Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (2 page)

Chapter 1

The Military, Political and Historical Background

The Royal Navy in 1939

W
hen war broke out in 1939 the Royal Navy was better prepared than the politicians who had denied it money and resources in the inter-war years deserved, but still very inadequately equipped for the challenges it would face. It had made great strides in naval aviation in the inter-war years, culminating in the Admiralty taking over control of the Fleet Air Arm in mid-1939. It had developed sonar or ASDIC to counteract the submarine threat. It had developed what was, for the time, state-of-the-art radar. It saw the multi-barrelled pom-pom as an effective counter to close-range air attack
¹
and had five new King George V class battleships being built or about to enter service. It had a proud tradition and a self-belief that had survived surprisingly well the disappointment of the Battle of Jutland, the lower-deck discontent and mutiny of the 1920s, and the Geddes Axe, which removed thousands of officers as a cost-saving measure. Its twelve battleships, three battle-cruisers and six aircraft carriers dwarfed Germany’s surface navy.

Many of these advantages were more apparent than real. The majority of the Navy’s battleships were First World War designs, and the battle-cruiser
Hood
was effectively so, though completed just after the war. The decision to modernize six capital ships in the inter-war period, in itself a very wise move, meant them being in dockyard hands for many months, with the result that the Royal Navy never had more than thirteen of its capital ships available at any one time in the 1930s, and the number frequently went down to ten or fewer. For obvious reasons, the modernization plan had not allowed for the outbreak of war in September 1939, and so ran over into it. The battleship
Queen Elizabeth
did not finish her modernization until 1941. The situation was complicated by the fact that older ships needed increasing amounts of time for refit and repair. Corners could be cut in wartime, and were, but it was a dangerous game to play, and there were very practical limitations on how much time could be saved, or how much things could be speeded up.

Even the two ‘modern’ battleships built in the 1920s –
Nelson
and
Rodney
– were very slow by the standards of other navies and arguably obsolete the minute they were launched because they lacked the speed to escort aircraft carriers which were flying off aircraft. Although the Navy had carriers, and in
Hermes
built one of the very first purpose-built vessels, many of its carriers were conversions. It had developed an excellent all-round aircraft carrier design in HMS
Ark Royal
whose eventual loss to a single torpedo hit was due to poor damage control more than poor design, but it had then gone down the path of developing carriers with armoured flight decks, initially seriously reducing the number of aircraft that could be carried. The newly-commissioned carrier
Indomitable
that we have been led to believe should have accompanied
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
to the Far East, was a belated recognition of the self-created problem of the first armoured flight-deck carriers, and sacrificed some armour in order to carry an increased number of aircraft. In addition, the Royal Navy was conditioned to see its carriers as working in the north Atlantic, and had much to learn from the USA who developed ‘deck parking’ on aircraft in the more clement conditions of the Pacific in order to increase aircraft carrying capacity. Yet advances in ship design had not been matched by equal attention to aircraft design, and the Royal Navy had no effective carrier-borne fighter or dive bomber in 1939. In fairness, this was a better situation than that which prevailed in Nazi Germany where Goering’s Air Ministry provided no aircraft at all for Germany’s one and only aircraft carrier, the
Graf Zeppelin
, with the result that the vessel never came into service.

The hope that the new undersea radar ASDIC (or sonar as we would now know it ) would solve the threat from submarines proved flawed. It had serious limitations. It could not reveal the depth of a submerged submarine and depth charges had to be set to explode at a given depth. Furthermore, contact with the submarine was lost when the attacking vessel was over the target. Nor at the start of the war did the Royal Navy have the weaponry to launch depth-charges ahead of the attacking craft when it was still being ‘held’ by ASDIC. Depth charges launched over the stern of an attacking vessel were in effect a guess at where a submarine might be as well as a guess at its depth. Similarly with anti-aircraft defences, the pom-pom was prone to jamming and its capacity to destroy an aircraft often came in to play only after an attacking aircraft had launched its bombs or torpedoes.

Only two KGVs were active in the early war years, and one of those –
Prince of Wales –
was never fully worked up. These ‘unsinkable’ battleships were to prove in combat that they had serious design flaws, many of which were driven home by the loss of
Prince of Wales.
The Royal Navy had built fleet destroyers in preference to cheap rudimentary escorts, meaning a significant shortfall that took time it could ill afford to fill with the Flower class corvettes. Even more crucial was a shortage of trained men, to the extent that when
Prince of Wales
set sail to meet
Bismarck
nearly eighty per cent of her crew were new, hostilities-only men. The Royal Navy rose to the challenge of training a staggering number of raw recruits but it faced a massive shortage of what in the civilian world would be known as skilled labour. It was not unique in the manpower problems it faced. It was the Canadian Navy that was deemed the worst hit by the need for rapid expansion, leading to the no doubt apocryphal story of an escort group coming across a forlorn Canadian corvette circling round in foul Atlantic weather with the church pennant hoisted to signal a church service taking place on board, and the interrogatory pennant, the flag equivalent of the question mark. When asked to explain the meaning of this novel display, the corvette signalled that it meant, ‘Dear God. Where Am I?’

There were other areas where the test of war would show weaknesses in the inter-war Navy. Its capital ships were by and large unable to refuel at sea, a failure that nearly got the
Bismarck
off the hook. Even ships as small as the 6-inch gun light cruisers of the Southampton class were designed to carry three of their own aircraft. Some commentators, including Admiral A.B. Cunningham, believed that the typical gap in the middle of the superstructure and the large, unarmoured aircraft hangar that this requirement demanded, acted as an aiming point for attacking aircraft and made ships so equipped more vulnerable. The lumbering Walrus aircraft carried by surface ships were rendered redundant once ships worked with aircraft carriers, and as ships had virtually to stop dead in the water to pick up the aircraft once it had finished its patrol any ship in a danger zone would steam on and instruct its aircraft to land at the nearest airfield, as happened with Force Z. However, the Japanese were good spotters of the aircraft carried on their cruisers, as shown when they spotted Force Z.

Yet even more serious than any of the above was the impossible vastness of the task facing the Royal Navy. Unlike its German equivalent, it faced multiple demands on its men and its ships. It had to defend the homeland not only against invasion but also against starvation and was always going to have to extend its reach across the Atlantic in convoy escort. This alone was a major task but it had two more major commitments, one to the Mediterranean theatre in the event of war and one to the outposts of Empire in the Far East. Britain in 1939 could find work for three navies.

There were other ominous omens for the mission Tom Phillips was to be sent on. In matters discussed at length later in this work, the supposed ‘island fortress’ of Singapore was a disaster waiting to happen, a fact that the Japanese almost certainly knew as a result of the loss of the merchant vessel
Automedon
. British intelligence severely underestimated the strength of both Japanese fighting men and their
materiel
. There was no significant tradition of inter-service co-operation and considerable enmity and rivalry between the Navy, Army and RAF, and a working partnership was not really formed until D-Day and the irresistible force of Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay. Singapore and the Far East exemplified the lack of effective co-operation between Army, Navy and Air Force. Historians have tended to focus on the maverick influence of Winston Churchill on naval affairs during the war and perhaps as a result ignored the in-fighting, feuding and rival camps of the senior Admirals of the time. As is so often the case with great institutions, the Royal Navy was fighting its own internal wars at the same time as fighting an external enemy. Human jealousies, bickering and rivalry do not cease simply because a uniform is donned or has more gold braid thrust upon it.

The inter-war period was dominated by the Washington Naval Treaty signed in 1922 and modified by the London Naval Treaty of 1930 and thereafter. The treaty was designed to stop a new naval race and in essence sought to dictate the number and size of capital ships held by the world’s major navies and the tonnage of smaller vessels such as cruisers. Britain came out the loser from these treaties. It suffered because its numerical superiority after the First World War hid the fact that most of its battleships were worn out by active service. It suffered also because unlike the German and Japanese navies it tried to stick to the treaty limitations. It suffered too because its ship designers failed to produce designs to match those of foreign navies, and not only because of the various treaty limitations. There were some triumphs, most notably the effective rebuilding of the First World War Queen Elizabeth class which though still too slow were tough and useful ship
s
. The two 1920s battleships
Rodney
and
Nelson
approached an old problem in a novel way by massing engineering and armament, and hence armour, together and astern, producing ungainly ships that bore such a resemblance to Fleet Oilers that the sailors christened them ‘Rodnol’ and ‘Nelsol’. Armed to American standard with an impressive nine 16-inch guns in triple turrets, all three situated forward of the superstructure, they came nowhere near the speed of American, Japanese, French, Italian or German rivals, reaching 23.5 knots on trials as distinct from the industry norm of thirty knots. As for the other new battleships for Britain, the KGVs, they provoked Churchill to rail that it apparently needed three KGVs to take on the
Tirpitz
²
and as mentioned above, the sinking of
Prince of Wales
was to show up serious weaknesses in all aspects of their design. Here as everywhere else is illustrated the truth that navies can only fight with what they are given, and by 1939 the Royal Navy had not been given enough by world leaders, its own politicians or its own designers. If war is indeed politics carried forward by other means, war can only be carried forward if politicians give those who fight it the necessary means.

There were other problems that were to emerge as the war progressed. Winston Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War and was to be briefly so again at the start of the Second World War (hence the famous ‘Winston is back!’ signal from the Admiralty to the fleet on 3 September 1939, the day war broke out), before becoming Prime Minister. Though a soldier by training and service he had, or felt he had, a special affinity to the Royal Navy, choosing among other things to describe himself in letters to the American President as ‘Former Naval Person’. If one is a supporter of Churchill he took a close interest in naval affairs. If one is a critic he interfered far too much. Churchill runs more like a rope than a thread through the story of Force Z and its commander. It was Tom Phillips’s flagship
Prince of Wales
that took Churchill across the Atlantic to meet Roosevelt in the early years of the war (Churchill flew back, to save time), and he spent longer on board her than he did on any other Royal Navy warship. Churchill had also been friendly with Tom Phillips and was instrumental both in choosing him to command Force Z and insisting that its flagship was
Prince of Wales
.

This was also the first war in which modern communications – the radio – meant far greater contact between the Admiralty at home and the commander out at sea. This caused both problems and resentment in the Norwegian campaign, and badly-worded or misinformed signals were to play a crucial part in the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.

The Royal Navy came to the Second World War with a significant number of new ideas that showed it had done far more than stand still in the years after 1918. Yet it also came to the war with far fewer new ships than it needed and with some of the new ideas developed in the inter-war years hampered by shortages of cash and resources. One example was radar. The Royal Navy had a significant lead in this area over any other navy in the world and the German and Japanese navies in particular. The sinking of the German
Scharnhorst
by the
Prince of Wales
’s, sister ship
Duke of York
was largely the result of her superior radar fit and radar-controlled gunnery which allowed her to smash
Scharnhorst
despite experiencing serious problems with her main armament. Yet radar in its most advanced form was not fitted to many Royal Navy ships at the start of the war, and when it was the technical back-up and know-how to work the radar and keep it in service was not always there.
Prince of Wales
called specialists in to fix one of her radars before she left Singapore on her last voyage but she sailed without a repair being completed.
Repulse
had only one surface warning radar fitted – on a makeshift mounting that reduced its effectiveness.