Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (27 page)

At 1210,
Prince of Wales
hoisted two black balls, the international signal for a ship not under control. At 1218 twenty-six Bettys of the Kanoya Group, low on fuel, spotted a seaplane (probably
Repulse
’s Walrus), and then spotted Force Z. These aircraft carried a heavier torpedo than their predecessors, the so-called ‘Model 2’ with a 204kg (450lb) warhead. Six aircraft were first to launch at
Prince of Wales,
at point-blank range.
Prince of Wales
could not steer, and could only manage some 15 knots on her starboard engines. Four out of the six torpedoes hit along virtually her whole length on the starboard side, from bow to stern. Pictures taken of the wreck show a hole punched right through her bow. Damage was increased as a result of compartments on this side having been filled with water for counter-flooding, the effect of an explosion on these being far greater than on an air-filled compartment.
Prince of Wales
was reduced to eight knots, down to one out of her four engines, and had only two of her eight dynamos producing the electricity she needed to help her stay afloat. It is estimated she had taken in nearly 18.000 tons of water.

At 1220
Prince of Wales
signalled she had been hit, and asked Singapore to send destroyers. This signal has been seen by many commentators as showing Phillips’s contempt for air cover: ‘… it is incredible that the Admiral should ask for destroyers rather than fighter aircraft.’
²⁴

It is only incredible if Phillips knew fighters were available. He called for all that he thought there was in the way of possible assistance.

At 1223 a new Japanese attack saw three planes break off from attacking
Prince of Wales
and turn on
Repulse,
when she had already taken evasive action to comb the tracks of eight torpedoes launched at her from relatively long range.
Repulse
was hit by one torpedo on her torpedo bulge, and shrugged off the hit, continuing to steam at 25kt. As for
Prince of Wales
, the last hit on her stern was probably decisive, as it negated all damage control in that area. By this time, and perfectly understandably, some people were cracking under the strain:

‘… to make matters worse, a commissioned gunner had needlessly and without orders decided to flood several magazines, presumably to prevent an explosion. Stopped by the ship’s engineer officer, Commander L. J. Goudy, this nevertheless caused yet more water to enter the ship …’
²⁵

At around 1223
Repulse
’s luck finally ran out. Caught in a pincer movement led by the last group of Kanoya aircraft under Lt Iki, she took three torpedo hits on her starboard side, one to port. Her rudder was jammed, and she took on a list of 30° to port. Hit by four torpedoes in four minutes, the old girl had received her death blows, and Tennant, realizing the end was inevitable, ordered ‘Abandon Ship’. She sank at 1233.

The last attack on
Prince of Wales
took place at 1243. A 1,100lb bomb hit the cinema flat, causing horrific injuries to the wounded gathered there in large numbers. The explosion also damaged uptakes and downtakes to her last operating boiler room. The ship stopped, dead in the water. At 1305, at considerable risk and showing magnificent seamanship, the destroyer
Express
came alongside
Prince of Wales
to take off survivors.

Prince of Wales
rolled over and sank at 1318. Shortly after, two Buffaloes arrived, possibly sent by Admiral Palliser, then 453 Squadron. The death toll was twenty officers and 307 ratings from
Prince of Wales,
twenty-four officers and 486 ratings from
Repulse.
Neither Admiral Phillips nor Captain Leach of
Prince of Wales
survived, though the most recent commentator believes, ‘Admiral Phillips had not tried “to go down with the ship”’.
²⁶

One account has the last words Phillips was heard to utter as, ‘I cannot survive this.’
²⁷

Majority opinion holds Phillips to have a very significant responsibility for the disaster:

‘Apologists for Phillips have claimed that the admiral was upholding the fighting traditions of the Royal Navy by taking Force Z in to the South China Sea to look for Japanese shipping. If Phillips’s foray had been well timed and executed that line of argument might have had some validity. But Force Z’s final cruise was launched too late to be effective and was riddled with operational mistakes. Two capital ships and many lives were wasted.’
²⁸

In fact the timing of the departure was largely out of Tom Phillips’s control. The only real ‘operational mistake’ Phillips made was to manoeuvre his ships in close order for the first attack, but there was good reason to do so and he changed the order as soon as a problem became apparent. Whilst operating in close order no damage was done to either of his ships that reduced their fighting ability.

The Judgment of History

So who was to blame for the loss of these two ships and their officers and men? The finger points at three people in particular. Winston Churchill’s major failure was not to support the reinforcement of Singapore more strongly in the 1930s, or agree to more modern weapons and aircraft being supplied to it. He may have been proved wrong, but his failure to make the defence of Singapore a priority can be justified on the basis that 1930s Britain simply could not meet all its obligations. Nor was his failure to dispatch Force Z to Singapore. It was a gambler’s throw, but the gambler in question could justify it by pointing out the weakness of his hand, and that in the circumstances this bluff was his only option. His failure rather was not to recall the ships when his bluff was called. In his defence, it matters little whether he sent out Force Z as a deterrent, to reassure the colonies or to bring America in as the defender of Britain’s Far Eastern colonial empire. The latter would have been an extraordinarily outrageous plan, but Churchill was an extraordinarily outrageous man. Furthermore, he was expert at producing plans that were brilliant in their conception but fell down on detail and execution: the Dardanelles was just one such. In any event, there is one common denominator in all three reasons for Churchill to push for
Prince of Wales
to be sent out: none of them would require the ship actually to fight. It was a diplomatic mission, one good reason for putting a brilliant thinker who was quick on his intellectual feet in charge rather than an up-and-at-‘em sea dog. The change to it being a military mission came about as a result of Pearl Harbor. There are tantalizing snippets to suggest that Roosevelt may have known more about the likelihood of the attack on Pearl Harbor being launched than he admitted at or after the time, but no hint that Churchill knew more than anyone else who was surprised by the speed and venom of the Japanese assault. Churchill was playing for high stakes. If his aim was to impress America or frighten Japan with his commitment he was right to send them
Prince of Wales
rather than a collection of obsolete rust buckets. Churchill may have been instrumental in taking the decisions that put the two ships in harm’s way. There was good reason to do so. There was much less reason for not ordering them out of it.

Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, must bear equal responsibility for the ships not being recalled. When things in the Far East went, as Admiral Somerville would undoubtedly have said, ‘tits up’, it could be argued that it was Churchill who should have issued the orders to get Force Z out of Singapore. Yet the person whose office set him up to give that order was Dudley Pound, ally and sponsor of Tom Phillips and the person most responsible for his early promotion. Churchill was a politician. Pound was a sailor in the service of the world’s proudest and oldest fighting navy. A politically possible mission became military suicide the minute war actually broke out, and it was the military arm who should have done what soldiers and sailors are employed to do, stick by their guns and win the day. Fair enough, perhaps, that Pound had not dug his heels in and threatened to resign when Churchill overrode the Admiralty and sent the Navy’s newest battleship out, rather than some of its oldest. It was not so fair that he failed to insist on the ships being pulled out when Churchill’s bluff in sending the ships out was called. Phillips could not pull himself out of the action: it could only be done on the basis of an order from the Admiralty, an order that never came. Courage takes many forms. One form is that in which one risks death and dishonour by taking ships out against a far superior enemy. Another form is that whereby one places one’s career and livelihood on the line by insisting that such a risk does not have to be taken, and sadly it was this form of courage that was found wanting in Pound when the moment came. Just as Churchill had been stopped from prosecuting Admiral James Somerville on a trumped-up charge of cowardice by the threat of resignations from senior officers, so it is difficult to see how Churchill could have failed to ignore a threat of resignation from his First Sea Lord if he did not order the ships to safety.

A third finger of blame points at Admiral Palliser. He made six crucial errors that contributed a significant amount to the sinking of Force Z. One: He told Phillips, quite categorically, that there was no fighter protection available, and then repeated it for good measure. Two: He sent a subsequent signal confirming his first by suggesting that any available aircraft were likely to be reserved for the defence of Singapore itself. Three: He sent a signal erroneously reporting a landing at Kuantan. Four: He failed to keep himself abreast of events and signal or spot that this was a false report: in either event, he was highly culpable. Five: He failed to realize the inevitable result of his signal in sending Force Z to Kuantan. Six: He failed to tell Phillips, or find out, that fighters were on stand-by for Force Z.

As for Phillips, he seems the least guilty of all. He was party to the pre-war tendency to underestimate the likelihood of war with Japan, for which he must bear a share of the responsibility, but his actions elsewhere – arguing for modern aircraft to be sent to Singapore, opposing the bombing campaign against Germany, opposing the Crete and Greece actions – showed him to have excellent overall judgment and the courage to stand up for his convictions. He was given an unbalanced and wholly inadequate strike force, with his best ship not fully trained. His grasp of the realities of war was clear through his emphasis on the importance of air support, and his call for reinforcements. He set sail as soon as he reasonably could in the best and unavoidable traditions of the Royal Navy, handling his flawed fleet with skill and dash. He was man enough to start the mission, man enough to call it off when he lost his only advantages, surprise and bad weather. He did everything he could to arrange air cover. He could not know that the ship he was in was a sinking waiting to happen, or that his Intelligence on the range and capacity of Japanese aircraft was hopelessly inaccurate. He failed to call for air cover because his representative ashore and liaison with the RAF had told him there was none to be had. The failure of a fellow Admiral saw him sail short of escorts, the decisions of the Admiralty left him to fight an advanced enemy without the aircraft carrier that would have made a balanced force, and that same Admiralty failed to recall him or send him into hiding when that was all that could have saved him and his ships. A few miles and a few minutes either way and he might well not have been spotted. A few feet away and his ship might have avoided or at least absorbed damage and fought on: it was effectively the torpedo hit that sheered off
Prince of Wales
’s ‘A’ bracket that sealed the battle, and looked at from any angle Phillips had appallingly bad luck.

Should he have set sail, without air cover? Apart from the fact that he would have faced a court-martial if he had not, betrayed every tradition of the service he loved and destroyed the morale and standing of Britain with every inhabitant of Singapore, there was good reason for doing so. He had surprise and the monsoon weather on his side, and if he could bring his force into contact with the Japanese invasion forces he could have changed the course of the war. Tom Phillips was too clever a man to think that any ship was unsinkable, but had no reason to think his ship would sink as easily as it did. If he did make an error in having
Repulse
too close to him on board
Prince of Wales
amid the opening shots of the battle then it was for good reason and did no serious damage before it was changed. He may not have signalled that he was being attacked because he could not do so, but more likely because with the information held at the time it could serve no useful purpose to do so.

In so many areas Tom Phillips was the victim of other people’s mistakes – those who sent him out there, those who failed to order him back, those who he left behind in Singapore, those who had failed to equip Singapore with modern aircraft, those who had provided so-called Intelligence in the inter-war period, those who designed
Prince of Wales
, those who failed to send him ships that were fit for purpose. His own death and inability to defend himself meant that those same people were able to use him as a front and a cover, and for over seventy years have done so to such good effect that it is still Phillips who is deemed guilty of a crime he did not commit, rather than them.

A jealous Navy which had never quite known how to handle a man whose skills were so much intellectual rather than physical, the premature death of his greatest ally in the Royal Navy who also bore a large share of the responsibility for the disaster and the hostility of the most influential naval historian of the Second World War were not the reason Tom Phillips was knocked to the ground, but helped to keep him down when he fell.

Unfortunately he has also been a victim of the trait whereby one must never let the truth stand in the way of a good story: an unreformed senior naval officer hoist by his own petard
is
a better story than a man who was the victim of circumstances he could not control. Phillips has also suffered, not from the School of Armchair History that has damned so many other brave commanders, but from the School of Hindsight, where so many have insisted that because we know a squadron of clapped-out death-traps were on stand-by to defend his ships, he too should have known.