Tony Miers, the former skipper of HMS Torbay whose exploits won him a Victoria Cross, arrived at Fremantle as British liaison officer in November 1943. He had sailed from Pearl Harbor on the USS Cabrilla, spending two months at sea with the American crew. In a letter to Admiral Claud Barrington Barry, Miers boasted, “I was easily the most aggressive officer on board (although the oldest).”1 Perhaps in part because he was miffed at being forced to share a miniscule cabin with three junior officers, he gave a less than flattering report on the Cabrilla’s commander, Douglas Thompson Hammond, describing him as “utterly lacking in aggressive spirit and imbued with the idea of ‘safety first.’”2 The crux of his criticism was Hammond’s refusal to mount a gun attack on two 200-ton trawlers spotted carrying cargo in San Bernadino Strait (between the Philippine islands of Luzon and Samar). The thirty-four-year-old Hammond did not wish to betray his position for such small vessels, whereas Miers believed coastal traffic could be attacked with relatively little risk.
Miers made the same point even more forcefully in a report sent directly to Hammond. Given that small vessels were known to be important providers of enemy supply, Miers wrote, “I think these craft should be sunk by gunfire even if it does give away the position. The bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”3 Indeed, Miers seems to have reflected a philosophy shared more broadly by British submarine commanders. While the Americans dominated the submarine war in the Pacific, in terms of surface gun attacks the British surpassed the Americans by a considerable margin at one stage. During 1944, thirty-one British submarines carried out a total of 293 gun attacks (see the appendix). Most of these actions took place in the waters between Sumatra and western Malaya known as the Straits of Malacca, a vital corridor of supply that remains one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
The Straits of Malacca
Initially, with the outbreak of war in Europe, all British submarines were withdrawn from the Far East. In 1940 ten submarines were transferred from the Pacific and Indian oceans to Alexandria. The Trusty and Truant briefly returned to Singapore, and even before the island fell in February 1942, the HMS Trusty sank a range of small craft with its deck gun.4 By early March 1942 the remnants of British naval forces, including four Dutch submarines under British command, were based at Colombo on Ceylon.
When the Japanese first attacked Malaya in December 1941, the Dutch fleet included fifteen submarines based at Surabaya. As a minor naval power, submarines played a key role in the Royal Netherlands Navy strategy in the Far East. The Dutch submarines made a strong showing in the early days of the Pacific war, operating in three-boat wolf packs; as well as sinking a number of merchant ships, they claimed the first Japanese warship sunk by a torpedo. Indeed, between the surrender of the Philippines and the evacuation of Surabaya, the Dutch managed to sink more ships than U.S. submarines, claiming six to the Americans’ three.5 By Christmas 1941, though, the Dutch had lost four of their boats—three to the Japanese and one wrecked by a battery explosion. More submarines were lost in Japanese air raids on Surabaya, either bombed or scuttled before evacuation of the base in March 1942. The remaining seven Dutch submarines were dispatched to the bases at Ceylon and Fremantle.6
In Australia the Dutch sailors were generally perceived as good fellows, noted for their informal approach and prodigious drinking.7 The Dutch submarines, however, were fraught with mechanical problems and mainly employed on “special missions”—landing and retrieving secret operatives on occupied islands. In September 1944 two additional Dutch submarines, the O-19 and Zwaardvisch, arrived at Fremantle with the British Eighth Flotilla. These two boats were sent on conventional operations, as were another two Dutch boats that arrived with the British Fourth Flotilla in April 1945. In the meantime, the larger Dutch boats O-21, O-23, and O-24 continued conducting numerous special missions from Ceylon under British command.8
Given their small numbers and the nature of their patrols, the Dutch boats made few gun attacks: one in 1942, one in 1943, fourteen in 1944, and ten the following year. Their victims included junks, coasters, and oilers, as well as seven prau (Malay sailing boats) (see the appendix). The O-21, under Lieutenant F. J. Kroesen, carried out the last Dutch submarine patrol of the war in July–August 1945. On patrol off Java, the submarine made only one attack, on 29 July, when it used its guns to engage two coasters. The action quickly ended After the submarine’s gun jammed and the coasters headed for shallow water.9
Meanwhile, the commitment of British submarines in the Pacific theater only gradually escalated. Initially expecting a Japanese attack at Colombo, the Trusty and Truant were posted to guard the Straits of Malacca but were then recalled to England for refit, leaving only the Dutch submarines to patrol. In early 1943 only four submarines remained under British operational control, and three of these were Dutch. In March 1943 the sole British submarine in the region, HMS Trusty, carried out a patrol off Indochina, but mechanical problems resulted in it sailing back to the United Kingdom for refit on 5 April.10
After the capture of Sicily, the British presence in the Mediterranean as the main theater of submarine operations became less pressing, and in July 1943 eight submarines were detached for the Far East: Tally Ho, Templar, Tactician, Trespasser, Taurus, Severn, Surf, and Trident. With the arrival of reinforcements and the modern depot ship Adamant, the British subsequently stepped up operations in the Malacca Straits. By late 1943 the Adamant and submarines of the Fourth Flotilla had moved with the Eastern Fleet from Colombo to Trincomalee, an expansive harbor ringed by jungle. After an armistice with Italy in September 1943, more submarines from the Mediterranean found their way to the Indian Ocean. A second depot ship, the Maidstone, arrived at Trincomalee from Alexandria in March 1944, and the submarine force consequently split into two flotilla.11
A third depot ship, the HMS Wolfe, arrived at Trincomalee in August 1944. With twenty-six submarines based at Trincomalee, more than needed to patrol the Straits of Malacca, the Maidstone sailed to Fremantle, arriving on 4 September 1944. The Eighth Submarine Flotilla, consisting of nine British and four Dutch submarines, arrived a short time later After completing patrols in the Straits of Malacca. The Eighth Flotilla thus became the first unit of the Royal Navy to operate out of Western Australia, brought under American operational control and Admiral Ralph Christie. In the meantime, the Fourth Flotilla remained based at Trincomalee with the depot ship HMS Adamant until April 1945, when it too moved to Fremantle, leaving only the Wolfe and its flotilla in Ceylon. At the same time the Eighth Flotilla advanced from Fremantle to Subic Bay in the Philippines.12
In Western Australia proximity to the Americans inevitably led to invidious comparisons between the British boats and the U.S. fleet submarines. Having inspected the HMS Clyde After it arrived at Fremantle in August 1944, Ralph Christie professed he had never seen a filthier ship.13 Edward Young, commander of the HMS Storm, arrived at Fremantle the following month, and After being guided through a U.S. fleet boat confessed, “I felt downright ashamed of the conditions [in] which my own able seamen and stokers had to live at sea.”14 Similarly, Tony Miers, although less than impressed with the Americans’ offensive spirit, had no doubts about the superiority of their submarines for all forms of patrol except in very shallow water. In fact, Miers’s suggestion that the British immediately adopt a similar design got him into some hot water; not only was this impractical, it implied that the British boats were hopelessly outmoded just when they were concentrating their efforts in the Pacific.15
In the Mediterranean, with the distance between Gibraltar and Alexandria only a couple of thousand miles, fuel had not been a problem for the British submarines. In the vast expanses of the Pacific, on the other hand, the British boats had a limited range. Production of the Swordfish or S-type boats, intended for operations in confined waters, began in the early 1930s. They had a cruising range of 3,800 miles doing nine knots on the surface. From Fremantle the S-boats could patrol only as far as the Makassar Strait or the Java Sea.
The Triton or T-class submarines, dating from 1937, had been designed with the possibility of war with Japan in mind, anticipating operation from bases in Singapore and Hong Kong. From Western Australia they could make it to Singapore or the north coast of Borneo.16 T-class submarines carried just over fifty officers and crew members. The average duration of a T-class submarine patrol was twenty-five days, compared to twenty days for the S-class boats.17
The American boats were not only bigger, they were better equipped, with amenities including air-conditioning. Although some British boats had dehumidifiers, these were so noisy and used so much electricity that they proved more or less useless.18 As described by the British submariner Ian Nethercott, on patrol “you were just one mass of prickly heat and sweat rash. Between your legs and under your arms it was just great running sores of blood and sweat.”19 The HMS Surf had to return to base After only eighteen days at sea because of five cases of heat stroke.20 Eventually these problems were somewhat rectified; new-construction submarines sent to the Far East were fitted with air-conditioning and ballast tanks converted for carrying fuel to give them greater range.21
The one advantage of the smaller British submarines was an ability to operate in shallower and more confined waters, making them better suited to attacking the small coastal craft that increasingly supplied Japanese troops. This was especially so in the treacherous Straits of Malacca, where abundant sandbanks, unpredictable currents, and low-lying coasts offered innumerable hazards for a submarine. On tropical nights spice-scented breezes reached those on patrol, but the proximity of land also meant that enemy airfields and naval bases were close at hand.22
Like their Dutch counterparts, British submarines were often deployed on clandestine “special” operations behind enemy lines. In May 1943 a submarine landed the first agents of Force 136 on the island of Pangkor, destined to serve as a base of operations in Malaya.23 However effective such operations, British submariners inevitably bridled against what they saw as distractions from their proper role—sinking enemy shipping. From Ceylon, the commander of the Fourth Submarine Flotilla, Captain H. M. C. Ionides, confided to Ralph Christie, “We envy you your freedom from having to use your submarines for these side-shows.”24
Once turned loose on Japanese shipping, though, the British found only limited success. By late 1943 the British had nineteen submarines operating in the Straits of Malacca, mainly attempting to cut off supplies to the Japanese in Burma. They managed to sink only one ship and one submarine before the end of the year. During the first six months of 1944 the British sank only eight merchant ships, totaling some 16,000 tons.25
In the absence of larger prey, the British increasingly focused their attention on smaller craft. Lurking like crocodiles, the submarines were often stationed near headlands and channels waiting for unwary coastal traffic. The HMS Storm, under Edward Young, encountered its first victim in the Straits of Malacca in March 1944, a 500-ton coaster on course for the port city of Belawan on the northeast coast of Sumatra. The Storm sank it with gunfire. As with the Americans, such actions served partly as morale-raising exercises. Young, the first Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) officer to command a submarine, noted that although the victim was small, sinking it “acted as a tonic to our spirits, and all was cheerful in the messes as we sat down to our evening meal.”26
By May 1944 the British Admiralty gave submariners permission to attack junks as well as other coastal craft believed to be carrying supplies from Malaya to Burma, and they began taking a heavy toll on local shipping.27 During the first three weeks of June, the HMS Stoic claimed the destruction of a coaster, two junks, and a landing barge; the Sirdar, Truculent, Sea Rover, Sturdy, and Spiteful reported between them the sinking or damage of another ten junks and eight other assorted vessels. In October 1944 the HMS Tantivy rampaged through Makassar Strait, sinking eighteen vessels with gunfire in four days. By the end of October British submarines had sunk nearly 100 small craft.28
With most attacks being made with the deck guns, additional ammunition was carried in spaces previously used for torpedoes. On patrol off the Malaya coast in April 1945, the HMS Statesman sank 10 landing craft, a schooner, and 8 junks without firing a torpedo. It did, though, fire nearly 500 rounds of three-inch ammunition, along with innumerable rounds from its Oerlikon gun and Vickers machine guns.29 Commander F. W. Lipscomb notes, “[M]atters got to such a pitch that submarines sailed with gun ammunition stowed in every possible place, including under the wardroom table!”30 Most of the vessels attacked in submarine gun actions were described as junks, totaling 121 in 1944, followed by 75 coasters and 32 schooners (see the appendix).
Chinese junks usually had at least three masts and were distinguished by their high sterns and batten-stiffened sails. Even before America went to war, the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, predicted that the only neutral shipping in the Pacific was likely to be conducted by Chinese junks.31 The status of neutral, however, proved ephemeral. Prisoners captured from junks confirmed that the Japanese were using them to ship rubber, timber, tin, rice, and tea.32
When crewmen from the HMS Tantivy boarded a junk they found a cargo of tin ore; thereafter British submarines were given permission to sink junks of twenty tons or more.33 Partly because junks were constructed with watertight compartments, they often proved difficult to sink. Indeed, even fifteenth-century junks were designed to stay afloat with flooded compartments, and were sometimes deliberately flooded for transporting trained sea otters. On one occasion the HMS Statesman required nearly fifty rounds of threeinch ammunition to destroy a single junk.34 When the U.S. Navy called for ideas on how to sink junks, Lew Parks from the Pompano suggested using phosphorous shells to facilitate burning them.35
From early 1943 the Japanese had begun employing junks from the Yangtze River capable of hauling up to 800 tons of cargo for military service in the south.36 With the increasing naval supremacy of the Allies, junks crewed by “drafted” Chinese and Koreans, as well as Japanese, regularly carried supplies.37 In the Straits of Malacca the Japanese depended on junks to transport rice from Siam to Singapore, and Alistair Mars, skipper of the HMS Thule, believed that junks moved thousands of tons of rice south every day.38
It was apparently a similar story off the east coast of Malaya, where junks transported huge amounts of food. Although the food was mainly for local consumption, it was claimed that 10 percent of everything went to the Japanese. Most of the junks were owned by Chinese and operated by mixed crews of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. According to some reports, such crews were often fairly cavalier about having their cargoes destroyed, and it was even rumored that the Chinese sometimes gambled on how many rounds would be needed to sink their craft.39 At least some junks, though, were run by Japanese firms and under direct orders to carry supplies to the military.40
Edward Young speculated that junks carried more than cargo, believing that they might be equipped with radio transmitters or even with torpedo tubes.41 At least some submarine commanders, though, considered the task of destroying junks disagreeable. Alistair Mars thought most of the junks were manned by Chinese crews from Malaya, impressed into service by Japanese threats against their families. Certainly the Chinese in Malaya and Singapore, having once sided with the British, were a special target of Japanese abuse, and an estimated 50,000 were murdered.42
Mars nevertheless carried out attacks on junks, believing that duty required it. Within the calculations of Mars’s moral economy, a 100-ton junk might carry enough rice to feed 2,000 Japanese soldiers for three months. When the Thule sank nine junks on a single day, Mars claimed that the actions had destroyed enough rice to feed 5,000 Japanese troops for months.43
Affectionately nicknamed “Mars Bars” and “Marvelous” by his crew, Mars made special efforts to pick up survivors when possible.44 Even so, witnessing the Aftermath of a close-range gun attack could be a life-scarring experience. When the Thule attacked a junk on 19 December 1944, most of the junk’s crew members jumped overboard. The submarine continued firing until the vessel sank, and then moved in to collect survivors. They found one of the Chinese badly wounded: “a sack of blood drenched crumpled limbs with a hole at the base of his chest as large as a cricket ball.”45 There was some talk of amputating one of the man’s legs with a hacksaw, but given his other injuries that seemed pointless. offered a cigarette as he lay dying, the man literally exhaled the smoke through his chest wound with his dying breath. Little wonder that Mars referred to attacks on defenseless craft as “atrocities,” and that Edward Young once described such actions as “like murder.”46
There were certainly some actions generally acknowledged as atrocities, the most notorious involving the HMS Sturdy under William St. George Anderson. In waters north of Australia on 25 November 1944 the Sturdy encountered a 350-ton Indonesian coaster suspected of supplying the Japanese. Although hit with some forty shells, the craft refused to sink, and some crewmen from the Sturdy boarded the vessel to finish it off with demolition charges. By this time the coaster’s crew of about fifty had already abandoned the ship in lifeboats, but about fifty women and children were left on board. Despite protests by the sailor setting the charges, Anderson instructed him to “get on with it”: the women and children were blown up with the vessel. Anderson later stated, “Owing to the nature of the cargo (oil) and the use of this type of vessel to the enemy, I disregarded the humanitarian side of the question.”47
There is some evidence that Ralph Christie pressed for an investigation of the incident, but that the British demurred.48 No one condoned the action, however, and the British submarine flotilla commander at Fremantle, Captain Lancelot Shadwell, declared that the incident would be “viewed with distaste and repugnance by the whole submarine service.”49 Nevertheless, Anderson still received a Distinguished Service Cross and Bar at the end of the war.
In reality, submarines often sank vessels with no knowledge of their cargoes and little regard for crew and passengers. The prospect of being spotted by enemy planes tended to deter hanging around to help survivors. When the HMS Shakespeare made its first Far East patrol in January 1945, it tried to sink a small merchant ship with torpedoes off Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. After the torpedoes missed, the Shakespeare attacked with its gun, but the merchant vessel scored a direct hit that penetrated the submarine’s pressure hull. Unable to dive, the Shakespeare was hit four more times, wounding four men of the crew. Forced to head back to base on the surface in full daylight, the Shakespeare had, by sunset, miraculously survived twenty-five attacks by Japanese aircraft, but at the cost of fifteen men wounded and two killed. Although the submarine made it back to its base at Trincomalee, its fighting career had ended.50
Despite such dangers, some British skippers adopted measures to minimize the costs in human lives. Alistair Mars, disgusted by the carnage, began trying to use the Thule to ram his victims instead of sinking them with the deck guns. In theory this would allow the crews of targeted vessels to jump clear into the water, leaving the submarine positioned to pick up survivors or to dive quickly if an aircraft appeared. The Thule first put the theory into practice on 22 December 1944, ramming a number of junks and then collecting survivors.
Mars, according to one of his crewmen, “wouldn’t go to gun action if he thought he could sink it in some other way, and that’s what he did.”51 On one occasion the Thule cut a fifty-ton junk cleanly in half.52 On another occasion, in December 1944, the Thule stopped a sampan, pulling the unwilling crew onto the submarine. The men of the Thule destroyed the sampan, which Mars described as a “little pisser” not even worth a gun shell, with fused charges.53 The use of boarding parties was a practice increasingly adopted both to destroy vessels and to ensure the safety of their occupants.
The idea of forming boarding parties on submarines seems to have developed more or less spontaneously, rather than as the result of uniform policy. As the British increased the number of surface gun attacks on small craft, so too did the use of boarding parties become more commonplace. In mid-1944 the British submarine Storm organized a boarding party while patrolling the Mergui Archipelago. Instructed to search and blow up small craft used for supplying the Japanese garrison at Rangoon, a young sublieutenant, Richard “Dicky” Fisher, was appointed “boarding officer.” Fisher put together a group of five crewmen equipped with grappling hooks, demolition charges, revolvers, and a lethal-looking collection of knives.
Edward Young, Storm’s commanding officer, described the group as resembling “as bloodthirsty a crowd of pirates as ever slit throats on the Spanish Main.”54 An element of boy’s own adventure certainly pervaded such parties, and like their pirate antecedents they offered a serious threat to merchant shipping. Despite the fierce appearance of the Storm’s boarding party, however, Young regarded it primarily as a way to save lives. Patrolling the Gulf of Boni in October 1944, the Storm had authority to sink local schooners carrying nickel ore from the port of Pomelaa. Since these craft were manned entirely by “native” crews, Young determined to try to avoid killing anyone. The first schooner the submarine encountered, a wooden two-masted craft, carried ten Malays. The Storm’s boarding party under Dicky Fisher searched the schooner and found the hold empty, but given that the vessel had orders to take back a load of nickel on its return to Macassar, Young felt compelled to sink it; “[S]he was useful to the enemy and we had no alternative.”55 Initially he brought the Malay crew on board the Storm, and then later transferred it to a fishing boat. In the course of the patrol the Storm managed to sink eleven schooners, all without loss of life or limb to their crews.
Boarding vessels, though, involved risks. In one action off Point Blair in the Andaman Islands, the HMS Taurus stopped a small steam ferry. When the ferry was secured alongside the Taurus with grappling hooks, eighteen Indian passengers boarded the submarine before the boarding party could move onto the ferry. Once the submarine’s boarding party got on the steamer, however, the grappling hooks separated and the ferry began speeding toward Point Blair. Eventually the Taurus men gained control of the ferry and headed back to the submarine, but only as an enemy aircraft approached. The Taurus dived with the Indians still on deck.56
The HMS Statesman fired the last torpedo of the war by a British submarine, After departing Trincomalee on 9 August 1945. In these final days of the war, the Statesman used torpedoes to finish off a derelict ship and then sank five junks in the Malacca Straits with gunfire. Over the course of nine patrols, the Statesman claimed the destruction of forty-nine vessels totaling about 10,000 tons.
The tactics of British submarines were in some ways a microcosm of the Pacific submarine war. There was often an appalling loss of life and disregard for noncombatant lives. On the other hand, there were those who tried to minimize civilian casualties. In the end British submarines accomplished their mission to establish control over traffic in the Straits of Malacca and cut off supplies to Japanese troops in Burma.57