Personally, I think Churchill’s biggest failure in that case was not sending that telegraph earlier and causing Percival to get a grip. If they’d actually fought like that rather than giving up when things got difficult, Yamashita’s campaign might have completely collapsed. The campaign was on such a shoestring that it would have taken very little extra.
From a purely military point of view, and ignoring the critical lack of Commonwealth aircraft, Churchill’s biggest failure in the campaign was preventing Operation Matador, which involved going into Thailand to meet the Japanese landing there (whether that would have had any effect on the initial landing in Malaya is debatable) being initiated until after the Japanese had landed, by which time it was too late and the Japanese had their unopposed beachhead.
From the wider perspective, it might have been justified as Churchill wanted Britain to be seen as the victim of a Japanese attack to encourage America to come into the war as an ally as, contrary to conspiracy theories, he did not know that Pearl Harbor was going to bring America into the war.
Percival’s biggest problem was airfield defence which presented him with an impossible ‘damned if he didn’t, damned if he did’ problem. He had, from memory, about half a dozen airfields widely dispersed around Malaya. If he didn’t defend them he risked the Japanese using them to land troops and establish forward air bases, or even air bases behind Percival’s lines. If, as he prudently did, he defended them, he drew troops and resources away from the Japanese line of advance to no Commonwealth advantage.
No disrespect to the troops who fought in the campaign but, apart from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Australians (both of which forces demonstrated their fighting spirit in a couple of notorious brawls between them in Singapore even before the Japanese had landed), the Commonwealth defenders generally did not fight well. This was in large part due to Commonwealth inability to respond to Japanese small and large unit tactics of infiltration and envelopment, which almost invariably resulted in Commonwealth troops abandoning their position when the Japanese got among or behind the defensive positions. In fairness to those Commonwealth troops, the Japanese tactics were usually successful in other areas of jungle operation during Japan’s advance phase until the Australian defence at Milne Bay in August - September 1942 demonstrated that a ‘stand and fight’ defence could succeed against the Japanese tactics. However, what is often overlooked is that at Milne Bay the Japanese advance was confined by the geography to a narrow coastal strip which severely hampered their ability to outflank and get behind the defenders.
I have a lot of sympathy for Percival. Around 1937 he prepared a paper which correctly anticipated the Japanese thrust into Malaya. He was quite capable of a much better and possibly successful defence, given the air resources which it was recognised at higher levels were required but denied him by Churchill; if allowed to implement Matador to respond much better to the Japanese landing in Thailand; and if not hamstrung by the airfield defence dilemma. Too often he is criticised for failing to win when his troops outnumbered the Japanese about three to one, but this simplistic comparison ignores the fact that all his troops were green while, apart from the Imperial Guards who distinguished themselves as much more brutal than the rest of the Japanese force, the Japanese troops were largely battle-hardened from the Chinese campaign. My inclination is that whoever was in Commonwealth command was going to lose under the circumstances which existed, the only issue was when and with how many dead and wounded Commonwealth troops. It may not have been a no win situation, but it was very close to one.
Percival’s biggest failure, apart from being an uninspiring leader, was his refusal to prepare Singapore island properly for a sustained defence, because he did not want to alarm the civilian population by doing so. This was idiotic from a military viewpoint and he, and the inadequately defended civilian population, duly paid the price when his hastily cobbled together defence failed to resist Japanese landings. The failure related not only to military aspects of the defence but the failure to provide for a water supply to sustain a siege. In the end it was Japanese control of pumping stations and denial of water to the defenders and the civilians which left him with no option but surrender. Whether he could have obtained sufficient water by other means is debatable, but his failure even to attempt to do so was disastrous.
But the ultimate cause of the loss of Singapore was Churchill’s uninformed imperial faith in the impregnability of fortress Singapore and his resultant failure to recognise the realities of the situation facing the Commonwealth forces, and to provide adequately for the defence. Churchill said after the war that he would have acted differently if he knew the true situation in Singapore. The only reason he didn’t ‘know’ it at the material time is because, as he often did, he chose to ignore competent advice from his military advisers.
We all know that Churchill made it up as he went along: he was not an analytical politician, but followed his intuitional conclusions and tried to turn them into policy. He simply had a huge personality, which overcame the inertia of a morose, unwilling population when it came to making war. Oddly enough, the masses realised this: i.e: that Churchill was the ideal leader in wartime. They very quickly showed him the door immediately after WWII. They knew that a Prime Minister who had been a virtual dictator for five years, would not be the best leader for rebuilding Britain post-WWII. Democracy works, after all.
Cheers,
Cliff
If a reasonable fraction of the RAF capability retained in Britain [or sent to Stalin], had been properly organised, - then instead of being a ‘bloody shambles’ & used per Malta/Tobruk… in the defence of Malaya, it would have been much less of a disgrace to British
Arms/prestige… & Churchill, both as a pre-war politician, & as wartime amateur strategic bungler - must bear a fair amount of the blame…
He shoulders the blame for a helluva lot of faulty decisions in WWII, and the peacetime thinking which led to them. But sending extra aircraft to Malaya would not have changed the outcome. The planes themselves were only the tip of the iceberg. Pilots and ground crew were inexperienced, and had no time to evolve tactics to counter their highly-professional opponents. The aircraft, whilst not inferior to the Japanese planes they faced, were unsuitable for the climatic conditions. None of this can be laid at Churchill’s door. Much is made of Winston’s “subaltern mentality”. True, he never attained heavy-duty military rank. (Did Hitler?) But he had the ability to prioritise. The defence of the British Isles was paramount, and Malaya/Singapore very much on the back burner. Nobody could have foreseen the disaster which unfolded (except perhaps Percival, but nobody listened to his pre-war conclusions - they sent him back out there to surrender).
Cheers,
Cliff
He didn’t do too badly on the Western Front, as a Lt Col in charge of 6 Royal Scots Fusiliers (nowadays 2 SCOTS) for a few months before he got bored and scuttled back to parliament. Having said that, he should never have been permitted on the western front at all - the risk involved in the very recently removed First Lord of the Admiralty taking part in trench raids on the Germans is blindingly obvious yet seems to have been ignored.
It must have been quite galling to Goebbels and Hitler when it finally dawned on them that this half-American drunkard plutocratic leader of a nation of shopkeepers and his partner the paraplegic “jew” “Rosenfeld” were going to be handing them their asses on a platter. How would that square with the inevitable victory of the ubermenchen? On top of that, the nasty, wily Georgian Dzugashvili was kicking derrieres and taking names in the east inflicting huge casualties on the Germans and not being very nice about it… No wonder that Goebbels said that “history is a whore”. How could he have been so wrong? Guffaw!
Well, it did mean [via the ‘unconditional surrender’] that Hitler would attempt to eliminate all perceived ‘enemies’
in his grasp before the overwhelm…
& it was Goebbels who coined the term ‘Iron Curtain’ to describe the abject failure of Churchill’s war aims, & predict the decades of U.S./Soviet hegemony over Europe to come…
& if the type of coordinated radar directed air defence/offence - so successfully used by the RAF in Malta/Western Desert operations - had been employed in Malaya, likely it would’ve worked there too…
JAW, please cite the source where Goebbels coined the term “iron curtain”. My understanding is that Churchill used the term following the war in a speech he gave during a university visit in Missouri. If you have a different source, I’d like to know it.
Are you suggesting that Hitler would have surrendered if “unconditional surrender” had not been a requirement of the Allies? Could you provide me with the recipe of the Kool-Aid you’re drinking? Thank you.
Kool Aid? or an ‘electric K.A. acid test’…
I might forego the ‘Jim Jones’ mix…& say, as far as synthesmic orange goes, wasn’t ‘Fanta’ a product of Nazi
science too?
I recall reading the Fe-curtain thing in a Goebbels book, & interestingly, I recently saw a vintage copy of his diaries on
a arcane book store shelf, maybe I’ll go back & pick it up…
Hmm Radar directed and co-ordinated defence of Malta and the Western Desert - you not confusing it with the UK which was the only area the British had Radar. The few mobile sets being of limited capability and used to plug gaps in the UK airdefence network.
The Radar chains themselves were suited to open areas and needed a complete line to be effective, they were backed up by thousands of personnel in control rooms of different levels all interconnected. Thousands of volunteers of the Observer Corps assisted with identification and spotting/plotting.
At the time period there was no way the British or even the whole Commonwealth could have put together that kind of integrated airdefence network.
The biggest problem for the British Commonwealth was where to concentrate its meagre resources - active theatres or threatened areas, many gambles were taken some worked some failed, some were pretty sure things others even at the time were considered very risky.
Always easy to come up with statements saying this or that should have been done, the hard bit most can not explain is just how they should have been able to do differently.
As to the Iron Curtain prase - according to ‘Wiki’ Goebbels used the term in 1943, although Wiki also states that it was in usage well before that time and had been used to describe communism in Russia in 1918.
Regarding Churchill on the WW1 Western Front - he was certainly not lacking in physical courage; even recklessness. He had come close to being killed on a number of occasions before WW1 - certainly in the course of Kitchener’s campaign against the Khalifa that ended to Mahdiist Wars, and again during the Boer War. Given his … difficult personality, perhaps his political colleagues thought that if he went to the Western Front, he might get himself thoroughly exploded. Not entirely kidding, JR.
Well look at the world today… & England?
Expand - what are you on about
Could he mean…
In the thrall of uber-captalist [U.S./Globalisation]hegemony, & right where Churchill manouvered it?
In that case, thank you Leccy and JAW. I was not aware of this.
REVISION: Apparently, Goebbels was far from the first to use the phrase:
From Wikipedia:
Pre–Cold War usage[edit|edit source]
Swedish book “Behind Russia’s iron curtain” from 1923
There are various earlier usages of the term “iron curtain” (Russian: Железный занавес Zheleznyj zanaves; German: Eiserner Vorhang; Czech: Železná opona; Slovak: Železná opona; Hungarian: Vasfüggöny; Romanian: Cortina de fier, Italian: Cortina di ferro, Serbian: Гвоздена завеса Gvozdena zavesa, Estonian: Raudne eesriie, Bulgarian: Желязна завеса Zhelyazna zavesä) pre-dating Churchill. The usage of the term goes back to the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sota 38b, which refers to a “mechitza shel barzel,” an iron barrier or divider: “אפילו מחיצה של ברזל אינה מפסקת בין ישראל לאביהם שבשמים” (Even an iron barrier cannot separate [the people of] Israel from their heavenly father). It was previously thought the term ‘Iron Curtain’ was first coined by Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians after World War I to describe the political situation between Belgium and Germany, in 1914.[7]
However, first usage of “iron curtain” perhaps should be attributed to British author Arthur Machen (1863 – 1947), who used the term in his 1895 novel “The Three Impostors:” " . . . the door clanged behind me with the noise of thunder, and I felt that an iron curtain had fallen on the brief passage of my life." [8] It is interesting to note the English translation of a Russian text shown immediately below repeats the use of “clang” with reference to an “iron curtain,” suggesting the Russian writer, publishing 23 years after Machen, may have been familiar with the popular British author.
The first recorded application of the term to Communist Russia is from Vasily Rozanov’s 1918 polemic The Apocalypse of Our Times and it is possible that Churchill read it there when the book’s English translation was published in 1920. The passage runs:
“ With clanging, creaking, and squeaking, an iron curtain is lowering over Russian History. “The performance is over.” The audience got up. “Time to put on your fur coats and go home.” We looked around, but the fur coats and homes were missing.[9] ”
Incidentally, this same passage provides a definition of nihilism adopted by Raoul Vaneigem,[10] Guy Debord and other Situationists as the intention of situationist intervention.
The first English use of the term iron curtain applied to the border of communist Russia in the sense of “an impenetrable barrier” was derived from the safety curtain used in theatres and used in 1920 by Ethel Snowden, in her book Through Bolshevik Russia.[11]
Another known usage is recorded in a 1924 essay by G.K. Chesterton in The Illustrated London News. Chesterton, while defending Distributism, refers to “that iron curtain of industrialism that has cut us off not only from our neighbours’ condition, but even from our own past.”[12]
The term also appears in the 1933 satirical novel England, Their England; used there to describe the way an artillery barrage protected the infantry from an enemy assault: “…the western sky was a blaze of yellow flame. The iron curtain was down.” Sebastian Haffner used the metaphor in his book Germany: Jekyll & Hyde, published in London in 1940, in introducing his discussion of the Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933. “Back then to March 1933. How, a moment before the iron curtain was wrung down on it, did the German political stage appear?”[13]
Who cares who coined the “Iron Curtain” phrase? It came into popular usage after Churchill’s (post-WWII) address to a US audience, and is popularly attributed to him as a result. In Churchill’s time, it describes a reality of world politics - not a scenario, as previous authors have claimed.
Cheers,
Cliff
& I think you might find that a certain Nazi minister used the term in that context…
Knowing full well - that Churchill had no chance of re-establishing an independent Poland…
And that certain Nazi minister had the last word in the argument, did he? … I think not.
Cheers,
Cliff
& Churchill did?