The Second World War (40 page)

There were two impediments to the success of the plan. One was that Japanese torpedoes could not run in the shallow waters of Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor, but modifications were soon made. The other was the danger that the Combined Fleet might be spotted on passage and its security compromised – even though it was to approach Hawaii by the most circuitous of routes, beginning in the stormy waters of the Kurile Islands between Japan and Siberia, and proceeding south-eastward by a route far from commercial shipping lanes. An experimental voyage was sailed by a Japanese liner in October 1941, and when it reported that it had not seen another ship or aeroplane the danger of compromise was discounted.

On 26 November the Carrier Strike Force sailed; the subordinate attack forces followed from their separate ports in the next few days. Nagumo commanded six carriers, two battleships and two heavy cruisers, three submarines, a covey of escorts and an attendant fleet of oilers to support his striking force over its long voyage; the Japanese, with the Americans, were pioneers of replenishment at sea, a technique which enormously extended the range and endurance of an operational fleet. The kernel and justification of his command, however, was his squadron of six carriers which between them embarked over 360 aircraft, including 320 torpedo- and dive-bombers and their fighter escorts for the air strike on Pearl Harbor. If they could be brought to their launch point, 200 miles north of Oahu where Battleship Row lay, the chances of their being deflected from their mission were remote.

Neither American strategic nor tactical intelligence of the planned Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor was adequate. American historians have disputed for years the issue of whether Roosevelt ‘knew’: those who believed he did imply that he had sought and found in foreknowledge of Japanese ‘infamy’ the pretext he needed to draw the United States into the war on the side of Britain. It is an extension of the charge that there was a secret understanding between Roosevelt and Churchill, perhaps concluded at their August meeting in Placentia Bay, New-foundland, to use Japanese perfidy as a means of overcoming American domestic resistance to involvement. Both these charges defy logic. In the second case, Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler, which a
casus belli
in the Pacific would not necessarily assure; as we have seen, Hitler’s perverse decision to declare war on the United States in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor solved problems of diplomacy which might otherwise have needed months of negotiation between the White House and Congress. In the first case, Roosevelt’s foreknowledge can be demonstrated to have been narrowly circumscribed. Although the American cryptanalysts had broken both the Japanese diplomatic cipher Purple and the naval cipher JN 25b, Purple was used only to transmit instructions from the Japanese Foreign Office to its diplomats abroad; in the nature of things, such instructions did not include details of war plans and, though their contents during the last months of peace aroused the suspicions of the American eavesdroppers, suspicion did not amount to proof. War plans, which would have supplied proof, were not entrusted to JN 25b. So stringent was Japanese radio security in the weeks before Pearl Harbor that all orders were distributed between Tokyo, fleet and army by courier, and the striking forces proceeded to their attack positions under strict radio silence. As an added precaution, Nagumo’s fleet approached Pearl Harbor inside the forward edge of one of the enormous weather fronts which regularly cross the Pacific at warship speed. This technique, long practised by the Japanese, ensured that the fleet’s movements would be protected by cloud and rainstorm from the eyes of any but a very lucky air or sea reconnaissance unit – from any systematic means of surveillance, indeed, except radar.

Yet Pearl Harbor was protected by radar; in the disregard for the warning it offered lies the principal condemnation of American preparedness for war in the Pacific in December 1941. A British radar set had been installed on the northern coast of Oahu in August and regularly monitored movements in the sea area it covered. Soon after seven o’clock on the morning of 7 December, just as it was about to shut down its morning watch, its operator detected the approach of the largest concentration of aircraft he had ever seen on its screen. However, the naval duty officer at Pearl Harbor, when alerted, instructed him ‘not to worry about it’ and the radar operator, a private in the Army Signal Corps, did as he was told. The duty officer had wrongly concluded that the echo on the screen represented a flight of Flying Fortresses which were scheduled to land shortly at Hickam Field from California. There was much aerial reinforcement in progress around Hawaii in December 1941;
Lexington
and
Enterprise
, the Pacific Fleet’s two carriers (
Saratoga
was Stateside for a refit), were currently delivering aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. The radar blip seemed part of an innocuous pattern.

In fact it represented the first flight of Nagumo’s air striking force, released 200 miles from Oahu and detected 137 miles – less than one hour’s flying time – from its target at Battleship Row. It totalled 183 torpedo- and dive-bombers, with their escort of Zeros – then and for two years to come the best shipborne fighters in the world – all of whose crews had been relentlessly trained in mock attacks on an exact model of the Pearl Harbor complex for months beforehand. A meticulous espionage programme had established where each battleship and cruiser lay; to each target a group of pilots had been assigned. All that remained was for the attackers to evade the defences and send their bombs and torpedoes home.

There were no defences. Such Sundaying servicemen as were topside when the first Japanese aircraft appeared over Battleship Row and the associated airfield targets at Hickam, Bellows and Wheeler Fields assumed their appearance to be ‘part of a routine air-raid drill’. Three-quarters of the 780 antiaircraft guns on the ships in Pearl Harbor were unmanned, and only four of the army’s thirty-one batteries were operational. Many of the guns were without ammunition, which had been returned to store for safekeeping. At 7.49 am the Japanese began their attacks; by 8.12, when the ancient battleship
Utah
was mistakenly sunk, the Pacific Fleet was devastated.
Arizona
had blown up,
Oklahoma
had capsized,
California
was sinking; four other battleships were all heavily damaged. The destruction was completed by the second wave of 168 Japanese aircraft which arrived at nine o’clock. When they left,
West Virginia
had been added to the score of destroyed battleships,
Nevada
was aground – saved by the quick thinking of the junior officer who temporarily commanded her – and
Maryland, Tennessee
and
Pennsylvania
were badly damaged. Another eleven smaller ships had also been hit, and 188 aircraft destroyed, most set ablaze on the ground where they had been parked wing-to-wing as a precaution against sabotage. It was a humiliation without precedent in American history and a Japanese strategic triumph apparently as complete as Tsushima, which had driven Russian naval power from the Pacific in a single morning and established Togo as his country’s Nelson.

But Pearl Harbor was no Trafalgar. Even as the Japanese carriers began to recover their aircraft, the first pilots to return confronted the Strike Force commander, Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, with the demand that they be launched again to complete their devastation of Pearl Harbor. It was a disappointment and anxiety to all of them that they had not found the American carriers at anchor. Failing strikes against them, the next best thing they could achieve was the destruction of the naval dockyards and oil storage tanks, which would at least ensure that the port could not be used as a forward base for a counter-offensive against the Japanese invasions of the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Genda too lent his weight to their urgings. Nagumo, a doughty warrior but no Nelson, heard them out and then signified his disagreement. ‘Operation Z’ had succeeded beyond his and Yamamoto’s wildest dreams. The rational course now was to withdraw the fleet from danger – who knew where the American carriers might be steering? – and hold it at safety and in readiness for the next stage of the offensive to the south. The rest of the Japanese navy and naval air force, and one-fifth of the Japanese army, was even then risking itself in perilous initiatives against the British, Dutch and American empires in the south-west Pacific. Who could say when and where the Combined Fleet would next be needed?

The ‘southern’ operation was already in full swing and the Royal Navy was about to feel the weight of Japanese maritime airpower. British plans to defend its scattered possessions in south-east Asia and the Pacific depended on the timely dispatch of capital ships, with carrier support, to the strongly fortified naval base of Singapore, at the tip of the Malayan peninsula between the two largest islands of the Dutch East Indies, Sumatra and Borneo. As a precautionary measure, the new battleship
Prince of Wales
and the old battlecruiser
Repulse
had been sailed to Singapore at the beginning of December. A carrier should have accompanied them, but casualties among those in home waters and the need to keep the only other uncommitted carrier to watch the German battleship
Tirpitz
in its Norwegian fiord meant that they had to sail unescorted. On 8 December, prompted by news that the Japanese had begun to land troops off the Kra isthmus, which joins southern Thailand to Malaya,
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
with their small escort of destroyers sailed from Singapore to intercept. The Japanese landing troops had already occupied the airfield from which the two capital ships might have been afforded fighter cover, but although their commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, was warned that strong Japanese torpedo-bomber forces were stationed in southern Indo-China he held his course. Early on the morning of 10 December the Japanese bombers found him, and both his capital ships were sunk in two hours of relentless attack. The loss of a brand-new battleship and a famous battlecruiser to Japanese shore-based aircraft was a disaster for which no one in Britain was prepared. Not only did it upset all preconceptions about Britain’s ability to command distant waters through naval power; it struck cruelly at the nation’s maritime pride. ‘In all the war’, wrote Winston Churchill, who heard the news by telephone from the Chief of the Naval Staff, ‘I never received a more direct shock.’

News quite as bad was on its way; on 8 and 10 December the islands of Wake and Guam, American outposts within the great chain of former German islands on which the Japanese were to base their south-western Pacific defensive perimeter, were attacked. Guam fell at once; Wake, heroically defended by its small Marine garrison, succumbed to a second assault on 23 December, after an American relief sortie had timorously retreated. The British territory of Hong Kong resisted siege, which began on 8 December, but although its Anglo-Canadian garrison fought to the bitter end it capitulated on Christmas Day. The atolls of Tarawa and Makin in the British Gilbert archipelago were captured in December. And on 10 December the Japanese opened amphibious offensives designed to overrun both Malaya and the Philippines.

The collapse of the British defence of Malaya has rightly come to be regarded as one of the most shameful Allied defeats of the war. The Japanese were outnumbered two to one throughout the campaign, which they initiated with only one division and parts of two others against three British divisions and parts of three others. The British were admittedly outnumbered and outclassed in the air, and had no tanks, whereas the Japanese invasion force included fifty-seven tanks. Superior equipment did not, however, explain the whirlwind Japanese success. That victory resulted from the flexibility and dynamism of their methods, akin to those that had characterised the German
Blitzkrieg
in France in 1940. The British were put off their stroke from the outset. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, the commander-in-chief, and Percival, his senior general, had intended to forestall a Japanese attack by moving forward across the Thai border to seize the potential landing places in the Kra isthmus, but the same sort of confused warnings that bedevilled American responses to Japan’s surprise attacks prevented them from making that move. When the Japanese appeared in their forward defensive zone, they did not contest the advance but fell back to what were deemed better defensive positions further to the rear. The retreat surrendered valuable ground, including the sites of the three northernmost airfields in Malaya, none of which was put out of action and which were soon in use by the Japanese. Much else was left behind which the invaders put to use, including motor vehicles and seagoing vessels. Long columns of Japanese infantrymen with the scent of victory in their nostrils took to the roads in captured cars and trucks, followed by others pedalling southward on commandeered bicycles. Seaborne units embarked in fishing craft began to descend on the coast behind British lines, which were abandoned as rapidly as word of the Japanese appearance in their rear was received. By 14 December northern Malaya had been lost; by 7 January 1942 the Japanese had overrun the Slim river position in central Malaya and were driving the defenders southward to Singapore.

The units which collapsed so easily before the Japanese onrush were mostly Indian. They were not the first-line regiments of the pre-war Indian army which were currently winning victories against the Italians in the Western Desert, but war-raised units manned by recently enlisted recruits and led by inexperienced British officers most of whom had not learned Urdu, the command language by which the Indian army worked. There was therefore a lack of confidence between ranks, and orders for retreat were too often taken as a pretext for pell-mell withdrawal. However, poor morale was not the only explanation of Malaya Command’s collapse. Few of its units had been trained in jungle warfare or had made the effort to train themselves. Even the resolute 8th Australian Division was bewildered and disorganised by the appearance of Japanese infiltrators far to the rear of the positions where they were expected. Yet one unit, the British 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, showed what might have been achieved in defence. In the months before the war its commanding officer had practised his soldiers in extending their flanks into the jungle beyond the roads running through its defensive positions and demonstrated that the enemy’s outflanking tactics might thus be nullified. It fought with great success, though at heavy loss, in central Malaya. Had all its fellow units adopted this practice, the Japanese invasion would certainly have been slowed, perhaps checked, before Singapore was brought under threat.