We look at how the British and Japanese came about to select their aims and how they got to them.
What was the British mission and what did Churchill understand of the mission to be? How did Brooke Popham understand his mission and how did that impact the troops on the ground (and pilots in the air).
We have a slight diversion to look at the Whole of Government approach to defence and how the Australian Government undermined the Air Force and it’s capabilities. Why would they do that? How effective was the Beaufort Bomber? Was a defence procurement decision influenced by political needs?
What role did the ‘China incident’ play with Japanese decision making processes? How did COL Tsuji influence the decision to go south and east as opposed to north and west.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was using 400 tonnes of oil an hour – how would they secure the resources they needed?
What were the similarities and differences between the Japanese and British thinking?
We look at Unity of Command in both the Japanese and British forces.
How did issues with command structure effect each of the forces?
What was the relationship between Bennett and Percival? Did Bennett’s micromanagement of the Brigades limit their effectiveness. How would command issues effect 22nd and 27th Brigade.
What issues did LT GEN Yamashita have? What is Gekokujo and why was Charlie Chaplin nearly assassinated?
What was the May 15th incident and why did 350,000 people sign a petition in blood?
Transcript
Selection and maintenance of aim for the Malaya Campaign
So welcome back everyone. In the last podcast we covered off on the differences in doctrine and I think that we can start to see some of the reasons why the Japanese were able to succeed and able to succeed so quickly, even though they were vastly numerically inferior to the defenders. This is the first podcast we’re actually going to be looking at one of the principles of war and it’s the most important one. It is the selection and maintenance of the aim. So straight out of LWD1 selection, maintenance of the aim. Military action is never an end in itself. It is always a means to an end. The end must always remain clearly in view. This cardinal principle applies equally to the strategic, operational and tactical levels of conflict. It relates to taking advantage of local opportunities only where they support the commander’s intent.
The aim must be simple, direct, unambiguous and within the means of the force available. It must be the one best calculated to further the favourable conclusion of the operation, the campaign or the war. Once the aim has been decided, all effort must continually be directed towards its attainment, so long as this is possible. And every plan or action must be tested by its bearing on the aim. So that’s a fairly wordy and in depth description of what selection and maintenance of the aim is. And as we alluded to in the Centre of Gravity, I think really the fundamental issue that the British had was that they, their centre of gravity was wrong and that drove the wrong selection and maintenance of the aim. So we’ll have a look at the British first and we’ll talk briefly about what their aim was.
We’re then going to look at the strategic decision making process for the Japanese and then I want to talk briefly about unity of command, because there were significant issues in unity of command on both sides, more so on the British side than on the Japanese. So as we’ve alluded to, the British really had the wrong aim. As late as 15 January, Churchill did not understand the grand plan for Singapore. The Chief of Staff had not changed the mission after the Royal Navy had moved naval headquarters to Batavia, which is present day Jakarta. So this is after Force Z is sunk and really there’s nothing for naval headquarters to command after this. So once the Navy has completely left Singapore, they are still defending the port at Singapore. And a lot of this comes down to the misunderstanding of the term fortress.
The Chief of Staff had fortresses referring to an independent command, Churchill thought that understood a fortress to be a position prepared to defend itself from any direction. So a fundamental misunderstanding here between the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff and this is quite late in the game. But even before then, Brook Popham and Percival realised that it was going to be a long time before the Navy was going to be able to come out in any meaningful numbers. And so the primary role of defending the port, defending Singapore was then shifted to the Air Force. So, and thus it become the role of the air force to deny the Japanese the ability to land troops in sufficient numbers to be able to capture Malaya.
And Brooke Popham had stated that Far East Command would be able to attribute approximately 40% of the landing forces before they hit the beaches and that they were going to be able to interdict the ongoing supplies for those forces after they landed. Now the huge problem for them was that the Air Force was never postured to be able to do that. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, they grossly misunderstimated the capabilities of the Japanese. So the army and the Navy had both built up significant air capabilities. The Navy had some excellent equipment. Their torpedo was probably the best torpedo in the world at the time. Their land based bombers were highly effective. And not only that, but they’d move their doctrine along to be much more focused on air power rather than traditional large capital ships.
And this is partially because as the underdog, they were looking for a way to overcome the strength of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy was very strong in large battleships with big guns. And they understood that they were going to struggle. If they were going to go battleship versus battleship, the aircraft carriers gave them the advantage to be able to fight the kind of the style of warfare that they felt more comfortable with. The second component of it is now Brook Popham saw his role as the commander of Far East Command to not go asking for too many resources because there weren’t any resources to be had. So he sent back moderately dire situation reports, but he was not fighting for the resources that were needed. The attitude just was we’ll make do.
And so that was partially because he had an appreciation of how dire the situation was for Britain on the home front as they were facing the Germans on the home front and in the Middle East. But he wasn’t pushing for the resources that was needed specifically around the Air Force, which is kind of unusual because he was an Air Force officer. So he left the Air Force in a very parlous state. And one wonders why he wasn’t requesting the fighter aircraft, the bombers that were required to allow the Air Force to be able to carry out its mission. And potentially he was a little out of touch. His previous appointment was as the Governor of Kenya in 1937.
So he’d spent time in Kenya probably away from the doctrinal realities of what the Air Force was capable of doing and probably out of touch from what the German, from what the Luftwaffe was capable of doing. And I think this is one of the reasons why the resources weren’t coming through that were required. And the interesting thing about this is that he oversaw a significant base building programme for the Air Force, but he didn’t have the aircraft and he didn’t have the pilots to be able to actually carry out that mission. One of the biggest problems before the invasion, they actually had quite a few experienced pilots with Battle of Britain experience. A lot of them were rotated out so that they got raw pilots in who were unaccustomed to combat prior to the invasion.
So we’ve got the wrong aim, and even if we had the right aim, we’re not ensuring that it is resourced to be able to carry out the mission. The Air Force was never going to be able to do what was needed to be done with the aircraft that it had. The aircraft that it had were completely inadequate for the role that was to be carried out. There was the Brewster Buffalo, which is a short, fat, slow fighter, which was no match whatsoever for the Zero. The maritime strike role was being carried out by Vickers Wildebeest, which is a massive biplane and incredibly slow and had virtually no chance of success at all. Now, just an interesting little diversion as we talk about selection and maintenance, the game, and I want to talk about the importance of the whole of government approach for this.
And the government was aware of the issues with the Singapore plan. It had become increasingly aware that there was an issue with the Singapore plan and that Australian defence was there were going to be issues should Britain become decisively engaged in a war in Europe, which was exactly what happened. But as we’ve already discussed, it’s difficult to get a democracy, to be able to spin up the economy and to spin up the population prior to the threat actually becoming apparent for everyone to see. However, I think that there are things that you can do in the background, and one of the really interesting examples of this is the RAAF Beaufort bomber programme. So Essington Lewis, one of the great industrialists of the 20th century, he was the general manager of BHP at the time.
He was really concerned about the lack of aircraft manufacturing capability in Australia back then. So he worked towards the formation of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation and they produced the Wirraway and they had Australia’s leading aircraft designer in, Sir Lawrence Whackett. He came on board as the general manager of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. They started manufacturing the Wirraway and he’s regarded as the father of the Australian aircraft industry. Now, what Wackett and Essington Lewis wanted to do is they wanted to go to the United States and manufacture under licence, some American aircraft. Now, this was seen as being a little bit unpatriotic because we should be buying British aircraft. And the amazing thing is that the Australian government actively worked to undermine the work of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. And they were sharing confidential documents with the British.
They worked really aggressively to make sure that rather than getting an American design, we got a British design which ended up being the Beaufort bomber. And rather than having so all of the aircraft manufacturing capability, and you gotta remember this is 10 years before the first production vehicle was made in Australia. So this was a not insignificant technical challenge to be able to build an aircraft, particularly the engines, that was really quite difficult. So rather than giving it to the smartest kids on the block with all of the resources and all of the capability and experience in building aircraft, no, the Australian government would give it to dap, the Department of Aircraft Production. And so now they didn’t have a Department of Aircraft Production, so they created one.
And what they did was they got a whole heap of railway workshops together and got them to do it. Now, got to tell you, there’s a slight difference between building a railway engine and building an aircraft. The tolerances are a lot finer, the work needs to be of a lot higher quality, and it took an inordinate amount of time to be able tool up and to be able to get the processes in place to be able to build the Beaufort bomber. And by the time of Singapore, only six aircraft had made it to Singapore just before the war started, and they didn’t have any weapons. So five of them were returned and only one was used, and that was used in a reconnaissance role.
It was described in one of the words of the test pilot, an exceptionally poor bombing platform being subject to an excessive and continuous role which made determination of drift particularly difficult. Now, all of this because of, rather than going out and getting the most expedient bombing platform that we could get, we wanted to support the mother country. And so a buying decision was significantly influenced for political means and with significant impact in the short term in Singapore. But in the long term over the performance of the raaf. Now let’s have a look at the strategic and grand strategic outlook for the Japanese. Now this is really interesting. So the important thing that we haven’t really discussed has been the China incident, which is what it was referred to. And by incident we mean full invasion after the.
So they’d invaded Manchukuo, I think, in 1932. They then invaded China proper, took over significant amounts of real estate, victory after victory. Failed to break the Chinese resistance though. And in a similar respect to what the Germans were finding in the Soviet Union in that they had a lot of ground to trade for time, it was the same in China. And there was a big strategic question that was being asked should the. Should the Japanese assist the Germans by attacking the Soviet Union? And the Soviet Union was able to transfer a great number of divisions from the east where they were on because there were multiple border skirmishes between the Soviet Union and the Japanese.
But they were able to transfer the majority of those divisions onto their western front, the Eastern front and to defeat the Germans, which was probably a significant factor in their success. So why was it that the Japanese didn’t attack the Soviet Union first? And a lot of this comes back to Colonel Tsuji, the God of operations. Now his experience was he’d been in the Soviet Union, so he was a part of the. He incited the battle of Khalkhin gol in 1939 and the Japanese were defeated quite badly there. And it was because he saw the impact that the firepower of the Soviet army had. He became a very firm proponent of attacking the United States after that. He wrote that his experience with Soviet firepower convinced him not to attack the Soviet Union in 1941.
Now, on top of that, you’ve got two significant parties of power that are working away in the Japanese decision making process. The first is the Imperial Japanese Navy and on the other side is the Imperial Japanese Army. Now the Navy wanted the army to attack Singapore because there was a role for the Navy in defeating the United States. If they were to fight the Soviet Union, there would be limited. There was no scope for action from the Imperial Japanese Navy. There was nothing for them to do. So there would be decreased power for the naval faction within the decision making process. Process. And they really lacked a central decision making system. This is part of the reason why they attacked the United States.
Now one of the reasons why the strategic surprise was so great was because no one expected the Japanese to attack the United States. And if we look at the situation by August 1940. It really does look quite enticing. So the Dutch have capitulated and they’ve left largely undefended colonies. French Indochina is cooperating with Germany and Japan is able to leverage this for strategic placement of some of their forces and for severing the flow of supplies to China. Moving into southern Indochina forces the US to embargo oil and other raw materials and to freeze Japanese assets. And this leaves Japan with less than 12 months of oil reserves unless they end the war with China or, sorry, the China incident.
So an interesting fact I came across was that the Imperial Japanese Navy was using 400 tonnes of oil an hour to maintain their war readiness. So you can see the imperative really was to go out and they needed to secure resources. This embargo really did force the Japanese hand. So on the one hand they’ve got the need for the resources to be able to finalise a solution to the China incident, but also a massive opportunity as you look at the issues that the British is now having. So they’re fighting for survival. The US government has proclaimed itself as isolationist and they’re only just beginning to prepare for war. And the question in the Japanese mind was, would they have the commitment for a large war that didn’t threaten the continental United States? And this is where their grand strategy emerged.
A surprise attack on a grand scale to drive Western forces out of Southeast Asia, harness the resources in the area to build a war economy strong enough to prevail in China. They would defend the Japanese Co Prosperity Sphere against counter attack and sooner or later the US would tire of trying to defeat the Japanese and they would sue for peace. The US was seen as materialistic, soft, individualistic and divided. And the assumptions were that the Japanese culture was far superior to the United States and a war economy could be built up quite quickly. In my reading, there’s an often quoted number that the U.S. Economy was 10 times larger than the Japanese. And I wanted to do a little bit of digging and I found some economic text.
It was only 5.3 times larger than the Japanese and interestingly enough, the amount of money that was being spent on defence. In 1936, Japan and the United States were spending the same amount of money and it was almost double in 1939. So a significant buildup with the Japanese spending twice as much as the United States. Now, 1939 was the last year of a slow, gradual buildup in defence spending for the United States and it increased significantly in 1940 and continued to grow after that. But on September 6, the Japanese government issue an outline for the execution of the Empire’s national policy, and this set the road to war with a break from an emphasis on political negotiations to a military solution. Now, operationally, it’s important to remember that this is a secondary effort, Malaya. So it is.
So for Britain, it’s definitely a secondary effort, and you can see that by the dire amount of resources that are sent there for them to accomplish their mission, but very much so for the Japanese as well. So operationally, the focus is on speed and speed. And the plan is to take Singapore in 100 days, which is really quite amazing, as they sat down for planning for the war. So in the Malaya book by Farrell and Pratten, there’s three planning similarities. Malaya and Singapore are strategically inseparable, so it’s the one campaign, the shortest route to conquer Singapore. The sea invasion is the most dangerous. So there were significant garrison artillery installations ringing Singapore, which would have made it very difficult and costly to invade. Lastly, air power would play a decisive role. The big thing was, though, that there were three planning differences.
The IJA could concentrate, the Imperial Japanese army could concentrate to fight at a specific time and place. That’s the prerogative of the attacker and they use that well and truly to their advantage. They could concentrate the right forces for the mission. And as we discussed previously, they had a task organised army specifically constituted for the mission at hand. They could coordinate grand strategy with their campaign. The British couldn’t do any of these things. So I just want to have a look at some of the issues with unity of command, because unity of command, I think, is a really important thing and it’s one of the things that both sides struggled with the Allies significantly more than the Japanese.
So first off, we’ve got the Commander in Chief of the Far East Command, Brook Popham, now an Air Force man, an Air Chief Marshal, no less. And this is the first time that you’ve got an Air Chief Marshal or an Air Force officer in charge of a joint operation. And one wonders if he was the first choice because of the fact that he came from. He was the governor of Kenya prior to this, so was there an element of there’s no one better that we can send or Singapore is not going to be invaded? And I think it was more the fact that Singapore wasn’t going to be invaded. Now he was responsible for Singapore, Malaya, Burma and Hong Kong. This was a much bigger role than being the Governor of Kenya.
Once again, in Singapore, he was responsible for the port for the Royal Navy, but interestingly enough, the Royal Navy didn’t report to Brooke Popham because the Royal Navy thought that their role was all around the world and so they would report directly to London. So he is responsible for the defence of a port for a service that doesn’t even report to him. That’s the first issue we’ve got. Second issue. So the 3rd Indian Corps under Lt. Gen. Heath is reporting to Lt. Gen. Percival. And this rank structure mismatch creates a bit of a problem here. So Heath thought that he should have been the general officer commanding Malaya command, given the fact that the vast majority of the troops were his Indian troops.
But this wasn’t to be the case and they actually worked quite professionally to make this command relationship work, even though it wasn’t ideal. Next off we’ve got Major General Gordon Bennett. So the commander of the Australian 8th Division, a very interesting character, difficult to work for. There were significant problems within Div headquarters. It doesn’t sound like a happy place to work and I’m sure that they didn’t get the best output possible because of the way that Bennett conducted himself. The other problem was the command relationship between Percival and Bennett really is summed up by one photo. There’s a photo of Percival, he’s standing there, he’s got this smile on his face. He looks like a nice, friendly guy. Percival, for all of his faults, he was a very intelligent officer.
In fact, as a measure of his intelligence, in 1937, when he was working for Major General William Dobby, who was the general officer commanding Malaya at the time, he was asked to draw up an appreciation. And his analysis in 1937, as a lieutenant colonel, his analysis showed that North Malaya would be the critical battleground The Japanese were likely to seize the east coast landing sites in Thailand and Malaya in order to capture air bases and to achieve air superiority. That would be the prelude to further landings, to disrupt communications and enable the construction of further bases, he had a really strong understanding of how the battle was going to turn out.
Now in 1941, when he returns to Malaya as a lieutenant general, the things that he would struggle with mightily was the ability to make decisions and to grip up the command relationships that he had. Now, as far as his relationship with Bennett, the photo, there’s a photo of him, he’s standing there, big smile on his face and Bennett’s looking at him pretty much with daggers. And it really does show the contempt that Bennett held Percival and most of the British forces as well at the time. Now, Major General Bennett was a shameless self promoter. He did this back to the government in Australia. And he also did it to anyone who would listen in Singapore. Now, one of the people who did listen to him was Wavell, who was the commander of Abdacom, which is American, British Dutch Australia Command.
And he was shocked at the way that the 3rd Indian Corps had performed. He met survivors of the Battle of Slim river and after that he saw Bennett. And Bennett was. Bennett hadn’t been in combat yet, so the eighth Division was still in Johor, still in southern Malaya, and hadn’t had contact yet with the Japanese. But he was 100% certain that they were going to be able to not only beat the Japanese, but start pushing them back up into northern Malaya. So Wavell instructed Percival to give him command of not only the 8th Division, which he had, but 9th Indian Division and the 45th Indian Brigade. This was a new brigade in theatre, very inexperienced and not acclimatised to the environment or the way the Japanese were fighting.
Now, this created all sorts of issues because the 8th Div headquarters was now, in effect, acting as a core headquarters. So it had struggled as a Div headquarters up until then and it now had more than two and a half times the responsibility without the increase in resources that it needed to be able to do its job. And with a Div commander who was struggling in the role as Div commander, who was now effectively a core commander, and the results that they achieved really were to be expected. I don’t think he was able to get anything extra out of the 9th Indian Division or the 45th Indian Brigades that anyone else wouldn’t have been able to. Their performance was not great, particularly the 45th Indian Brigade, but they were untrained and they were very new to theatre. So it’s not surprising with that.
The portents, though, were already there in the way that he’d been acting as a brigade commander. Now, when the 22nd Brigade was the first brigade into Malaya and they were planned to have been under Malaya command, but it was decided in army headquarters that a brigade headquarters would not have the resources to manage the national command responsibilities under the British. So they deployed with elements of the Div headquarters and they were met on the wharf by Bennett on 18 February 1941. Quite quickly, very strained relationships between Brigadier Taylor and Major General Bennett developed. Taylor wrote in his diary that he quite thought that Bennett liked commanding the brigade. He was micromanaging it at every opportunity that he could. The 22nd Brigade deployed with an artillery regiment, anti tank battery, field engineer squadron. But Bennett only allowed Taylor to exercise his three infantry battalions.
So there was no combined arms training. Now I’m struggling to understand why that was the case. When you think that we’re trying to synchronise the effects that we’re able to create with the forces that we’re given, why wouldn’t you be allowing them to exercise together? Unless, of course, there’s an element of these are my toys and you can’t play with them. And I think that’s really sad. And it significantly impeded the ability of the brigade to generate combat power. When the 27th Brigade arrived on 15 August in 41, it made command and control a lot easier for Bennett. He now had a reserve that he was able to use if he only used one manoeuvre Brigade.
And the 23rd Brigade, which was a part of 8th Brigade, was removed from his command and he was made the general officer commanding of the AIF in Malaya. Now, when the 27th Brigade arrived, they had some command problems of their own. So Brigadier Marshall had retired and that meant that a new brigade commander was needed. Bennett wanted the CO of the 2 19th Battalion to take command. And this was Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Maxwell. Now, he was a doctor in Civie street and he hadn’t been in the CMF for a significant period of time. Yet for some reason, Bennett was 100% committed to him, argued over the replacement with Sturdy. So Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee, who was the Chief of the General Staff, Bennett, being the forceful character that he is, had his way and Maxwell was promoted to Brigadier.
And we’ll talk a little bit later about that, because his performance as a brigade commander, particularly in Singapore, is of particular interest to us. So from a Japanese point of view, the unity of command, they still had some issues. So the chiefs of the General and the naval staffs had direct access to the Emperor and the civilian government had ministers who were appointed by the services. The high command was responsible to the emperor through the General Headquarters, not the civilian government. This allowed the services to drive theory that Japan must force hegemony on China or collapse as a major power. They concentrated on strategy and operations, but they neglected areas like R and D and economic mobilisation. Cooperation between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese army became difficult, and each service maintained its own air force.
Probably the main exception to this was the development of amphibious warfare, where the two were actually able to work together really closely and they developed a joint doctrine and equipment to be able to execute the operations that they were able to do and they were able to do. It really well. Now I want to quickly just highlight some of the issues that Yamashita had within his own command because things weren’t rosy. And we’ve already mentioned how Suji, the God of operations, was so upset about some of the decisions that Yamashita was making that he spent. There were days where he wouldn’t talk to anyone. But it was a lot more fragmented than that. And a lot of this comes back to the concept of gykokuju, which is overthrowing or surpassing one’s superiors. And it was a concept of principled disobedience.
If you believe that you had the moral authority to do that. So a lot of this was around the rule of the emperor and what should be right for the country and for the empire. Now, this concept led to some fairly interesting events. So the first one was the Muktan incident, which in the early 1930s, which started the Manchurian War. And the effect of that was that Japan left the League of Nations. And it put more stress on their relationship with the United States, which the civilian government was trying to maintain. Following on from that, in 1932, a group of 11 junior naval officers and around 20 years old, they believed that the government wasn’t being aggressive enough in putting Japan in its rightful place in the rise of the Asian nations. And so they plotted to assassinate the prime minister.
And they were able to do this. They lobbed hand grenades at the Mitsubishi bank. As a side note, they planned on killing Charlie Chaplin, who was in Japan at the time visiting the prime minister. It was just lucky for him that he was with the prime minister’s son at the time, watching sumo wrestling. The perpetrators were captured. They received really light sentences because a petition was received that had been signed by 350,000 people with signatures that had been made in blood. Which goes to show just how deep the angst was about Japan feeling like it was being subjugated by the Western nations. It really does show the depth of these feelings. Now, the assassination in 1932 really saw the end of civilian rule. So the prime minister became appointed by the military, but they still weren’t seemed to be moving as quickly enough.
And so there was another assassination attempt in 1936. Now, the problem for Yamashita was that the perpetrators believed that they had implied consent from a whole range of senior officers, and one of them was him. There was also the precedent set that because the first 11 perpetrators had got light sentences, it wasn’t thought that anything was going to happen to the perpetrators of the second assassination plot. The problem was that there was still a lot of factional fighting within the military and. And the emperor was deeply displeased about these ongoing assassinations or government by assassination. And because Yamashita was implicated in it, he realised that he’d fallen out of favour with the emperor. He then went on to become a div commander and he led his division extremely bravely.
And some think that he was actually trying to get killed as a way to purge the stain that was on his honour. His time in Manchuria gave him time to reflect on the way that he had conducted himself. He spent some time reading some Buddhist and Zen texts and he became increasingly concerned about a war with the United States. He was one of the people who didn’t want war with the United States. The problem for him, Tsuji and his div commanders were very strongly in favour of it. And this created significant friction within the 25th Army Command because of course, his div commanders were from a different faction to what from what he was.
That’s an interesting little story that just shows some of the pressures that can happen in an army headquarters within div headquarters, and just how people need to work really, to make those relationships work smoothly. Because at the end of the day, they were all 100% committed to the rapid seizing of Malaya and Singapore. It was just the way that they went about it that created problems within that command structure. So that’s about it for selection and maintenance of the aim. I think we’ve done selection and maintenance of the AIM to death, but I think it’s really important that we understand that when you select and maintain your aim on an aim that is incorrect, everything else is much less important because it’s only the velocity with which you are going down the wrong road.
And for the British, this is the classic example of that. So that’s it for selection and maintenance of the aim. We’re back with an exciting one. Next time we’re going to be talking offensive action and there’s lots offensive action in Malaya to talk about, so that’s going to be an exciting one. That’s it. I hope you’ve learned something today. Bye.
