Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.
Before the battlecruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: ‘Brussels ball once again.’ Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: ‘We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes…I know the old ship will give a good account of itself…Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried…not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship – she is much too lucky.’ Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: ‘Every man waved and put his thumb up to me…as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton…I saw the spirit which wins wars.’ Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: ‘RAF – Rare As Fucking Fairies!’
In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1/14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying anti-tank guns had no time to unlimber. ‘Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,’ wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. ‘The din was terrific…almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover…within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks…passed me…They had crashed right through our forward companies…I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.’
The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: thirty of its men were killed in their first action, while only two hundred escaped with their weapons, leaving most to be captured. An officer recorded ‘scenes of indescribable confusion, with small leaderless parties of Indian and Gurkha troops firing in every direction…no one appeared to know what was happening…their own artillery was falling short among the British troops’. Some units, notably including a battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, acquitted themselves well. But isolated stands were of little value when Japanese who met resistance repeatedly outflanked the defenders by infiltration through jungle the British had deemed impassable.
Duff Cooper, British resident minister in the Far East, wrote to Churchill about Britain’s military commander in Malaya, Arthur Percival: ‘a nice, good man…calm, clear-headed and even clever. But he cannot take a large view; it is all a field day at Aldershot to him. He knows the rules so well and follows them so closely and is always waiting for the umpire’s whistle to signal ceasefire and hopes that when the moment comes his military dispositions will be such as to receive approval.’ The British defence of Malaya was hampered by Percival’s limitations, poor communications, and the familiar institutional weakness of the British Army. Some units resorted to communication by bugle call when radio failed and field telephone lines were cut. The Japanese could exploit almost absolute command of sea and air. When Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces met stubborn resistance at Kampar in central Malaya, he simply launched a new amphibious landing to outflank the defenders. The British were confounded by bold Japanese use of tanks, against which the defenders lacked even Molotov cocktails. Yamashita’s three divisions, though heavily outnumbered, displayed an aggression and energy of which their opponents were bereft. Their commander penned a poem:
On the day the sun shines with the moon
The arrow leaves the bow
It carries my spirit towards the enemy
With me are a hundred million souls
My people of the East
On this day when the moon shines
And the sun also shines.
Churchill asserted that the Japanese army was expert in jungle warfare. Yamashita’s three divisions had indeed gained combat experience in China, but their men entered jungle for the first time when they landed in Malaya. In China, they had used horses for transport, but now bicycles were substituted – 6,000 were issued to each division, in addition to five hundred motor vehicles. In the intense heat the bikes suffered frequent punctures, and two-man repair teams attached to each company mended an average of twenty tyres a day. Infantrymen meeting resistance on roads merely sought a bypass, humping their machines across rivers and through jungle, pedalling up to twenty hours a day, carrying a sixty-pound pack behind their saddles. Even old Lt. Col. Yosuke Yokoyama, commanding an engineer regiment, rode a bicycle. Short, chunky, dripping with sweat, he followed close behind the leading infantry inspecting British demolitions and directing bridge repairs, effected by raiding local sawmills for lumber. The Japanese referred to the huge ration dumps they captured, and exploited for their own units, as ‘Churchill supplies’.
‘The Jitra line was penetrated in about fifteen hours by barely five hundred men,’ Col. Masanobu Tsuji wrote contemptuously. In that action, he reported Japanese casualties of only twenty-seven killed and eighty-three wounded. ‘The enemy retreated leaving behind as souvenirs about fifty field guns, fifty heavy machine-guns, three hundred trucks and armoured cars, and provisions for a division for three months. Over 3,000 men surrendered having thrown away their arms in panic and taken refuge in the jungle…The majority of these were Indian soldiers.’
Some such units crumbled swiftly, especially when their British officers fell, as many did. The reputation of the Indian Army suffered severely in Malaya, where the lack of motivation of many of its mercenaries was laid bare. The Japanese used ‘jitter’ tactics to formidable effect, panicking defenders into retreat and sometimes headlong flight by noisy demonstrations behind their front. The huge wartime expansion of the Indian Army had resulted in some British officers being deployed with only six months’ training in place of the usual thirty, and unable to speak Urdu, thus incapable of communicating with their men. The cultural chasm between foes was exposed when British troops surrendered. They expected the mercy customarily offered by European armies, even those of the Nazis; instead, they were stunned to see their captors killing casualties incapable of walking, often also unwounded men and civilians. The teenage daughter of a Chinese teacher who brought food to an Argyll officer in his jungle hiding place one day left a note in English for him about the Japanese: ‘They took my father and cut off his head. I will continue to feed you as long as I can.’ At an early stage, discipline collapsed in parts of Percival’s army, in a fashion evidenced by fleeing soldiers’ looting of Kuala Lumpur. Counterattacks, a vital element of any successful defence, were seldom pressed. Most Indian units were composed of young and poorly trained soldiers. Whatever else Percival’s subordinates lacked, they displayed considerable courage, reflected in a high loss rate among British officers striving by example to keep Indian troops fighting. In this, they were seldom successful: one entire Indian brigade simply melted away under attack.
Some British units performed no better: the 18th Division arrived at Singapore as a belated reinforcement, and suffered swift humiliation. One of its battalions, 6th Norfolks, lost six subalterns and a captain in its first seventy-two hours of action. The attacking force might be small, but Yamashita’s three divisions were among the best in the Japanese army; they moved fast, and losses seldom deterred them from mounting attacks. The code of bushido caused them to treat themselves as mercilessly as they did their foes. A Japanese fighter pilot crash-landing in Johore fired a pistol at curious Malays who surrounded him, then used his last bullet to shoot himself.
From the outset, fleeing British clung to the racial conventions