‘And so we came back across the ocean waves, uplifted in spirit, fortified in resolve.’
(Winston Churchill, 1942, a year after his Placentia Bay meeting with Franklin Roosevelt)
‘It is upon the Navy, under the good providence of God, that the Wealth, Prosperity and Peace of these Islands do mainly depend,’ or so the Articles of War have said since the reign of King Charles II. And the Royal Navy was for several centuries the very essence of British power and supremacy. So two episodes, one before the period covered by this book, and one afterwards, are useful indicators of the extent of that power, and of the role of the United States in bringing it to an end.
One of the great paradoxes of modern history is that Britain’s relations with Imperial Germany were badly damaged before 1914 by what was thought to be a German threat to British naval supremacy. Yet the war against Germany which followed ended with Britain ceding that naval supremacy to the United States, its ally. In truth, the USA had all along been its real rival for mastery of the seas. While the once-feared German High Seas Fleet was first interned and then scuttled in Scapa Flow, President Woodrow Wilson was demanding ‘the freedom of the seas’, by which he meant American freedom from British naval interference.
As Adam Tooze recounts in his extraordinary book The Deluge (2014), Wilson believed that
if Britain would not come to terms [on naval limitation], America would ‘build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it … and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and more bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map.’1
Wilson’s administration felt strongly that any remaining ties of sentiment between the two countries should be cast aside. The president’s general coolness towards Britain was demonstrated in these words he spoke in 1919 on a visit to London, words which have been entirely forgotten since the invention of the ‘special relationship’ after 1940:
You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language … No, there are only two things which can be established to maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and interests.2
By this he meant a British acceptance that its old imperial dominance of the globe was at an end, and that it must now acknowledge the USA as an equal, at least.
The resulting discussions in Paris went badly. The USA was not sympathetic to the ‘exceptional naval needs of a world-wide empire’. And so, ‘by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other.’3
Wilson, Tooze notes, had been arguing for a huge United States Navy since 1916, to ‘force the British to accept the terms of the new order’.4 The idea was not entirely new. His forerunner, Theodore Roosevelt, had dispatched his ‘Great White Fleet’ around the world between 1907 and 1909. The Fleet Steps in Sydney Harbour are rather surprisingly named after the 1908 visit by this astonishing parade of power and grandeur, which trespassed into many seas where Britain had until then been supreme. One of its purposes had been to deter Japan, whose new (largely British-built and British-trained) navy had turned it into a Pacific power challenging the USA’s ambitions in China. Britain had coped with this development by making a naval alliance with Japan, which allowed the Royal Navy to neglect the Pacific during World War I, a huge saving in men, ships and money. The United States disliked this alliance, because it strengthened Japan and got in the way of its Chinese policy. And so America sought to end it. In spring 1921, a few months before the Washington Naval Conference that would end British naval supremacy (and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance), the British ambassador to Washington, Auckland Geddes, had an interview with the new Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes.5 Geddes raised objections to American demands for the cancellation of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Secretary Hughes all but detonated himself. He raged and shouted at Geddes, saying that America had saved Britain from defeat, and so had better be grateful from now on.
In The Deluge, Tooze reports that in a voice rising to a scream, Hughes railed:
You would not be here to speak for Britain – you would not be speaking anywhere, England would not be able to speak at all! It is the Kaiser who would be heard (he shouted) if America, seeking nothing for herself, but to save England had not plunged into the war and (his voice here rising to a scream) won it! And you speak of obligations to Japan!6
Tooze notes, for the avoidance of doubt, that Hughes was a ‘sophisticated progressive Republican’.7
Not long afterwards, the USA hosted and forced the pace at the Washington Naval Conference, which, as Tooze points out, led to the quiet but definite snuffing out of centuries of British naval supremacy.8 It also brought about the end of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, so leaving Britain fatally exposed in the Pacific. The mismatch between American and British interests in this region would in the end be one of the factors which led to war in the Far East in 1941. It is fair to say that the USA was not especially interested in protecting London’s imperial interests in that part of the world, in 1920 or in 1941. Meanwhile Japan greatly resented what it saw as a shabby betrayal of an old friendship by Britain. Tokyo moved swiftly from being an ally of London to being a potential (and fearsome) enemy, as we would shortly find out.
The British Admiralty admitted after this humiliation,
It must be clearly understood that Great Britain will no longer be supreme at sea … we shall be supreme in European waters but as regards the seas as a whole the supremacy will be shared with the United States.9
This was not as bad as what Woodrow Wilson had threatened, and had probably been inevitable since Britain had become a pensioner and debtor of the USA in 1916, thanks to war spending. The only other choice would have been to refuse any limits on sea power and so provoke the USA into a warship-building frenzy unseen in history. Had this happened, it would have made the Anglo-German naval race look like a minor event. The USA would certainly have been the winner.
Winston Churchill himself is the human symbol of the post-1940 supposed friendship between Britain and the USA. But he never truly had the illusions about a ‘special relationship’ with the USA which he later had to promote because of national necessity. He recognised the USA as a naval and world rival, and foresaw that Washington would seek to interfere in British imperial policy if it had the chance and felt strong enough, and had warned Cabinet colleagues in 1927 (during a dispute over how many cruisers the US and Royal Navies would be permitted to have),
We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India, or Egypt, or Canada, or on any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled.10
Churchill’s assumed ‘shoulder to shoulder’ view of the USA was not wholehearted during the 1940 crisis. His close aide Jock Colville recorded him growling, on 19 May, ‘Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees!’11
Let us now slip forward a few decades, to what was perhaps the last true political confrontation between the USA and Britain, in which Britain still thought itself capable of independent action. This was the Anglo-French attack on Egypt at Suez in 1956. At the time, the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations was the great fighting admiral Arleigh Burke, Swedish by ancestry and generally a friend to Britain. But the interests of the USA and Britain greatly diverged. The USA did not sympathise with the attack on Egypt, or with the plan to seize back the Suez Canal. There exists, in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, a recording of Admiral Burke reminiscing in retirement about a conversation he had with the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, about how US power might halt the British action. I have listened to it. Dulles has just wondered out loud if there is any way to stop the British and French navies from launching their attack.
Admiral Burke describes his reply:
And I said, ‘Mr Secretary, there is only one way to stop them. We can stop them, but we will blast hell out of them.’ He [Dulles] said, ‘Well, can’t you stop them some other way?’ I said, ‘No, if we’re going to threaten, if we’re going to turn on them, then you’ve got to be ready to shoot. I can’t give these people orders to do something. They can’t do it in the first place – no matter who gives them orders – to demand and then get laughed at. The only way you can stop them is to shoot. And we can do that. We can defeat them – the British and the French and the Egyptians and the Israelis – the whole goddam works of them we can knock off, if you want. But that’s the only way to do it.’
Burke then sent orders to the admiral in charge of the US Sixth Fleet, Cat Brown:
I gave him orders to go to sea, to be prepared for anything, to have his bombs up, to be checked out, so that we would be ready to fight either another naval force or against land targets, and to make sure of all his targeting data – a little cautionary dispatch – but it ended up to be prepared for any war eventuality.
Cat Brown sent back, ‘Who’s the enemy?’
And I sent back, ‘Don’t take any guff from anybody.’
History records (though few know) that America’s Sixth Fleet duly stalked British ships, fouling their sonar and radar and shining their searchlights at French and British vessels by night.
Admiral Sir Robin Durnford-Slater, second-in-command of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, complained to his superiors:
We have already twice intercepted US aircraft and there is constant danger of an incident. Have been continually menaced during past eight hours by US aircraft approaching low down as close as 4,000 yards and on two occasions flying over ships.12
General Sir Charles Keightley, commander of Middle East land forces, wrote afterwards: ‘It was the action of the US which really defeated us in attaining our object.’ He complained that the movements of the US Sixth Fleet ‘endangered the whole of our relations with that country’.13
These two episodes, greatly distant in time, are a faint grey phantom of a war between the two great maritime powers of the twentieth century, which never actually took place but might have done had other conflicts not intervened. Instead, it was fought with treaties, conferences, speeches, loans and secret pressure.
But the future and the past are worth bearing in mind as we consider the voyage of the handsome heavy cruiser USS Augusta, making her secret way to Newfoundland, with President Roosevelt aboard, in August of the bloody year 1941. The British premier, who Roosevelt was travelling to meet, was not in a strong position. The meeting to which he was heading, as Roosevelt knew, had been postponed thanks to the latest British disasters in Greece and Crete, both caused by Churchill’s insistence on stretching limited forces to embark on ill-planned adventures.
The Augusta was an interesting ship. She was equipped with the only bathtub in the US Navy (Roosevelt could not easily take a shower) and was also permitted to serve alcohol to the chief executive and his guests, ignoring the general rule that all US Navy ships are dry. She was favoured by Roosevelt as a sort of presidential yacht and was sister ship to the USS Louisville, which had notoriously been sent to collect British gold from South Africa in the cruel months when Britain was being stripped of all its assets as the price for Lend-Lease. Britain was still being taught lessons by the USA about its new place in the world, and its proper attitude towards America. This meeting was one such lesson for those who could read the signs. On arrival at Placentia Bay, President Roosevelt pointedly inspected the USA’s latest acquisition of land from its former colonial master, and prepared for the arrival of Winston Churchill aboard the new but war-battered (and doomed) battleship, HMS Prince of Wales.
Roosevelt reached the scene on Thursday, 7 August, after a reasonably secret journey up from Washington DC, while the American press were fooled into thinking the president was on a fishing expedition. The deception, intended to prevent the Germans intercepting Churchill on his way west, would not last long.
Two days later Winston Churchill arrived after a far longer and far more secret voyage. The two men met for many hours, mostly aboard the Augusta, until, on the following Tuesday, as bands played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, HMS Prince of Wales steamed homewards.
There is some poignant film footage of Divine Service on the British battleship’s quarterdeck on the morning of Sunday 10 August 1941, and a few snatches of sound recording as well. These scraps of the dead past are filled with melancholy for many reasons. But before we turn to them, let us examine why Winston Churchill was so very late for his Atlantic meeting at Placentia Bay, and why its later reputation as the foundation of a great alliance is not really justified.
He was late because everything he touched during 1941 had gone wrong, or was about to go wrong. He had, by mistakes and misunderstandings, also created the conditions for Britain’s single worst military defeat, in Singapore in early 1942. In this curious moment, between Hitler’s invasion of Russia and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war was infinitely more perilous for Britain than at any time since the summer of 1940. A Soviet defeat was perfectly possible, and that would mean that Britain would be forced to make a shameful peace on bad terms. The London Blitz, which had continued for a painful year, was almost over, as Germany’s forces were diverted to the East. But this might only be a lull before a much worse tempest of fire and destruction. What might Hitler do if Stalin was beaten? How could Churchill persuade the USA into the war? What could Britain do to affect the outcome if this did not happen? Nothing.
As things stood, Britain was a marginal combatant in the European conflict, preoccupied with North Africa and the Middle East, and rightly worried (though doing little) about the Far East. A. J. P. Taylor, in The Second World War and Its Aftermath (1998), explains harshly why Britain, defeated at Dunkirk but relatively safe in its islands, had become entangled in a Mediterranean war. It is one of the many curious aspects of that war that the high drama of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain were followed by a complete shift of scene, to Libya, Greece and Crete, and later to the Far East. Suddenly we seemed to have stopped fighting the enemy on land anywhere near home.
As a child, I studied many patriotic accounts of the war, my favourite being a cartoon strip produced by the boys’ weekly The Eagle, called The Happy Warrior, published in book form in 1958.14 This cast Winston Churchill as a sort of superhero who was somehow always right amid an unending succession of disasters which mysteriously ended in a final triumph – after which he was even more mysteriously dismissed from office. It would be many years before I understood how wrong this treasured picture was, and I still find it painful to acknowledge. So do millions of others.
I also watched the many films about the war that punctuated my childhood. And my schoolboy mind simply passed over the strange shrivelling of the ‘Finest Hour’ into a series of smallish foreign entanglements under fierce African or Asian skies or amid the Isles of Greece. I had little idea of the profound weakness exposed by the sinking of HMS Hood, no idea at all of the accumulated folly which led to our surrender in Singapore in 1942 and less than none about how very close the Battle of the Atlantic was – though I knew of that conflict through that fine film, The Cruel Sea. I simply accepted that great men knew what they were doing. It never crossed my mind to wonder why our most famous battle against the German Army, at El Alamein, took place in an African desert. I was persuaded that this must have been inevitable and necessary.
A. J. P. Taylor was not so sure. His description of what followed has a strong tinge of mockery:
The British had always stationed a fleet in the Mediterranean from the time of Nelson on. Now they maintained an army also in Egypt for the protection of the Suez Canal. With no prospect of intervention on the Continent, there seemed no other place for their forces to go to. When France fell out of the war there were short-lived doubts whether the British could hold the Mediterranean and Egypt by themselves. On 16 June 1940 Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, suggested to Sir Andrew Cunningham, the naval commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, that he should block the Suez Canal and withdraw the bulk of his fleet to Gibraltar and the rest to Aden. Cunningham disliked this as a further blow to British prestige. Pound did not insist, and the question of remaining in the eastern Mediterranean was never formally discussed by either the chiefs-of-staff or the war cabinet.15
This is an astonishing detail, which undermines almost every justification for the Mediterranean war. But few are even aware of it. Almost all accounts of these years assume that the Suez Canal was essential to our survival, and that the war in North Africa which chased backwards and forwards for many months was a decisive theatre. The same assumption lies beneath the view that our possession of Gibraltar was decisive, and the belief that Malta GC, my island birthplace collectively decorated for its bravery, was a great fortress of the empire whose undoubtedly heroic defence was decisive. In fact, this was not the case. The Suez Canal could have been – and nearly was – blocked and abandoned for most of the rest of the war. It would have made little difference to the outcome of events had it been blocked. Our ships were almost all going round by the Cape of Good Hope anyway. The decisive theatre was, and always would be, the Eastern Front, at which we were not present, and where, until June 1941, there was no fighting. The decisive sea battle was in the Atlantic, where German U-boats came close to destroying the transatlantic supply line.
But Churchill, even so, decided to pour essential and scarce resources into North Africa. Taylor explains, ‘The three British commanders in Egypt reported that they could hold it only if they were reinforced.’16
But the real danger was elsewhere. This was in Singapore, which, unlike Egypt, was genuinely threatened by an immediate enemy. It was also genuinely vital to our future as an imperial power in Asia. Our defeat there, as we now know and could have foreseen, caused a permanent collapse in British power and reputation in the East from which we could not afterwards recover. Even though, with great bravery and bloodshed, Britain later retook its lost Burmese and other Eastern territories, the action was futile. Within a few years they were independent. And so was India independent, and soon after that the rest of the empire. After the war, we had neither the standing, nor the money, nor the freedom of action, to retain these possessions.
The Japanese made much, in their propaganda, of disarmed and humbled British officers and soldiers bowing to them and submitting to them. There is a once-famous Japanese official painting of the Singapore surrender talks, by Saburo Miyamoto, painted in 1942. It shows British officers, headed by General Arthur Percival, scrawny, pale and beaten, sitting opposite an impatient and imperious General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who appears to be on the verge of pounding the table. It was well noted in every Asian country that the all-powerful white man could be crushed and enslaved by superior power, and had been.
Percival was not to blame. He had in fact done what he could to avert the catastrophe, which is more than can be said for the British government of the prewar era, or for Winston Churchill. Most military experts agree that, with the forces at his disposal, no general could have saved Singapore from capture. Percival’s unfortunate appearance, stooped, toothy and suburban, has caused many people to dismiss this personally brave, modest, courteous and competent officer as a useless failure. This is deeply unfair. Percival was one of the few people who had tried to prevent this defeat from happening when there was still time to do so. But London had been uninterested in his warnings, not least because it would have been expensive to heed them. Singapore itself was astonishingly complacent, partly because of the racial prejudice against the Japanese which caused so many to underestimate their fighting abilities. Singapore was poorly governed, with commerce always placed above defence by its colonial officials. The plan to turn it into a mighty base for capital ships – to make up for the ending of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance – was pursued only half-heartedly through the 1920s and 1930s. After the cuts in the Navy of the early 1920s, partly imposed by the Washington conference, the ships themselves did not exist and the base was seldom used. But it was widely believed in and written about, like a British version of France’s Maginot Line – except that the Maginot Line was at least a real obstacle.
Singapore, an island about the size of the Isle of Wight, could not have survived for long on its own once the Malayan peninsula was in Japanese hands. If Malaya could not be held, then Singapore would fall. So, as Percival understood, it was necessary to ensure that Malaya was well defended. But Malaya was feebly defended by too few troops, many of them poorly trained, with inadequate armour and air power, against an attack which had been foreseen in detail by the then colonel Arthur Percival some years before. During a posting there in 1937, he had warned his superiors of the danger of a fast Japanese advance through Malaya. In a carefully prepared paper, he had even predicted some of the precise landing sites which the Japanese would use in 1941. Unlike so many in the British military, he respected Japan as a serious enemy with good intelligence. But poor Percival would end up living through the debacle he had himself tried to prevent, and then weighed down with the responsibility for it. The politician directly responsible, Winston Churchill, had meanwhile disappeared into a cloud of glory where he was beyond criticism. This was wholly unjust, and Churchill was well aware of how bad the defeat would look, once he recognised it was inevitable. Plainly he hoped it would not reflect on him. At one point, Churchill had ludicrously suggested a blood-soaked fight to the death – by others, not himself – to save British honour in Singapore.
Churchill’s forerunners, who had wasted the years before 1939, were already so loaded with blame for their European policy, their ‘appeasement’ and their supposed neglect of rearmament, that their neglect of Asia was forgotten. It was Percival alone who stood in the midst of the jaundiced glare of failure, his bent defeated figure, bowed by undeserved shame, pictured on the front pages of a thousand newspapers. Percival had been hastily given command of weak ill-prepared forces at a time of national emergency when it was hard to argue for more. He was charged with the defence of hopelessly ill-sited air bases and the inadequately prepared fortress of Singapore when the Japanese attack he had prophesied duly took place in 1941. There is also no doubt that Japan had accurate intelligence about the weakness of Singapore and the details of its defences. This was bad enough. But all opportunities to put the matter right were neglected by the Churchill government.
No important reinforcements were sent in time to be of any use. Percival was predictably overwhelmed. It is another interesting aspect of the common British memory of war that the great victory of El Alamein is remembered and celebrated, though it had little material impact on the war’s outcome. Singapore is passed by with the briefest of mentions, and poor Percival is left to take the blame he of all people did not deserve. Yet this defeat, the worst suffered by Britain in modern times, did more than any other event to bring about our decline into the second rank of nations. No doubt this decline would have happened anyway, sooner or later. But the terrible speed of it, and especially the shameful and panic-tinged disaster of Indian partition, was the direct result of defeat at Singapore.
Was it avoidable at this late stage? Quite possibly. In the weeks before he headed to Newfoundland, Winston Churchill was taking decisions which would help to ensure defeat at Singapore. In contrast with his failure to help Singapore, Winston Churchill willingly committed scarce land and sea forces to the comparatively unimportant defence of Britain’s position in Egypt. Later developments, including devastating British naval and military defeats of the Italians, would show that Britain’s fears of a threat to Cairo from Mussolini had been greatly overstated. Alas, these Italian defeats would draw Hitler’s attention to this theatre at last, and so bring Germany into the area.
The importance given to Egypt by Churchill remains astonishing. For example, Taylor notes: ‘On 16th August, at the height of the Battle of Britain, a third of the existing tank strength was ordered to Egypt.’17
This is an incredible fact, suggesting (as I discuss elsewhere) that Churchill never took seriously the threat of a German invasion of Britain, though he was very willing to exploit the alleged danger for morale-building purposes.
Taylor argues that this decision to reinforce Egypt entangled Britain inextricably in the Mediterranean for years to come: ‘From this moment Great Britain was committed to war in the Mediterranean on an ever-increasing scale.’18
He suggests that this was an implicit breach of a promise originally given to Australia and New Zealand that, in the event of a Japanese attack, Britain would cut its losses in the Mediterranean and ‘sacrifice every interest, except only the defence and feeding of this island’.19 All the signs were that a Japanese attack was inevitable, not least because the two other Western empires in the area, the French and the Dutch, had been decapitated by Hitler. French Indo-China fell under Vichy control, and was in no state to fight the Japanese even if its rulers had wished to. They did not. It was more or less completely open to Japanese troops, planes and ships, who by this means moved ever closer to British-ruled Malaya. Japan’s Imperial Navy, unresisted by the Vichy French authorities, made great use of Cam Ranh Bay, later to become famous in the Vietnam War. As Taylor expresses it, Britain gambled that Japan would stay out of the war.20 In fact, it was even worse than that. Churchill needlessly gave more priority to the Russian front than he gave to Singapore.
One important result of this avoidable disaster was the postwar shift of Australia and New Zealand away from British influence and towards the USA. In the end, the supposed ‘mother country’, which Australians and New Zealanders in those days still called ‘home’, had let them down. And, as in the Great War, it had made profligate use of their young men in its wars.
As General Percival battled for more men, tanks and planes in the summer of 1941, in the hope of reinforcing Malaya against a foreseeable Japanese assault, he was simply told there were none available. This was not true. Churchill was instead convoying tanks and aircraft to Stalin.21
On 21 August 1941 Britain sent 48 Hurricane fighters to the USSR aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Argus, with many more in merchant ships. Tanks followed in October. In total, as the danger to Singapore grew more and more obvious, Britain supplied 676 fighters and 446 tanks to Stalin by the end of 1941.22 This equipment would have completely changed the balance of forces in Malaya. The supplies were largely political, designed to please Stalin rather than alter the actual military balance on the Russian front. At this time Russia had 39 armoured divisions to Germany’s 36, and reasonable supplies of its own very good tanks.
Singapore, deprived of these things, had instead to make do with Churchill’s old friend Duff Cooper, dispatched to the Far East after a failed stint at the Ministry of Information. Cooper was supposed to take charge of this endangered part of the empire, not that there was much to take charge of. It was a futile gesture, typically Churchillian. So was the belated decision, taken when defeat was already inevitable, to divert some Russia-bound aircraft to Singapore. They arrived far too late to prevent catastrophe.
When disaster duly arrived, Churchill ordered Percival to make a last stand as if to expiate the shame of his loss. It is now most interesting to read the almost hysterical dispatch which Churchill wrote to the supreme commander, General Archie Wavell, on 10 February 1942:
There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs. The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon, the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved. It is expected that every unit will be brought into close contact with the enemy and fight it out.23
Eventually Percival wrung permission out of Wavell to make his own operational decision about surrender. Churchill’s grandiose orders bore no relation to reality. Even the bravest commanders must sometimes surrender rather than subject their men to needless savagery.
Percival was for many crucial years unable to defend his reputation as he languished in various mosquito-infested Japanese prisons. During that time, the unsleeping Churchillian reputation machine was hard at work ensuring that the real author of the cataclysm was not blamed for it. The historian Sir Michael Howard concluded magisterially, but rather too late, that Percival’s treatment was unjust, writing:
If there is one pair of shoulders on which blame must be laid it is that of Winston Churchill himself. It was he who in 1941, against the advice of his Chiefs of Staff, gave to the Far East a lower priority in allocation of resources than the Middle East.24
For those who spent the next three years being starved, beaten and enslaved by the Japanese, the question of who was to blame might have seemed distant. It was the Japanese who were barbarously mistreating them. But the only good thing about mistakes is that we can learn from them. Alas, we can do so only if we acknowledge and examine them, which Churchill’s many uncritical admirers have never much wanted to do in this case. To treat him justly, as a fallible human being with many admirable qualities, is to damage the legend to which we all cling. Even so, this miserable story makes it plain that Winston Churchill was no superman and could make severe errors; and that vanity and self-deception, those themes of this war, came at a very high price.
There was also a price to be paid for our humiliation by the USA at the end of the Great War. The destruction of the old Anglo-Japanese Treaty, ripped up 20 years before under irresistible American pressure, had now produced its sour long-term consequences. Japan was a regional superpower with an experienced and battle-tested army, an effective air arm and a potent navy. The Fall of France had by then allowed Tokyo to push its experienced armies into undefended and compliant Vichy-controlled French Indo-China, within reach of Malaya’s beaches and of Singapore. And so the whole of Malaya, Hong Kong, Burma and ultimately India were in grave danger.
All this lay in the very near future as Churchill approached Newfoundland for his first encounter with Roosevelt. But American policy was one of the forces pushing us towards disaster.
The USA’s growing desire to put severe pressure on Japan was perilous to Britain, which was bound to be caught in the resulting trouble. The Russo-German war had also relieved Japanese fears of a renewed conflict with Russia, the one European power which had given it a bloody nose in modern times. This largely forgotten but decisive battle took place at Nomonhan (also called Khalkhyn Gol) in August 1939.
But Roosevelt would not discuss his Japanese policy with Churchill before, during or after the Newfoundland summit. He had no interest, then or later, in saving the British empire. He was pursuing the interests of the USA in China and the Pacific. If these endangered the British empire, then there were few in the USA who would care much about its disappearance.
In hindsight, the danger was obvious. At the time, politics and personal prejudices had triumphed over strategy. Britain, then and later, had decided to make a fetish of the Suez Canal. No doubt it was an artery of the empire in peacetime, but after Italy entered the war in the summer of 1940, the Mediterranean would be closed to British shipping for the next three years.
A. J. P. Taylor points out acidly:
Far more British shipping was consumed in sending supplies to Egypt round the Cape [of Good Hope] and in reopening the Mediterranean than was gained by reopening it, and the British came near to losing the Battle of the Atlantic largely because of their Mediterranean obsession.25
Yet Churchill would later admit that the narrowly balanced struggle against U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic was the one part of the war which had genuinely caused him to lose sleep with worry.
Taylor also points out that Egypt did not guard Persian and Iraqi oilfields (as is often claimed). This was because Hitler was never interested in approaching them from that direction. He might eventually have threatened them from the north, via the USSR, but had he done so, a garrison in Egypt would have been of little use against him.
Echoing a bitter old soldiers’ wartime song, ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here Because We’re Here’, Taylor concludes, ‘The British were in the Mediterranean because they were there. They fought there because there was nowhere else for them to fight.’26 There was, of course, somewhere else, in Malaya. But nobody had thought to send them there in time.
Apparent victory in North Africa, Taylor argues, was worse than illusory. General Archie Wavell’s defeat of the Italians in Cyrenaica in 1941 was overwhelming, but
this moment of victory was also the moment at which Great Britain ceased to be an independent power capable of waging a great war from its own resources. By the beginning of 1941 British financial resources were almost exhausted. Left to themselves the British would have had to concentrate on their export trade and would have remained only nominally in the war. This did not suit President Roosevelt, who wished Great Britain to act as America’s sword until such time as she herself entered the war.27
Britain’s next intervention – in Greece – was also begun for reasons of prestige, not military ones. It was supposed to hearten the remaining free nations of the world. But instead it turned into a miniature Dunkirk, with headlong evacuations from both Greece and Crete, costing valuable warships that could not be spared. It failed both militarily and in its aim of putting heart into the free nations.
Taylor makes another important criticism of Churchill’s priorities. It was German air power, and Britain’s lack of it, that destroyed the British forces in Crete. He says, ‘Three squadrons of fighters would have saved Crete but none were available because of the obsession with strategic bombers.’28 This obsession would have many other sad and dispiriting results, as we shall see.
It was with this series of setbacks and false dawns behind him, and Britain’s worst ever defeat just in front of him, that Winston Churchill, ever boyish, boarded the Prince of Wales at Scapa Flow, where the ruins of the Imperial German Navy lay beneath the shallow waters, and set out for Newfoundland.
Despite the hopes Churchill placed in Stalin, he still needed America, and still hoped somehow to draw it into a war Roosevelt was equally determined to avoid and had faithfully promised his own people that he would avoid. It was a triumph of wishful thinking. Many in Britain sought to win comfort and hope from the Placentia Bay summit long after it had already failed.
It went wrong very quickly, in small ways as well as large ones. It was meant to be held in secret, but word of it leaked out before it was over thanks to lax security in the peacetime USA. And so its outcome was revealed officially to the British and American publics while Churchill was still on his way home across the stormy and U-boat infested Atlantic. Such a meeting of great and famous men, and in such surroundings, could not fail to excite the imagination. But its actual immediate outcome – a refusal to discuss the Far East, a dismissal of British concerns about the Near East and a continued American determination to stay out of actual war – was insignificant. In fact, it was worse. It was a hurtful disappointment for Churchill and turned out to contain a time bomb, possibly an accidental one, which would blow up under what was left of the British empire.
Its outcome, a press release unsigned by either leader, was soon after dubbed ‘The Atlantic Charter’ by an overexcited Daily Herald, distant ancestor of today’s Sun newspaper. No such document really exists. Yet the moment was important, even so.
The enormous ship Prince of Wales was majestic and evocative of centuries of sea power, though her rather unbalanced look and inadequate 14-inch guns were (as in the case of so many British warships at the time) the result of financial compromise and treaty limitations. The best description of those now-vanished monsters was given by Churchill himself in July 1914, as he watched the Home Fleet heading to its war stations. He called them ‘scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought’. But by 1941 these colossal, vastly expensive vessels had become the Trident missiles of their age, designed for a conflict that was over, symbols of superpower status rather than practical weapons of war. They were very hard to use, far too easily lost in battle at great cost and hopelessly vulnerable to air attack. Like the British empire, Prince of Wales seemed modern, solid and strong in 1941. But in truth her day was almost over, and her end nearer than anyone could have believed.
She looked warlike enough, decked out in dazzle paint supposed to camouflage her in northern seas. She had very recently (on 23 May) been in actual combat, though rather disastrously, in the first clash with the German battleship Bismarck. In this engagement, her accompanying ship, the beautiful but ill-armoured battlecruiser Hood had been sent to the bottom with almost every man in her ship’s company. Prince of Wales had broken off the encounter after sustaining quite severe damage, one shell striking her below the waterline and another hitting the compass platform close to the bridge, a bloody moment which her captain, John Leach, nearly did not survive. At the time of this encounter, Prince of Wales was an unfinished ship, not even ready for sea. She had set out for battle with contractors’ workmen still on board trying to overcome problems with her guns. Hood was revenged soon afterwards, when all the remaining firepower, air power and skill of the Royal Navy were concentrated on hunting and sinking the Bismarck. But it was vengeance rather than victory, a recovery from a setback rather than a triumph in its own right.
As in so many other aspects of the war, we were reacting to events, and our successes, such as they were, were in rescuing morale. Even with a great empire behind us, we could not strike at Germany on the continent in any way that would do it serious harm. The Phoney War had certainly ended in May 1940. From then on the contest was genuine enough and the combatants truly hostile to each other’s aims. But the conflict that followed was not an equal struggle between two well-matched antagonists. It was a stalemate, in which the loser refused to concede defeat, and the winner was not strong enough to complete his victory.
This, then, was the story of the Prince of Wales, rapidly repaired and with an inexperienced and half-trained ship’s company, which Churchill chose as the chariot to bear him to what he believed was the most important meeting with a foreign leader he was ever likely to have. The unintended symbolism, of a shabby and ill-prepared Britain recently damaged by a woeful loss, must have been evident to Roosevelt and to the hard, unsentimental, calculating men, military and civilian, who formed the president’s entourage.
There was other symbolism. The meeting was held a few miles from a raw new US naval station at Argentia on British imperial territory, one of the bases granted to the USA by Britain in return for the obsolete destroyers from the US Navy’s reserves. The closeness to this place cannot have escaped either leader. It was clear who was the supplicant and who the host. For the same reason, most of the meetings took place aboard the US Navy ship bearing the president, the Augusta, rather than aboard the Prince of Wales.
By the time they arrived at Divine Service aboard the Prince of Wales on Sunday 10 August, both men were probably not very well disposed towards each other. It must already have been clear that, beyond gestures of friendship and promises of future material aid, the United States had no plans to enter the war on Britain’s side. Yet this had been Churchill’s great hope and the reason for his journey. The USA was also pursuing aggressive diplomacy towards Japan that might bring on a war in the Far East that Britain greatly feared, and with good reason.
But Churchill was anxious for a moment of public friendship for the cameras, and sat happily next to the president during the extraordinary ceremony which then took place. US Navy sailors attended, and mingled with their British counterparts.
It is easy to see the working of Churchill’s mind. He was most concerned with making the right impression and strode about beforehand ‘inspecting every detail, often taking a hand by moving a chair an inch one way or another or by pulling out the folds of the Union Jack’.29 Churchill himself recalled afterwards:
The sun shone bright and warm while we all sang the old hymns which are our common inheritance and which we learned as children in our homes. We sang the hymn founded on the psalm which John Hampden’s soldiers sang when they bore his body to the grave and in which the brief precarious span of human life is contrasted with the immutability of Him to whom a thousand ages past are but as yesterday and as a watch that is past in the night. We sang the sailors’ hymn ‘For Those in Peril’, and there are very many in peril on the sea. We sang ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, and indeed I felt that this was no vain presumption, but that we had the right to feel that we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded from on high.
When I looked upon that densely packed congregation of the fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals and to a large extent of the same interests and certainly in different degrees facing the same dangers, it swept across me that here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from merciless degradation.
And so we came back across the ocean waves uplifted in spirit, fortified in resolve.30
Alas, spirit and resolve were all he got, when he had hoped for an alliance and a declaration of war.
The apparent similarity of the two peoples was superficial, as Woodrow Wilson had warned all those years ago when he had told the British to stop imagining Americans were their cousins, or even Anglo-Saxons. It is also easy to imagine the faint bafflement of many US Navy enlisted men, Irish, Italian, German or Polish by ancestry, at a ceremony quite unlike the ones most of them were used to. This was stately, measured, purposely unenthusiastic Anglicanism, a form of religion confined in the USA to the well-off and to Anglophiles. It was wholly different from the bare-bones evangelical churches, or the ritualistic Roman Catholic ones, that the American poor attended. They may have been puzzled more than impressed as Captain Leach read an Old Testament lesson in his old-fashioned upper-middle-class voice, from the Book of Joshua (1:9), ‘Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’ Even so, to all who heard them, the words would seem especially poignant a few months later.
Most of the hymns were chosen by the British prime minister, who selected ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. But it was, surprisingly, Roosevelt who insisted on the ‘Navy Hymn’, common to both the US and Royal Navies. It begins with the words ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’, and makes a repeated plea (no doubt very fervent among the men of the Prince of Wales, who were already at war and had seen the snarling, fiery face of battle only a few weeks before) ‘for those in peril on the sea’.
One verse runs ‘From rock and tempest, fire and foe, protect them wheresoe’er they go’. On that day, and at that time, only a prophet could have foretold where they would go, and where they would next meet both fire and foe. Anyone expert in naval strategy and warfare would have thought their next mission close to insane, which it was. Much good their prayers and hymns were to do them in the face of either fire or foe. Against political posturing and vainglory, even the prayers of the just cannot always avail.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Japan policy – a devastating embargo on fuel – would, intentionally or not, result in war in the Pacific before Christmas. Winston Churchill’s own misconceived and hasty orders a few weeks later would send most of the men aboard Prince of Wales to pointless death or condemn them to ghastly captivity, thousands of miles away, before a year had passed.
Yet the occasion, at the time, was portrayed as one of friendliness and hope. The then famous author and travel writer, H. V. (Henry Vollam) Morton, was recruited by Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Minister of Information, to memorialise the event in a fascinating little volume, Atlantic Meeting (1943).
Its frontispiece is the reproduction of a card signed by president and prime minister bearing an uplifting quotation from Longfellow (‘Sail on, O ship of state!’). Much of it is now dated beyond belief, and describes a world as vanished as the lost city of Atlantis.
But there are several telling moments, the first being the unintentionally early arrival at the scene of Prince of Wales. The British warship was observing local time in British imperial Newfoundland, whereas the US Navy destroyers sent out to meet and escort her were on the emphatically independent and non-imperial USA’s Eastern Time. So was President Roosevelt, who was thus still fast asleep as Churchill paced the decks and peered excitedly at the horizon through the morning haze. Prince of Wales had to be shooed away by the American Navy and was then compelled to steam in circles for 90 minutes to avoid waking the president. It was an early warning of who was in charge.
Morton was given no access to the talks, or to President Roosevelt. Despite his exalted accreditation, approved by Churchill himself, he was not even allowed to go aboard any of the US Navy ships anchored in Placentia Bay. They were not, as it happened, especially impressive. At that time all the real modern power of the US Navy was concentrated at Pearl Harbor, so Roosevelt had no vessels to match Churchill’s new battleship. The president himself was aboard the comparatively modest Augusta. Nearby lay the ancient dreadnought battleship Arkansas, launched in 1911, hardly a fitting vehicle for a modern president. But Morton recorded that the American ships sparkled with polished brass and new paint, in contrast to the British ship’s deliberately dirty and unkempt wartime state. When the Americans came aboard, he noted a conversation between a US Navy officer and his British opposite number in which the American took the Royal Navy man’s stoic cheerfulness for unseriousness: ‘I guess you boys take this war very lightly,’ said the American. ‘Oh, rather,’ replied the Englishman – who had been aboard the battleship Royal Oak when she was torpedoed and sunk with great loss, and whose Portsmouth home had been obliterated by bombs. Two years of war had deepened, not narrowed, the gap between the two nations.
As Morton wrote,
I soon became aware of a subtle and peculiar thing. Between ourselves and those charming and virile young Americans was the War, strange and impalpable as a curtain. It was not that they were not war-minded or sympathetic: it was simply that they were out of the war and knew nothing of it and could not imagine what it was really like. We must have been much the same at Munich. They belonged to peace-time still, to the prosperous easy world of the fat ham advertisements in the magazines, a world of gleaming touring cars, new clothes, luxury, a world where money still meant almost everything. We were living in different time cycles.31
Morton devoted several pages to describing the church service, not least because he was kept away from any information about the talks. But he observed some interesting Churchillian moments, as when the prime minister told him, ‘I have an idea that something really big may be happening – something really big,’ presumably American entry into the war. But of course that did not happen.
Embarrassingly, elaborate British attempts to keep the meeting secret had failed. The relaxed and insecure peacetime USA simply was not capable of keeping such secrets. This meant the journey back would be far more dangerous than at first expected, as German submarines had been alerted to the fact that Winston Churchill was about to cross the ocean in a battleship whose route could be guessed all too easily. It also meant a growing public hunger for news about the event. Absurdly, Morton, who had been within a few hundred feet of both leaders for days without finding out anything at all, eventually heard the first details of the talks in a broadcast by the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, picked up on the ship’s wireless as it ploughed homewards through stormy waters on 14 August. He might as well have been at home in England, where the wireless reception would have been better.
He recorded,
Then we heard, point by point, the clauses of the Atlantic Charter [as it was not yet known].
I have since been told that in clubs, and places where men gathered to hear the broadcast, faces grew long with disappointment as Mr Attlee proceeded, and the exciting rumours set about by Mr Churchill’s Atlantic journey were all deflated in an atmosphere of anti-climax. Curiously enough, precisely the same scene took place in the wardroom of the Prince of Wales. What we had all subconsciously hoped for, and not, perhaps, entirely subconsciously, was a declaration that America was coming into battle with us; the only thing that seemed to us to justify the dramatic encounter in the Atlantic between the two statesmen. In comparison with that, words, no matter how admirable, were a disappointment.
We sat looking at one another, remembering the launches going to and fro […] the staff meetings, the air of bustle and excitement; and this was all they meant! We were not, of course, statesmen. We knew nothing of the difficulties […] we knew that, sooner or later, somehow and in some way, America would come in with us and fight. Then, we asked ourselves, why not now?32
The answer to ‘why not now?’ was that American political opinion, and the checks and balances of the US Constitution, absolutely prevented it. But this certainty of an eventual alliance is an interesting reflection. How did they ‘know’ that America would enter the war against Germany? They did not. It remains a mystery whether the USA would ever have declared war on Germany had Hitler not declared war on the USA. The war could have ended up with a lopsided alliance of Britain and the USA against Japan, while Britain and the USSR, no doubt aided by the USA, continued the fight against Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union, after all, did not join its Anglo-American allies in the war against Japan until the very last weeks of the war.
Morton concluded, ‘“Well,” said a senior officer when the wireless had been switched off. “I expect there was far more to it than just that!”’33 Of course this was true. There was plenty more. But it mainly consisted of Britain asking, and the USA saying ‘no’.
The actual wording of the supposed ‘Charter’ would become a major nuisance to Churchill, and to Stalin as well, as he had so recently gobbled up the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania and could therefore be accused of colonialism.34
The three opening clauses had differing disadvantages for all the anti-Hitler states – except for the USA, which alone was unaffected.
The section proclaiming that ‘First, their [the Allied] countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other’ obstructed any hopes that any victor might have of changing long-hated borders. Stalin’s 1945 seizure of the East Prussian city of Königsberg was outlawed in advance by this clause, as was any plan he might have to hold on to the parts of Poland he had first swallowed in September 1939. But unlike the enfeebled British empire, Stalin was powerful and dangerous enough to brush aside these provisions. Today, Königsberg remains in Russian hands, as Kaliningrad, and Stalin’s Polish conquests of 1940 still belong to Belarus and Ukraine, which inherited them from the USSR.
‘Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.’ This clearly ruled out the Soviet takeover of the Baltic nations, which was in fact to last until the USSR fell apart in 1991.
‘Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’ This wording was almost immediately seized upon by independence campaigners in the British empire as clear encouragement for their cause. Can Roosevelt, like almost all Americans of his generation instinctively resentful of British colonialism, possibly have been unaware of this side effect? Did Churchill not see the danger?
Then came:
Fourth, they will endeavour, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.
This was plainly aimed at imperial preference in trade, as agreed before the war by the main British imperial nations, at the 1932 Ottawa conference, and greatly resented ever since by the USA. This was not just sentiment. The USA would later squeeze and pummel a bankrupt Britain into abandoning the last vestiges of its imperial economic system.
And ‘Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance,’ was clearly directed at the Royal Navy’s hitherto unchallenged habit of stopping any ship it chose, anywhere.
The whole document, read carefully, threatened the continuation of the British empire and of British power as it had been until war began and the European colonial nations faced the modern world in arms. Mahatma Gandhi, seeing his opportunity clearly, soon wrote to President Roosevelt:
I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India, and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain.
It was impossible for anyone to ignore this for long. But it became much more urgent in December 1941, when Japan decided to strike at Britain and the USA in the hope that neither would be able to recover what they then lost. They were right about Britain. Though British troops fought with extraordinary tenacity to recapture Burma, the regained territory was almost immediately handed over to an independent government, some of whose members had collaborated with the Japanese. They were wrong about the USA, whose astonishing ability to create a new war economy, conscript huge numbers of men and still run a prosperous domestic economy was – as yet – unknown. By 1945, US troops were on Japanese soil as occupiers, and they are still there, though no longer in that role. They were wrong about Stalin, too, who cheerfully ignored any agreement that did not suit his aims.
HMS Prince of Wales had her own part to play in the terrible events of December 1941, when Japan asserted itself and the British empire received its mortal wounds. But the ship would have a few weeks of happy respite before the shadows closed in on her. Churchill himself greatly enjoyed his voyage home, glorying in the possibility of an encounter with the enemy. For he was sure they now knew where he was, as he recrossed the Atlantic in one of the world’s largest and most recognisable ships of war in conditions of total publicity. He entertained himself and the senior officers with films, some brought aboard by Lord Beaverbrook who, excluded from the meeting, had made a private journey to Newfoundland to push his way in. These entertainments included such appropriate delights as High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart as a fugitive criminal, Saps at Sea, in which Laurel and Hardy were adrift on the waves, and That Hamilton Woman, in which Vivien Leigh played Lady Hamilton and Laurence Olivier played her lover, Horatio Nelson. The last of these three had been condemned a few weeks before by the America First committee, accused of ‘preparing Americans for war’ by suggesting parallels between Bonaparte and Hitler.
Showing off as always, the prime minister persuaded a rightly nervous Captain Leach to divert his precious, irreplaceable vessel and to steam not once but twice at high speed straight through the middle of an eastbound convoy. The prime minister (as Morton recalled), ‘upon our bridge … waving his hand in the air, making a V with the forefingers of his right hand, was cheering as madly as any of the men who were cheering him’.35
This is uncomfortably reminiscent of Siegfried Sassoon’s sour verse ‘The General’, in which two Great War soldiers concur that their commanding officer is a cheery old card, as they slog up to Arras with rifle and pack. But Sassoon ends the verse by noting that the jovial officer ‘did for them both’ in the attack he then sent them into.
And Winston Churchill certainly did for hundreds of his shipmates aboard Prince of Wales, very soon after he arrived home, by ordering them all into a futile suicide mission which would end in the deaths of many and the long and arduous captivity of others. It can also be argued that he failed to protect the Atlantic convoys, by diverting aircraft to the bombing of German civilians and by his preoccupation with the Mediterranean, which deprived the Atlantic Fleet of ships and men. That preoccupation greatly diluted the Navy’s ability to fight U-boats in the Atlantic.
But his power over the fate of Prince of Wales was absolute and direct. He sent the ship and those aboard into mortal peril against the advice of experts. It is worth pursuing this sad event, because its combination of sad reality and defeat and military folly, and of boyish Churchillian posturing, is striking.
And this contrast between the heroic story and the often dismal fact is at the heart of the myth of the ‘Good War’. Many of us, to this day, are angered and upset to learn that Churchill’s actual war leadership was often fiercely contested by professional fighting men and excoriated in secret sessions of Parliament – especially the Crete fiasco. We would so much rather believe that he was indeed the spotless hero and military genius that we had been brought up to believe in. If any part of the legend is in doubt, then the whole secular faith which is built upon it is in danger too.
One of the bitterest accounts of Churchillian bombast and error is to be found in Someone Had Blundered (1960), Bernard Ash’s account of the last weeks of Prince of Wales and Repulse, the elderly but speedy battlecruiser which accompanied her to Singapore and then on to the bottom of the China Sea.36
Ash describes exactly how Prince of Wales and Repulse both came to be sunk by Japanese aircraft on 10 December 1941 off the coast of Malaya, just four months after Winston Churchill, aboard Prince of Wales, had waved so jovially at the passing convoy, and sat among sailors, his eyes damp with sentimental tears, watching Hollywood movies.
With bald simplicity and cold fury, he states, ‘These two ships should not have been there’,37 detailing Churchill’s fanciful belief that the presence of great ships in Eastern waters would act as a deterrent to Japan, much as the mere existence of the German battleship Tirpitz was a deterrent and menace to the Royal Navy. He argues that Tirpitz ‘exercised a general fear and menaces all points at once’.38 But the German ship only did so because Germany was on the offensive and we were on the defensive. In the Pacific, Britain could do more than wait to be attacked, and Japan, overwhelmingly superior to Britain in land, naval and air power, could choose its time and place. Britain’s main concern was to wonder when and how Japan would strike against our inferior forces. Sending more major ships into the region only gave the Japanese more targets. The idea was naval nonsense.
Ash argues that even with the accompanying aircraft carrier which Churchill wanted to dispatch, but which could not be sent because it ran aground, the two ships (and the aircraft carrier) would have been destroyed once they had got within range of Japanese land-based aircraft. He puts the whole mission (resisted from the start by the professional sailors at the Admiralty) down to Churchill’s ‘romantic conception of warfare’ dating from another age.39 In this lost world, nations had ‘sent a ship’ to overawe the primitive locals, as if we still lived in the Victorian era. Churchill wrestled with the Admiralty for several weeks, failing to get their agreement to the deployment. He only overpowered them after the Foreign Office came in on his side in mid-October.40 On 20 October 1941, Churchill opined to the Cabinet’s Defence Committee that he did not foresee an attack on Malaya.41 He wrote this foolish thing little more than two months before just such an attack took place. In fact, he wrote it when Japanese forces were already in French Indo-China, and known to be. It is amazing that anyone who could read a map could not see the imminent danger to Malaya, unless the truth was that he did not want to see it. He also knew that President Roosevelt was pursuing an aggressive policy towards the Japanese that might well lead to war. And he is most likely to have known of General Percival’s urgent desire (discussed at the start of this chapter) for more aircraft and tanks. But on 21 October 1941, Trafalgar Day, the Admiralty was officially informed that Prince of Wales was ordered to Singapore. And so on 25 October she steamed out of Greenock on the Clyde, never to see British waters again.
Ash furiously remarks, ‘He [Churchill] got the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the result of his getting them was their destruction and the end of British power in the Far East.’42 It is very hard to disagree with this savage but just verdict.
But Winston Churchill’s grandiose folly continued. On 10 November, the great man said in a speech at the London Guildhall, ‘Every preparation to defend British interests in the Far East, and to defend the common cause now at stake, has been and is now being made.’ Seldom have words less true been spoken so soon before the iron proof of their falsehood would become apparent. The horrible truth was that British power in Singapore had been a pretence since the tearing up of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty. Nobody had known how to defend Malaya against an aggressive and powerful Japan, except by spending a great deal of money, which Britain did not have. So nobody had done anything effective to prevent it. The fabled fortress at Singapore was nothing of the kind. Intended as a base for capital ships, it had not been used as such because there were no such ships to fill its great new docks. It was useless as a defence against attack from the landward side. This was not because its guns faced the wrong way, as the myth goes (they could be trained inland, though they did have the wrong sort of ammunition for a land battle). It was because the only effective defence would have been a powerful military force in Malaya. None was ever created, even in the last months when it might just have been done.
The Japanese, by contrast, were making clever, intricate preparations. When the two British capital ships arrived in Singapore, Japanese spies were recording every detail of their condition and armaments. Despite feeble attempts to conceal the name of Repulse, any remotely skilled agent could have identified her distinctive shape. Prince of Wales was no mystery. Her presence was even publicised, in the belief that this would impress Tokyo. She was the ‘glamour ship’ of the Royal Navy, known since the Placentia Bay visit as ‘Churchill’s Yacht’ and sometimes, foolishly, as HMS Unsinkable. Rather than being impressed, the Japanese Navy and Air Force took note of the necessary details, and made careful plans to sink her and Repulse at the first available opportunity. Japanese forces were already alarmingly close, in what is now Vietnam. Yet an oblivious British government carried on as if Singapore was a safe refuge far from any real danger. In fact it was a target, already in the enemy’s sights.
When Japanese bombers caught Prince of Wales and Repulse off the Malaya coast, they were on a brave but futile mission to attack invading Japanese troops. The Japanese pilots who found them plainly knew not only what ships they were, but which was which. High-altitude bombers ignored the Prince of Wales, with her heavily armoured decks, and concentrated exclusively on Repulse, with her weak, lightly protected decks, obsolete since Jutland in 1916 but never strengthened in all the 25 long and wasted years between. Like the poor Hood, she was the victim of Winston Churchill’s naval economies of the 1920s.
Eventually both ships were destroyed by air-launched torpedoes, against which neither possessed any effective defence. They fought and manoeuvred with all the skill and courage at their command, but they were helpless because they were the wrong weapons in the wrong place. Only land-based air cover might have saved them, but there was none worth the name. Captain Leach of Prince of Wales, he who had read the moving lesson at the Church Service in Placentia Bay four months before, died with his ship. His son Henry, then a midshipman stationed in Singapore, was within earshot of the politically inspired disaster which engulfed his father. The rumble of battle could clearly be heard afar off. Two nights before, he had shared a relaxing swim and a gin sling with his father. Now his admired parent was dead and his personal misery was swallowed up in the greater woe of national defeat.
That desperately unhappy young midshipman would later become Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord, and command the Royal Navy’s recapture of the Falkland Islands. Those islands had also been the victims of official and political vanity and incompetence. They would never have needed to be recaptured if politicians, especially the late Lady Thatcher, had not endangered them. They had done this in the time-honoured way of such people, by giving the impression they were not interested in defending them. Sir Henry, like his father, knew all about politicians and warfare. He believed (wrongly, as it happens) that by showing it could recapture the lost islands, the Royal Navy could now save itself from the severe cuts which Mrs Thatcher was imposing on it. So he strode into Downing Street in full uniform and overawed Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues by his resolve. Perhaps, having had so long to ponder his father’s fate, the result of political posturing, he knew more than most about the minds of political leaders. It is he, rather than Mrs Thatcher, who should have the credit for the success of the Falklands task force. Her historical bodyguards have, with few exceptions, passed politely over the decisions to sell or scrap warships, and to signal a weariness with the Falklands to Argentina, which led to the whole episode. Final victory, as in the case of Singapore, has blotted out earlier incompetence and defeat. Perhaps only defeated countries learn the lessons of history.
There are other small echoes of the disaster in the modern world. The honoured name of Repulse was revived in the 1960s, and given to one of Britain’s original fleet of Polaris nuclear missile submarines (this author spent a weekend aboard her in the 1980s). The new, ultra-modern submarine contained mementoes of her forerunners of the same name, as if trying to keep the spirit of the former ship alive. Thus do small parts of history persist into the present day. But we do not necessarily make sense of them. Indeed, we struggle to make sense of this whole strange war, and its many tragedies and calamities behind the showy parade of eventual victory. Prince of Wales still lies, her huge 44,000-ton bulk turned upside down by the violence of the enemy, nearly 40 fathoms deep off the Malaysian coast. Here, in all its concentrated, solemn vastness, an official war grave, is a solid, enduring relic of Britain’s final days as a great industrial, economic and naval power. At 745 feet long and 105 feet wide, she contains centuries of shipbuilding and fighting experience, now dead, scattered, disbanded, forgotten or lost, thousands of tons of steel from blast furnaces, mills and forges long demolished, made with coal from mines long ago closed and sealed, and dug and smelted and hammered by an industrial working class now vanished. Every intricate part of her was made according to the traditional measurements of England, feet, inches, pounds and hundredweight. These are now abandoned in favour of the metric system which was used by our enemies in that war and which would have been imposed upon us had we been defeated. But in this matter, as in so many others, we have made a conquest of ourselves. Somewhere in her barnacled ruins is the cabin where Churchill slept, the cinema where he watched That Hamilton Woman with tears in his eyes, the bridge from which he waved so cheerfully, and perhaps the rotted fragments of the hymn book from which he so lustily sang ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’, beside his ally and supposed friend, the president of the United States.