Why Was Britain Defeated in Malaya?

[Kokoda]

The British grossly under-estimated the fighting qualities of the Japanese soldier.
The British had no tanks, and did not believe that Japanese tanks would be effective in Malaya.
The elements of the RAF and RAAF in Malaya were totally inadeqaute, and inferior in performance to the Japanese aircraft.
Most of the "British" troops were Indians or Gurkhas - led by British officers, with whom they had little rapport and for whom they had little respect - and rightly so. The only troops who offered any significant resistance to the Japanese were Australians.
"Rabbit" Percival was just not up to the task, and should have paid more heed to the "advice" of Major-General Bennet, GOC Australian 8th Infantry Division.
Moreover, the loss of Malaya and Singapore can be seen as yet another strategic and tactical blunder by Churchill.

Kokoda

[Smileshire]

Care to name these British Officers and the Aussies ones that went with them?

EDIT: How about a quote from 'wikipedia' of North Africa:

By July 1942 Auchinleck had lost the confidence of Dominion commanders

You wrote:

The only troops who offered any significant resistance to the Japanese were Australians.

In the defence of Hong Kong the Middlesex Battalion and the 2nd Surrey Bn held up 2 Japanese Divisions for four days!

Until they were ordered to withdraw to Singapore and surrender.

[Peter H]

Care to name these British Officers and the Aussies ones that went with them?

The only troops who offered any significant resistance to the Japanese were Australians.

In the defence of Hong Kong the Middlesex Battalion and the 2nd Surrey Bn held up 2 Japanese Divisions for four days!

Until they were ordered to withdraw to Singapore and surrender.

There as only one Japanese Division involved--the 38th.

The Hong Kong garrison consisted of 6 battalions(2 British,2 Indian,2 Canadian).See below,no 2nd Surreys either:

http://niehorster.orbat.com/017_britain ... -kong.html

No one withdrew to Singapore.

Please at least get your facts correct before you post a rebuttal.

[Smileshire]

And same goes for all the other loose cannons on this site.

Ok big shot:

http://www.wellpm.ndirect.co.uk/History/1939-1945.htm

Sort that out.

[Wm. Harris]

The British grossly under-estimated the fighting qualities of the Japanese soldier.
The British had no tanks, and did not believe that Japanese tanks would be effective in Malaya.
The elements of the RAF and RAAF in Malaya were totally inadeqaute, and inferior in performance to the Japanese aircraft.
Most of the "British" troops were Indians or Gurkhas - led by British officers, with whom they had little rapport and for whom they had little respect - and rightly so. The only troops who offered any significant resistance to the Japanese were Australians.
"Rabbit" Percival was just not up to the task, and should have paid more heed to the "advice" of Major-General Bennet, GOC Australian 8th Infantry Division.
Moreover, the loss of Malaya and Singapore can be seen as yet another strategic and tactical blunder by Churchill.

The suggestion that Indian troops did not perform well because they were under British leadership is patently untrue. The Indian Army had long been undergoing a process of 'Indianisation'; most of the junior officers were Indians, not British. When British officers were present, they were long-serving Indian Army officers and had long since gained a "rapport" with their men - particularly since British-born officers were required to learn Urdu or Gurkhali.

The Indian Army had also undergone a very rapid expansion, and many of the troops in the Far East were only partially trained and poorly equipped.

In the defence of Hong Kong the Middlesex Battalion and the 2nd Surrey Bn held up 2 Japanese Divisions for four days! Until they were ordered to withdraw to Singapore and surrender.

Every history of the defence of Hong Kong I've read cites the presence of 2/Royal Scots, 1/Middlesex, 5/7th Rajputs, 2/14th Punjabis, the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada, along with a battalion of Hong Kong Chinese. Only the naval vessels based at Hong Kong were ordered to withdraw to Singapore, but I have no idea whether they got there.

Bill H.

[Smileshire]

From my link:

In the Far East, the defence of Hong Kong island by The Middlesex (1Bn) against the Japanese was in the finest tradition of the 'Diehards', and the 2nd East Surreys, having held up 2 Japanese divisions for 4 days on the mainland were ordered first to withdraw to Singapore and then to surrender

Can someone please explain this. Are we to say the order to singapore was there but not acted upon for some reason. (Hence clarifying Peter H that no one arrived there?)

But regards the 4 days, i have read an action lasting from the 15th to the 18th december 41(which is 4 days in fact) in a war dairy i passively looked at. Is this 1/Middlesex?

[Peter H]

And same goes for all the other loose cannons on this site.

Ok big shot:

http://www.wellpm.ndirect.co.uk/History/1939-1945.htm

Sort that out.

You obviously have misinterpreted that narrative...the 2nd East Surreys were in Malaya.

http://www.cofepow.org.uk/pages/armedfo ... urreys.htm

My comment on getting the facts right still stands.

[Smileshire]

Oh nice one, a link for just another link :roll:

[Barry Graham]

The "mainland" referred to in the 1939-45 history is Malaya.
The 2nd East Surreys withdrew from mainland Malaya across the causeway to Singapore Island.

[Jon G.]

A post by babyblue containing several national slurs was removed.

Babyblue, please make your point without stooping to insults. As a bonus, that also ensures that your posts will remain in place.

Thank you.

[John W]

By the way:

Speaking of the guns of Singapore and how they utterly "failed" to protect Singapore from the Japanese.

The Japanese later dismantled those big guns and had them shipped to Tarawa - there, they were mounted on Betio in anticipation of slaughtering the allied invasion force even before they got to the reef.

On D-day, the guns utterly failed to hit even one capital ship (or even a landing braft). To be fair though, US big guns didn't fare any better (leaving most of the grunt work to be done by the destroyers - who each gave a splendid performance of close in fire support).

Irony or what?


cheers,

[Peter H]

John

You could be right but note this:

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/ba ... arawa.html

There were four 8in (203mm) naval guns at Temakin Point and near Takorongo Point. For many, many years they were referred to as 'Singapore' guns as it was assumed they were the Vickers guns taken when the Japanese captured Singapore but a United Nations official, William Bartsch, examined the guns in 1974 and made a note of their identification numbers. These were identified with the help of Vickers as being part of an order supplied to Japan in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War.

Regards
Peter

[Peter H]

‘Out-generalled,Outwitted, and Outfought’,The Australian Army Journal,Winter 2004,Lt General John Coates:

http://www.defence.gov.au/army/lwsc/Abs ... Coates.pdf

[419*]

The biggest reason Britain lost in Malaya can be summed up in two words: Winston Churchill.

Churchill fancied himself as a military strategist but his record, such as his follies at Gallipoli in WWI and in Greece and Singapore in WWII, shows he was a lousy at it.

Churchill’s imperious Victorian / Edwardian outlook still blinded him in 1941 to several critical realities about contemporary warfare; the declining significance of Britain’s naval power; and contemporary Japanese military ability.

Despite abundant evidence in Europe in 1939 - 1940 and Greece in 1941 that air power determined land campaigns by ground support and the ability to influence crucial matters beyond the battlefield, such as supply and troop and naval movements, Churchill continued his long refusal to recognise that air power had supplanted the might of the Royal Navy. Churchill also subscribed to the common English-speaking people’s arrogance that the Japanese were no military match for Europeans, despite evidence going back to the war with Russia at the beginning of the 20th century that the Japanese, who had had no Western technology before about 1860, were supremely fast learners and quite capable of defeating Europeans militarily.

His mistaken beliefs were summed up by Norman Rose in ‘Churchill – An Unruly Life’.

Even as late as 1934, after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria and advance on Shanghai, he was still reiterating that Japan posed no threat to ‘our Empire’ and lauding Manchuko (the puppet state that had supplanted Manchuria) as rather ‘a good thing’. Only three years later did Churchill detect, reluctantly, ‘a somewhat different Japan’, powerful, violent, ambitious, about whom her civilized neighbours must feel ‘serious anxieties’. He now recognized the possibility of war. General Sir Edmond Ironside was left ‘gasping’, if in agreement, at Churchill’s proposed strategy: to abandon Hong Kong and Shanghai and retire on Singapore. Churchill expressed complete faith in the navy. Not only was it ‘absolutely efficient’, it was also ’unassailable from the air’, a ready match for the Japanese. Six months before the outbreak of the Second World War, he elaborated upon these ideas. He still thought it possible, though by no means certain, that Japan would join ‘a hostile combination’ against Britain. If so, and given the fact that the Mediterranean was ‘the decisive battle-ground at sea’, and Europe the more immediate danger, Britain must conduct a holding action in the Far East. He discounted the likelihood of a Japanese land assault on Singapore. As for a naval expedition, its exposed lines of communications, would invite failure, not success. ‘Japan would not run such a risk’, he reasoned. ‘They are too sensible a people.’ Churchill’s faith in the impregnability of Singapore, the proficiency of the navy, and the good sense of the Japanese was touching but fanciful. pp 182-3

As the supreme war leader in Britain, these naïve attitudes led him to deny Malaya the air support that it needed if it was to have any chance of defending itself a Japanese attack.

In fairness to Churchill, he had to balance strong competing demands for air and other resources in other theatres at a time when Britain and its dominions were fighting the Axis combatants on their own and with severely strained resources. In 1941 he could not afford to take large numbers of aircraft and aircrew from other theatres where they were actively engaged in a war so he could station them in Malaya, doing nothing, against the risk of a Japanese attack. Malaya needed, at the very least, several hundred extra British fighters and maybe a couple of hundred fighter-bombers / medium bombers / torpedo aircraft to even begin to have any hope of meeting the Japanese air power and being able to provide effective ground support and to damage Japanese naval forces moving troops and supplies during the campaign.

While Churchill could not divert such large air forces in anticipation of an attack, he did not bother to bolster the air forces after Japan attacked. He failed to do so because he still believed that naval power was supreme and “unassailable from the air”. So he sent the Repulse and Prince of Wales, the prompt loss of which demonstrated just how far out of touch he was with the realities of contemporary warfare and Japan’s ability to wage it.

Naturally there were plenty of people around Churchill who shared his views, but in the end Churchill must bear the ultimate responsibility for the arrogant and outdated thinking and the bad decisions which flowed from it and which made it almost inevitable that Britain would lose Malaya, regardless of what General Percival or any of his senior commanders or the British ground troops did.

The ability of adequate British air power to have influenced and quite possibly to have altered the result can be illustrated by considering what would have happened in a few examples.

First, what would have happened if the British could have mounted effective air attacks on the Japanese forces as soon as they established their beachheads and maintained those attacks for as long as necessary? Would the Japanese have been able to break out in sufficient organised strength to win the campaign?

Second, what would have happened if the British by air attack could have stopped the naval movements of Japanese troops to land behind the British front? Would the Japanese have been able to get behind the British and cause mayhem?

Third, given that the Japanese were advancing rapidly and not dug in, what would have happened if the British had been able to bring strong air support to bear on the forward troops and lines of communication? Would the Japanese have been able to maintain pressure on the British in advance?

If Churchill had had the brains to see that air power trumped naval power, he wouldn’t have lost the Repulse or the Prince of Wales. He might even have won in Malaya by early 1942, which might well have influenced Japan’s attitude to the future prosecution of its war aims instead of giving a huge boost to its military confidence.

[Peter H]

One valid criticism of RAF deployment in 1941 was that it was too defence home orientated,even after Germany turned east in June 1941.

RAF Home Fighter Command in 1941 reached a peak war strength of 79 squadrons by mid-1941,all with the latest fighters.The constant fighter sweeps across occupied northern France and Belgium that started in that year has also be seen as a result of giving them something to do.

Too late for Malaya,something like 30 squadrons were sent off the move elsewhere from 1942.

It does highlight that there was a strategic RAF fighter reserve in being,underutilised as such.Even 10 squadrons of Spitfires sent east would have bettered the strategic edge.