CHAPTER SIX

Zipper

‘That night … I dined with Admiral Fife, and he made me feel that I had known and served under him for years.’

—Captain William Fell, 14th Submarine Flotilla

Captain Fell’s eyes widened as his jeep came to a jarring halt. ‘Good grief,’ he muttered under his breath as the Japanese soldiers turned and stared at him. Their eyes were full of undisguised loathing, and, thought Fell, contempt. Fell stepped down from the jeep with the American general and his escort and approached the rudimentary wire enclosure.

‘How many are there?’ asked Fell, his shoes slipping on the muddy path.

‘One hundred and thirty, Captain,’ replied the general cheerfully, dressed like all of the other Americans in olive green fatigues and a helmet with camouflage cover. ‘Took the bastards prisoner this morning.’¹

Fell surveyed the scene, fascinated to be face-to-face at last with the dreaded Japanese. The enemy POWs stood around or squatted on their haunches in the mud, their tan or green uniforms filthy and ragged. Most had shaved heads or closely cropped black hair under soft peaked caps or steel helmets adorned with a yellow star. Red and gold rank tabs adorned the collars of captured officers and NCOs; their sword frogs hung empty, their prized samurai swords having been surrendered.

Fell was struck by how small the Japanese were – an army of children next to the hulking figures of their US Marine Corps guards, who menacingly fingered Thompson sub-machine guns. The Marines looked as though they would happily kill every single prisoner without a thought, and after the appallingly bloody battles on the island of Peleliu it was understandable.

Fell looked at the Japanese, the soldiers who had been built up into a race of jungle-fighting supermen in the imagination of the Allied troops. Most of them looked dejected or ill, many wearing the shame of capture on their thin faces. Others stared back at him defiantly. Fell knew that given a chance, these Japanese would kill him in an instant. They didn’t care whether they lived or died. In their military culture, being made a prisoner was a living death.

Fell was glad that he had seen the Japanese prisoners, but also a little unsettled by the experience. For he knew that he was intending to send his own men deep behind Japanese lines. He had taken the measure of the enemy troops that he had seen. They looked like formidable foes even in defeat. That much was obvious from the careful way in which the Americans guarded them. Peleliu was a hellhole, one of the worst places Fell had ever had the misfortune to visit, a stinking island of death. He would be glad to leave and be on his way again, continuing on his journey to the Philippines.

*

Though the news had appeared to be uniformly gloomy and unpromising for 14th Submarine Flotilla, a tiny glimmer of hope, at the time totally unbeknown to Captain Fell, had long since flickered to life in Kandy, Ceylon. There, on 3 February 1945, while HMS Bonaventure was preparing to leave Scotland, among the white-painted colonial buildings and immaculate gardens teeming with birds and insects, a message had arrived from London. It was addressed to Lord Mountbatten. He received new directions from the Chiefs of Staff instructing him to liberate the rest of Burma at the earliest date and to then liberate Malaya and open the Straits of Malacca.² Mountbatten was delighted – it was what he had been pressing for since his appointment as Supreme Commander. The only question that remained in his mind was whether he would be able to gather sufficient forces to make such an operation feasible. Mountbatten had Churchill’s firm backing but, like Captain Fell, he was to find that his plans were being frustrated by politics and hampered by dissension among supposed allies.

*

When the Bonaventure had arrived in Brisbane on 27 April the crew had discovered that there were only two good things about the city. Firstly, the pubs were open – and Captain Fell granted everyone some well-earned shore leave. Unfortunately, the pubs didn’t have very much beer. And, secondly, the local shops were full of the kinds of things most Britons hadn’t seen for years, particularly fresh fruit.³ But still, it was an awfully long way to come for a banana.

For the Australian members of 14th Submarine Flotilla, arriving home on the way to war was a slightly surreal experience. These men had already answered the Empire’s call and gone to Britain in the early years of the war. Now they were passing through the familiar world of their pre-war lives headed towards points unknown.

When Max Shean went ashore in Brisbane he immediately rang his parents in Perth, on the other side of the continent. They had only been able to communicate by letter for years, so hearing his mother’s voice after so long was strange. He felt emotionally disjointed. He was home in the land of his birth but he wouldn’t have time to travel all the way to Perth to see his parents. That would have to wait until the end of the war. And his new wife remained in England, half a world away. This unsettled feeling was experienced by not only the Antipodeans among 14th Flotilla but also by many of the Britons. The feeling was brought on by being in Australia, whose cities looked so British, and whose people were so similar in personality, tastes and sense of humour.

In the meantime, word had arrived that 14th Submarine Flotilla was to be placed under the command of Rear-Admiral James Fife, an American officer based in the recently liberated Philippines who had responsibility for all submarine operations in the US Seventh Fleet.

Captain Fell had remained deeply unhappy. He positively writhed with frustration at what he perceived as the complete waste of talent caused by apparent American shortsightedness. His talented XE-men and their amazing submersibles deserved better than twiddling their thumbs in this backwater of an Australian posting, albeit a friendly one. While everyone else was enjoying some leave in the welcoming environment of Brisbane, Fell had decided to act. Putting aside the Americans for a moment, he had decided to try to persuade one of his own commanders to find employment for 14th Flotilla. Churchill’s motto was ‘action this day’, and Fell took a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s book.

*

Fell had boarded a twin-engined DC3 Dakota and flew down to Sydney, headquarters of the British Pacific Fleet, to meet its redoubtable commander, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser.

Winston Churchill had been against the British Pacific Fleet when the Chiefs of Staff had first raised the idea. He thought that the Fleet, though large, would nonetheless be dwarfed by the enormous US Pacific Fleet, making Britain look even more like America’s junior partner in the war against Japan. He also believed that the Americans would not welcome the British trying to muscle in on ‘their patch’. In this opinion Churchill was probably right, as the US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, tried to block the proposal. Churchill backed Mountbatten, believing that Britain was better served by retaking Burma, particularly the port of Rangoon, and then striking at Malaya and Singapore, in the process being seen to liberate three British colonies rather than having the Americans do it for them.

Churchill lost the fight over the creation of the British Pacific Fleet when the Chiefs of Staff threatened to resign en masse if he blocked them. They believed that the new fleet would strengthen British influence, and some in the US high command wanted the fleet to help finish off the Japanese quickly before public opinion at home turned against a protracted campaign and the high casualties that would surely follow. The Chiefs failed to see that by diverting British naval power away from Mountbatten’s theatre, they were making it less likely that Britain would singlehandedly rebuild her Asian empire, making Britain a second-class power in the region in the postwar period.

President Roosevelt had finally settled the arguments over the British Pacific Fleet when he went over Admiral King’s head and graciously accepted British help in the campaign against the Japanese mainland. The benefits for postwar America were obvious and Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, continued this amicable policy.

Fifty-seven-year-old Sir Bruce Fraser, who was developing an excellent working relationship with Admiral Nimitz and his American superiors, could not help Captain Fell when he came calling, accompanied by an old friend from submarines, Commander G.S.P. Davies. Davies was Staff Officer (Operations) to the new Flag Officer Submarines, Rear-Admiral Sir George Creasy, whose headquarters was in London. Admiral Fraser had simply repeated Nimitz’s mantra that the targets that the XE-craft had been designed to sink were no longer available. Instead, Fraser had ordered Fell to meet the British Pacific Fleet’s chief of administration, Vice Admiral Charles Daniel, in Melbourne to discuss how the Bonaventure could be usefully employed in the ‘fleet train’. Fell was horrified. If Fraser was to have his way the XEs would be offloaded and placed into storage and the Bonaventure, a dedicated midget submarine depot ship full of highly skilled crewmen, would be forced to become a simple transport vessel reduced to hauling supplies to the British Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers and battleships fighting off Okinawa.

Fell’s protests had fallen upon deaf ears in Sydney. But he was not completely outsmarted. Gleaned from the intelligence material that the Bonaventure had taken aboard at San Diego was, believed Fell and his second-in-command Derek Graham, the kernel of a mission. Fell changed tack and decided to lay his idea on the line.

‘Hong Kong, sir, is where my boys could do a lot of damage,’ said Fell enthusiastically to Admiral Fraser.

‘Go on,’ said Fraser, his face expressionless.

Fell explained that Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong was full of Japanese merchant ships. ‘A couple of my XEs could make short work of half a dozen Jap transports, sir,’ said Fell. He wanted Fraser’s permission to work up a plan and present it to Admiral Fife in the Philippines. Though dubious, Fraser acquiesced.⁴ He was impressed by Fell’s salesmanship and determination and saw no harm in letting him try a few doors, even though he personally believed that they would all be shut firmly in his face.

*

With each passing day the jungle campaign in Burma sped towards a British victory. Following the important battles of Kohima and Imphal in late 1944, the Japanese army in Burma was in full retreat. General Sir William Slim’s Fourteenth Army was hot on its heels. The strategically vital city of Mandalay had fallen on 20 March 1945 and by mid-April British forces were only 300 miles from the Burmese capital, Rangoon. Capturing this port would provide the British with a major supply base to strike at the remaining Japanese forces in the country and perhaps also springboard Mountbatten across the border into Thailand and even Malaya. The sooner Japanese resistance in Burma could be crushed the more likely it was that Mountbatten would launch an assault on Malaya and eventually the great prize of Singapore.

The British were determined that His Majesty’s forces would liberate Singapore, their greatest pre-war naval base in Asia. It was a matter of national pride after the humiliating surrender in February 1942. Such an undertaking was going to need the support of every available British unit in the theatre, particularly now that the best naval assets had been hived off into Admiral Fraser’s new British Pacific Fleet.

Mountbatten’s plan was christened Operation Zipper. It was to be Mountbatten’s Overlord,⁵ his D-Day, when Britain would strike decisively at her most important colony outside of India and simultaneously place Britain in a much stronger position vis-à-vis the strategic balance in the Pacific. With his background in Combined Operations in Europe, Mountbatten knew he needed a bold strategy against the Japanese that would also bring the added bonus of operational equality with the United States.

The British identified two strategically important ports on Malaya’s west coast as possible future landing sites, each possessing large beaches. The first, Port Swettenham, was, after Singapore, the most important port in Malaya, located only 24 miles from the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The second target, Port Dickson, lay almost 55 miles south-east of Kuala Lumpur, and therefore closer to the main target, Singapore.

The plan would involve seizing a beachhead or beachheads, possibly both ports, and using them as a springboard for an attack on Singapore. Mountbatten intended on landing 182,000 men in the first seven weeks after the invasion, along with 18,000 vehicles and half a million tons of supplies in an operation to rival the American efforts at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He would then advance south and assault Singapore in the same way the Japanese had in 1942, by making assault crossings of the mile-wide Johor Strait onto Singapore’s northern shore.

Mountbatten expected to encounter the usual stiff and suicidal Japanese resistance that British forces were already well used to in Burma. The Japanese had identified Malaya’s west coast as vulnerable to just the sort of operation that Mountbatten intended to launch, and they had taken steps to create a strong defence. Lieutenant-General Teijo Ishiguro’s 29th Army, consisting of one infantry division and four independent brigades totalling 26,000 men, had been created in January 1944. They were well trained and well equipped and psychologically prepared to fight to the death.

Singapore Island was garrisoned by the Imperial Army’s 26th Mixed Brigade and, due to the importance of the captured British naval base to the Japanese, a very large number of well-armed Imperial Navy Landing Troops from the 10th (Singapore) Special Base Unit, 7th and 101st Guard Units. But as Mountbatten was shortly to discover, the Japanese also had a couple of formidable aces up their sleeves if the British were considering assaulting Singapore from the north. These were to come as a very nasty shock to the Zipper planners.

*

Captain Fell’s journey out to meet Rear-Admiral Fife at Subic Bay in the Philippines had turned into a marathon of endurance. On 15 May, HMS Bonaventure had arrived in Townsville, Queensland. The big ship occupied most of the quay space and was met enthusiastically by the locals. As a party kicked off that night, Fell, accompanied by Commander Davies, had been driven to the local aerodrome and had boarded a DC3. The plane was packed with sharp pieces of machinery and had no seats. The two British officers had nothing to eat and, dressed only in naval shirts and shorts, had suffered in the bitter cold as the plane cruised at 11,000 feet.⁶ Fell carried with him detailed plans for the proposed XE-craft attack on Hong Kong.⁷

The DC3 had flown on until noon over heavy cloud cover and the pilot had a job finding a hole to come down through at recently liberated Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea. The plane spent only an hour on the ground refuelling before taking off in stifling heat, affording the passengers a breathtaking view over the mountains.⁸

Fell’s DC3 had touched down at 4.30pm at Manus in the Admiralty Islands. Met by an American jeep, the two officers had been driven to their accommodation, given meal tickets and told where the beer was kept. A meal was taken on well-scrubbed tables alongside 1,000 US other ranks and 200 officers.⁹

The following day Fell and Davies had been airborne again, heading for Biak off the coast of New Guinea at 6,000 feet, passing by the formidable Owen Stanley Range. Below, fighting continued between Australian and Japanese forces, though Fell saw only some ground fires from the plane. At noon, Fell had landed at Wewak, the plane crunching along a black coral strip.

Fell saw impromptu film tents, ice cream, doughnuts and crates of tinned SPAM, comforts for the troops. His plane was met by smiling American Red Cross girls carrying cartons of reviving sweet, tepid syrup and packets of dry biscuits or tins of warm and runny SPAM. The airstrip was battered and scarred, littered with the wrecks of Japanese planes and the occasional American one, unceremoniously pushed clear of the runways by US Army bulldozers. Trees in the surrounding area clearly showed the effects of artillery fire and aerial bombing, while large khaki tent encampments had sprung up next to enormous piles of oil drums and packing crates. It rained frequently, hardly alleviating the enervating humidity, turning the airstrip into a muddy affair.¹⁰

At 1.00pm Fell had been off again, landing next at Peleliu in the Palau Islands. Here the conditions had been even worse than at Wewak. The whole island stank. The latrines were ‘unspeakable’, the food ‘unpleasant’, and the tent where Fell and Davies were billeted ‘pretty nauseating’.¹¹ Fortunately, an American general had asked the two Britons to dine with him. It was after this that Fell was taken to view the recently captured Japanese prisoners and watch them being interrogated.

Fell and Davies were shaken awake at 3.00am ready for their flight, which frustratingly didn’t leave Peleliu till 7.00am. Packed aboard a DC3 that was full of boxes of sanitary towels, Fell and Davies endured another seven hours in the air without seats or comforts. Once they had disembarked at Leyte in the Philippines they were met by several harassed American officers who tried to secure for them onward transportation to Subic Bay. The Britons were forced to stand by and witness several heated arguments until they were given seats on a Dakota that was full of recently arrived US Army colonels and their mountain of baggage.¹²

As his plane circled over Manila, Fell could see the devastation caused by the Japanese resistance in the city. Fell’s DC3 touched down in a cloud of dust and flies at Nichols Field. Fell and Davies could find no one to answer their question of how to get to Subic Bay. Eventually, five of the American colonels, Fell and Davies were piled on to a jeep and driven for miles through what remained of Manila.¹³

After a fruitless search for the British Consul, Fell and Davies pitched up at US Navy Headquarters, a bombed-out and largely floorless skyscraper. A thousand American sailors were preparing a rudimentary supper of SPAM, doughnuts and ice cream before watching a film and the two Britons joined them. It proved almost impossible to freshen up as the building’s only water supply consisted of a single tap on the road in front of the building. Sleep was also largely impossible as constant loud explosions rocked the skyscraper all night long as US Army engineers detonated Japanese booby traps and abandoned ordnance while growling bulldozers worked under artificial lights clearing the streets of debris from collapsed buildings. At the same time the grim business of clearing up the dead was well under way – the bloated corpses were shovelled into mass graves without ceremony.¹⁴

The next morning a weary Fell and Davies boarded a US Navy landing craft that took them out through a maze of sunken ships, past Corregidor Island and on to Subic Bay, which was reached in late afternoon. Waiting to meet them was a very welcome sight – the Royal Navy submarine tender HMS Maidstone, base ship for the 8th Submarine Flotilla. Her skipper, Captain Lance Shadwell, greeted Fell and Davies warmly and had them conveyed below for a cup of tea and a chance to shower and change before the Maidstone’s motor boat took them all over to meet Rear-Admiral Fife.¹⁵

*

‘I fear your trip to see me has been a wasted one, Captain,’ announced Rear-Admiral James Fife, the 48-year-old commander of submarines in the US Seventh Fleet, shifting in his rattan chair on the pleasant veranda of his headquarters building. Fife, who bore a slight resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, though with a pair of steel-framed spectacles, lit a cigarette and looked across at the rather crestfallen faces of his British visitors.

‘But, sir, I just know that my chaps can be of use to you, real use,’ replied Captain Fell. His two companions, Commander Davies and Captain Shadwell, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

‘I could have used your guys two months ago, but the big picture has unfortunately changed,’ said Fife, sipping from a white porcelain coffee cup. ‘The targets are just not around any more.’¹⁶ Fife replaced his cup in its saucer with a clink and leaned back in his creaking chair.

The news was hard for Fell to take in. He lived and breathed 14th Submarine Flotilla. He was becoming almost frantic in his efforts to prevent it being broken up. The one thing that he was determined on was that his flotilla would not end the war running stores – that would have been the supreme indignity.¹⁷

The air was sultry and heavily scented with the flowers growing in the garden. Fell and the other British officers wore tropical kit: a white shirt, white shorts and black shoes with rank lace on their shoulder boards. Fife, in contrast, was dressed in army khakis, his senior rank indicated by two stars on each collar of his open-necked shirt. All of the men’s medal ribbons provided a flash of colour above their left breast pockets, indicating long service and experience. An orderly had set out a tray containing a coffee pot and cups on the cane table between them. Insects and birds chirruped and buzzed in the warm air. It was easy to forget that there was a war on in such bucolic surroundings.

The Hong Kong operation had appeared perfectly sound to Admiral Fraser, hence his support. The plan was for one XE-craft to enter Victoria Harbour by the Mun Passage while another would simultaneously creep in through the mined East Lamma Passage. ‘Numerous merchant shipping targets are reported to be present in Hong Kong daily,’¹⁸ read a British Naval Intelligence summary confidently.

Fell had also decided to expand the plan by including Amoy, a busy Chinese port city on the Formosa Strait.¹⁹ After all, his flotilla contained six XE-craft, so finding useful employment for all of them was a must. At Amoy it was planned to use one XE-craft to penetrate the harbour. Three or four Japanese merchant ships, including one tanker, were reported to be present daily. An additional advantage to the Amoy operation, in comparison with that at Hong Kong, was a complete lack of anti-submarine booms and defensive minefields. Apart from a few Japanese motor patrol boats the place was wide open. ‘The two operations are considered to be both profitable and reasonably easy,’²⁰ wrote Naval Intelligence to Fell.

But Fife, after listening to Fell, had immediately stymied both operations, informing Fell that the ‘hot intelligence’ that he had based his plans on was now more than eight weeks out of date and the number of Japanese ships in both ports had dwindled.²¹ It would be a waste of time and resources bringing only a minimal return, and, perhaps more importantly, a waste of British lives if anything went wrong.

As for the idea of using the XE-craft against the remaining vessels of the Imperial Navy in the Japanese Home Islands, that idea, said Fife, was also sadly unrealistic. The Imperial Japanese Navy had practically ceased to be a serious threat to the Allies since the Battle of Leyte Gulf, appropriately nicknamed the ‘Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’ by the Americans, in late October 1944 when the remaining surface fleet had lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers and most of its experienced naval aviators. It was certainly true that what remained of the once-formidable Imperial fleet was bottled up in harbours from Singapore to Japan. But whether these ships were worth the risk of attacking was another matter entirely. American doctrine during the so-called ‘Island Hopping Campaign’ was to simply bypass pockets of Japanese resistance and allow them to wither on the vine, cut off from relief or resupply. Concomitantly, the surviving Japanese capital ships could be similarly left to wither in port.

But Fell refused to give up. He, Fife, Davies and Shadwell talked for three hours, or rather Fell did most of the talking while Fife listened patiently, smoking and sipping coffee. Fell carefully explained the history and development of the X-craft, how they had been used successfully in Norway against the Tirpitz and the floating dry dock at Bergen. How they had helped to guide in the massive invasion fleet during the Normandy landings, of the competence and training of the crews and of how useful employment should be found for them in the Far East. And of the criminal waste if no jobs were forthcoming. Eventually, the captain fell silent. He had run out of arguments. But he had, through his eloquence and enthusiasm, gained a new friend.

Above his row of medal ribbons James Fife wore a gold badge that depicted a dolphin flanking the bow and conning tower of a submarine. The Admiral was a submariner just like Fell, and before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he had even served three tours in British submarines in 1940–41, seconded from the US Navy. He was an admirer of the famous British fighting spirit and he respected the Royal Navy.²² This may have been in part due to his having been born in Scotland. He had emigrated to the United States with his parents when he was two.²³

In response to Fell’s many arguments, Fife carefully, patiently, and with great diplomacy, explained the strategic situation in the Pacific and why the 14th Submarine Flotilla was just too late. But though Fell still hadn’t secured a mission for his precious XE-men, he recognised in Fife a kindred spirit. That night Fife invited his British guests to dine with him. ‘Our friendship began there,’ Fell later recalled, ‘and the more I saw of this man in the next months strengthened my feelings that I had met the most sincere, the straightest and ablest of men.’²⁴