‘You are all sentenced to death by beheading,’1 stated Colonel Masayoshi Towatari, the president of the court. His face betrayed no emotion, his dark eyes flicking across the faces of the ten ‘defendants’ who stood before him. There was a sharp intake of breath among the British and Australian servicemen, who looked lean and hollow-cheeked from months of brutal imprisonment.
‘But, sir, we are prisoners of war,’ exclaimed Major Reginald Ingleton, the 25-year-old senior surviving officer of Operation Rimau. Ingleton’s face was badly bruised on one side from the beatings that he had suffered, his uniform dirty and torn, but he still had the air of a leader about him and the others looked to him in this, their moment of greatest despair. Ingleton, a Royal Marine, stood ramrod straight, his eyes burning with intense anger and his voice cracking as he spoke. ‘We were captured in British uniform attacking legitimate military targets. We have rights under the Geneva …’ Before Ingleton could finish his sentence a small and wiry Japanese major, his white armband emblazoned with red characters indicating membership of the dreaded Kempeitai military police, jumped up from his chair near the prisoners, the hilt of his sheathed samurai sword banging loudly on the table in front of him. Red faced, he bellowed out a long stream of guttural Japanese at them. Although Ingleton and his men understood little, the tone was unmistakable.
Colonel Towatari muttered something in Japanese to the major, who abruptly stopped shouting, bowed stiffly and then resumed his seat, a malevolent look on his face. Turning to Ingleton, Towatari continued in heavily accented English, ‘The verdict of the court has been reached.’ With that Towatari issued orders to clear the court and the prisoners were unceremoniously bundled out of the room by Kempeitai guards and marched back to their cell. It was 3 July 1945. During the course of their ‘trial’ the defendants had received no legal representation, nor had they been given the opportunity to defend themselves. Their guilt had already been decided long before their appearance before Towatari.2
The crime that Major Ingleton and his nine fellow defendants had committed was to have been part of one of the most daring raids on Singapore yet mounted by the Allied forces. The previous October, Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Lyon and 23 British and Australians, drawn from the top-secret Force Z based in Australia, had infiltrated the seaway around Singapore intending to penetrate the harbour using a group of ingenious one-man submarines called ‘Sleeping Beauties’ and mine as many ships as they could find. Rimau appeared set to emulate the earlier success of Operation Jaywick in September 1943, when 29-year-old Lyon had led thirteen army commandos and sailors in folboats, a kind of collapsible kayak, and blown up seven Japanese merchant ships with limpet mines inside Singapore Harbour for no loss to the raiding party.3
But the Rimau mission had been blown among the jungle-covered islands south of Singapore. Due to bureaucratic fumbling and incompetence, the Royal Navy submarine detailed to pick up Lyon’s men did not arrive, making their escape unlikely. Abandoned to his fate, Lyon had refused to give up and with a small party of men had gone north in black kayaks and, like the Cockleshell Heroes, paddled into Singapore Harbour and managed to mine three ships. He and his men had then fought a terrible running battle through a string of tiny islands as they tried to escape south to Australia. Thirteen had been killed in action, including Lyon, or had committed suicide to avoid capture, while Major Ingleton and nine others were eventually rounded up.
The Japanese had horribly tortured Ingleton and his men. They all knew that only one fate awaited them – death. They were placed on trial for ‘perfidy and espionage’4 but the fact that the Japanese had resorted to a show trial was, in their opinion, just one more indignity at the hands of a dishonourable foe before they finally met their maker.
That day came on Saturday 7 July 1945 on a scrappy piece of waste ground on the Bukit Timah Road in Singapore. Ingleton and his men had been driven to the execution ground in a Japanese army truck; during the journey they had said little to each other. Each man was resigned to his own thoughts. A group of senior Japanese army officers stood off to one side watching the proceedings with grim expressions. The judge Colonel Towatari stood chatting with Major General Otsuka, the local Kempeitai commander as well as the commandant of Outram Road Jail, where Ingleton and his men had been held and abused.5 Kempeitai officer Major Hisada commanded the execution. Ingleton and his men had had their hands tied painfully behind their backs and ragged blindfolds wrapped around their heads. Hisada hissed an order and the first prisoner was dragged forward by a group of five Japanese sergeants who would take it in turn executing the Allied servicemen. Three rough burial pits had been dug, and each man was forced to kneel on the edge of one, his head forced down to expose his grimy neck.6 A Japanese sergeant unsheathed his katana sword, took careful aim and with a cry brought the razor-sharp blade down in a terminal arc. The head fell into the pit while dark arterial blood pumped from the prisoner’s still-quivering corpse. Laughing and clapping, the other Japanese quickly kicked the body into the pit and then snatched up another victim.7 Hardly expert swordsmen, the Japanese soldiers slashed at their victims, often taking two or three strikes to remove the heads.8 Each British or Australian prisoner could only sit in darkness, listening to his comrades being horribly butchered, and wait for his own terrible moment to come. Some prayed aloud, others stoically said their goodbyes to their mates or to their wives, sweethearts or children back home.
Such was the price for failing on a mission against the Japanese.
*
Unbeknown to Ingleton and his doomed men, a thousand miles away in Australia a new plan was taking shape to attack Singapore. A band of highly experienced submariners, among them some of the men who had audaciously crippled the giant German battleship Tirpitz in Norway in 1943, were preparing to mount the most audacious raid yet against Japan’s most important Asian conquest. The men involved knew that the stakes were very high. If they succeeded, the way would be open for a British liberation of Singapore. If they failed they could expect to join the Rimau commandos in ragged graves in the colony’s lush tropical soil. Eighteen men, all under 30 years old, prepared for missions aboard vessels that the Americans had derisively christened ‘suicide craft’. If the Japanese thought that by murdering Ingleton and his men they would frighten the British off from mounting any further raids on Singapore they were sorely mistaken. The Japanese were about to come face-to-face with some of the bravest and most determined special operations personnel the British possessed, men for whom the word ‘danger’ was a matter of mundane routine.
The Japanese were about to face the ‘Sea Devils’.