Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (19 page)

Why is it ‘reasonable’? Given what he had been told, and what he had not been told, the ‘reasonable’ position was exactly the opposite. What would have been unreasonable would have been to suppose it was available.

Commentators have also tended to pass over the fact that there were Allied aircraft over Kuantan, which failed to spot Force Z and could have called for air cover if they had. The fact that RAF aircraft sent out to spot an invasion force could not see a battleship, a battle-cruiser and three destroyers is in itself a condemnation of the RAF’s being fit for purpose at the time. It was not a mistake the Japanese would make.

The final issue from the Allied side is what difference, if any, the Brewster Buffaloes which we now know were available, but about which no one seems to have bothered to inform Force Z, would have made had they arrived in time.

The Brewster Buffalo was a disaster: ‘These had given consistent trouble since their arrival from America, demanding twenty-seven modifications before being either safe or battle-worthy.’
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The initial armament of Colt .5-inch machine guns tended to fire one shot each and then cease. The cocking handles for each gun required the pilot to put his feet against something and pull, but as only two of the handles were accessible, there was not much else going on in terms of flying while the guns were being cocked, and even that only gave two more shots. Two of the guns fired through the propeller via an interrupter mechanism, but this was unreliable. ‘… things used to get out of function and now and again you would punch a hole in the prop.’
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Even with the lighter guns, the aircraft had very limited endurance, a ceiling of 22,000 feet on a hot day and up to half an hour to reach that ceiling. Oil seals had a tendency to burst and blot out the pilot’s view by spraying oil on the windscreen, and at altitude the aircraft suffered from fuel starvation and supercharger problems. The plane’s radios were out of date and unreliable, and the realistic maximum speed of a 270mph (sometimes given as a rarely-achieved 313mph) revealed an aircraft short of several hundred horsepower, and with an unreliable Wright Cyclone engine. At least some of the planes supplied to Britain were given an even less powerful engine than their American counterparts. The purchase of the planes was not a result of their quality, but more Hobson’s choice. When appraising the planes the RAF criticized their armament, engine overheating and poor performance at high altitude. In essence the problem with the Brewster Buffalo was that its airframe was not strong enough to take the more powerful engine it needed to be an effective fighter.

The replacement of the Colts by .303 Brownings gave more reliability of fire but a lighter hitting power and increased chance of blowing a hole in the propeller. As initially designed the Buffalo (known as the ‘Bullock’ among ground crew) carried no armour plate to protect the pilot. When protection was installed it altered the centre of gravity of the plane. In a dive it was necessary to manipulate the trim tabs, but with one hand off the joystick it was liable to flick back uncontrollably. The Buffalo was totally outclassed by the Zero, but even Japanese bombers could give them a run for their money, largely through the Buffaloes’ slow rate of climb.

A factor rarely mentioned is that Buffaloes that had flown at full speed to Kuantan might well have found themselves with limited fuel over the combat zone, suggesting they might have disrupted one attack but not all.

So would the Buffaloes have saved the ships? One senior Japanese officer certainly thought so: ‘It was completely incredible that the two warships should be left naked to attack from the skies. Interception of our level and torpedo-bombers by British fighters might have seriously disrupted our attack and perhaps permitted the two warships to escape destruction.’
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Flight Lieutenant Tom Vigors led the Buffaloes that arrived just as the battle was over. He too was vociferous about what might have been: ‘Six fighters could have made one hell of a mess of even fifty or sixty slow and unescorted torpedo bombers.’
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Those who believe the Buffaloes could have saved the day have further evidence in their favour in terms of the aircraft used by the Japanese, the Mitsubishi Type 96 G3M3 Nell and the Mitsubishi Navy Type 1 G4M1 Betty. Both types sacrificed armament and protection for the crew in favour of range, altitude and speed. They were prone to exploding fuel tanks, and their crews had a notoriously high mortality rate. However, with all this being said, they could fly at a significantly higher altitude than the Buffalo, and at high altitude their speed was not greatly below that of the Buffalo.

There are a number of contrasting factors that suggest the arrival of what was a relatively small force of Buffaloes would not have saved the ships. Flight Lieutenant Vigors, a young Australian pilot, is best known for making a fool of himself in flying over the scene of the sinking and reporting men in the water as waving and cheering, when in fact they were almost certainly cursing the RAF for the late arrival over the scene of their planes:

‘I witnessed a show of the indomitable spirit for which the Royal Navy is famous … as I flew round, every man waved and put his thumb up as I flew over him … I had seen many men in dire danger waving, cheering and joking, as if they were holiday-makers at Brighton waving at low-flying aircraft. It shook me, for here was something above human nature. I take off my hat to them, for in them I saw the spirit which wins wars.’
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One has to be careful not to confuse those who win a war of words with those who win the real thing. There were veterans of the Battle of Britain in Singapore, but the majority of the pilots were inexperienced, and vastly so when it came to aerial combat and the defence of capital ships against air attack. Vigors was a brave young pilot, but he had been ordered from Kallang to command 453 squadron and was shot down in flames on his first sortie. Though wounded, he survived being machine-gunned by Japanese aircraft as he hung from his parachute. Thus the man who claimed his aircraft would have carved up the Japanese attacking
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
was himself carved up early in combat. Buried in the only book to have been written about the Buffaloes in the Singapore Campaign is a comment from one of the pilots who arrived over the sinking that strikes a different note: ‘If there had been Japanese aircraft about there was not a great deal we could have done.’
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The same Flight Lieutenant Vigors who professed how easy it would have been for the RAF to shoot down Force Z’s attackers was also the officer who discussed air cover for Force Z with the officer responsible from
Prince of Wales.
It was Vigors who suggested the RAF could provide fighter cover to a force whose ships were not to go more than 100 miles north of Kota Bharu, and no more than sixty miles from coast at any time, a condition that was an operational impossibility. One cannot help but wonder, given the fact that there was no love lost between the Services, if this rejection left the RAF feeling it had tried and failed to help, that the whole thing was therefore not their problem.

Certainly there was an alternative Japanese view that the Buffaloes would have made little real difference: ‘… assuming our attack squadrons were intercepted by the ten Buffalo fighters when we attacked Force Z, we would still have sunk the two battleships, although the damage and losses would have been increased to some extent.’
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This assessment is based partly on the assumption that the Buffaloes would have gone first for the Nell bombers, which the pilots would have known were slower than the Bettys and whose 20mm canon had a limited range of fire. The Bettys would also have been first in line for the Buffaloes as they were flying at a higher altitude than the Nells, and no Buffalo pilot liked to lose altitude when it took him so much time to regain it. However, the Bettys would have been flying in tight formation for mutual protection, and were sufficiently well trained to continue their bombing run even when under attack. The Nells would have been the easier target, and were the most lethal to Force Z, but there is no reason to think the pilots were trained to spot this, concentrate on a target
before
it launched its torpedo, or choose individual targets rather than ‘ganging up’ on a few aircraft. It has to be deemed likely that pilots untrained in this kind of operation, even had they reached the low-level torpedo-bombers, would have been attracted to attacking the torpedo-bombers when they were most vulnerable, after they had launched their torpedo and were struggling to gain height. The Buffalo pilots had been trained to destroy enemy aircraft, not protect surface ships. The absence of radio communication or any combat air patrol direction from the surface ships also meant the aircraft could not be directed on to the most immediate target. These were pilots untrained in the task they would have had to do, and in effect from the moment they sighted the enemy it would have been every (inexperienced) man for himself. This could not have been in starker contrast to the Japanese. Whilst the Allied pilots were inexperienced in combat, and inexperienced in defending capital ships, they were facing arguably the best-trained and most potent anti-surface aircraft and aircrew in the world:

‘All through the summer of 1941 Rear-Admiral Sadaichi Matsunga’s 22nd Air Flotilla had been carrying out an intensive sea-attack training programme from their airfields in South Formosa. Many of the pilots had already seen action in China and had carried out attacks against Chinese shipping. Their future targets were likely to be more heavily and skillfully defended, however, and this prolonged course was intended to prepare the crews for the time when they would have to meet the fire of British and American warships and fighters.’
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Much later in the campaign it was reported that the Buffaloes’ guns were still jamming, and if, as seems to be the case, some were using only the two wing-mounted guns, then their capacity to do serious damage would have been limited. An earlier extract showed that the radios were not working, which would have ruled out any coordinated attack, even had the pilots been trained for it. Buffalo tactics were to dive down on the enemy, fire a three to five second burst and then try to get away – very similar, in fact, to the tactics used by German fighters low on fuel in the Blitz over London. The nightmare for a Buffalo pilot was to be caught at low altitude. It could take up to half an hour for the Buffalo to reach its operational ceiling. Had the planes arrived earlier and concentrated on the bombers it would have been completely the wrong target. Given the lack of armour-piercing or even heavy bombs available to them, the Japanese had planned to reduce the upper works and superstructure of the two capital ships, thus reducing their anti-aircraft power, and then attack with torpedoes. This might have brought into play another weakness of the Buffalo, and one of the strengths of the Betty. The Buffalo presented a large head-on target because of its big belly, and the Betty had a tail-turret that unpleasantly surprised many American pilots. The likely attack position for the Buffaloes would have presented their weakest point to the Japanese aircraft’s strongest point.

Rarely reported are the pilots who saw sinking capital ships, were convinced they were Japanese and flew home triumphant: ‘Without any Japanese aircraft in the air, [we] turned and headed back … [we] had no radios, but waved happily to each other. That must have been one hell of a fight, with the Japanese Navy taking it right where it hurt most.’
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Yet actually the whole thing is a sterile and dry academic debate. ‘What if the Buffaloes had arrived in time?’ is undeniably an interesting question, but it is not the crucial one. The fateful, crucial decision was taken before the first Brewster Buffalo could or did take off. It was to decide not to signal Admiral Tom Phillips that some fighters at least were available – if one is to believe their commander, with the pilots actually sitting in their cockpits waiting to be scrambled.
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Seen in this light, it is not true that:
‘
The heaviest responsibility for the Force Z calamity … must be borne by the RAF … An obsession with the heavy bombing of Germany, approved and even encouraged by Churchill, resulted in not a single modern aircraft being allocated to the Far East.’
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It was not the RAF that had decided not to send modern fighters to Malaya, of course, but Churchill, an action bitterly opposed by Tom Phillips at the time. Yet the heaviest responsibility lies with the individuals or individual who kept news of the available fighter support away from Phillips. The finger must point at Palliser. It was he who had told Phillips in an appallingly worded signal that fighter cover was not available, he who had signalled the likely prioritization of air cover for the defence of Singapore. He took no risks of revealing the whereabouts of Force Z by sending a signal. He should have known where it was heading because it was his signal, false as it turned out, that sent it there, but either way he knew Force Z was heading home and should at least have told Phillips the limits of available cover, thus allowing Phillips to decide if it was worth calling for the cover. And if he did not know that the Buffaloes were waiting on the runway? Then it was exactly his job to find out, never mind badgering the RAF into providing cover whether they liked it or not.

There are some footnotes that need to be added to the discussion about air power. Firstly, we have seen that Phillips was aware of the importance of air cover. Yet the fact remains that high or medium-level bombing was a threat that had been overcome by surface vessels, even those stuck in port and unable to manoeuvre. Between March and July 1941 RAF, Bomber and Coastal Command had flown 1,875 sorties and dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
in Brest. There were nine hits causing only superficial damage and thirty-four aircraft were lost. ‘It must be recognized,’ wrote Churchill to the Chief of Air Staff in April 1941, ‘that the inability of Bomber command to hit the enemy (battle) cruisers in Brest constitutes a very definite failure of this arm.’
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