Marine H SBS

by Ian Blake

  Supremo finished his pep talk, stepped lightly from the bonnet of the jeep into the driving seat, and then drove slowly down the avenue of cheering men.

  ‘He’s some showman, isn’t he?’ said Tasler when everyone had returned to their normal duties. He threw some papers into his pending file and indicated that Tiller should draw up a chair.

  ‘He’s got a memory any elephant would envy,’ said Tiller.

  Tasler retrieved one of the pieces of paper from the pending file and studied it. ‘Talking of elephants, Tiger, B Group SBS have just been given the task of supporting an Indian division which is poised to cross the River Chindwin in upper Burma. I want you to go with them. You’ll be using the new Mk VI canoes.’

  ‘Not the Welmans then, sir?’

  It was meant to be a joke, but Tasler looked unusually grim. ‘No, not the Welmans, Tiger. Not yet.’

  ‘They found another instructor then, sir?’

  ‘They did. I told them you were away on business and that you might not return, as it was very risky. That shut them up.’

  ‘Away on business’ was an expression Tasler always used for anyone going on a clandestine operation.

  ‘Not for me it wasn’t risky,’ Tiller said meaningfully.

  ‘Anyway, they flew someone out from Scotland last week. So you’re in the clear.’ Tasler pressed a switch on his intercom. ‘I want to introduce you to your new CO. Name of Grayson. Good chap.’

  Ian Grayson was a captain in the Royal Scots who soon made it known to Tasler, in the nicest possible way, that he did not like Supremo’s decision ultimately to transfer SOG’s work – and those SOG personnel who would agree to it – to the Royal Marines.

  ‘You must understand, sir,’ he said in his soft Lowland burr, ‘my regiment is the army’s senior regiment. We’re fast of foot and right on the line.’

  Tasler made the soothing sounds he always employed to smooth ruffled feathers. He pointed out that the change was bound to be a postwar one and that for the moment all that mattered was the closest co-operation between army and navy. He realized Grayson’s B Group was entirely an army unit, but reassured the captain that Tiller was no Trojan horse. ‘I’m sure you’ll find him useful,’ he said. ‘And I promise you he isn’t going to start a recruitment drive.’

  The captain seemed mollified and at dawn three days later Tasler was up to see off the small group of men, their supplies and their Mk VI canoes, which had all been dismantled and packed in containers. The journey took them by air, road, rail and sea to Calcutta, Dimapur, Imphal and Kalewa, and finally by Dakota to a forward airstrip near the Chindwin at Mawlaik, where they were greeted by the divisional commander himself.

  Major-General Dai Llewellyn, late of the Rajputana Rifles, was a short man. But his diminutive stature was the only aspect of him that was undersize, for his personality, as B Group soon found out, was larger than life. He had men of many races under his command and he seemed to be able to speak all their languages, whether it was Ghurkali, Hindi or Urdu. A firebrand who did not drink, smoke or swear, Llewellyn spoke with a soft Welsh accent that could turn to sandpaper when he was annoyed. Which was often. It was said that he fired his staff almost as often as he fired his divisional artillery. He wore a broad-brimmed Gurkha hat on the front of which was pinned a large gold general’s badge. On its right side he had had sewn his divisional flash, a hand holding a dagger. Round his neck he always wore a bright red silk scarf so that he was easily identifiable to his troops. He flew a large red divisional pennant on his jeep for the same reason – a fact the Japanese had long ago discovered but had so far been unable to exploit.

  Llewellyn drove his men ruthlessly, for he knew he could not afford to pause for even a day. If he did the Japanese would use that time to dig in, to set booby-traps and to fell trees across the jungle tracks, so that it would be harder to force them on to the back foot again, and that to do so would cost lives that might have been saved by pushing on ruthlessly. His men, who worshipped him, knew this. They grumbled a lot but they kept going. Now they were close to the mighty Chindwin, one of the three great waterways of Burma, and the momentum had to be maintained.

  ‘The Chindwin, gentlemen, is not the Thames,’ Llewellyn stated bluntly to the officers and NCOs of B Group, who had been gathered for his briefing. ‘At the point where we will approach it it is nearly five hundred miles from its source in the Pathai and Kumon ranges, and some two hundred miles from where it joins the Irrawaddy. It is several hundred yards wide in some places and at this time of the year it is full of water, sandbanks – and crocodiles. There will be a nasty current. On the near shore there will still be Japanese stragglers trying to escape across the river, while on the far shore there are Burmese refugees trying to join us to escape the clutches of the Japanese. In short, once the division closes up to the river, you can expect two-way traffic. I want the maximum number of my men across the Chindwin in the minimum time. Speed is what counts, gentlemen. My G1 will now go over the details of the operation. Thank you.’

  The division’s Grade One General Staff Officer, Operations, his G1, stood up and rolled out a large-scale map of the area, which he hung on the blackboard. He was a full colonel, astonishingly young, who spoke with the accomplished ease of someone who knows his brief backwards.

  B Group, he told them, were to make a report to him immediately on the suitability of the crossing point, and would then help secure the division’s flanks by patrolling the Chindwin above and below the crossing. They were to let no Japanese escape across the river; nor were they to allow those who had already managed to cross to establish defences on its far bank.

  Above all, they were to prevent any Japanese river-borne attack while the division was being ferried across.

  ‘They are known to have some local native boats upstream from here,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how you stop them using them to pester us while we are crossing, but stop them you must.’

  He paused when Grayson caught his eye to ask him why the RAF didn’t deal with them.

  ‘I thought you might ask that,’ said the G1. ‘But our Japanese friends are too wily to be caught out by daylight attacks from the air. We have discovered that what they do is every morning take out the bungs of their craft and sink them in the shallows, where they can’t be seen by aircraft. Then every evening they put the bungs back in and bail the water out.’

  ‘Cunning bastards,’ said Grayson admiringly.

  ‘I dare say they have a lot more tricks up their sleeves,’ said the G1. ‘And I don’t need to tell you how vulnerable our troops, artillery and transport are going to be while they’re being ferried across. We will, of course, establish a defensive perimeter on the far bank first, but that won’t be able to cover any attacks coming up or down river. From what I’ve heard about the SBS you’re a resourceful lot. You’re going to need to be because we won’t be in any position to help, though I can spare you one regiment of artillery standing by for an emergency. Apart from that, gentlemen, you’ll be on your own. Good luck.’

  ‘Jikatsu jisen,’ Tiller repeated to himself. ‘Sink or Swim.’ That’s how it was and that was exactly how he liked it.

  The following night, under cover of darkness, B Group moved up to the river in lorries, established a temporary base at the mouth of a chaung, and began assembling the Mk VI canoes, which only a few of them had tried out in Ceylon.

  ‘Now that looks like a proper war canoe,’ Tiller said to his new partner, a lugubrious Liverpudlian corporal who, because his name was Wood, was naturally nicknamed Timber.

  The Mk VI was a rigid canoe made of fabric-covered plywood which had been treated with a sealant. It was assembled by bolting its three sections together and was lined with a rubberized material which kept the hull watertight if the wood skin was punctured. On either side of the canoe outriggers were attached to the hull on alloy arms and between the two canoeists was an engine whose exhaust pipe stuck up vertically into the air.

  Fitted in the bows on
a traversing mount was a type of machine-gun Tiller had never seen before. It looked something like a Bren gun without a butt but had a circular metal magazine like a cake tin on top of it instead of the Bren’s curved one.

  ‘It’s a Vickers K-gun,’ Timber informed him. ‘Originally they were fitted to RAF fighters with open cockpits and so have a very fast rate of fire. The magazine takes a hundred rounds of ordinary .303 ammo.’

  Tiller then took off the wooden engine cover, which had a wire-stiffened skirt to protect the engine from spray.

  ‘Is the engine going to be able to cope with the current?’ he asked.

  Timber nodded. ‘It’s four horsepower, which pushes it through calm water at seven knots or so. Should be more than enough, as they reckon the current at the moment is only about three or four knots.’

  Tiller peered into the engine compartment and saw that there was an aluminium sleeve through the bottom of the canoe into which the engine was clamped. Timber showed him how the sleeve rotated so that the propeller was lowered into the water. He said the only thing to watch was that the engine’s water-cooling system didn’t get choked with sand.

  ‘It’s silenced, I hope.’

  ‘Very effectively,’ said Timber. ‘In fact there are two silencers. The main one is on the water-cooling system but another can be added to the exhaust when extra-silent running is needed. When both are working you can’t hear the engine further than a couple of hundred yards.’

  ‘It’s going to need a good range,’ grunted Tiller, looking out across the river. ‘Looks more like the English Channel than a fucking river to me.’

  Timber explained that though the main tank didn’t hold much there were a number of supplementary tanks which gave the canoe a maximum range of 110 kilometres at full throttle and 145 kilometres at half throttle.

  The next evening at dusk they went out on their first patrol. Grayson sent three of the canoes upstream and three downstream with orders to reconnoitre the river so that they could familiarize themselves with every yard of it. The other members of the group would work, right under the noses of the Japanese, on assessing the area where the crossing would take place, measuring the depth of the water, the firmness of the shelving beach and its gradient.

  As his canoe forged steadily upstream against the current, Tiller noticed immediately that central Burma had a different landscape to the Arakan: the jungle was sparse and the forests – many of them of teak – were much larger and more dense. The humidity was lower and with the monsoon coming to an end the rains had almost petered out.

  The canoes were as silent as Timber had said, but in mid-stream, despite the alleged strength of the engine, it was difficult to make any headway against the current, so Tiller took his tiny flotilla of three canoes as close to the shore as he dared.

  Timber sat in the forward position and kept the K-gun trained on the bank while Tiller steered with the twin metal rods that were connected to the rudder. These ran the length of the boat so that, in an emergency, either crewman could steer. They motored upstream for about five miles as darkness closed in on them, and then in line abreast the three canoes turned and drifted with the current, listening and watching, noting the whereabouts of the sandbanks and the contours of the river, testing the depth of water and gauging the strength of the current.

  They repeated this twice more until they were familiar with every twist and bend in the river, and every likely ambush position on its banks. They also carefully noted the position of every sandbank – though these, they knew, constantly shifted and changed according to the amount of water flowing down the Chindwin.

  By the time they had returned to the base that had now been established for the group up the small chaung, the first glimmer of dawn was showing above the teak trees.

  The next evening, as the division began to close up to the river ready for crossing it the following night, Tiller allotted his three canoes their own stretch of water to patrol. He and Timber took the upstream stretch, knowing they could quickly come to the aid of the others should they need it.

  Llewellyn’s advancing division had already driven most of the Japanese across the Chindwin, but there were still plenty of stragglers who were trying to rejoin their units. Every night there had been reports of small groups trying to get across with vehicles or guns, or with just their personal weapons.

  Tiller decided that the best tactic to intercept these stragglers was to lie in wait for them in the dead water under the near bank. They did not have long to wait.

  The first group – Timber counted that there were five of them – arrived soon after midnight. They arrived upstream of the canoe and stood chattering quietly about what they should do. They were out of range of Tiller’s silenced Mk V Sten gun and he did not want to use the K-gun unless he had to, as firing it would alert any other Japanese in the area to their presence.

  Eventually the Japanese decided to make a raft and spent an hour binding three large logs together. When it was completed they began poling it across, but the current caught it and swept it towards the waiting canoe.

  When it came level with the canoe Tiller raised his Sten and opened fire. As it was fitted with a silencer he could fire only single shots. They sounded like champagne corks. Three of the Japanese toppled into the river. The fourth dived in, but the fifth swung up his rifle and was about to fire when Tiller shot him too. The raft drifted past with one Japanese still draped across it. Then they heard a splash and the arm of the Japanese, which was trailing in the water, was seized. The raft tipped up and the Japanese rolled over and hit the water with a splash, before vanishing in a swirl of spray and mud. It happened so quickly that Tiller hardly realized what had occurred.

  ‘Hope the poor bugger was already dead,’ said Timber, swivelling the K-gun back to the shore. ‘I wouldn’t wish anyone a death like that.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘If they weren’t dead when you hit them, they will be now.’

  They moved further upstream, scanning the bank for movement, but if there were any other Japanese in the area they stayed hidden, and after an hour they turned and drifted with the current.

  It was then that they saw movement on the near bank and cautiously circled wide of the area. There were more Japanese this time, perhaps as many as a dozen. One group was manhandling a pontoon into the water while a second was pulling a field gun of some kind out of the bushes. Boxes of shells for it were piled on the bank.

  Timber flicked up the sights of the K-gun, but Tiller laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. It was too big a prize not to use the K-gun but the field gun was better at the bottom of the river.

  ‘Wait till they get it afloat,’ he whispered.

  Timber nodded and they waited in dead water downstream from where the Japanese were planning to cross. Eventually the pontoon, with the field gun aboard, left the shore, but its outboard engine was too weak to counter the current. The pontoon took a crablike course across the river so that by the time it was parallel with the canoe it was only a couple of hundred yards away. Timber crouched over the K-gun and took a bead on the pontoon.

  One in five of the cartridges in the gun’s magazine was tracer and as Timber opened fire it arced across the water and on to the pontoon. Tiller, who had looked away so that the tracer would not impair his night vision, could hear the Japanese screaming and cursing and the pontoon swung erratically towards the canoe.

  A second burst from the K-gun hit the boxes of ammunition and the pontoon detonated with a blinding flash and a muffled roar. The canoe rocked from the force of the explosion. The pontoon went down stern first and the field gun slipped quickly into the water.

  Tiller could not resist looking round.

  ‘Good shooting,’ he shouted, thumping Timber on the shoulder. ‘Let’s see what else we can find.’

  They prowled the river for the rest of the night, but no other Japanese attempted to cross it in their sector. At dawn they returned to their base in the chaung and fou
nd that the other canoes had been equally busy.

  The SBS teams ate and then slept for most of the day, but were woken in late afternoon by the divisional artillery opening up. It was a preliminary bombardment to clear the way for the troops who were to form the initial bridgehead on the far side of the river. At five o’clock Captain Grayson received his orders from the G1 by wireless. The crossing would start at midnight that night and would continue until it was completed, even if that meant crossing in daylight. The RAF had supremacy in the air and it was highly unlikely that the Japanese air force would try to attack.

  The G1 confirmed that the greatest threat to the Division were the native craft hidden upstream. For V Force, the intelligence scouts used by the Fourteenth Army, had managed to capture a Japanese who had said an all-out attack was being planned for that night in an attempt to throw the crossing into confusion. Most of the boats would attack downstream though it was known that a few might try to attack against the current. Grayson therefore sent four of the canoes upstream under Tiller and kept the other two for any Japanese who might attempt to come up the river.

  Tiller decided the best tactic would be to force any Japanese boat that came downstream to run the gauntlet of the four canoes. So he spaced them out at one-mile intervals and positioned himself in the upstream spot. As the senior NCO he felt he had the privilege of taking the first crack at anything that came down the river.

  They kedged the canoe in slack water and settled down expectantly. They did not have long to wait, for gliding out of the mist that hung above the water came two long, low boats. Both were quite close to the near bank, out of the main current. If they kept their present course, it looked to Tiller as if they would pass very close to the SBS canoe.

  At first, in the dark, it was difficult to judge how big they were, though they could soon hear they were powered by outboard engines. As they came closer Tiller recognized them from the sketches aboard Davy’s ML as being lundwins: thirty-foot, canoe-type native craft which shifted agricultural produce up and down the largest Burmese rivers. Their central ‘doghouse’ made of matting and their very high counters on which the helmsman sat made them easily identifiable.