Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse

‘… even now his [Winston Churchill’s] treatment of some officers, and his invariable search for scapegoats when anything went wrong, leaves an impression almost amounting to vindictiveness…’

Stephen Roskill;
Churchill and the Admirals

This book is dedicated to Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and all those who lost their lives in the sinking of HMS
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
and to Commander T.V.G. Phillips
–
a fine man, a fine officer and a loving and dutiful son

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

Pen & Sword Maritime

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © Martin Stephen 2014

ISBN 978 1 78383 178 4
eISBN 9781473840126

The right of Martin Stephen to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in Ehrhardt by

Mac Style Ltd, Bridlington, East Yorkshire

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword

Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family

History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select,

Transport, True Crime, and Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper,

Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail: [email protected]

Website:
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1
    The Military, Political and Historical Background

Chapter 2
     The Loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
The Action: The Case Against Tom Phillips

Chapter 3
     Admiral Sir Tom Phillips

Chapter 4
     Singapore and Signals

Chapter 5
     Churchill and ‘The Secret Alliance’

Chapter 6
     The Ships:
Prince of Wales

Chapter 7
     The Ships:
Repulse
and Escorts

Chapter 8
     Intelligence, SS
Automedon
and ‘Matador’

Chapter 9
     Aircraft

Chapter 10
     Struggles for Power: Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and the Royal Navy in 1941

Chapter 11
     The Loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
: A Revaluation – the Preliminaries

Chapter 12
     The Loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
: A Revaluation – The Action

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I
owe a great debt for this and my other books to the research facilities offered by the Cambridge University Library. I am also grateful to The National Maritime Museum, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum and Churchill College, Cambridge. In particular I would like to thank Helen Mavin, Assistant Curator (Photographs) and Parveen Kaur Sodhi (Commercial Sales & Licensing Executive, Image Sales and Licensing) both of the Imperial War Museum.

I am grateful to Sir Tom Phillips, Sheila Gregory and the family of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips for allowing me access to his papers and the extensive collection of material collected and kept by the family and friends after the loss of Force Z. Similar thanks go to Jennifer Leach. I am also extremely grateful to Alan Matthews of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
Survivors’ Association.

Note on Methodology

Wherever possible I have referenced quotations to the most readily available source in which they have been published. For the occasional item which is not thus available I have given the original Public Records Office (PRO) reference, or that applying to the British Museum and Churchill College Archives (CA), otherwise known as the Roskill Collection.

Original naval records present something of a nightmare for the researcher. The official records suffered by virtue of having been generated in wartime conditions, and things were seriously confused further by the methodology adopted by those responsible for the writing of the official naval history of the war which saw considerable re-arrangement of the material that may have been helpful to the authors but was not helpful to subsequent researchers. One of my fondest recollections is calling up a file which I believed to be full of details of requisitions for the naval base at Alexandria, and having fall out of it an extraordinary statement from Admiral Vian taking full responsibility for something a junior officer was about to be blamed for. Several years and at least one ocean separated this document from those actually listed as being in the file and this was only the most extreme example of a not uncommon event. I regret I do not speak Japanese and have relied on secondary sources for all Japanese material.

Introduction

O
n 10 December 1941 two Royal Navy warships, the newly constructed King George V class battleship
Prince of Wales
and the First World War battle cruiser
Repulse,
were sunk by land based Japanese bombers and torpedo bombers while attempting to disrupt Japanese landings on British held territories, the length of what was then Malaya and is now Sri Lanka. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the commander of the ill-fated Force Z, was criticized by many post-war authorities for the disaster, which, along with the raids on Taranto and Pearl Harbor, is deemed to have marked the end of the battleship as the dominant force in naval warfare. The loss of these two great ships is associated with more than the end of the battleship era. A few weeks later Singapore, from whence the ships had set sail on their last voyage, was to fall to the Japanese, an event that to many people marked the effective end of the British Empire.

Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
had embarked on their mission with no accompanying aircraft carrier. When spotted by a Japanese aircraft, Phillips failed to call up air cover from RAF air bases on the Malaysian Peninsular. As someone with no combat experience, and a man who had professed his faith in the ability of a well-handled surface ship to survive air attack, Phillips was held responsible in greater or lesser measure for the sinking of the two ships. In some quarters the image was cultivated of a man who combined some of the worst features of martinet and dinosaur. Phillips, who lost his life in the engagement, as did the captain of
Prince of Wales
, was therefore not able to defend himself and had no friends among the remaining senior Admirals such as A.B. Cunningham or James Somerville to fight on his behalf. Phillips had fallen out with Churchill, having once been a favourite, and in the aftermath of the debacle of the fall of Singapore and a mass stampede by some of those involved to cover their own backs, Phillips’s reputation was never even a starter in the race for rehabilitation.

My own interest in Admiral Sir Tom Phillips was kindled when I was commissioned to write a book,
Sea Battles in Close Up,
looking at ten of the major naval engagements of the Second World War. I dutifully wrote a chapter on the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
that took what was then something of a middle ground, not totally condemning Phillips but at the same time finding little reason to exonerate him. I was left feeling edgy about what I had written for reasons of intuition I still do not clearly understand. The edge persisted to the extent of my badgering the long-suffering Leo Cooper to commission a book titled
The Fighting Admirals. British Admirals of the Second World War.
He thought it was about British Admirals of the Second World War. I thought it had given me a good cover story for writing a book about Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. I needed the cover story because I believed no one would commission a book on Phillips alone.

Then things started to go wrong. Try as I might, I could find no trace of the private or family papers of Tom Phillips. Admirals always leave these and they are an invaluable insight for any proper historian who wishes to work from primary sources. With two naval history books under my belt by then I knew the various archives where any such papers ought to be. Yet despite everything I found Tom Phillips might as well not have existed. After six months of increasingly frantic letters and ‘phone calls, I had resigned myself to the fact that
The Fighting Admirals: British Admirals of the First World War
would more or less have to omit the one Admiral who had caused me to want to write it in the first place. Then one evening I came home to find my wife chatting in our drawing room to Sheila, a woman she had met earlier and invited round for a drink. Her surname bore not even the remotest connection to anyone or anything in the Royal Navy. Sheila commented on how the walls were lined with quite a lot of naval history books. I told her this was a hobby and that I was working on what was meant to be a book about a man she would never have heard of, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, but that I would have to take another direction because I had failed to track down any of the man’s private papers. A funny expression crossed Sheila’s face, and she said: ‘I do know who he was, actually; he was my grandfather. And I can tell you why you can’t find the papers.’

It transpired that Tom Phillips’s son, who tended to be known as ‘Tom’ after he left the Navy but prior to that was known as ‘Gerry’ to his father and ‘Gerald’ to the world in general, had inherited all the family papers on the death of Lady Phillips, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips’s widow, in the 1970s. Lady Phillips had been responsible for the creation of an extremely interesting archive containing not only letters but also other contemporary material. Gerald Phillips had trusted the brilliant naval historian Arthur Marder to look inside the huge, old suitcase containing the papers but Marder had died before he could make full use of them. Following an invitation to Sunday lunch with the family, I was allowed access to the material in one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. There were unpublished letters from Churchill, a string of tributes to Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and personal letters that gave a very different impression of the man from that found in most available books. Reading through this material I gained the sense of a man radically different from that generally portrayed, and infinitely more attractive. There were also some crucial corrections to the standard historical version of what happened, some of which I was able to include in
The Fighting Admirals.

There is always a danger that a historian in contact with the family of his subject can be influenced emotionally to be kinder than purely intellectual considerations might allow for. When writing an earlier book I had an extremely cordial relationship with the son of a Second World War Admiral I previously believed to be a charlatan. And I have written extremely warmly about another whose family I regret to say I did not like at all. I believe my view of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips is as objective as it is unfashionable and is formed from a straightforward analysis of the facts.

Much more has emerged in the past years to merit a new book on both the loss of the two ships and the Admiral in overall command. Much more has been released or become known about the fall of Singapore, some of which has a direct bearing on the sinkings. The wrecks of both vessels have been thoroughly examined and battle damage assessed, and there is considerably more information available about the design of
Prince of Wales
in particular
,
which has a crucial bearing on the ship’s loss. So too does an increasing store of knowledge about
material
on both the British and the Japanese side, new intelligence
material
in general, the increasing information available on Churchill’s role in the incident and the fall of Singapore itself. As stated above, the private Phillips papers give a completely different picture of his character and personality to the stereotype presented in many books and allow for a revisionary book on the loss of the two ships and the reputation of their commander.

It is frequently said that history is written by the victors. So it is for around a hundred years after the events. Beyond that time the stranglehold on history exerted by those who won and survived to write the tale lessens and the truth will out. It is time the truth was revealed about Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the man who was probably least responsible of any for the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.
To this day those most responsible for what happened on 10 December 1941 have not been called to account.

There is another factor behind my interest in Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. As with many people before and after him whose reputations have been traduced by history, there is a strong possibility that he was a scapegoat, a convenient figure to absorb the blame that should more properly have been placed on the shoulders of others. When I have not been writing books I have been privileged to be Head of three of England’s leading independent schools. The Head of such schools has the rather strange experience of sitting at tables for which he does not qualify in terms of wealth, birth or social status. I imagine being something like the country vicar asked to make up the numbers for dinner at the big house in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have listened to, and even been treated as a confidante of, some leading figures in the Church, politics, the military, commerce and industry. It has made me extremely cynical and left me convinced that vast power is exercised by those who are neither elected nor accountable. It has also suggested strongly that many people elected to positions of real power do not use that power in the first instance to promulgate the Gospel, win the election or war or sell more widgets. Instead, their first and overriding priority is to use that power to guard their own backs. They exist in any organization I have known, but there is also a separate group of people who actually do the job and keep the business afloat (or who are simply naïve) and are far too busy to guard their backs. These are the most vulnerable when the fur starts to fly and are prime candidates to be made scapegoats for whatever has gone wrong. The more I read about Admiral Sir Tom Phillips the more I came to believe that of all the people who could be blamed for the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
he was the least liable and a classic example of the scapegoat – the person blamed for the faults of others.

A further factor that has helped to damn him was neither his own fault nor of his own making. Writers and journalists face a terrible pressure not to let the truth stand in the way of a good story. What makes a good story – Shakespeare’s
Richard III
or the final moments of the First World War in the
Blackadder
television series – is often bad history. An antediluvian Admiral who did not believe in air power and had his two battleships sunk under him by aircraft is a classic good story, a headline from Heaven, and so good a story that it ought to be true. It wasn’t of course, but that wasn’t the point.

Phillips made a crucial mistake in getting himself killed. It meant the coast was clear for his detractors, those in power in the hierarchy of the Royal Navy who disliked or were jealous of him and those who might otherwise have shared the blame. The Royal Navy, as is common in any institution, had its own internal wars and jealousies in 1941 and tragedy can bring the best and the worst out of an institution. Being zealous of one’s own reputation in the eyes of some senior naval officers became confused with being rather less zealous for the reputation of others. And, of course, just as everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon, so does everyone want to jump off when it threatens to crash.

In the battle to rescue the reputation of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips a number of forces have gathered in recent years and scouting missions been sent out. Perhaps now is the time for those forces to be gathered together for a major offensive, which I hope is what this book represents.