The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (381 page)

That morning, Churchill sent a personal letter to the Japanese ambassador in which, very politely, he announced that a state of war existed between their two countries. Some of his colleagues thought the note too proper. “But after all,” Churchill later wrote, “when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” He told King George later in the day that he hoped to leave for Washington “without delay, provided such a course is agreeable to President Roosevelt, as I have no doubt it will be,” and added that he would defer proposing a visit until the situation with Germany and Italy (neither had yet declared war on America) became “more clear.” Then, too impatient to defer, he cabled Washington with a request to meet with Roosevelt in order to “review the whole war plan.” Roosevelt did not reply directly; instead, he told Halifax that perhaps sometime around January
7 might work for everybody. For Churchill, that would simply not do. But it would have to. The next move was Roosevelt’s alone to make.
²²

Eden, about to depart Scapa Flow for Moscow, thought it unwise that both he and Churchill should leave the country at such a critical time. He also believed that Stalin, who trusted no one, would conclude that Churchill and Roosevelt were up to something. He telephoned his concerns to John Winant, who replied that as far as he knew, no meeting had been arranged. Eden’s parliamentary secretary Oliver Harvey told his diary: “Really, the PM is a lunatic; he gets in such a state of excitement that the wildest schemes seem reasonable.” Eden set sail later in the day somewhat secure in the belief that the King, Winant, and the War Cabinet would prevail upon Churchill to stay at home. Churchill intended otherwise. Yet, still no invitation had arrived from Roosevelt. And, still, Hitler remained silent.
²³

It was time for Churchill to roll out long-ignored charts of Pacific islands and archipelagos, many of which were unfamiliar even to high-ranking British leaders, including the prime minister. Churchill loved maps, as much for their utility as for their ability to stoke his imagination. Maps and naval charts lifted him away to far-off places and conjured images of heroic adventures long past. This caused problems when he—regularly—meddled with his military planners. Antony Head, a decorated Dunkirk survivor and a junior staff officer in War Plans, recalled Churchill stabbing a finger at a chart of the Philippines while offering that a particular island—which Churchill claimed was actually part of the Dutch East Indies—was “inhabited by dragons.” Clementine had supplied much of his knowledge (or lack thereof) of the region in her letters home during a four-month cruise to the East Indies seven years earlier.

Virtually every stop on her tour, from Rangoon to Singapore to Borneo, had now been or soon would be attacked by the Japanese. From Singapore Clementine had suggested to Winston that he procure from the Admiralty a map of the new British naval base, located between Singapore Island and the mainland. Had he done so he would have learned that no fixed defenses were planned for the Malay mainland, an oversight Wavell brought to his attention only weeks before the final battle for Singapore. Clementine had also visited Komodo, where indeed she took part in a “dragon” hunt. Distances across the Pacific and Indian oceans defied imagination, including Churchill’s—14,000 miles and fifty-five days sailing from London to Calcutta via Cape Town, 8,000 miles and three weeks from San Francisco to Bombay. Churchill simply referred to “vast expanses” without quite understanding just how vast the expanses were in that watery part of the world. The entire European and North African theaters and much of the eastern
Atlantic war zone fell within a 1,300-mile radius extending from Berlin, within which the newest British and German bombers could depart a base at sunset, cruise halfway across the theater, and arrive home again in time for breakfast. Railroads, which had shuttled troops to the trenches in 1914, could now carry entire armies across the Continent. Modern technology had made Europe a smaller place, but not so the Pacific. All of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the entirety of North Africa could disappear into the Pacific Ocean several times over.
²⁴

In this vastness Churchill expected
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
to impart to the Japanese a lesson in sea power as practiced by the world’s greatest sea power, perfected long before Captain A. T. Mahan, U.S.N., set about putting his thoughts on that subject to paper.
^*
The Japanese understood, as did the British, Mahan’s maxim that in distant seas—where colonial fortresses and naval bases were separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles—the destruction of an enemy’s fleet must precede any attempt to take a fortress or anchorage. This was in essence a waterborne version of Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum that the destruction of enemy armies, not the capture of real estate, should be a commander’s first objective. Mahan believed that the destruction of an enemy fleet virtually guaranteed the success of any land-based assault that followed. Churchill wrote of that very circumstance in
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
where he attributed Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown to the inability of the Royal Navy to prevent the French fleet from getting between Cornwallis and his seaborne reinforcements: “Sea-power had once more decided the issue, and but for the French blockade the British war of attrition might well have succeeded.” The rebel American army in the meantime had marched overland four hundred miles to trap Cornwallis, who, encamped and besieged at Yorktown, at the foot of the Virginia Peninsula, realized that he was at the end of his rope. Singapore was now in an identical position. The Japanese forces that had landed four hundred miles to the north were moving smartly down the Malay Peninsula. Unless
Prince of Wales
found and killed the enemy’s warships, Yamashita could reinforce at will.
²⁵

For almost two centuries the security of the British Empire had been guaranteed by great ships, wooden before the late nineteenth century, weighing in at several hundred tons, driven by wind, armed with smooth-bore cannons capable of splintering enemy ships, and with a range of a mile or so inland, just far enough to dissuade native troublemakers from harassing British coastal trading posts. In the mid–nineteenth century, James
Brooke, a Lord Jim sort of fellow and the self-made Rajah of Sarawak on the northern coast of Borneo, wrote to London that with “a frigate… a slight military force and the English Union Jack,” he could “control all the neighboring evildoers.” He was correct. Nineteenth-century warships carried all the power necessary to dissuade competing colonial powers and unfriendly natives from harassing the British in their territorial waters.

By 1942 a pair of battleships displaced almost as many tons as Nelson’s entire main battle fleet at Trafalgar. Twentieth-century British war wagons were encased by more than a foot of steel, and by 1942 they were equipped with radar and driven by huge motors that could generate enough electricity to light a small city. Most sailed armed with fourteen- and fifteen-inch guns that could loft 1,500-pound projectiles more than twenty miles.
Nelson
and
Rodney
were armed with sixteen-inch guns. These great ships,
Prince of Wales
foremost among them, were the steel needles and iron threads that stitched together the quilt of the Empire, and secured the sea lanes that bound the Empire to London. When Churchill contemplated the Pacific and Indian oceans, he did so only in terms of the sea routes from London to India and, to a lesser extent, British Malaya, Australia, and New Zealand. Churchill and the Admiralty had for two decades paid scant attention to the outlying archipelagos snatched from Germany after World War One—New Britain, northeastern New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, Buka and Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. The remainder of the Solomon Islands, a British protectorate since 1893, had for decades gone largely ignored by London.

But not by Tokyo. The Solomons stretched away into the South Pacific like a fleet of derelict ghost ships, forgotten and undefended. Other than machete-wielding natives and a few remaining British coconut planters, all other Britons had been evacuated to Australia. Other western Pacific archipelagos—the Marshall Islands and the Mariana Islands—had been German territories until they were handed to Japan (then an ally) following the Great War. Japan also ruled the Caroline Islands, which together with the Marshalls and Marianas, formed a buffer midway between Tokyo and New Guinea. These island chains offered jump-off points for further advances in the Pacific. The Japanese had long understood the importance of the Solomons. Their capture would isolate Australia, a scenario now grasped with fear in Canberra but not yet fully appreciated in London. One of these long-ignored Crown possessions, a mostly uncharted mountainous jumble of rivers, malarial swamps, and thick jungle, was virtually unknown to Londoners—Guadalcanal, located at the southern end of the Solomons. Churchill took note of these far-flung places, not because the entire southern Pacific might soon become a furnace in which the antipodal Dominions could perish, but because the sea routes from those regions
were vital to transporting reinforcements to the theater of war he most cared about: North Africa. “I wouldn’t have thought the Pacific was something which had much troubled Churchill,” recalled Mark Bonham Carter, the son of Churchill’s old friend Violet Bonham Carter: “He thought in rather continental terms.”
²⁶

That is why Churchill took umbrage at increasing Australian resistance to his demand for more Australian troops. If Londoners had not complained while being slaughtered, he asked his doctor, why should Australians, who had yet to see a single enemy bomb fall? Yet Australia, with just three army divisions stationed at home, feared now for its safety, its survival even. Churchill reassured Australia’s new prime minister, John Curtin, that
Prince of Wales
would keep Australia safe from Japanese depredations.

When he first proposed sending
Prince of Wales
to Singapore, the Admiralty, fearing
Tirpitz
might emerge in the Atlantic, “expressed their dissent.” Churchill thought likewise, but in reverse, recalled Sir Ian Jacob: “He was thinking in terms of the annoyance caused us by the
Bismarck,
and thought
Prince of Wales
would cause the Japanese a great deal of trouble.” Yet “the parallel was not a good one because the Japanese hadn’t a vital lifeline, as we had across the Atlantic, which could be threatened and which required constant protection.” Churchill was so sure of
Prince of Wales’
s deterrent threat, so enthused at the prospect of his great battleship mixing it up with the Japanese navy, and so positive of the outcome that he instructed the ship’s arrival at Cape Town to be “reported to the enemy”
via
radio broadcast. The Japanese duly noted the news.
Repulse
was by then on station at Singapore. With no destroyers available for escort,
Prince of Wales
made the journey to Singapore alone. Too late, having insisted the venture proceed, Churchill told the Admiralty that he regretted the lack of a destroyer escort. “This is a case where I am for ‘Safety First.’ ” The mission itself belied that claim. Churchill discussed the mission in several telegrams, including a message reassuring Curtin, and another to Stalin, which employed the same phrase he had used when he told Roosevelt of
Prince of Wales’
s departure: “It is grand to have something that can catch and kill any Japanese ship.”
²⁷

Admiral Tom S. V. Phillips, in command of
Prince of Wales,
agreed with Churchill’s assessment of his battleship’s prowess, with one caveat. The Japanese fleet, Phillips told the War Cabinet, consisted of a mix of newer and older ships, as did the British fleet, but Britain’s newest and best ships, such as
Prince of Wales,
operating near British Asian possessions “
under cover of shore based aircraft
,” would prove more than a match for the Japanese (italics added). No such land-based air cover was available anywhere near Singapore on December 8. Months earlier Churchill had dissuaded
his military chiefs from sending “very great diversions” of aircraft to the Far East. “The political situation in the Far East does not seem to require,” he told the chiefs, “and the strength of our Air Force by no means warrants, the maintenance of such large forces in the Far East at this time.” Churchill’s Far East strategy, recalled Ian Jacob, was based on the premise that “if the Japanese came into the war, it will bring in the Americans and we shall win the war and then, anything we lose we shall get back; that was his simple view of the matter, yet in many ways it was a sensible view.” Thus, as the political situation in the Far East wobbled and then collapsed, Churchill chose to keep his aircraft close to home. Had he kept rigidly to his strategy of not reinforcing the Far East with men, planes, or ships,
Prince of Wales
would not have sailed. But he had sent the ship, and now it sailed without air cover. Churchill had suggested to the Admiralty that an aircraft carrier accompany
Prince of Wales
to the Far East. Yet when it became clear that no carrier could be spared, Churchill and the Admiralty sent the battleship anyway, alone.
²⁸

Foretold by Britain of its coming, the Japanese were waiting for
Prince of Wales
somewhere in the South China Sea, waiting not only with ships, which the powerful British man-of-war might catch and kill, but with airplanes. Late on December 8,
Prince of Wales, Repulse,
and four old destroyers ventured together from Singapore and down the Strait of Johore in search of the Japanese transports that had landed troops far up the Malay Peninsula. Absent air cover, Phillips was sailing into a deluge without an umbrella. He knew this, and although the Admiralty had not
ordered
him to depart Singapore, implicit in the orders that sent him there was the understanding that he behave like an English admiral, that is, that he fight.