For Americans, the attack on Pearl Harbor tends to dwarf other events in the Pacific during December 1941. Yet it was just one component in a much larger scheme of interlocking Japanese operations. Japan’s overarching goal was to secure the resource areas of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, but to do that it first had to destroy the important Allied bastions in the Philippines and Malaya. As the first month of war unfolded, the Allies were made grimly aware of just how well-prepared for war their opponents were—and how badly equipped their own forces were to cope with these well-thought-out plans.
The 7 December Pearl Harbor attack was intended to give Japan a decisive naval victory that would provide a year of breathing room from interference by the U.S. Navy. Japanese leaders hoped that a sufficiently heavy blow to the Americans would not only weaken their will to fight, but also prevent them from dispatching naval forces to succor both the Philippines and the British and Dutch in Indonesia and Malaya. In the event, the Japanese need not have worried. The U.S. Navy had decided not to attempt a massive reinforcement of the Philippines at the outset of the war. But the Japanese were not aware of that, and the Hawaiian operation went forward as planned.
Despite its outward success, a closer examination of the Pearl Harbor attack reveals it to have been largely a failure in that it neither completely debilitated the U.S. Navy nor lessened America’s will to fight. However, that was only visible in hindsight. In the short term, the devastation dealt to the Pacific Fleet’s battleship force, and the very heavy casualties inflicted, were truly shocking.
Nor was the attack on Pearl Harbor the only Allied naval disaster that occurred as the Pacific war commenced. Just two days later, Japanese naval aircraft based in French Indochina (Vietnam) located a British battle group attempting to forestall the Japanese landings against Malaya. Centered on the battleship Prince of Wales and the older battlecruiser Repulse, Force Z had no air cover of its own. On the morning of 10 December in the Gulf of Siam, 88 twin-engined Japanese naval bombers attacked Force Z in three waves.
In just two hours, both British capital ships were sunk and more than 800 sailors lost. It was the first time a battleship had ever been sunk by aircraft while under way. That it had happened to the fast, modern Prince of Wales was even more staggering. The effect on the morale of British ground forces in Malaya was immediate and dire: They now knew they would have to fight without the benefit of England’s traditional trump card—naval supremacy.
Initial Advances in Malaya
The Japanese landings that Force Z was trying to interdict had already taken place early on 8 December. Japan violated Thailand’s neutrality by putting troops ashore at the southern tip of that country, as well as at Kota Bharu in Malaya. Those units quickly established a beachhead for Japan’s 25th Army, which began moving additional forces ashore and developing attacks aimed down Malaya’s east coast and also inland.
Talented Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded the 25th Army, whose eventual goal was the capture of the great port and naval base of Singapore, located on the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula. Singapore would provide the Imperial Japanese Navy with a firm base to push eastward into Indonesia, as well as to threaten British positions in the Indian Ocean.
The 25th Army intended to develop a campaign along both coasts of Malaya, so as to multiply the difficulties of the British defenders. In this, the aggressive Yamashita was eminently successful. Marching across the Malayan Peninsula’s upper neck, the Japanese 5th Infantry Division quickly reached the key town of Jitra, near the west coast. On 11–13 December the Japanese convincingly defeated the 11th Indian Infantry Division there, forcing it to retreat south. The invaders were now astride both of Malaya’s coasts.
The British very quickly came face-to-face with the reality of just how good the Imperial Japanese Army was. Although deficient by Western standards in motorization, heavy weapons, and logistics—factors that would cost it dearly in later campaigns—the Japanese compensated in a number of other ways. For one thing, the army demonstrated in Malaya that its staff work (when provided with adequate military intelligence) could be superb. It had been scouting Malaya for years, and its efforts had accelerated as war clouds gathered in 1941. The result was that it possessed unprecedented knowledge of British defenses, as well as an intimate understanding of the difficulties of Malaya’s terrain. The Japanese used the knowledge to good effect, beefing up the 25th Army’s three divisions with substantial engineering units to construct and repair roads and bridges.
However, it was Yamashita’s troops themselves that gave the British their worst shock. Japan’s warriors were tough and war-hardened from fighting in China. They marched rapidly, lived on very short rations, and endured levels of privation unthinkable to most other armies. Emperor Hirohito’s infantrymen were uniformly ferocious on the attack and disinclined to take prisoners, which they treated with ruthless disdain in any case. The Japanese had a low opinion of British troops and even of the normally well-regarded Australians. They viewed native Indian and Malayan units with utter contempt.
Well-schooled in shock tactics, insensitive to casualties, and adept at making both night attacks and flanking maneuvers through the jungle, the Japanese would deftly pry the British out of one defensive position after another. Not surprisingly, British morale—and that of the Indian and Malayan troops in particular—began crumbling almost from their first contact with this aggressive enemy. Once the 25th Army grabbed the initiative, General Yamashita’s hard hand never let it go. Pushing his forces mercilessly, his rapid tempo of operations never gave the British a chance to rest, reform, or create coherent defenses.
In this the Japanese were helped inestimably by the superiority of their airpower. Malaya had been a backwater of the British Empire for years, and as World War II in Europe had progressed, the British were using practically all their resources just to continue fighting in the home islands and North Africa. Consequently, Malaya got only dribs and drabs of equipment that was no longer considered fit to face the Germans. The results were reflected in Malaya’s skies.
Japanese army fighter squadrons fielded the formidable Ki-43 “Oscar” during the campaign, but the Imperial Japanese Navy’s A6M “Zero” truly ruled the roost. Flown by skilled pilots, the fast, long-ranged, and extraordinarily nimble Zeros swept the skies of second-rate Allied aircraft during the initial phases of Yamashita’s campaign. Thereafter, Japanese air forces dominated the daylight hours, launching bombing raids against Singapore and other British bases and shooting up anything that moved on the roads below. The effects on British spirits can readily be guessed.
Assaulting American and Filipino Forces
American holdings in the Pacific were not being ignored during the first week of war, either. The Japanese had wasted no time in landing 5,600 troops on the Central Pacific island of Guam on 8 December, quickly compelling the small American garrison there to surrender. Three days later, a Japanese flotilla carrying 2,500 naval infantry arrived on the doorstep of the tiny island of Wake.
By all rights the attackers should have forced the American garrison there, consisting of about 450 Marines, to capitulate in short order. However, with a tiny force of F4F Wildcat fighters that sank a Japanese destroyer, and some deft shooting from 5-inch shore batteries that sank another, the Marines managed to repel the Japanese task force. It was the one bright spot in what had otherwise been a very grim week.
The attacks on Guam and Wake were but sideshows in comparison with the major attacks the Japanese intended to deliver against the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, the initial blow in this campaign came from the air. Taking advantage of the Zero’s extraordinarily long range, Japanese air forces based in Taiwan launched a heavy raid against the main American air base at Clark Field, on Luzon. The Americans, though alerted to their danger by receipt of messages describing the attack on Pearl Harbor, were nevertheless caught by surprise at Clark as well. Through a series of mishaps, almost the entire American air force in the Philippines, about 140 aircraft, was busy refueling or rearming on the ground at Clark when the Japanese attackers rolled in. The result was a slaughter, with most of the U.S. planes destroyed in a single blow. The Americans were now largely defenseless in the air.
The Japanese began landing small naval infantry forces on the north shore of Luzon two days later. These were followed on 12 December by a brigade-size unit landed at Legaspi on Luzon’s southeastern tip. However, the main amphibious assault would not take place for another ten days, when the Japanese were certain that they had destroyed American airpower and driven off the U.S. Navy. Heavy air attacks against the American naval base at Cavite, along with the loss of American air support, compelled the U.S. Navy to withdraw all its larger warships south toward Java, leaving only submarines to contest Philippine waters.
After these events had come to pass, on 22 December, the Japanese landed their main forces—some 43,000 men of the 48th and 16th divisions—at Lingayen Gulf on the northwestern shore of Luzon. Once they were ashore, General Douglas MacArthur’s forces could neither hurl the Japanese back nor prevent them from advancing south toward Manila.
The same tactics the Japanese had employed so successfully in Malaya—using multiple lines of approach and jungle infiltration and turning the flanks of defensive lines—were on full display on Luzon as well. American and Filipino forces, underequipped and in some cases poorly trained, fought hard but were forced from one position to the next. To complicate the situation, on 24 December the Japanese put ashore an additional brigade of the 16th Division at Lamon Bay, southeast of Manila, and began advancing toward the capital. MacArthur’s forces could no longer concentrate on a single axis of attack. Faced with an increasingly desperate situation, on the 24th MacArthur gave orders for his army to conduct a fighting retreat back into the Bataan Peninsula, west of Manila.
The retreat was conducted stubbornly. However, MacArthur was far less successful in getting supplies into the peninsula with which to feed his army. Indeed, it is arguable that the supplies could and should already have been in place there, given Bataan’s role as a likely final redoubt if MacArthur’s forces were bested in the field. His efforts were likewise complicated by the horde of civilians who fled Manila toward Bataan; instead of the planned-for 43,000 military mouths to feed, there would eventually be more than 100,000 soldiers and civilians trapped on the peninsula. Despite Japanese efforts to cut off MacArthur’s forces before they reached their positions, the last of his troops retreated into the peninsula in good order on 4 January 1942. Two days earlier, Manila had been occupied by the Japanese, who celebrated the event with their normal excesses against the civilian population.
How long Bataan could hold out was an open question, but it was now clear that the Americans eventually were going to lose the Philippines. The U.S. Navy was in no position to reinforce or evacuate MacArthur’s beleaguered forces. No supplies could be sent. The result was a foregone conclusion; the only issue was how long it would take.
Collapse in Malaya
Despite British reverses in December, Malaya was not yet doomed. However, just three days after MacArthur finished his retreat into Bataan, Yamashita’s troops won a stunning victory that put the writing on the wall in Malaya as well. By late December, British troops had been bested in several engagements in the north of the country but had retreated southward in reasonably good order. They had lost most of northern Malaya, but there was still a very long way to go before the Japanese would be at Singapore’s doorstep. However, to a perceptive observer it should have been clear that things were beginning to come apart at the seams. The 11th Indian Division, which had borne the brunt of most of the heavy fighting the previous month, was worn out and demoralized. If the Japanese could deliver a decisive blow and restore fluidity to the campaign, there was no telling what might happen.
New Year’s had found the 11th Indian dug into a strong defensive position at the town of Kampar. There they had delivered a rather sharp setback to the advancing Japanese, largely thanks to their superior artillery. But the success had been short-lived. On 2 January 1942, the Japanese used an amphibious end-around to put troops behind the 11th and astride the road back to Singapore.
The Indian division thereupon made its way back some 35 miles to a new set of positions in front of the Slim River. With the river barrier behind and dense jungle all around, the British hoped they would be able to rest and reform. It was not to be, though, as the Japanese 5th Division continued its relentless drive south, catching up to the British on 5 January. An initial probing attack was repulsed, but now the Japanese had another trick up their sleeves: tanks.
The Imperial Japanese Army was hardly destined to gain a reputation as luminaries in the art of armored assault, but their attack on the Slim—launched in the middle of the night during a raging rainstorm—was notable for its dash and élan. Supported by a battalion of motorized infantry, engineers, and a few light guns, a column of about 30 light and medium tanks hit the 11th Indian Division’s 4th Battalion, 19th Hyderabad Regiment at 0330 on 7 January. Momentarily halted by a roadblock in front of the British positions, the Japanese quickly brought forward engineers and demolished the obstacles, allowing the tanks to bull their way through.
Having lost contact with divisional artillery, and without antitank weapons of their own, the Indians were driven headlong into the jungle. The Japanese tanks then simply charged down the road toward the Slim. In quick succession, they plowed through a battalion of Punjabs and then through the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Battalion as well. By this time the Japanese had demolished the 11th Indian’s forward brigade. Yet given the speed of their onset, none of the division’s British commanders had any understanding of what had happened.
That was made grimly apparent as the onrushing Japanese tanks ran into two more battalions of Punjabs and Ghurkas on the road. Making their way toward the sound of fighting to their north, the Indian troops were utterly surprised to encounter Japanese tanks. Driving into and through the marching columns, firing wildly all about, the tanks simply scattered the troops to the wind, and the Japanese continued their mad dash unmolested. By midday it was all over. The tank column had advanced 16 miles and captured both the road and railway bridges over the Slim.
The 11th Indian had basically been crushed by 30 tanks and a Japanese infantry battalion. Two Indian brigades were decimated, with the survivors trying to make their way back across the Slim without the benefit of the bridges that had, until recently, been theirs. With the 11th finished, the defense of central Malaya was similarly over before it had even fairly begun. Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the British commander in Malaya, ordered the remnants of his forces to retreat south, where they could fall back on the fresh 8th Australian Division. The city of Kuala Lumpur and most of central Malaya were to be given up without a fight.
Australian troops in general were very well-regarded and had proved themselves in North Africa against the Germans. But to any perceptive observer it was clear that the campaign in Malaya was beyond recall. The British had no seapower or airpower left to speak of, and the situation on the ground was a complete shambles. Yamashita’s 25th Army, though outnumbered 3:2 by British forces, was simply hounding Percival’s forces to death.
30-Day Assessment
At the end of a month of war across the breadth of the Pacific, the picture was one of accelerating calamity for the Allies. The Philippines were as good as gone, and things in Malaya were not looking much better. The Marine defenders at Wake, for all their gallantry, had been hit with an even larger invasion force on 23 December that captured the island after a night’s costly fighting. Hong Kong had been lost almost at the outset. Even now, the Japanese were accelerating their plans for a second phase of operations aimed at capturing the true objectives of their larger war plan—the oilfields of Borneo and Java and the rich resources in places such as Sumatra.
The coins of the realm in the Pacific were naval and air power, and in both these vital commodities the Americans and British were now sadly lacking. The U.S. battleship line still smoldered at Pearl Harbor, and though the American carriers had survived, they did not have the power to contest the Japanese navy’s overwhelming dominance in the Pacific. As for the Royal Navy, it could not conjure up another Force Z to try to rescue the situation in Malaya. Indeed, it would be lucky just to hold its own in the Indian Ocean in the coming months. British ground forces in Malaya (and soon in Burma as well) were essentially on their own, which is to say they were doomed.
The Japanese had boldly contested and won the strategic initiative in each of their major campaign areas. Attacking hard and fast, they gained crucial positional advantages and established a relentless tempo of operations. The emperor’s soldiers had shown a keen appreciation for the full value of airpower, using aircraft to strike naval forces and their bases, destroy Allied planes, and attack enemy ground forces. The Japanese army had shown itself to be aggressive, skilled, and utterly ruthless. In some cases Allied troops had fought hard and acquitted themselves well. But in the end, temporary tactical victories could not mitigate the overwhelmingly favorable operational advantages that the Japanese had fought for, legitimately won, and now used in their favor.
These trends would have to run their course before the Allies would have a chance to stabilize the situation. And they still had quite a way to run. Indeed, as bad as the situation already was by 7 January 1942, it was only going to get worse. Japan had prepared well for its initial series of operations, and it would reap its due rewards for that hard work. As events would prove, Singapore was doomed, as was all of Southeast Asia. The Dutch, who had yet to really enter the fray, had only two months left to enjoy their Indonesian holdings before they were crushed by the Japanese juggernaut.
The only glimmers of hope for the Allies—almost invisible in the ruins of early 1942—were the retention of Hawaii and Australia, the continued existence of the American carriers, and the very slender logistical threads on which the Japanese were sustaining their newly expanded empire. As it developed, these would be the foundations of eventual Allied victory in the Pacific war. But the road toward that goal was destined to be long, difficult, and winding.
For the attack on Pearl Harbor, the standard Western work remains Gordon Prange’s At Dawn We Slept (Penguin Books, 1982). Among the scores of other volumes on the subject, this author is fond of H. P. Willmott’s Pearl Harbor (Cassell, 2001) and Alan Zimm’s recently released Attack on Pearl Harbor (Casemate, 2011), which contains the most thorough operational analysis of the Japanese attack yet written. The Malayan campaign is described in numerous volumes as well. H. P. Willmott’s Empires in the Balance (Naval Institute Press, 1982) remains a very vibrant account, to which can be added Brian Farrell’s The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940–1942 (Tempus, 2006) and Allen Warren’s Singapore 1942: Britain’s Greatest Defeat (Hambledon & London, 2003). The first month of the Philippine campaign is likewise covered in Willmott’s Empires in the Balance. The U.S. Army’s official history of the campaign, Louis Morton’s The Fall of the Philippines (Government Printing Office, 1953) remains invaluable and fortunately is available online at http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-P-PI. For single-volume histories of the Pacific war as a whole, Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun (Random House, 1985) remains a very readable and thorough account.