Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (10 page)

Churchill’s memoirs refer to a meeting – ‘mostly Admiralty’ – that was convened in the Cabinet war room to consider the naval situation in the Far East on the evening of 9 December. Churchill tried to argue that this meeting reached the conclusion that the best thing for
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
to do was to make an appearance at Singapore, and then vanish and hide in the islands or join the American fleet, the former allowing them to act as a threat to Japanese ambitions without putting themselves in undue danger. The problem is that generations of historians have been unable to find a shred of contemporary documentary evidence supporting Churchill’s account of ‘the disappearing strategy’.

This leads on to the issue of whether or not Churchill can be let off the hook of blame by arguing that Phillips himself should have adopted the disappearing strategy:

‘A clear distinction should therefore be drawn between Churchill’s decision to place two capital ships at Singapore on the eve of war, and the subsequent decision, taken thousands of miles away, that resulted in these ships being caught in the open and without air cover off the coast of Malaya on the morning of 10 December 1941.’
¹⁷

In other words, Churchill put the ships in Singapore. He did not make them leave it to attack the Japanese: only Phillips could make them do that.

It is a feeble argument, akin to saying that Churchill pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger, but they could always have moved out of the way. To all intents and purposes Tom Phillips had no option other than to use Force Z to try and disrupt Japanese invasion plans. True, he had received two signals suggesting he might withdraw his ships, but the ‘prodding’ signal he received on 7 December sent from Pound but undoubtedly backed by Churchill, that asked what action it would be possible to take with naval or air forces seemed to make it clear that the Admiralty wanted action. Phillips had, as discussed above, signalled his intention to attack and not had that challenged. He undoubtedly had a chance to do serious damage to Japanese invasion plans, believed he was out of range of Japanese torpedo-bombers and would undoubtedly have been accused of cowardice had he retreated, as Captain Leach of
Prince of Wales
had so nearly had done to him, not to mention Admiral James Somerville after Cape Spartivento. The impact on the morale of Singapore of the two ships running away would have been disastrous, the boost to the Japanese tremendous. Ironically, the fuss that the Government and Churchill insisted on making about the dispatch of
Prince of Wales
made it far harder for the force to do nothing. That same fuss provoked the Japanese to transfer within range the very aircraft that sank the ship, so making the fuss in the first place was not one of Churchill’s most triumphantly successful ideas. And, of course, the two Royal Navy ships were not just the major but perhaps, given the weakness of the RAF, the only means Singapore had of striking a blow against Japanese aggression, and not to use them would not just have been cowardice, but a rank admission of defeat.

Churchill’s own relationship with Phillips has tended not to do the latter any favours. A man perceived as having political patronage does not always recommend himself to other senior officers who may not feel they have that same access to corridors of power, and many of whom distrust politicians anyway. Churchill clearly thought highly of Phillips who spent weekends at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, and the admiration was, most of the time at least, mutual. Writing to a family friend after he met with General Smuts, and despite his falling out with Churchill, it is Churchill’s
opinion of Smuts that Phillips uses to validate his own: ‘… there is no doubt that Winston’s description of him as the greatest man alive today is fully justified.’
¹⁸

The letter Churchill wrote when Phillips was appointed a Vice-Admiral has clear warmth:

‘My Dear Phillips,

It gives me great pleasure to tell you that we have all agreed that the importance of your work and the part you play at the heart of the Naval War requires your immediate promotion to the rank of acting Vice-Admiral. The official intimation will reach you during the day, but let me take this occasion of offering my cordial congratulations.’
¹⁹

Phillips is sometimes assumed to have achieved his promotions simply through the influence of Churchill. In fact, Dudley Pound was Phillips’s greatest supporter and arguably played a more prominent role in his advancement. It is clear that Pound found Phillips invaluable.

However, it is beyond doubt that there were significant differences of opinion between Churchill and Phillips and that their relationship cooled dramatically as a result. The latter objected to the mass bombing of German cities, and the campaigns for Greece and Crete. It is difficult to believe Phillips was not right on both counts. Had the RAF’s long-range bombers been sent out under the banner of Coastal Command with the radar necessary to detect U-boats the whole course of the war could have been changed, the war shortened and thousands of lives – particularly those of merchant seamen – been saved. As for Crete and Greece, Admiral A.B. Cunningham eventually acquiesced to Greece
²⁰
and produced the famous comment to the effect that it took a few years for the Royal Navy to build a warship but a lifetime to build a reputation. It was a good speech, but bad tactics. Cunningham’s strapline ignored the fact that the ships sunk in the Greece and Crete campaigns were not only vital to the war effort, but in many cases took down to the bottom of the sea with them men whose training had taken many years, and whose experience was invaluable in a navy strained to the very limit in finding the men to man its ships.

Churchill did not like objections to his ideas:

‘The clash of powerful wills, that had once worked in sympathetic harmony, destroyed all confidence between these two self-assertive men. Churchill … determined to be rid of Tom Phillips as soon as he could without causing a crisis at the Admiralty.’
²¹

A friend of Phillips’s wrote after the war that Phillips stood up to Churchill, albeit reluctantly, and without losing respect for him:

‘He had the greatest respect for the P.M. but did not always agree with him and was outspoken enough to say so… I remember his saying that he did not think the P.M. liked being opposed, but he had to do it.’
²²

It is not as clear that the respect was mutual. In the First World War Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had packed off Sir Doveton Sturdee to chase down German raiders in the Falkland Isles following a disagreement, and it may well be that sending Tom Phillips off to the Far East was a repetition of this trait on Churchill’s part. If so, it is a further charge against Churchill, namely that he chose a commander for Force Z for reasons that had little or nothing to do with his military suitability.

It is therefore quite easy to cast Churchill as the villain of the piece in the loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.
Churchill misjudged the likelihood of Japan declaring war against Britain and consistently underestimated the threat to Singapore. He was partly responsible for the parlous state of Singapore’s defences. He sent crucial supplies to Russia rather than Singapore. He should never have sent the ships out there in the first place. He chose Force Z’s commander for the wrong reasons. Force Z was a diplomatic mission suddenly required to fight but unsuited to do so. He put his voice behind giving the despatch of the force a high public profile, believing it would increase the deterrent effect, but in practice both ensuring crucial Japanese reinforcements and that the ships would have to sail to attack against all the odds. Once war was declared he should have pulled the ships back either into hiding, or ordered them to join the American fleet, and his ‘prodding’ signal and failure to order Phillips to withdraw were an effective death sentence for the ships. He tried to cover for his own failings, after an initial defence of Phillips, by blaming Phillips for the disaster.

However, it is possible to take another view.

The Case for Churchill

It is very hard to forgive Churchill for his shameless backtracking following the sinkings, whereby he sought to claim he had always intended Force Z to retreat from Singapore. He did not and lied to cover his back. This was an act of moral cowardice and distasteful on a personal level. But just as Admirals do not have to be liked, so with great leaders. Machiavelli would have willingly allowed his leaders a measure of hypocrisy and falsehood if the result had been that Machiavelli was spared torture. The same instinct for survival that saw his attempt to wriggle out of responsibility for the sinkings also drove his wider instinct for the survival of Great Britain. On this wider canvas, it is clearly true that Churchill did not have the defence of Singapore as a top priority. It is possible to argue that in this he was correct. The war in Europe threatened the very continued existence of Britain. The loss of Singapore threatened its income and its influence. It was not that Churchill thought Singapore unimportant, merely that he ranked it as less important than the survival of the country. There is actually nothing unsound in his suggestion that Australia could just as easily be defended by ships based in Darwin. Even Roskill, one of Churchill’s fiercest critics, can only find to say about this idea that Churchill did not seem to consider where the ships for this defence might come from. One might equally as well ask where the ships for the defence of Singapore would come from.

In effect, Churchill and Phillips were linked by more than their former friendship. Both took a gamble. In Phillips’s case, the gamble was that a surprise attack under cover of monsoon bad weather might significantly delay or stop the Japanese invasion of the Malayan Peninsula. It was not an unreasonable gamble, given what Phillips had been told, and what he thought he knew.

Churchill’s gamble was on an altogether larger canvas, though not without its own justification. He gambled that the Japanese would not wish to take on Imperial Britain, that if they did so America would come in on Britain’s side and that in the event of hostilities it would take months to wear down Singapore, not so much by its military strength but more by reason of its distance from Japan’s starting point. He gambled that Japanese involvement in Indo-China would continue to occupy them. Perhaps most of all, Churchill knew that a Britain near bankrupt after the First World War could not afford on its own the war on two fronts that crippled Germany in two world wars. What might have saved Singapore was a sizeable portion of the American fleet based there, not to mention the American air force. Churchill’s gamble failed, in no small measure because the Japanese acted more speedily and more effectively than anyone had expected. If one was a serviceman sent to Singapore as a raw recruit, without tanks or modern aircraft, was taken prisoner at Singapore and subsequently became the victim of appalling Japanese cruelty, one can be excused for seeing Churchill in a most unflattering light. The same goes for the family and friends of those who died on
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
who could quite reasonably have blamed Churchill and a number of others before they blamed Tom Phillips. But if that gamble had succeeded, and Britain held on to Singapore, it could and would have been a very different story.

So what is the truth? Churchill’s role in the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
was crucial. It was the wrong force for the threat it was destined to meet, and Churchill, who has so often been criticised for interfering in naval matters, for once failed to intervene when it might have done some good and order the two ships in to hiding. That he bears a very significant responsibility for ‘Britain’s greatest naval defeat’ cannot be denied. He gambled with these two ships as his chips. His bluff was called, he lost his bet and many men died. When push came to shove, he was probably the only man who could have issued orders that would have saved two ships, nearly a thousand lives and British prestige in the Far East, the latter perhaps for only a short while. Years on from the event, we can argue from our armchairs that Tom Phillips could have ordered his force away from the sound of the guns, and in so doing denied the very life blood of the service he served so well. For the only British force capable of offensive action in a theatre of war where Britain was facing its greatest-ever defeat simply to run and hide was never going to happen, and the subsequent fate of other Royal Navy vessels in the same theatre of war when Japanese carriers arrived suggests it would only have delayed rather than stopped the inevitable. Admiral James Somerville’s Far Eastern Fleet, a ‘forgotten fleet’ to match the ‘forgotten army’, played hide and seek with the Japanese, achieved very little and came near to disaster on several occasions. Churchill, on the other hand, could have issued the order for the ships to ‘disappear’, and at least deferred a tragedy. His mistake was the one single action most responsible for the loss of the ships. For every action Tom Phillips took there was a clear reason. There was no clear reason for Churchill not removing from Force Z the obligation to mount an offensive operation.

Why did Churchill not order the two ships out of danger? The most likely reason is that he was constitutionally incapable of seeing attack as anything other than the only form of defence and may well have believed that offensive action on the part of the two ships might actually have made a difference to the British defence of their Far Eastern countries and interests.

There may be another lesser, almost pathetic reason. Churchill worked into the small hours when others were at their least effective, and had a strict instruction that he should not be woken before 8.00am except in the event of Britain being invaded. His peculiar regime did not only play havoc with the biological time clocks of those who served with him. It meant that his availability frequently did not match that of those same people. Following a typical late-night meeting in the Cabinet war room it may simply be that Churchill’s own work regime meant he was out of action during the only time when, after reasonable thought, he could have given Phillips an acceptable reason to call off the proposed action. By the time he woke up and was back in action himself, the events that were to put two fine ships permanently out of action were irrevocable.