To counter this, plans were drawn up to establish a balanced fleet at Singapore’s great naval base that would secure the city as well as protect India to the west, Australia to the south and Malaya to the north. In the 1930s, British military planners designated Singapore the empire’s most strategic point short of the home island itself, and they correctly saw Japan as the greatest threat to that crucial port. The increased militancy and nationalism of Japan, however, eventually caused them to reconsider this stance. Believing that future difficulties in these possessions would be confined to maintaining order and putting down internal dissent, Great Britain’s leadership did little to prepare for a larger conflict. For the leading Allied powers, this included maintaining their vast overseas empires, some of which had been expanded further by the acquisition of German- and Turkish-held territories.Īmong those nations with the largest overseas concerns was Britain, whose imperial outposts dotted the globe. When World War I finally ended on November 11, 1918, victorious European nations refocused their attention on prewar pursuits. The prelude to one of the final naval battles of World War II began before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, when people believed that the war to end all wars had already been fought. In the final days of World War II, the Royal Navy achieved a victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy that restored some measure of the prestige that it had lost early in the war.ĭriven from the waters of Southeast Asia by a resolute opponent intoxicated with victory in the first months of war, it would be years before ships of the Royal Navy returned to the Pacific to achieve some measure of revenge on the Imperial Japanese Navy. How the Royal Navy Got Revenge on Japan in World War II Close
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