The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [118]
Sailing southwards along the Malayan coast in the South China Sea without air cover, or even aerial reconnaissance, Z Force came under attack from eighty-eight Japanese planes from southern Indo-China. Less than two hours later the only two effective Allied battleships left in the Pacific were at the bottom. ‘The Prince of Wales is barely distinguishable in smoke and flame,’ recalled a survivor, ‘I can see one plane release a torpedo… It explodes against her bows. A couple of seconds later another explodes amidships and astern.’47 In his memoirs Churchill described his feelings when the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, reported the news to him over the telephone:
In all the war I never received a more direct shock. The reader of these pages will realize how many efforts, hopes, and plans foundered with these two ships. As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the survivors of Pearl Harbor, who were hastening back to California. Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.48
The collapse of morale among the defenders ashore was also shattering. Through January, the Commonwealth forces retreated steadily, with the Johore Line 25 miles from Singapore breached on the 15th. The Straits of Johore were only a mile wide, and the north coast of Singapore island was poorly defended. On 31 January, the remaining Commonwealth troops on the mainland, outfought and exhausted, crossed over to the island and destroyed as much of the causeway link as they could. It was another sign of poor British planning that no preparations had been made for a siege of the island itself.
Without a pause, the Japanese assaulted the north of the island in armour-plated barges on the night of 8 February – a further indication of their excellent Staff work – rebuilt the causeway and sent tanks across it. Counter-attacks were broken up by Japanese dive-bombing. Accusations have been made that troops of the Australian 8th Division deserted in significant numbers, drank and looted before returning to try to find boats in the harbour on which to escape. ‘There were individual examples of cowardice,’ concludes an authoritative study, ‘but for the most part this is slander.’49 It was a slander repeated by a large number of British officers, despite the fact that the Japanese lost half their battle dead in the campaign on Singapore island in the final week, when the Australians provided most of the resistance. The official war diary of the 8th Australian Division Provost Company does use the word ‘panic’ to describe the confusion of 9 February and ‘stragglers’ two days later, ‘sullen’ on the 12th, troops ‘very reluctant to return to the line’ on the 13th, ‘All imaginable excuses being made to avoid returning to the line’ on the 14th, and on the 15th ‘Morale shocking. A lot of men hid themselves to prevent and avoid return to the line,’ although this was also true of British and Indian soldiers.50 ‘In some units the troops have not shown the fighting spirit which is to be expected of men of the British Empire,’ read Percival’s covering note to senior officers attached to the Order of the Day for 11 February. ‘It will be a lasting disgrace if we are defeated by an army of clever gangsters many times inferior in numbers to our own.’51 The Japanese were not gangsters for using little conventional transport, attacking without large-scale artillery support, and pushing as far and fast ahead as possible, but they were clever. They had learnt the central lesson of the war so far, that Blitzkrieg and boldness worked. Churchill meanwhile on 10 February cabled Wavell, who had been appointed commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in the region, to say that since the Singapore garrison outnumbered the Japanese:
in a well-contested battle they should destroy them. There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The