The sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse

On 10 December 1941, in less than two and a half hours, Japanese bombers and torpedo aircraft flying from airfields in southern Indochina sank two great British warships in the South China Sea, about 100 kilometres east of Kuantan on the east coast of Malaya: the new battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse. According to British figures 840 sailors were killed, 513 from Repulse and 327 from Prince of Wales, and with them the force commander, Admiral Tom Phillips, and the battleship’s captain, Captain John Leach. The Japanese lost three aircraft, and a fourth crashed on landing. These were the first capital ships to be sunk by aircraft alone on the open sea, under way and while fighting back. Three days after Pearl Harbor the battle showed that without fighter cover no warship was safe within range of modern aircraft, and it gave Japan command of the seas of South-East Asia for many months. The Japanese called the engagement the Naval Battle off Malaya (Marē-oki kaisen).

War chronologies describe it accurately: a British battlecruiser and battleship were sunk by Japanese aircraft in the South China Sea. It is worth adding that these were not carrier aircraft, as in Hawaii, but twin-engined machines of the naval air arm operating from land, at a range of more than 600 kilometres.

Ships as a deterrent

From the 1920s British strategy in the Far East rested on the base at Singapore, to which the main fleet was to sail in the event of war. In 1941, with the war against Germany and Italy under way, no such fleet existed. When in October the Konoe cabinet fell in Tokyo and General Hideki Tōjō became prime minister, the British government concluded that Japan had to be deterred. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, wanted to assemble gradually in the Indian Ocean a force of older battleships which by the spring of 1942 might form a fleet capable of fighting. Prime Minister Winston Churchill preferred a quick gesture: a few modern ships which, like the German Tirpitz in the Atlantic, would tie down the enemy’s forces by their mere existence. The commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral John Tovey, objected to giving up one of the new King George V-class battleships. On 20 October the Defence Committee decided to send Prince of Wales to Cape Town for the time being, from where she was to sail on if the situation required. Soon the destination was fixed as Singapore.

Prince of Wales was a ship with a short but eventful history. In May 1941, still with civilian dockyard workers on board, she had fought in the Denmark Strait, where Hood was lost, and her hits contributed to the fate of Bismarck soon afterwards. In August she carried Churchill to Newfoundland for the meeting with President Roosevelt that produced the Atlantic Charter; the two leaders attended a joint church service on board. In September she escorted a convoy to Malta. She was joined by Repulse, a battlecruiser of 1916, fast but thinly armoured and with obsolete anti-aircraft armament. The new carrier Indomitable, with her fighters, was to have accompanied them, but on 3 November she ran aground at the entrance to Kingston harbour in Jamaica and had to go in for repairs.

Command of the new Eastern Fleet went to Tom Phillips, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff since 1939, a close associate of Pound, respected for his intelligence but without any sea command in battle for years. Like most officers of the Royal Navy he underrated Japanese air power: he believed that well-armed, manoeuvring ships could defend themselves against aircraft. Experience in the Mediterranean seemed to bear him out, for German and Italian aircraft had damaged British ships but had not yet sunk a single battleship at sea. The squadron, designated Force G, arrived at Singapore on 2 December and was soon renamed Force Z. Churchill publicised its arrival. The Japanese responded in their own way: additional Mitsubishi G4M bombers were sent to the naval air arm in Indochina, and the crews of Rear Admiral Sadaichi Matsunaga’s 22nd Air Flotilla practised torpedo attacks on moving ships.

A sortie without cover

On 8 December, when the Japanese landed at Kota Bharu and in Thailand and bombed Singapore at dawn, Phillips decided to act. He believed that the fleet could not stay in harbour while the army and air force were fighting for Malaya. On the evening of 8 December Prince of Wales, Repulse and four destroyers – the British Electra, Express and Tenedos and the Australian Vampire – sailed from Singapore to strike at the Japanese transports off Singora and Kota Bharu. Phillips asked for fighter cover over the area of the attack, but the RAF, which was just then losing its airfields in the north, replied that it could not provide it over Singora on 10 December. Phillips was counting on surprise, bad weather and speed.

On the afternoon of 9 December the British force was spotted by the Japanese submarine I-65, which shadowed it for several hours and sent reports, and before dusk Japanese reconnaissance seaplanes appeared over the ships. Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa sent the empty transports north, and Japanese cruisers and the battleships Kongō and Haruna set off south from Indochina. Phillips, knowing that he had lost surprise, turned back for Singapore in the evening. During the night a report came in of a supposed Japanese landing at Kuantan, halfway between Singapore and Kota Bharu, and the admiral turned in that direction without informing the shore, so as not to give away his position. There was no landing: jumpy outposts had fired in the dark on harmless boats. During the night a second submarine, I-58, located the British and fired torpedoes at them, but missed – something that was not even noticed aboard the ships.

Two hours on 10 December

On the morning of 10 December reconnaissance aircraft took off from the airfields near Saigon and at Thủ Dầu Một, followed by some 85 bombers in all from the Genzan, Mihoro and Kanoya Air Groups, Mitsubishi G3Ms and G4Ms, some carrying bombs and some torpedoes. They searched for the squadron too far to the south, having not foreseen its turn towards Kuantan. At about 10.15 a.m. a reconnaissance pilot, Ensign Masato Hoashi, sighted the British ships and reported their position. The aircraft, scattered over the sea and running low on fuel, attacked in small groups, one after another, as they arrived.

At 11.13 a.m. eight bombers of the Mihoro Air Group dropped their bombs on Repulse. One hit, without causing serious damage. At about 11.40 the torpedo aircraft of the Genzan Air Group arrived. Repulse evaded every torpedo, but Prince of Wales was hit on the port side where a propeller shaft left the hull. The hit proved fatal: the bent shaft, still turning, tore open the seals, water poured into the engine room and the shaft passages, the ship took on some 2,400 tons of water, listed to port, slowed to fifteen knots or so and lost much of her electrical power. Most of her anti-aircraft guns, which were electrically controlled, ceased to work, and the steering failed. The battleship, whose anti-aircraft fire-control system was among the most modern in the world, was defenceless; tropical heat and humidity had already damaged her radars and the ammunition of her light guns. Only then, about an hour after the first attack, did Captain William Tennant of Repulse send a report of the air attack to Singapore. Phillips maintained radio silence throughout.

At about 12.20 p.m. 26 G4M bombers of the Kanoya Air Group struck. Three torpedoes hit the starboard side of Prince of Wales. At the same time aircraft attacked Repulse from both sides. Tennant, who according to accounts had managed to evade 19 torpedoes, this time had nowhere to turn. The ship was hit by at least four torpedoes (surveys of the wreck in 2007 confirmed two hits; the rest of the hull lies in the seabed), capsized and sank at 12.33 p.m. At 12.41 a bomb from another wave pierced the deck of Prince of Wales and exploded among the wounded gathered there. The destroyer Express came alongside the battleship to take off the wounded and surplus crew; as the battleship rolled over she almost dragged the destroyer down with her. At 1.18 p.m. Prince of Wales sank. Phillips and Leach remained on the bridge. Leach had also commanded the battleship in May, in the battle with Bismarck.

Ten Buffalo fighters of the Australian No. 453 Squadron, assigned to cover the fleet, arrived over the scene of the battle just as the battleship was going down. Their acting commander, Tim Vigors, had spent the whole day waiting in his cockpit at Sembawang airfield. Earlier he had proposed standing patrols of six fighters over the squadron by day, but Phillips had not accepted the offer. Vigors wrote after the war that six fighters could have made “quite a mess” of the slow, unescorted torpedo aircraft. Historians debate how much a few Buffaloes could have changed against several dozen bombers, but they agree that Phillips made a grave mistake in not asking for cover once he knew he was being shadowed. The Japanese launched 49 torpedoes and, according to surveys of the wrecks, scored at least six hits – eight according to older accounts. The next day a Kanoya Air Group airman, Haruki Iki, flew over the scene of the battle and dropped two wreaths into the sea: one for his fallen comrades and one for the British sailors.

The destroyers Electra, Express and Vampire picked up more than two thousand survivors from the water, many of them covered in oil. The Japanese aircraft did not fire on them.

“A more direct shock”

On the morning of 10 December London time, a few hours after the battle, Dudley Pound telephoned Churchill, who was still in bed going through his papers. Pound reported that Prince of Wales and Repulse had both been sunk by the Japanese, “we think by aircraft”, and that “Tom Phillips is drowned”. Churchill wrote years later: “In all the war I never received a more direct shock.” Over the whole of that vast expanse of water, he went on, Japan held sway, while Britain was everywhere weak and exposed. The same day in the House of Commons, before Question Time, he announced that he had “bad news for the House” which he ought to pass on as soon as possible, and said that word had come from Singapore that both ships had been sunk, the only source of details being a Japanese communiqué that spoke of an air attack. The following day he gave a fuller statement on the war situation. In Britain, which in the preceding weeks had been shaken by the loss of Ark Royal and Barham, the news was received as one of the heaviest defeats of the war at sea.

Place in the war

The sinking of Force Z ended an era in which the battleship had been believed to rule the sea. Aircraft had sunk capital ships in harbour before: the British at Taranto in 1940, the Germans the Soviet Marat at Kronstadt in September 1941, the Japanese the American battleships at Pearl Harbor. Bismarck had been crippled by an aerial torpedo, but it was warships that sank her. Off Kuantan, for the first time, land-based aircraft sank two fast capital ships on the open sea while they were defending themselves. From then on no fleet put to sea within range of enemy aircraft without fighters of its own, and the war in the Pacific was to be decided by aircraft carriers.

The strategic consequences were immediate. After Pearl Harbor and Kuantan the Allies had no effective force of capital ships in the Pacific or in the waters of South-East Asia, and the only striking force left in the Pacific was three American aircraft carriers. The east coast of Malaya lay open to Japanese landings, and Singapore, conceived as a fleet base, became a fortress without a fleet. Nine days later Italian frogmen disabled the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant at Alexandria, and within a few weeks the Royal Navy’s superiority in capital ships had melted away. On 15 February 1942 Singapore capitulated. The British Eastern Fleet, rebuilt from old battleships under Admiral James Somerville, fell back to Ceylon and East Africa, and in April 1942 Japanese carriers, raiding into the Indian Ocean, sank more British warships. The wrecks of Prince of Wales and Repulse lie upside down at a depth of several dozen metres and are war graves.