Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [105]
In December of 1941, the area commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, had under command about 80,000 combat troops, generally poorly trained and deficient in artillery and armor; about 150 aircraft—precisely half of what was considered necessary for defense—and a naval force whose mainstays were the newly arrived Prince of Wales and Repulse. In other words, his ground forces lacked material, his air forces were short of planes, and his naval forces had no air cover. All the British really had for comfort when the Japanese landed on the Malay Peninsula was the belief that the enemy could not advance through the jungles. Of that happy ignorance they were swiftly to be disabused.
The Japanese forces under General Tomoyuki Yamashita were well trained and battle tested in China. There were four divisions of them, plus adequate support from air and naval units. Unlike the British, they had a tough, integrated, well-coordinated force. By launching air strikes early on the 8th, the Japanese quickly gained air supremacy. They followed it by winning naval supremacy as well.
The outbreak of war found Repulse and Prince of Wales at Singapore; the fleet commander, Admiral Sir Tom Philips, was in Manila conferring, or commiserating, with his American opposite number. Philips flew back to Singapore immediately, and when news came in of Japanese convoys up the coast, he sailed into the China Sea to intercept them. He asked for air cover from shore-based units, but cooperation broke down between the rapidly changing situation and the inadequacies of the British command and communication structure. Instead of British planes, Philips got Japanese. Scouts picked up his two huge ships at sea, naked to their enemies, and before noon on the 10th the two great ships were attacked by a series of bomber and torpedo aircraft. Both ships went down that afternoon, giants killed by insects. They were the last standard-bearers of Allied naval might in the Pacific, and the first capital ships ever sunk in battle by aircraft alone. When a Japanese patrol plane dropped a wreath over their graves, it acknowledged not only a brave enemy, but the end of the dreadnought era as well.
Air power and naval power gone, the defense of Malaya now rested on the shoulders of the land commander, General A. E. Perceval. He had two divisions scattered about the Malayan Peninsula, and one in reserve holding the approaches to Singapore. Within days the Japanese were all over his forward troops, moving through the supposedly impassable jungle, sending tanks down the tracks and roads to ambush the British, cutting in behind them and setting up roadblocks. Harried, confused, cut off, the British fought a series of rear-guard actions that turned into a shambling retreat. By the first week of January they were pushed out of the Malay States and into Johore, only fifty miles from Singapore. The British hoped to hold there, but once again the Japanese flanked them and levered them out of their positions. By the end of the month, Perceval was off the mainland, his troops pulled back to the island of Singapore itself.
The Strait of Johore, which separates Singapore from the mainland, is shallow and narrow. The British had built some defenses along the island, but had not extensively fortified the area. The great naval guns in their fixed positions were across the island, pointing resolutely out at the empty sea. After a week of intensive bombardment and air attack, Yamashita put three divisions across the strait, and by the morning of February 9 his troops were firmly ashore. The British, Indians, and Australians of the garrison did their best to hold a line through the center of the island, but this went too; the linear defenses and static ideas of 1916 simply could not withstand the Japanese tactics of penetration and infiltration. They lost the reservoirs in the center of the island and by the 15th were back in a tight perimeter around the city of Singapore, while a pall of smoke from burning oil