William Forbes-Sempill
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In August 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt held a top secret meeting on the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales to discuss military matters, including America’s then-top-secret assistance of the British battle against Germany.
Later that month, British codebreakers intercepted a communique from the Japanese with an exact, detailed account of that meeting. While the news stunned the British leader, even worse was the revelation that one of the men who passed the information along was not only a longtime Churchill associate, but a highly regarded member of the House of Lords.
“The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal,” a BBC documentary now airing in Britain, reveals that not only did British officials provide the Japanese with all the technology and know-how they used to attack Pearl Harbor, but that for 20 years, a distinguished British peer fed them so much crucial military information that, without his actions, the attack might never have happened.
In 1919, William Forbes-Sempill, a high-level wing commander whose father had been an aide to King George V, led a mission to Japan — then a British ally — to help them develop an air base.
But when Japan developed their own aircraft carrier several years later, Britain, at the urging of the United States, broke the alliance. Sempill took a job advising other foreign governments on aircraft sales, but also secretly continued assisting Japan.
“Sempill gave them designs of the latest aero engines, bombs and all kinds of paraphernalia that go with aircraft carriers,” says Richard Aldrich, the University of Warwick professor who discovered the formerly classified British files implicating Sempill. “But most importantly, he coaxed them down the route of naval airpower.”
Thanks to help from Sempill and another distinguished British pilot turned spy, Frederick Rutland, the Japanese carrier fleet rivaled the British in just seven years.
By 1924, the British intelligence agency MI5 was on to Sempill, having intercepted alarming correspondence between him and the Japanese, including secret details of the latest British airplane engines and discussion of recruiting other high-level Brits to their cause.
But despite their overwhelming evidence, the British not only declined to prosecute but also did nothing to stop his activities for fear of embarrassing the government.
“They were really worried about him,” says Paul Elston, the film’s director. “But the difficulty they had was, he’s a war hero, he’s at the heart of the British aristocracy, and he knows everyone — including Churchill. So there was a lack of political will to do anything about it, and it never stopped, even 20 years later.”
By the mid-1930s, Sempill became a member of the House of Lords and also joined a number of British pro-Nazi groups, a situation that was shockingly common among the British aristocracy.
“Sempill is part of a group in Britain who believed Britain should be allied with Germany and Japan against Russia and the Communists,” Aldrich says. “They were a lot of the aristocracy then in Britain. One government official said, if we rounded up all the pro-Nazi sympathizers in Britain, we’d have to lock up half the House of Lords.”
“Amongst many people in the British upper classes, the real worry was that communists would take away their lovely landed estates, as they had done in Russia,” Elston says. “What happened to the czar was very resonant to the aristocracy in Britain.”
When Churchill first learned of his longtime friend’s activities in 1941, he was terrified that the world would learn that he had been casually chatting about military secrets with a friend who was then passing them along to their enemy.
“They were social friends,” says Aldrich, who says the incident was a “potential death knell” for Churchill. “Sempill goes around for a cup of tea, Churchill’s talking about the war, and then Sempill goes to the Japanese Embassy to tell them what Churchill told him. If this comes into court, Churchill’s going to be tremendously embarrassed, because he’s been blabbing. He drinks a lot, and he’s very gregarious. Who knows what he said?”
Even when he was caught calling the Japanese Embassy several times in the week following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sempill escaped arrest. And when the House of Commons made noise about a potential investigation, Churchill said no.
“If there had been a trial, it [might] have come out that these guys had trained the Japanese back in the 1920s,” Elston says. “The British fleet was destroyed by the Japanese naval air [forces] that had been trained by Sempill. The guy who led the attack was trained by Sempill. You can imagine the effect that would have had, in the middle of the war, on American public opinion — the shock and consternation it would have caused.”
After the war, Sempill was decorated both by the Japanese and by the British — the latter, supposedly, to further cover up his activities. Ironically, Rutland, who taught the Japanese how to take off and land from carriers and also spied on American bases, was interned by the British for two years, later committing suicide. Unlike Sempill, Rutland did not have an aristocratic bloodline to spare him.
Without their spying, “Japan would have lacked the state-of-the-art naval air power to strike Pearl Harbor,” Aldrich argues. “Maybe Japan would have done something else, but it would have been very difficult for them to do Pearl Harbor the way they did.”