Malaya was a secondary effort of secondary effort for both the British and the Japanese – so how does Concentration of Force work for secondary efforts?
This is Part 8 in our 17 part podcast series on the Malaya Campaign.
Force Z was HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse. A force too small to affect the outcome, but too large to lose. How did Admiral Tom Phillips plan to interdict the Japanese landing forces? What is the role of the naval LO? Why did CAPT Tennant disobey orders about radio silence?
1 Squadron RAAF conducted the first air strike against the Japanese in WW2, but the RAAF support for Force Z was too little, too late. We look at the reasons for the lack of coordination between the RAAF and the RN.
Churchill described this as the most direct shock that he had ever received after Force Z was sunk. Force Z were the first capital ships sunk by air power alone, this is a great example of technological surprise.
The Japanese create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation – how did this impact the British decision making?
The IJA stacked the deck for the invasion in with aircraft. More aircraft and aircraft that were better with better pilots – this helped swing the balance for the Japanese.
The force ratios for the Japanese were very low. They never achieved overwhelmingly combat power, but they achieved overwhelming success.
They had 11 Divisions for their land operations across the Pacific AO. How did Yamashita entirely pay off Concentration of Force and still succeed?
Leadership, training, doctrine, planning, morale, combined arms and audacity. Do this and pay off Concentration of Force at your leisure.
“Read this alone and the war can be won” was the book that built the moral case for the offensive and covered the tactics that would lead to victory. It was written by COL Masanobu Tsuji, the Chief of operations and Planning for the 25th Army.
Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast player to learn the answers to these questions and more.
Transcript
Concentration of Force in the Malaya Campaign
Welcome to episode eight of the Principles of War podcast. This one, we’re going to look at the principle of concentration of force. And this is really interesting because you’ve got the British and the Japanese fighting a campaign in the Malaya peninsula. For both forces, the Malaya campaign is a secondary effort of a secondary effort. So when you look at what the Japanese are trying to do, they’re trying to solve the China problem, so they want to conquer the Chinese army and they need the resources to do that. So the secondary effort is to sweep down and get the land masses so that they can get the resources that they need to do that. They need to knock the Americans out of the war. Now, this is a war that they’re not even in yet.
So what they want to do is to deal them a decisive blow that will stop them from interfering with the land grab. For the resources, that main effort of the secondary effort is the strike on Pearl Harbour. The secondary effort around that then, is the landing of troops in various places. Hong Kong, the Philippines and Malaya. For the British, their main effort is obviously the defence of the home island. The war is going badly. The secondary effort is to support the Russians in the defence of their territory, because of course, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s their secondary effort. The secondary effort of the secondary effort is obviously Singapore. It’s a long way down the list of priorities because we’re talking about a war that hasn’t even been declared yet.
So we’ve got two sets of combatants, both who are fighting a campaign with limited resources. And for the British, that really showed through in the fact that they’ve got a great new port which isn’t big enough for the fleet that they need to def the island, but it’s a fleet that was never going to come out there anyway. So the air force picks up the slack to defend Singapore and of course they don’t have any modern fighters, but until after the actual invasion, which everyone just really tried to ignore, that doesn’t become a critical issue. As the grand strategic picture is becoming increasingly bleak for the British, they decide to send out Force Zone.
Now, forced was going to be made up of indomitable Repulse and Prince of Wales, and this was sent as a flying squadron to go out to show the flag and to provide some sort of Royal Navy effort into the defence of Singapore. Now, this whole idea was the idea of Churchill because he was playing a grand strategic game. What he wanted to do was to show the British flag in the Far east and to show that they were still capable of providing some sort of support to the empire. So he needed to mollify the Empire and also he needed to give the United States the confidence that they needed to join the war on the side of the Allies. Now, the Royal Navy, they didn’t want anything to do with this. They were stretched to very close to breaking point.
They just didn’t have enough units to be able to do all of the things that they needed, particularly around the defence of the home island. There was convoy escorts, particularly for the convoys that were going to Russia. So they. They were quite keen to let the battle play out and to send a much bigger fleet at a later date. Because the question that the Royal Navy had was, well, what are these ships going to be able to do? It was a very small force and it certainly wasn’t concentration of force. But Churchill, having a view to the grand strategic game that he was playing, thought that it was absolutely vit that some effort be made to show the capability of the British in the Far East.
Now, two days before the actual attack on Malaya, the RAAF had a couple of squadrons out doing reconnaissance and the Hudsons spotted the Japanese invasion fleet. But because of the orders that the Air Chief Marshal, Sir Robert Brooke Popham, had, he didn’t allow the convoy to be bombed. He was unsure about where they were going and he was unsure of their intent. So unfortunately, a good opportunity to commence operations even before the offensive had started was missed. Now, shortly after midnight on local time on the night of the 7th and 8th of December, the Japanese forces landed at Kota Bharu and number one squadron RAAF, they launched a strike against the Japanese forces. And so they became the first aircraft to make an attack in. In the Pacific war. It was moderately successful.
They sank a troop transport, the Ahuazasan Maru, and they damaged two more transports, the Ayatosan Maru and the Sakaru Maru, and they lost two Hudsons. This actually occurred an hour before the attack on Pearl Harbour. To put it into some sort of context, of course, it wasn’t enough to be able to stop the landings, but it was the first strike against them. Now, the impact of this was that it really started to worry the Japanese planners because of the effect that interdiction against the landing forces could Have. So they deployed the 22nd Air Flotilla and this was done expressly to destroy Force Z. They could see what the lightly armed Hudsons were capable of doing and there was significant concern about what Force Z would be able to do if it was able to get amongst the troop transports.
And we see Force z arriving on 2nd December. On 8th December, it departs. Now, it was comprised of HMS Prince of Wales and HMAS Repulse. Now, Repulse was a battlecruiser which had been laid down in 1916, so not the newest piece of kit in the Royal Navy, but Prince of Wales was a battleship which had been laid down in 1937. So significantly more capable ship. They were meant to sail with HMS Indomitable, an aircraft carrier, but it had hit a reef and had to go to the Caribbean for repairs. So there was no organic air support available to Force Z, and this was going to be a significant problem for them. And on the 8th of December, they sail out.
Admiral Tom Phillips, who was commanding force, said he signals to the fleet upon departure, we are out looking for trouble and no doubt we shall find it. We hope to surprise the enemy transports tomorrow and we expect to meet the Japanese battleship Kongo. So a couple of interesting things about this. Admiral Tom Phillips, quite short in stature, so his nickname was Tom Thumb, had been promoted to Admiral and given command of Forceted. And this raised a little bit of consternation within the Navy because he was felt to be a bit of a desk admiral. He didn’t have recent sea experience. Now, the Japanese battleship the Kongo, she was actually laid down in 1911 and fun fact, she was built by Vickers Shipbuilding Company in Barrow in Furness.
So she was expressly built for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but built by the British forced set sail on December 8th and they head out hoping to find the landing forces and wreak havoc amongst them. And who wouldn’t want to seize that opportunity? Opportunity to do that. Naval decision making and leadership requires initiative because of the traditionally very poor comms between the commanders of the ships and their higher headquarters. So naval tradition really dictated that they needed to head out to try and interdict these troops as they were landing and they head out and by the time they get to the place off Cota Bahru, they’re unable to find anything. So the landing forces have been deposited on the beach and the naval element has left the area.
Phillips continues to search until 18:30 on 9 December, when he’s spotted by three Japanese naval reconnaissance planes and he realises then that the gig is up, he doesn’t have air support. He’d already been told by his LO that the RAF was going to be unable to provide fighter cover for his force. He now knows that their position is known. So he returns to Singapore at high speed. At midnight, though, as he’s heading towards Singapore, he receives word of landings at Khaan, which is halfway between Kota Bharu and Singapore, and he decides to attack. Now, the problem with this is that those reports were based on skittish troops. They were actually just firing into the dark. There was no landing. So he moves to where he thinks this new landing is occurring, with once again the intention of disrupting landing operations.
Now, his hello to the RAF fails to anticipate that he would do this and Phillips maintains radio silence. The next morning they arrive at Kuantan Port and they find nothing. There’s no landing forces there because of course they never were there. But tragically, they’re spotted by another Japanese reconnaissance plane at about 10:20 in the morning and things really start to go downhill from there. At 11 o’clock, Repulse is bombed by nine aircraft from 10,000ft and there’s one hit on the catapult deck. At 11:40, Prince of Wales is hit by a torpedo astern and at knocking out propellers and rudder. At 11:58, Captain Tennant, an exasperated Captain Tennant breaks radio silence and requests air support. This is one of the mysteries of the demise of Forced is why did Admiral Phillips maintain radio silence for so long?
And it was only Captain Tennant who broke radio silence against orders requesting support. It was painfully obvious that the Japanese knew where they were, so breaking radio silence wasn’t going to have any impact on operations. 1120, Prince of Wales is hit by torpedoes three more times. Repulse is hit by four, and at 1233, repulse sinks. 1318, the Prince of Wales is sunk and it nearly takes HMS Express with her. Just then, the RAAF arrived to provide air cover. Tragically, 840 sailors are lost. The Japanese fire 49 torpedoes, eight of them hit, four each for repulse and Prince of Wales. Now it was number 453 Squadron Flying Buffaloes. And they were airborne within six minutes of receiving the request for air support. But they had already withdrawn to Singapore.
And so by the time they had assembled and by the time they made the flight to where Forced was located, both ships had been sunk. Because there was no fighters in the area, the Japanese were able to fly low and straight and this enabled them to get the eight TORPEDO HITS in that sunk both of the ships. The morning after the battle, Winston Churchill receives a call from the First Sea Lord, which is Sir Dudley Pound and Sir Dudley Pound, he was one of the people who had recommended strongly against the sending aforesaid. And he said, I have to report to you that Prince of Wales and Repulse have both been sunk by Japanese, we think by aircraft. Tom Phillips is drowned. CHURCHILL Are you sure it’s true, Pound? There is no doubt at all.
CHURCHILL HANGS UP and he said that in all the war, I never received a more direct shock. As I turned over and twisted in bed, the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific, except for the American survivors of Pearl Harbour, who were hastening back to California. Over all this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme and we everywhere were weak and naked. And so you can see that this was a significant shock for Churchill. He knew Tom Phillips, he was a friend. He’d actually had a hand in his promotion to Admiral.
So there’s the personal element of it, but then there’s the strategic implications of the fact that the Imperial Japanese Navy now had a significantly free hand to do whatever it wanted in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Obviously the Indian Ocean more important for the British because of the fact that there lay the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, India. And so there’s a couple of lessons to come out of the demise of foresight, I think. Firstly, there was a lack of understanding of the changing technology that air power was now able to defeat capital ships. Now, Prince of Wales and Repulse were the first capital ships to have been sunk solely by the action of enemy aircraft. And Tom Phillips had significantly downplayed the risk that he was running by operating without adequate air cover.
Now, he understood the risk, but he thought that it would be very diffic for aircraft to be able to sink such a massive ship like the Prince of Wales. It was quite new, it was a huge ship and he thought that it would be immune from the effects of aircraft. Sadly, this wasn’t to be the case. Secondly, there was a big issue about his conduct, so the maintaining of radio silence after being sighted. This meant that his load had to anticipate his actions and organise the air cover for him, which he failed to do. He could have quite easily requested that a lot earlier in the action, particularly once it became aware that the force’s location was known to the Japanese after the first bombing, but it was a full hour before the request for aircraft support was sent.
And even then, that was done by Captain Tennant, not by Admiral Phillips. Lastly, there’s the actions of Admiral Phillips in sailing to the sound of the guns. Now, this was required. Every good admiral would have done it. Every great admiral would have done it. You move to the sound of the guns. This was the one opportunity to do what the Royal Navy was always meant to do, and that was to defend Singapore. So the Japanese are coming to invade. This was their role. Their role was to dominate the seas, to deny the Japanese the ability to land and resupply ground forces. So there’s no problem whatsoever with that. But where there is a problem is that 4Z’s destruction left the Allies with no ships in the Pacific.
The thing that had fundamentally changed was that the strike on Pearl Harbour had dramatically increased the strategic importance of Force Zone. One of the options was that they could have sailed to Java and threatened the Japanese as a fleet. In being, as Farrell and Pratten put it in their book on Malaya, that would have left the risk of Force Z turning up at some stage, anywhere in the ao, and that would have tied down resources as the Japanese continued to look for them. Once they were sunk, and that was it. That was the end of the Allied forces in the Pacific. Now, Shenton Thomas, the Governor of the Straits Settlements, in a meeting, he’d actually suggested, you know, maybe we should go back to London for clarification of orders.
And in fact, this is something that Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff were actively thinking about. However, they were focused on organising a conference with Roosevelt, because now the war had fundamentally changed in the last two or three days. What had been a struggle for British survival had now turned into a global war with the entrance of the Japanese and the strike against the Americans. So a fundamentally different problem that they now had to deal with, and that problem had occurred very recently. Now, what the Japanese were able to do is that they created the turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope. This is the essence of manoeuvre warfare. And the payoff of creating that deteriorating situation is the fact that the Ooda loop blows right out.
So there was no decision made about Force Zone at a grand strategic level, and that led to its destruction. So Admiral Phillips was kind of bound to go and sail to the sound of the guns. He needed to do that. Naval tradition, naval leadership, dictated that. What was required, though, was a grand strategic decision. So a decision above his pay grade, that rather than sailing into battle, he needed to retain the fleet, because in the last 48 hours, the value of that fleet had significantly increased. Because Churchill and Chiefs of Staff were preoccupied with other matters, no decision was made. This is the payoff of the synchronicity across strategic campaigns that led to a greatly degraded capability to make decisions in a timely manner. And the Japanese were able to reap the benefits of that.
The ability to sink the battleships because they’d been committed to battle when they shouldn’t have been, because the grand strategic decision couldn’t be made in time. So this really sort of highlights when you have the lack of concentration of force, and I guess it transfers to a lot of other examples. The penny packeting of significant elements of your force, like the penny packeting of tanks, particularly when we see that in World War I, when they were penny packeted out and destroyed piecemeal, is in contravention of the principle of concentration of force. Now, so what does concentration of force look like from the Japanese point of view? And so you’ve got to remember that the Japanese are in the exact same problem that the British are in that the Malaya campaign is a secondary effort to a secondary effort. The main effort was China.
The secondary effort was Pearl Harbour. And because of that, there was very little support from the Imperial Japanese Navy for the Malaya campaign because all of their carrier group had just struck at Pearl Harbour. What the Japanese did was that the Imperial Japanese army transferred the 3rd Air Group from Manchuria and that was going to give it a 3 to 1 ratio in aircraft over Malaya. And of course, as we’ve seen now, not only did they have a numerical superiority over the Allied air Force, they also had a technical superiority. So each of the aircraft that they have had were significantly better than the aircraft of the Allies, with the exception of a couple of Hurricanes that were shipped late in the piece. On top of that, the pilots were significantly better trained.
So initially, there were some Battle of Britain pilots who had been deployed to Malaya, but they were taken out. So there was a lot of untrained pilots. Compare and contrast that with the pilots for the Imperial Japanese army. And they had significant operational experience, so they weren’t learning their craft, they were experts at it. And it’s these factors that make that three to one ratio over Malaya even more difficult for the Allies to overcome. Now, when we look at the land forces, it’s even more amazing when you look at the force ratios. So only 11 divisions were assigned to the Southern army at the outbreak of war. That is 20% of the combat forces in the Imperial Japanese Army. So You’ve got the Southern army, which is responsible for the invasion of Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya and Singapore all at the same time.
That’s only 11 divisions. Now, when we first talked about the concentration of force, you know the old quote, my strategy is 1 to 10, my tactics is 10 to 1. Yamashita, with his ground forces, seem to have a strategy of one to three and tactics of one to three. Or even worse, he paid off concentration of force relentlessly purely because of the fact that he was unable to generate the combat power required. It was paid off at a strategic level by the allocation of forces to Yamashita. Even then, even with the meagre forces that he had been allocated to him, he left one of his divisions behind, which, you know, is a really interesting fact. He’s gone into battle, he’s conducted this landing without all of the fighting force that he had available to him. At an operational and tactical level.
It’s almost like they used a recon pull type methodology where the driving charge, the filleting attack straight up the road was used wherever possible. And it was only when that was blunted that they would then fight for the road off the road and go round, flank the defending forces, get in behind them, take the road behind them, and then create such havoc that the defending forces simply just melted away. So how did this work? Because this is doctrinally the exact wrong thing to do. He has completely paid off concentration of force. He hasn’t developed a Schwerpunt where he has generated overwhelming combat power at the decisive point. He’s been able to attack with vastly inferior ratios of combat power that you would expect to be successful in the attack.
And I guess really you have to look at some of the other things that made up the numbers for him. And I think fundamentally it comes down to leadership training, doctrine, combined arms, morale and cooperation. So breaking it down, the leadership was really quite strong. These were battle hardened leaders who fundamentally understood the troops that they were commanding and the doctrine that they had. The training embedded. A bias for the offensive, more so I would say a bias towards audacity. And so time and time again they would be audacious right up until the point that they were forced to pay heavily for that. And the problem for the Allies was that when they were acting incredibly audacious, there were significant opportunities to strike and to close down that audacity, but they were all too infrequently taken.
And a good example of that is the Battle of Gamas, where Japanese troops are just riding down the road on their bicycles. There is no security whatsoever. And that is just so. There was an ambush there. It was a moderately successful ambush, but did very little. It was a small road bump in the move in the advance down to Singapore. It wasn’t enough to stop them. Their doctrine had the advantage of being used in battle for a significant amount of time. They’d been at war with the Chinese for years, so their doctrine was quite advanced. What it wasn’t advanced in though was jungle warfare. The Japanese knew that, they understood it and they came up with a plan to mitigate the risks of fighting in the jungle. And this is what all of these exercises were that were conducted in Taiwan.
So they had gone and they realised that there was a problem with doctrine. They then gone and conducted the exercises so that they could write the doctrine that was required. And that resulted in that book entitled Read this Alone and the War Can Be Won. It was a 70 page manual on how to conduct operations in Malaya and in Singapore. It’s an amazing book. It covers off on why it is that the Japanese are fighting there. It talks about how the British and the Americans want to keep the Far east in a permanent state of subjugation and colonisation. And that at stake in the present war, without a doubt, is the future prosperity or decline of the Empire. Slowly, little by little, like a man strangling his victim with a soft cord of silken floss.
America has been prohibiting the export to Japan of oil and steel. So it covers the important in order to of why they’re invading Malaya so that they can feel like they’ve got the moral supremacy over their enemies. It then goes on to describe the enemy. It describes Westerners as very effeminate and very cowardly, have an intense dislike for fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. And it says that our opponents are even more feeble than the Chinese army and their tanks and aircraft are a collection of rattling relics. Victory is certain and the only problem is how to win in the cleverest way. And it does have some interesting notes. So it talks about troops who are really efficient in battle, do not plunder and rob, chase after women or drink and quarrel.
Bear in mind that the misbehaviour of one soldier reflects upon the good name of the whole army and discipline yourself. Now obviously that didn’t get carried out a lot of the time or some of the time, but it. There are actual doctrinal underpinnings for that, which I think is quite interesting. But not only did it have the moral underpinnings and the in order to for the campaign. But it also had some very practical information. It talked about how to march through the tropics, camping in the tropics, scouting and sentry duty, what it was going to be like in battle. And it notes the long voyage, the sweltering march all has been for this squalls, mist and night are our allies.
Battle movements in extreme heat hindering the flight of the enemy, guarding strategic areas, anti gas precautions, which is quite interesting information for signal troops, motorised troops, how to cherish your weapon provisions. And there’s quite a bit on hygiene as well. So this gives the Japanese a significant advantage. They have got troops who have got a strong doctrinal underpinning for the way and reason of the conduct of jungle warfare. On top of that combined arms. So their doctrine was significantly different to the British in the fact that the British still had an artillery centric approach. They wanted to be able to pin the enemy down and then use artillery to attrit them. And they still hadn’t come fully to terms with the employment of tanks, so much so that it was deemed that they weren’t going to be able to work in Malaya.
And as we’ve seen that was a significant problem for them because the Japanese brought along tanks. The tanks weren’t very good, but those tanks were significantly better than anything else that the British could foster because they only had armour personnel carriers. So their approach to combined arms worked a lot better. So they were infantry heavy, light infantry heavy with armoured support as opposed to a road bound Allied approach which relied on the employment of artillery. And lastly, we’ve got this significant overmatch when it comes to morale. The Japanese troops were highly motivated and they were up against especially the Indian troops who because of moral reasons were significantly less motivated than their opposition. And it’s all of these things that come together to enable Yamashita to significantly pay off concentration of force.
Now, next episode we are going to look at the flip side of concentration of force, which is economy of effort. And then from there we’ll move into cooperation.
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