A World at Arms (64 page)

There were during the lull of February and March the beginnings of those signs of collaboration with the Japanese which later came to be widespread, at the same time as other Filipinos began a guerilla movement; and the Philippine President, Manuel Quezon, toyed with the idea of pulling out of the war. President Roosevelt dismissed all such projects, ordered continued resistance, and directed MacArthur to leave his command post on the island of Corregidor, which dominated the Manila Bay entrance, for Australia to build up a new front and command new
forces. The Philippine President was evacuated, and General MacArthur, the United States High Commissioner and a group of American officers left on March 11. Before leaving, MacArthur, Sutherland, and two other American officers accepted huge sums of money from Quezon with the knowledge of Roosevelt and Marshall;
³
what would the soldiers left behind on Bataan and in the rest of the Philippines have said about this? They were already doubtful about their commander, but his boastful publicity and the prolonged resistance at a time when all else was crumbling even more rapidly would make MacArthur a great hero in the eyes of the American public.

In early April the renewed Japanese offensive quickly broke the famished and diseased American and Filipino soldiers, who had to surrender on April 9. Japanese bombardment and subsequent landing forced the surrender of the island of Corregidor by May 6; the remaining forces in the other islands had surrendered by June 9. The tens of thousands captured had before them a terrible death march in which thousands of American and Filipino soldiers died or were slaughtered;
⁴
years of privation in the most wretched prisoner of war camps followed. But by the time of the last surrender in the Philippines, the Pacific War had changed and the great tide of Japanese victories which had lapped around as well as over the Philippines was already being halted.

The other American holdings within reach of the Japanese had also fallen. Guam, the largest island in the Marianas, had been practically undefended and was occupied quickly. Wake Island, a key position in the central Pacific, had been defended, successfully beating off the first Japanese landing attempt with heavy losses; but a relief attempt from Hawaii was bungled, and a second Japanese assault on December 22 succeeded in overwhelming and capturing the island. The British garrison in Hong Kong was by that time also clearly headed for the POW camps.
⁵
They staged a five-day fighting retreat from the mainland portion of the territory to the island of Victoria, on which the Japanese unleashed a landing in the night of December 18-19. A week’s bitter and bloody fighting followed, and by December 26 the surviving British, Canadian, and Indian troops had to surrender. Here, as on Wake and Bataan, a garrison with little hope of relief had fought hard and effectively against an experienced but not very capably led opponent; Malaya was different on both counts.

Unlike the Americans, who had decided to leave the Philippines long before, the British had intended to remain in Malaya into the indefinite future. They controlled certain portions including the island of Singapore as a crown colony, and had worked out a complicated system for directing the affairs of the federated and the non-federated Malay States
which made up the rest of the area. Defense arrangements were fully in British hands but afflicted by a series of contradictions and complications which, but for their tragic implications, would have been considered too far-fetched for a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

The main defense point was the naval base at Singapore which, it was assumed, would provide – as naval bases generally should – a base for a navy to defend the area. But there was no navy and, until the last moment, none was expected. Since the navy was busy in the waters off Europe, dealing with the Germans, a series of major airfields had been constructed so that the area with its important naval base could be defended by units of the Royal Air Force. But under the pressures of war in Europe and North Africa as well as the need to send planes to the Soviet Union, the air force had not received the planes to defend and operate from the airports. So now, to keep the Japanese from seizing the airfields, the army was to defend them as well as the naval base. The army, in turn, faced the preposterous task of defending airfields and a naval base located at opposite ends of the 300-mile-long peninsula with no tanks, practically no anti-tank weapons, and the widely held assumption that the Japanese were inferior and incompetent.

The major operation planned for the contingency of war under these circumstances was a move called “Matador” into the adjacent portion of Thailand where the Japanese, it was correctly assumed, would land and from which they were expected to mount their major thrust into Malaya.
^c
The unit prepared for this operation, one of the two Indian divisions, which along with one Australian division and some smaller British units constituted the defending army, was never given the order to carry out “Matador,” in part because of concern over Thai neutrality and provoking the Japanese, in part because of a level of hesitation and confusion in the headquarters in Singapore at the beginning of the war which makes that in Manila look well organized.

The Japanese wanted to conquer Malaya for several reasons. It produced rubber and tin which they preferred to control themselves rather than purchase from others; it offered a fine naval base at Singapore; and it opened a route into the Netherlands East Indies and into the Indian Ocean. The occupation of southern French Indo-China in the summer of 1941 had provided them with the naval and air bases for this operation as well as the staging ground for the units that were to carry out the invasion of Malaya; in fact, that had been one of Japan’s primary reasons
for occupying South Indo-China and subsequently for their refusal to consider evacuating it. Detailed plans were worked out for a series of landings in southern Thailand and northern Malaya by the Japanese 25th Army commanded by General Yamashita Tomoyuki, whose three divisions were to carry out the operation. With Japanese naval air concentrated on the Hawaii attack, army air based on French Indo-China would carry the primary burden of beating down the British air and naval forces, thereafter operating from the British-built airports in north Malaya once the landing army units had seized them.

Early in the morning of December 8 (local time and date) the Japanese began landing.
⁶
While their air force quickly destroyed most of the available British planes, the landing force rapidly pushed inland, overwhelming the 11th Indian Division in the west and pushing back the 10th Indian Division on the east coast. In the first few hours of fighting it became clear that the poorly directed and inadequately trained Indian divisions, bled of many of their best officers and non-commissioned officers for the building up of new formations in India, could not hold off numerically inferior but well directed and equipped Japanese advance detachments. Even as the Japanese were driving the British out of north Malaya, they ended any prospects of defense pinned on the Royal Navy.

In part in the hope of deterring any Japanese move south, the British Admiralty, overruled on this issue by an insistent Churchill, had sent the battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Repulse
to Singapore, where they arrived at the beginning of December.
⁷
Without an attached aircraft carrier, they would be dependent for air support on the already hopelessly inadequate units of the Royal Air Force in Malaya. Hoping to surprise first the real Japanese landing at Khota Baru in north Malaya and, when discovered by Japanese reconnaissance, shifting to attack what proved to be an imaginary Japanese landing farther down the Malay coast, the British commander, Admiral Phillips, went down with both ships and hundreds of others under Japanese bombs and torpedoes on December 10. Coming on top of successful Japanese landings and air raids, this disaster for the British badly damaged both military and civilian morale in Malaya and Singapore, as it simultaneously exhilarated and spurred on the Japanese.

In the following weeks the energetic Japanese forces drove forward, outflanking British roadblocks and periodically surrounding and destroying such strong points as the defenders clung to.
⁸
Steadily driven back, the Indian, Australian, and United Kingdom units also began to lose heart. This situation was not remedied by the reinforcements sent to assist them. In the mistaken belief that parts of Malaya and Singapore might still be held, air reinforcements were sent in only to be used up
quickly in battle; in addition, large numbers of army units, British, Indian, and Australian, often made up of barely trained soldiers, poured into the battle through Singapore harbor. Demonstrating dramatically and sadly what would have happened if MacArthur had received the reinforcements he was calling for,
⁹
these additions to the defending forces served primarily to increase the eventual bag of Japanese prisoners. Sent elsewhere, they could have reinforced the new fronts being built up in Burma and Australia.

In a series of short but bloody battles in the second and third weeks of January, the Japanese broke the major British defenses in northern Johore province, the last important line that could protect the fortress.
¹⁰
The remaining British forces then retreated to the island, blew up the causeway connecting it to the mainland, and awaited the final Japanese blow. Almost no serious preparations to meet a siege had been made on the island of Singapore in the two months since fighting had begun any more than in the preceding decades of peace. When Japanese infantry assaulted across the straits, beginning in the night of February 8-9, they quickly gained footholds which they as quickly expanded.
¹¹
Some of the defenders fought hard, but others were clearly demoralized.
¹²
On February 15, the British commander, General Percival, surrendered about 70,000 soldiers, many of them having only just arrived with the last reinforcing convoys.

Two days after the surrender, General Sir Archibald Wavell, who had been put in charge of all Allied forces in southern Asia, wrote the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that he would have needed one additional month of fighting on the mainland of Malaya to build up an adequate defense for the Netherlands East Indies.
¹³
The subsequent analysis of the greatest disaster in British military history prepared in the British War Office in 1942 suggests that underestimation of the Japanese, lack of aggressive leadership, inadequate armaments, the constant splitting of divisions and even smaller units in battle, and the piecemeal tossing of reinforcements into battle all contributed to defeat.
¹⁴
The author of the official history added a divided command structure to this list. There was certainly plenty of blame to go around, but perhaps the most important points to be stressed are that a vigorous Japanese offensive crushed a partly dispirited, poorly handled and badly trained though much larger force at a time when the major focus of the defeated had perforce to be in another theater of war against a more threatening and powerful enemy. Even the temporary checks administered to that enemy by the RAF in the West, the Red Army in the East, and the British desert army in North Africa could not provide enough relief for adequate concentration against the assaulting Japanese.

This deficiency had become ever more dramatically obvious as, even during the Japanese run of victories in the Philippines and Malaya, the forces of the Allies were being crushed at other places. Before the fall of Singapore the Japanese advance southward had begun to strike into Burma and the East Indies. The campaign in Burma will be taken up shortly. The seizure of the East Indies was begun at practically the same time but completed first. On December 15 the Japanese began landing on the island of Borneo, important both for its location and its great oil resources. Divided between the British and Dutch, the island could not be defended seriously by either as both had to concentrate what forces they had available on other assignments: the British, the defense of Singapore; the Dutch, the protection of the island of Java. In two weeks the northwestern British portion of the island with its great resources was taken over; many of the oil installations had been destroyed by the British themselves, but not so effectively as to deny them to the Japanese for long. In January Japanese forces seized key points in Dutch Borneo and completed the conquest of the island by mid-February. Here, too, the oil installations though damaged were repairable.
¹⁵

In operations which overlapped with the latter stages of the attack on Dutch Borneo, the Japanese landed forces on the larger islands of the Netherlands East Indies: Sumatra, Celebes, and Amboina. To isolate the Allied troops on Java, and to provide a springboard toward Australia, the Japanese also landed on Timor in late February 1942. Since parts of this last island were Portuguese, there was great concern in the German government that Japanese action there could lead Portugal to offer facilities to the Allies on the Portuguese Azores, with very bad results for the German submarine campaign in the Atlantic; but while this issue produced endless diplomatic exchanges, it ended up having no significant impact on events (and neither did the lengthy holding out of a small Australian force on the island).
¹⁶

Vastly more important than the endless diplomatic discussions about Portuguese Timor was the core issue: could the Allies defend the key island of Java against the Japanese?
¹⁷
With the Japanese holding air superiority this was primarily a question of naval power. The Allies were able to put together a collection of Dutch, United States, and British cruisers and destroyers by now under the general command of the Dutch Admiral Conrad Emil Heltfrich, who had replaced Admiral Hart as a result of a series of complicated maneuvers reflecting Allied dissension rather than cooperation. Though fighting with incredible stamina and great bravery, the Allied naval force was simply no match for the larger, more numerous, and in part more modern Japanese naval forces escorting the invasion transports for Java. In the Battle of the Java Sea,
the largest surface naval battle since Jutland in 1916, the Japanese literally destroyed the Allied fleet in a series of engagements on February 27-28. Four American destroyers had been sent to Australia to refit; the other Allied ships, including five cruisers, were all sunk in this and immediately following engagements.
¹⁸
The whole action held up the Japanese landings for only one day. The main landings on Java took place on March 1, and on March 8 the remaining Dutch, British, Australian, and American soldiers on Java had to surrender.
¹⁹