There is a new definition of the Manoeuvrist Approach – In the time that we have been producing the Malaya Campaign series in The Principles of War, the Australian Army has produced a new version of the LWD 3-0, so Army Doctrine is moving faster than this podcast!
We look at the new doctrine and the application of Manoeuvre Warfare and how it relates to the Malaya Campaign. Is Malaya the best example of the Manoeuvrist Approach that the Australian Army has ever been involved in?
We look at the application of tenets of manoeuvre theory.
- Focusing friendly action on the adversary’s centre of gravity.
- Achieving surprise.
- Identify and prioritise a main effort.
- Utilising deception.
- Reconnaissance pull.
- Operation Tempo
- Combined arms teams.
- Applications of joint fires and effects.
How did the Imperial
We discuss how the logistics tail for the Japanese could have been the critical vulnerability the Allies could have targeted.
We discuss the question of what would have happened if the 9th Division had been in Malaya rather than the 8th Division.
Got a favourite Australian military quote? Let us know, we are crowdsourcing a list of the best quotes about and by Australians.
We discuss how the Japanese were able to target the Allied moral centre of gravity and how the Asia for the Asian memes undermine the effectiveness of the British Army in Malaya.
With surprise, we look at the strategic surprise that the Allies experienced with Malaya. The fact that the Singapore strategy was well understood, especially by people like MAJ GEN Lavarack, who was arguing for a better ability to defend the country.
We look at Group Captain John Lerew and his famous signal “Morituri vos salutamus”. What would cause him to signal his higher headquarters “Those who are about to die, salute you.”
What effect did a racial bias play in the intelligence appreciation of the Japanese capabilities, especially given the kind of operations that the Japanese were conducting in places like Shanghai?
Transcripts
Was this really the most manoeuvrous campaign that the Australian army has ever fought in? And what, if anything, could have saved Malaya? We conduct the After Action Review. This is the Principles of War podcast, professional military education for junior officers and senior NCOs. Welcome back, everyone, to the podcast. This is our final episode on Mobile Malaya. Now, I don’t want to say that it’s taken us a long time to cover off on all of the things that needed to be discussed about Malaya, but in between starting the podcast series and getting to this point, the Australian army has released a new version of LWD three bar zero, our land warfare doctrine. So that gives you the indication of the pace that we’re moving at, probably a little bit too long. And, of course, in the new version, there is new information around manoeuvre warfare.
So our definition of the most manoeuvres campaign that the Australian army has ever fought in has changed. But that’s all right. Flexibility is a key principle of warfare and realistically, it doesn’t change a lot. So what I want to do is I want to work through some of the definitions in there, look at Malaya through the lens of the manoeuvrist approach, and then we want to look at what would have made a difference for the defence of Malaya. Now, when we started out, I asked the question if this was the most manoeuvrous campaign that the Australian army had ever fought in. And I was really quite worried that someone was going to say, well, what about this? You haven’t mentioned this or you haven’t thought about this. And there was a couple of people who spoke about the Western Desert.
And, yes, the Australian army fought really well in some of the campaigns there. They took some significant numbers of prisoners of war, but generally they were fighting against troops that weren’t expected to put up a stout resistance. And in the end, they didn’t. Singapore was very different to that. And Malaya, of course, prior to that, it wasn’t expected to fall. It was a massive shock to Churchill, to the Commonwealth and probably to the world that Singapore had fallen. And so I think that really we have come across the most manoeuvrous campaign, particularly when you start delving into what it is that a manoeuvrous campaign is meant to look like. So what does the latest discussion about the application of manoeuvre theory talk about? What does it look like?
Manoeuvre theory focuses commanders at every level on applying friendly strengths against adversary weaknesses, shielding friendly vulnerabilities and defeating the enemy’s will to fight through the destruction of the enemy plan rather than attrition of the physical force. So it’s good that we’re thinking about commanders at all levels. Hopefully, we’re aiming to synchronise the forces and the effects that we’re creating. We’re applying friendly strengths against the adversary’s weaknesses. That’s a good little bit of Sun Tzu popped in there. Shielding friendly vulnerabilities and defeating the enemy’s will to fight through the destruction of the enemy plan, shielding those friendly vulnerabilities. They’re the critical vulnerabilities that would have fallen out of your centre of gravity analysis. So we’re defeating the enemy’s will to fight. We’re not actually defeating the enemy, we’re defeating their will to fight. Excellent.
And we’re doing that by destroying their plan rather than attrition of the physical force. Why doesn’t the Australian army do that? Because the Australian army is really small and we don’t have the ability to fight an attritional war. It goes on with. Manoeuvre is used to shatter the enemy’s morale and physical cohesion through orchestrated actions across multiple lines of operation, creating an exponentially deteriorating situation, overwhelming the adversary’s physical and cognitive capacity to respond. So no longer are we creating a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope. We’re creating an exponentially deteriorating situation, overwhelming the adversary’s physical and cognitive capacity to respond. It then goes on to say that manoeuvre theory encourages land forces to leverage traditional physical means in order to achieve psychological effects in furtherance of strategic objectives. Leveraging traditional physical means. That’s probably alluding to kinetic effects.
That’s probably meaning that we’re going to be blowing things up. And that psychological effect, not only do we want them to have a bad day, we want them to feel like they’re having a bad day. We want to go that one step further. We want them to feel that their day is actually worse than it really is. And the appropriate use of kinetic means is an excellent way of doing that. Manoeuvre theory requires commanders and staff to undertake a detailed, comprehensive and ongoing analysis of the situation, mission requirements, relative strengths, characteristics of the operational environment and desired end states. That means we’re pretty much going to be continuing to do the military appreciation process as the battle unfolds.
The LAAN commander is going to focus friendly forces on fighting the enemy and adapting the scheme of manoeuvre to exploit opportunities, mitigate risks and generate a higher relative rate of action and thus decision superiority over the enemy. So this is alluding to the old OODA loop, Colonel Boyd’s observe, orientate, decide, act process, which he developed and then was modified through to, or evolved to be asda, which is act, sense, decide and adapt. Now, the exploiting of opportunities, a lot of that is inherent in Mission Command and we’ve moved Mission Command. This was talked about in the manoeuvre theory part of LWD3. That’s gone and they’ve now gone and put that away in a different part. It’s got its own part under command.
But it’s important to remember that Mission Command gives you that flexibility, particularly in environments where communications is degraded or the situation is unfolding so rapidly that you don’t want to be going up to higher headquarters asking the question, you want to seize and exploit that initiative relentlessly. It then goes on to talk about shaping and fighting the adversary rather than slavishly executing battle plans developed during the initial military appreciation process. It then goes on to list. It talks about the application of the tenets of manoeuvre warfare to joint land combat, emphasises the importance of the following principles. Now, these are focusing friendly action on the adversary’s centre of gravity, achieving surprise, identifying and prioritising a main effort using deception, recon pool, operational tempo, combined arms teams and the application of joint fires and effects.
So when it comes to focusing friendly action on the adversary’s centre of gravity, let’s start with the Japanese. Now, the. In the doctrine, it goes on to say that the enemy’s centre of gravity is constituted by those characteristics, capabilities or localities from which the adverse, the adversary derives freedom of action, physical strength or the will to fight. All physical action should be focused on destroying or dislocating the adversary centre of gravity in order to achieve the psychological disruption prescribed by manoeuvre theory. Okay, so that’s all well and good. Now. So strategically, they were focusing on the centre of gravity of the moral centre of gravity of the United States.
They didn’t think that the United States would be able to stomach a long war if the Japanese struck hard, struck quickly, took what they needed to get the resources that they needed to be able to fix the China problem. And you got to remember that’s the main effort is fixing what’s going on in China. So really, they want to. They want to really bloody everyone’s nose. And they want to make sure that everyone understands that it’s going to be a very long war and it’s going to be very painful unless you just allow Japan to create the Greater Co Prosperity Sphere. That was the end goal that they wanted to achieve. Now, one of the tenets that was in the old doctrine but isn’t in there now is orchestration.
So the Japanese want to knock the Allies out of the war as quickly as possible. So what they do is they create orchestration at a strategic level. And by orchestration, this is the whole orchestra, it’s the whole symphony. Not only that, they’ve got the Kwak singing along as well. Everyone is on the same page in the same hymn book. Because on the same day, they attack Pearl Harbour, they attack the Philippines, they attack Thailand, they attack Hong Kong, they attack Malaya, they attack Wake Island. This is all Japan, all within a 24 hour period, which is an incredible amount of orchestration when you think about it, to have armies so geographically dispersed, we just think about the issues that you’ve got with weather. It’s an amazing effort to be able to synchronise that level of activity across the army and navy.
Now obviously, as we know, the moral centre of gravity was a little bit stronger than they thought it was. And the Americans were more than prepared to once aroused with anger, to fight the war in its entirety until its completion. So that was the issue for the Japanese. Operationally, of course, in Malaya they saw the army as the centre of gravity. And the goal for Yamashita was to destroy the army. He didn’t want them to be able to withdraw into Singapore. As we know, he was able to take Malaya within 55 days. But he failed in that strategy, in the operational goal of destroying the army on the peninsula before it could withdraw to Singapore. Now, as it turned out, it didn’t really matter. It was so badly demoralised and so badly beaten that it made a little difference.
And the battle for Singapore was not as anywhere near as bad as it could have been. Now, I think that in the strategic centre of gravity construct lies the operational critical vulnerability that could have been targeted by the Allies. So Force Z was sunk by naval aircraft from a land based airfield. Now that was because there were no carriers in the area. The carriers were off attacking Pearl Harbour. Yamashita left one of his divisions in Taiwan. Why did he do that? Because he didn’t have the logistics capability to land it and then supply it. The logistics tale was so precarious for the Japanese, but the Allied appreciations never understood this fact. And if they had, they would have probably put a lot more effort in not willy nilly supplying the Japanese and acting as their Q store. As well as their own.
They would have made sure that the supplies at the airfields were blown up. They would have made sure that the fuel and bombs at the airfields would have blown up. They would have made sure that all of the supplies in all of the towns that they took were destroyed before they were taken by the Japanese. None of this happened and it made a significant increase in the tempo that Yamashita was able to generate. So for the Allies, they saw that their centre of gravity was the port, which, given the current doctrine, the centre of gravity is constituted by those characteristics, capabilities or localities from which the adversary derives freedom of action.
So they were trying to protect the port in Singapore and that was to enable the incoming reinforcements to have somewhere to come in so that they could build up their forces so that they could resume the offensive. The problem was, though, that they conducted an entirely defensive campaign. All they were trying to do was to buy time by conducting a series of set piece defensive battles, which they were hoping was going to buy them enough time for the reinforcements to come through for them to retake the offensive. Operationally, probably not too bad an idea. Tactically, it was a disaster because they were never able to fight the kind of fight that they wanted to be able to fight. Well, I shouldn’t say never. There was a couple of times when they could. The battle of Camp R is the perfect example of that.
They were able to pick ground of their choosing. And this is a big thing. They had ground of their choosing because a lot of the time they didn’t have ground of their choosing. There was no cooperation between the Air Force and the army in the placement of the airfields, which meant that the army was often fighting on ground of the Air Force’s choosing, which put them at a significant disadvantage at Campah. They picked the ground they were able to fight. And the regiment that first went up against the Indians at Campah was so badly mauled, it didn’t even take any place in the fighting in Singapore. That’s how badly mauled it was. Good ground, good use of artillery enabled the British to fight the kind of battle that they wanted to do. There was a couple of other times that it happened.
Gamas is a minor example of that, but in reality the way of Japanese fighting was just far too fluid for that set piece battle. Once they came up against a hard block, they would skirt around it, and that was if they couldn’t do a filleting attack just by going straight up the road. And that’s one of the things that sets Campah apart, was the Fact that there was actually fairly good cooperation with the artillery, that happened rarely in many of the other battles. Now, as a side note to that, one of the interesting things that’s been really great about the podcast so far has been the discussions that have been taking place, some on Twitter, some on Facebook as well. And someone asked a really good question, what would have been like if it was the ninth Division rather than the eighth?
And I think that there’s another question. There’s a similar question. When you look at the fighting at a section level, at platoon level, the soldiers of the 8th did a really good job. They were acknowledged by the Japanese as being really strong, aggressive fighters. And I think that you could probably argue quite convincingly that they bested the Japanese infantry when it was a fair fight. The big problem is that the higher you went, the less likely our troops were to be put in a fair fight. So Brigadier Taylor did. Did a fairly good job. Brigadier Maxwell, not quite so much. How did he get to be a brigade commander? That’s an interesting question. And above him. So Major General Bennett, at the time he was commanding 8th Division.
And I can’t help but think, what would it have been like if it had been Leslie Moore’s head in charge of 8th Division rather than Gordon Bennett? I think that’s a really interesting question to ask. They both talked a pretty good talk. So Gordon Bennett really had Wavell really quite impressed with his capabilities. And based on the way that he talked himself up, he was able to get enough troops to effectively be almost running a core headquarters, which was really sad and problematic because he struggled to have a functioning div headquarters. And with the extra troops, it just compounded matters exponentially. Now one of the things I’ve started doing is I’ve started creating a list of all of the interesting quotes from history for the Australian military forces. And the one that I started off one was one from Moore’s head.
And when he was in Tobruk, he saw a British propaganda piece that said that to brook we can take it. And Morse head said, we’re not here to take it, we’re here to give it. And it’s that kind of fighting spirit that was sorely needed in Malaya. Now, not only could he did he able to come up with a pithy quote, he was actually able to execute on that, which was something that Bennett was never really able to do. So these series of set piece defensive battles allowed the Japanese to continually outflank the Allied positions, which allowed them to get closer and closer to Singapore. And meant that by outflanking the troops, they often ended up behind the front line or behind enemy lines, which decreased morale and a huge number of prisoners were taken.
This is one of the other things that I think is really interesting, and this is the moral centre of this gravity in a situation. Now, this is something that not a lot of people have been talking about, but I think is probably fundamental to why the Indian army fought so badly. So you’ve got Indian troops and, let’s face it, the relationship between the British and India is not that great. At this time, there’d been multiple massacres india conducted by the British army. Not only that, the treatment of Indian workers in Malaya was so bad that the Indian government was actually trying to stem the number of people who were coming out to Malaya from India because they were being mistreated. The wages that they were paid were very poor, and there was civil unrest there.
And the British had used Indian troops to put down Indian strikes in Malaya. On top of this, there was the example of the racial segregation that was occurring in Malaya, where British officers would go out and the Indian officers were unable to go into a club or a swimming pool because they were black. Now, what happened was that the Japanese were able to create a critical vulnerability that they were able to target through this meme of Asia for Asians. And this was the genesis of the Indian national army, the army that was raised from Indian troops to actually fight the British, because the Japanese were able to say, well, we’ll give you freedom. Are you prepared to die for the cause that you represent?
As you sit in a defensive position, waiting for the enemy to attack, knowing that enemy is probably going to help you get independence for your country. This is a very interesting part of the centre of gravity analysis, which I don’t think enough work’s been done on. There was definitely significant unrest between the Indian population and the native Malays as well. Flip side of that, of course, is that there was a significant number of Chinese and they were very sympathetic to the British because they knew exactly what Japanese rule was going to mean for them. They feared that the Japanese would come in and they would conduct some sort of atrocity, which was exactly what happened with the Sook Ching massacre that occurred after the fall of Singapore. So that’s centre of gravity.
The Allies did a poor job of centre of gravity analysis, as did the Japanese. When you think about it, their strategic centre of gravity was incorrect. And operationally, they had the right centre of gravity. They just weren’t able to execute on that plan. Now, the next one’s a really interesting one. Achieving surprise. And when we look at surprise, there’s. There’s two components to it. One is the. The actual surprise or the. The party doing the surprising. And then there’s the surprise E. The people who are being surprised. And the Allies were fundamentally surprised by this. How did that come about that we could be so badly surprised? And I think that there’s a couple of interesting parts in it. Firstly, Percival, when he did his appreciation, basically worked out what the Japanese plan was going to be.
He thought that Singapore was the fundamental part of the. Or the port in Singapore was the fundamental part. To be able to protect that, they would need to defend Malaya and Singapore was too difficult to assault. So the Japanese would land in northern Malaya and they would move down the peninsula. Probably they would also come in through Thailand as well. And that’s exactly what happened. So there was years and years of knowledge about what the Japanese would do if they were to do it. Secondly, Major General Laverack was one of the people who was saying, the Singapore strategy is probably not going to work. We need a more robust defence force to be ready to be able to defend the nation. Now, it’s easy for that to be dismissed.
He’s the Chief of the General Staff and he just wants a bigger army to be able to play with. And that’s kind of the thing that he’s meant to say. But the problem is when he is right, when his appreciation is of the geopolitical sphere is correct and we are in grave danger and the politicians don’t do anything. And that is what happened here. And this affected everyone. It affected navy, army and air force. And there’s a great quote about that. One of the things I’ve done is I’ve created a page to create a list of all of the great Australian military quotes because I couldn’t find one. And so I wanted to put one place where we can put all of the great quotes in there. And someone had a quote from Group Captain John LaRue.
So he was stationed out at a airfield in Rabaul. Now, all he had there was some Hudsons and some Wirraways which were. And the Wirraways were meant to be used as fighters. They were never designed as that. And no one apart from RAAF headquarters thought that they could be used in that role. And at one point the headquarters reached down and they threatened to relieve him for his lack of results. And they wanted to know what his excuse was. And one of the excuses that he gave was disappointment in the lack of assistance rendered by the Almighty, which I think is a pretty good excuse. The situation gets worse. At one point, he’s down to one Hudson bomber and two Wirraways. This is after another Japanese air raid.
The Japanese fighters added to the humiliation of the damage that they’ve done by executing aerobatics over the airfield. He signals two Wirraways useless defence. Will you please now send some fighters? And the reply that he got was, regret inability to supply fighters. If we had them, you would get them. Now, the next day, he was ordered to attack the approaching Japanese fleet with all available aircraft. So this is just two Wirraways and one Hudson bomber. Now, the Wiriway is a. Well, it’s a trainer with no bomb rack, so he’s only got one bomber to be able to execute this mission. He tries to go to find the enemy fleet. He’s unable to. The next day, RF Headquarters instruct him to keep the airfield open, at which point he replied with his famous signal, moroccuri vos salutamus.
Now, that message obviously created some confusion within headquarters. I wonder how many times they decoded it to see if they were getting it right. Until someone looked at it and recognised it for what it was, which is Latin. He was able to get a book to decode it. And it’s the famous, legendary phrase that the ancient gladiators used when they were going into the games at the Coliseum. We who are about to die salute you. Now, the good news is he didn’t die. He refused orders to abandon his crew there. He flew them back and went on for quite a distinguished career. We get that pithy little quote because of strategic surprise. Now, you can’t create a fleet. You can’t add capital ships overnight. You can’t create squadrons overnight. You can’t create divisions overnight. And this is the concept of strategic surprise.
This is what happened to Australia. The amount of notice that we received that were going to be engaged in a war with an enemy in New guinea was too little. This is why Group Captain LaRue was fighting with Wirraways and Hudsons. This is why 8th Division fully expected to be fighting in the Middle East. And the amazing thing about this is that when the appreciation was done, far too many people were making an appreciation of the Japanese capabilities based on a racial bias, which is criminal. The evidence was there. Their capabilities against the Russian Navy was well demonstrated. Their capabilities against the Chinese was there for everyone to see. Places like Shanghai had large diplomatic communities there, so everyone could see what was going on. Everyone could see the viciousness of the fighting. Everyone could see the capability that they were doing.
They were mounting amphibious operations, large amphibious operations, supported by naval, by carrier aviation. And yet no one was able to put two and two together and say, this is going to be a significant problem for us. It wasn’t even foreseen that with the increasing trade restrictions and that the United States was putting on the Japanese, that sooner or later it was highly likely that they were going to do something about that. Part of it probably was just wishing away the problem, and part of it was a failure to properly appreciate the capabilities that the Japanese Navy and the Japanese army had. Both of them are incredibly negligent mistakes to make, and they are mistakes that were incredibly expensive for the United States, for Britain and for Australia. At an operational level, the Japanese were able to use their amphibious capabilities to create surprise.
So when the going got tough, they were able to outflank the Allies out of the positions. And Kampar is a perfect example of that big defeat for the Japanese. They realised that they weren’t going to be able to get through that defensive position, so they just thought, well, that’s fine, we’ll land troops to the south of it and we’ll cut off the withdrawal route. And that’s exactly what happened. They withdrew out of Kampah and they moved down. And that was just before the Battle of Slim river, which was a complete debacle. At the tactical level. There was two things that enabled them to have that surprise. Firstly was the tempo that they were able to generate, that operational tempo that was just absolutely relentless, particularly with the tanks. And the tanks.
The tanks had been trained to run over their own troops if they had to. It was important just to keep on going. And, you know, they only had the road to go on a lot of the time. So they just kept on going, going and going. And on multiple occasions, they would run into a battery that was still limbered up. They would run into troops that they would machine gun off the road, and then the troops would just watch the tanks as they drove by, and they would continue going deeper into the rear areas of the Allied forces. When that didn’t work for them, of course, search for the flank, and then cut off the withdrawal route. Which brings us to one of the few occasions that Allied troops were able to surprise the Japanese.
And this is because they were so big on generating operational tempo that they completely paid off security. So the troops going over the bridge, Akamas, no scouts out forward, just bicycle infantry and it’d be pretty hard to shoot your rifle when you’re riding your push bike. And they paid the penalty for that. The thing was that even though they completely paid off security, they were far too infrequently held to account for doing that. So we’ve covered off on the issues around the centre of gravity. We’ve talked about moral centres of gravity as well, and I think that there’s a lot of work that can be done in this space. It’s going to be really quite an interesting discussion, I think. I would like to think when we talk about centres of.
When we talk about centres of gravity and we’ve talked a little bit about surprise and the way that it manifested itself on the battlefield. Next week we’re going to come back and we’ll talk about the rest of the tenants of manoeuvre warfare and we’re going to look at the big things that led to the fall of Malaya. The Principles of War podcast is brought to you by James the show notes for the Principles of War podcast are available at www.theprinciplesofwar.com. For maps, photos and other information that didn’t make it into the podcast, follow us on Facebook or Tweet us at surprisePodcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on itunes and tag a mate in one of our episodes. All opinions expressed by individuals are those of those individuals and not of any organisation.
