The royal navy, is perhabs England greatest pride of it's history, it ruled the wave during the 18th century and carved up 1/3rd of the known world in the ensuing centuries. We remenber the RN has this prestigious institution that gain immense prestige at Aboukir, Trafalgar and later on Jutland and even sinking the pride of the Geramn Navy, the dreaded Bismark. In conclusion, the royal was a serious force to be recon with, i don't have the numbes nor the details about the navy but by 1940 the RN was the only obstacle against Hitler invasion of England mainland.
But as the war went on the RN drastically "fell apart", the pride of the royal navy was sunk by the Bismark at the battle of the Danmark strait and the British were unable to protected their far eastern colonies such as Singapure or Hong Kong, and were left open to Japanese invasion. For the first time since the 18th century Britain ceased to rule the wave and was outmatched by the Japanese navy, they would later on regain their long lost colonies only when the Japanese were ultimately defeated by the growing US navy. Despite the losses of the war, the British Navy was still seen as the greatest fleet in Europe along side the French and in some extent the Italians. For exemple during the Suez crisis ( a joint French-British operation on the suez canal ) the RN was the primary forces in Operation Musketteer despite French assitsance.
But nowaday's, as the time as we speak, the royal navy is cleary outmatched by the American navy, in fact in the early 2010 the French actually had the upper hand notably with the introduction of the nuclear aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, for exemple during the Lybian civil war of 2011 the RN was under direct control of the French command, something not seen since the crimean war.
Witch bring us to the question, how was the mighty RN was defeated by the japanese and why the American finally became the naval superpower as we know it today?
I don’t know anything about the American navy so I won’t attempt that part of the question. I can outline 22 years of disastrous events leading up to the Royal Navy (RN) losing Repulse and Prince of Wales in December 1941, the event which resulted in Japanese control of the South China Sea and the retreat of the RN fleet in the Far East.
However, I want to point out that while the Royal Navy lost to the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the Asia Pacific in 1941, and while Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong did fall to the Japanese, we cannot therefore say that on the whole the RN was outmatched by the IJN. That would be like saying, because the American air force failed to protect Pearl Harbour, the entire American air force was outmatched by the Japanese air force.
WW1 Aftermath
In 1919, Britain was absorbing the lessons of the Great War, one of which was that, in any future large scale European war, Britain needed the strength of her Empire behind her. Manpower and raw materials from across the world would flow into Britain, with which a future foe could be beaten.
Thus, the Empire had to be maintained at all costs, and central to the defence of the Empire was the RN. Only the RN could project power to defend colonies in the Far East while defending supply lines between them and Britain.
Based on this assumption, the logical requirement was that 3 separate, powerful fleets in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean/Africa and the Far East were required. However, Britain in 1919 had been exhausted by WW1 and couldn’t afford this. Instead, Winston Churchill, future heroic leader of the British Empire, proposed the Ten Year Rule - the armed forces should base their budgets on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years.
This caused something like a 75% cut in defence spending between 1919 and 1920, and the navy was left to ponder how exactly it was supposed to be the protector of the Empire on a shoestring budget.
While pondering, the RN received another rude shock in the form of the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, where the Americans not only suggested sweeping cuts in the navies of Britain, the United States and Japan (and France and Italy), but also that the navies should be limited to a 5:5:3 ratio.
The RN was furious. The strength of the RN - indeed, any armed force in the world - should be determined by the Empire’s needs and its capability to support them. But if they accepted that they could be no larger than the American navy, then the strength of the RN would be determined by America’s needs, even though the RN might have greater commitments.
Unfortunately, the Americans were not going to back down. The unspoken threat was that America had emerged from WW1 as the Greatest Nation on Earth. And if the treaty was not signed, then the Greatest Nation on Earth would build the Greatest Navy on Earth, and neither the Japanese nor the weary British would have any hope of matching it.
Thus, by 1922, the RN found its budgets determined by treaty and limited by the Ten Year Rule, but the requirement to defend the Empire did not change.
So the RN submitted a new plan, under which there would be no major fleet stationed in the Far East. Instead, Britain would maintain just one fleet closer to home, and, in case of hostilities in the Far East, it would send this fleet to meet and defeat the threat.
Singapore Naval Base
These ships would need a major regional base from which to operate. British planners as far back as the 1920s saw Japan as the threat of the future in the Far East, and, accordingly, selected Singapore as the site of the new naval base. Hong Kong was too close to Japan, Sydney too far. Singapore was close enough to Japan to be a threat, yet far enough to be inconvenient to attack.
This “Singapore Strategy” endured all the way till 1942. Practically all British plans for the defence of the colonies in the Far East were based around it. But even in 1923, Jan Smuts, the highly regarded military man who was Prime Minister of South Africa, pointed out that Britain would only be able to send out the fleet if it were not engaged in Europe, but that it was precisely only when the fleet was engaged in Europe that the Japanese would attack. But this and other criticisms were not heeded. Indeed, given treaty and budgetary constraints, there was really no real alternative.
Almost immediately, the naval base, essential to the Singapore Strategy, ran into financial constraints. The original plan, the “Green Scheme”, envisaged a massive facility with a floating dock, sealed inner basins, at least 10 docks, lots and lots of petrol storage and more. All in all it was meant to support at least 12 capital ships and a full complement of escorts.
The government was never going to agree to the cost, so in 1923 the RN submitted a revised “Red Scheme” that cut capacity by about 40% and cost to about 25m pounds. Such a base could only handle about 20% of the main fleet, good enough for peacetime, probably not good enough for war.
In 1924, future hero Churchill complained about costs again, arguing that there was no chance of war with Japan in their lifetime. By 1926 the base was again reduced by removing all repair capacity. Warships needing serious maintenance would have to use the facilities of the commercial harbour. This plan was accepted, but successive governments dragged their feet, viewing it as unnecessary expense, until 1938 when it was decided to officially open it, in a half-finished state, to try and calm Dominion jitters over the increasingly aggressive Empire of Japan.
The result was that, whether Britain would be able to send a fleet or not became moot, because the naval base no longer had the capacity to support a fleet large enough to wage war. Instead, it now contained enormous petrol reserves and not enough ships to defend it, making it a very tempting target.
The decade before war in the Far East
In 1932, the Ten Year Rule was finally scrapped. However, now in the throes of the Great Depression, Britain could not afford to grow its navy by nearly enough to make up for lost time. To make matters worse, the decade saw the rise of Italy, Germany and Japan, 3 powers that threatened the Empire on 3 different fronts.
In 1940, after the fall of France, Britain found itself fighting alone against Germany and Italy. The RN now had to concentrate its forces in the Mediterranean against Italy, while still sparing ships to protect vital imports in the Atlantic against Germany.
Meanwhile, between 1940 and 1941, Japan took over the whole of French Indochina, giving it access to bases on Malaya’s doorstep. Troop carriers could now reach Malaya in just 4 days. But the RN was too tied up to spare enough strength to repel an invasion.
Finally, in October 1941, the British scraped together an aircraft carrier, the HMS Indomitable, and 2 capital ships, Repulse and Prince of Wales, to send to Singapore. This was publicly announced in the hopes that it would deter Japanese aggression. Instead, the Japanese dispatched the 22nd Naval Air Flotilla, a land-based unit specially trained and equipped to destroy surface vessels, to southern Indochina.
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