Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (20 page)

Phillips set sail in the belief that his threat from the air would consist of high to mid-level bombing of the type that in the Mediterranean Royal Navy capital ships had been able to cope with, and which had visibly failed in France in attacks on stationary targets. Phillips did not invent this definition of the threat; it was simply what he had been told by the intelligence arm of the service he loved and trusted.

He and the Royal, Dutch, Australian and United States navies were all badly let down by the dismal inaccuracy of intelligence agencies in assessing Japanese strike potential. The Royal Navy took as its benchmark the performance of its own antiquated Swordfish torpedo bombers, which could drop a torpedo at a maximum speed of 90mph from a maximum height of 50ft, and assumed 200 miles as the reasonable range for such an attack, and 400 miles as the outside limit. In fact Japanese aircraft could double the speed and height of a torpedo drop, reducing the run-in time and therefore the vulnerability of the attacking aircraft. When on the approach of the torpedo bombers that to all intent and purposes sank his flagship Phillips said, ‘There are no torpedo aircraft about’ he was merely telling the truth as the Royal Navy saw it.

Phillips was the victim of a far wider failure of Intelligence. A makeshift Intelligence group had been formed in Singapore, and following research into a Zero fighter shot down in China meant that it had a good grasp of the quite frightening superiority of the Zero against the Buffalo. It appears that the information was passed on in late September to Air Command, but buried in a pile of other material and so ignored:
²⁰

‘The general impression in Malaya was that Japanese aircraft were made of rice paper and bamboo shoots; and, except for the Zero incident, Combined Intelligence Bureau supplied no information to the contrary.’
²¹

It also needs to be recorded that the figure for the percentage of bomb hits in the attack on
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
– nine per cent of those dropped – confirms the relatively low threat posed by such attacks. Even the figure for torpedo hits – twenty-two per cent – needs to take into account that after the catastrophic hit that sheered off
Prince of Wales
’s ‘A’ bracket, the Japanese were aiming at a sitting duck, and were freed to give their attention to
Repulse.
That ship’s remarkable feat in avoiding nineteen torpedoes also suggests that in hindsight it was not the torpedo as such that sunk both ships, but one torpedo in particular, in that once
Prince of Wales
was disabled the Japanese were able to concentrate on
Repulse
, thus more or less ensuring her destruction.

What is certainly untrue and unjust is a comment such as: ‘Phillips, and only Phillips, was responsible for the ships being where they were, and he seems to have been almost alone in totally dismissing at least the
possibility
of torpedoes being used against him.’
²²

Responsibility for the ships being there starts, in descending order, with Roosevelt, and goes on down through Churchill, Pound, Palliser and Tennant. Nor was Phillips alone in dismissing the idea of a torpedo attack. Responsibility for that lies with the inadequacy of British Intelligence. It is extremely unlikely that any other of the Admirals mentioned in connection with the attack as having more seagoing and combat experience – Cunningham. Somerville and Layton are the obvious three – would have any more reason than he to predict torpedo attack.

It all comes down to the same point I have laboured throughout this work. We cannot judge the actions of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips on the basis of what we now know, but only on what he knew at the time he agonized over taking out his two capital ships, and when he decided to call off his mission. On the basis of what he knew, it was certainly a high-risk mission, but so a justifiable one; after all, what was at stake was Britain’s Far Eastern Empire.

Chapter 10

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

T
he most senior Admiral who consistently defended Admiral Sir Tom Phillips after the loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
was his erstwhile boss, Dudley Pound. Pound died in 1943, leaving the field clear for other admirals who were not supporters of Phillips, most notably Admirals Layton, Cunningham and Somerville. Their criticism of Phillips has provided easy ammunition for those who blame him for the sinking of Force Z, and has coloured the way successive historians have written of Phillips. The reputation of an Admiral is, of course, built on their actions. It is also built on their ability to defend themselves once the fighting is over and the post-mortems start. It is perhaps no accident that the three senior figures whose actions have either not been properly recognized or misrepresented all died during the war. Phillips was the first to go, and was the most senior naval officer killed in action. Pound was next, and Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay, whose planning of the naval side of the 1944 invasion was absolutely crucial to its success, was killed in an air crash in 1945.

There were general reasons why the Royal Navy in general did not rally round and defend Tom Phillips, and reasons specific to individuals. As regards the culture prevalent in the Royal Navy at the time among its fighting admirals, Phillips was not popular among some of his contemporaries. ‘I shudder to think’, Admiral Somerville wrote to Admiral Cunningham, of ‘… the pocket Napoleon and his party. All the tricks to learn and no solid sea experience to fall back on. They ought to have someone who knows their stuff and can train that party properly on the way out.’
¹

News of Phillips’s appointment to Force Z straight from a long string of staff postings was not popular in naval circles. Admiral Cunningham commented: ‘What on earth is Phillips going to the Far Eastern squadron for? He hardly knows one end of a ship from the other. His only experience is as RAD [Rear Admiral Destroyers] and then he had the stupidest collision. However, if you have a seat on the board you can generally manoeuvre yourself into a good job – I did!’
²

These comments illustrate a number of ways in which Phillips had made himself unpopular. Firstly, Phillips had received a double promotion, over the heads of a number of his contemporaries. Such promotions provoke jealousy in any organization, but more so in one that at the turn of the century trained and educated its officers in terms or years at the
Britannia
training college (actually two hulks moored together off Dartmouth) of less than 100 young men, in an intensely competitive environment. The result was that each new generation of naval officers knew each other extremely and perhaps even too well. It is as if the boys at a public school (to which
Britannia
bore many resemblances) had left that school all together to work at the same job for the same company, and a company that practised a fiercely competitive system of promotion that meant the majority of those young men would not get to a top job. It gave rise to close friendships, but could also lead to bitter enmities and jealousy.

Secondly, Phillips was seen as a Staff officer, not a real sailor or seaman. The Japanese navy was relatively unusual in prioritizing staff work for its most brilliant young officers, at the expense of seagoing experience. Contempt for staff officers (by definition non-combatants) is a longstanding military tradition. Hotspur uses it as an excuse for his behaviour to King Henry IV in Shakespeare’s
King Henry IV Part One.
Hatred of Phillips was not helped by his perceived closeness to Winston Churchill. However, technology has introduced a new level of friction between commanders at sea and the Admiralty and its staff officers back home. The radio allowed the Admiralty much more knowledge of what was going on at sea than had ever been the case before. This issue first raised its serious head in the Norwegian Campaign, when several commanders at the sharp end felt that interfering signals had been sent out by the Admiralty. This needs another book to answer, but the truth probably lies halfway between the opposing parties. There were serious mistakes made on the front line, but the Admiralty had not learnt to use its new communication capacity to best advantage and sometimes did more harm than good. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the Admiralty gained a reputation for unwarranted interference, and as VCNS and Pound’s right hand man Phillips was seen as part and parcel of the problem.

Part of the resentment against Admiralty interference sprang from the Fisher reforms to the Royal Navy, which were also to do away with the original
Britannia
. Phillips, who became a Midshipman in 1904, was one of the last cadets to graduate from the two hulks moored in the Dart which formed the then Naval College. Admirals of Phillips’s generation saw as Midshipmen and junior officers some of the greatest changes ever to affect the Royal Navy. In particular, Fisher’s ‘calling home of the legions’ saw the centre of the Royal Navy move to home waters, the abolition of the Pacific Station, the amalgamation the Australia, China and East India Stations, and the similar amalgamation of the South Atlantic, North America and West Africa stations. Phillips’s generation were the last to experience the dash, daring and eccentricity only achievable on ships that were for long periods out from under the eye of any Fleet Commander. Cunningham remembered these days with affection, from when he was a Midshipman on the cruiser
Fox
on the Cape Station in 1898: ‘It was before the days of wireless … our captain … was monarch of all he surveyed.’
³

A comment made in 1945 reveals an attitude that was quite widespread, and which though it had originated with the Fisher reforms had long outlived them:

‘… it was POUND and PHILLIPS, with their storekeeper minds, who quenched all the spirit in the fleet. Everything was scheduled; even a snipe shoot in a Greek swamp went into a book because ships were told to report full details of all sport when cruising independently.’
⁴

In fact neither Pound nor Phillips were responsible for an individual commander’s loss of freedom: radio, the demise of the type of battle fleet that fought at Jutland and the extremely fast movement of events that typified the Norwegian and the Greece/Crete Campaigns simply meant maritime conflict had to be commanded more from the centre. A crucial additional factor was ULTRA and the fact that the Admiralty frequently knew far more about what was happening, because they had cracked German codes, than did the commander at sea. It was essential that knowledge of ULTRA was on a strict need-to-know basis, and the information gleaned from it had to be used so as not to reveal to the Germans that Britain was reading its most secret signals. It meant that apparently gnomic or interfering orders from Whitehall could seem very different to those whose view was seas breaking over the bow of a battleship than it did to those whose view was the script of a decoded signal.

Thirdly, Phillips ran up against a body of opinion and a culture that valued physical prowess and seamanship more than intellectual ability. The emphasis on seamanship is understandable. It is, after all, at the heart of what sailors do. Phillips certainly had less time at sea than some of his contemporaries, but the allegation that he did not know one end of a ship from the other is simply stupid bigotry. Phillips commanded a destroyer for a year and a cruiser for three years, and the collision Cunningham refers to, between
Encounter
(a vessel which was to recur in the story as one of the ‘crocks’ Cunningham sent to reinforce Force Z) and
Furious,
did not even provoke a Board of Enquiry. There is no evidence that Phillips was a bad seaman, and even if he had been the best in the world it would not have saved
Prince of Wales.

As for physical prowess, the Navy’s emphasis might seem contradicted by the fact that
Britannia
had an extremely demanding entrance examination that all applicants had to pass. Despite this,
Britannia
followed the public school model by placing a great emphasis on competitive sport. Not only did it tire out a potentially extremely feisty group of young men. It encouraged all sorts of qualities that were a decided advantage in a military setting – physical fitness, personal bravery and courage, the ability to take pain and injury, the ability to be a team player and the will to win. For some whose physical stature did not allow them to excel at team sports, competitive sailing was an effective substitute, and a skill acquired by both Tom Phillips and A.B. Cunningham. ‘Muscular Christianity’ was not only the preserve of Rugby School’s Thomas Arnold. It was, and is, a besetting sin of all-male establishments, which will insist on giving more credit to physical ability than intellectual prowess. It was another feature of the Royal Navy bearing many resemblances to the public schools of the time – or perhaps an inevitable feature of primarily all-male institutions – where athletic prowess was far more highly regarded than intellect. A fellow Admiral seeking to praise Captain Henry (‘Trunky’) Leach of
Prince of Wales
automatically turned to praise of his physical prowess: ‘Navy standard at lawn tennis, and indeed he could hit any ball that moved, let alone being a fine shot.’
⁵
Apparently one of
Prince of Wales
’s best officers established himself by becoming known as Tarzan because of gymnastic expertise in the Mess. In reading memoirs and letters of the time, one is reminded of Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School, who as a new arrival is reported to have strode up to the crease with cricket bat in hand, dispatched his first ball for a six and proudly declared: ‘Now I am Headmaster!’ Only the very brightest passed out at the top of their year from
Britannia
, the Royal Navy’s training ship, but intelligence was not the most highly regarded virtue in the Royal Navy in 1941. Phillips may have been the brightest intellect of his generation, noted at Dartmouth for his restless intelligence, and the letters written to his family after his death show how invaluable that intellect was at the Admiralty, and how impossible it was to replace. Yet that ability won Phillips little credit outside the charmed circle of the naval staff, Dudley Pound and Churchill. None of Phillips’s enemies praised or even acknowledged his ability. Bravery, toughness and tenacity in the face of the enemy, and a bluff manliness, were the most obvious virtues, not intellectual ability. It was summed up by one Navy description of him as ‘all brains and no body’.
⁶
The overwhelming concern for the body as distinct from the brain was shown by the number of naval officers who were near obsessive about physical exercise – even the undeniably bright Admiral Ramsay may have suffered heart strain from driving himself too hard physically as a Midshipman.

Phillips did not therefore fit into the same mould as many of his contemporaries, who gave their approval more to the man who having won the inter-services rugby cup for the Navy could steer
Ark Royal
stern first into Malta Harbour at full speed whilst avoiding a full-blown Stuka attack than to the man who could think why the ship was there in the first place. The answer, of course, is that both have their uses.

As regards individuals who have blackened Phillips’s reputation, Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton was perhaps the one least qualified to make an objective judgment, as a clear case of sour grapes. Commander in Chief of the China station, Phillips had been promoted over his head, and Layton was not pleased about it. After the sinkings, he commented to his Secretary: ‘I don’t know exactly what’s happened. But I always said he would make a balls of it, and he has.’
⁷
An analogy would be a Judge who commented he had not heard the evidence, but knew the defendant was guilty anyway. Layton seemed an obvious choice to many for the Far Eastern command. He had been a successful sub-mariner in the First World War, and had commanded the Fifth Cruiser Squadron in the North Sea at the start of the Second World War. He was a fighting admiral, very much the salty old sea dog. Cunningham wrote to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Algernon Willis:

‘What do you think of the Far East? What about P of W &
Repulse
? Why & o why did they not send out someone of experience or at least have Geoffrey Layton who is a well-tried sailor & full of determination.’
⁸

Yet on closer analysis it is clear why Layton was passed over. It was a little rich for those who supported him to justify his appointment on his seamanship. He ran aground his submarine
E13
off the Danish coast in 1915, and a German warship destroyed the boat and killed half the crew the next morning. Layton himself was interned, but managed to escape back to the UK. On the scale of things this was a far more serious incident than the collision between two destroyers which Phillips had held against him. However, Layton was unsuitable on other grounds. Layton could get on with officers from other navies, but his diplomatic skills were suspect. Roskill tells the following story in a footnote in his book
Churchill and the Admirals:

‘When I was investigating Admiral Layton’s activities as C-in-C, Ceylon I was told an amusing story about how the recently appointed Civil Defence Commissioner Mr (later Sir Oliver) Goonetilleke complained that the Governor (Sir Andrew Caldecott) that Layton had called him “a black bastard”. To which the Governor replied “My dear fellow that is nothing to what he calls me!”’
⁹

Amusing? No doubt Mr Goonetilleke thought it hilarious. However, the speed and ease with which Layton was passed over gives strength to the idea that what Churchill and perhaps even the Admiralty needed for Singapore was a diplomat and a negotiator with the Americans, and someone whose known friendship with Churchill would only add to his credibility. The need for a fighting admiral came second and, as has been discussed, when called on to fight rather than negotiate Phillips showed himself to have the aggressive spirit of Layton without his unyielding personality.