell Australia what had happened. Obviously he had never heard of the Jacobite ballad ‘Johnny Cope’, in which General Cope ‘ran with the news of his own defeat’ after the battle of Prestonpans. Bennett’s, Maltby’s and Wavell’s allegations were hotly denied by survivors of the campaign. Whatever the exact truth, there was and still is something distasteful about beaten generals making scapegoats of their men; when armies fall apart it is invariably from the top downwards.

The record of the civilian and military leaders in Malaya supports this dictum. Penang with its valuable port and stores intact was surrendered on 15 December. Indian soldiers who took part in the retreat afterwards complained of insufficient ammunition, orders which denied them the chance to make a stand, the absence of air cover, erratic delivery of rations, and a host of operational mischances which could have been avoided.
34
Nothing like this troubled the Japanese, who shattered the myths cherished by British, and for that matter American, commanders by revealing themselves as hardy, resourceful and well-trained fighting men. After a duel with a Japanese submarine in January 1942, an officer on board the destroyer
Jupiter
remarked of his adversaries, ‘they showed guts and fighting spirit, to say the least, that took us by surprise.’
35
There were many surprises for Allied servicemen in the Far East during December 1941, and there were more to come.

While imperial troops were being forced back through the jungles of Malaya, and Singapore, the keystone of the empire’s defences in the Far East, stood in increasing jeopardy, Churchill’s mood swung between despair and exhilaration. The latter predominated; on 11 December 1941 Germany and Italy declared war on America and spared Roosevelt the awkward necessity of having to seek Congress’s approval for entering the European conflict. With the United States now a full combatant, Churchill felt sure that the Allies (soon to be known as the ‘United Nations’) would eventually win the war on all fronts, although there was no way of knowing how long this would take.

The Prime Minister and his chiefs of staff were unwavering in their belief that, despite the recent setbacks in the Far East and the Pacific, Britain’s primary objective was still the defeat of Germany. Japan would have to wait and British prestige and territories in Asia would have to be sacrificed, although for a short time hope was placed on the Allies being able to hold a defensive line stretching from Burma southwards through Singapore and the Dutch East Indies to the northern coast of Australia.

Beating Germany and sustaining a defensive front in the Far East required Britain to keep control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Both were under growing German pressure. At the beginning of winter, the German Army Group South had penetrated southern Russia as far as Rostov and, British intelligence believed, would push into the Caucasus at the onset of spring. If this advance succeeded, Germany would be well placed to intervene directly in Iraq and Iran (where Axis fifth columnists were already making mischief) at the same time as Rommel’s forces renewed the assault on Egypt. Axis attempts to disrupt supply lines through the Mediterranean were being stepped up, and there were fears that Germany would seek Spanish assistance for an attack on Gibraltar.

More than the Suez Canal was now at stake, for during 1941 the Middle East had become the focus of an aerial lifeline. Aircraft, supplied under Lend Lease, were being ferried across the Caribbean to Trinidad, and from there south to Natal on the eastern coast of Brazil for the transatlantic flight to a new airfield at Takoradi in the Gold Coast. The machines then flew overland to Khartoum for the final leg of their journey to aerodromes in Egypt. At first only long-range bombers could make the journey, but at the beginning of December the United States approached Britain to build a transit airfield for medium-range machines on Ascension Island.
36
The Far Eastern conflict added to the importance of this route, for machines could be flown on from Egypt to India. In the spring of 1942, and in response to a shortage of fighters, some were carried by the carrier USS
Ranger
to a point 125 miles off the coast of West Africa and then flown to Accra on the first stage of an aerial marathon that would take them to India.
37

Aircraft using this route were serviced by RAF and USAAF personnel, and Pan American airlines, turning a wartime emergency to profit, used the ferry service to break into the imperial air transport market. They established a civil route between Accra and Khartoum, and gained permission for the conversion of the Ascension base into a civil aerodrome after the war.
38

If this route was fractured, the defence of India and the Far East, as well as that of the Middle East and Mediterranean would be gravely imperilled. Faced with what might turn out to be a double-pronged German assault on the Middle East during 1942, Churchill sailed to America on 15 December prepared to convince Roosevelt that the only viable Allied strategy had to be one in which Germany was overcome first. In reaching this conclusion, he and his advisers had to face the bitter fact that, for the time being, imperial interests in Asia would have to be abandoned, although Churchill hoped that those defending them would fight stubbornly. Their efforts would, however, turn out to be futile if Germany was allowed to establish itself in the Middle East, and thereby secure the means to cooperate directly with Japanese forces which, by the turn of the year, were beginning to advance westwards through Burma to the borders of India. By sacrificing one part of the empire, Churchill hoped that he might ultimately secure all of it.

Allied grand strategy for 1942 was hammered out by Churchill, Roosevelt and their advisers during the last two weeks of December. They agreed to the principle of Germany first, then Japan. First would come the expulsion of German and Italian forces from North Africa, and then USAAF and RAF bombers would begin the systematic pounding of Germany, using British airfields. No longer able to defend itself, the British empire in the Far East would pass under American protection; GIs were to be rushed to Australia and, if the Philippines fell, the remnants of its garrison would be shipped to Singapore, if it was still tenable.