Do you know what Task Force Z was doing on December 6th? Well. 2 things. The first was a meeting with the Americans, to 'coordinate' actions in event of a Japanese attack with the Asiatic task force in Phillipines. The fleet at Pearl harbor was left up to Churchill and the Imperial Staff but negotations earlier had failed.Zinegata wrote: Yes, but the point is Churchill was still wrong to have kept Force Z in Singapore by December 8th. It was clearly mass suicide at this point, and they would have known it was already mass suicide well before this had they bothered to not allow hubris to allow them to grossly underestimate the capabilites of the IJN.
The second was an ongoing plan to actually divert to Sydney, so as to act as a 'fleet in being'. Hell, Churchill comments in sending Task Force Z to Singapore was to act as an entire FLEET in being. The only difference was that Churchill believed it should be staged in Singapore. Phillips, not being utterly insane, believed it should be staged somewhere safer......... say Australia.
The only reason why Task Force Z sailed up north was because they HAD to contest a Japanese landing and note, their job was to attack the transports, which were guarded by cruisers. While they couldn't know that, Admiral Phillips also made it clear in his operational orders that they would evade if facing severe opposition. There was also no 'severe' underestimating of the IJN naval air arm, because they used cloud cover and etc to evade air surveillance and attacks.
HELL, given other official blurbs in service, it is now believed that Phillips refusal to signal to the RAAF for air support at Kelantan, leaving it only after they spotted incoming aircraft was due to the fact that he believed that doing so would reveal his position to the Japanese via RDF, exposing him to Japanese air power. A severe mistake because the RAAF didn't know where Phillips was and nobody communicated to each other that there was no air patrol to help Phillips and Phillips didn't ask where his requested air cover was.
And why the RN withdrew Hermes from the Indian Ocean instead of playing tag......... Are you NOT aware of the concept of the fleet in being? The entire 4 R task force was intended to relace Task Force Z as a fleet in being.Those British carriers again would be little more than target practice had they been deployed. The IJN is a completely different beast from the Luftwaffe. You could have deployed every British carrier with Force Z and it would still have not been enough. To not play the carrier vs carrier or battleship vs battleship game was in fact the only way to "win".
These were the comments from Churchill himself. BOTH regarding sending a two modern capital ship to Singapore as well as the R ship task force. Overriding his military opposition to sending ships to Singapore.
WHAT lighter warships? You mean the 4 destroyers assigned to Task Force Z and the only warships in the area? Now, tell me what happens when a destroyer goes up against an expected cruiser escort............. Or are you referring to the patrol boats assigned to Penang and their glorious ride to doom 'trademark British inadequacy at attempting to set up a suicide squad results in whole squadron being demolished before they could even get near the Japs'The problem with this mode of thinking is that it ignores that Force Z was destroyed on December 10th, or days after the obliteration of battleship row at Pearl Harbor, which already demonstrated that the IJN in fact possessed far advanced carrier strike abilities than previously thought.
Moreover, what you're forgetting is that Force Z was never premised to stand alone. Even if the British hubris made them blind to Japanese carrier advances (when Chennault and his Flying Tigers were already reporting that the Japanese were flying much more advanced aircraft types since the 30s to anyone who would listen), they were fully aware that the IJN possessed an actual battlefleet, including two ships of the Nagato class, four Kongos, and four WW1-era dreadnoughts; all of which could easily crush a task force consisting of only a KGV and a battlecruiser.
Force Z was in fact supposed to operate in concert with the American battle line, giving the combined British + American fleet something like 10 battleships to face the Japanese battle line. The problem by December 8 is that the American battle line was already gone and that you now had just these two British capital ships and four destroyers against ten IJN battleships plus their cruiser and destroyer escorts.
Force Z should in fact have withdrawn to the Indian Ocean on the 8th. Staying was suicide at this point, because the Japanese had in fact achieved naval and air supremacy no matter how you count it. That it didn't withdraw and instead went on what was the equivalent of a death ride against suspected troop transport convoys (a task that should have been left to lighter warships - indeed ABDA's destroyers and cruisers proved much more successful in this regard) was again an issue of pride overriding military sense.
You keep ignoring what Phillips and Churchill wrote in their orders. We DO know that Admiral Phillips knew his task was not winnable, but the Royal Navy tradition could not be abandoned. Just what would be the political fallout if the RN had simply withdrawn from Malaya without doing anything? HENCE. Phillips decided to do a possible task. Go up north, hunt for troop convoy, withdraw. Note that his orders were explicitly designed to make this a 'cruiser raid'....... with motherfucking battleships, because he knew that his force was overmatched. We have his orders preserved from Battle Box and Sembawang. Go up north, avoid enemy contact, find transports. That's not suicide. That's the British trying to make the best of a FUBAR military situation.
And you can't possibly think the Imperial Staff and any officer assigned to Singapore didn't know that Singapore was impossible to defend, because we have statements from everyone, including Brooks, the Chieff saying that. You and Simon Jester are simply arguing based on incomplete facts and assumption. Contrary to what you believe, or the common airman and soldier, the British high command was clearly aware of the superior capabilities of both the IJN and the attached aerial arms, both in a military threat to Malaya and the ships, they were just unable to simply say fuck it and withdraw from Malaya without defending it.