The Sea Devils

Dire Straits

‘I always considered our operations were those of a humane killer.’

The minutes dragged agonisingly by. The slight vibration of the hull as the electric motor powered the little XE-3 forward at barely two-and-a-half knots was the only indication to the crew that they were moving – that, and the occasional sudden change in depth when the submarine passed through another patch of fresh water. Mick Magennis sat bolt upright, the stopwatch clasped in one hand, its rhythmical ticking almost hypnotic. Kiwi Smith sat at the hydroplanes, keeping the submarine level 15 feet below the surface of the clear greenish waters of the Johor Strait. Charlie Reed ran an oily rag over his sweaty face at the steering controls. Tich Fraser knelt in the periscope well, waiting, his khaki shirt stained with sweat and grease.

No one talked; they just waited for the eight minutes to run. With nothing to do but wait, thoughts inevitably turned to home, to wives and loved ones, and to the awful prospect that these few minutes might be their last. If the Japanese had mounted hydrophones on the boom defence tender they would probably be detected. What then? Turn and run for the open sea? Surrender? Fraser’s face remained a mask of confident concentration in front of his crew, but inside he was thinking again about his wife and baby and of the chances of imminent detection.

‘Eight minutes, sir,’ piped up Magennis suddenly, his voice jolting everyone out of their private reveries.

‘Right,’ sighed Fraser, glad again to be doing something. ‘Up periscope.’

Fraser conducted a quick scan of the surface. An expression of relief crossed his face.

‘Down periscope.’ He turned from the instrument and let out a long breath. ‘Gentlemen, we’ve made it, we’re through.’²

The relief inside the submarine was almost palpable. But there was no time to celebrate. They had just entered the lair of the beast. So far, so good, thought Fraser shakily.

For the next few minutes Fraser monitored the XE-3’s progress up the gently curving strait, popping the periscope up and down to take quick navigational fixes. He couldn’t leave the instrument up because the water was so flat calm that someone was bound to notice the slight wake the small periscope head made as it cut the surface.

Fraser noticed that there was plenty of activity in the strait – small craft of different sizes and types were buzzing around on the surface, some Japanese Navy and some Malay. That could be a problem.

‘Down periscope!’ said Fraser urgently after another quick peek. ‘There’s a launch coming up on our stern.’ He had noticed the grey-painted Japanese motor patrol boat immediately, bulling its way through the water towards the British submarine’s position at high speed, a red and white Rising Sun Imperial battle ensign fluttering from its tall mast. The crew of the XE-3 tensed and listened intently. Had the Japanese seen something?

A few seconds later came the unmistakable throb of propellers passing overhead before they faded away ahead into the distance. The XE-3 continued on her way unmolested.

‘Magennis,’ said Fraser, turning from the periscope well, ‘you’d better get dressed.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Magennis, moving further back into the engine compartment where the diving equipment was stored. The XE-3 had just passed the western tip of Pulau Ubin Island. The island blocked off any view of mainland Malaya until it was passed, when the banks of southern Johor came back into focus.³ The XE-3 had already been submerged for seven hours and the atmosphere inside the submarine was hot and stuffy and getting worse by the minute. Neither Smith nor Reed had moved from their posts for almost the whole time. Fraser glanced at the periscope tower thermometer. It read an uncomfortable 85 degrees Fahrenheit.⁴ He knew that it would get a lot worse before it got better.

Max Shean started his third run over the Saigon to Singapore cable just after 10.00am. His first two attempts had resulted in failure. But, once his initial frustration and panic had subsided, Shean had settled down – he would keep ploughing with the grapnel until he found it, no matter how long it took.

The depth was now over 40 feet. The danger for the divers increased considerably every foot of depth that was added.

With a sudden lurch the XE-4 came to a halt. Shean glanced at the marine chronometer. 10.27. He ordered Ben Kelly to increase revolutions. When the motor was up to full power the XE-4 suddenly started to move again. Shean ordered the submarine about and went back over the same position. The same thing happened – the XE-4 was brought to a sudden, jarring halt. Had they snagged the cable?

But something was wrong. During the training exercises in Australia when the flat fish grapnel had caught the cable it had not let it go. Nonetheless, Shean had to be sure.

‘Stop the motor,’ ordered Shean. The XE-4 was settled onto the seabed.

‘Ken,’ said Shean, turning to Sub-Lieutenant Briggs, his fellow countryman. ‘Time to suit up, I think.’

‘Okay, Max,’ replied Briggs. The other diver, Jock Bergius, helped Briggs put on the diving suit. It was hard work in the cramped interior of the submarine. Briggs pulled on the suit’s hood and Bergius helped him strap into the DSEA diving lung.

‘Good luck,’ said Shean, shaking Briggs’ hand.

‘No worries, skipper,’ replied Briggs, grinning.

Then Briggs crawled into the Wet and Dry Compartment. Shean glanced at the depth gauge. It showed 40 feet, which meant a bottom depth of 50.⁵

‘Ken, you mustn’t stay out for more than fifteen minutes,’ said Shean through the W&D’s open door. ‘Attach yourself to the cutter hose.’

‘Will do, boss,’ replied Briggs. The door to the compartment was closed and the process of flooding the W&D begun.

For safety, Shean wanted the divers to tie themselves to the hydraulic cutter hose so that if they passed out from oxygen narcosis he could probably save them by surfacing the boat and dragging them inside. The diver could then be revived while the submarine dived away and awaited the reaction of the Japanese. It wasn’t the best plan in the midst of enemy territory, but it was the only practical way of saving a diver under the circumstances.

Shean positioned himself at the night periscope, the shorter instrument used for seeing underwater, and watched as the W&D hatch came open. Briggs gingerly clambered out into the half-a-knot current and gave Shean a confident thumbs-up signal. ‘Diver out,’ announced Shean to the crew. Briggs began to pull himself hand over hand down the grapnel line towards the seabed, disappearing from sight in the gloom. Shean remained at the periscope, his eyes pressed to the viewfinder, waiting. No one spoke. Shean glanced several times at his wristwatch or the chronometer, acutely conscious of the diver’s 15-minute limit.

Ken Briggs suddenly reappeared five minutes after leaving the XE-4. He pulled himself back onto the submarine’s deck and gave Shean another ‘thumbs-up’ signal indicating that he was fine. But something must be wrong. Shean hadn’t seen him remove the cutters from their storage closet on deck.

‘Diver in,’ said Shean, as Briggs closed the W&D compartment hatch and flooded down. A few moments later Shean had the internal door to the W&D open. Briggs, soaked and panting for breath, crawled back through.

‘Nothing there, Max,’ he said. ‘It’s a dirty great boulder.’

‘A boulder?’ exclaimed Shean.

‘Yeah. A big bugger,’ panted Briggs.⁶

Shean was disappointed, but it explained why the grapnel had come away from the obstruction twice. It was back to square one.

While Shean’s XE-4 had begun dragging her grapnel across the seabed south of Saigon, and the XE-3 had penetrated the Johor Channel off Singapore and Jack Smart’s XE-1 was about to, Pat Westmacott and the crew of the XE-5 were still crawling their way towards Hong Kong. Operation Foil was now 24 hours behind schedule, meaning that not only would the operation to cut the telephone cable in Hong Kong’s West Lamma Channel take far longer than planned, the crew would have to spend an additional exhausting day at the very least inside the submarine. 31 July passed slowly for Westmacott and his crew as they silently motored through the sea towards Hong Kong. There was nothing for it but to wait and for Westmacott and his first lieutenant, Beadon Dening, to go over their charts and timings yet again.⁷

‘Stop the motor,’ yelled Max Shean as the XE-4 swayed violently on the grapnel cable. She had snagged something at 12.05pm. Shean had ordered her full ahead group up, but she hadn’t budged like before, and instead she had swung to port. Shean had Kelly take her down to the bottom. The depth beneath the keel was 54 feet, well beyond safety limits for the divers.

Ken Briggs prepared for his second dive of the day. Once more he went through the W&D and Shean watched as he exited the submarine and swam aft at 12.29. A wave of elation swept through Shean when onboard gauges indicated that Briggs was powering up the hydraulic cutters. He must have found something worth investigating.⁸

The wait inside the XE-4 seemed interminable, but in reality it was only a matter of a few minutes.

‘He’s back,’ exclaimed Shean, as the murky outline of Briggs clambering along the deck came into view in the night periscope. Briggs was carrying something in one hand and breathing hard into his DSEA.

When Shean got the W&D Compartment door open at 12.42, Briggs immediately thrust something heavy, metallic and about a foot long into his hands.⁹ It was a length of thick armoured telephone cable, with insulated copper wires in the centre. At either end were colourful ribbons, placed there by the diver before cutting to guide him. They had their evidence.

‘There’s my paperweight,’¹⁰ panted Briggs, grinning.

‘Bloody well done,’ said Shean, shaking his hand vigorously. They’d done it. The first cable, Saigon to Singapore, was cut. Now all they needed to find was the northbound cable that ran from Saigon to Hong Kong and the primary mission would be complete.

‘Steer oh-seven-five degrees,’ ordered Shean, ‘half ahead group down.’ The XE-4 turned and began her fourth run of the day. Morale was good, and Jock Bergius, the second diver, waited for his turn.

Jack Smart and the XE-1 were playing catch-up. When the XE-3 passed the defence boom at 10.30am, XE-1 was supposed to have already passed through 90 minutes before and be well on her way towards the Myoko, moored close to the Singapore–Johor Causeway. Instead, Smart was several miles behind.

He first caught sight of the anti-submarine boom slightly before 12.00. Following the same penetration method as Tich Fraser, he took several quick periscope bearings before passing through the still-open boom gate just after noon without incident. Leaving the gate wide open was a major security breach on the part of the Japanese, but Smart described the gate as a ‘ramshackle affair.’¹¹ Clearly, the Japanese were not maintaining the high standards of the boom’s previous owners, or they were arrogant enough to think that the Allies would not attack the naval base. It was even more surprising because the Imperial Japanese Navy had been a pioneer of small attack craft, and had used midget submarines to penetrate Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Sydney Harbour in 1942.

Singapore Naval Base was one of the best facilities in the Japanese Empire. The Japanese had repaired most of the damage inflicted by the British during their ignominious retreat in early 1942. The centrepiece was the King George VI Graving Dock, at 1,000 feet long the largest dry dock in the world. Renamed No. 1 Dry Dock by the Japanese, it had seen extensive use repairing their battleships. There was also the 50,000-ton Admiralty IX Floating Dry Dock, the third-largest in the world. The Royal Navy had attempted to deny this marvel of engineering to the Japanese by scuttling it, but Japanese engineers had managed to return it to service. The British had also blown the gates off the King George VI Dock and wrecked the machinery, but this too was repaired. Complementing these facilities was a huge floating crane and a 5,000-ton floating dry dock from the Netherlands.

The United States Army Air Force had had some success against these targets, flying B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers to the extreme of their range from a base in India. On 5 November 1944, B-29s had managed to put the King George VI Dock out of action for three months. The Admiralty IX Floating Dock had been sunk on 1 February 1945.

The lax Japanese attitude to security at Sembawang saved Jack Smart a lot of time, and motoring just below the surface at fifteen feet he pushed on down the channel between Singapore Island and Pulau Ubin Island as fast as he dared.¹² But his eyes were constantly drawn to the deck head chronometer or to his wristwatch. It felt like time was running through his fingers and he was powerless to slow it down.

Mick Magennis struggled to pull on the heavy rubber diving suit inside the cramped confines of the XE-3. Sweat poured from his naked upper torso and his face turned red from the effort. His black hair fell in his eyes as he struggled and cursed. Just getting dressed was enough to completely exhaust a man inside the tiny overheated submarine. Unlike in the cable-cutting XE-4 and XE-5 there was only one diver instead of two, so there were no free hands to help Magennis dress. Charlie Reed leaned over to try to help him, but in doing so knocked the steering slightly off course, earning a sharp rebuke from Fraser.

‘All right, Reed,’ snapped the skipper in an irritable voice, ‘leave him alone and watch your course.’¹³ Fraser was under a lot of pressure, which, combined with the challenging conditions inside the XE-3, would have tested anyone’s good humour. But Magennis couldn’t manage to get dressed alone. He needed help.

‘Make your depth 40 feet,’ said Fraser.

‘Aye aye, skipper, 40 feet,’ repeated Smith. Fraser stood away from the periscope and went to help Magennis. After a few more minutes of struggling and sweating, Magennis was finally dressed. All he needed to put on now was his rubberised hood and the DSEA oxygen rebreather. He could manage those by himself when the time came.¹⁴ Fraser returned to the control room and ordered Smith to take the XE-3 back up to periscope depth. Magennis stood by to control the periscope motor. It would be a much more uncomfortable journey for Magennis now that he was dressed in the thick diving suit – everyone else was already suffering from the heat even in thin khaki shirts and shorts.

‘Ten feet,’ called out Smith.

‘Up periscope,’ said Fraser, pulling down the handles as the eyepiece came level with his face. ‘Down periscope,’ he ordered a few seconds later after completing a sweep. The XE-3 was on course and all was well.

Fraser repeated the process over and over again. He would raise the periscope, have a brief look around, and then order it lowered.

When the clock read 12.50pm Fraser felt excitement pulse through his chest. By his calculations the submarine should be close to the last reported position of the Takao. The heavy cruiser should soon be visible.

‘Up periscope,’ he ordered, kneeling in the well and pressing his eyes to the viewfinder. He watched as green bubbles and foam once more resolved into land and clear sky. He began his sweep. The mangrove swamps that marked Singapore Island’s northern shore were on his left. He made a mental note – they might prove to be useful hiding places later tonight if the XE-3’s batteries were empty. He might lie up in a tidal creek and make a standing charge. It was a last resort but he might not have any choice. He continued his scan, looking back briefly at the way he had come, the wide expanse of the Johor Strait framed on both sides by low-lying green scrub, swamp and jungle, flocks of tropical birds wheeling about above the treetops.

Fraser swung the periscope back to face the ship’s head and gasped. The XE-3 had just negotiated a slight bend in the Strait, her way ahead partly obscured by mangrove swamp. But suddenly a great dark mass of green and grey angular shadows filled the little periscope’s lenses, jutting out into the Strait like a huge finger. Fraser could scarcely believe what he was seeing.

‘There she is!’ cried Fraser, unable to contain his excitement. His three companions all gasped. ‘There she bloody well is!’ repeated Fraser, grinning wildly. There, as plain as day, dominating the Strait, sat the heavy cruiser Takao, looking as massive and as solid as a battleship. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ repeated Fraser several times in a low voice, his eyes still pressed firmly against the periscope.

Fraser’s eyes busily ran over the Takao, taking in as much detail as he could in the short time that was available. Visibility was excellent, the sun high in the sky, and the water clear. The barrack blocks and dockyard cranes were visible behind the Takao’s great bulk marking the old British naval base. There were several Japanese vessels moored midstream and as Fraser watched he could make out numerous small craft making their way back and forth between them and both sides of the Strait. A smaller warship that Fraser judged to be a destroyer escort was tied up between large floating buoys mid-channel. This was the 1,720-ton destroyer Kamikaze, built in 1922, and one of the last Japanese escort vessels still afloat in southeast Asia. The Kamikaze was armed with three 4.7in guns as well as ten 25mm anti-aircraft guns, torpedo tubes and mines. Fraser made a mental note of the destroyer’s position – she might be worth attacking, if time permitted, on the way back. Now that would be a record, a heavy cruiser and a destroyer bagged on the same mission.

But Fraser’s eyes were soon drawn back to the Takao.¹⁵ She had been painted in a green and brown disruptive pattern camouflage scheme that allowed her to blend in well with the shoreline. Her three forward 8in gun turrets were arranged like ‘Olympic winners on a rostrum, the centre one above the other two, and all three close together’.¹⁶ The guns of the third turret, ‘C’ Turret, pointed backwards, something only seen on Japanese warships. Her bridgework was massive, rising up like a giant pagoda, with a thick black-topped funnel raking astern of it. There was a second, smaller smokestack, stuck between the two tripod-like masts. Two more 8in gun turrets were located aft. Secondary armament consisted of eight 5in guns and an astounding 66 25mm autocannon primarily for use against aircraft.

Fraser saw that the Takao was still moored in the position last photographed by RAF air reconnaissance, with her bow sticking out into the Johor Strait. From her curved bow two thick anchor cables plunged into the water. On her starboard side was a gangway for crew to access her from cutters. The ship appeared to be quiet. Fraser couldn’t see anyone on deck, though there was plenty of activity all around her, with tiny boats puttering to and fro close by.

‘Down periscope,’ ordered Fraser. He had seen enough for the time being. They would continue their current course towards the target. Fraser felt wired up, his senses heightened, and the knot of anxiety that had been plaguing him on and off since starting the mission had suddenly evaporated. He was all business. He turned briefly to his crew, his eyes suddenly flinty and hard. When he spoke his voice was low and confident.

‘Stand by to commence attack.’¹⁷

The XE-3 continued motoring towards the Takao. Fraser had the periscope raised again.

‘Time?’ asked Fraser, not moving his eyes from the viewfinder.

‘Fourteen-oh-two hours, Tich,’ replied Kiwi Smith, glancing at the chronometer.

‘Our range is two thousand yards,’ said Fraser. Just one more mile to go. The Takao was moored 30 degrees on the starboard bow.

‘Down periscope. Four hundred and fifty revolutions, steer two-one-eight degrees, stand by to start the attack,’ said Fraser, his voice quick and firm.

‘Course two-one-eight degrees. All ready to start the attack, skipper,’ said Smith.

‘Start the attack,’ ordered Fraser in a flat voice. Magennis immediately started his stopwatch with a solid click.

‘Up periscope,’ Fraser ordered once more. ‘Bearing right ahead, range two degrees on her funnel … down periscope.’¹⁸

Magennis worked fast, calculating the range by turning the degrees into yards on his slide rule.

‘Length 1,600 yards, sir,’¹⁹ said Magennis.

The training had now taken over completely. They were all utterly focused on the job at hand. The heat, the stuffy atmosphere, the danger, were forgotten. The men were focused only on completing their sections of the attack run efficiently, just as they had done on countless occasions during the intensive training in Scotland, Trinidad and Australia.

For the next few minutes the XE-3 kept coming up from her depth of 40 feet to periscope depth so that Fraser could check his position and scan for danger.

‘Length 400 yards,’ announced Magennis.

‘Up periscope, stand by for a last look round,’ said Fraser. Grasping the periscope’s rubber-covered brass handles he slowly scanned the instrument to port. The Takao danced back into focus, huge at this range, completely filling the viewfinder. Fraser could now see figures walking on her superstructure and decks, Japanese sailors in khaki shirts and peaked caps. ‘Range eight degrees,’ said Fraser, who then swung the periscope to check the starboard quarter.

‘Jesus!’ Fraser suddenly screamed, ‘Flood “Q”! Down periscope! Thirty feet!’²⁰ Smiling and laughing Japanese faces had suddenly filled Fraser’s periscope viewfinder. Less than 40 feet away on the submarine’s starboard side was a cutter crammed with Japanese sailors going ashore on leave. It was on a direct collision course with Fraser’s periscope. There were only seconds to spare.²¹ The dozen Japanese sailors surely couldn’t miss the periscope in the crystal clear water or the dark shadow of the British submarine just ten feet below them. The last thing Fraser saw before he jumped back from the periscope was a Japanese sailor’s hand trailing in the water.²² The cutter’s bows were on a collision path with the periscope. Fraser winced and looked at the deck head. It was all over – it had to be.