Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (5 page)

Others have seen his failings as more concerned with his personality. ‘Few [survivors] realized, however, that they had been let down, not by the RAF, but by the dogmatic obstinacy of their admiral.’
²⁶

Either way, majority opinion holds Phillips to have a very significant responsibility for the disaster:

‘Apologists for Phillips have claimed that the admiral was upholding the fighting traditions of the Royal Navy by taking Force Z in to the South China Sea to look for Japanese shipping. If Phillips’s foray had been well timed and executed that line of argument might have had some validity. But Force Z’s final cruise was launched too late to be effective and was riddled with operational mistakes. Two capital ships and many lives were wasted.’
²⁷

Is it actually true, as stated in the most highly-regarded book written about the sinkings, that ‘… the facts speak for themselves: two great ships and many good men were lost because one stubborn old sea-dog refused to acknowledge that he had been wrong’
²⁸
?

There is an alternative argument that of all the people involved directly and indirectly in the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and the crews of his ships were the least responsible of all for the tragedy.

Chapter 3

Admiral Sir Tom Phillips

T
om Spencer Vaughan Phillips was born in 1888, the son of a colonel and the grandson of an admiral. In this he was typical of a relatively small ‘pool’ of families who at that time supplied a significant number of the officer recruits to both services. He attended the training school
Britannia
(two wooden-hulled training ships moored in the River Dart) and was promoted to Lieutenant at the early age of twenty, largely as a result of his obvious intellectual brilliance. He had obtained the maximum possible number of five ‘firsts’ in his courses at
Britannia.
Tom Phillips was an extraordinarily intelligent man. Unlike the case in the great public schools of the day, candidates for
Britannia
had to pass demanding examinations in Mathematics (Arithmetic, Geometry and Algebra), English and a number of other subjects to qualify for a place. At the turn of the century of 240 Cadets nominated for entry, sixty failed the medical, 180 took the examination and sixty-three passed. Phillips has been accused of not suffering fools gladly, a feature he shares with most of the successful Admirals of the Second World War, but closer to the mark are probably those who report that he could retreat in to intense periods of concentration in which he blocked out other people, and thus appeared aloof, inconsiderate or rude. Phillips specialized in navigation, was present at the Dardanelles, but was ‘marooned’ on board HMS
Lancaster
for much of the war in the Far East and missed Jutland. In a varied and successful career he attended the first Royal Naval Staff College course after the war. He became Staff Officer to the notorious firebrand Admiral Sir Roger Keyes in the Mediterranean and proved his capacity to work with difficult people. He had two periods of roughly five years in all commanding destroyer flotillas and as captain of a cruiser, but Admiralty appointments were more common. When Phillips was promoted to Rear Admiral in January 1939 it was as Commodore commanding the Home Fleet Destroyer Flotillas. He was made Deputy Chief of Naval Staff on 1 June 1939 in succession to A.B. Cunningham, the post being renamed Vice Chief of Naval Staff in April 1940. It was from this post that he received a double promotion and became Commander in Chief of the Eastern Fleet, a rather grand name for a very small fleet indeed.

Phillips was no taller than 5ft 2in and most commentators state that he was known as ‘Tom Thumb’ in the Navy. In fact the name ‘Titch’ was both more commonly used, and a much more familiar tag in Royal Navy naming slang.

Much of the case against Phillips hinges on one opinion and one feature of his personality that have been repeated so often that they have become an almost unchallenged truth. The first is that he was a die-hard believer in the supremacy of the surface ship over the aircraft, and the second is that he was an arrogant, overbearing and short-tempered man convinced that only he was in the right. One particularly virulent writer sums this all up:

‘It may have been to compensate for [his] lack of stature that he developed a rather pugnacious personality, a feature of which was his repeatedly putting forward his conviction that aircraft bombers were no serious opposition for a battleship. It was this haughty disdain for air power and his obsolete philosophy, together with arrogant self-confidence against an opponent that was “only Japanese” that was to lead to the disaster … in fact Phillips had never commanded any sea-going ship … For over twenty years the largest piece of naval equipment under his command had been an Admiralty desk ….’
¹

Phillips, of course, had held sea-going commands and there is no evidence that he dismissed the Japanese any more than the world in general at that time. There is conclusive evidence that by the time Force Z set sail Phillips had fully realized the dangers to surface ships posed by aircraft. A major element in what was undoubtedly a change of mind was the experience of the Royal Navy in the Norwegian Campaign in 1940, but also the experiences of Phillips’s own son.

Prior to the lessons of the Norwegian campaign, Phillips was justified in thinking that aircraft did not pose a terminal threat to well-handled surface ships. In the 1920s Colonel ‘Billy’ Mitchell, head of the United States Air Force, had sought to prove that battleships were vulnerable to air attack. The evidence for this was a series of staged bombing attacks on the captured First World War German battleship
Ostfriesland.
It took Mitchell’s bombers an inordinate amount of time to sink
Ostfriesland,
which was not only an obsolete design with none of the deck armour needed to resist bombing attacks, but was also stationary and incapable of evasive manoeuvring, could put up no defensive fire and had no damage control to stem flooding. When the target eventually sank it was as the result of progressive flooding of precisely the kind that proper damage control should have been able to correct. Mitchell was not so much a loose cannon as a lighted match in a gunpowder store and Phillips was far too intelligent to be convinced by Mitchell’s blatant propaganda. The experience of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean at the start of the war, where ships were continually attacked by Italian aircraft, seemed to confirm that the air threat was containable.

It might be thought that the success of the Taranto raid in November 1940, in which three Italian battleships were sunk by Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo bombers, could have changed Phillips’s mind. There was little reason for it to do so because yet again the targets were stationary. What did force a change of mind, or confirmed him in it, was the Norwegian Campaign, where for the first time the Royal Navy came up against the Luftwaffe, and the Stuka dive-bomber in particular. Stukas sank two destroyers,
Gurkha
and
Alfridi
, and the German air threat forced the Royal Navy to withdraw surface ships from the southern theatre of operations. In its turn the Royal Navy notched up the first sinking of a warship by aircraft when it sank the German light cruiser
Königsberg
. It is inconceivable that Phillips did not take on board the lessons of the campaign and his personal and operational closeness to the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, means he must have been involved in the decision to withdraw the British surface fleet in the face of the air threat. As a footnote, it is interesting what Phillips said to his fellow officers about leading Force Z out of Singapore: ‘It was’, he told the officers gathered in his day cabin, like ‘taking the Home Fleet into the Skagerrak without air cover. Nevertheless, I feel we have to do something. So, gentlemen, we sail at 1500.’
²

Skaggerak was the theatre of war over which the Germans had exercised air command in the Norwegian campaign. This is the language of someone with the lessons of the Norwegian campaign still strong in his mind. It is not the language of someone who dismisses the air threat.

Phillips talked about that threat to his son, by then himself serving in the Navy, and mentioned specifically to him the loss of HMS
Southampton
as a reason for his growing concern about the threat from the air.
Southampton
was sunk with the loss of eighty-one men by two bombs from German Stukas, on 11 January 1941. His son remembered his father linking the loss of
Southampton
with the mauling of the carrier
Illustrious
(the carrier from which the Taranto attack had been launched), again by Stukas, on 10 January 1941, but there is even more conclusive evidence to suggest that Phillips learnt in a very direct way of the reality of the threat from the air, evidence so far not noted by any other commentator.

Phillips married relatively late in life and his wife brought two children to their marriage. They had only one child themselves, Tom Vaughan Gerald Phillips (known as Gerald or ‘Gerry’) though family tradition relates that throughout his life Tom Phillips made no distinction between the three children in terms of his time and affection. Jack, the son of his wife by an earlier marriage, was something of a tearaway and tragically lost his life while an officer in the Sherwood Foresters, at about the time his step-father died. There is an extended series of letters in the family papers dealing with an incident in which Jack appears to have blown up someone’s pond with a bomb with his step-father footing the compensation bill apparently without complaint. The letters that survive between father and the younger Gerry Phillips are warm and caring, unusually so in my experience at least of reading correspondence of the time. A typical letter, written as Phillips was on his way to Singapore, is addressed, ‘My darling Gerald’ and ends with, ‘lots of love & I miss seeing you so much, Daddy’.
³
Phillips was not afraid of the ‘l’ word, and appears very much in touch with his emotions. The warmth and humanity of his letters to his son are touching. On his son’s twenty-first birthday he finishes by writing, ‘Mummy and I count ourselves very fortunate in you and thank God that you are as you are.’
⁴
The fact that Phillips wrote whilst actually in charge of Force Z and at the most demanding time of his life, is testimony to his sense of duty as a father and his love. Phillips took an intense interest in his son’s naval career. Gerald, or Tom as he became known in later life, was posted to a ‘J’ class destroyer,
Jackal¸
which took part in the Crete Campaign and was in close company with the destroyers
Kelly
and
Kashmir
on 23 May 1941 when they were sunk by German aircraft. Phillips was given the most direct confirmation possible from his son that surface ships were vulnerable to air attack, even if (as seems most unlikely) he had not noted the fact from official reports to the Admiralty.

As a cruel footnote,
Jackal
was badly damaged by Italian torpedo-bombers in December 1941 at around the time their Japanese counterparts were killing Tom Phillips. Subsequently, in May 1942, German bombers hit
Jackal
so badly that she eventually had to be scuttled. Lady Phillips heard the news of the ship’s loss before she heard that her son had been taken off her as a result of illness shortly before her last voyage, and for a period of time must have feared that her son had gone the same way as her husband.

The most convincing argument of all to suggest that Phillips was fully aware of the air threat was his continual emphasis on its necessity. As is shown below, it was none of his doing that deprived Force Z of its carrier. He was unrelenting in his quest for air cover, and made it absolutely clear to all those with whom he served what importance he placed on it. A note to the RAF to that effect was his last act before Force Z set sail and was delivered by hand from his private car:

“I’m not sure”, he told Captain Bell, his senior aide, “that Pulford realizes the importance I attach to fighter cover over Singora on the tenth. I’m going to write him a letter stressing the point, and asking him to let me know for certain what he can do.”’
⁵

Phillips left his subordinates in no doubt as to the importance he attached to fighter cover: ‘..the Admiral most certainly did not believe that ships should be subjected to heavy air attack in 1941–2 without the assistance of fighter defence.’
⁶

Phillips made one of his most telling comments to the American Admiral Hart in Manila shortly before sailing with Force Z: ‘With the Navy what it really comes down to when you are within range, if you have the fighters you can do your job. And if you haven’t it is, as at Crete – none too good.’
⁷

In May 1941 off Crete the Royal Navy lost three cruisers and six destroyers to air attack, including the two witnessed by his son.

There is therefore no evidence to suggest that, as one commentator has said, ‘… the most likely explanation for the decision not to break radio silence is that Tom Phillips ‘was confident his ships could defend themselves …’
⁸

Even Captain Stephen Roskill, the official naval historian and no supporter of Phillips, admitted privately (though not as far as I know in print) to a leading historian and to Phillips’s son that Phillips had changed his mind: ‘I have no doubt at all that your father changed his views – certainly by 1941, and perhaps earlier … By the time your father got to Singapore I am sure he was fully alive to the realities of the air threat.’
⁹

One of the most authoritative commenters on the war in the Far East wrote:

‘The Tom Phillips of the autumn of 1941 was therefore not the Tom Phillips who had made light of the air danger in the Norwegian campaign a year and a half earlier. He was certainly alive to the threat imposed by dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers in particular. The legend, nevertheless, persists, as legends will, that Phillips had undergone no change in his views on the threat from the air.’
¹⁰

It is therefore simply not true that Phillips believed in December 1941 that surface ships did not need air cover. He probably had believed this at one stage in his career, but his mistake was to leave a legacy of comments from this period that historians intent on a good story simply could not resist. It is time this accusation against Phillips was permanently laid to rest.

There may be a hidden agenda here. It is documented that Phillips disagreed with both ‘Bomber’ Harris and Churchill about the bombing of Germany. Phillips was not the type of man to disclose the reasons for his disagreement with the country’s wartime leader and one of its most powerful military leaders; to do so would have been against every code of conduct he followed, and be deemed disloyal. It has been assumed that the arguments over the bombing of civilian targets were largely to do with Phillips’s dismissal of air power, and possibly even a rather territorial feeling that the resources expended on Bomber Command should have been more properly expended on the Royal Navy. It is more likely that Phillips realized that victory against the U-boats, arguably the major concern of his boss and confidante, Dudley Pound, and Pound’s greatest victory, could have been achieved far more quickly if the RAF’s long-range bombers had their course reversed and were sent out over the Atlantic. To defeat the submarine menace a bomber did not have to drop a bomb on a U-boat. It merely had to force it to submerge, where the Type 1XB boat, the most successful in the war, had a top speed of 7.3 knots and a range of less than seventy miles at four knots underwater. Criticism of the civilian bombing campaign has centred on its morality and its strategic effectiveness. It should more properly focus on whether or not that campaign was the most horrendous example of misuse of military resources in the war, and Phillips’s brain was exactly the kind that would focus on a truth such as this. Churchill and Harris survived the war to fight their corner. Phillips has never had the chance to tell us what his corner was. We do know that he was a brilliant and perceptive man who was quite capable of seeing the wood for the trees. He argued for the sending of modern fighters, and tanks, to Singapore and had he been listened to the defence of Singapore would have turned out to be a very different story. He predicted the useless carnage of the Royal Navy’s involvement in the campaign for Crete and Greece.