View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS INSTITUTIONAL FORCES IN THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH TACTICAL DISASTER IN MALAYA 1941-1942 MALCOLM TAN SHIH LUNG B.A. (Merit), NIE A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Summary v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Background and Context 8 Chapter 2: The British Army in 1941 19 Chapter 3: The Imperial Japanese Army in 1941 38 Chapter 4: The British Army on the Defensive in the Malayan Campaign 50 Chapter 5: The British Army on the Offensive in the Malayan Campaign 69 Chapter 6: The British Army’s Delaying Missions in the Malayan 83 Campaign Chapter 7: The British Army in the Greek, Crete and Burma Campaigns 92 1941-1942 Conclusion 109 Bibliography 118 Appendix One: Profile of Selected British and Indian Army Units 123 Appendix Two: Orders of Battles, Selected Battles, Malayan Campaign 129 Appendix Three: Orders of Battles, Selected Battles, Greek, Crete and 133 Burma Campaigns ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, “Field Marshal” Associate Professor “Sir” Brian Farrell, “KBE, KCE, DSO, etc, etc.” Despite the fact that I graduated without an Honours Degree, he was willing to support my application into this Masters program. During these two years, he kindly endorsed my application for funding to do research at the Imperial War Museum and the British Archives, provided guidance in content matters, given me invaluable advice on conducting research and thesis writing, and has spent many hours correcting my lengthy drafts. He has enhanced my understanding of military history as a whole, and more narrowly, of the British and Japanese military institutions during World War II. I have gained lots of on-the- ground information from him through participating in the various field trips that he conducted. I would also like to thank my parents for understanding my decision to resign from my economically stable and well-paid teaching job to pursue this scholarly undertaking of mine, in the name of passion, without any scholarship or regular income. They have been most gracious in supporting my “leap of faith” and to accept that I would not be able to contribute to the family income during these two years. Indirectly, they sparked off my passion in history by encouraging me to watch historical dramas and documentaries, and bringing me to historical sites on family outings when I was in primary school. On my first visit to the then Sentosa Wax Museum at the age of eight, I was awed by the wax figures replicating the scenes of the British and the Japanese surrenders in Singapore during World War II. On the same trip at Fort Siloso, I was fascinated with the coastal guns and mysterious tunnel complexes. It is thus not by coincidence that my thesis topic is about the Malayan Campaign. My interest in history, especially military history, took off from that trip and I have never looked back since – I chose to study history all throughout my years in education from secondary level to the current Masters program. Gratitude must also be expressed to Dr Karl Hack, Dr Daniel Crosswell and Mdm Tan Teng Lan. They taught me history while I was an undergraduate in NIE and readily agreed to be my referees in my application to this Masters program. Mdm Tan, in particular, has been a iii mentor to me all these years. Thanks also be to Dr Mark Emmanuel, who allowed me to see the potential that narrative history has to offer, Dr Thomas Du Bois, from whom I learnt useful tips on academic writing, the administrative staff of NUS History Department, especially Kelly and Gayathri, who have been most helpful, and Brandon Chee, my fellow course mate who has been a source of encouragement to me. I would also like to thank my two confidantes, my “intellectual sparring” partner, Philip Seetho, and fellow military history enthusiast, Ho Tze Yee, for listening to me share my findings and discussing history related topics. I will not want to forget Susan Chin, who besides encouraging me, also kindly allowed me the use of her most conducive premises to do my work on a number of occasions. Last but not least, I would like to thank our Heavenly Father, who has been providentially guiding me through many personal “ups” and “downs” these two years according to His good will and purpose for me. All praise and glory be to the Lord Jesus Christ. iv SUMMARY The British defence of Malaya and Singapore was seriously jeopardized once Germany conquered France in June 1940, as this event encouraged both Italy and Japan to join the Axis Powers and opened the way for Japan to occupy the air and naval bases in French Indochina. Yet how does one explain the speed and scale of the British surrender at Singapore? How did the British Army lose Malaya and Singapore so easily, even though it had an overall numerical superiority of two to one over the Imperial Japanese Army? Why did British Empire troops not put up a better and longer fight in the Malayan Campaign? How did strategic defeat turn into tactical disaster? This thesis seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the tactical aspects of the Malayan Campaign. Relatively few authors have specifically looked at how British military disaster happened on the Malayan battlefields. They typically mention British Malaya Command‟s weaknesses vis- à-vis the Japanese 25th Army‟s strengths in command, control, communications and intelligence, tactical doctrines, training, experience, ethos, morale, organisation and equipment in isolation, without making the connections between them to identify the main overarching problem. This thesis fills an important gap by examining the institutional forces that influenced, shaped and caused the strengths and weaknesses of the Japanese and British armies respectively, while, not discounting the role of circumstantial factors and personalities. This thesis argues that institutional forces in the form of the British military system were the decisive and prime mover influencing and affecting most, if not all, of the weaknesses of the British Army in 1940-1942. They were, hence, the main determinant of the British tactical disaster in the Malaya Campaign. It makes three assertions. First, the British military system was primarily responsible for the many flaws of the British Army in the Malayan Campaign. Second, the British military system is more responsible for the British Army tactical disaster in Malaya than adverse circumstantial and personality factors. Third, the British Army‟s tactical disaster in v Malaya was not an isolated case but was part of a global chain of failures, revealing the general failure of the British military system from 1940-1942. vi INTRODUCTION The size of the British surrender at Singapore, the scale of the British defeat in the Malayan Campaign and the great strategic and political impact that followed, have rarely been matched throughout the long military campaigns involving the British Empire. Although the British government never conducted an official inquiry regarding the fall of Singapore, postmortems and reviews were conducted in both private and official capacities in Britain, India, Australia and Japan, starting soon after Singapore surrendered. This process still continues, boosted by the declassification of official documents in the public archives of Britain and Australia in the 1990s. Three questions tended to dominate the scholarly debates and controversies in the historiography of the reasons for the British defeat in Malaya - Who was ultimately to blame for the defeat? Was the British defeat inevitable? Why were the British defeated so quickly and easily by the Japanese? The first two questions examine the Malayan Campaign mainly at the strategic level.1 Amidst controversy, eminent military historians, such as Raymond Callahan, Alan Warren, Karl Hack, Kevin Blackburn and Brian Farrell, have convincingly argued that the ultimate blame for the British defeat in Malaya lie with the successive war planners in Whitehall, in the two decades leading up to December 1941 - they all decided to put the defence of the UK homeland and the Mediterranean region on a higher priority than the Far East.2 They also agreed that British defeat was hard to avoid, as the strategic and tactical situation in the first six months of the Pacific War favoured the Japanese overwhelmingly.3 1 According to Jonathan M. House, Combined Arms Warfare in the 20th Century (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 5, strategic level of warfare „takes into considerations the political objectives and limitations of governments‟. In this thesis, the strategic level of command is equivalent to the command of army groups and theatres of war. 2 Raymond Callahan, The Worst Disaster – The Fall of Singapore (Singapore: Cultured Lotus, 2001 (1977)), 271; Brian Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1941-1942 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2005), 173-182. 3 Alan Warren, Singapore – Britain’s Greatest Defeat (London, Talisman, 2002), 289-291; Farrell, 379- 382; Karl Hack & Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (New York, Routledge, 2003), 87-88. 1 The British defence of Malaya and Singapore was seriously jeopardized once Germany conquered France in June 1940, as this event encouraged both Italy and Japan to join the Axis Powers and opened the way for Japan to occupy the air and naval bases in French Indochina. Yet how does one explain the speed and scale of the British defeat? How did the British Army lose Malaya and Singapore so easily, even though it had an overall numerical superiority of two to one over the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA)? It must be remembered that although the US also suffered the humiliation of surrendering the Philippines to Japan in May 1942, it did so only after five long months of struggle during which the defending American and Filipino soldiers were able to inflict heavy casualties on the enemy at Bataan.