Inferno - Max Hastings [133]
Before the battle cruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: “Brussels ball once again.” Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: “We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes … I know the old ship will give a good account of itself … Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried … not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship—she is much too lucky.” Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: “Every man waved and put his thumb up to me … as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton … I saw the spirit which wins wars.” Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: “RAF—Rare as Fucking Fairies!”
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In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1st Battalion 14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying antitank guns had no time to unlimber. “Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,” wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. “The din was terrific … almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover … within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks … passed me … They had crashed right through our forward companies … I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.”
The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: 30 of its men were killed in their first action, while only 200 escaped with their weapons, leaving most to be captured. An officer recorded “scenes of indescribable confusion, with small leaderless parties of Indian and Gurkha troops firing in every direction … no one appeared to know what was happening … their own artillery was falling short among the British troops.” Some units, notably including a battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, acquitted themselves well. But isolated stands were of little value when Japanese who met resistance repeatedly outflanked the defenders by infiltration through jungle the British had deemed impassable.
Duff Cooper, the British resident minister in the Far East, wrote to Churchill about Britain’s military commander in Malaya, Gen. Arthur Percival: “A nice, good man … calm, clear-headed and even clever. But he cannot take a large view; it is all a field day at Aldershot to him. He knows the rules so well and follows them so closely and is always waiting