An example was Churchill's decision to send Force Z including the battleship and the battlecruiser to Singapore without, as it transpired, adequate air support. Both Alexander and the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound had vigorously opposed this deployment but were overruled by Churchill. This decision was made before Pearl Harbor – the ships were sent east as a deterrent to Japanese aggression, at the request of the Australian government and British forces in the Far East. Initially an aircraft carrier HMS "Indomitable" was included, but she ran aground in the Caribbean, and was not replaced by HMS "Hermes" which was regarded as too slow. "Prince of Wales" and "Repulse" were attacked and sunk by Japanese aircraft off the Malayan coast immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, before plans for their re-deployment in the light of actual hostilities with the Japanese could be decided upon and executed. Although Churchill had overall responsibility for the deployment, according to Richard Lamb, he 'had no responsibility for the fate of these two battleships'. The Admiralty view, argued for by Alexander and Pound, was that the "Prince of Wales" and the "Repulse" would have been better deployed in the Atlantic to counter the German threat from the German battleships "Tirpitz", the "Scharnhorst" and the "Gneisenau".