Myths of the Malayan Campaign

[Sea Skimmer]

The target date for the fall of Singapore was February 11, a major holiday in Japan and a political coup for Yamashita if he had succeeded.

Well that might have been the desired target, but the Japanese timetable actually allowed for as much as six months too capture Singapore. The whole Malay operation was run on a very tight logistic rope, had the first assault on the island failed another could not have been mounted for some time, so they had to allow for the possibility of a protracted siege. The penalty would have been a delay in the capture of northern Burma, though other forces could (and did) seize Rangoon which pretty much doomed any defence of the place.

With Singapore besieged the operation against south Sumatra could go ahead unhindered, as its staging base was in Indochina. No major Japanese invasion actually needed Singapore as a staging base, except Operation T to hit Northern Sumatra which was pretty devoid of objectives of value. As it was the convoy to capture Palembang in south Sumatra (the single most important objective in all of south East Asia because it had the only refinery that made AVGAS) sailed on Febuary 10th from Camranh Bay, the landing went ahead on the 14th. The place was only defended by about 2000 men and demolition of the refinery was incomplete… its too bad about 15,000 men couldn’t have been shipped over from Singapore. That might have played hell with Japanese planning and certainly would have given enough time to blow the refinery off the map.

I'm not a trained military historian, but to me, it always feel as if the Malayan Campaign was fought the best the British could strategically, but they screwed up in every way tactically and on the minute level due to the level of strategic resources and attention the British Empire could send to the region.

The British made some pretty dumb strategic moves (besides building the naval base, instead of continuing to rely on bases in India) before the war even began, like filling northern Malay with airfields without bothering to place them position which could be defended against ground attack.

[PainRack]

Well that might have been the desired target, but the Japanese timetable actually allowed for as much as six months too capture Singapore.

I was not referring to the strategic timetable set by Southern Army, but rather, the personal timetable set by General Yamashita to capture Singapore.

The British made some pretty dumb strategic moves (besides building the naval base, instead of continuing to rely on bases in India) before the war even began, like filling northern Malay with airfields without bothering to place them position which could be defended against ground attack.

Unfortunately, the naval base was a strategic issue forced by political concerns. The needs for Imperial defence and RN spending created its idea, Imperial politics and the need for the American alliance accelerated its construction. Indeed, given that one of the political goals was to tie America Pacific defensive policies to the British, and its specifically mentioned that the USN accelerated construction of Pearl Harbor in response to Sembawang.

The airbases however was a prime example of the British inability to balance strategic and tactical considerations between the services in Malaya. The RAF were there to defend Malaya, having earned the task over from the Army as it was considered too weak and expensive to station more infantry in Malaya. Therefore, they NEEDED to be positioned at the extreme coast so as to fulfil their tactics, long range strikes against coastal shipping that would had aided the Army. Unfortunately, the base deployment thus created the demand for additional Army divisions to be comitted to their static defence, and "technically", Heath was up there to cover those airbases solely. UNFORTUNATELY, the inability to supply the required number of aircraft neccessitated the need to deploy additional soldiers so as to compensate for the lack of aircraft which was supposed to compensate for the lack of soldiers.

And since the Airforce couldn't defend northern Malaya, the British needed to secure southern Thailand via Matador or at the bare minimum, the Ledge, which the Airforce couldn't support despite the fact that those operations were conducted so as to defend the airbases.

Its amazing to see how the lack of resources forced the British to make increasingly bad decisions so as to compensate, and their only hope was that the Americans would join in and absorb and defeat the Japs. Indeed, this hope was so paramount, that it crippled Matador from the begining as the Thai amabassador absolutely refused to authorise any incursion into Siam as this would hurt relations with the Americans! And of course, Task Force Z was made irrelevant since the first thing they did was for the Admiral to fly off to meet the Americans to discuss joint operations and a shake-down cruise further south to Auustralia............meaning that the Admiral couldn't make it back in time to interfere with the landings.