Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (16 page)

HMS
Electra
.

HMS
Tenedos
.

HMS
Express
.

The Japanese cruiser
Chokai.

Prince of Wales
docking at Singapore.

The final photographs of both vessels, leaving Singapore for the last time.

Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
: Japanese photograph of the action.

Japanese photographs of the attack.

Electra
alongside
Prince of Wales
.

Captured Japanese ‘Betty’ aircraft in RAF livery.

Chapter 7

The Ships:
Repulse
and Escorts

HMS
Repulse

H
MS
Repulse
was launched in January 1916. Originally intended as an ‘R’ class battleship, the decision was taken to remove guns and armour in exchange for a speed of over thirty knots, and turn
Repulse
and the similar vessel
Renown
into battle-cruisers. As a point of comparison, figures for 1917 show that
Hood,
whose fate is well known
,
had 6,500 tons of armour and 7,500 tons of plating;
Repulse
2,440 tons of armour, 3,300 tons of plating.
¹
With only six 15-inch guns in three double turrets, there was considerable concern among gunnery experts that this unusually small number of guns would make spotting fall of shot and hence accurate gunnery very difficult, and that it left the ship seriously under-gunned. In fact six guns were decided on in three turrets for no better reason than that this was the maximum number than could be made available if the ships were to be built in the fifteen months demanded by Admiral John Fisher. If ever there was a self-inflicted wound this was it, and Fisher’s actions were tantamount to culpable negligence. As originally built the ships appeared to be too lightly constructed, earning the nicknames in the Navy ‘Refit’ and ‘Repair’.

In one of the many ironies that mark the loss of these ships,
Repulse
was a pioneer in the development of naval aviation, when on 1 October 1917 she flew off for the first time at sea a fighter plane from a platform secured over two of her main guns.

The blowing up of three British battle-cruisers at the Battle of Jutland has given the type of ship a bad name, but this is not wholly justified. There is some evidence that the battle-cruisers blew up because flash-proof shielding had been removed in order to speed up rate of fire. There was certainly a school of thought current at the time that rate of fire was going to be crucial in any fleet engagement. Safety precautions, such as flash-proof scuttles between the turrets and the magazines, can slow down the rate of fire, and it is not unheard of for sailors on the spot to make unauthorized modifications – unauthorized, that is, by the Admiralty – to machinery. If this was one of the causes of the blowing-up of three battle-cruisers at the Battle of Jutland, it was certainly not the only cause. The instability and tendency of British cordite to blow up was at least as damaging and dangerous. In any event, the lesson was that a heavy main armament did not justify putting a ship in the heart of an engagement against similarly-gunned vessels; for that, a corresponding weight or armour protection was needed. The battle-cruiser was ideal for hunting down raiders, or as a scout for the main fleet. Its high speed also made it able to provide big-gun escort for carriers, whose ability to launch aircraft was greatly aided by a high speed airflow over the deck and were therefore designed to be capable of speeds over thirty knots.
Repulse
was therefore an interesting medley. She was under-gunned and under-armoured even for a battle-cruiser, but used in the right way was a useful vessel.

In any event,
Repulse
and others had more armour slapped on them in the aftermath of Jutland, one piece of which saved her from incapacitating damage in the early stages of the Japanese attack, but unlike
Renown
she was never fully modernized nor re-engined in the inter-war years, being capable of only twenty-nine knots when she was sunk as distinct from her design thirty-two knots. Her ventilation was significantly better than
Prince of Wales.
However, her biggest weakness was a lack of deck armour to resist bomb attacks, and what was generally recognized as a seriously inadequate anti-aircraft armament consisting of six antiquated, hand-operated 4-inch guns and three eight-barrelled two-pounder ‘pom-pom’ short range anti-aircraft mountings. Captain Tennant of
Repulse
wrote in his official report on the loss of the ship: ‘I believe that 90% of short range stuff that is being fired at any aircraft goes behind them.’
²
One comment on her anti-aircraft fit was: ‘But her AA armament was juvenile to a degree. She was, in Admiral Hayes’s words, ‘armed with not much more than an umbrella to push at the enemy like an old lady’… the
Repulse
was indeed the worst-armed from the AA aspect of all the Royal Navy’s capital ships.’
³

Neither was
Repulse
privy in any serious way to one of the Royal Navy’s greatest advances in the inter-war years, the development of radar. She carried only a Type 284 surface set, which had been fitted on her way out to the Cape. It was not integrated into the gunnery control system, which was still controlled by voice messages. To add insult to injury, the radar was wedged on to ‘B’ turret, which had to sweep round for the radar to be effective, to the detriment of its machinery.

The battle-cruiser was based on a perfectly sound idea, namely that of a ship which would combine the firepower of a battleship with the speed of a cruiser. As noted above, such vessels were ideally suited to act as the hunters of commerce raiders. They served best as scouts for the main fleet, heavily-gunned enough to take on anything smaller than a battleship and fast enough to clear off when the battleships appeared – which raises the question as to why on earth
Repulse
was chosen to sail with
Prince of Wales.
Never mind that she was singularly unsuited to meet the threat that eventually sank her, by virtue both of her lack of armour and lack of effective anti-aircraft weaponry, or that there was no fleet as such for her to scout for – she was barely a knot faster than
Prince of Wales
. She was equally unsuited to taking on the Japanese battleships that seemed at the outset her most likely opponents. Yet
Repulse
was an extremely happy and efficient ship, with none of the problems besetting
Prince of Wales,
something achieved in no small measure by the fact that around two-thirds of her complement were pre-war regulars who had served some time with the ship. What she was not was a vessel fit for the mission on which she was sent. In the film
Zulu
, the nervous young soldier awaiting the onslaught asks, ‘Why us?’ The Sergeant Major answers to the effect, ‘Because we’re ‘ere, lad, because we’re ‘ere.’ It is tempting to think
Repulse,
finely manned and captained though she was, sailed with Force Z because she was there, and because she was a ship no-one could find another use for.

The warships that accompanied
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
as escorts were woefully few in number and half were obsolete. The two destroyers
Electra
and
Express
were modern, 1930s built. Sailors are superstitious, and
Electra
was seen as bringing bad luck because she had been with
Prince of Wales
when
Hood
blew up and sank. It was
Electra
that had picked up the only three survivors from
Hood
. However, as individual ships these were undoubtedly fit for purpose. Both had received high-angle 4.7-inch gun mountings capable of elevating to 40° as distinct from her 30° of earlier classes, giving them a useful anti-aircraft role.
Electra
put this to good use when she shot down a German bomber in April 1940.
Electra
at least was retro-fitted, after a collision, with a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun and a 20mm Oerlikon mounting.
Electra
survived to be sunk in the Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February 1942, that battle suggesting strongly the fate that awaited any Allied naval force that did not at least have numerical and qualitative parity with the Japanese.

Express
was one of the last vessels to leave Dunkirk, having played a crucial part in the evacuation of British troops. She was eventually transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy as the
Gatineau,
and ended her days safely but ingloriously as part of a breakwater in Royston, British Columbia.

Of the other two escorts, HMS
Tenedos
had been launched in 1918, and was obsolete, hampered not least of all by a very limited range. She was sunk by Japanese carrier-borne aircraft on 5 April 1942, in an engagement that also saw the losses of the carrier HMS
Hermes
, and the cruisers
Dorchester
and
Cornwall.

The same engagement saw the loss of Force Z’s fourth escort, HMAS
Vampire
, which was sent to the bottom by a second strike of Japanese aircraft after the one that sank
Hermes. Vampire
was launched in 1917, and though useful enough to shoot down at least one Japanese aircraft prior to her sinking, was also obsolete.

At least two other destroyers should have accompanied Force Z. Admiral A.B. Cunningham was ordered to send two destroyers to join Force Z. One of them,
Jupiter,
was described by Phillips as a ‘notorious crock’. She had spent an unusual amount of time in refit and repair, even for a class with known hull weaknesses, and it appeared that she suffered from faulty riveting during her construction. The other gift from Cunningham was HMS
Encounter
which had to go into dock immediately on arrival at Singapore for renewal of her stern bushes. Cunningham had sent one ship that had faulty fuel tanks and took on a 10° list when full of fuel, and another with a corrugated bottom which meant that with the helm amidships she could not steer in a straight line.
⁴

Cunningham has never properly been called to task for the dirty trick he played on Force Z. He cannot have failed to know that when asked to send reinforcements to a body of ships about to face action under the most demanding of circumstances, he chose to respond by using the request to rid himself of two liabilities.

The decision is made even less praiseworthy by the fact that Cunningham undertook serious sniping at Tom Phillips for his lack of combat experience. Cunningham had no such excuse: he had combat experience, and must have known how useless these ships were for combat, and he of all people was in a position to realize the crucial importance of a decent escort for Force Z. History has tended to focus on the air threat to the ships, because with hindsight we know this is what sank them. The paucity of the escort available to Phillips posed a serious threat to his ships in two other areas. Force Z was sighted in the first instance by a Japanese submarine and had had a salvo of torpedoes, all of which missed, launched at it. The submarine threat to Force Z was a serious one and the only antidote was a decent screen of escorts. The reason for this need is sometimes misunderstood. Surface vessels do not need to spot a submarine or even to attack it to reduce seriously its effectiveness as a weapon of war. Submarines hunted on the surface, at least before the final German U-Boat designs and nuclear submarines, submerging only to kill. With a tiny speed submerged, and low endurance, a submarine forced to submerge either by surface vessels or aircraft could be rendered impotent, in an ideal world unable either to catch up with a target or position itself to make a successful attack. To work this trick, the commander of a surface force needs both to throw out a screen of escorts around his capital ships, and keep some close so their sonar can hope to detect any that have broken through the screen. Furthermore, if a submarine’s conning tower is detected on radar, there need to be a number of escorts sufficient to allow for one to be sent to force the submarine under, without denuding the main force of cover. Chasing the
Bismarck,
the Admiral commanding the hunting force could signal his destroyers to break off if they could not keep up, because foul weather, poor visibility and high seas reduced the submarine threat. This did not apply in the calmer water off Kuantan, and that Phillips was clearly aware of the threat is evidenced by his request for additional vessels to screen his hoped-for return to Singapore, and the comment he made early on the morning of 8 December: ‘I certainly can’t go to sea until I have more destroyers.’
⁵
Certainly four destroyers was the minimum deemed necessary to escort capital ships at the time in the Royal Navy.

A further threat against which Force Z was under-defended was the mine. Mines pose a very serious threat to capital ships. The only damage inflicted on the German battle-cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
in the infamous Channel Dash of February 1942, was by mine, and only one of Force Z’s escorts had proper minesweeping capacity. A common image of the mine is the single, floating horned monster lying waiting in the middle of the ocean for a ship to run over it. A classic example is the equivalent of a mine in the film
The African Queen,
in which the German warship conveniently heads to the one spot in the lake where a warhead awaits it. This, of course, is not how it works. The random sowing of mines is a useless act. The mine comes in to its own when it is known that surface ships will have to traverse or gather in a given, limited area. The British knew in 1942 exactly the path
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
would have to take to make it home, and were able to lay mines accordingly. The entrances to Singapore were an obvious area, and one of which the Japanese made full use.

Phillips was also short of another type of ship that would normally have been de rigeur for a force of his type. The cruiser is a fast scouting vessel, large enough to see off any surface ship short of a battleship and nimble enough to get out of its way if it does come across any such. Cruisers would have been invaluable to Phillips to act as his eyes and ears, both for Japanese invasion points and any threatening force of surface ships. Again, he made clear his concern in a signal to the Admiralty, saying: ‘Need for further modern cruisers is great.’
⁶
A few more days and he might have had a force containing five modern cruisers. However, the Japanese proved unwilling to postpone their invasions to allow the British to build up a suitable number of vessels.