17 – Malaya Campaign After Action Review Part II

We look at the remaining principles of Manoeuvre Warfare in the conduct of the Malaya Campaign.

Percival attempted to be strong everywhere and was never able to generate enough combat power to slow the Japanese.

We look at the loss of Force Z and how it decreased the Allied ability to influence the war at sea and the sea lines of communication.  The loss of Force Z created an exponentially deteriorating situation which denied the Allies the time required to

Deception was not really used well.  The Allies were quite good at signalling their intentions and movements to the Japanese.

Recon Pull was well used by the Japanese with their recon in force.  Success was reinforced and any slow down lead to a flanking manoeuvre, either by land or by sea.

Combined Arms Teams – why weren’t the Allies able to use their combined arms teams to defeat the light Japanese infantry and light tanks?  We look at what was lacking.  The story of LT Russell ‘Bill’ McCure highlights the lack of training in the use of artillery for the Battalion COs.  Employing the guns worked very effectively when the Allies were able to do it, but sadly, this happened to infrequently.

We look at some of issues that lead to the erosion of trust within the Allied battalions.

Operational Tempo – the Japanese were able to rotate troops through the front line and bring them out to rest.  Some of the Allied COs were sent to hospital with sleep deprivation.  This highlights the difference between the Allies and the Japanese.

Application of joint fires and effects – The Japanese did a better job than the Allies, however the Japanese didn’t fully exploit their advantage that they had with regard to air superiority.

What could have made a difference in the Malaya Campaign?

Yamashita had culminated just prior to the Allied surrender of Singapore.  What would have made a difference in the conduct of the defence?

The allocation of resources?  More fighters (with trained pilots) and tanks.  Tanks!

Ensuring that Allied supplies did not fall into the hands of the Japanese.  Too many trucks, POL installations, rations, and ammunition fell into the hands of the Japanese.

We look at the moral implications in the campaign.

Lastly, we discuss the training and leadership of the Allies.

Check out the show notes for the podcast for images and more details for this and other podcast episodes.

Transcripts

What does reconnaissance pool look like in the jungles of Malaya? Welcome to part two of the After Action Review.

This is the Principles of War podcast, professional military education for junior officers and senior NCOs.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. We’ve got a few of the tenants of manoeuvre warfare to go through and then we’ll finish up with what were the things that could have been changed that would. That potentially could have made a bit of a difference in Malaya. So the ones that we’ve got to go identifying and prioritising the main effort, utilising deception, recon pool, operational tempo, combined arms team and the applications of joint fires and effects. So identifying and prioritising a main effort. This was something that the Japanese did really quite well. I think they had a scheme of manoeuvre that was flexible and allowed them to either push the Allies out of each of their defensive positions or dislocate them out of them by threatening their withdrawal routes. From an Allied perspective, though, not so much.

This was very much a case of Percival wanting to be strong everywhere. And even though he had the force ratio to be able to do that, even though he had more troops than the Japanese, his efforts to be strong everywhere meant that he was really strong nowhere. The big opportunity was to create a defensive battle, get the Japanese forces engaged, decisively engaged, and then use a reserve to outflank them and to destroy them in place. That was never achieved at all. Now, one of the big issues that he had, of course, was that he and Lt. Gen. Yamashita, both of them were fighting secondary efforts of secondary efforts. So obviously, Britain is fighting for its very survival. In December 1941, the situation is quite dire. The Germans are advancing relentlessly across Russia.

Some people think that Russia has only got months left to live, and if that occurs, then that is going to be a decisive event in the German war plan, and it’s going to free them up to, of course, focus directly on the invasion of Great Britain, so what resources they can spare, they are sending to the Russians. And so they’re probably about three months in to spinning up, really starting to get those convoys going and sending across as many supplies as they can. As we’ve discussed with Yamashita, the Malayan campaign was just one of many things that were going on outside of China, and China was their main effort. So both of them are really quite a long way down the pecking order when it comes to getting supplies and reinforcements.

And I think in some respects there’s an element of a disconnect between Fortress Singapore, what Fortress Singapore meant. It meant different things to different people. To Percival, Fortress Singapore was the kind of the name that you give the island. It was a name only it wasn’t a real fortress. For Churchill, it was a real fortress. It was impregnable, never going to fall. But with the increasingly desperate pleas for reinforcements, he did want to do something and this is why he fought for the creation and dispatch of Force Zed. So it was meant to be an aircraft carrier in the two capital shifts, Prince of Wales and Repulse. The aircraft carrier Indomitable struck a reef, wasn’t able to make it out there. Who knows what difference it would have played in the battle.

I think it probably would have just sunk along with Prince of Wales and Repulse. The admirals in the navy were very much against it because they realised that the two ships were. Were definitely too little and probably too late to be able to make a difference in the battle for Singapore. And I wonder, if Churchill realised the dire position that Singapore was in, would he. Could he have dispatched five squadrons of Hurricanes? What difference would that have made? Potentially a significant one, particularly if they were dispatched prior to the destruction of Force Zone, because I think Forced and its destruction, this is one of the turning points in the campaign. The Japanese were incredibly worried about Allied capital ships in theatre because of the fact that they were going to do a couple of things. One, inhibit their sea lines of communication.

That line is pretty tenuous at the best of times. It’s so tenuous that Yamashita left an entire division behind because of the fact that he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to get enough supplies. Forced would also have been able to dominate areas of the ao. It would have been able to deny the Japanese the freedom of manoeuvre that they needed to be able to conduct amphibious operations. They were quite concerned about this. Landings were called off because of the fact that people. At one point there was a faulty reconnaissance report detailing an Allied capital ship. An amphibious operation was called off because of it, because it was too risky to be able to conduct that kind of operation, which with Allied capital ships in the area.

When we talked in the last episode about the orchestration that the Japanese were able to create with their simultaneous invasions in theatre, what would have been going through Churchill’s mind at that time? Now, obviously it means the entry of the Americans into the war. This is something that he’s been waiting for a very long time. But it also means that they’re unclear about what effects have been, what damage has been done in Pearl Harbour. And the big thing was that Force Z were the only capital ships in the entire Indian and Pacific Ocean area. So the carriers hadn’t been attacked at Pearl Harbour, they were going back to the US west coast. There was nothing there. Nothing.

And this is that fundamental thing Admiral Phillips did, what naval tradition dictated that he must do, what someone needed to do in the Admiralty, or Churchill himself. Say, we need those ships, we can’t afford to lose those ships, we need to withdraw them. Because being a fleet in being, having. Being able to threaten Japanese sea lines of communication, being able to threaten their operations, that was something that they lost when they were sunk. And then there was no one able to do that. No one. And for me, that is the embodiment of the creation of that turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation, or as we call it now, an exponentially deteriorating situation. That is an exponentially deteriorating situation. All of the American battleships have been sunk, the Philippines have been invaded, Malaya’s been invaded, Hong Kong’s been invaded.

It takes time to start processing all of those sort of things. And there’ll be lots of things that are going through people’s minds. Lots of planning, lots of communication, lots of waiting to get information. And it’s in that time that the Japanese strike, before someone can rationally assess what it is. What is the mission? What is the purpose of Force Z? Has the mission changed? Is it no longer valid? No one has the time to be able to think about that because the situation has exponentially deteriorated. And with the sinking of Force Z, that situation has deteriorated even further. And that is the essence of manoeuvre warfare. Now, onto utilising deception, there wasn’t a lot of the utilisation of deception. The British were really quite good at signalling the kind of things that they were doing.

There was a press report about new fighters arriving in Singapore. That’s interesting reading for the Japanese. I’m sure it was in the papers when Force Z arrived. These are all good things to be reading in your daily paper about your enemy, and certainly the exact opposite of deception. The Japanese had done quite a good job of infiltrating expats and sympathisers to feed them with information. Having said all of that, Yamashita said after the war that the Malaya campaign went the way that it did because they dramatically underestimated the number of Allied troops in Malaya and Singapore. He rolled lightly, which enabled him to roll quickly, and he only rolled as lightly as he did because he didn’t think there was as many troops as there actually were in Malaya. Which brings us on to recon pull. So recon pulled a really interesting one.

Very difficult to do from a defensive point of view. Of course, you need to be fairly aggressive in your defensive battle if you’re going to be using recon pull. Much, much more useful in the offence. So recon pool actively seeking to identify weaknesses and vul in the enemy scheme of manoeuvre, or tactical disposition for exploitation, guided by a tactical analysis conducted during the map, but confirmed by dedicated intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance capabilities in order to overcome enemy deception measures, Recon pool ensures that friendly strengths are pitted against adversary weaknesses at the point of main effort to achieve decisive physical and psychological effects. So the way that the Japanese did this, they were much less on the use of isr. There wasn’t a lot of it was recon in force.

And it really comes down to the two tactics that we’ve talked about time and time again. So the filleting attack. I’m going to see if I can punch through this defensive position and if I can, I’m just going to keep going. I will keep going and going, because the hard bit is fighting through that. The fibre, the forward edge of the battle area. All of the juicy stuff is well and truly behind that. And that’s going to be the troops who aren’t in a defensive position, the troops who are just moving, doing an admin move along the road. You know, particularly when you’re in a tank. I can only imagine how exciting that would be to be in your tank as you’re going down the road at top speed and to come across, you know, trucks with troops on board. That would be.

That’s what the tankers are looking for. And when that didn’t work, then, of course, let’s feel for the flank, feel for the flank. Keep going until you find that flank, then move around and continue on into the rear. Now, that was the Japanese way of doing business and we’ve seen how effective that was. So what I want to do is I want to leave that there and I want to go on to the next one, which is combined arms team. Because the antidote for the Japanese way of conducting war really was just the proper execution of the way that the British liked to fight, just with a couple of minor tweaks. And the difficulty was creating the situation for these minor tweaks to come about.

So the first one was trust, because what we want you to do is that when you do get outflanked, you’re just going to stay and fight. Because what should happen is that everyone should now pour all of the resources that they’ve got into punching through and marrying up on your position. If the Japanese have gone round and they’ve taken the road behind you, then if you’re fighting to get out and the flanking unit is fighting to get in, then the Japanese are fighting on both sides. And the really big part of this is the combined arms team. And this is something that, for just some unknown reason, was not something that was done well at all. Lots of Australian battalion commanders didn’t understand the employment of artillery. And so we’ve got the classic example at the Battle of Bakri with Lt.

McCuir that we talked about, where he was placing guns in places that the battalion commander, the co, didn’t want them because that was what he was meant to do. And it was because of that he was able to destroy eight tanks. So why didn’t it work? Well, for starters, you need to be fairly specific when you pick the terrain that you’re going to be fighting a static defence on. And this is particularly difficult in jungle locations, places like Malaya, because it’s very mountainous. And mountainous terrain is difficult for artillery for a couple of reasons. One is crest clearances, so you’ve got to be able to get a round from where the guns are to where the enemy are. And if there’s hills in the way, sometimes the rounds are going to hit those hills. Secondly, unique communication with the guns and that is difficult.

There was issues with radio, so there was a big fear within the Australian headquarters. There was a lot of fear around the use of Japanese direction fighting equipment, which I can’t actually find that they had that capability. So they were relying on comms, cable a lot, which didn’t work out that well for them in multiple occasions. So the lack of communication capability and the difficulty of the terrain meant that generally the guns needed to be employed in a direct fire role. That’s not ideal because you’ve got trained gun crews and they’re susceptible to enemy small arms fire when they’re being used in a direct fire role. This is one of the big lessons that thousands and thousands of gunners learnt the hard way in World War I. However, in the jungle, the engagement distances are closer.

There is the opportunity for that combined arms effect to be generated and we saw that on multiple occasions. It was just the fact that it was never done enough. Employing the guns in the anti tank role worked on multiple occasions. Either when the guns were in a prepared position or when they were under attack and they were able to un limber quickly enough and to be able to start getting some rounds off to destroy the tanks. But the problem was there just wasn’t the training or the understanding around the employment of artillery. And this dramatically impeded the ability to generate a combined arms effect. The Japanese were really quite predictable when it came to their flanking manoeuvres, so there was a lot of scope to shape them into the activity that you wanted them to do.

So prevent that hard surface across the road, make it deny them the ability to conduct a filleting attack. Then they are going to start feeling around for the flank. Now you know where your flank is, you therefore know where it is that they’re going to be moving. Now that gives you a couple of options. You can conduct defensive fires into those likely forming up places where the enemy is going to be conducting their flanking attacks, or you can ambush them as they’re moving around. Once again, though, it required trust. And on multiple occasions, the ability to synchronise the manoeuvre of different units was just not available. There was no attack put in to relieve the 2nd 19th and the 2nd 29th as they were fighting their withdrawal from Bakri.

Now there were British units that were meant to put in an attack and they dilly daddillied for way too long until the attack was eventually called off. And Australian units could have done the same thing. But Bennett wasn’t prepared to put the Australian troops in. This undermines the trust that is required. You’re much less likely to stay and fight if you know that no one’s going to be coming to your aid. Now, operational tempo. I’m not going to talk too much about operational tempo, because that is effectively the whole story of the Japanese. The way that they generated operational tempo was so good that they were actually able to pull troops out of the front line and rest them. So the poor defenders, they’re just being defeat after defeat and they’re being pushed back, they’re deprived of sleep.

Multiple Australian battalion commanders ended up in hospital from sleep deprivation because the conditions were so arduous. And yet you’ve got Yamashita over the other side of the front line and he’s taking units out for a couple of days of rest. That is a fundamental part of the generation of that operational tempo. He was able to swap out troops that had been attacking aggressively and put in other troops and that maintained the operational tempo, which created a situation which once again was exponentially deteriorating. Now, the doctrinal definition of operational tempo talks about enabling a friendly force to seize and maintain the initiative. That high rate of operational tempo is achieved through decision superiority and a function of superior command and control relative to the adversary. And that sadly, the higher up you went, the more it was lacking across the entire Malaya force.

Decision superiority is achieved when the commander is able to more rapidly and accurately translate information into actionable intelligence, shape the enemy in accordance with intent, and conceive and execute decisive manoeuvre faster than the adversary can counter it. Maintenance of a higher rate of operational tempo amplifies the deleterious psychological impact on the enemy prescribed by manoeuvre theory. And the commanders in Malaya Command talked about the cancer that ate through the force. And that cancer was this surrender and withdrawal mindset that became that permeated the entire of Malaya Command. It started out when withdrawal routes were seized by the Japanese, forcing the surrender of large numbers of Allied troops. And then it got to the point where even the threat of the seizure of a withdrawal route meant that the troops would pull out.

And this meant that the Allies were never able to get the breathing space that they needed to be able to create the defensive works that they needed to be able to fight the battle that they wanted to fight. Yamashita was just too quick. Which brings us on to the last one, the application of joint fires and effects. So land forces leverage capabilities across all environments and war fighting domains to achieve physical and psychological effects on the adversary. The application of joint fires and effects from the land and sea and the electromagnetic spectrum in support of land manoeuvre greatly increases the lethality and effectiveness of the force. It also compounds force protection and counter response dilemmas for the enemy, assisting in the preservation of combat power by avoiding unnecessary attrition through close combat. Now, this is something that neither side really did that well.

The Japanese obviously gained air superiority really quite early in the operation, and at times the effect of air power was quite overwhelming. Lt. Col. Anderson became an acting brigade commander because the Brigade Commander’s headquarters had been hit by a bomb dropped from a Japanese aircraft. And that had pretty much killed his entire staff and stunned him so badly that he was unable to perform his role for 24 hours. But there were numerous occasions where Australian troops talked about, particularly on the withdrawal from Bakri. They talked about how the vehicles were bunching up and they were such a juicy target for Japanese aircraft, which thankfully never came. And the most damning lack of Japanese air power was right at the end when the only way to get off the Malayan peninsula was the causeway that led to Singapore.

Had that been bombed, had that been strafed, it could have dramatically increased the number of troops that would have surrendered because there was nowhere for them to go. Yet Yamashita was not able to get the air power that he required to be able to do that. Now, we don’t know why that was the case. They’d certainly been able to generate air superiority, generate air to ground missions in the past, but for some reason they let most of Malaya command escape across the causeway. The Japanese navy, of course, was spread so thin, that was why there was no naval bombardment that I was able to find. Once again, though, the hilly terrain on the Malayan peninsula probably meant that naval gunfire wouldn’t have been as effective as it has been in other campaigns. So that’s the effect of manoeuvre on the Malaya campaign.

What could have made a difference, what should have made a difference? What could have been done better? And I think that there’s multiple things here. Now, of course, I don’t think Malaya probably wasn’t savable without a significant readjustment of the strategic allocation of resources. However, Yamashita said, so we are going to come back to Singapore and I don’t want to give the story away, but Yamashita said that it was a very near run thing. And when he demanded the surrender of Percival, he had nothing. He had culminated. He’d conducted a large artillery barrage with most of his guns and he’d shot off most of his ammunition. That was to create that psychological effect. He wanted everyone to be thinking, there’s plenty more of that where it came from. You either surrender now or I kill everyone tomorrow.

That was the effect that he wanted to create. That’s what he wanted Percival thinking. That’s what Percival thought. It wasn’t actually the case. So what would have happened if some of the things had been done a little bit differently? Obviously, the first thing would have been not committing force. Zed, that’s something that was outside of the role of Percival, higher up than him, something that the Admiralty or Churchill should have been looking at. Secondly, the allocation of resources. I think that a few resources would have gone a lot further. They initially had some Battle of Britain pilots there, but they were rotated out and relatively unexperienced pilots were rotated in. I think that was probably a big mistake.

Had the appreciation been made that the critical vulnerability to go after was the logistics chain for Yamashita, I think that the war would have been dramatically different. A large number of trucks were given to the Japanese. A large amount of fuel was given to the Japanese. Food, ammunition. He called them Churchill supplies. Now, the generating of operational tempo precluded the timely destruction of those supplies. But if that had gone ahead, I think that Yamashita would not have been able to generate the tempo that he was able to generate. And it really generates this positive feedback cycle. Because things are moving so quickly. Some supplies get handed over to the enemy, which means that they’re able to move faster, which means that more supplies are handed over to the enemy, which means that they can move faster. He made some inspired choices.

The fact that he had 30,000 bicycles in his force enabled his troops to move very quickly with very little logistics tail requiring to keep them moving. But I think that highlights the necessity of the oily rag mentality to logistics that Yamashita was undertaking from a grand strategic point of view. And I know it’s very easy for us to look back with our eyes and see the mistakes that were being made. But I would have thought that some people probably would have seen that treating Malaya as a tin and rubber repository and exploiting the people there relentlessly was probably not a long term viable solution. It created a moral, critical vulnerability that the Japanese were able to exploit. They were getting information about troop dispositions. They were getting assistance where they required it from the inhabitants of Malaya.

Not only that, it fed into a unwillingness of the Indian troops to stand and fight. Had the Indian and Malay workers been treated fairly, had there not been the industrial unrest that had been there prior to the war breaking out, and had there not been racial segregation amongst the Indian troops, if relationships had been a little bit better india, I think that they probably would have fought more aggressively. Which brings me to the last point. And I think that definitely when you look at the Australian troops, the Aussie troops fought really well at platoon, at company and at battalion level, they fought really well at brigade less so. And at Div. They were really badly led. That leadership component was lacking in so many cases. This is partly the fact that they had that the 8th Division had been raised so quickly.

It was the third of the divisions to be raised. So the talent pool for officers and senior NCOs had been significantly depleted already. But the Australian digger has a natural inherent capability and that shone through. There just wasn’t enough time to really shake out those tactics, techniques and procedures that they needed to fight in the jungle. And Malaya command in general, I think had some significant problems. The fact that you had battalions that had been in a defensive position for over a year and that defensive position was still not fully developed. That just boggles the mind. What were they doing? Where was the sense of urgency? And I think the last point, and probably the most fitting point of the discussion is really around Lt. Col. Ian Stewart of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He was the CEO who could see what was happening.

He’d been given a battalion that was positioned in the jungle, so he thought, well, we need to learn to fight in the jungle. He took the battalion out, he taught them to fight in the jungle, he taught them mission command, and for it he was labelled a crank. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were badly cut up. They took significant casualties because they became the go to battalion to plug the gap when it was all falling apart, because they were the battalion that was fighting the best in that forward defence in northern Malaya. We can only speculate what it would have been like if more of the British and Indian units at the Bataan level had spent more time out in the jungle rather than in the mess in the afternoons when it was hot and sticky and sweaty.

The fact that there were some units who had not actually been in the jungle by the time the war started is a damning indictment on the training programme and the leadership skills of those COs. And I think it’s fitting that Lt. Col. Stewart was the last person off the Malaya peninsula. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, augmented by some of the Royal Marines who had survived the sinking of Force Z, formed up. The Pipers were at the front, piping Highland Laddie, and they marched across Lieutenant Colonel Stewart, last one across the causeway. That was the end of the battle for Malaya and the start of the battle for Singapore.

Now I will come back and look at the battle for Singapore, partially because I think it’s important that we look at that and partially because I think it’s really important that we spend some time looking at some of the key personnel involved. I definitely want to look at Percival. I think it’d be really interesting to look at Yamashita, an excellent operational history. He was hanged for war crimes. And I think there’s a bit of a story that we can look at with that and I think it’s really important that we spend some time looking at Major General Gordon Bennett. Who was he? How did he get to be a divisional commander? Now we know the answer to that, of course. It was when Bradnall White was killed in the Canberra air tragedy and Sturdee was promoted to Chief of the General Staff.

But who was there? No one better than Bennett, I think that’s a really big question to ask. And the flow on effect from that was. Brigadier Maxwell, there’s an interesting story to be told there. I’ve deliberately steered away from talking about the 8th Division soldiers as POWs. There’s a lot of people who’ve talked about that. If you’re interested in that story, then you can go and look that up. For me, though, I think it’s really important that we dwell on what it is that they did as a fighting formation. I don’t think there was any real difference between the soldiers of the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th. The big difference was the battles that they fought and the opportunities that they had. The soldiers of the 8th Division, I think, represented all of the things that make Australian soldiers great.

Strong, resilient, aggressive and well led, capable of inflicting significant defeats on the enemy. So that’s it for Malaya. From here we’re going to do a little bit of looking at the centre of gravity construct. I think there’s some interesting work that can be done there. After that, really excited. We’re going to be doing a series on the Battle of Longtan. I’ve been lucky and privileged and honoured to spend a not insignificant amount of time with Dave Sabin, who was the platoon commander for 12 Platoon at the Battle of Longtan. There are some really fascinating insights into the battle, not only the battle, the leadership around the battle, and how Delta was shaped to be the company that it was, to be able to fight the battle that it fought. And I think that’s a really fascinating story.

We’re also then going to look at the Battle of Bullecourt in World War I, then to the Falklands, then back to the Battle of Amel on the Western Front in World War I. Some really interesting stories to be told in all of those battles. There’ll be a few surprises along the way, I dare say, and I’ll start putting some information up on Facebook because there’s some actual information that I’m keen to get for some of those battles, which you may be able to help me out with. So that’s it. I hope you’ve learned a lot from the Malaya campaign. It’s one of those campaigns that people don’t talk about for obvious reason. But I think that there are so many learnings to come out of the battles where we do not perform well.

And that’s why it’s important that we should all have a good understanding of what went right and more importantly, what went wrong. So stay tuned for the centre of.

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