The Pacific Naval War 1941–1945

By David Wragg

This vividly detailed WWII history chronicles the bitter conflict at sea between Allied and Japanese naval forces.

The Pacific War was primarily fought at sea. Naval power allowed the Japanese to mount their attack on Pearl Harbor and then advance westwards and southwards. It also enabled the Allies to strike back and even take the war to Japan itself. The tide turned very quickly, with the US victory at Midway in June of 1942 ending any Japanese hope of domination.

The book begins with the decisions that led Japan into war, and the difficult situation faced by the Royal Navy elsewhere. It then describes how, within a couple of years, the Royal Navy was able to send the strongest and most balanced fleet in its history to severely disrupt Japanese operations.

Historian David Wragg also covers how the Royal Australian Navy developed into a viable naval force ready to become a major fleet in the immediate postwar years. The progress of the war is supported by eyewitness accounts from those involved in the fighting at sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781844689712

Book preview

Chapter 1

‘We’ll Send a Strong Fleet!’ – Fortress Singapore

The United Kingdom and the Royal Navy had a long association with the Far East and the Pacific region. By the beginning of the twentieth century this had developed with India as the largest colony, but this so-called ‘Jewel in the Crown’ was to be outstripped in importance by Malaya, which was to prove far more worthwhile as the century progressed given its resources of rubber and tin, and by the trading colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong. For many Britons, however, the links that mattered most in the Pacific were Australia and New Zealand. These two countries, about as far away from the Mother Country as they could be, were no longer simply colonies but self-governing dominions with Australia achieving dominion status in 1901 and New Zealand in 1907. The problems that had led to the American War of Independence had been noted and lessons learned. It was far better to leave the colonists to rule themselves and retain their allegiance than to attempt to govern remotely from a long distance.

Both Australia and New Zealand were important to the United Kingdom economy as a source of cheap agricultural products and, unlike the colonies, neither was a drain on the Exchequer. Many of the colonies were in effect a liability, not least India, large but over-populated and poverty-stricken, with ethnic divisions that were in the end to prove devastating, as well as the growing clamouring for independence.

By contrast with India, both Australia and New Zealand were underpopulated. In the former case, most of the population was clustered in a number of urban developments around the coast with small and scattered agricultural communities inland, while New Zealand was little bigger than the Mother Country but also with a small population. Australia had iron ore and coal as well as its agricultural products, but New Zealand had no mineral resources.

In one respect, defence, both these dominions were heavily dependent upon the home country. To some extent this was understandable as small populations made it difficult to sustain sizeable armed forces. Nevertheless, not only in the case of Australia and New Zealand but also in the other two dominions, Canada and South Africa, there was the feeling in London that the populations of the dominions and their governments did not consider that defence mattered and were not prepared to devote funds to it. Attitudes varied, with Canada and South Africa taking a more fiercely independent line and refusing to contribute towards ‘Imperial Defence’, while Australia and New Zealand were far more amenable.

The growing burden of defence and the obvious prosperity of the dominions and some of the colonies by the late nineteenth century led the United Kingdom to press for them to play a greater part in the defence of the Empire, and especially maritime defence. Historical concerns about the relationship with France were already giving way to fears about the growing power of the newly-unified Germany and of Tsarist Russia. Even in the late nineteenth century, the Royal Navy was providing advice to the new Imperial Japanese Navy, the Teikoku Kaigun, which also ordered ships from British shipyards, and while there were commercial and trading reasons for this interest, it was also driven in part by a desire to be able to counter Russian influence in the Far East.

The despatch of the Russian Fleet to Japan in 1904 was a shambles, not least because the United Kingdom and Russia came close to war after the Russians shelled British trawlers as they steamed south through the North Sea, believing the fishing vessels to be Japanese torpedo boats. There was satisfaction at Russia’s devastating defeat in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Nevertheless, Japan itself was already embarked on a programme of aggressive expansionism, taking the Kwantung Peninsula in China and ousting China from Korea. In the years that followed the First World War, unease about Japanese intentions was to grow, although at first relations with the United Kingdom were so cordial that a naval mission was sent to Japan, and much of Japan’s development of naval aviation can be traced back to the work and guidance of the Royal Navy officers who formed the mission. British naval aircraft were built under licence in Japan.

This is to jump ahead, for as the twentieth century dawned, it had become clear to the British Admiralty that there was a growing threat from Germany in particular, and in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War there was a naval race between the two countries. The Admiralty’s solution was to concentrate as much of the Royal Navy as possible in Home Waters, or at least close to them, with its two major fleet divisions being what was to become the Grand Fleet in British waters, and the Mediterranean Fleet.

East of Suez, the Royal Australian Navy was established in 1911, and a New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy was also created. In both cases, command lay in the hands of senior Royal Navy officers on secondment, and officers were trained for both navies at Dartmouth. India created the Royal Indian Marine, a coastal defence force.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The First World War saw Japan, like Italy, as an ally and the Japanese even sent a flotilla of destroyers to the Mediterranean. During the war, the Royal Australian Navy functioned as if it were part of the Royal Navy, as did the New Zealand Division. Following the war, the dominion naval forces shrank again, but did so amid a debate over the role that the Royal Navy, really only strong enough to operate in one hemisphere, could fulfil as it remained clear that it was meant to discharge its duties in two hemispheres.

One problem was that the First World War saw the Royal Navy, in the words of the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher: ‘Weak everywhere, strong nowhere.’ This was especially true of the Pacific.

In 1914 there were three squadrons of ships east of Suez. These were the China Squadron, based at Hong Kong and consisting of a pre-dreadnought battleship Triumph, the armoured cruisers Minotaur and Hampshire and two light cruisers, Newcastle and Yarmouth. On the outbreak of war, Triumph was in dockyard hands, but she was quickly returned to service. To crew her, four Yangtze River gunboats were quickly decommissioned and their crews transferred, but efforts to recruit Chinese stokers proved fruitless and volunteers had to be sought from the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, which eventually provided 106 men and two officers. At Singapore, base for the East Indies Station, there was a sister of Triumph, the pre-dreadnought Swiftsure, as well as two light cruisers, while the French placed two armoured cruisers under the command of the flag officer, and the Russians followed providing two elderly light cruisers. Strongest of the squadrons was the Australian squadron, based on Sydney, and consisting of the dreadnought battlecruiser Australia, one of the Indefatigable-class, and two modern light cruisers, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as two older light cruisers. A First World War light cruiser, nevertheless, was more akin to a destroyer of the Second World War in terms of tonnage, while the destroyers of the day were small; usually well below 1,000 tons standard displacement. Only the protected and armoured cruisers were of a size comparable with their Second World War successors.

While the Pacific was far from being the main crucible of the war, the Germans realised that it was necessary to interfere with shipping, and especially that bringing Australian and New Zealand troops to Europe and the Middle East. The Royal Navy, which opposed convoys until late in the war, did nevertheless ensure that troopships in the Pacific and Indian Ocean were escorted. Even so, between them the German commerce-raiders Emden and Karlsruhe sank thirty-nine merchant ships out of a total at sea of 40,000, accounting for 176,000 tons of merchant shipping. Emden was disguised as a four-funnelled British light cruiser, but had gained a certain public regard for the way in which the crews of its victims were allowed to leave their ships before they were sunk. Nevertheless, on 9 November 1914, Emden’s luck ran out. Personnel at a telegraph station on the Cocos Islands spotted the ship and their signal was picked up by the Australian light cruiser Sydney, faster, heavier and better armed than the German ship, which left the Australian troop convoy it was escorting to the Red Sea and headed to intercept the Emden. A gunnery duel resulted and after two and a half hours, Emden was driven onto a reef, already a burning wreck.

Karlsruhe, intended to be another thorn in the British flesh, never had the chance to display her full potential, sinking in the Caribbean on 4 November 1914 following an internal explosion.

CORONEL

While Emden had used subterfuge to score her successes against the Royal Navy, a German battle squadron was on the loose in the Pacific. This was the East Asia Squadron, based on Tsingtao and commanded by Admiral von Spee, with the two armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the light cruisers Leipzig and Nurnberg, although a third, Emden, was as already mentioned, to lead a free-booting existence as a solitary commerce-raider. This was a powerful force, but in total, the British and Allied force was far stronger, while certain of the British ships outclassed their German rivals, especially Australia, but also including Minotaur which was superior to either of the German armoured cruisers, and Newcastle and Yarmouth were superior to the German light cruisers. The Germans, on the outbreak of war, also pressed into service the armed merchant cruiser, Prinz Eitel Friedrich.

Despite a reluctance to introduce convoys elsewhere and a shortage of destroyers with which to provide escorts, with German merchant raiders loose it was essential that troops from India, Australia and New Zealand were brought to Europe in well-protected convoys, and this rapidly became a duty for the squadrons in the east. There were other priorities as Australia and New Zealand moved to seize German possessions in the Pacific, for which they needed naval support.

Von Spee spent some time cruising the Pacific, uncertain as to which course to take. His squadron made the most of the limited facilities allowed belligerent warships by neutral nations. His initial plan was to rendezvous with the cruisers of the German American Station, but on his way down the coast of South America he encountered Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who had taken part of his squadron round Cape Horn seeking the German Asiatic Squadron. Cradock had just the armoured cruisers Good Hope and Monmouth, with the former his best ship although already obsolescent and under-gunned for her 14,100 tons displacement, as well as the new light cruiser Glasgow and the armed merchant cruiser Otranto, an Orient Line ship intended to hunt down German merchantmen rather than engage warships. Monmouth had been due to be scrapped. Despite the overall balance of naval power in the southern oceans being in Britain’s favour, when it came to battle the situation was reversed with small squadrons of ships engaged. Lacking aerial reconnaissance and with limited communications, searching for enemy forces was akin to seeking a needle in a haystack, if not even more difficult.

The opposing forces met off the Chilean coast near Coronel in bad weather with high seas on 1 November. Only the armoured cruisers were able to use their guns effectively because of the high seas, but the two elderly British armoured cruisers were silenced quickly by their more modern German opponents, with the flagship Good Hope sinking after an hour, and with Cradock becoming the first of four British admirals to lose his life in battle during the war. Monmouth was then sunk by a torpedo from a German cruiser and went down with no survivors. This sacrifice did at least enable Glasgow and Otranto to escape.

Retribution followed in the Battle of the Falkland Islands when the Germans suffered devastating losses, and the balance of power in the South Atlantic and the Pacific was reversed. Even so, the Germans continued to harass Allied shipping, and the Pacific proved to be a happy hunting ground for the German commerce-raiders Wolf and Möwe.

The following year, at Singapore, an inherent weakness in the British Empire was exposed when Indian Muslim Sepoy troops mutinied in response to reports that they were to be sent to fight Ottoman, or Turkish, forces who were fellow Muslims. They murdered several of their British officers and a number of civilians before the mutiny could be suppressed by troops brought quickly from Johor, the most southerly of the Malay states, and Burma. This sharp division between Muslims and other religions existed throughout many of the colonies and while most obvious in India, it was also a factor in places as far apart as Malaya and Nigeria.

ONE POWER STANDARD

The twentieth century had started with the British body politic believing in the ‘Two Power Standard’, which meant that the Royal Navy had to match the combined strength of any two navies which it was likely to face in combat. Many believed that there should be a slight margin over and above the two power standard, which became the ‘Two Power Standard plus Ten Per Cent’. This was fine in theory, but in harsh practical terms, the advent of the Dreadnought, the large all big-gun battleship, a British innovation, wiped out the Royal Navy’s lead in battleships almost overnight and it became a question of shipbuilding capacity and the funds with which to utilise it that became important in the years before war broke out.

Even while the war raged, it seems that the difficulties of maintaining such a large fleet and deploying it worldwide were worrying the British government. The idea arose that there should be an Imperial Navy, based on the Royal Navy but augmented by ships from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and possibly India. This would clearly be under Royal Navy control, with the dominions contributing their share of the manpower, ships and, of course, the cost. On 15 August 1918 the idea was decisively rejected by the dominion governments. The strongest opposition came from Canada and South Africa, but even Australia and New Zealand were conscious of retaining their own separate identities and retaining control over the financial and defence commitments that might be expected of them.

Following the First World War, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, among other limitations on naval power, capped the Royal Navy at the agreed size of the United States Navy which was growing to match the needs of what was becoming the world’s leading superpower. Both navies were limited to a total warship tonnage of 525,000 tons each and all other navies were smaller, including those of France, Italy and Japan, while defeated Germany was confined to a coastal force. So between the wars, the Royal Navy found itself at what may be described as a ‘One Power’ standard.

In such a diminished state, the political debate in the United Kingdom centred around the fact that the Royal Navy was essentially capable only of influencing events in one hemisphere, but in practice had responsibility for two hemispheres. London applied pressure to the dominions to make up the balance, but they were largely unwilling to do so. In Australia naval personnel dropped to as low as 3,117 at one stage, with another 5,446 in the reserves. The UK started construction of a major naval base at Singapore, able to provide a forward operating base for a major fleet, and assured Australia and New Zealand that in the event of a war with Japan, the Royal Navy would send almost its full power to the east, and Australian and New Zealand forces would harass the Japanese Navy’s advance while the arrival of the large fleet was awaited. New Zealand was particularly anxious that the Singapore base should be completed, and contributed the then significant sum of £1 million towards the cost of construction.

To many, including Winston Churchill who had been First Lord of the Admiralty on the outbreak of the First World War and was to return to this post at the start of the Second before becoming Prime Minister in 1940, Singapore was seen as the ‘Gibraltar of the Far East’.

This strategy not only failed to recognise the prospect of war in Europe, but also ignored the enthusiasm with which Japan would take up the cause of naval aviation and the aircraft carrier.

Also relevant to this strategy was the impact of the Depression years on the armed forces of the democracies. The Royal Australian Navy received two County-class cruisers in 1928, but could not afford anything further until 1934. The Royal Navy was similarly affected.

Almost alone among the great powers and future belligerents, the British also sought to tighten the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. Attempts were made to reduce the maximum tonnage of cruisers and aircraft carriers. Heavy cruisers were built with six guns in three turrets instead of eight guns in four turrets. Battleships had the calibre of their main armament reduced from 16 inches, having risen from 15-inch, to 14-inch; not only implying shells with less explosive impact, but a shorter range as well.

As the threat of war with Germany, Italy and Japan became more apparent, modernisation and expansion of the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy started, while the New Zealand Division received two more modern cruisers and started to expand to become the Royal New Zealand Navy.

Elsewhere, the Royal Indian Navy numbered just 1,708 men and had five sloops, only two of them modern, a patrol boat and two auxiliaries, all of which were regarded as part of the Royal Navy’s East Indies Station. Further away, but as the Mediterranean became impassable in 1941, significant for ships passing to and from the Far East was South Africa, with a major naval base at Simonstown, near Cape Town. South Africa was not a maritime nation even though its trading links were largely by sea, and maintained small coastal forces which became the South African Naval Force in 1942.

The Royal Navy’s influence on these dominion and colonial services was considerable. Three-quarters of the officers in the Royal Indian Navy were on secondment from the Royal Navy, while of 1,257 ratings and eighty-two officers in the New Zealand Division in September 1939, just 716 ratings and eight officers were New Zealanders. Unable to expand rapidly enough to accommodate all of the New Zealanders anxious to come to the aid of the Mother Country on the outbreak of war in 1939, many joined the Royal Navy direct and ‘Kiwis’ formed a significant proportion of naval aircrew in particular. It helped that the Royal Navy had a recruiting office in Auckland.

The scene was set for a war in Europe that would so absorb the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force that the Far East had to be left to chance, even though Japan was already waging a full-scale war in China.

SINGAPORE

Despite Churchill’s comparison with Gibraltar, Singapore is almost 100 times as large at 225 square miles to the 2½ square miles of Gibraltar. While Gibraltar is in effect a small peninsula, Singapore is an island, roughly half as big again as the Isle of Wight. There are other differences as the harbour at ‘Gib’, or as it is often known, the ‘Rock’, is largely man-made, but that at Singapore is much larger and one of the great natural harbours of the world. Gibraltar has had to be sufficient in itself with a naval base but relatively little commercial shipping, while Singapore was the port for much of the exports from the southern states of Malaya, an entrepot port, and one of the great trading centres of the East. While Gibraltar was and remains a British colony, Singapore was run as one of the Straits Settlements for many years, actually governed from India, and it was not until April 1867 that Singapore became a Crown Colony in its own right, with the governor in direct communication with the Colonial Office in London.

The predominant racial grouping in Singapore was the Chinese, although there were a substantial number of Malays. As early as 1906 the Tongmenghui, a revolutionary group dedicated to the overthrow of the ruling Qing Dynasty in China and establishing a republic, established a branch in Singapore, which became the group’s headquarters in SouthEast Asia. The Tongmenghui was in effect a predecessor of the Chinese Nationalists.

CREATING A NAVAL BASE

While the need for a major naval base at Singapore was identified as early as 1919, largely following the Russian Revolution but also with early concerns about Japanese policy, the decision to establish a major naval base was not announced until 1923. The reason for the need being identified so late in the day was that for the previous fifty years or more, there had been no discernable threat with the area dominated by the colonial territories of friendly powers, especially the Netherlands and Portugal, and as the nineteenth century drew to a close, relations between the United Kingdom and France had become increasingly friendlier after several centuries of mutual antagonism. France was the third colonial power in the region, possessing Indo-China. It was clear by this time that there had to be a counter to the growing aggression of Japan and the rise of that country’s armed forces. This was at a time of severe economic problems in the Western world and work proceeded slowly until 1931, when the Japanese invasion of Manchuria acted as a spur to complete the work. Even so, the naval base was not finished until 1939, by which time it had cost the then significant sum of £125 million, equivalent to US $500 million at the then exchange rate, or £7,500 million at today’s prices and around US $10,500 million at the current exchange rate.

For this large sum, the base was indeed something special. It had the world’s largest dry dock, capable of handling any existing or projected British warship, or even the still larger ocean liners such as the RMS Queen Mary and the even larger RMS Queen Elizabeth, that could conceivably be pressed into service as troopships. It had the world’s third largest floating dock. The fuel storage depot had the capacity to keep the entire Royal Navy fuelled for six months. Protection included five large shore-based 15-inch naval guns located at Fort Canning, Fort Siloso and Labrador, while the Royal Air Force had an air station at Tengah, a necessary aspect of the defences that Gibraltar did not enjoy at the time.

While the heavy naval guns could fire inland if necessary, they were provided with heavy armour-piercing shells for use against enemy warships rather than fragmentation shells more suitable for use against enemy troops. Realising that this was a weakness, the Admiralty proposed that the causeway linking Singapore with Malaya should be covered by light and medium-calibre field artillery. These guns were opposed by the RAF, which felt that the money would be better spent on air defences as any battle would be fought over the sea or over Malaya. While Churchill insisted that a garrison of 20,000 men would be sufficient to defend Singapore from an army of 50,000 men, the British also doubted that the Japanese could move so many men and then maintain the force for any length of time given that ‘… Singapore is as far away from Japan as Southampton is from New York … ’

Yet, the RAF’s plans for the air defence of Singapore and Malaya involved a well-balanced force of 556 aircraft following the collapse of France and the Netherlands, as support from their forces in the colonies could no longer be counted upon. In fact, as we shall see, the Netherlands East Indies continued to fight as an ally. The British Chiefs of Staff considered the RAF’s plans and scaled these down to 336 aircraft, with the army having forty-eight infantry brigades and two armoured brigades.

The major weakness in the base was that it was only a strong base or a fortress if provided with a strong fleet, but neither funds nor manpower were available for the Royal Navy to create a Far East or Pacific Fleet. What had become the Home Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet were in fact the only two fleets the Royal Navy could muster. For the Far East, there was the East Indies Station due to be based on Singapore itself, but in 1941 moved to Trincomalee in Ceylon, and the China Station, based on Hong Kong; two of a number of stations around the world where the RN maintained a presence, but the small number of warships assigned to each could by no means be described as a ‘fleet’, and they were in fact rarely stronger than a squadron. Combined after war broke out in Europe, the East Indies and China Stations formed the British Eastern Fleet.

Chapter 2

The Opponents

The wartime Allies were a collection of convenience, pushed together by events which few, if any, had foreseen before the war. This is important as in the years preceding the outbreak of war, first in Europe and then in the Pacific, there was no structure such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, to plan and coordinate, train and exercise, the forces at the disposal of the member nations. While war was widely expected, only the United Kingdom and France were expecting it. The Belgians realised that if the war in Europe followed the pattern of the First World War, as everyone expected, then their only Allies would be the United Kingdom and France, but there was no attempt among any of these three countries to exercise together, largely because in the anxious state of these countries, there was concern that such activity would be seen by the Germans as provocative. Indeed, the French even opposed attacks by a British Advanced Air Striking Force, AASF, in France against German targets for fear of bringing the Luftwaffe’s retribution on their cities.

The Belgians were not present in the Pacific, but they had been almost completely overrun by German forces during the First World War. The Dutch had not, and had survived through placing their faith in neutrality. This had worked for them in the earlier conflict, as it had for both the Danes and the Norwegians. To their surprise, it did not work in the Second World War. What many Britons called the ‘Phoney War’, and the Germans the Sitzkrieg or ‘Sitting War’, came to an end in April 1940 with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, followed by the thrust into the Netherlands and Belgium, the prelude to the invasion of France. Of course, at sea and even in the air there had been no phoney war, with losses at sea from the first day of war.

Italy did not enter the war until 10 June 1940, just in time for the fall of France, which earned German contempt with many Germans calling the Italians the ‘harvest hands’: there just in time for the fruits of victory in the west.

The United States had tried to maintain strict neutrality and remain clear of any involvement with the war in Europe. Generally this has been regarded as simply being the application of the Munro Doctrine, that effectively meant that the United States regarded the Americas as its sphere of interest and kept out of Europe and Africa, expecting the Europeans to reciprocate. This was never a realistic option as many individual Americans volunteered for service with the European Allies, as their fathers’ generation had done in the First World War. In any event, the first US involvement in the ‘Old World’ had been as early as 1816 when a combined US, British and Dutch naval squadron swept into the Mediterranean to rout the Barbary pirates. Even at government level the US was sorely tempted to help, starting with ‘lend-lease’ of equipment to the United Kingdom, and then the United States Navy escorting convoys to the mid-ocean handover point to ease the burden on the Royal Navy. Even before the fall of France, American aircraft manufacturers had been allowed to take orders for the Armée de l’Air and the Aéronavale.

THE COLONIAL POWERS

French and Dutch territory in the Far East was extensive, with the Netherlands having its largest colony, the Netherlands East Indies, a large collection of islands of all sizes running more than 3,000 miles east to west; while the French had French Indo-China, today’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Both were effectively cut off from their mother countries by their fall and subsequent occupation by Germany, although a substantial area of France, Vichy France, was nominally self-governing and not occupied by German forces until late 1942.

The French in Indo-China initially