Shortly after arriving in Singapore
Repulse was sent to show the flag in Australia.
Prince of Wales was drydocked to scrape her bottom and clean her tubes.
The problem with
Indomitable was, even without her grounding off Jamaica, she wasn't scheduled to complete her work-up until Jan 10 1942. So she won't be joining the Eastern Fleet for a while.
This thread
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/all...t-should-have-been-sent-east-in-41-t8559.html
and the map therein of RN dispositions in October 1941 might be of interest. My own conclusion towards the end was to build an Eastern Fleet based on Ceylon and put a cruiser squadron with a carrier in Singapore.
Phillips force was inadequate, and he knew it. On December 8th, he was in Manila asking Tommy Hart to loan him a DesDiv of US destroyers to bolster his forces. The problem was, that once the balloon went up, was he had the ONLY force capable of slowing the Japanese. The Army was incapable and the RAF in Malaya was a joke. He had two capital ships and a handful of destroyers to counter a navy with over a million tons of warships, including 10 capital ships and 9 aircraft carriers. He sailed anyway, and with luck, he and his ships might even survive. That they didn't should come as no surprise to anyone.
Two side notes: Phillips was a staff officer, and he had studied the war so far. He knew torpedo bombers were the greatest threat to his capital ships, he knew fighters were the best defense against torpedo bombers (hence his request for fighter cover on the 10th, which the RAF failed to provide) and he knew he would be operating outside the longest range a torpedo bomber attack had yet taken place. What he didn't know was the Japanese were using long-range land-based bombers AS torpedo bombers. That's a failure of intelligence, not his.
Second, Phillips told the Admiralty he intended to attack the enemy forces off Kota Bharu and eight hours later, he sailed, 1005 on the 8th London time. The Admiralty did not reply to his message, and at 2200 on the 9th London time, when Force Z had been at sea for some 36 hours, there was a staff conference on naval dispositions in the Pacific. Churchill, Alexander (First Lord of the Admiralty) and Pound were in attendance. Churchill favored withdrawal, but at the late hour, it was decided to settle things in the morning. It was already too late. If deterrence had failed, why not immediately order him to Ceylon or Australia? That's a failure of the Prime Minister and the Admiralty.
To return to the original question, what was really needed was an equal commitment by all three services. The Army should have provided artillery, including AAA (when the Japanese bombed Singapore on the 8th, the only guns that could reach the altitude of the bombers were the 5.25in aboard
Prince of Wales), and some light and/or medium tanks, and the RAF needed to provide more modern fighters and some twin-engine medium bombers A squadron or two of heavy bombers, even Short Stirlings would have helped as well.
Vickers Vildabeest were not exactly the planes to give the Japanese pause. Ad those to a cruiser squadron with supporting destroyers, and larger carrier/capital ship fleet in the Indian that could be in Singapore in a number of days (even if it doesn't do so, the threat is there) and the Japanese calculations for their southern move would be very different, in my opinion.
My thoughts,