How did Security and Surprise impact operations in Malaya and Singapore?
There was little security in the Malaya campaign for the Allies. The Japanese had a strong expat community.
We look at the work of Patrick Heenan, a Kiwi born British and Indian Army Officer who became a spy for the Japanese, betraying the Air Force base at Alor Star. Not sure why he did, but he took a 6 month secondment to Japan prior to the war.
We also look at how the Japanese learnt that the British had no capability to reinforce Singapore and Malaya when a highly sensitive document from the British War Cabinet for Brooke Popham was captured on the SS Automedon.
Security for the Allies created a reluctance to use wireless, which inhibited tactical flexibility.
Japanese security was tight enough to limit the time available for Brooke Popham to be able to make a decision.
Percival conducted an appreciation in 1937 that was very accurate in regards to how the Japanese would attack Singapore and yet there was little work done in the 4 years before the Japanese landing.
The Allies are surprised because they fundamentally under rated the technical and operational capabilities of the Japanese. The British were reading Japanese diplomatic messages one month before the invasion, but it still did not start ringing alarm bells.
The British did not think that the Japanese would attack during the wet season – why were the Japanese in the wet, with the much more difficult conditions for troops and movement.
How about in the Australian Army? Were we surprised?
Where do you find the Officers and SNCO’s when you raise 3 new divisions?
What impact did the death of Australia’s ablest soldier on 13 August 1940 have on the Australian Army?
Gordon Bennett gets the Div Comd job that he so desperately wanted. Sixth time lucky after being rejected 5 times prior!
How did the battalions prepare for the Malaya campaign? We look at a PAR report from 6 months before the Japanese invasion.
Surprise sees Australia commit 2 BDEs to Malaya, poorly equipped and poorly trained – we look at the reasons.
How can a country improve the Whole of Government approach when moving over onto a war footing?
Lastly we look at what happens when the Japanese pay off security entirely and repeatedly.
Transcript
Security and Surprise in Malaya. How were the British surprised with 4 years warning of invasion
Okay, welcome back everyone. We’re going to be talking today about security and surprise. So straight into it with security. From an Allied point of view, security was really poor. The Japanese were utilising a lot of open source methods. They were reading in the newspapers a lot of what was going on, partially because the British were actually trying to communicate how well things were going in Singapore. So there was information about what was going on in the port and there was great fanfare when Force Z arrived at Singapore. So a lot of information was coming out to the Japanese. They’d sent a Japanese officer on reconnaissance who travelled the entire peninsula and through Singapore in civilian clothes years earlier, and he was able to conduct a detailed reconnaissance of the terrain. He was able to talk to a lot of Japanese businesses.
So they had quite a strong intelligence network already built with the Japanese business expat community in Malaya. They were even lucky enough to pick up a Kiwi spy. So a guy called Patrick Heenan, who was born in New Zealand, went to the uk, joined the army, became an officer, even though he didn’t know who his father was and that would have stopped him becoming an officer back in those days. He was transferred to the Indian army and he took a six month sabbatical in Japan, which was common in those days for officers to take a six month time off. He went to Japan. Now his unit was subsequently stationed at Alor Star where he was an air liaison officer. During one of the air raids it was discovered that he wasn’t in any of the slit trenches. And so people became suspicious.
In his room they found a radio that was still warm because the problem was that the Japanese always knew the recognition codes for the airfield, even though they were changed every 24 hours. It was because Heenan was transmitting them now. He escaped. He was later captured and transferred to Singapore where he was court martialed. Now he. It doesn’t look like he was formally sentenced because the sentence for that would have been, of course, death. It doesn’t look like he was formally sentenced. However, as it became apparent that the Japanese were winning and that they were going to conquer Singapore, he became increasingly cocky towards his guards. And so the guards decided to take matters into their own hands.
They drew straws and a sergeant took him out to the docks and executed him with a single pistol shot to the back of the head and his body was dumped in the bay. There’s debate about how much information or what the worth was of the information that he had, but I think it just really shows how incredibly porous the Allies were when it came to security and the information that they were, you would generally want to retain in your control. A couple of other examples. In November 1941, a ship called the Automedon, a British merchantman, was sunk by a German surface raider. Now, before it was sunk, it was boarded by the Germans. And a Chief of Staff report detailing that the British were focused on defending Britain and couldn’t spare any reinforcements for the Far East.
Now, that was captured by the Germans, so it was locked up in a safe and the person responsible for that safe was killed in the shelling. Prior to the boarding by the Germans, the captain of the raider recognised how important it was, went to Japan, gave it to the German Embassy and a copy went to the Japanese. So a month before the invasion, the Japanese are tipped off. The fact that there’s going to be very few reinforcements coming to Malaya, which is probably just exactly what they wanted to hear, and it goes down to a tactical level as well. One of the APCs that was a part of Crokol, after it had moved into Thailand, it was hit and a bloodied map that showed all of the defences of Jitra was found in the apc.
This was one of the things that emboldened the Japanese when they were making their attack at Jitra. They knew the layout of the defences, which made it so much easier for them to surround them and create the route so quickly. On 15 January, Churchill scolded Wavell, who’d taken over command in the Far east, for a press report about air supremacy, which was going to be gained in three days time. And this was. This was just after the arrival of some Hurricanes. So the British were obviously talking up the cards that they had to play. The Hurricanes didn’t get air supremacy, they didn’t come anywhere near it.
There was just too few of them, too late and the pilots weren’t well trained enough, but they were tipping their hand that there was going to be a change in the way that the Air Force was fighting. There’s evidence to suggest that some of the methods that the Allies were taking were actually more of a hindrance than a help, actually stopping the communications between the Allies and within in units. Lt. Col. Capp, who was in command of SIGS for 8th Division, said that they were changing call signs frequently changing codes, and it created a huge amount of confusion. There was also a lot of reluctance to use wireless because of the expectation that the Japanese were going to use direction finding capabilities, which I couldn’t actually find any documentation that they were using that.
But because they were worried that they were going to get DF’d, they refused to use wireless, which meant that it made it significantly more difficult to coordinate offensive action. This also meant that a lot of communication occurred over civilian phones which was there was just way too few phone lines to be able to conduct communications between DIV and Malaya Command. So there was a reliance on dispatch riders who were very slow and vulnerable to encirclement. So for the Allies there was limited security and the measures that they did take were more of a hindrance than a help. Now from the Japanese point of view, strategically, they assembled their invasion fleet really at the last moment partially because of operational demands and partially because they didn’t want it to be known that there was going to be a large invasion.
You’ve got to remember that they weren’t just invading Malaya. They had a lot going on in the early part of December. So they assembled their landing fleet in Hainan and Indochina. At the last minute it came together. Now it was only detected by an RAAF Hudson on 6 December. And the amount of warning time that they got was insufficient, that the Allies got was insufficient for their decision making cycle. So Brook Popham, unable to make a decision quickly enough, there was insufficient time for his deliberations, which meant that in most instances the Japanese were able to land unopposed. And this really goes to the whole heart of it.
If you can deny the enemy the information that they need to be able to formulate their plans for long enough so that their decision making process and the actual time to execute those plans is insufficient, then you’ve achieved surprise. And so this is a good place for a segue between security and surprise because you need to deny the enemy the information that they need to be able to make their decisions. Now, from an Allied point of view, I want to talk about this concept of strategic surprise. Because it took a long time for the Allies to gear up. And when you read the accounts you can see that they.
There were so many things that still needed to be done, which is amazing because Percival conducted an appreciation of Singapore and Malaya in 1937 and he thought that they wouldn’t be able to, it would be too hard to invade Singapore that they would need, that the Japanese would invade in Malaya and the British would need to defend all of Malaya to deny them the airfields that they would need and that they were probably going to land in Thailand. So Percival’s appreciation was spot on as far as what the Japanese were going to do. And this was done. So he was a lieutenant colonel in 1937. He comes back as a lieutenant general, which isn’t too bad promotion wise. That’s quite a rapid series of promotions. It shows the intelligence of the man and he’s quite derided.
But I think he was very prescient in his understanding of the way that the Japanese were going to tackle the problem. The one thing that he didn’t understand though, was the relentless driving charge. So the Allies found themselves with no ships, not enough aircraft. The aircraft that they did have were too old, not enough troops. The troops that they did have were untrained and lack of defensive preparations. So after four years, how could they get to this point? And this is this strategic surprise. The 90 day warning that the fleet was going to be dispatched had increased over time out to six months, which was where the need for air power became apparent.
So they modified the Singapore plan so that it would be led with air power to deny the freedom of mobility required by the Japanese for long enough for the fleet to be able to come. Now, it’s interesting when you read Uforth’s book on surprise, he says that you need a willing participant for surprise to work. When you think about a willing participant, this is the Allies in 1940. The writing is on the wall. The Japanese are becoming increasingly belligerent. There’s attempts to throttle them with economic sanctions which really leave them with nowhere to go. Particularly when you look at the fact that the Americans try to stop the flow of oil. Now that’s going to mean that the Imperial Japanese Navy is going to run out of oil. Do you think that they would allow that to happen?
Because that’s probably not going to be a set of circumstances that they’re going to be comfortable with. When you can see that over the last 10 years they’ve become increasingly warlike, increasingly expansionist. They’ve got this huge problem in China which they’re trying to overcome. And so we’re left with a strategic problem that is very difficult to solve. How will the Allies respond to an aggressive Japanese action when they don’t have the resources to be able to do that, when the fleet is fully committed. So they start to look for reasons why this worst case scenario, this most dangerous course of action won’t occur. And it’s really interesting looking at the intelligence appreciations.
So the Japanese have poor eyesight, they haven’t fought a real army Now, I think when they say they haven’t fought a real army, I think they mean they haven’t fought a white army. It wasn’t until the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, where the Japanese were comprehensively defeated by the Russians, and it wasn’t. So the thing that really was glaring there was the fact that they didn’t have modern armoured warfare doctrine. And of course, one of the interesting things about Khalkungol was that the Russians were led by a general called Georgy Zhukov, and he would go on to much greater things. His performance against the Japanese was very highly rated. His first Hero of the Soviet Union awards, he would go on to get three more.
And for the Japanese, they started to understand that the material lack that they had as far as tanks was a crucial problem. So in tank production was increased from 500 a year to 1200. But importantly for the Allies, not a lot of notice was taken of what happened in this battle. And the British continued to think that their army was significantly better than that of the Japanese. Now, in November 1941, the British were reading Japanese diplomatic messages. It was clear that they were preparing to move into Southeast Asia. So a full month’s advanced warning of Japanese intentions. However, they weren’t sure of the time frame. And it’s interesting because they were convinced, the British were absolutely convinced, that the Japanese would not strike before the end of the monsoon season, which was in March 1942.
Now, this is fantastic because in November you’ve still got four or five months before you can expect an invasion. There’s a lot that you can do in four or five months. But the problem was that the Japanese weren’t singing off the same songbook. Now, why was that? It’s because the British were putting their planning process over what they expected to see from the Japanese. So the British wouldn’t have invaded during the monsoon season because it would be too wet. And they’ve got a heavily motorised organisation which, if the roads become muddy, it’s going to be very difficult for them to move. You know, thinking back to the mud and the horrors of the rain of the Western Front, they were quite keen to avoid in was what, a much more motorised force than they’d had back then.
They were keen to avoid those problems, but the Japanese weren’t thinking like that. Their decision making process was much more around wanting to get inside a reinforcement cycle. So they needed to seize Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines before these places could be reinforced, because they knew that once the Allies truly geared up, so that the British were already fully geared up for war, but the Americans certainly hadn’t. They still had a lot more work to do as far as gearing up for full time war production and getting new soldiers in and training them up.
They wanted to establish the Japanese Greater Coke Prosperity Sphere as quickly as possible, get the resources that they needed to build up their industrial base and then be able to defend it because they believed that the Americans were morally weak, be able to stomach the losses of a campaign when their homeland wasn’t threatened. And so fundamentally it was the different strategic imperatives that the British were assuming when they tried to do their enemy analysis that led to these false beliefs. Now let’s look at the strategic surprise from an Australian point of view. So we’ve talked a bit about the kind of work that’s required to go from a whole of government approach from a peacetime footing through to a wartime footing. What did that look like in Australia?
So in the late 1930s, the Australian army was really unsuited for modern warfare, especially in regard to logistics, weapons and leadership development. In September 1939 there was a CMF, the Citizens Militia Force, that had around 80,000 troops in it and a regular army of just 3,000. And the Defence act limited the role of the militia to service within Australian territory. So the Prime Minister Menzies decides to raise the second aif, the Australian Imperial Forces. And that starts off with the raising of sixth division. Now this is the first division in the second AIF. So there were already five CMF divisions and that’s why we started off with sixth. In November 1939, the decision was taken to raise a second division, the seventh. And Blamey was promoted to Lieutenant General and he took on command of the first Corps.
Now, because the Japanese won’t invade Singapore, the second AIF is sent to Palestine. And most of the burden in the Middle east fell to the Dominion troops as the British army focused on home defence and it became increasingly obvious that little support for the Dominions would be forthcoming for their own defences. Now this created the decision to raise a third division, the 8th Division, for service at home or abroad. So 8th Division was raised at Randwick Barracks in Sydney on 8 July 1940, with Major General Vernon Sturdee commanding. Now, 8th Division was behind 6th and 7th Division when it came to the priority for equipment and it was also behind some of the CMF units. So they were, from the outset they were struggling to get the equipment that they needed to form the division.
Now the other thing that’s really quite Eye opening is that the formation of the sixth and seventh Divisions and a corps headquarters had depleted the militia of its best and brightest command talent. Now, this was out of a CMF of 80,000, so particularly when it came to battalion cos it was quite the struggle to find officers who were capable of fulfilling that role. Now, the 22nd and 23rd Brigades. So 22nd was based in New South Wales, 23rd in Victoria and Tassie, and the 24th was based out of Queensland, South Australia and WA. Now, on the 13th of August 1940, tragedy strikes the Australian army and the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Cyril Brudnall White and three government ministers are killed when their RAAF Hudson crashes as it’s coming into land in Canberra. Now, Brad Nor White was extremely well respected.
General Sir John Monash described him as far and away the ablest soldier Australia has ever turned out. His death creates a massive problem for the army. Sturdee is promoted up to become the new Chief of the General Staff and command of 8th Division passes to Major General Gordon Bennett. Now, Major General Bennett had been overlooked for DIV command on five separate occasions. So I guess it’s a case of sixth time lucky for Bennett as he gets the command that he so desperately wanted and he starts to go around sixth Division and start to try and put his mark on the division. He’s got some difficulties. It’s spread all across the country, it doesn’t have a lot of the equipment that it needs. And the job of finding Infantry Battalion cos is a big problem. A lot of them were too old.
They were looking for cos under the age of 45. A lot of them were lacking experience, a lot of them were unfit and a lot of them lacked continual service. What they were hoping to do was to find Battalion COS who’d been serving in the CMF. Sixth of the ones that were taken up by 8th Division had less than a year’s experience as a battalion co. And by October 1940 it was still expected that the most likely deployment for the 8th Division would be to the Middle east. And training was based on that assumption that they would be fighting in the desert. There was little combined arms training and now this was partially because the DIV was spread across six states and later two countries.
Each of the battalions had organic mortar platoon, a Pioneer platoon, a a platoon of Bren gun carriers and enough organic transport to lift the entire battalion. But little training was done with these organic capabilities, let alone with other corps officer and senior NCO training suffered. Brigadier Taylor, the Brigade commander for 22nd Brigade. He worked to counter this by bringing his officers into camp before the troops arrived so that he could run some officer specific training for the officers and the senior NCOs. Few of the officers in 8th Division had attended the AMF Command and Staff School in Sydney and there was no integration in Malaya for officer training, so they lacked exposure to the current doctrine.
Now, later in October, there was a conference and a recommendation was made that a brigade from 8th Division should be offered to go to Malaya as long as it was replaced by Indian troops, allowing it to proceed to the Middle East. So as late as October 1940, the focus was still the Middle east as far as the employment of Australian troops. In early 1941, the Prime Minister Menzies goes to London to see what the situation is and to discuss the increasingly perilous situation for Australian security. And he finds out that the United Kingdom and the United States have agreed that if there was a war that they would move all of the resources into Europe and fight the European battle first before concentrating on Asia. The feeling within Australia was becoming one increasingly of abandonment.
And Acting Prime Minister Arthur Fadden stated that if Australia were abandoned by these two great powers until the war in Europe was decided, we and our countrymen might be pulling rickshaws before long. Now, the army does its own appreciation and the understanding is that if Malaya, well, if Singapore can be held, and by extension we need to hold Malaya, then there’s little risk of an invasion of Australia. So it’s important that Singapore is held. So the army is starting to look at needing to defend Malaya.
The division is continuing to train troops, but it is taking a while and there’s a par a post activity report from the 27th Brigade exercise that was held in May 1941 and it stated that there was a lack of SOPs across the battalions, haphazard communication plans, often with no backup, poor passage of information and orders along the chain of command. Lack of appreciation for security, camouflage and concealment. Flawed understanding of the use of specialist weapons, particularly anti tank and Bren gun carriers. Dismal sanitation and hygiene cos often fail to take two ICS and adjutants into their confidence. An under utilisation of the intelligence sections and a lack of thoroughness in personal reconnaissance. Now, the great thing is that the brigade is finding all of this out in May 1941.
It’s only six months though before they will be in contact and time is rapidly running out. So the Australian army in December 1941 finds itself temporally dislocated so the enemy has prevented us from employing our strength at a time that we wanted to do so. Part of this is because of what the enemy did. But more so, and particularly at a tactical level, but more so strategically, it was done by us. Now, how could this happen? How could we let partially trained, poorly equipped troops and a division’s worth, well, two brigades worth, be committed into a theatre when they were unprepared? And this goes to the heart of some of the issues with Western democracies. It’s hard to get the whole of government approach to spin up for a war footing when there is no clear and present danger.
The risks of spinning up for that are very high because if you start committing resources to the defence of the nation when it isn’t required, then you have to take money from other areas of the economy. However, if you leave that too late, it can be very difficult to catch up. And this is what we found. It’s very hard to create a division out of nothing, even when you’re utilising partially trained forces from the cmf. So the Allies temporarily dislocated themselves by wishing away a problem which was very difficult to solve for too long before it became a real problem, before they judged that there was a clear and present danger and that they were prepared to act on that danger. It’s an interesting comparison today when we have a lot smaller reserve.
However, the level of training is significantly higher than it was back then. Although it does raise the interesting question of what would it be like if we had to re raise third, fourth and fifth Division, let alone sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth? So at a strategic level, the Allies were surprised. They were unable to bring to bear the forces that were required to defend Malaya in the time that was available. At a tactical level, though, you can see the pendulum swings the other way in a couple of cases. And so the, probably the best example of this is the ambush at Gamas. And we’re going to talk about that when we look at Lt. Col. Galligan and the way that they fought that action.
But the Japanese who paid off security at a tactical level were highly susceptible to surprise because they were willing to trade off high rates of movement with little security for the effect of the offensive action. It enabled them to seize the initiative and it enabled them to get the significant multiplier effect of being able to fight behind enemy lines effectively. Time and time again, they went around the flanks and were able to appear behind the front lines, which had a significant morale effect and enabled them to take Malaya and go on to take Singapore in less time than they had planned for. And this created a transformation in the Allies from being willingly strategically surprised to hyper vigilant to tactical surprise, often giving up strong defensive positions without even fighting in them because of encirclement or the threat of encirclement.
And the repeated surprises that the Japanese were able to inflict on the Allies fundamentally undermined the confidence of the soldiers. Lastly, and I think this is probably the big lesson to come out of this, is don’t take your doctrinal thinking and overlay that over the enemy forces. So they invaded during the monsoon season. The British didn’t expect that because they thought that they would need sufficient time to build up the logistics train and get everything organised to land and it would be too difficult to conduct operations in the monsoon. The Japanese, partially because they had a different doctrine and partially because of the greater time imperative to get in ahead of the reinforcement cycle that the Allies were going to spin up, were much more interested in landing earlier rather than later.
And that was the fundamental thing that surprised the Allies and was a large component in the downfall of Malaya and Singapore. Next up, we’re going to be talking about concentration of force and economy of effort, two more principles that often go tightly together.
