Failing Britain

For my holiday reading in Australia I chose Max Hastings’s brilliant but exceedingly depressing Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Once you’ve read it, it’s impossible to take any pleasure from second world war history ever again.

Basically, runs Hastings’s persuasively argued thesis, we were rubbish at pretty much everything. Our generals were useless, our citizen soldiers lacked dash and folded at the first opportunity, our tanks were ill-protected and undergunned. Apart, maybe, from Bletchley, we contributed nothing major whatsoever to the Allied war effort: the Soviets doing all the killing and dying for us and the Yanks providing all the materiel.

So, really, it should have come as no surprise to learn from The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal (BBC1, Monday) that we British were responsible also for the destruction of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and our own abject humiliation at Singapore. That’s because — amazing but true — British spies provided the Japs with all the technical information and training they needed to build their devastating carrier fleets.

At the end of the first world war, when Japan was still an ally, Britain was the world leader in aircraft-carrier technology. The Japs badly wanted to get their hands on it and were greatly helped by two Brits: Frederick Joseph Rutland (an RFC ace known as ‘Rutland of Jutland’ because he’d been the first to spot the German fleet) and William Forbes-Sempill, a Scottish toff and member of the Right club (dedicated to purging the Conservative party of Jewish influences).

Rutland trained the first Japanese carrier pilots in the art of taking off and landing from a flight deck (at the time, British intelligence refused to believe Jap pilots could ever be a threat because they lacked the right spirit); later he moved to Hawaii where he provided the Japs with counter-intelligence information in the run up to Pearl Harbor.