Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Battle of Samar - Odds? What are those?" video.
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@spatsky C'mon. He received a war warning on November 27, 1941. Rather than disperse his aircraft, order constant air patrols, and order his large fleet of submarines out to perform reconnaissance patrols, most were still in port or on the ground on December 8. MacArthur's decision not to send out reconnaissance flights toward Formosa at dawn, as advised his air force commander, was disastrous. If he had sent out flights at dawn he would have had at least six hours to disperse his aircraft and mount an attack from safety. Even though he was warned, he seemed to have no understanding that Clark Field was within range of Japanese aircraft from Fornosa.
By the time he did order reconnaissance aircraft aloft, they were met by incoming Japanese aircraft. The bombers and aircraft at Clark Field were fueled and armed up for an attack on Formosa that came too late. Japanese fighters and bombers destroyed half the combat aircraft and most of their fuel in the Far East air force in less than an hour. He did a terrible job preparing and stocking a redoubt in Corregidor and Batten. There were only half the supplies in the tunnels as there were supposed to be, and it was the Navy that extended the tunnels when MacArthur had decided not to use Army troops to do so. MacArthur had decided by July of 1941 that the Philippines could be defended with his B-17's, and that Japan would be deterred from attack because the B-17, which had never been used in combat, was such a formidable aircraft. Nothing MacArthur did would have staved off the eventual defeat in the Philippines, but better planning and tactics could have extended the time of resistance and not had his troops in near starvation at the end.
You seem to have a rather starry eyed admiration for MacArthur. You really need to read "MacArthur and Defeat in
the Philippines" to understand some of the blunders and mistakes MacArthur made in the defense of the Philippines. If not for the flowery and self-serving dispatches he sent after the attack and his effective public relations team in the US he would have been sacked. American needed a hero in the dark days of early 1942, and MacArthur made sure he was primed to fill that role.
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@spatsky First, I don't despise MacArthur, but accuracy in history is more important than who anyone likes or dislikes. Hong Kong was never a fortress. Churchill and the general staff consider Hong Kong a mere outpost and actually reduced the size of the garrison on 1940. It wasn't until September of 1940 that a token Canadian force of 1975 troops were dispatched to Hong Kong, not arriving until November 16.
Singapore and Malaysia were part of the same campaign. It was a failure of British planning that assumed now army could traverse the whole of Malaysia on the ground, assuming the Royal Navy could sink any troop convoys that were close enough to threaten Singapore. The Malay Command never received the equipment it needed to defend the Peninsula and Singapore, with the British not having a since tank in the whole command. Percival didn't do a good job in defending Singapore, never allowing his large force of engineer troops to set up roadblock and defenses that would have slowed the Japanese advance. His battlefield intelligence was defective, and he believed an entire Japanese corps was attacking rather then the 38,000 troops under Yamashita's command. Percival surrendered an army of 138,000 men to a much smaller force, and better planning and execution should have allowed the British to hold out for far longer than they did.
The Phillipines lasted longer because we had the redoubt of Corregidor, something the British didn't have. We were able to fight a retreating action on Bataan that lasted until April only because the Japanese had foolishly assumed the battle had been won by early January. They had withdrawn their best troops and almost all their airpower to fight in the Dutch East Indies, leaving second line troops to mop things up. It's doubtful we would have lasted a month in Bataan if we had still been facing the Japanese 48th Division. The 10,000 remaining troops lasted until May 8 only because the tunnels provided shelter from the bombings and artillery fire. If the tunnels had been properly provisioned with food, ammunition, and medical supplies, the defender may have been able to hold out for another month or 45 days.
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