On 10 December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval bombers flying from Indochina found the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off Kuantan, on the east coast of Malaya. In about two hours of bombing and torpedo attacks both ships were sunk, with the loss of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips and some 840 men. They were the first capital ships ever sunk by aircraft on the open sea.
Force Z
Prince of Wales, flying the flag of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, sailed from Singapore at 5:35 p.m. on 8 December with Repulse and four destroyers, a squadron known as Force Z, to strike at the Japanese transports landing troops in northern Malaya. Whether the ships had any hope of air cover is told differently. Lawrence Spinetta, writing in Air & Space Forces Magazine, says Phillips believed so strongly in the battleship that he made no effort to arrange it. The despatch of Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, published in the London Gazette in 1948, records that Phillips asked for fighter protection off Singora at daylight on 10 December and was told it could not be provided.1
Once Japanese aircraft had sighted the squadron on 9 December, Phillips gave up the attack and turned back. Then a signal reported an enemy landing at Kuantan, and at 0052 on 10 December Force Z turned toward it at 25 knots. The report was false: when the destroyer Express looked into Kuantan at 8 a.m., she found complete peace.2
The air attack
The Japanese bombers came from airfields in southern Indochina, around Saigon. The first attack, a high-level bombing run on Repulse, came shortly after 11 a.m.. Torpedo bombers followed in waves. Early on, a torpedo struck Prince of Wales aft, damaging her propeller shafts and steering and cutting power to many of her guns and pumps, according to Pacific Wrecks. Repulse, struck by several torpedoes, capsized and sank at about 12:33 p.m.. Prince of Wales was hit again, the order to abandon ship came at 1:15 p.m., and she rolled over and sank at about 1:20 p.m.. Six Buffalo fighters from Singapore arrived just as she went down, after the attackers had gone.3
Captain Tennant's report counted 27 officers and 486 men lost from Repulse. Pacific Wrecks gives 327 dead from Prince of Wales, Admiral Phillips and Captain John Leach among them. The total usually cited is 840. The destroyers picked up the survivors, Captain Tennant among them.4
The National Maritime Museum notes that the two ships were the first capital ships to be sunk at sea by aircraft. Spinetta stresses the point: earlier air attacks, at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, had struck ships lying at anchor, while these were under way and fighting back on the high seas.5
Also on this day
- 1652: Battle of Dungeness. A Dutch fleet under Maarten Tromp, fresh from escorting a large merchant convoy, met Robert Blake's weaker English fleet off Dungeness in Kent in the First Anglo-Dutch War.
