Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (6 page)

As for Phillips’s abrasive personality, a close examination of the historical record shows a very different picture of him from the one often presented. Certainly he did not suffer fools gladly, could have a sharp tongue and be short-tempered: ‘As VCNS his great qualities were rather marred by ill health, which combined with the strain and anxiety of his office, made him over domineering and intolerant, and increased the strain under which we all worked.’
¹¹

What has not to my knowledge been published before is that Phillips suffered from a hereditary bone disease, Multiple Epiphysial Dysplasia, which was almost certainly responsible for his stature. Something of a cross between rickets and chronic arthritis, it arrests bone growth in what would normally be its last spurt in teenage years and can cause the sufferer constant discomfort and occasional sharp pain. The illness may well have contributed to a lack of patience and some short temperedness from Phillips, but there is no evidence that it ever affected his judgment or intelligence.

Furthermore, obstinacy and even obduracy need to be placed in context. Successful military leaders do not achieve what they do by being nice. British Admirals of the Second World War were frequently ‘strong-willed’. Certainly, there were Admirals such as Robert Burnett who had been a PE instructor and used to slap his bottom saying that was where his brains were. The hail-fellow-well-met approach could and did work in certain circumstances and with certain people. Unfortunately, and in private, rather a lot of those he served with tended to agree with Burnett about where his brains were. More typical was Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay. His obstinacy and unwillingness to back down when he thought he was right led to him being placed on the retired list before the war. Only brought off it because of the chronic manpower shortage at all levels in the Royal Navy in 1939, it was Ramsay who master-minded the Dunkirk evacuation, saving countless lives by arguing almost as a lone voice that beaching craft on the sands of Dunkirk so as to allow them to evacuate troops who would never have made it beyond the shallows would not break the ships’ backs. He then went on to plan, brilliantly, the whole naval side of the D-Day landings. Even his ever-loyal widow penciled in to some of the family papers the comment: ‘Reflection 1967. Maybe BHR [Bertram Home Ramsay] was too intolerant and opinionated at times!’
¹²

Arguably the most famous Admiral of the war, A.B. Cunningham, was a charismatic and heroic leader at sea who drove his staff mad on shore and dismissed any request that cost money as ‘Too velvet-arsed and Rolls Royce for me!’ As part of research for an earlier book I talked to Admiral Vian’s driver, who if he had given permission for what he knew to be published would have been responsible for posterity taking a rather different view of Vian. He said to me, in admittedly admiring tones: ‘Now that Vian … if his mother’d been standing in front of the car stopping ‘im from doin’ what ‘e wanted ‘e’d have run her over no problem.’ Willingness to be knocked over easily was not a recipe for success at the top of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, and doing so to one’s mother apparently acceptable to at least one Admiral and a cause of some admiration from his driver.

A number of those who have written on Phillips’s personality would possibly see this as a description of him: ‘Always serious-minded and a hard taskmaster – a dedicated “slave driver” as one of his officers described him – he did not tolerate fools gladly and his wrath when roused was truly devastating. He was a man of steel, who did not bend easily.’
¹³

In fact it described Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, a brilliant officer who was preferred above Pound for the post of First Sea Lord in 1938. Like Pound, Backhouse in effect worked himself to death though, like Pound, his official cause of death in 1939 was a brain tumour. If one looks at his contemporaries, on a Richter scale of pugnacity Phillips sits only about halfway down. Armed forces can forgive their leaders many things: weakness and inability to fight one’s corner are not among them.

It also needs to be remembered who Phillips worked alongside. Admiral Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord for the first four years of the war, took over after Backhouse’s death. He was a comparatively mild-mannered man and it is uncertain how long he was growing the brain tumour that was to kill him, along with two strokes, in 1943. Dudley Pound’s temperament allowed him to duck and weave in the face of some of Churchill’s wilder moments and still salvage something for the Navy. It also had its weaknesses. His opposition to the sending out of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
did not alter Churchill’s decision. Phillips’s more acerbic and assertive personality may have been a very necessary counterbalance to his superior at the time, even something of a successful double act, though it would not recommend him to those who thought they had got their way with Pound and then ran up against Phillips.

Yet with all this, Phillips’s personality as it is often described bears little or no resemblance to the person described by many of his contemporaries. This applies from the top downwards. A.V. Alexander, the Labour First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote of him:

‘I cannot put into words my sense of the loss sustained by the Royal Navy, the nation, and all of us here who counted your distinguished husband as loyal colleague and personal friend. I always, through difficult days last year, found in him a constant support and encouragement, not only because of his knowledge and resource [sic] but the impression one always got of complete reliability.’
¹⁴
…

‘The First Lord, Alexander, considered him “a great leader, a great Christian, a man of perhaps as high a standard of conduct as it would be possible to find anywhere in society.”’
¹⁵

Pound was equally unstinting in his praise: ‘He had such a wonderful combination of brilliance, soundness of judgment and drive and he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries …. His friends are legion, both in and out of the Service …’
¹⁶

Phillips had a capacity to get on with people in other navies and other nations, and win their respect:

‘…The years he had spent in the corridors of power had made Tom Phillips very much aware of … political considerations and was, indeed, one of the more cogent reasons why he had been picked to command the Eastern Fleet.’
¹⁷

‘…Phillips had a knack of getting along well with others outside the Navy: the Services, civil servants, diplomats, and particularly Foreign Naval officers.’
¹⁸

It certainly worked. General Smuts was no easy person to win over. His response to his meeting with Phillips was: ‘Admiral Tom Phillips has been here for most useful talks … He has much impressed me and appears admirable choice for most important position.’
¹⁹

He seems to have impressed the American Admiral Hart every bit as much. Hart said he was, ‘as good an Englishman to work with as I have had for some time.’
²⁰
Hart wrote in his diary for 5 December 1941:

‘…I had pictured a big, burly personable magnetic sort. He’s a bare 5ft. two and decidedly the intellectual type – good stuff, all right, and has a first-class brain … We were quite frank with each other, laid our cards down, and wore no gloves … Well I acquired considerable respect for Phillips…’
²¹

Even more importantly, he persuaded Admiral Hart to station four destroyers in Singapore, which were actually on their way there when Force Z was sunk. There was more than military good sense in these reinforcements. Had they been in Singapore and the Japanese attacked (and of course while Phillips was negotiating the deal no one knew about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor), their presence might have drawn the United States into the war without an attack on America’s main base. This and the concept of the ‘Secret Alliance’ are discussed below, but in any event politics played a major part in the decision to send Phillips and Force Z to Singapore, and politics would have inevitably played a large part in the success of their mission had the Japanese not decided to start the war when they did. Phillips was no wheeler-dealer politician, but he was an extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive naval officer who could deeply impress those who were.

His reputation as a desk Admiral rather than a fighting one also seems to be unsound. Certainly he had not had the seagoing experience in 1941 of some of his contemporaries, but those who criticize him often overlook that he took Force Z out in enemy-infested waters, evaded the minefields the Japanese had laid to trap him, dodged submarines and used prevailing bad weather so skillfully that it was only at the last minute, and when his assailants were at their last gasp, that he was spotted. It ended in disaster but right until the last minute the voyage of Force Z was handled in the best fighting traditions of the Royal Navy and with considerable tactical skill.

It was not merely the good and the grand who thought highly of Phillips. There are too many letters on this theme to do justice to in the Phillips papers. A sampling would include:

‘To me the Admiral was the very embodiment of the great English leader. I loved and admired him more than I can ever explain on paper.’
²²

Phillips was capable of inspiring the greatest loyalty, as the widow of one of those officers lost with him shows: ‘My husband was serving as Flag Lieutenant to your husband, and I had two letters from him this week posted in Cape Town, saying that he had never had respect and admiration for anyone as he had for “his Admiral” and that he was a really great man. My husband did not give his heart freely and I feel much comforted to feel that he lost his life serving such a man. It seems the only spark of brightness in what is a very sad time to me.’
²³

Another contemporary wrote: ‘Of all the naval officers with whom I have had the honour of being associated in the last twenty years, there is none who has commanded a higher share of my regard for his character his professional brilliance and the great charm of his personality …’
²⁴

Others comment on his ‘kindness and thoughtfulness’
²⁵
and ‘lovable personality’
²⁶
. In one of the best epitaphs an officer could ever receive, a correspondent writes, ‘I have never served under a better officer.’
²⁷
His Flag Lieutenant in HMS
Aurora
wrote of Phillips’s ‘infinite kindness and patience.’
²⁸

Phillips also commanded great loyalty from those far junior to him. A Lieutenant wrote to Churchill after his ‘magnificent defence’ of ‘this great little man’, the letter marked in an unknown hand, ‘Prime Minister to see’:

‘Our first meeting was not a happy one. New to the Admiralty and its working, and warned against the admission of unauthorized intruders, my first night watch alone in your old War Room was disturbed in the early hours of the morning by a diminutive figure in pyjamas. I asked who it was. VCNS [Vice Chief Naval Staff] was the answer. “That means nothing to me. Have you a Basement Pass?” persisted I in my ignorance. A silence that could be felt, followed by and [sic] explosive but none the less amused “Good God” made me realize how greatly I had blundered. Later contacts outside the War Room were happier, for we discovered a mutual interest in old prints, and I came to know him well. I shall always remember his unbounded loyalty to yourself and the First Sea Lord, his quiet authority and unsparing sense of duty, his rare quality as a leader, his utter devotion to the Service.’
²⁹

One of the letters Phillips wrote to a friend on his way to Singapore tells of him noting a Midshipman reading a John Buchan novel, one of the friend’s favourite authors. It is a throwaway line, but interesting to note that an Admiral with a newly-acquired and burdensome command had the time to note what a Midshipman was reading.

One of the officers who was there at the death, and one of the last to see Phillips alive, wrote to his widow: ‘All of us who have been with him for so many years felt like spaniels who had lost their master.’
³⁰

The Phillips papers are full of tributes. A former Petty Officer writes in pencil:

‘Will you please accept your Ladyship our heartfelt sympathy you have sustained by the loss in action of your husband. The Navy has lost a good Father as the lads always named him who served in and under his Command. Rose and my son joins with me in this sincerity in this sudden bereavement.’
³¹

Of all the tributes paid to Phillips, two stand out to me. Captain Tennant of
Repulse
, who has been as universally praised for his actions as Phillips has been damned for his, might be expected if anyone did to have a low opinion of Phillips. In a very telling letter to Lady Phillips, he wrote:

‘I saw your husband several times before 10 December. It was very good to see him again and he was very charming & good to work with. I so entirely agreed with his plans for operations and told him so. Please accept my deepest sympathy.’
³²

‘Charming and good to work with?’ Why is it that so many historians have chosen to blot comments such as this out of the record? There is no mention in the many books that comment on Phillips of the man who arranged for a copious supply of make-up to be left in his day cabin when it was used on board ship as the Ladies Withdrawing Room for social functions, as female guests often failed to realize how hot it became on a warship and the consequent effects on their make-up.
³³
Nor is Phillips seen as the type of man whose widow received a letter of condolence from a small boy who worshipped Phillips ever since the man had taken the trouble to show him round his ship: ‘I am sorry that Admiral Sir Tom Philips [sic] went down on the
Prince of Wales
I can remember the time when he took me over the Aurora. I came home from school yesterday.’
³⁴