The Second World War (41 page)

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Authors: John Keegan

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By 15 January, however, the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army, having advanced 400 miles in five weeks, was only a hundred miles from the island fortress and in heavy fighting over the next ten days drove the Australians and Indians from Singapore’s covering positions. On 31 January their rearguards, piped out of Malaya by the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland’s two remaining pipers, crossed the causeway linking Singapore to the mainland and retreated to lines covering the naval base against attack from the northern shore.

The tragedy of the Malaya campaign was now reaching its climax. Singapore had just been reinforced by the British 18th Division, brought from the Middle East, so that despite the toll of units lost in the retreat from the north Percival commanded forty-five battalions to oppose thirty-one in General Tomoyuku Yamashita’s Twenty-Fifth Army. General Sir Archibald Wavell, the victor of the war against Italy in the Middle East and now commander-in-chief in India, also counted on the arrival of air and sea reinforcements to support the troops on the ground and believed that the much-bruited strength of the Singapore naval base defences would assure its resistance for several months. As the most casual reader of the history of the Second World War now knows, however, Singapore’s defences ‘faced the wrong way’. This legend is false. The island’s strongpoints and heavy guns had been positioned to repel an attack from the mainland; but the guns had been supplied with the wrong ammunition, unsuitable for engaging troops. Singapore is separated from Johore by a channel less than a mile wide at its narrowest. The northern shore of the island, moreover, was over thirty miles long, requiring Percival to disperse his battalions – when some had been concentrated in central reserve – at one to the mile. ‘Who defends everything’, Frederick the Great had written, ‘defends nothing.’ It is a harsh truth of war. Yamashita concentrated his forces (now reinforced by the Imperial Guards Division) against six Australian battalions on the north-west corner of the island and on 8 February launched them across the narrow waters of the Johore Strait. Under this overwhelming attack the Australian 22nd and 27th Brigades rapidly crumbled. Counter-attacks by the central reserve failed to throw the Japanese back from their footholds into the water. By 15 February the reservoirs in the middle of the island which supplied Singapore city, the population of which had been swollen by the influx of refugees to over a million, had fallen into Japanese hands. Percival faced the prospect of an urban disaster. Late that evening he marched into Japanese lines to offer surrender. He was photographed carrying the Union Jack beside a white flag borne by a staff officer. According to the historian Basil Collier, it was for ‘the British the greatest military disaster in their history’, entailing the capitulation of more than 130,000 British, Indian, Australian and local volunteer troops to a Japanese force half their number. Most of the captured Indians, seduced by the appeals of the mesmeric Hindu nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose, would shortly go over to the Japanese to form an Indian National Army which would fight on Japan’s side against the British in Burma in the cause of Indian independence. The Indian defection and the white flag incident were two of many reasons why Percival was never forgiven by Churchill’s government or its successor for his catastrophic mismanagement of the Malaya campaign. After liberation in 1945 he became a ‘non-person’, shunned by all in official life and excluded from every commemoration of Britain’s belated Asian victory.

Admiral H. E. Kimmel, the Pearl Harbor commander, was to suffer much the same official oblivion, though with less justification. As the coming turn of events in the Dutch East Indies was to demonstrate, no Western commander who stood in the path of Japan’s surprise attack of December 1941 could preserve his professional honour, in a theatre hopelessly unprepared for the conduct of modern war, except by death in the face of the enemy. Admiral Karel Doorman, the senior Dutch naval officer in the East Indies, has gone down in history a hero – but only because he died on the bridge of his sinking cruiser in battle against fearful odds with the Japanese fleet. The Dutch East Indies were even less ready to resist attack than Hawaii or Pearl Harbor; Doorman may have regarded death as a merciful release from catastrophe, for which he bore no more responsibility in his sector of the ‘Southern Area’ than Percival and Kimmel in theirs.

 
Unlocking the East Indies treasure-house

Japanese attacks against the East Indies had opened on the British enclave in Borneo on 16 December. It was clear that they would shortly be extended to the whole of the island chain which stretches eastward from Malaya through New Guinea to the northern coast of Australia. In 1941 Australia was almost without defences, since the bulk of its army had been shipped overseas to fight with the British in the Middle East and south-east Asia. A frantic effort ensued to concentrate such Australian, Dutch, British and American forces as existed in the region into a coherent command. It was dubbed ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian) and placed under the authority of General Wavell. The strength at his disposal consisted of the small United States Asiatic Fleet, the Royal Australian Navy and the home defence elements of the Australian army, the remnants of the British Eastern Fleet, the units of the Dutch navy in East Indian waters and the Dutch East Indies Army. The latter numbered some 140,000, the vast majority locals, unequipped and untrained for modern war; unlike the best of Britain’s highly professional Indian army, it had never even fought a war. ABDA’s naval force included eleven cruisers, twenty-seven destroyers and forty submarines. The United States hastily rushed a hundred modern aircraft to Java; the Dutch had only obsolescent models, and the British air component was wholly engaged in – and did not survive – the fighting in Malaya.

The Japanese strategy for the conquest of the East Indies – for them a treasure-house of oil, rubber and non-ferrous metal production, as well as rice and timber – was excellently conceived. They planned to use their plentiful naval and amphibious forces to attack in close succession at widely separated points across the 2000-mile length of the archipelago: Borneo and the Celebes in January, Timor and Sumatra in February, Java in March. An important subordinate aim of the attack on Timor, which lies only 300 miles from Australia’s northernmost port of Darwin, was to cut the air link between Australia and Java. All forces were eventually to combine for the capture of Batavia (today Jakarta) on Java, the capital of the East Indies.

The Japanese landing troops found little difficulty in overcoming the Dutch local forces (which the population showed little inclination to support) wherever they were met. The Australians – whose will to fight was stiffened further by an air raid on Darwin, mounted from four of the carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor, on 19 February – proved a tougher case. However, they were too few to check the trend of events. The only substantial counter in ABDA’s hands was its fleet, a formidable force as long as the Japanese did not employ airpower against it. It enjoyed some early successes. On 24 January American destroyers and a Dutch submarine sank transports off Borneo and on 19 February Dutch and American destroyers engaged others off Bali. Admiral Doorman’s test came on 27 February, when the ABDA command launched a Combined Striking Force against the Japanese invasion fleet approaching Java. Doorman’s ships included two heavy and three light cruisers and nine destroyers, drawn from the Dutch, British, Australian and American navies. Admiral Takeo Takagi, his Japanese opponent, commanded two heavy and two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Numerically the encounter looked an even match; and in resolution, as Doorman was to display, the Japanese had no edge at all. However, they possessed a superior item of equipment, their 24-inch ‘long-lance’ torpedo which was a far more advanced weapon than its Allied equivalents.

The Battle of the Java Sea opened late in the afternoon of 27 February, with little daylight left. The initial stage of the largest naval engagement since Jutland took the form of a gunnery duel at long range. When the Japanese closed to launch torpedoes, however, they quickly scored hits, and Doorman was forced to turn away to protect his casualties. As darkness fell he lost contact with the Japanese and shortly afterwards had to detach most of his destroyers to refuel. He nevertheless remained determined to prevent the Japanese fleet putting its troops ashore and so turned back in darkness to where he judged it to be. His force was now reduced to one heavy and three light cruisers and one destroyer, and the moon was bright. At 10.30 pm he found the Japanese again; more accurately, the Japanese found him. While he engaged one part of their fleet, another approached unseen and launched the deadly torpedoes. Both surviving Dutch cruisers went down almost at once,
De Ruyter
taking Doorman with her. The USS
Houston
and HMAS
Perth
escaped, only to be sunk the following night after a heroic fight; misaimed Japanese torpedoes sank four of the transports they had been trying to intercept. All the major units of the force on which ABDA ultimately counted to repel the Japanese from the southern Pacific and the approaches to Australia had ceased to exist.

Beaten at sea, the Dutch were also quickly forced to surrender on land. On 12 March a formal Allied capitulation was signed at Bandung, on Java; the Imperial Guards Division, which had taken Singapore, landed the same day in Sumatra, the last of the large Dutch islands remaining outside Japanese control. The Japanese were by no means unwelcome in the East Indies: the Dutch, unlike the French, had never found the knack of tempering colonial rule by offering cultural and intellectual equality to a subject people’s educated class. Educated young Indonesians – as they were shortly to call themselves – responded readily to the message that the Japanese brought ‘co-prosperity’, as they certainly brought liberation from Dutch subjection, and were to prove among the most enthusiastic of collaborators in Japan’s New Order.

Another people who had always resented colonial subjection were the Burmese, whose intractability was at odds with the much more complex mixture of love and hate their Indian neighbours felt for the British Empire. Britain had always had difficulty in ruling Burma, which they had finally conquered only in 1886 (the young Rudyard Kipling’s Tommies, drawn from life, had marched on the road to Mandalay). Few Burmese had ever accepted the outcome of the war and conquest and in early 1941 a group of young dissidents, later to become famous as ‘the Thirty’, had gone to Japan, under the leadership of Aung San, to be trained in fomenting resistance to British rule. Their opportunity was to come sooner than they had expected. During December the Japanese Fifteenth Army, which had entered Thailand at the beginning of the month, crossed the Burmese border to seize the airfields at Tenasserim. It was clear that a major offensive would follow shortly.

Burma was defended by a single locally enlisted division; part of the 17th Indian Division joined it in January. The only other Allied forces to hand were Chiang Kai-shek’s Sixty-Sixth Army, based on the Burma Road and (like most Chinese formations) of doubtful value, and two Chinese divisions commanded by the redoubtable American ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell on the Burma-China border. The commander of the Fifteenth Army, General Shojira Iida, had only two divisions, the 33rd and 55th, but they were well trained and supported by 300 aircraft; the British troops were not well trained and had almost no air support at all.

The campaign went wrong for the British from the start. Required to defend a wide front with few troops, the 17th Indian Division soon lost its forward defensive line on the Salween river on 14 February, pulled back to the Sittang river, guarding the capital, Rangoon, held there briefly and then, through a misunderstanding, blew the only bridge across it while most of the fighting troops were on the wrong side.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. General Alexander, who had arrived from Britain to stop the rot on 5 March, decided that the remnants of ‘Burcorps’, as his force was called, would have to retreat to the Irrawaddy valley in the centre of the country if a stand were to be made. The Japanese Fifteenth Army, now reinforced by the 18th and 56th Divisions and 100 aircraft, followed on his heels. Alexander hoped to hold south of Mandalay, Burma’s second city, on a line between Prome and Toungoo, where a Chinese division had arrived; but he was pushed out of it on 21 March and forced into further retreat. His British and Indian troops were now short of supplies and exhausted, his Burmese troops had started to desert
en masse
. He was threatened with being outflanked both to the west and to the east, where the Japanese were driving the Chinese back towards the mountains of the China border. Faced with the dilemma of following the Chinese Sixty-Sixth Army (in reality about a division strong) along the Burma Road, which led from north-east Burma into China, where he had no assurance of supply, or of embarking on a trek across the roadless mountains of north-west Burma into India, he opted for the latter course. On 21 April he agreed with Chiang Kai-shek’s liaison officer in Burma that their two beaten armies should go their separate ways and set off to lead his troops, accompanied by thousands of civilian refugees, on ‘the longest retreat in British military history’. On 19 May, having traversed 600 miles of Burma in nine weeks, the survivors of ‘Burcorps’ crossed the Indian frontier at Tamu, in the Chin Hills, just as the arrival of the monsoon made further retreat impossible – but also, fortunately, denied the Japanese the possibility of pushing their pursuit into India itself.

About 4000 of the 30,000 British troops who had begun the campaign had perished; some 9000 were missing, most of them Burmese who had left the ranks. Only one Burmese battalion, largely recruited from one of the country’s ethnic minorities, arrived in India. Many of the fugitives accepted Aung San’s call to arms and joined his Burma National Army, which under Japanese colours briefly fought on Japan’s side in 1944 and after the war provided the nucleus of his successful independence movement. There were other survivors of the rout. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell trekked back into China, whence he sallied into Burma again in 1944. General Bill Slim, Alexander’s subordinate, reached India; he too returned to Burma in 1944, at the head of the victorious Fourteenth Army, which he rebuilt from the debris of the rout. Among its units were the 4th Burma Rifles, the sole surviving element of the original 1st Burma Division.

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