Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [129]
Some blame attached to Wavell, not for failing to achieve victory, but for declining to avow the inevitability of Singapore’s fall and for not making an uncompromising recommendation to halt reinforcements and evacuate every possible man. Brooke had done exactly this in France in June 1940. The British 18th Division landed at Singapore on January 29, 1942, by which date there was no prospect of saving the campaign. Almost the entire army fell into captivity a fortnight later. It remains hard to understand why Churchill deluded himself that Singapore could be held. Every soldier knew that its fate must be decided in southern Malaya, that the island in isolation was indefensible, and the Chiefs of Staff made this plain to the prime minister on January 21. It was regrettable that commanders on the spot did not adopt a more trenchant tone. While Wavell’s signals about Malaya were unfailingly pessimistic, they did not explicitly acknowledge that Singapore’s demise was inevitable until it was too late to save any portion of its garrison. It was true that he exercised his short-lived command amid draconian signals from Churchill, demanding a last-man, last-round defence. But whereas it should have been possible to hold Crete, Singapore was doomed.
British and imperial forces in Malaya were ill-trained, poorly equipped and badly led at every level. They faced an enemy who commanded the air, but two years later German and Japanese soldiers displayed extraordinary resilience in the face of vastly stronger air forces than the Luftwaffe deployed in Greece or the Japanese in Malaya. It was the absence of any scintilla of heroic endeavour, any evidence of last-ditch sacrifice of the kind with which British armies through the centuries had so often redeemed the pain of defeats, that shocked Churchill. In Malaya, there was no legend to match that of Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in the Napoleonic Wars, of Rorke’s Drift in Zululand, of the defence of Mafikeng and Ladysmith in the Boer War. The Americans forged a propaganda epic, however spurious, out of their defence of the Bataan Peninsula between December 1941 and April 1942. The British salvaged nothing comparable from Southeast Asia. Their soldiers gave up pitifully easily, 130,000 surrendering after the loss of only around 3,000 killed. The Times of February 16 offered its readers crumbs of comfort for Singapore: “The sacrifice and the suffering and the incomparable gallantry of the defence were not wholly in vain.” This was nonsense. There was only abject defeat, surrender to numerically inferior enemies who had proved themselves better and braver soldiers. It is brutal, but seems valid, to suggest that Malaya might have been defended with greater determination had British, Indian and Australian soldiers known the fate that awaited them in Japanese captivity.
Who could wonder that Churchill should be plunged into despair? “At the back of his mind and unconsciously467, I believe,” wrote Oliver Harvey shrewdly, “the PM is jealous of Stalin and the successes of his armies.” Even if American aid enabled Britain to survive the war, how could the nation hold up its head in the world, be seen to have made a worthy contribution to victory, if its army covered itself with shame whenever exposed to a battlefield? Lack of shipping remained a massive constraint on deployments. John Kennedy wrote: “We have masses of reinforcements468 we cannot move.” At any one moment of 1942, two thousand British and American merchantmen were afloat on the Atlantic shuttle, three or four hundred of them vulnerable to U-boat attack. In peacetime, a cargo ship took an average thirty-nine days to complete a round-trip between Europe and North America. Now, the same rotation took eighty-six days, with forty-three spent in port instead of a peacetime fourteen,