in late-September. Crew leave prevented from deploying until mid-December, and a gun refit scheduled from February to May 1942 was required before she could conduct further operations. With working up, the earliest either could reach the Far East was August 1942. The King George V-class was, aside from the Revenges, the only worked-up battleship that could sail east before Spring 1942. On 20 October, the Committee decided to send Prince of Wales to Cape Town, South Africa. Once at Cape Town, a review would decide whether to send the ship onward to Singapore; this would keep Prince of Wales available to respond to an emergency in home waters. In December 1941, as a deterrent to Japanese territorial expansion which was recently demonstrated by the invasion of French Indochina, it was proposed that a force of Royal Navy warships be dispatched to the Far East with a view to providing reinforcement for Britain's possessions there, most notably Singapore. First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound represented that Singapore could be adequately defended only if the Royal Navy sent the majority of its capital ships there, to achieve parity with an estimated force of nine Japanese battleships. However, dispatching such a large British force was impractical as the British were at war with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared optimistic about the improving situation in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean; he advocated sending two capital ships along with an aircraft carrier to defend Malaya, Borneo and the Straits Settlements. Churchill has been criticised for showing "considerable ignorance" and holding an "exaggerated belief in the power of the battleship," along with "a tendency to interfere in naval matters." This may have led him to propose a squadron of three modern ships: one battleship, one battlecruiser, and one carrier. His view was that using the Ultra decrypts that would give Japanese ship locations to the British, they could then use their own ships to form a "fleet in being" to deter Japanese action, as the German battleship Tirpitz, sister to the lost Bismarck, was in the North Sea. However, there was no firm plan for such a task. The revised British proposal allocated the new King George V-class battleship , the veteran , and the for air cover, though the plan had to be revised when Indomitable ran aground in the Caribbean Sea. The dispatch of capital ships to Singapore