Big Ships, Ocean Bound

Abstract

Four big passenger liners, serving as wartime troopships, arrived in Singapore docks on 29 January 1942. They carried troops of the 18th Division and military equipment and stores in what was a late attempt to reinforce the defences of Malaya and Singapore. Troopships from Britain to the Middle East in 1941 had to make the long sea-journey via South Africa, and Churchill had been concerned to provide substantial additional forces, up to two infantry divisions, to be at hand for whatever developed in the Middle East theatre of war. With heavy demands on British merchant shipping, he secured the loan of six fast American merchant ships for this large-scale and long-distance kind of trooping, though, before Pearl Harbor, the American President thought it undesirable to send American ships directly into British waters. For the one division that was transported on the long sea voyage in 1941 before Pearl Harbor, British troops were first taken westward across the Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then transferred to a convoy, known as WS 12X, which followed a wide route to South Africa, heading for the Cape and, eventually, the Red Sea.