The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [117]
Conventional British military thinking held that Singapore was safe from a northern attack because the 500 miles of dense jungle and rubber plantations of central Malaya were impassable by tanks. ‘Well,’ the British Governor of Singapore is alleged to have told the British commander in Malaya, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, ‘I suppose you’ll see the little men off.’41 Percival also had more artillery and shells and many more troops than Yamashita, and on 2 December Admiral Sir Tom Phillips’ Force Z, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battle cruiser HMS Repulse, with destroyer escorts, had arrived in Singapore harbour. Although aircraft had sunk ships in Norway and Crete, this had not yet happened to a battleship (the Prince of Wales had no fewer than forty automatic anti-aircraft weapons).42 The RAF in Singapore, it was true, had only 180 aircraft, some of them outdated, but on paper Percival ought to have been able to withstand the coming onslaught, at least for a considerable length of time. But almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. ‘Defeat’, as one historian of the campaign has put it, ‘was a team effort.’43 The Japanese seized the initiative from the moment they landed amphibiously at Kota Bharu near the north-west tip of Malaya on 8 December 1941 and marched south, and Percival was never able to wrest it back from them. The invaders flung themselves into jungle warfare with gusto, and also proved enthusiastic and adept at hand-to-hand fighting. There was no particular reason why the Japanese should have excelled at jungle warfare in the early days; the fighting in China had not taken place in jungles, nor are there any in Japan. Yet they were trained for fighting there in a way the Commonwealth troops were not. ‘The jungle betrayed the British,’ recorded an historian; ‘the jungle had been their possession for eighty years, whose possibilities for war they had never learned.’44 Because the jungle impeded lateral movement and visibility along a defended front, it made it easy for front-line units to be cut off, and thus favoured the offensive over the defensive. All too often the Commonwealth units found themselves outmanoeuvred and surrounded, almost before they knew it. It turned out that tanks – of which Percival had almost none – could indeed move through the jungle and rubber plantations, and the British found themselves woefully short of anti-tank weaponry.45 Only six weeks after landing, the Japanese had got to within sight of Singapore island.
Vast numbers of Japanese planes operating at first from southern Indo-China but subsequently from captured airfields in northern Malaya won the all-important air superiority. British intelligence reports proved inaccurate, and the two Indian divisions, one Australian division and smaller British units were ineffectually led. ‘Defence arrangements were fully in British hands, but affected by a series of contradictions and complications which, but for their tragic implications, could have been considered too far-fetched for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.’46 In a detailed War Office examination of what went wrong, compiled later that same year, and in subsequent historical estimations, Singapore fell because the Commonwealth leaders had underestimated the enemy, displayed lacklustre leadership, trained their troops badly, split divisions in battle, used reinforcements in a piecemeal manner, had a divided command structure, shown poor strategic grasp, had heavy commitments in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and had insufficient air cover. It was this last that caused the greatest maritime disaster of the war for the Royal Navy, when both the 35,000-ton HMS Prince of Wales and the 26,500-ton HMS Repulse were sunk on Wednesday, 10 December