Tagged: WWII

The Battle of Los Angeles

On the night of 23 February 1942, the Japanese submarine I-17 crept along the coast of California; lookouts desperately trying to identify their captain’s very specific target – the Ellwood Oil Fields. Commander Kozo Nishino had an intensely personal reason for the target of the first Japanese attack on the Continental United States: The Americans laughed at him there.

Nishino was a naval reserve officer, and as a civilian he was an oil tanker captain. A few years before the American embargo, he sailed through the Santa Barbara strait destined to pick up a load of oil from Ellwood. On his way to the docking ceremony, he tripped and fell into a cactus, and his crew had to pull needles from his posterior. He never forgave the snickering Americans.

At 7 pm, the I-17 spotted the oil fields, and Nishino ordered his 5.5” deck to fire. On the choppy seas, the Japanese gunner was not very accurate. But each of the 21 rounds fired landed within about a hundred yards of the spot where Nishino had the cactus spines removed from his ass, so his honor was satisfied. I-17 sailed away to look for merchant ships. The bombardment did about $500 worth of damage, and slightly lowered property values.

The psychological effect was much greater. Pearl Harbor was only 80 days or so previously. The US Army had recently established black out and civil defense procedures and drills. But this was No Drill: those were real explosions, made by real Japanese shells, fired by real Japanese guns, from a real Japanese ship, by really real Japanese sailors shouting “Banzai”. After dutifully blacking out his hotel, a local innkeeper near the oil fields called the sheriff to report explosions nearby. More drmatically, the ship was spotted by a reverend in Motecito, who also called the police. From those two initial reports rumors snowballed across southern California: The Japanese were going to invade.

The next night the entire 37th Coast Artillery Brigade, responsible for Los Angeles and the surrounding area, went on alert. A total blackout was ordered and they prepared to repel the invaders. Nothing happened until 3:14 am on the morning of the 25th, when someone thought they heard something above. Search lights pierced the night sky, then someone fired. Soon, everyone began shooting. For the next hour, Angelinos and their defenders in the 37th blazed away into the darkness above. They fired 1400 large caliber anti-aircraft gun rounds, and tens of thousands of small arms ammunition, before order was restored. Seven civilians were killed: three from heart attacks caused by the stress of the situation, and four from descending rounds, because what goes up must come down.

The Japanese later denied any forces in the area besides I-17. The official US Army investigation concluded that the incident was “a case of war nerves”, and the object sighted at 3:14 in the morning was an “errant weather balloon”, which led many conspiracy theorists to believe that the object was actually a UFO.

The Battle of Timor

The island of Timor was split between Dutch and Portuguese halves, and Portugal was so far neutral in the Second World War, if only because Ferdinand Franco, the ruler of Fascist Spain, didn’t want to give Hitler a reason for occupying the Iberian peninsula. Nonetheless, the administrators of the Portuguese Far East colonies weren’t blind to Japanese atrocities and were sympathetic to the Allied cause. In accordance with a secret Dutch and Portuguese agreement, Australian troops occupied the island in January 1942, with the Portuguese governor taken “prisoner” to give the appearance of neutrality.

On 20 February, 1942, Imperial Japanese forces simultaneously landed on both the Dutch and Portuguese halves of Timor, with an airborne landing to capture the airfield. The defending “Sparrow Force”, a mixed formation of Australian and Dutch infantry, Australian commandos, and Timorese irregulars slaughtered the Japanese on the beaches and annihilated the airborne landings so thoroughly that the Japanese would never again attempt it in such numbers. But the Allied forces, out of respect for the Portuguese, didn’t cover all possible landing zones. A victorious fixed force defending a beach is still a fixed force, and within three days the overwhelming number of Japanese infantry, tanks, and aircraft, landed on the Portuguese half of the island, forced the Sparrow Force’s surrender. However, dozens of Australian commandos and Timorese irregulars escaped into the mountains to carry on resistance.

For the next six months, the commandos carried on a guerrilla war against the Japanese. The Japanese responded by slaughtering Dutch, Portuguese, and Timorese civilians, which only drove them to cooperate with the Australians. Australian and Dutch ships and planes ran supplies and replacements to the commandos, the sum total never exceeded 500. They tied down a division of Japanese, much needed elsewhere.

In the fall of 1942, the Japanese knew they needed to change: Timor was an unholy vortex sucking men, weapons, and material from the New Guinea campaign. They changed their tactics. They shipped reinforcements to Timor and ordered the Japanese troops there to separate the Australians and Timorese fighters from the population, and recruit Timorese civilians to inform on the resistance. A natural byproduct was an end to the atrocities, and a velvet glove handling to Portuguese and Timorese civilians.

The new Japanese approach worked, and the Allied commandos were forced into a smaller and smaller pocket of mountainous Portuguese Timor. On 10 February, 1943, nearly a year after the invasion, the last Australian and Dutch troops were evacuated from the island. They tied up nearly 30,000 much needed Japanese troops for almost a year.

The Japanese tactics were only a matter of convenience. Once the Japanese were sure the Allied troops were gone, they turned on the Timorese, Dutch, and Portuguese civilians. They slaughtered anyone suspected of assisting the commandos. By the beginning of March, 1943, more than 20,000 were murdered.

O’Hare

Even before the last Australian surrendered at Rabaul, the Japanese flooded New Britain with men, weapons, and material to enlarge the aerodrome, expand the port facilities, and turn Rabaul into a proper staging area for further campaigns in eastern New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, both scheduled for May. The harbor there was packed with Japanese transports waiting to unload. It was a ripe target.
 
In an attempt to replicate the Marshall/Gilbert raids, Nimitz directed Task Force 10, consisting of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington and her escort of cruisers and destroyers, to raid Rabaul. But the Japanese commander expected this, and his reconnaissance spotted the Lady Lex and TF10 450 miles out, well outside strike range for the carrier.
 
The Japanese commander launched all seventeen of his land bases G4M torpedo bombers, nicknamed “Betty” for their voluptuous figures. They had a much further range than anything the Lady Lex carried although they were armed with bombs instead of torpedoes because the torpedoes weren’t unloaded yet. As Halsey pointed out a few weeks before, American carriers were severely deficient in fighters. A proper CAP rotation (combat air patrol, the fighter screen charged with protecting the TF from air attack) required more fighters than the carrier had, much less those needed to escort the bombers. When the first wave of eight Betty’s approached, the Lexington’s CAP fighters and the ready fighters on deck screamed off and shot them all down. Unfortunately this left the TF defenseless (We will see this phenomenon again). The next wave of nine Betty’s approached from a different direction and had a clear run at the TF.
 
Luckily, there were two fighters from a previous CAP still being refueled on the deck. Their pilots, LT Edward “Butch” O’Hare (the son of Chicago gangster Al Capone’s lawyer), and his wingman jumped into their cockpits and took off. They had just enough fuel to intercept the incoming Japanese a few miles out.
 
The Betty’s were flying in a “V” of “V’s” formation which gave good overlapping fields of fire for their rear gunners. Nevertheless, O’Hare and his wingman pounced on them from above. All four of the wingman’s guns jammed, which left just O’Hare to defend the Lexington. With only 450 rds per gun or 32 seconds of continuous firing, he didn’t have the ammunition to shoot them all down. He would try though.
 
O’Hare dove into the Betty’s and in a feat of aviation gunnery and ammunition conservation unequaled in the Second World War, shot down five Japanese aircraft in less than four minutes, and damaged a sixth. All those extra hours on the range paid off. Multiple observers would point out that there were three burning Betty’s falling from the sky simultaneously. The last three were driven off by the TF’s anti aircraft fire, much of which was directed at O’Hare.
 
One .50 cal gunner on the Lexington was particularly irksome, and though he didn’t do any damage, he wouldn’t stop firing at him. When O’Hare finally landed, he calmly walked over to the gunner’s position and admonished the young man: First, for not knowing the difference between an American F4F Wildcat and a Japanese G4M Betty, and then for not actually hitting anything. If he didn’t straighten up, he would “report him to the gunnery officer”.
 
O’Hare was the first American “Ace in a Day” (from zero to five confirmed kills in a single day) and the first US Navy ace of the war. He would subsequently be awarded the Medal of Honor, and Chicago would name its new airport after him.

The Raid on Darwin

Japan’s plan to conquer the strategically important oil fields, tin mines, and rubber plantations of the Dutch East Indies entered its final phase with the surprise assault on Bali in order to establish a forward air base in the middle of the Allied defenses. The main attacks fell on Java and Timor later in the month, but before they could happen the main Allied base at Darwin, on the north coast of Australia, had to be neutralized.

The defunct ABDACOM’s main logistical chain for men, weapons and material was India to Singapore, and then Singapore to Surabaya. This was cut with the fall of Singapore the week before. Darwin was the Australian equivalent of the Dutch Surabaya, and the main base for Australian logistical support for Allied, primarily Australian, forces in eastern Dutch East Indies, such as Timor, and New Ireland, New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomon Islands. It would replace Singapore for Allies still fighting the Japanese. In order to seize the remainder of the Dutch East Indies, Adm Nagumo’s Kido Butai struck Darwin on the morning of 19 February 1942.

The aircraft from the aircraft carriers, Soryu, Hiryu, Akagi, and Kaga (the Shokaku and Zuiakaku were trying find Halsey after the Marshall/Gilbert raids) launched 242 aircraft in the largest naval air raid since their raid on Pearl Harbor, and the biggest attack on mainland Australia in history. The initial attack was a mirror of Pearl Harbor and the woefully inadequate Australian air defenses were crushed. The Japanese aircraft then had free rein to work over the ships in the harbor. A second wave of land based bombers from the Celebes arrived over the defenseless port later that morning and added to the carnage. Eleven Allied ships were sunk and thirty more severely damaged. There would be no chance, if there ever was, of stopping the conquest of the last island chain north of the Australian mainland.

The psychological damage was worse, and Australia became gripped with invasion paranoia. The Japanese Navy, especially the Kido Butai, were seen as the Masters of the Sea, and attributed almost mythical levels of danger and invulnerability.

Executive Order 9066

From 1936 to 1941, the FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence, and US Army Military Intelligence collected information on Japanese, German, and Italian immigrant communities in the United States and compiled lists of potential “troublemakers” that would be put into concentration camps in the event of war with the Axis powers. In mid-1941, FDR ordered a comprehensive investigation of the Japanese American communities on the West Coast. The “Munson Report” released a month before Pearl Harbor, stated that though some Japanese retained loyalty to Japan and its emperor, “the Japanese (American) problem didn’t exist”, and there was a “remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty among some of this generally suspect ethnic group…” FDR ignored the report.

With war tensions high and a general civilian paranoia of a potential Japanese invasion of the West Coast, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which gave the Secretary of War the authority to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded” and to “provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary . . .”

Three weeks later Congress passed legislation which funded Executive Order 9066 after the briefest of discussions. Opposition to the obvious unconstitutionality and potential for abuse in the bill made strange bedfellows. The minority Republican leadership in Congress was muted under their pledge to FDR in December to not let domestic politics interfere with the conduct of the war, so they found their champions in the only two of FDR’s cabinet members that opposed the EO, Attorney General Francis Biddle and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Biddle and Ickes would eventually get Executive Order 9066, and related later EOs, to the Supreme Court and have them declared unconstitutional. But after a decade of the courts and Congress acquiescing to FDR’s expansion of executive power during the Great Depression, it would take three long years for that to happen. However, just after Pearl Harbor that didn’t matter – on 9 March 1942, FDR signed Public Law 503 into law, and the legal justification for one of the greatest tragedies in American history was established.

Surprisingly, Executive Order 9066 was not used as justification for exclusion of the largest Japanese American community in the US on one of the few pieces of American soil under actual threat of Japanese invasion: Hawaii. US Authorities there had arrested 2500 Japanese illegal aliens under FDR’s Alien Enemies Act in December. The other 100,000 Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not deemed a threat, too important to Hawaii’s economic well-being, and their internment not a military necessity citing the Munson Report, and a separate Naval Intelligence report which found “no evidence of ‘fifth column’ activity among Japanese Americans”. This was not the case for the American West Coast.

Shortly after EO 9066’s funding by Congress, Arizona and California, and Oregon and Washington were in their entirety designated as two military districts by LTG John DeWitt, the commander of the Fourth US Army and the Western Defense Command. DeWitt applied EO 9066, probably against its spirit, to the entire Japanese American community on the West Coast. DeWitt wanted to relocate anyone of Japanese American ancestry out of the two West Coast military districts. But there were 120,000 Japanese Americans in his area, so DeWitt, through the Sec of War Henry Stimson requested additional funding for quasi permanent internment camps throughout the US and a separate organization to coordinate and administer the relocations. FDR signed Executive Order 9102 on 18 March 1942, and Congress funded it. 9102 created the War Relocation Authority. Moreover, the racialists and Eugenicists in FDR’s administration reared their ugly heads and the EO was applied to anyone with 1/16th Japanese blood, or in practical terms one great-great-grandparent born in Japan. These also included Koreans and Taiwanese whose lands were Japanese colonies since the 1880s. EO 9066 could be argued as not racial in character and just an abuse of eminent domain; EO 9102, DeWitt’s proclamations, and the administration’s and army regulations pertaining to both, cannot.

In April, flyers from the Western military district headquarters began appearing in Japanese American communities advising not only Japanese resident and illegal aliens but also Japanese American citizens to prepare for relocation. Flyers also appeared in German and Italian American communities, but the racial character of DeWitt’s proclamations, and the easily identifiable stereotypical facial features of Japanese Americans meant that few Caucasians were interred, and those that were, were already identified on FDR’s lists. The director of the War Relocation Authority, Milton Eisenhower (Dwight’s younger brother), attempted to mitigate and limit the relocations through various means, including limiting them to just adult males, but was thwarted by DeWitt and administration officials.

Throughout the end of April and through the summer, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 2/3rds of whom were US citizens, were ordered to report to assembly areas in parks, stadiums, and even racetracks. They were permitted to bring one suitcase and the clothes on their backs. The rest of their possessions were left behind, and left at the mercy of their communities. Many families lost everything: land, pets, furniture, cars, and savings were all gone when they returned three years later. The internees were packed into buses and trains for long journeys to ten hastily and poorly constructed internment camps, two as far away as Arkansas, each surrounded by barbed wire, and armed guards.

In late April, the frustrated and defeated Eisenhower wrote, “when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done…”

The Battle of Badung Strait

The Fall of Singapore and the simultaneous capture of the intact oil facilities at Palembang on Sumatra by Japanese airborne forces were the death knells for the ABDACOM (American-British-Dutch-Australian Command) in the southwest Pacific. A series of lightning strikes seized Borneo, Celebes, and Sarawak islands, and left Field Marshal Wavell with a weak and battered force on an indefensible and exposed line from Java to Timor. Adm Nagumo’s Kido Butai ranged the seas around the islands and shot down any Allied plane in the air, and bombed any ship it could find. Allied air cover was nonexistent outside of East Java, and air reconnaissance was impossible. The Allied ships were blind and flailing about looking for the Japanese, and the ships’ crews were nearing exhaustion from being on near constant battle stations. Wavell refused further reinforcement lest they arrive just in time to surrender, as the 18th Division had on Singapore, and directed all further men and material be rerouted to the fight in Burma which itself was going badly. Finally, he requested and received permission from Churchill to disband the ABDACOM HQ. America’s first attempt at an Expeditionary Joint Multi National headquarters ended ignobly.

Despite ABDACOM’s departure, the Dutch decided to stay and fight on. Hitler’s armies occupied the Netherlands, and the Dutch government-in-exile was not willing to give up the East Indies. The Dutch settled the area a century before the US was a glimmer in George Washington’s eye, and many Dutch families had lived there for eight generations. Java and East Timor were no different in Dutch eyes than Holland and Zeeland. Adm Karel Doorman, the former ABDACOM Naval Commander and highest ranking Dutch officer in the Pacific, requested that the forces still in theatre, whether they be American, British, or Australian, remain. Wavell agreed in order to gain time, do as much damage and tie up as many Japanese resources as possible. The old WW1 vintage British, Australian, and US Asiatic Fleet ships fell under Dutch command.

Doorman received his first challenge almost immediately. On 18 February 1942, a Japanese task force landed on the island of Bali and captured the airfield. It had to be retaken: if the Japanese managed to get land based fighters on Bali, they would be able to threaten the main Dutch base at Surabuya on Eastern Java. Surabaya was the last base in the East Indies with the facilities to refuel, repair, and rearm the remaining Allied ships. Doorman ordered every ship and plane he could get in contact with to concentrate on the Badung Strait.

On the morning of the 19th, the last B-17s and A-24s of the USAAF in the South West Pacific attacked the convoy in the restricted waters around Bali. They scored exactly one hit on a transport. But from the Japanese point of view the Bali operation was risky as the Kido Butai was enroute to raid Australia and unavailable to support this first operation against the Java to Timor line of resistance. Not wanting to risk his exposed task force further, the Japanese commander unloaded his ships and withdrew north. The majority of the task force got away before Doorman’s ships arrived, but two destroyers, the Asashio and Oshio, were left to escort the wounded merchantman and one other transport that was the last to unload.

Doorman’s ships and submarines tasked with destroying the Japanese in the Badung Strait were scattered about the area, and did not have time to concentrate. They would attack the four small Japanese ships in four waves throughout the evening and night of 19/20 February. The first wave were two submarines, one and American and one British. The American submarine got lost and ran aground, and the British submarine was driven away by depth charges from the destroyers. The next wave was led by Adm Doorman with the pride of the Dutch navy, the light cruisers HNLMS’s DeRuyter and Java, along with a Dutch destroyer, and two American destroyers. They alone constituted six times the fire power as the Japanese. But Doorman’s ships had trouble identifying them. The Asashio and Oshio immediately attacked and crossed Doorman’s “T” inflicting significant damage on the Java, and forced the two leading cruisers northward, from where they would lose contact. The Allied destroyers made torpedo runs on the transports, but were duds or failed to hit. In the process they were ambushed by the Japanese, one of whose torpedoes sunk the Dutch destroyer. The two battered and confused American destroyers fled south.

Three hours later the next Allied wave attacked the two aggressive Japanese destroyers, and again superior Japanese night gunnery skills won the round. This time four American destroyers and one Dutch cruiser, the HNLMS Tromp, sailed into the strait. But the Americans and Dutch had trouble identifying the Japanese in the smoke and darkness, and the language barrier between the Dutch commodore and the American destroyer captains prevented any coordination. In the confused melee that followed, the Asashio and Oshio deftly maneuvered through the torpedo spreads and fog of war, and savaged the larger Allied force. By this time two more Japanese destroyers arrived to assist them but they weren’t needed. They even got in the way of the two lone samurai ships and one was crippled. Unable to come to grips with the slashing and evading Asashio and Oshio, the damaged and humiliated Allies fled. The fourth wave of seven Dutch torpedo boats arrived at dawn, but they found nothing.

The outmatched and out gunned Japanese defeated and scattered a superior Allied force strictly through aggressiveness, and superior training, discipline, and seamanship. The conduct, state, and training levels of the American crews were especially appalling. The US Asiatic Fleet got its first hard lesson: More attention needed to be given to surface warfare than to Filipino hookers, Indonesian hooch, and tall tales in seedy bars by tattooed old salts. It was too late for them though.

The Sook Ching Massacre

Like all racialists, the victorious Japanese on Syonan-to (Japanese for “Light of the South”, the new name for Singapore) immediately separated their adversaries and the civilian population by the color of their skin. In a process known as “Daikensho”, “The Great Inspection”, Japanese Kempeitai (secret police) categorized each prisoner and civilian based on race, and then by how likely they would resist the Japanese occupation.

After an initial bloodletting in which all of the occupants and staff of the Alexandra Hospital were murdered, and all surrendering wounded were killed, the white civilians, and officers and soldiers of the British and Australian units were marched north. They were sent to camps in Thailand where they were to be worked to death building roads, bridges, and railroad tracks in support of the Japanese invasion of Burma, and subsequently India.

The 40,000 Indian soldiers and ex-patriates were initially treated quite differently. The Japanese sought to exploit Indian nationalism, and actively recruited Indian soldiers to fight against the British in Burma. An Indian expatriate, Mohan Singh, gave a powerful speech to the assembled mass on an independent India’s role inside the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere. Over 12,000 volunteered to fight for Japan under the banner of the Indian National Army. The wounded from the remainder were then killed, and the rest were sent to camps on Singapore and were worked to death improving Japanese defenses and facilities around the Southeastern Pacific.

Most of the population of Singapore was ethnic Chinese, and the Japanese were concerned about their support for Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader in China. The Kempeitai set up screening centers all across the island. At first, only members of Chinese nationalist organizations were killed. Then the killing was extended to wealthy Chinese, then businessmen and capitalists, and then teachers, priests and monks. Soon, as with any bureaucracy drunk with power and evaluated by “numbers processed”, the criteria constantly changed to include more and more “undesirables”. Civil servants, Chinese who arrived after 1937 (the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, men with tattoos (thought to be Triad), men from Hainan (thought to Communist), people who possessed weapons of any kind, even “tall” men (thought to be potential leaders), and anyone deemed a threat were all killed, many in the most gruesome manners possible.

The process dehumanized the Chinese, and in the eyes of the Japanese were unworthy of dignity. They weren’t just murdered, they were used as objects to fulfill a purpose – as training aides and playthings for the Japanese occupiers. The women were forced into brothels or raped to death in the barracks. The men were used as live bayonet dummies, targets on rifle and machine gun ranges, or tortured for fun or sport at the end of a hard day’s work.

Over the next three weeks, the Daikensho would claim the lives of at least 70,000 Chinese on Singapore, with tens of thousands more unconfirmed.

The Chinese would remember The Great Inspection of Singapore as the “Sook Ching”,

“The Purge”.

The Fall of Singapore

“15 February 1942.

To: Lieut. Gen. Arthur Percival, GOC (General Officer Commanding) Malaya.

From: General Sir Archibald Wavell, Supreme Commander Far East.

So long as you are in position to inflict losses to enemy and your troops are physically capable of doing so you must fight on. Time gained and damage to enemy of vital importance at this crisis.

When you are fully satisfied that this is no longer possible I give you discretion to cease resistance…”

That was all the gaunt and gloomy Percival needed. He thought that his command was forsaken in the face of overwhelming Japanese military might, and he just wanted the chaos to end. On 8 February, the island of Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East” was invaded along its entire north coast, and it seemed his troops did nothing about it. His big 15” naval guns, placed and designed to protect against an attack from the sea, were turned against the Japanese landward but their armor piercing shells were ineffective against infantry formations. At every point they attempted to defend, the Japanese appeared behind them. The newly arrived 18th Division had barely gotten into the fight, and were already cut off. Even worse, he received reports that entire Australian companies refused to fight anymore, and that thousands of Australian and Malayan soldiers were drunk and rioting in the city. The entire island’s civilian population was crammed into a small area around the harbor and order there broke down. The mass of humanity made a perfect target for air attack.

The Japanese planes ruled skies and bombed and strafed both military and civilian targets at will. On the 14th, the Japanese Army captured the last reservoir, and quickly water became scarce for his 80,000 troops and one million civilians. And now there was a mass exodus. Down in the harbor, chaos reigned as hundreds of ships of all sizes and packed with people tried to escape. Japanese planes made a sport of strafing and bombing them as they exited the harbor. Percival had heard nothing from his commander for days (Wavell fell off of a wall and was unconscious for four days) and one of his first communiques after being incommunicado was this message referencing surrender. Percival contacted Gen Yamashita immediately.

Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was already being referred to as “The Tiger of Malaya” by his men, peers, and superiors, but Percival’s request for a cease fire and surrender was most welcome. He only had 30,000 men on Singapore, and they were exhausted. His men were extremely low on supplies. That he could invade Singapore at all was a wonder to him: the week’s worth of preparations at the beginning of the month was in full view of British observers and Australian patrols and grossly exposed to any artillery fire at all. Had Percival’s large coastal defense cannons had any high explosive rounds, he would have had to retreat out of range farther up the peninsula and await reinforcements. His “invasion fleet” was composed of captured civilian coastal and river craft, and it had taken three days to ferry his army across the narrow Johore Straits.

On the beaches he found no defenses, and that the British didn’t seriously counterattack his meagre beachheads baffled him. And later British counterattacks were piecemeal and halfhearted, when they came at all. His tanks ran roughshod over the Allies, but were beginning to break down and run out of ammunition. The British in the east fought off the feint by the Imperial Guards Division but that was expected: they were good for ceremonial duties in Tokyo, but made poor soldiers in the field. The only troops that put up any serious resistance were ethnic Chinese irregulars and the Australians in the west, and they had seemingly melted away (The Australians compromised 14% of Percival’s force, and took 77% of the casualties so far in the Malaya campaign. They assumed they were being sacrificed to save British units, and were no longer willing to fight for someone who wouldn’t fight for themselves. On the 14th, the Australian commander with his staff commandeered a junk in the harbor and sailed home.)

And now Yamashita was receiving reports of Australians in the city. His greatest fear was a protracted house to house fight for Singapore. He simply did not have enough men and supplies for such a costly operation, even with Japanese control of the air. It would be untrue to say that Yamashita himself had control of the air: the Japanese pilots did, and he had no influence over their operations. If the British discerned the true Japanese situation on the island, there was no doubt they would fight on.

Yamashita accepted Percival’s surrender as soon as it was offered.

“Yamashita’s Bluff” was one of the greatest deceptions in history, if only because the only witting and unwitting actors were well led, well trained, and enthusiastic soldiers that made themselves seem eight times their actual number targeted against lethargic and out of touch commanders of poorly equipped and demoralized troops. On 16 February 1942, 80,000 British, Australian, Malayan, and Indian troops marched off to captivity, some having been in theatre for less than three weeks. In context of the recent Russian defense of Moscow and American and Filipino defense of Bataan, it was the largest and most humiliating surrender in British history.

The Channel Dash

With America’s entry into the war, Hitler correctly surmised that Roosevelt and especially US Army Chief of Staff George C Marshall would advocate an invasion of Western Europe at the earliest possible time in order to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union, who was fighting the bulk of the Wehrmacht. German planners calculated that the Allies would need the shipping capacity and capability to support 100 divisions in France, in order to successfully invade, defeat a German counterattack, and liberate the country (They were spot on, that’s exactly what the Allies had in 1944). In early 1942, they estimated the Allied shipping support at 40 divisions (it was actually ten), so they weren’t too concerned about an invasion of France that year. However, their erroneous belief that the Allies had 40 divisions’ worth of shipping support was more than enough to liberate Norway. Norway hosted several greatly successful commando raids in 1941. Moreover, Hitler believed that Churchill would want to avenge his 1940 Norwegian fiasco, and would gladly acquiesce to the Americans’ demands of an invasion somewhere in Western Europe in 1942, provided the target was Norway.
 
To successfully defend Norway against an Allied invasion, the entire German surface navy would be required, otherwise much needed troops from the Eastern Front or U boats from the Med and the Atlantic would have to be transferred to Scandinavia. The major capital ships of the German Navy were currently a fleet-in-being, the majority in Brest, France. This was an excellent location for threatening the vital shipping lanes from America to Britain, but not for patrolling the North and Norwegian Seas. Hitler ordered these ships, the big modern battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the modern heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, to sail home.
 
There were two ways to get back to Germany from their French Atlantic base: they could either sail around the British Isles, and do a “reverse breakout” through one of the Greenland-Iceland-Faeroe-Scotland gaps, or sail right up the English Channel. The first would put them close to the Royal Navy’s main anchorage at Scapa Flow Scotland, and well outside the range of any Luftwaffe support. Admiral Raeder, the Kriegsmarine’s top surface commander, chose the direct and bold option.
 
The British expected this. They had Ultra intelligence confirming it, just not the time and date. Furthermore, as the Germans knew, the Channel option just made more sense. The Home Fleet at Scapa Flow would welcome a showdown in the North Atlantic, and they had to stay there anyway to defend against a possible breakout by the Tirpitz (another Bismarck-esque breakout was still Britain’s top concern). What small ships could be spared, the Royal Air Force, and especially the RAF Coastal Command would have to stop any German dash up the English Channel.
 
Raeder was keenly aware of the Japanese destruction from the air of the Prince of Wales and Repulse two months earlier, and demanded and received priority Luftwaffe support for the entire trip to mitigate any RAF interference. Furthermore, the German squadron would be escorted by six big Z class destroyers, which were meant for fighting, not escorting convoys, so consequently were twice the size as any comparable British destroyer in home waters. They were also escorted by a dozen E-boats, which had the same advantages over British motor torpedo boats as the German destroyers did over their counterparts. The only advantage the British did have was reconnaissance, in particular radar.
 
But the British Coastal Command, responsible for reconnaissance and surveillance of the British home waters, was the red headed step child of the Royal Air Force. The RAF believed that to win the war against Germany they had to be bombed into submission with heavy bombers. The next priority was fighter defense. Far and away in priority was Coastal Command reconnaissance aircraft. And even further was Coastal Command and Fleet Air Arm maritime strike aircraft. Despite the German squadron never being more than 200 miles from Piccadilly Circus in London, and never traveling higher than their top speed of 30 knots, the British had precious little to stop the two day operation from succeeding. And what they did have was misused.
 
The British couldn’t keep their squadrons on full alert all the time, so they concentrated the alert times based on the reasonable assumption that the Germans would try to force the most dangerous part of the trip, the 20 mile narrows between Dover-Calais, during a period of darkness and at high tide. They adjusted their limited patrol schedules based on where they expected the Germans to be based on that information. For example, this meant that the Germans should depart Brest at noon for a 0200 push through the narrows. They were could not have been more wrong.
 
The Germans thought it more important to depart under the cover of darkness lest the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow sail and engage them in the North Sea. The Germans believed that the Home Fleet had more than enough time to intercept them and be back in position to intercept the Tirpitz (They greatly overestimated the Royal Navy’s agility). The Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen and escorts departed Brest at 2245 on 11 February 1942. They passed out of the estuary to the sounds of ineffectual RAF bombing of the very docks they had recently occupied. If all went to plan, the German warships would sail past the White Cliffs of Dover at noon in broad daylight.
 
Coastal Command still had a chance to pick them up in the Atlantic and Western English Channel by long range Hudson recon aircraft with airborne radar. But British engineering is just good enough in the best of times (as any Land Rover owner will tell you), and the past 20 years were not the best of times for Coastal Command. Of the two Hudsons that could have spotted the squadron that night, both had malfunctioning radar. Fighter Command spotted them twice during early morning fighter sweeps off the Normandy Coast, but the pilots had misidentified the ships and reported them as destroyers escorting local cargo ships. The British only positively identified the frankly unbelieving and astonished Germans when a veteran British fighter pilot recognized the big 11 inch guns on the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at 1042 in the morning about 15 miles southwest of Calais, nearly 13 hours into their audacious journey.
 
The report then had to move through the stovepiped reporting mechanisms of the RAF and the Admiralty: all the way up through Fighter Command then down through the Admiralty and Coastal Command before anything could be done about the German ships seemingly strolling by as they were watched by observers on the beaches. The Germans passed through the straits at precisely noon, easily dodging artillery fire by British shore batteries along the way. British motor torpedo boats attacked at 1219, an hour and 23 minutes after they were first spotted, and were easily brushed away by the E-Boats. The initial airstrike on the ships was executed by just 12 antiquated Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers at 1239, from an airfield just minutes away. They were almost all shot down by the Luftwaffe covering force. By the time the Coastal Command’s six old and slow destroyers got into the fight, the RAF was throwing everything they had at the German squadron. But the former Lend Lease “four stacker” First World War vintage destroyers were easy targets for the Germans ships, – those that survived the battlecrusiers’ big guns met the Prinz Eugen’s batteries, and then the Z Class destroyers’, all of whom out ranged them. Those that survived courageously charged in to launch their torpedoes while dealing with the E boats’ own spreads. The German squadron didn’t even slow down.
 
Nearly 800 RAF aircraft attacked the Germans as they traversed the North Sea for the rest of the day, and most couldn’t find the fast moving ships. Those that did, did no damage: the heavy bombers had a bad track record of actually hitting inside city limits on the continent, much less a ship at sea. The fighters didn’t have the ordinance to do more than irritate the ships’ crews, and the Luftwaffe fought off the rest. The only bright spots for the British happened when both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau struck mines, which slowed but did not stop them. That night, all of the dashing ships were safely inside German harbors.
 
It was the most embarrassing action for Great Britain in its own home waters since the Dutch Admiral DeRuyter sailed up the Medway in 1667 and burned the British fleet at anchor. This was doubly so fresh on the heels of the disaster off of Malaya when the Japanese had no trouble sinking two British battleships with less aircraft, less reconnaissance, and on the open sea. The Germans sailed under the nose of the British for nearly two straight days and got away clean. As one author put it,
 
“The cheek of it!”

The First Gold Record

On 10 February 1942, Glenn Miller was awarded the very first Gold Record for his swing version of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. The song went to #1 on 7 December 1941 and by February sold more than 1.2 million copies. Chattanooga Choo Choo was featured in the movie “Sunny Valley Serenade”, one of only two movies that featured Glenn Miller and his orchestra. The song accompanied a dance number and sung by Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers.