Abstract
Writing these remarks in his diary five days before Hong Kong surrendered, Sir Henry Pownall was merely voicing what most in Whitehall thought at the time — that whilst losing Singapore to the Japanese would be a dire wartime loss, it would have significant and far-reaching consequences for the integrity of the British Empire. Almost a decade later, when Churchill was drafting his memoirs, he was confronted by these ‘rude shocks’ once again.2 Churchill had already faced his own profound sense of guilt and sadness when recounting the loss of the Prince of Wales, the Repulse and of Admiral Tom Phillips, in his memoirs. Understandably he had tried to avoid ‘the repercussions and the feelings aroused’ when relating these events for publication, but Churchill found himself in the same situation when recalling the ‘terrible forfeits’ which the British Empire in the Far East had endured during the war.3 After examining Churchill’s portrayal of the losses of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, this chapter will illustrate what Churchill attempted to hide (the extent of his role in the weakening of the British Empire in the Far East) but also how successful he was in shaping ‘the story of the British war effort for a generation’ so that his personal role was far less immediately visible or obvious.4
Singapore has got to be held, for to lose it may well mean losing Australia, if not New Zealand. I don’t mean losing them to the Japanese, but to the Empire…. That would lead to quite unpredictable results.1
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Notes
Brian Bond (ed.), Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall: Volume II (London: Leo Cooper, 1974), 20 December 1941, p. 67.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume IV, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), p. 81.
CCAC, CHUR 4/233B/240: Allen to Churchill, 23 February 1949; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume III, The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 540. Due to Churchill’s schedule, but perhaps also to avoid the recurrent pain, Pownall was assigned the task of writing the majority of the narrative about the loss of Singapore. See CCAC, CHUR 4/258/23–4: Deakin to Churchill, ‘The Fall of Singapore’ chapter structure with assignment details, 27 July 1949; in which Deakin noted that ‘some reconstruction’ would ‘have to be done in the Far Eastern story’ and that Pownall would be responsible for four out of the five sections of the chapter.
Raymond Callahan, ‘Churchill and Singapore’, in Brian Farrell and Sandy Hunter (eds), Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2002), p. 156.
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 223.
A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Off the record: W.P. Crozier, Political interviews, 1933–1943 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), c. before 8 June 1941, p. 225.
Kent Fedorowich, ‘“Cocked Hats and Swords and Small, Little Garrisons”: Britain, Canada and the Fall of Hong Kong, 1941’, Modern Asian Studies, 37/1 (2003), citing Ian Morrison, ‘A Letter from Hong Kong’, August 1939, p. 112.
Memorandum by Admiral Tom Phillips, 3 January 1940, cited by Christopher M. Bell, “Our Most Exposed Outpost’: Hong Kong and British Far Eastern Strategy, 1921–1941’, Journal of Modern History, 60/1 (1996), p. 74.
Norman Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule, 1912–1941 (Hong Kong: OUP, 1987), p. 144.
See John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 251–60.
Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan: Volume I, The Loss of Singapore (Uckfield, East Sussex: Naval & Military Press, 1957; edition, 2004), p. 113.
Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), p. 65.
Oliver Lindsay, The Battle for Hong Kong, 1941–1945: Hostage to Fortune (London: Spellmount, 2005; edition, 2007) especially pp. 47–83. Based on the memories of John E. Harris, this confirms the extent to which the expectations of the Hong Kong garrison were unrealistic from the very outbreak of war in Europe.
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2004).
For compelling accounts of the battle for Hong Kong see: Tony Banham, Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); John R. Harris, The Battle for Hong Kong, 1941–1945 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); and Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003; edition, 2004).
Kirby, The War against Japan: I, pp. 119–52. Also see J. M.A. Gwyer, History of the Second World War: Grand Strategy, June 1941–August 1942, Volume 3, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1964), p. 311.
Sandra Koa Wing (ed.), Mass-Observation: Britain in the Second World War (London: Folio, 2007), Edie Rutherford (39-year-old, housewife, Sheffield), 8 December 1941, p. 115.
Major-General Stephen Woodburn Kirby, The War against Japan: Volumes I–V (London: HMSO, 1957–69;Uckfield: Naval & Military Press edition, 2004).
See Ian Hamill, ‘Winston Churchill and the Singapore Naval Base, 1924–1929’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 11/2 (1980), pp. 277–86; George Peden, ‘The Treasury and defence of empire’, in Greg Kennedy (ed.), Imperial Defence: The old world order, 1856–1956 (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 71–90; and James Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1919–1941 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 102–21 for the period which covered Churchill’s time at the Exchequer, and pp. 122–51, for the development and effects which occurred during the 1930s.
Louis Allen, Singapore, 1941–1942 (London: Davis Poynter, 1977); Noel Barber, Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore (London: Collins, 1968); Geoffrey Brooke, Singapore’s Dunkirk: The Aftermath of the Fall (London: Leo Cooper, 1989); Raymond Callahan, The Worst Disaster: The Fall of Singapore (Newark, USA: University of Delaware Press, 1977); and ‘The Illusion of Security: Singapore 1919–1942’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9/2 (1979), pp. 69–92; Stanley L. Falk, Seventy Days to Singapore: The Malayan Campaign, 1941–1942 (London: Robert Hale Publishers, 1975); Farrell and Hunter (eds), Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore; Karl Hack and Karl Blackburn, Did Singapore have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (London: Routledge, 2003); Richard Holmes and Anthony Kemp, The Bitter End: The Fall of Singapore, 1941–1942 (Chichester: Anthony Bird Publications, 1982); Colin Smith, Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II (London: Viking, 2005; Penguin edition, 2006); Peter Thompson, The Battle for Singapore: The True Story of the Greatest Catastrophe of World War II (London: Portrait, 2005); and Alan Warren, Britain’s Greatest Defeat: Singapore 1942 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2002; edition, 2007).
The furore over the guns and which way they pointed (landward or seaward, fixed or movable) is constantly referred to. As James Neidpath rightly points out, by the time Churchill’s fourth volume of memoirs was published, ‘the notion that the guns were pointing in the wrong direction had already been effectively propagated’. Yet as Singapore was part of his imperial phoenix rising from the ashes image, Churchill did nothing to dispel this myth. In fact, he added to it. See James Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1919–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 223.
See Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York: OUP, 1980; Oxford edition, 1982), who highlights how government interference in travelogues of the 1930s helped to create Singapore’s sense of impregnability. Fussell quotes the journalist Mona Gardner who arrived in Singapore in 1939 and who emphasised ‘Singapore’s utter invulnerability to land attack from the Malayan Peninsula’. Fussell concludes that Gardner was in fact creating ‘specious propaganda’ which did nothing but increase the ‘shock’ of the fall of the ‘impregnable fortress’, pp. 224–5. This also shows the extent to which the British Empire indulged in imperial bluff and bluster — at times to its own detriment — and how British imperial security in the Far East was little more than an illusion. See also Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Allen Lane, 2004; Penguin edition, 2005), chapter 2, ‘A Very British Disaster’, which examines the nature and extent of the illusion surrounding the ‘fortress that never was’, pp. 106–55.
Victoria Schofield, Wavell: Soldier and Statesman (London: John Murray, 2006), citing Wavell, p. 219.
CCAC, CHUR 4/258/68: Churchill dictated draft on Singapore, undated, c. summer 1949–April 1950. See also, Lieutenant-General H. Gordon Bennett, Why Singapore Fell (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1944), in which Bennett concluded that the loss of Singapore was due to insufficient troops (both in number and quality), the ‘complete absence of prepared defences’, ‘poor leadership’ and the ‘contributing factor’ of the lack of sea and air power. Factors about which Churchill shared partial responsibility. See pp. 220–29.
Max Arthur, Lost Voices of the Royal Air Force (London: Hodder, 1993; edition, 2005), p. 342.
David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 85.
Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 200.
For comprehensive accounts of the argument between Churchill and Dill see: Callahan, The Worst Disaster, pp. 90–94; Brian P. Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940–1942 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 74–5; Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base, pp. 178–81. The most succinct account is to be found in: Glen St. John Barclay, ‘Singapore Strategy: The Role of the United States in Imperial Defence’, Military Affairs, 39/2 (1975), p. 56.
In fact it was being suggested, as late as 1937, by Samuel Hoare (later Lord Templewood) that to avoid an air of defeatism and to stop Australia and New Zealand becoming solely concerned with the safety and defence of their own coastline and not the coastlines of the British Empire in the Far East, British policy should be ‘to some extent, to leave them guessing’. See Lawrence Pratt, East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: CUP, 1975), p, 51, citing TNA CAB 16/181: First Lord, ‘A New Standard of Naval Strength’, 29 April 1937.
Steve Morewood, The British Defence of Egypt 1935–1940: Conflict and Crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean (London: Frank Cass, 2005).
David Jablonsky, Churchill, The Great Game and Total War (London: Frank Cass, 1991), p. 129; Sir John Kennedy, The Business of War: The War Narrative of Major-General Sir John Kennedy (London: Hutchinson, 1957), p. 60. For a concise and thorough account of Churchill’s wartime evolving relationship with his Chiefs of Staff, see: Gen. Sir William Jackson and Field-Marshal Lord Bramall, The Chiefs: The Story of the United Kingdom’s Chiefs of Staff (London: Brassey’s, 1992), pp. 179–259.
Once Dill was ‘retired’ from his post as CIGS, on his sixtieth birthday but officially on 25 ember 1941, he became the head of the Joint Staff Mission and the senior British member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Possibly much to Churchill’s chagrin, Dill became the wartime linchpin in Anglo-American relations (and arguably outstripped Churchill himself in terms of both relevance and importance in this regard) as Dill was seen by the American’s as transparent whereas Churchill was not. For a nuanced and persuasive portrayal of Dill, see Alex Danchev, Very Special Relationship: Field-Marshal Sir John Dill and the Anglo-American Alliance 1941–44 (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1986); “Dilly-Dally’ or Having the Last Word: Field Marshal Sir John Dill and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’, Journal of Contemporary History, 22/1 (1987), pp. 21–44; and ‘Dill, Field-Marshal Sir John Dill’, in John Keegan (ed.), Churchill’s Generals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991; Cassell, 2005), pp. 51–69.
Andrew J. Brookes, Photo Reconnaissance (London: Ian Allen, 1975), p. 155.
Jock Colville noted how he had been on duty in Pretoria when he heard Churchill’s announcement on the radio of the fall of Singapore. Colville wrote how the ‘nature of his words, and the unaccustomed speed and emotion with which he spoke, convinced me that he was sorely pressed by critics and opponents at home. All the majesty of his oratory was there, but with a new note of appeal, lacking the usual confidence of support’. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, Volume II, October 1941–April 1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985; Sceptre edition, 1987), 15 February 1942, p. 46.
Stuart Ball (ed.), Parliament and Politics in the age of Churchill and Attlee: The Headlam Diaries, 1935–1951 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1999), 15 February 1942, p. 295. See also Nicolson (ed.), Nicolson Diaries, where Nicolson noted that Churchill appealed for national unity in an unfortunate manner which reminded him of Neville Chamberlain (a barbed insult indeed), 15 February 1942, p. 258.
Brian P. Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942 (Stroud: Tempus, 2005; edition, 2006), p. 414.
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© 2014 Catherine A.V. Wilson
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Wilson, C. (2014). Churchill’s Imperial Losses: Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore. In: Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_5
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