Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (7 page)

There is also in the Phillips papers a letter from, of all people, the owner of Young’s Motor Stores, Tooting Bec Road, London. Phillips loved tinkering with cars. He was the proud owner of registration number A 74, which the family kept until after the war, and when appointed Commander in Chief he wrote: ‘This chapter is going to be very difficult for my personal life, because as C in C I am so much in the limelight I can’t go and play about with bits of cars & all the other wrong things I like to do.’
³⁵

Clearly he was not only known as a customer at Young’s Motor Stores, but well remembered. The owner wrote: ‘I shall remember him as a Gentleman with a strong yet charming personality, with eyes that twinkled but spoke volumes, who could find great pleasure in the simplest things of life – in brief – a Very Gallant English Gentleman. Would it be asking too much of you to let me have some very small memento of his, say a button off his Uniform? If granted, I would greatly treasure it as a remembrance.’
³⁶

Whatever else he may have been, Phillips was not the bullying martinet he has sometimes been portrayed as. Perhaps one answer as to why this vision of him has persisted is given by this comment: ‘His manner of being completely absorbed in a thought or matter, as he had a great power of concentration, at times gave the impression of not caring for others, and this was sometimes misconstrued as being rude, or indifferent to his subordinates.’
³⁷

Admiral Sir Tom Phillips was a brilliant, dedicated and ferociously hardworking Naval officer with a capacity to see the truth, however unpopular that was, and say so. If he occasionally criticized junior officers, he was prepared to do the same to Churchill. He was also a far richer, warmer and more interesting personality than many historians have been willing to admit. It is often said that history is written by the victors. So it is, but perhaps for only a hundred years or so after the victory. The days are gone when any book on the naval history of the Second World War was incomplete without the approval of Lord Cunningham of Hyndhope, and it was treason to criticize Churchill. It suited many of those who survived the debacle of the loss of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
to see the commander of Force Z as a personality equally as flawed as the mission in which he lost his life.

As a footnote, occasional references to Phillips’s health, his pale complexion and the fact that he kept picking at his desk drawer and popping whatever he took out of it into his mouth have linked this to a suggestion that he took amphetamines or other drugs. In fact if he had an addiction at all it was to ‘Peter’s’ chocolate, which after his death was found in large quantities both in his desk and even his safe. Reportedly his fondness of chocolate was something he was reluctant to admit in case it was seen as making him seem weak in the macho world in which he lived and worked.

There is one final question that has not yet been answered. Did Tom Phillips choose to ‘go down with the ship’? We know that he remained in a relatively dangerous part of the vessel as it was about to sink, despite taking the time to order his staff to safety. There are survivors’ comments that have Phillips and Leach, the Captain of
Prince of Wales
, walking down the side of the ship as it capsized. His last words were reported as, ‘I cannot survive this.’ Leach’s body was found face down in the water, floating by virtue of a half-inflated life jacket, and when it was turned over in a vain hope of finding life it was noted he showed the signs of someone who had been dragged underwater and drowned before he could make the surface. A survivor recollects seeing Phillips face down in the water, whereupon he started to swim towards him in order to take off a signet ring or similar from the body to give to the family, but gave up the idea as being too macabre. The likelihood is that Phillips was dragged down by the sinking hull and drowned before his life jacket could bring him to the surface. However, this raises the question as to how hard Phillips fought to regain the surface. My own, entirely personal, conclusion is that Tom Phillips chose neither to live nor die, but rather as a man whose judgment of himself would be far harsher even than that of history, did not choose to fight death when it came.

Phillips was a man of honour who in his own mind could probably not have survived the gambler’s loss that he had sustained, despite the fact that all war is a gamble and this one, the sailing of Force Z, was actually less of a risk than has often been supposed, and where the principle quality Phillips lacked was the one most prized by Napoleon in his Generals – luck. Yet his worst bad fortune was to die and so be prevented from giving his version of events as a counter to all those who were so willing to do so in order to cover their backs. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips lost his reputation in part because so many of those who survived him were so assiduous in protecting their own.

Chapter 4

Singapore and Signals

Singapore

T
he majority of books written about the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
acknowledge that the loss of the two ships was part of the wider defeat of British power and influence in the Far East, culminating in the loss of Singapore itself. The fact that Force Z was always seen and constituted as a separate command, with the navy working independently of the control of both the Army and the RAF in Singapore, has tended to mean that the loss of Force Z is talked and written about in many respects as a stand-alone incident, a harbinger of the defeat that was to come to Singapore but not linked by umbilical cord to Singapore itself. It is an easy mistake to make. A battleship at sea looks like the classic island unto itself, a self-contained world operating independently from the land. The truth is that any warship functions only whilst it is being stored, fuelled, maintained and repaired from shore. The nuclear submarine is the first and only warship able to function effectively and healthily for long periods without calling in to a port. A further truth about
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
is that their survival hinged on two vital inputs from Singapore – intelligence reports and communications. It was to play a major role in the sinking of the two ships in that both these areas were not being managed to the necessary level of efficiency in Singapore’s command structure. Of course the two ships were ‘independent’ in the sense that, subject to orders and the range of his ships, Tom Phillips could take them wherever he wished. Yet at the same time they were acting as one of the major arms of the military effort Singapore could exert against a Japanese attack. If they were not the only such arm, the weakness of the RAF in Singapore made them almost such. Inevitably, these two arms were not immune from the illness affecting the main body back at Singapore.

The Admiralty did not seek to deny the possibility of war against Japan in the inter-war years, though it underestimated the probability. It took a decision to a question to which there was no perfect answer in stating that there were too many potential threats facing Britain to allow the Royal Navy to station capital ships in Singapore in peacetime. The plan was for such vessels to be rushed there in the event of war – the so-called idea of a ‘main fleet to Singapore’ – in the meantime trusting to its land defences and air cover. The time for which Singapore would have to defend itself alone varied, with ninety days the most likely option. This was the theory. In practice there never was going to be the money available in 1930s Britain to make Singapore anything like the impregnable fortress Britain wished its own and other people to think it was, nor was the Royal Navy ever likely to have enough ships at its disposal to send a significant fleet so far away from the home theatre of operations, where the very survival of England as an independent nation would be at stake. The ‘main fleet’ idea was little more than spin to calm down Australia in particular or to attract the United States to using Singapore as a main base. It was thought, not without reason, that it would help deter Japanese aggression if Britain knowingly talked up the ‘impregnable fortress’ concept of Singapore. Such puffing of reality cost nothing. Unfortunately, it was a bluff that the loss of confidential papers sent for Singapore on the steamship
Automedon
blew apart, and a bluff that as a result the Japanese felt able to call.

Ironically, the great British naval base at Singapore commenced in 1921 but not finally completed until 1938, exacerbated tensions. Seen as defensive by the British, it was violently objected to as an offensive weapon by the Japanese and seen as a sword pointed at the Japanese heart. If so, it was a remarkably blunt one. Threat evaluations had suggested the risk to Singapore came from sea-based bombardment and assault, and that its back door of thick Malay jungle was impassable to any significant number of land forces. It is a common misconception that most of its heavy guns pointed only out to sea. This was not true. What was true, and crucial in Singapore’s inability to defend itself, is that the available ammunition for these guns were armour-piercing shells designed for use against ships but hopeless for use against ground troops, where high-explosive shells were essential. Armour-piercing rounds simply buried themselves in the ground which then contained much of the explosion. In 1937 Major-General Dobbie, in overall command in Malaya, realized how vulnerable Singapore was, but it was too late, and only paltry sums were spent on reinforcing the northern perimeter, or the east where landings might take place. Similarly, the Singapore Defence Conference held in 1940 recognized that with Japanese expansion into Indo-China the main threat to Singapore was possibly to come from the north and ground troops, and asked for 582 modern aircraft to act as Singapore’s main defence until the Royal Navy arrived. The majority of these were never sent. Something that did happen was a new command structure – after all, it was a cheap option and might make those involved feel that at least something was being done. The importance being placed on air cover as Singapore’s main defence until naval reinforcement could arrive is illustrated by the appointment of Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham as overall Commander in Chief of Far East Forces. He was due for routine replacement when hostilities broke out. His appointment should not be seen as a belated realization on the part of the powers that be that air power was now the dominant force. Rather, it was the only option left after it had been accepted that the dominant force, sea power, would be late in coming.

We now know that Singapore was a disaster waiting to happen. One area was a lack of clarity over what would actually be defended in the event of hostilities – the Malayan Peninsula or parts of it, or just Singapore itself. Operation Matador was a plan for a pre-emptive invasion of southern Thailand, produced by the military in part because they knew the real weaknesses of Singapore’s defences. In the event it was never initiated as the result of a cocktail of fear of breaching Thai neutrality, lack of resources and the speed of the Japanese advance overwhelming the decision-making process.

Another serious weakness was air defence. British aircraft:

‘… operated from the airfields recently carved out of the Malayan jungle – Alor Star, Kota Bharu, Gong Kedah, Kuantan and the others – with much difficulty. Although the C in C Far East, Brooke-Popham, had lain down that defence of the airfields was to take precedence over everything else except the naval base itself, Pulford had received few weapons for this purpose, and the anti-aircraft and ground defences of all the airfields were quite inadequate to meet determined attack. The real facts of the air situation in Singapore … were far worse even than Phillips had judged from the figures he had been shown before his departure. In the event of serious attack, Malaya possessed no measurable air defence at all.’
¹

Phillips quite rightly distrusted the Brewster Buffalo fighters that were the stalwart of Singapore’s air defence (
see
Chapter 8
) and had argued to the Chiefs of Staff on 25 April 1941 for both Hurricane fighters and tanks to be sent to Singapore, further testimony that this ‘desk’ Admiral was alive to the demands and reality of actual combat. Both tanks and fighters were available but were sent instead to Russia. It is doubtful that they had a major impact on the military fortunes of the Russians, but beyond doubt that they could have had a major impact on the battle for Singapore. The failure to equip Singapore stretched even to the supply of the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle. A British design that came into service in 1937, it was ineffective against the thickness of armour found in most German tanks and was superseded by the bazooka, but would have been effective against the Japanese light tanks used in the assault on Singapore, which had armour of 16mm thickness against the 20mm the Boys Rifle was designed to penetrate. Two hundred were sent to Russia before the Japanese invaded, none to Singapore.

However, it is only selected parts of the military provision for the defence of Singapore that relate to the sinking of Force Z. Air cover is so important a part of this that it is dealt with below in a separate chapter. It is perhaps worth stating that Phillips was aware of the chaos that was Singapore – he wished to go out there in the summer of 1941 to try and sort some of that chaos out – but he was overruled.
²
He was not, of course, in any way responsible for the lamentable state of its defences. The fact that as a result of the sinking of the merchant ship
Automedon
the Japanese knew of Singapore’s weakness is also dealt with in a later chapter.

Recent research has focused on an area that may have contributed significantly to the loss of the ships. Inter-service rivalry was intense at Singapore, co-operation between the Army, Navy and RAF notable by its absence. It was to take a very long while indeed for Britain to learn how to manage combined operations, and it had certainly not done so by the time hostilities hit Singapore. In some respects Tom Phillips was to prove as much a victim of the petty rivalries, jealousies and failure to talk to each other that beset the Army, Navy and RAF in Singapore, as he was a victim of the Japanese. We have already seen how the RAF ignored the views of the Army in positioning its airfields. Partly as an attempt to solve some of these problems, and prior to the opening of hostilities, a new underground command building was being opened, known as the ‘Battlebox’. ‘Thus the defences of Malaya were split between the naval base and Sime Road, with the Battlebox becoming a third command centre to take charge of the Singapore aspect of the operations.’
³

Despite the existence of separate command centres, initially they could only communicate out through the domestic telephone system. The problem was not limited to an actual geographical separation of the command bases, or a situation that leads one to wonder sometimes if the various services did not see each other, and not the Japanese, as the enemy. It had further ramifications:

‘In practice, however, the lack of skilled manpower to run two almost identical war rooms and insufficient clarity among field commanders and officers in Malaya meant that many operational calls and signals were still being routed to Fort Canning which then had to be re-routed to Sime Road. As a result, the decentralized war rooms created greater confusion and down time as it took ages for ground intelligence and reports to filter up and be represented on duplicate situation charts…’
⁴

The picture that emerges is one of chaos, and chaos in particular linked to ineffective communication. This becomes historically significant because signals, or the lack of them, are at the heart of the story of the sinking of the two ships. To understand why signals failures may have made a major contribution to the disaster one needs to understand also that Signals Intelligence was a relatively new phenomenon for the Singapore military. The Far East Combined Bureau (FECB) or Centre for Operational Intelligence and Signals (COIS) was housed at the naval base, but intended to serve all three services, and intercepted much Japanese traffic. They were helped by the Japanese tendency to chatter over the radio, and to send messages in ‘clear’ rather than in code. However, FECB and COIS suffered from insufficient manpower, and were not accepted by the top brass: ‘… the military commanders in Southeast Asia had little faith in these new forms of intelligence gathering and disregarded much of the contents of the daily situation reports.’
⁵

In one of the more bizarre episodes in this story, staff at FECB could see
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
out of their office window. Yet the only information they received about the sailing of Force Z was from their own eyes, when they came in to work and saw the empty berths. It was the reports of landings that came from FECB that had caused the ships to be scrambled, yet no-one thought to tell the originators of the mission that it was happening.

It appears that FECB intercepted Japanese signals stating that British capital ships had been sighted off Kuantan. One can only agree with the historian of military Singapore when he writes:

‘Not keeping the FECB informed about ongoing operations meant that the signal intelligence officers were not overly concerned about a Japanese report in P/L (plain language) on 10 December, which said British capital ships were sighted at a specific position off Kuantan. Although Malaya Command and the Admiralty were informed immediately, no one at these headquarters had pieced the two together and realized that Japanese fighters had obviously spotted Force Z and were now planning to destroy it. Had the FECB been kept in the loop, it is highly likely that defensive air cover would have been sent sooner to aid the capital ships, rather than only after receiving distress calls from the floundering vessels.’
⁶

In other words, British High Command in Singapore knew Force Z had been sighted off Kuantan
in time for such fighter cover as there was to be sent out to cover the ships
but no action was taken. If this is true – and the fact of so many records being lost when Singapore fell means that some issues can never be fully proven to the most exacting historical standards – it was an act of criminal negligence.

This also relates to the suggestion examined in more detail below that Singapore or the Admiralty actually knew of the existence of Japanese torpedo-bombers, this providing an explanation as to why the First Sea Lord sent a signal to Phillips shortly before Force Z was sunk warning him to be on his guard against a Taranto-like attack on his ships in Singapore.

Signals procedures at Singapore raise another issue. It is sometimes argued that Admiral Palliser in Singapore had no reason to think Force Z would head for Kuantan following his signal of landings there. What is overlooked is that
Tenedos
, detached by Phillips because of its lack of endurance, did send the signal Phillips had given it confirming his return to Singapore and asking for additional destroyers to screen Force Z against Japanese submarines on the run-in to Singapore. It is inconceivable that Palliser did not have enough information to allow him to know at least roughly where Force Z was, or at the very least to arrange air cover as a contingency plan.