Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse Read online

  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 ships. 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 Tirpitz2 and as mentioned above, the sinking of Prince of Wales was to show up serious weaknesses in all aspects of their desig
n. 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.

  Perhaps crucially for Prince of Wales and Repulse, what the inter-war years had not produced was any foray into inter-service co-operation. One nadir of such ‘co-operation’ was the escape of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prince Eugen from France back to Germany in February 1942 when large numbers of RAF aircraft were flung without proper coordination or fighter support against the well-escorted German ships. In fairness to the RAF, this was a very rare example of fruitful co-operation between the German Navy and the Luftwaffe. The destruction of Force Z has rarely been seen as in any way connected to this lack of any real tradition of inter-service cooperation, yet the need to liaise with the RAF was always going to be crucial to the success or failure of the mission.

  With the above list of weaknesses and frailties it might be wondered that the Royal Navy in 1939 was able to fight at all. Rather than being a criticism of the Navy, the list of the problems it faced in 1939 is a huge tribute to the spirit with which it fought the war, and a remarkable illustration of just how much it did achieve and had to overcome to fight as successfully as it did. It was just unfortunate that so many pre-war chickens were to come home to roost in the rigging of Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941.

  The Political and Historical Background

  There is a body of opinion that sees Japan in the inter-war period as a wanton aggressor. Another camp, although acknowledging its failings, sees it as much put-upon and perhaps even driven to war by the USA. An ally of Britain in the First World War, Japan posed a real problem to both Britain and America in the post- and inter-war years. It seemed clear to many contemporary observers that Japan was intent on building a new order in East Asia. Rather like someone who had decided it owned a house it needed to kick out the existing tenants, in this case the colonial powers including America. It was clearly in Japan’s interests to create a large closed area from which it could draw nearly all the raw materials it needed, which in turn would allow it to gain sufficient power to threaten major parts of the British Empire in Australia, New Zealand, Borneo, Malaya and New Guinea and American links with the Philippines, as well as being poised to disrupt the crucial trade in tin and raw rubber, with south-east Asia supplying over two-thirds of both commodities to the west. It was not lost on western commentators that an alliance with Germany and Italy was a logical step on the route to a new position of dominance, which increased the threat to Britain even more. British Chiefs of Staff wrote on 12 November 1937: ‘… we cannot foresee the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our entire territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously.’3

  An increasingly expansionist Japan, desperate for sources of raw materials, saw a General as its Prime Minister in 1928 and there was growing resentment at what it saw as racist attitudes and western determination to limit its power. In 1936 a strident book written by an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, titled Japan Must Fight Britain, sold 11,000 copies in translation. It is true that Britain and America might have handled Japan more tactfully, but a major problem in their doing so was Japanese warmongering in Indo-China and the atrocities conducted by their forces. They did nothing to make the voting populace sympathetic towards Japan, and to that extent the hands of the politicians were tied.

  As war with Germany grew more and more likely so did the possibility of war with Japan, if only because war in Europe presented a classic opportunist opening. It was not that the British Government did not know of the threat, rather that it simply did not have the naval resources to deal with it or to leave a significant enough deterrent threat in Singapore. Some would argue that it was the First World War that brought an end to the British Empire with an impoverished nation simply unable to afford to defend itself to the four corners of the world.

  If economic hardships in the inter-war years meant that the British would be hard-pushed in the event of war to send anything other than a token naval force to the Far East, political necessity demanded that such a force would be sent. To that extent Tom Phillips’s fate and that of his men had been sealed before the keel of his flagship touched the water for the first time. Great Britain’s Empire was not about waving the flag, colouring the map red or even promulgating the Gospel. It was about trade and raw materials. Following the ruinous cost of the First World War, the greatest recession the world had ever seen and with an ageing industrial plant, Britain was nearly broke, more dependent than ever on its Empire as a cheap market for its goods, not to mention its petrol, rubber and tin. It would have been economic suicide to lose the Empire and political suicide as well. It is difficult for us now to conceive of a country that defined so much of itself through Empire, but that was what it did.

  In fact that Empire in the Far East posed two quite different problems. To some countries Britain was simply the occupying power exerting supremacy over an indigenous population by virtue of visible military strength and an ability to keep other nations out of its patch. Singapore was just such a colony which was why its fall was a death-knell to Empire. Never mind that it eventually regained what it had lost: the Japanese had broken not just
an army when they took Singapore in 1941, but also the credibility of the colonial rulers and the myth of British invincibility.

  Countries such as Australia and New Zealand were different. The majority of their population was not indigenous but could trace their ethnic origins back to the home country of Great Britain. Such countries were not retained as paid-up members of the British Empire by military force and indeed made a significant contribution to Britain’s military strength themselves. However, these were countries increasingly maturing into nation states with their own identity and culture. Japanese militarism and expansionism posed a real threat to them – one Australian Prime Minister described his country as being but ‘a stone’s throw’ away from Japan – and they exerted continuous pressure on the British to station a permanent fleet in Singapore. A naval force in Singapore to deter or impress Japan was essential to persuade Australia and New Zealand that London cared and mattered. Repulse was actually on its way to Australia when it was recalled to sail with Prince of Wales to disrupt Japanese invasion forces. Politics and economics placed two nails in the coffin of Phillips and his men before 1941. A further practical factor was the need for Britain’s war effort to be reinforced by Australian troops, something it was made clear would not happen unless Britain in turn showed tangible support for its colonies. There was persistent pressure from the governments of Australia and New Zealand throughout the 1930s for Britain to station a fleet at Singapore. Unable to do so, but desperate to reassure, British policy was to build Singapore up into a major naval base complete with massive defensive 15-inch guns (which contrary to post-war belief did not only point out to sea), and to evolve the ‘main fleet to Singapore’ plan whereby Singapore would be organized so as to defend itself before the ninety or so days it would take for a ‘main fleet’ to be mobilized and sail there. All these factors dictated that a naval force would be sent to Singapore if war with Japan threatened, yet politics and economics dictated that the force would be inadequate. The main fleet promise was a cheque written against an account which simply did not have enough funds to meet it.