Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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Название: Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe
Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007585373
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In Malaya, Britain’s military commanders and rulers alike reflected paucity of talent. The Empire seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unwarlike warrior chieftains. Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief Far East until the end of 1941, was a sixty-three-year-old former governor of Kenya. Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, the army commander, was a long-serving staff officer whose meagre operational experience had been gained against the Sinn Féin insurgency in Ireland. Sir Shenton Thomas, the colony’s governor, said to the generals as the Japanese began to land in the north early on 8 December: ‘I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ His contempt might have been enhanced by reading the orders issued to Japan’s soldiers committed to the assault on Malaya, which included homely injunctions to avoid constipation and heartburn, and to employ deep-breathing exercises to escape sea-sickness: ‘Remember that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering patiently.’ Men were urged: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer.’
Although British and imperial troops were deployed in northern Malaya in expectation of a Japanese amphibious assault from Siam, the onset of war inflicted as devastating a cultural shock as it did upon Pearl Harbor. Each society around the world which found itself overtaken by the contagion of violence responded with initial disbelief, even if logic had been proclaiming its inevitability from the rooftops. When the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore in the early hours of 8 December, Australian engine-room artificer Bill Reeve was asleep in his bunk in the harbour aboard the destroyer Vendetta, fresh from months of heavy action in the Mediterranean. On hearing explosions, Reeve thought he was having a bad dream of battles past: ‘I said to myself, “You silly bastard, roll over.”’ A heavy concussion close at hand caused him to acknowledge reality, yet even as successive sticks of bombs fell, the city’s street lights blazed on.
Churchill had made a brutal and probably inescapable decision to concentrate the best of the Empire’s forces in the Middle East. The air defence of Malaya mustered just 145 aircraft, of which sixty-six were Buffaloes, fifty-seven Blenheims and twenty-two Hudsons. The obsolescence of most of these aircraft was less significant than the overwhelming superiority of Japanese pilots in experience and proficiency to those of the Allies. When the Japanese began to land at Kota Baharu, the defenders’ response was pitifully limp. It was some hours before local RAF commanders bestirred themselves to launch strikes against the invasion fleet. When they did so, British and Australian planes, along with the shoreline defenders, inflicted over a thousand casualties. Not all the invading troops showed themselves heroes: a Japanese officer described how ‘one section of non-commissioned officers of the Independent Engineers had…become panic-stricken at the enemy’s bombing. Without orders from the troop leader, they boarded the large motor boats…and retreated to the open sea off Saigon.’
Yet by the end of the first day, British air strength in northern Malaya had been halved, to around fifty serviceable planes. Many senior officers and ground crews failed to act effectively: the pilots of a section of Buffalo fighters which took off to intercept attacking Japanese were disgusted to discover that armourers had failed to load their guns. At Kuantan airfield, hundreds of ground personnel fled in panic. ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs,’ a bemused Indian driver of the Royal Garwhal Rifles asked his officer as the two contemplated a chaos of equipment, personal baggage, tennis rackets and debris strewn around airfield buildings. The young lieutenant snapped back crossly: ‘They are not sahibs, they’re Australians.’ But British soldiers and airmen were also fleeing. Some Indian units collapsed in panic; the British CO of a Sikh battalion was believed to have been shot by his own men before they bolted. ‘We now understood the capacity of the enemy,’ wrote a Japanese officer contemptuously. ‘The only things we had to fear were the quantity of munitions he had and the thoroughness of his demolitions.’
The first of countless atrocities took place. Three British airmen who crash-landed in Siam were arrested by its gendarmerie, who handed them over to the Japanese. Tokyo’s local vice-consul told a Siamese judge that they were ‘guilty of taking Japanese lives and destroying Japanese property’, and the men were beheaded on a nearby beach. Historically, and especially in the 1905 Russo–Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo ‘control group’ changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as ‘the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.’ The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands.
Before the battlecruiser Repulse left Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales, to seek Japanese amphibious shipping, there was a dance on the great ship’s after-deck. This roused in Diana Cooper’s breast ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond’s legendary soirée before the Battle of Waterloo: ‘Brussels ball once again.’ Off eastern Malaya, Captain William Tennant told his crew: ‘We are going to carry out a sweep to the northwards to see what we can pick up and what we can roar up. We must all be on our toes…I know the old ship will give a good account of itself…Life-saving gear is to be worn or carried…not because I think anything is going to happen to the ship – she is much too lucky.’ Yet just before midday on 10 December, Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, a devastating blow to British prestige throughout Asia. Consolation could be sought only in the heroism of some doomed men such as Wilfred Parker, the New Zealand chaplain of Prince of Wales who stayed with the dying rather than save himself. A British fighter pilot who flew over the scene as hundreds of sailors clung to wreckage in the oil-soaked water wrote admiringly: ‘Every man waved and put his thumb up to me…as if they were holidaymakers at Brighton…I saw the spirit which wins wars.’ Yet survivors later asserted that, in truth, they were shaking their fists at the airmen overhead and shouting derisive catcalls: ‘RAF – Rare As Fucking Fairies!’
In the northern jungle, again and again British units were confounded by fast-moving Japanese. The 1/14th Punjabis were surprised by enemy tanks while sheltering from torrential rain in their vehicles; their accompanying anti-tank guns had no time to unlimber. ‘Suddenly I saw some of my trucks and a carrier screaming down the flooded road and heard the hell of a battle,’ wrote their commander, Lt. Peter Greer. ‘The din was terrific…almost immediately a medium tank roared past me. I dived for cover…within the next two minutes a dozen medium tanks…passed me…They had crashed right through our forward companies…I saw one of my carriers; its tail was on fire and the Number Two was facing back firing his light machine-gun at a tank twenty yards behind me. Poor beggar.’
The Punjabis’ survivors scattered and never reassembled. The same fate befell a green Gurkha battalion: thirty of its men were killed in their first action, while only two hundred escaped with their weapons, leaving most to СКАЧАТЬ