Enemy Coast Ahead
‘The courage and determination of Lieutenant Fraser are beyond all praise.’
—The London Gazette, 9 November 1945
Tich Fraser sat on the edge of the XE-3’s open main hatch, his legs dangling. A slight red glow came from the special night lights inside the submarine. It was the early morning hours of 31 July 1945. The XE-3 was motoring on the surface while Fraser checked his position. Gentle waves slapped against the submarine’s black pressure hull, a slight bow wave glowing with green phosphorescence. Fraser was looking for a large buoy that was clearly marked on his Admiralty chart. He wanted to reach the anti-submarine boom that protected Singapore’s old British naval base at first light, so there was a sense of urgency in taking a bearing and hurrying on.
Fraser had a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes as he scanned the darkness looking for the outline of the buoy, a tall metal structure with a large light mounted on top. It was supposed to be lit; yet he could see no light. Ever cautious, Fraser ordered a reduction in speed.
Straining his eyes into the darkness, Fraser espied an object in the sea ahead of him. It was where the buoy was supposed to be, but it was unlit. Fraser cursed Lieutenant Potter and his damned ‘intelligence’. Potter had assured him aboard the Bonaventure before he left Brunei Bay that the buoys that marked the eastern approach to the Johor Strait would still be lit. Intelligence was wrong.
The distance between the XE-3 and the object decreased until only 50 yards separated them. Suddenly, the indistinct image that was hidden in darkness and shadow resolved itself without warning into the shape of a boat, its tall mainsail raised. It was a Malay fishing boat. In the stern Fraser could make out two men looking over the side, watching their fishing lines.1
‘God Almighty,’ said Fraser in a loud and strained whisper, ‘hard a’starboard!’
‘Wheel hard a’starboard, sir,’2 came the reassuringly calm voice of ERA Charlie Reed from inside the submarine. The XE-3 swung around until her stern was pointing at the fishing boat, showing as little silhouette as possible, and quietly crept away. Did the fishermen see us? Fraser’s mind screamed. They were close to Singapore now, and blundering into a vessel that could report the encounter to the Japanese might jeopardise the whole mission.
Fraser continued to watch the fishing boat until it was swallowed up by the darkness. The Malays aboard her never moved, just sat like statues watching their fishing lines. Fraser let out a long breath, rubbed his eyes and issued fresh orders to the helm. If they had been anyone other than sleepy native fishermen the XE-3’s stealthy approach to Singapore would have been blown. Fraser lifted his heavy binoculars back to his tired eyes and started scanning the darkness for danger. It was proving to be the longest night of his life.
*
‘We’re sinking!’ shouted Sub-Lieutenant Beadon Dening to Pat Westmacott aboard the XE-5.
‘Depth?’ yelled back Westmacott, who up until that moment had been resting in the control room.
‘Seventy feet, Pat … 75 … 80 feet,’ replied Dening, his eyes fixed to the big round depth gauge. The motion of the submarine had suddenly and dramatically changed. HMS Selene had been towing them towards their target in Hong Kong when the sudden emergency had occurred on 29 July.
‘She’s still falling, Pat,’ said Dening urgently. The submarine was going down by the head. ‘Depth one-five-oh feet,’ said Dening. That was halfway to safe depth.
An XE-craft could safely dive to 300 feet. Occasionally they could reach 400 feet for very short periods, but this was not encouraged. Postwar tests showed that XE-craft imploded between 520 and 540 feet, where the pressure was equivalent to 250 pounds per square inch.3 As the XE-5 began to free-fall down into the dark depths Westmacott knew that in this location the ocean was 1,000 feet deep. If he couldn’t arrest the dive, he and his crew were dead.
‘Shit. The tow must have parted,’ exclaimed Westmacott. ‘Slip the rope!’ Still attached to the submarine’s bow was 350 feet of sodden rope weighing hundreds of pounds and this was dragging the submarine deeper and deeper at an increased velocity.
But Westmacott’s order was easier given than followed. The releasing mechanism was in the XE-5’s bow, a tight squeeze for a crewman sent forward to try to manually release the tow.
‘Depth?’ shouted Westmacott, as ERA Clifford Greenwood struggled with the release mechanism.
‘Two hunded and fifty feet!’ exclaimed Dening, his eyes never leaving the depth gauge.
‘Come on, Greenwood, release the damned thing,’ Westmacott called through the control room door.
‘I’m almost there, skip,’ shouted back Greenwood, his voice strained and muffled.
‘Depth?’ demanded Westmacott.
‘Three-oh-oh feet, skipper,’ replied Dening.
‘Stand by to blow all tanks,’ ordered Westmacott.
The XE-5’s hull began to groan and rumble as the submarine continued its death dive. It was the worst sound in the world for a submariner – it meant that the outside water pressure was building up around the hull like a vice that was being inexorably tightened by a giant unseen hand. As the pressure built, the groaning turned into a long rumbling that was interspersed with weird metallic cracks and thumps as the hull started to contract.
Westmacott instinctively glanced around him, waiting for leaks to spring in the hull, cold jets of water lancing into the crew’s dry inner domain as joints began to separate at their weakest points.
‘Tow line released!’ suddenly yelled Greenwood triumphantly from the bow.
‘Blow all tanks,’ shouted Westmacott. ‘Full speed ahead. Hydroplanes hard to rise.’4
Westmacott intended to drive the XE-5 to the surface as fast as possible. The submarine’s hydroplanes, the fins that steered her through the water, were set at their maximum elevation.
‘Depth?’ yelled Westmacott.
‘Three-five-oh feet, skipper,’ replied Dening instantly.
The crew was thrown back hard as the submarine started to rise, its bow pointing up sharply towards the surface. She was coming up fast, very fast, like a cork.5 The crew grabbed hold of fixtures and pipes to steady themselves as the propeller bit into the water and the depth gauge started running anti-clockwise.
*
Once Westmacott had the main hatch open he clambered out onto the deck. The sea was heavy and running hard, the little submarine rolling erratically in the chop. There was no sign of HMS Selene. This was the last thing he needed. The tow to the slipping position was 560 nautical miles.6 The XE-5 was hundreds of miles from anywhere, a tiny submarine in the midst of a hostile ocean. Westmacott immediately started to scan for the Selene. He knew that her skipper, Lieutenant-Commander Hugo Newton, would realise that the tow line had parted and would retrace his course to try to find them.
Two-and-a-half anxious hours later and HMS Selene reappeared. But the sea state was still rough. Westmacott and Newton decided against reattaching the tow rope. Instead, it was agreed that the XE-5 would continue independently towards her target, with Selene heading for the rendezvous area to wait for her.7 The carefully timed plan was now shot to pieces. A 24-hour postponement was imposed, meaning that the XE-5 would not arrive in the West Lamma Channel until late on 31 July. Westmacott cursed his bad luck and stared fixedly at his charts. He now realised that he would not be in position and ready to begin searching for the cables until the early morning of 1 August 1945.
*
Tich Fraser had smelled Singapore long before he saw it. It was a peculiar aroma that was indicative of the Far East, a mixture of overripe mangoes, spices and oily cooking. Fraser had had the XE-3 trimmed down low in the water and was making about five knots in the darkness. The sea was flat calm, but this had actually caused both Fraser and Lieutenant Smart aboard the XE-1 a few miles away some problems. The movement of the two submarines had stirred up the natural phosphorescence in the water, particularly on the bow and in the wake, leaving them thumping along in their own peculiar halos of colour.8 Fraser in particular had been pushing his XE-craft hard and taking a calculated risk by running at top speed in this manner, but he was determined to arrive at the anti-submarine boom that was strung between Singapore Island and Pulau Ubin Island off the Johor coast no later than 7.00am on 31 July. His eyes and arms ached from constantly scanning the darkness with his binoculars, perched between the periscope standards. Inside the submarine all was silence.
At 1.36am Fraser had fixed his position as three-and-a-half miles southwest of Pualmungi Lighthouse on the southeast corner of Johor. On the XE-3 went, eating up the miles towards the Takao, further and further into Japanese territory.9
Fraser’s mind kept wandering as he perched on the submarine casing staring into the darkness. His mind kept returning to his obsessive fear of falling into Japanese hands. All of the XE-men involved in Operations Struggle, Sabre and Foil were thinking about it. You wouldn’t have been normal if you hadn’t.
As he had continued to scan the darkness with his binoculars – made, according to the manufacturer’s plate, in 1908, twelve years before he was born – Fraser also thought about his wife Melba, who was back in England with their month-old daughter. He had never seen his child, and he wondered morbidly whether he ever would.
Fraser took a deep breath and lowered the binoculars for a second. ‘Brew up?’ he shouted down the induction trunk, and a few minutes later he was nursing a mug of steaming hot tea that tasted a little of engine oil. But it restored his confidence and he resumed his lonely vigil a little more at peace with himself.10
*
Aboard the XE-1, Jack Smart had been having a rough night of it. Like Fraser he had spent virtually every minute on the submarine’s casing since he had slipped the tow from HMS Spark at 11.00pm on 30 July. Like Fraser, his binoculars had hardly left his eyes, as he constantly scanned for trouble or landmarks. Three times he had been forced to take evasive action when unidentified vessels had been encountered. The area was littered with Malay and Chinese fishing boats, and who knew how many Japanese patrol craft. Smart couldn’t risk a single encounter, but the evasive manoeuvres were starting to eat into his carefully timed schedule.11 The XE-1, which had the greater distance to cover to reach the heavy cruiser Myoko, was expected to pass through the anti-submarine boom in advance of Fraser’s XE-3, but in fact Smart’s boat was falling behind, a fact that he was very much aware of.12 He was beginning to develop an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, a knot of anxiety and frustration that he was going to be late for the party.
*
‘Looks like a small armada of junks,’ said Pat Westmacott as he scanned the surface through the XE-5’s raised attack periscope. ‘I’d say at least 20 to 30 of them.’13 Westmacott’s target, the submarine cable linking Hong Kong to Singapore, was located off the west coast of Lamma Island, in West Lamma Channel. The third largest island in the colony, Lamma is a hilly, rocky, jungle-covered island 4.3 miles long lying southwest of Hong Kong Island. The West Lamma Channel, one of the main shipping lanes into Victoria Harbour, passes between the island and the larger Lantau Island to the west.
Apart from the submarine telephone station, the occupying Japanese forces had constructed a series of caves near one of Lamma’s dozen small villages at Sok Kwu Wan. The Imperial Navy was preparing for a final battle with the Allies and had hidden small one-man Shinyo-class suicide attack boats in these caves ready to assault any invasion fleet. Each was armed with 700lbs of high explosives.
As Westmacott’s submarine motored in on the surface towards Hong Kong during the early predawn hours on 31 July he could make out the mountainous backdrop of jungle-covered low peaks and rocky islands. Pinpricks of light were dotted across the darkened land. Already, during his run in, he had had to take evasive action on several occasions when Chinese junks, appeared. Nothing was seen of the Japanese navy, though British Intelligence knew that they had several patrol vessels operational around the islands.
Before leaving the comfort of the Selene, Westmacott and Beadon Dening had carefully gone over the subsidiary operation that they had been ordered to undertake. If they located and cut the cable on time Westmacott and the XE-5 were to proceed into Victoria Harbour and mine as many Japanese ships as they could find before exfiltration and heading for the rendezvous with ‘mother’. But the approaches to Victoria Harbour were well protected. The Japanese had incorporated the original British antisubmarine defences into their own plan.
The British defence boom remained in place blocking Tathong Channel, the main shipping lane into Victoria Harbour from the eastern side of Hong Kong Island. Stretching from Tathong Channel south and then west in a great arc terminating at Lantau Island were eight sets of submarine indicator loops installed by the Royal Navy in the 1930s.14 They were designed to pick up the magnetic signature of a large underwater object passing over them. The British had destroyed some of the control stations before Hong Kong was overrun in December 1941, but the Japanese might have repaired them.
Finally, the old British contact minefields remained in place and had probably been supplemented by the Japanese. The north end of West Lamma Channel was sown with 371 mines, while the narrower East Lamma Channel was blocked with 96.15 Westmacott knew that penetrating the small and well-protected Victoria Harbour without being detected was as difficult a proposition as getting into the Johor Strait and sinking the Takao and Myoko. But Westmacott would try. After all, he had done this kind of thing before when he successfully crept into Bergen Harbour in Norway aboard the X-24 on 15 April 1944 and blew up the Germans’ prized floating dock. Of the four XE-craft skippers attacking the Japanese, the tall New Zealander was the only one to have any experience of harbour penetration.
*
At 2.17am Fraser aboard the XE-3 had ordered a ‘slow down’ in order to pass suspected Japanese listening posts off the southern end of Johor. The diesel engine was stopped and the quieter electric motor switched on for 30 minutes. Naval Intelligence had been unable to verify whether the Japanese had hydrophone stations in operation but it was wiser to err on the side of caution. If the roles had been reversed the British most definitely would have installed this equipment.
After he felt that the danger of sound detection had passed, Fraser had ordered the clutch engaged and the main engine restarted. The XE-3 had suddenly picked up speed, lurching forward in the water, her bow wave growing. Fraser was still relaying his orders by shouting down the raised induction trunk, and he had begun to feel rather foolish. The night was so quiet that he suspected his voice must be carrying for quite some distance. He opened the main hatch and sat with his legs dangling inside. Due to the noise of the machinery Fraser still had to raise his voice to be heard by the crew, but he was no longer bawling at them like a parade-ground sergeant major.
At 3.50am Fraser had sighted the dark outline of an unlit buoy. He immediately asked Charlie Reed for the direction of the submarine’s bow.
‘Two hundred and eighty degrees, sir,’ had come Reed’s reply from below.
‘Steer ten degrees to port two-seven-oh degrees,’ Fraser had ordered.16 He intended to pass close to the buoy to be certain of his position on the chart. It was at this point that the ‘buoy’ had resolved itself into the Malayan fishing boat, necessitating an emergency course change before the two natives who were peering over the stern spotted them.
After steering around the fishing boat the XE-3 continued across uncharted minefields and past listening posts without further incident. Every so often Fraser permitted each member of the crew to put his head out of the open hatch for some fresh air.
*
Max Shean, following his dunking in the sea, managed to establish the XE-4’s position. They were close to the cable and there was plenty of work to do while the darkness held. The XE-4 stopped and Shean ordered a standing charge of the batteries and compressed air used for blowing the buoyancy tanks. Shean went back topside, where small waves continued to wash over the submarine’s deck. He extracted the ‘flatfish’ grapnel from its storage compartment. It was already attached to 20 feet of stout chain and 30 feet of very strong sisal rope. The grapnel’s line was attached to a bridle that went around the XE-4’s hull, designed to make sure that when the submarine began ‘ploughing’ for the cable the grapnel would be pulled from just aft of the propeller, so as not to upset the craft’s delicate trimming.17
The major problem facing Shean was locating the right cables to sever. Several emerged from the shore station, but only two were still in service. The only way to identify the right ones was by very accurate navigation. The XE-4 was in the correct position according to the charts to begin grappling, now Shean had to wait for dawn to break so that his two divers, Ken Briggs and Jock Bergius, could see what they were doing when they swam out of the submarine to start work.
After preparing the grapnel Shean remained on deck, his binoculars clamped to his eyes. The Mekong River delta was a major waterway, with plenty of traffic into and out of the port of Saigon.
‘Prepare to dive,’ shouted Shean down the partially raised induction trunk at 3.30am. Two junks were on a direct course for the XE-4.18 Shean didn’t want to take his submarine out of position and have to waste lots of time navigating back to the correct place so he dived the stationary boat where it was. The XE-4 came to rest on the bottom with a gentle bump.
‘We’ll stay here till oh-six-hundred hours,’ announced Shean to his crew.
‘Righto, skipper,’ said Ben Kelly. ‘Tea break?’
Shean smiled. ‘A brew sounds bloody marvellous, Ben.’
*
By the early hours of 31 July, the XE-3 and XE-1 were creeping along only half a mile to a mile from the southern coast of Johor. When Fraser and Smart trained their binoculars into the gloom they could make out the palm-fringed shoreline on their starboard side. Apart from the hum of the engine and the slapping of water against the bows of the submarines, the only other sound was the occasional shriek or caw of some tropical bird ashore. The land appeared dark and deserted, with no lights visible anywhere. Then the eastern end of Singapore Island began to take shape in the gloom, the reaches of the Johor Channel gradually appearing to starboard.19
Singapore Island is shaped like an elongated diamond, 20 miles from east to west and about ten miles north to south at its widest point in the middle. The main population centre, Singapore City, lies on the south coast around Keppel Harbour. This was where Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Lyon and his Force Z commandos had successfully sunk Japanese merchant ships during Operations Jaywick and Rimau. Tich Fraser and Jack Smart’s targets, the heavy cruisers Takao and Myoko, were in a much less accessible and more easily defended location off the island’s north shore. On this northern side of the island was the old British naval base at Sembawang, a vast collection of dry docks, cranes, and huge workshops, acres of barracks and railways. Shortly before Singapore fell to the Japanese in mid-February 1942, the British had extensively damaged the facilities in a vain effort to deny them to the enemy, but the Japanese had managed to repair them and Seletar had been used as a major fleet base for most of the war. At this point, the Johor Strait is about one mile wide.
Three miles west of the dockyard is the Causeway, a concrete and rubber bridge that carries the only road and railway links to mainland Malaya over the Strait. In 1942, the Royal Engineers had blown a 60ft gap in the Causeway to prevent the Japanese from using it to invade Singapore. The Japanese had instead launched successful amphibious assaults either side of the Causeway and later repaired the structure after the British defeat.
At the eastern end of Singapore Island is Changi. Under the British, Changi Cantonment had been a vast modern barracks complex that housed 10,000 troops and their families. The Japanese had turned it into a huge prisoner-of-war camp, originally accommodating 50,000 British and Australian POWs. But, by the time Fraser and Smart sailed past, the number of POWs was down to less than 20,000 after drafts had been shipped off as slave labourers to complete the Burma–Thailand Railway or sent down the mines in Japan, Formosa and Manchuria.
Adjacent to the Cantonment was Changi Jail, a large, modern prison. It was being used by the Japanese as an internment camp for British and Allied civilian men, women and children. Conditions were dire.
The heavy cruiser Takao was moored slightly east of the dockyard, so Fraser would need to travel eleven miles up the Johor Strait from the old British anti-submarine boom that was located at a point east of Pulau Ubin Island and Singapore Island. Eleven miles through a narrow and shallow channel deep within the Japanese backyard.20 Jack Smart had slightly further to travel as his target, the Myoko, had been moored two miles west of the Takao, and a mile east of the Causeway.
Once inside the Johor Strait, the XE-3 and XE-1 would be like rats trapped in a barrel if they were discovered. The channel was in effect an enormous cul-de-sac. They could not escape west as the Causeway blocked the strait, and returning east would mean getting through the defence boom for a second time.
As far as Fraser was concerned, Smart and the XE-1 should already have passed ahead of his boat. But having encountered more surface vessels than XE-3, Smart was falling further and further behind schedule. The XE-3 had unknowingly taken the lead.
*
Fraser intended to pass through the anti-submarine boom at around 7.00am, when visibility through the attack periscope should be adequate. At 4.13 he obtained a good land fix but he had no confidence that he would be able to find the buoy that was supposed to mark the limits of the Johor Strait – the Japanese had probably removed or sunk it with its flashing red light long before.21 He altered course, steering the XE-3 towards the north, designed to take him past Pengelly, a promontory, on the starboard bow. His speed was four-and-a-half knots. Everything was going as planned.
*
‘Dive, dive, dive!’ yelled Tich Fraser suddenly.
‘All main vents open, “Q” tank flooded, induction shut and lowered,’ said Charlie Reed, spitting out the words like a machine gun.
‘Take her to 40 feet, number one,’ Fraser ordered Kiwi Smith.22
As the XE-3 slid beneath the Johor Strait, Fraser braced himself. A few seconds before, he had been on the submarine’s deck, his eyes fastened on two indistinct shapes coming towards him. He had taken a fix on them, and it was clear that they were closing the distance. Two vessels. Fraser’s eyes strained through his binoculars. The bigger ship looked like some kind of tanker. The smaller must be an escort vessel. An escort meant trouble. It was a Japanese navy motor launch and it would be armed with machine guns and possibly depth charges.23 Fraser didn’t hesitate. He clattered down the ladder and sealed the main hatch, simultaneously giving the order to dive.
‘Thirty feet,’ said Smith, calling out the depth. ‘Blow “Qs”.’
‘“Q” tank blown, sir,’ replied Reed. He had hardly finished speaking when the XE-3 smashed into the bottom of the Strait with an almighty crash, short of the depth Fraser had ordered. The lights flickered as the crew was thrown violently towards the bow.
Fraser instantly demanded a depth reading. ‘Thirty-six feet, sir,’ replied Reed.
The impact had broken the sensitive Chernikeeff Log, vital for navigation; the speed and distance needles on the dials in the control room were no longer giving readings. Fraser swore loudly. They would just have to manage as best they could without it.24
‘Stop the motor,’ said Fraser, and the submarine suddenly went dead quiet. The four men stood or sat virtually motionless for half an hour, their eyes looking upwards as they listened for the sounds of propellers passing overhead. But there was nothing, no sound at all. Fraser decided to surface for a quick look.
Fraser would use the Wet & Dry Compartment for his look-see. It would remain dry. Fraser would wait until the XE-3 had surfaced and then quickly open the compartment’s hatch and stand up. This would mean that his head and shoulders would present a lower profile than if he clambered out onto the submarine’s deck. But the manoeuvre was very risky. The XE-craft were not fitted with hydrophones so Fraser had no way of knowing whether enemy vessels were close. The submarine would head for the surface essentially blind and deaf. Fraser could find himself surfaced in the midst of the Imperial Japanese Navy. But he couldn’t stay submerged – time was of the essence. He had to get the XE-3 running fast on the surface to have any chance of arriving at the defence boom at 7.00am.
Fraser ordered the main ballast tank partially blown, which should ensure that when the XE-3 surfaced, only the top of its deck would broach the water. Fraser tensed, both hands on the W&D hatch release clip. Kiwi Smith started counting off the depth from his post at the hydroplanes.
‘Thirty feet, skipper … twenty feet … ten feet.’ Fraser’s hands tightened on the clip. What if I’ve made a mistake and those vessels are still up there? he thought as he listened to Smith’s countdown. It was a submarine’s moment of greatest vulnerability. Christ, let my luck hold! Fraser thought fiercely.
‘Nine feet, eight, seven, six, five, four, three … surface!’25 yelled Smith, as Fraser flung open the hatch, cold spray smacking him in the face as he scrambled awkwardly to his feet. As soon as he raised his binoculars to his eyes he knew that he had just made a very big mistake.