ABSTRACT
By the time a carrier-less Force G had reached the Sembawang naval base in Singapore and received an enthusiastic welcome from the civilian population on 2 December, the crisis in East Asia was only days from exploding into war. Some of the Japanese military forces who were slated to launch that war were already on the move. A submarine flotilla was nearing Oahu and a large strike force, spearheaded by six carriers with 423 aircraft on board, was six days out of Hittokappu Bay, observing complete radio silence and bound for the eastern Pacific under the command of Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.1 On the same day (4 December) that acting-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips left his fledgling Eastern Fleet behind and flew to Manila to confer with Admiral Thomas Hart, the C-inC of the US Asiatic Fleet, an enemy troop convoy with 26,640 infantrymen on board eighteen transports left Hainan for their southern Thai and northern Malayan landing sites. By the afternoon of the following day the Southern Expeditionary Fleet with seven more transports had weighed anchor and set out from Saigon to join the convoy south of Cape Camao on 6 December. Before a shell was even fired in the Pacific War, therefore, the Japanese had seven carriers, four battleships, twelve heavy cruisers, five light cruisers, forty-five destroyers and thirteen submarines underway at sea – all of which were moving into place to strike at Allied interests at the appropriate time.2
