The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (382 page)

Max Beaverbrook and his lieutenant, George Malcolm Thomson,
^*
considered the mission of
Prince of Wales
to be “pure rubbish.” The Beaver had begun to think a great many of Churchill’s schemes—Greece, Crete, and now the sojourn of the battleships—were rubbish, and had begun to fancy himself a suitable replacement as prime minister should Churchill not survive a vote of confidence or an errant German bomb. Beaverbrook differed with Churchill on North Africa, where Max would abandon the shifty sands in order to establish a second front on the Continent. He differed with just about every Allied military man on the prospects for Russia when he claimed soon after Barbarossa began that with prodigious British and American help, Stalin could last far longer than several weeks, maybe
even win. By November, Beaverbrook had helped deliver the first installments of that aid to Moscow. But Max harbored doubts about Churchill. He “had not so much respect for Winston’s intelligence” and strategic acumen, recalled Thomson, but respected Churchill “as the godsend leader that we had to have.” Churchill’s dispatch of
Prince of Wales
to the Pacific only reinforced Beaverbrook’s uncertainty. Sir Ian Jacob agreed: “Churchill was much too ardent and active a man. He thought something should be going on all the time” and “was so desperately keen for us to have the biggest part in whatever was going on.” He was “not at all a theoretical strategist” who “considered the best thing to do and then made quite certain nothing detracted from it, and that the proper forces were concentrated in the proper place.”
²⁹

Admiral Tom Phillips
was
a theoretical strategist, and that was the problem. He was a desk admiral, vice chief of the Admiralty staff, a thinker who was considered by many to be the brains of the Admiralty. He shared four traits with Churchill: he was prone to anger; he was given to meddling in operational plans; he thought Britain’s seagoing admirals lacked aggressiveness; and he worshipped battleships. The Far East venture was to be his first fleet command, and although the previous year he had objected when Churchill divided Wavell’s Middle Eastern forces between Greece and Egypt, he embraced the Singapore adventure with alacrity. Knowing of the absence of air cover in Malaya, Phillips might have better served Churchill (and improved his own chances for survival) by pointing out the potential folly in the Singapore gambit. But here was Phillips’s chance for glory. Physically, the admiral was a wee man—he had to stand on a box to see from his bridge—who possessed an oversize ego; Admiral James Somerville called him “the Pocket Napoleon.” Phillips was well aware of the damage inflicted on capital ships at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, yet those ships had been riding at anchor;
Prince of Wales,
under his command, could zig and zag at speeds of almost thirty-five miles per hour, all the while shredding the sky and everything in it with its vast array of armaments. Yet, any gardener who has ever fled a swarm of wasps knows that size and maneuverability do not always carry the day.
³⁰

The Japanese, like Churchill and Phillips, were not burdened with any doubts whatsoever of their military talents. They had demonstrated at Pearl Harbor the means to deal with the battleships of the world’s most powerful navies. When it came to airborne torpedo and bomb attacks against great warships, the Japanese understood what the blasé British and Americans still, incredibly, did not: the Taranto raid and the sinking by aircraft of
Southampton
(a cruiser) had marked late afternoon in the era of battleships. December 7 marked the end of that era.
³¹

On the ninth, Churchill outlined to the cabinet his plan for the
Prince of
Wales
and
Repulse,
already at sea, to “vanish into the ocean wastes and exercise a vague menace” akin to the behavior of “rogue elephants.” By then, the
Prince of Wales,
flying Phillips’s flag, and captained by John Leach (whom Churchill had wanted to court-martial the previous May), was steaming up the Malay coast escorted by the four old destroyers and the HMS
Repulse. Repulse’
s captain, William Tennant, offered to Cecil Brown, an American reporter who was on board: “We are off to look for trouble. I expect we’ll find it.”
³²

Near Saigon, more than four hundred miles away, Japanese ground crews were arming two dozen long-range Mitsubishi “Nell” bombers and several dozen “Betty” torpedo-bombers. Churchill and the Admiralty knew that the Japanese were reinforcing the Indochina airfields, but, Churchill later wrote, “sound reasons”—the distance, four hundred miles—implied that
Prince of Wales
“would be outside the effective range of enemy, shore-based torpedo bombers.” Here was an astounding case of errant reasoning, given that two days earlier, Japanese airmen had flown almost three hundred miles to Pearl Harbor from aircraft carriers. What was another hundred miles to the best fliers in the world? Churchill—who had once denigrated the Japanese as “the Wops of the Pacific”—later wrote that “the efficiency of the Japanese in air warfare was at this time greatly underestimated both by ourselves and by the Americans.”
³³

Tars aboard the two British battlewagons certainly underestimated the Japanese. When late on the ninth word came down to Cecil Brown that a Japanese battleship, three cruisers, and at least four destroyers were thought to be somewhere close ahead, Brown joked that he’d like to get a taxi back to Singapore. “Oh, but they are Japanese,” an officer replied, “there’s nothing to worry about.” Another officer chimed in: “Those Japs can’t fly,” he said, “they can’t see at night, and they’re not well trained.” Churchill happened to feel the same way: he had told luncheon guests months earlier that as far as Japanese airplanes were concerned, “We are of the opinion that they are not very good.” On board the
Repulse,
yet another officer claimed that the Japanese “have rather good ships but they can’t shoot straight.” The Japanese had in fact been shooting pretty smartly all over the Pacific, while the men on board
Repulse
had yet to fire a single shot in anger during the first twenty-seven months of war.
³⁴

The next morning, the tenth, at 11:07 in Malaya—3:07
A.M.
in London—Brown jotted in his notebook: “Enemy aircraft approaching… action stations.” At 11:14 he spied nine Japanese planes at an altitude of around 12,000 feet. “And here they come,” he wrote. A wave of torpedo bombers came in low. The
Repulse
dodged nineteen torpedoes “thanks to Providence,” the captain signaled to Admiral Phillips. The very next torpedo hit
Repulse
near midships, throwing Brown to the deck. Immediately
the ship heeled sharply to one side. Within a minute, from the loudspeakers came the captain’s final order: “Prepare to abandon ship.” A pause: “God be with you.”
³⁵

A half mile ahead, the
Prince of Wales,
the victim of two torpedo hits, rode low in the water, its steering smashed. Fires burned along its length. On the
Repulse,
Brown slumped to the deck and watched as a dozen Royal Marines dove overboard; all were swept into the still-churning propellers. A sailor leapt from the radio tower and straight down the smokestack. Three dozen tars climbed from belowdecks up the inside of the decoy funnel only to find themselves fatally trapped by a steel grate at the top, locked from the outside. Brown watched, stunned, as hundreds of men scrambled over the sides and into the sea, yet he could not bring himself to join them. Finally, he took a last look at his watch—smashed at 12:35—and jumped. He landed in a mess of debris and heavy oil discharged from the ship, in which he and Captain Tennant and hundreds of sailors struggled to get themselves away from
Repulse
before it went down. Bloodied and soaked by the thick oil, they watched in silence minutes later as the ship, its bow stabbing “straight into the air like a church steeple,” heeled over and plunged under the swells with more than half the crew of 1,300 still on board. But the
Repulse
wanted a larger ship’s company on its final journey, and Brown, who felt his legs were being pulled from his hips, watched in horror as several nearby sailors were sucked back aboard as the ship went under.
Prince of Wales
followed an hour or so later, with Admiral Phillips and Captain Leach still on the bridge. They were last seen bidding God bless to the crew, of whom more than five hundred joined them at the bottom of the South China Sea. British destroyers arrived later in the day to pluck Brown and the other survivors from the water.
³⁶

Later, Averell Harriman said of Churchill, “He sent those two battleships to Singapore in order to help. He was very anxious to do his share in the Pacific. He knew it would be mostly the United States, but he wanted Great Britain to do its share.” Churchill had tried, and failed.
³⁷

B
efore sunrise on December 10, Churchill sent a message to Anthony Eden informing him that the government expected a declaration of war by Hitler within two days. He also told Eden that news had arrived overnight from North Africa by way of Auchinleck that Rommel was “in full retreat” westward. And in Russia, “magnificent Russian successes” had put the Germans on the “defensive and retreat.” Still ebullient over the U.S. entry into the Pacific war and its likely entry into the European war, he signed
off with, “We are having a jolly time here.” The jollifications ended when Churchill, in bed opening his boxes of intelligence briefs, picked up the ringing telephone at his bedside. “It was the First Sea Lord,” he recalled. “His voice sounded odd. He gave a sort of cough and gulp, and at first I did not hear quite clearly. ‘Prime Minister, I have to report to you that the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
have been sunk by the Japanese—we think by aircraft. Tom Phillips is drowned.’ ” In all the war, Churchill wrote, “I had never received a more direct shock.” As he lay in bed, speechless, he realized that in all of the Indian and Pacific oceans, there were no British or American capital ships, other than the survivors of Pearl Harbor, which he had been told were “hastening back to California.” He had no need to consult a map to grasp his position in the Pacific: “Over this vast expanse of water, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
³⁸

Within that expanse the Japanese were rampaging faster and more furiously than any warrior nation in history. Japanese fliers had needed only a few hours on the seventh and eighth to rattle the foundations of three centuries of British, Dutch, and American imperialism. Within days the foundations cracked. Churchill, after the loss of the
Prince of Wales
, told Britons that with the American fleet based at Singapore, the city and naval base could hold out for six months, until offensive Allied operations could be undertaken. But there was no American fleet. Other than a few destroyers and the cruiser
Houston,
no American naval force existed in the western Pacific. Churchill did not grasp that Singapore’s fate—in large part due to London’s having underestimated the enemy—would likely be determined within weeks. Hong Kong’s tenure as a British possession could likely be measured in days. “The Japanese rising sun,” wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, was “sending ever more trenchant beams over that empire on which a benign British sun was supposed never to set.
³⁹

Inspector Thompson kept his counsel as Churchill “moped about, wept, and sat staring off to nowhere for two days after
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
went down.” Thompson had “never seen him take a war shock so hard.” Churchill had suffered the sort of devastating loss experienced by Caesar Augustus who, after the slaughter of his finest legions in the Teutoburg Forest, allowed his beard and hair to grow out for months and took to wandering about his palace calling out, “Quinctilius Varas, give me back my legions.” Churchill, like the Roman, had sent the pride of his Empire to do battle with an enemy he little understood and vastly underrated, and had paid the price. Thompson recalled Churchill sitting for long moments while mumbling repeatedly to himself, “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand it.”
⁴⁰

For more than a year he had been shuffling his army and naval forces
about, much as he had once so long ago deployed with enthusiastic abandon his army of 1,500 toy soldiers across the Arabian rugs of his father’s London town house. He recalled in his autobiography,
My Early Life,
that his decision to embark on a military career was “entirely due” to sending “infantry divisions with cavalry brigades” into battle as a child. Those mock campaigns allowed him to study “the noble profession of arms” (although the young Winston stacked the deck against his “enemy,” brother Jack, whose army, at Winston’s insistence, consisted only of “coloured” troops, and lacked artillery). The toy soldiers, Churchill later reminisced, “turned the current of my entire life.” Those lead and tin legions (and every man jack of them a British soldier, no colonials or foreigners in Churchill’s ranks) were hand-cast and painted in Germany by Heyde and in Paris by C. B. G. Mignot. They would today be valuable to collectors for their craftsmanship and priceless for their association with the young Winston Churchill, but they are long lost. Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames, attributes the paucity of early Churchill memorabilia to his parents seeing no reason to preserve for posterity anything of Winston’s. “In those days his [Churchill’s] hopes were so unpromising… they wouldn’t have had any idea he was a child prodigy.” A military career, at the time, was the only choice available to an aristocratic lad of meager talent. Had Lord Randolph lived to witness the Greek and Crete fiascoes, the siege of Tobruk, the loss of
Prince of Wales,
the looming threats to Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the very essence of the Empire, India, he would have judged the decision to discard his son’s toy lancers and fusiliers self-evidently correct. The adult Winston had juggled his armies and fleets like an inept prestidigitator; he slipped his peas under shells, shuffled them about, and Hitler and Tojo made them all vanish.
⁴¹