December 28th - The Day of Infamy, Part III

Malaya

On December 29th Hong Kong and Malaya were invaded. Hong Kong fell quickly.

On the morning of January 3rd, 1942, a mixed force of Japanese land-based bombers located and sank the battlecruiser HMS Repulse and the carrier HMS Indomitable, despite desperate efforts from the latter’s air wing. The 9 Sea Hurricanes and 12 Fulmars did manage to destroy 23 Japanese aircraft and damaged a dozen more, but the loss of their carrier sealed their fate. A second wave later in the day sank the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the destroyer HMS Vampire. Japanese losses were 32 aircraft destroyed and 21 damaged.

In Malaya, as in the Philippines, the attacking Japanese were outnumbered. However, the Commonwealth forces (notably the 8th Australian Division), while riddled with problems, were still far more organized then the American and Philippine forces. Gen. Yamashita also had far worse logistical problems. These factors, along with unfavorable weather, caused the Japanese offensive to run out of steam just short of Singapore in late February. Now aware of the force disparity against them, the Japanese began to shift troops from the Philippines to reduce Singapore. Gen. Wainwright’s offensive in the Philippines then caused troops to be shifted back, and the Malaya front became a stalemate.

The ABDA (American British Dutch Australian) command had been struggling to keep a supply line open to Singapore almost since the war began, and to interfere with Japanese operations in the area. They had been barely successful at the former and a failure at the latter while suffering heavy losses. The arrival in the area of Kido Butai, fresh from a string of victories, spelled the final defeat of this force in the Battle of the Java Sea on March 26th. Now cut off and subjected to a series of carrier airstrikes, Singapore joined Corregidor as “the Alamos of the Pacific.” The Alamo, of course, fell, and so did Singapore on April 30th. Kido Butai followed up on this victory by raiding into the Indian Ocean, making a whirlwind series of attacks. In ten days, the British lost the light carrier HMS Hermes, the cruiser HMS Cornwall, two destroyers, and a number of merchant ships and aircraft. Japanese losses were only a handful of aircraft.

Kido Butai had ravaged the world’s two largest navies, sinking or crippling almost everything they encountered and losing not a single ship themselves in the process. The dominance of the aircraft carrier had been established. But the raids had a cost: the IJN’s elite carrier pilots had lost many of their number. By the time Kido Butai returned to Japan only a third of the aircraft it had sailed for Pearl Harbor with were still operational. A determined effort would repair many of these and replace others, but the experienced aircrews were a larger problem, one that would never be fully solved.

Dutch East Indies

The oil and mineral wealth of the Dutch East Indies made them one of the most important objectives of the initial Japanese offensive. The first landings on Borneo occurred on January 7th. The ABDA command attempted to coordinate the defense, but fared no better than they did at sea. On April 6th, the last allied troops in the Dutch East Indies surrendered. Some of the Japanese veterans of this campaign would participate in the final assault on Singapore three and a half weeks later.

While organized fighting would continue in the Philippines until the surrender of Corregidor on August 8th, and guerrilla warfare would continue for years, the opening phase of the war is generally considered to have ended with the fall of Singapore on April 30th. The Japanese had sunk or destroyed three fleet carriers, four battleships, a battlecruiser, a light carrier, three heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, a score of destroyers, hundreds smaller vessels and merchant ships, almost 1,000 aircraft, and killed or captured tens of thousands of allied troops. In exchange they had lost no warship larger than a destroyer (and only two dozen warships of any size), less than a hundred merchant ships and transports, a few hundred aircraft, and a few thousand men. They had met every objective of their pre-war plans, some of them ahead of schedule, with lower than expected losses. The few temporary reverses were blamed on local commanders in a surge of what later historians would characterize as ‘victory disease’; the superiority of the Japanese race had been clearly demonstrated for all the world to see.