The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (391 page)

In late December, Hitler sent Rommel ten ships bearing gasoline and rations along with an entire air corps transferred from the Russian front. At the time, both Churchill and Hitler considered Rommel to be in “mortal peril.” Then, in the last days of the old year, a British task force of three cruisers and four destroyers searching for Rommel’s supply ships sailed into a minefield. Within minutes all three cruisers were damaged; one of the destroyers was crippled, while another blew up and sank with the loss
of all but one of the ship’s company. Thus, a lucky U-boat captain, six Italian swimmers, and an uncharted minefield succeeded in destroying virtually the whole of Britain’s eastern Mediterranean battle fleet. The Royal Navy no longer needed the largest anchorage in the eastern Mediterranean to shelter its ships. A cove would have sufficed. And Churchill possessed not nearly enough sea power in the eastern Mediterranean to interdict Rommel’s supplies.
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By mid-January the supplies Rommel needed had arrived in Tripolitania, as had Rommel, having made good his retreat. Contrary to Randolph’s optimistic assessment, not a single German vessel had been lost. On the British side of the equation, Malta was cut off and under constant air attack; its dwindling fleet of aircraft could neither protect the island nor stop Rommel’s reinforcements. He had retreated before Auchinleck, but more to the point, he had
escaped
and re-armed. The peril had shifted to the Auk, although the danger was belied by the quietude that had settled over the desert, where the armies dug in and faced each other just beyond field artillery range.

Nights were cool. Intermittent rain showers brought forth blooms to stunted shrubs. Small desert flowers scrabbled from beneath the cracked stones as sunshine as weak as chamomile tea threw indeterminate shadows across the sands. At nine each night both armies tuned their radios to the German news beamed from Belgrade, not for edification but to listen to the melancholy love song played at the end of every broadcast, a tune called
Lili Marlene.
Based on a little-known Great War poem called “The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch,” and later set to music and recorded by the Berlin cabaret singer Lale Anderson as “The Girl Under the Lantern,” with an understated
omp-pah
rhythm of a march, it told the tale of a young soldier who sought to meet his sweetheart under the lamppost beyond his barracks. Rommel loved the tune, Goebbels loathed it, and Frau Göring crooned it at parties to Nazi big shots. British Tommies, not understanding the German lyrics, made up their own words. The song, once heard, became hard to shake, a haunting presence in the mind. Churchill hated it, given its German genesis.
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On January 21, Rommel probed the British lines with a reconnaissance in force, just as he had almost a year earlier. Within hours, the first British troops that Rommel’s panzers encountered crumbled before the Germans, just as they had a year earlier. It was now the turn of the British Eighth Army to retreat, again, this time under the command of General Ritchie. A good man and former staff officer under Alan Brooke, Ritchie had never commanded a corps, let alone an army in the field. Auchinleck, meanwhile, had replaced his experienced 7th Armoured Division at Rommel’s front with the newly arrived and green 1st Armoured Division, which was now
falling back with heavy losses before the oncoming Germans. The Auk, as well, could no longer use the port of Benghazi in order to supply his troops; Rommel had leveled the place on his way out of town in December.

By January 29, as Nicolson learned from the news ticker, Rommel was back. Recalling Churchill’s warnings to the House, uttered two days earlier, Nicolson that night jotted in his diary, “Grave disasters indeed.” By February 5 the Germans had raced two hundred miles from Benghazi to near Gazala, where they halted. The British dug in behind a defensive line running about forty miles southeast from Gazala before hooking east and partway around Bir Hacheim. Rommel was now approximately forty miles from Tobruk, which Auchinleck told London he intended to abandon if Rommel attacked. There would be no siege this time. Churchill did not object to the plan, but in the days that followed—based in part on incorrect Ultra decrypts—he pushed Auchinleck to execute a counterstroke within weeks. When Churchill learned that Auchinleck’s army would not be ready for any such undertaking until June, he termed the situation “intolerable,” adding that it would be “judged so by Roosevelt, Stalin, and everybody else.”
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A
uchinleck could fall back in semi-orderly fashion before Rommel, but no such option existed for Arthur Percival, the military commander of Singapore. He was trapped. Percival’s enemy, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, had since early December proved his mettle on the Malay Peninsula. Now came Percival’s turn to prove his. Yamashita considered his Twenty-fifth Army—charged with capturing Singapore—to be so well prepared for jungle combat in Malaya that it could accomplish its mission with only three of its five divisions. He had fought Chinese guerrillas for three years and noted their tactics of stealth and fast movement, which he trained his troops to emulate. He had spent six months in Germany the previous year, where he became familiar with the genius of blitzkrieg tactics—tanks in the spearhead, close air support, and bold strokes. Hitler had been so impressed with Yamashita that he’d promised him he would stipulate in his will that Germans “bind themselves eternally to the Japanese spirit.”
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Yamashita had opened his campaign on December 8, when Japanese bombs from a dozen aircraft crashed down outside the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. That morning his troops made two landings four hundred miles north of Singapore, at Singora and Patini, on each side of the Thai-Malay border. The British had long anticipated such a stroke, but their
immediate problem was diplomatic. When a British force arrived at the Thai border, Thai border guards refused it entry. Not knowing of the unfolding events at Pearl Harbor, and not wanting to precipitate a political crisis (the Americans would look very much askance at such an incursion), the British turned around and headed south. Yamashita had also made a diversionary landing farther south near Kota Bharu and the nearby airfield with the object of drawing the RAF to the airfield’s defense and away from his transports and main forces to the north. Within hours he took the airfield. By afternoon the few squadrons of RAF fighters in the region had been halved in numbers, leaving only mostly inexperienced Indian troops standing between Yamashita and an easy march to Singapore. Light tanks from Yamashita’s 5th Division smashed through the Indians, some of whom had never before seen a tank. Implicit in that fact is that the British had no tanks deployed to defend northeast Malaya. The capture of the Kota Bharu airfield rendered the few remaining British aircraft in northern Malaya orphans. Those losses and the loss of the
Prince of Wales
left Singapore hanging like low fruit, and Yamashita was keen to pluck it.
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The British Plan B for Malaya had called for a scorched-earth policy similar to the ruin Churchill advised Stalin to inflict on Russian foodstuffs and, especially, Russian oil fields. Rubber and tin were Malaya’s most abundant natural resources. More than 40 percent of Britain’s rubber came from Malaya; more than half of the world’s tin came out of the mountainous spine of the peninsula. It was impossible to chop down the rubber trees, but all equipment having to do with mining and smelting tin should have been destroyed. It was not. The first elements of Yamashita’s 5th Division who rode into Kota Bharu not only found ample stocks of rice and gasoline but also discovered that, such was the haste of the British exit, the power plant had not even been turned off, let alone destroyed. Within a week the Japanese crossed the Kra Peninsula to smash the British airfield at Point Victoria, the southernmost point of Burma. With that stroke Yamashita cut off Singapore from airborne reinforcement by way of Europe and India.

Throughout December, Yamashita’s 5th and 18th Divisions—the former moving down the eastern shore while the latter scoured the western—found rubber plantations and tin refineries abandoned but intact. They found British lorries topped off with petrol and ready to bring tin and rubber to ports, where docks that should have been demolished were ready to receive Japanese cargo ships. When the Japanese flushed the British from Penang, on the west coast of the peninsula, they found a small fleet of coastal gunboats in perfect running order, which they used to mount raids on British coastal positions. They came upon stores of rice and $250,000 in cash left behind in the British treasury. And they found a radio station, with the microphones on and the generator running, from which on Christmas
Day they broadcast “Merry Christmas and an
Unhappy
New Year” to the residents of Singapore, who did not grasp their terrible position because British censors withheld all information regarding the whereabouts of the Japanese. On the day Penang fell, the British press office told reporters, “There is nothing to report.” In fact, all Europeans in Penang had been evacuated, leaving the natives to fend for themselves. The conquerors, wrote Cecil Brown, were “reverting to type… that is to say, they are looting food shops and… raping the native women.” Within a week the Japanese outflanked Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Malay federation and the railroad center of the country. The railway was intact. In retreat, the British performed exceptionally well—as quartermasters to the Japanese. By New Year’s, Yamashita had raced halfway to Singapore.
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There, Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival and almost 90,000 men—including 17,000 Australian, 33,000 British, and 40,000 Indian—prepared to destroy the city and naval base if need be, and to fight amid the rubble to the last man, per Churchill’s orders. Yet Churchill’s initial hope that Singapore might hold out for six months under Percival’s command faded overnight when, upon his return to London from Washington, he was “staggered” to learn from Wavell that Singapore’s largest, fifteen-inch naval guns faced out to sea. The landward side of the city, which gave out to a gorge, was without heavy defenses. To Ismay, Churchill wrote, “I must confess…. It never occurred to me for a moment… that the gorge of the fortress was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward.” Why, he asked, had he never been informed? Why, when he had for two years so stressed the defense of Singapore over the Kra Isthmus fallback strategy, had no defenses been erected? “I warn you,” he continued, “this will be one of the greatest scandals that could possibly be exposed.” In fact, Singapore was no “fortress” in the manner of Gibraltar; it was an island of gentle hills and ridges, twenty-seven miles long by thirteen miles wide. Churchill had formed images of the terrain and of the “fortress,” and they were incorrect. The only way to keep the Japanese off the island would have been to bring them to decisive battle on the peninsula; instead, the British fell back, toward the presumed safety of the fortress that wasn’t. As for the big guns facing the wrong way, Wavell had sent Churchill incorrect intelligence; several of Singapore’s fifteen-inch Vickers guns indeed covered the straits, but they had been supplied with armor-piercing ammunition intended for use against ships. Against men they were useless.
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The fault for that lay with Arthur Percival. Percival was a thinker, a planner, and he had displayed great intellect while serving under Dill as a staff officer in the 1930s. Yet, like Admiral Tom Phillips, he lacked field experience. Staff officers fight their battles in map rooms. In ordering Percival to Singapore, Dill broke ranks with those in the British military—and
there were many—who traditionally gave more credence to a general’s character than his intellect, often with disastrous results. British generals, wrote T. E. Lawrence, “often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.” But here was an instance where character and courage would have trumped a superior, methodical mind. Following the Great War, Percival served as the intelligence officer for the Essex Regiment in Ireland, where his penchant for torturing suspected Irish rebels resulted in the partisans putting a price on his head. The Irish Republican Army had put prices on a great many heads, including Churchill’s, but Percival’s case was different; it was personal. The man was despised not only because he had tortured Irish rebels but also because he had enjoyed it. The defense of Singapore would require planning, which Percival had done, and character, of which Percival had none.

But for the British colonial buildings, Englishmen’s clubs and polo fields, and Raffles Hotel, Singapore was no paradigm of orderliness or cleanliness. The British called it the city of “Chinks, drinks, and stinks.” Most of its 750,000 Malay and Chinese citizens lived in nineteenth-century squalor. Monkeys roasted in open-air markets, where the blood of pig carcasses hanging from meat hooks flowed slowly into shallow gutters. With a blackout on since mid-December, the sounds of the city after sunset consisted in large part of the creaking of oxcarts hauling night soil out of town and the occasional blind firing of anti-aircraft batteries. Yet Singapore’s citizens, especially the Chinese among them, got along secure in the knowledge that the British would at the very least protect them. In fact, by mid-January most British officials had left, including Duff Cooper, who Churchill had appointed resident minister after the early December attacks. With the city’s fate in the hands of the army, Cooper and his wife, Diana, left for London on January 13. Lady Diana had a final gin sling before leaving for the airport, which helped fortify her when Japanese bombers appeared overhead just as they arrived. Chinese friends hustled the Coopers into the air-raid shelter. It was made entirely of glass. “It seemed a suitable end,” Cooper later wrote, “to our mission to Singapore.”
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