Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (14 page)

We now know that she was only a few feet away from avoiding the hit that in effect sank her.

Armour and Other Protection

Defence against torpedo attack was not so much by armour as by a Side Protection System, or ‘SPS’. This was based on the idea of using space to dissipate the force of an explosion, whereby twenty-five empty, energy-absorbing compartments were placed along the ship’s side.
Prince of Wales
was built to fit the Royal Navy dry-docking facilities at Portsmouth and Rosyth, limiting their beam to 103ft and the maximum depth of the SPS compartments to 13.5in. Events proved this not to be enough. The situation was not helped by the fact that Captain Leach had had to order several compartments to be flooded, to correct the ship’s list, but even the loss of shock-absorbency this brought the compartments is not the reason the ship’s basic torpedo defence system was overwhelmed:

‘The attack by Japanese torpedo-bombers against
Prince of Wales
during December 1941 proved this dimension to be inadequate as shock-absorbency and the integrity of the bulkheads was destroyed.’
¹⁸

Prince of Wales
could not and did not survive multiple torpedo hits on one side, and was never going to do so.

Conclusion

By April 1942 a number of stable doors had been bolted in the remaining ships of the class, largely as a result of the loss of
Prince of Wales.
Alterations and additions included much additional watertight subdivision and ‘blanking’ of doors and openings, significantly more pumping capacity, shock-proof mountings for machinery and fittings, duplicate power-leads for the 5.25in mountings and significant improvements to generating capacity.
¹⁹

Prince of Wales
was almost certainly one of a class of battleship that was the best of those designed in response to inter-war treaty limitations. It did mark an advance in design terms, taking more torpedo hits than ill-fated, First World War designs such as the Royal Sovereign class battleship
Royal Oak,
still lying on the seabed at Scapa Flow where it was famously sunk by
U47,
or the Queen Elizabeth class
Barham,
sunk by torpedo in the Mediterranean in 1941. Yet the fact is that this supposedly ‘unsinkable’ battleship had serious design flaws that were exposed in action. Tom Phillips set out with a flagship that was unable to mete out the punishment it was designed to inflict, and unable to stay afloat when it in turn was punished. His flagship was not fit for purpose.

Tom Phillips was also sailing to a meeting with crack Japanese pilots who were probably the only unit in the world trained to a high level in delivering bomb and torpedo attacks against surface vessels, and had been posted to the area as a result of any secrecy surrounding the dispatch of Force Z. Opposed to them were a crew who were barely trained at all to meet such a threat. The Royal Navy had insisted on eight months as the absolute minimum to work up a ship to full fighting efficiency. The Admiralty had allowed
Prince of Wales
to sail to fight a far more powerful opponent after only seven weeks.

The inbuilt inability of
Prince of Wales
to withstand battle damage also renders irrelevant and inapplicable any criticism of Phillips as a seaman. The best seaman in the Royal Navy would have made no difference to the outcome of the battle once early damage rendered
Prince of Wales
a sitting duck.

Phillips was sailing to war in a ship that was shown in the most dramatic manner not to be unsinkable, as the media had claimed, but all too sinkable, with systemic weaknesses that made it unacceptably vulnerable to precisely the type of attack to which it was subjected. It was not only the physical weakness of his flagship that made Force Z such a hollow threat. It was human weakness as well, and Tom Phillips was responsible for neither the physical nor the human deficiencies in his force. He was not only let down by the Admiralty. He was let down by his flagship, and by the honesty of Great Britain in adhering to treaty limitations in the 1920s and 1930s.

Newly Qualified Tom Phillips.

Admiral Sir Tom Phillips.

Admiral Phillips and Churchill.

Captain Leach.

Tom Phillips Tour of Command, probably HMS
Aurora
.

Captain Tennant after the sinking.

Tennant as Vice-Admiral.

Churchill negotiating with Blanche,
Prince of Wales
’s ship’s cat, with US destroyer alongside.

Admiral Stark, Admiral Pound and Admiral King.

Admiral Palliser and Admiral Phillips at Singapore.