Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse by Dr Martin Stephen

never initiated as the result of a cocktail of fear of breaching Thai neutrality, lack of resources and the speed of the Japanese advance overwhelming the decision-making process.
    Another serious weakness was air defence. British aircraft:
    ‘… operated from the airfields recently carved out of the Malayan jungle – Alor Star, Kota Bharu, Gong Kedah, Kuantan and the others – with much difficulty. Although the C in C Far East, Brooke-Popham, had lain down that defence of the airfields was to take precedence over everything else except the naval base itself, Pulford had received few weapons for this purpose, and the anti-aircraft and ground defences of all the airfields were quite inadequate to meet determined attack. The real facts of the air situation in Singapore … were far worse even than Phillips had judged from the figures he had been shown before his departure. In the event of serious attack, Malaya possessed no measurable air defence at all.’ 1
    Phillips quite rightly distrusted the Brewster Buffalo fighters that were the stalwart of Singapore’s air defence ( see Chapter 8 ) and had argued to the Chiefs of Staff on 25 April 1941 for both Hurricane fighters and tanks to be sent to Singapore, further testimony that this ‘desk’ Admiral was alive to the demands and reality of actual combat. Both tanks and fighters were available but were sent instead to Russia. It is doubtful that they had a major impact on the military fortunes of the Russians, but beyond doubt that they could have had a major impact on the battle for Singapore. The failure to equip Singapore stretched even to the supply of the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle. A British design that came into service in 1937, it was ineffective against the thickness of armour found in most German tanks and was superseded by the bazooka, but would have been effective against the Japanese light tanks used in the assault on Singapore, which had armour of 16mm thickness against the 20mm the Boys Rifle was designed to penetrate. Two hundred were sent to Russia before the Japanese invaded, none to Singapore.
    However, it is only selected parts of the military provision for the defence of Singapore that relate to the sinking of Force Z. Air cover is so important a part of this that it is dealt with below in a separate chapter. It is perhaps worth stating that Phillips was aware of the chaos that was Singapore – he wished to go out there in the summer of 1941 to try and sort some of that chaos out – but he was overruled. 2 He was not, of course, in any way responsible for the lamentable state of its defences. The fact that as a result of the sinking of the merchant ship Automedon the Japanese knew of Singapore’s weakness is also dealt with in a later chapter.
    Recent research has focused on an area that may have contributed significantly to the loss of the ships. Inter-service rivalry was intense at Singapore, co-operation between the Army, Navy and RAF notable by its absence. It was to take a very long while indeed for Britain to learn how to manage combined operations, and it had certainly not done so by the time hostilities hit Singapore. In some respects Tom Phillips was to prove as much a victim of the petty rivalries, jealousies and failure to talk to each other that beset the Army, Navy and RAF in Singapore, as he was a victim of the Japanese. We have already seen how the RAF ignored the views of the Army in positioning its airfields. Partly as an attempt to solve some of these problems, and prior to the opening of hostilities, a new underground command building was being opened, known as the ‘Battlebox’. ‘Thus the defences of Malaya were split between the naval base and Sime Road, with the Battlebox becoming a third command centre to take charge of the Singapore aspect of the operations.’ 3
    Despite the existence of separate command centres, initially they could only communicate out through the domestic telephone system. The problem was not limited to an