The train was delayed and delayed, and it got to the point where everyone wanted it to be gone, and to have done. We had said every possible version of goodbye and exchanged every consoling promise, and invested ourselves into too many farewells, so that by the time the whistle went there was a sense of staleness in the air. At that second, a revived, mad Rufus did a lanky somersault on the platform and delivered himself upright into the doorway of the train. A small group of soldiers and sailors further along the carriage whistled and cheered him, and his smile went crooked and toothy beneath his eye-glass.
Goodbye, goodbye. Dotty and I and other girlfriends and wives ran along the platform as the train gathered speed, until the barrier at the end stopped us.
I know from Tom Lydon’s book The Sea Otters most of what happened in the training of the group for Memerang on Australia’s west coast. Rufus and the Boss instituted a severe regime at the base near Fremantle, on an island connected to the mainland by a spit of sand, Garden Island. The camp was primitive and tented, but the British submarine flotilla was nearby. Here was stationed a mine-laying submarine named Orca. It had been assigned the job of taking Doucette’s party to a well-wooded island off Singapore where a pick-up base could be established. Then it was meant to convey them further throughout the region till they found a junk that suited them for their attack on the port of Singapore.
The winter nights were severe, and Leo and the others spent many of them in folboats at sea, between Fremantle and Rottnest Island, named by Dutchmen making for Indonesia. Those men who came down with exhaustion were thereby eliminated by Rufus. Dig – Leo – passed every test of course. Jockey similarly. Old hands. The news came that the submersibles, the Silver Bullets, had arrived in Melbourne by ship and were being flown across. For many of the young soldiers and sailors, they would be the ultimate test for membership of the raiding party. They arrived in specially built canisters designed by their inventor, Major Frampton. By this time, their English instructor, one Lieutenant Lower, had also arrived, with Major Frampton. After the first Silver Bullet was uncanistered and displayed to the men, there was enthusiasm and some secret anxiety. Lower warned them that the vehicle proceeded well on the surface, travelling on its batteries at more than 4 knots, but it was harder to handle in the mode in which the operator’s head was just above the surface and the Bullet below, and it also took some skill if the operator drove it down below the surface altogether. The mask had to be breathed into in a particular way. Otherwise carbon dioxide would build up and kill the breather. If any of them got disoriented or otherwise panicked and abandoned the Silver Bullets, they would be court-martialled, since the vehicles were too precious to be let sink. Make sure the submersibles come to the surface! said Lower, a calm, devout man, as it turned out, an Anglo-Catholic. You are free to remain below and drown, he instructed them.
In that rough proving ground off Western Australia, disoriented men drove the Silver Bullets into the silt and came gasping up through murky water to the surface. How I wish one of them had been Leo! But solidarity with the Boss sustained him – even when he found, as he experimented on survival in opaque, churned water, testing the vessel’s every gear, that he could get it to rise only by driving it backwards to the surface.
Doucette decided that Major Eddie Frampton, the engineer creator of the machines, must be their conducting officer, their representative on the submarine, the man who would arrange their delivery and pick-up. Frampton began work with the captain of the submarine Orca, a young officer rather strung out by the long war. When he found that Frampton’s SB containers were incorrectly dimensioned to easily fit his mine tubes in the aft of the Orca, and that when they were jettisoned they fouled against the roof of the compartment, he became very petulant and seemed to have decided that this is what happened once you got into the business of transporting raiding parties.
A lost commando from the abandoned great Natuna plan also turned up at Garden Island. He was an English officer named Filmer, a member of an élite regiment, the Green Howards. Though a professional officer, a type usually suspect to Leo (apart from Doucette, of course), everyone seemed to like Filmer. He had the status of having been an actor in great events – he was one of the commandos who went ashore by canoe during the night preceding D-Day to make gaps in the wire of the coastal defences. How could you leave a man like that out, especially if you were Doucette? Even though his arrival in Australia was due to absurd accidents and mixed signals between SOE and IRD, he became one of the party.
By the end of August they had boarded the sub, Orca, going north and largely living, officers and men, in the torpedo room. How does one exist on a submarine so severely overcrowded? How does a person sleep and keep one’s energy in the cramped, hot, dim daytimes of a submarine? Tom Lydon gives a brief and superficial picture of their two-week journey to the island named NE1, Serapem. In the first days, within reach of Australian aircraft, they were permitted on deck at night for a quarter-hour of callisthenics while the bosun and messmen were preparing the evening meal. Apart from that, it was the torpedo compartment, where they hunched, did exercises in batches, slept in batches, and ate communally of the normal submarine diet of tinned herring, canned bacon and tomato, powdered eggs and haricots musicales, as the sailors called baked beans. The edgy commander, Captain Moxham, had explained to Doucette that as much as he would have liked to entertain the other officers to his table, he could fit only Doucette himself at the wardroom table. Doucette decided, with appropriate thanks, it would be better to have meals with his own officers and men. That was, he said, the way it would be during the real part of the operation.
When the submarine got them to NE1, Serapem, east of Singapore, Rufus and a sailor went ashore at night in a dinghy and stayed there throughout the next day. Orca had gone off into deeper water, but now returned in the dark to signal to the shore by lamp and so to pick Rufus and his crewman up. Paddling aboard, Rufus declared NE1 was perfect – a good landing beach to the east, a hill for watching and a swamp for concealment, and deserted except for a few structures on the west side. During the rest of the night the Memerang group and the sailors of the watch transferred loads of supplies up through the forward hatches to the deck and onto a large inflatable raft which the Memerang men then rowed ashore. Well before dawn, canisters of food and equipment were safely concealed on the flanks of the island’s hill and, as he always planned, Doucette left one officer at NE1, Serapem, to dig in the supplies and await the return of the raiding party for Singapore. The officer he had chosen was my cousin Captain Melbourne Duckworth, son of a devout admirer of that southern city.
Everyone else boarded Orca again and went hunting for a suitable junk. On the coast of Borneo, Moxham sighted a junk named Nanjang, and invited Doucette and Rufus to inspect it through the periscope. They both declared it perfect for their needs. When Orca surfaced, the Malay crew of the 40-ton junk thought them a Japanese submarine and so merely prepared for inspection. The junk was boarded and the fairly amiable crew were transferred to the submarine and made secure, taking the place of the Memerang men who were getting ready to board the Nanjang, with its rather spectacular feature of a Japanese flag painted across its stern. Over a frantic night, as a nervous Moxham fretted on his conning tower, all that was needed to raid Singapore with Silver Bullets and perform great warrior endeavours was loaded on the junk. The Nanjang crew would be delivered back to Western Australia and interned. Orca would then return to collect Doucette and his men.