by Ian Blake
As the lundwins moved nearer, Tiller could see they were filled with Japanese troops and that in the bows of the leading one a large mortar was mounted. To Tiller it looked like an 81mm, a fearsome weapon in the right hands.
‘Get that leading boat,’ Tiller told Timber urgently. ‘If they get that mortar firing they could fuck up the whole crossing.’
He had abandoned his silenced Sten for a tommy-gun. Now he dragged it out of the canoe and cocked it.
By now the lundwins were about 200 yards from the SBS canoe and bearing down on them rapidly. Tiller could even hear the Japanese chattering among themselves. They must have thought they were a long way from any danger.
‘Wait till you see the whites of their eyes,’ he urged, and heard Timber chuckle at the cliché. ‘At all costs that first boat mustn’t get past us.’
As Timber corrected his position he rocked the canoe and the glitter of phosphorescence this caused caught the eye of a Japanese lookout in the leading lundwin, who cried out a warning to the one behind. The second boat sheered away into mid-stream while the helmsman on the first one laboriously turned it towards the canoe, miminizing the target that Timber had to fire at. He pressed the trigger of the K-gun and Tiller could see the bullets ploughing into the boat’s thin planking. Splinters of wood flew everywhere and someone in the lundwin began shouting – orders perhaps, or just words of encouragement or fright.
Tiller let the boat approach as close as possible and then, disregarding the rifle fire that was beginning to come from it, lobbed a 36 grenade with great accuracy on to its crowded deck. The grenade exploded with a shattering crunch that slewed the vessel round and Tiller shot the soldier in the stern who was steering it.
Without anyone at its helm the lundwin started to spin in the current and the high chatter of the K-gun almost drowned out the screaming of its occupants. It was over in seconds as the current bore the lundwin on past the canoe and Timber could not traverse the K-gun quickly enough.
Tiller swore out loud.
‘The others will get it,’ said Timber coolly, deftly changing the K-gun’s magazine. ‘One of the bursts I got off must have riddled it below the water-line.’
Tiller turned away and fumbled for his walkie-talkie.
He was warning the next canoe down what to expect when he heard Timber shout: ‘Watch it, Tiger’, and the K-gun started chattering again. Tiller looked up and dropped the walkie-talkie into the bottom of the canoe and grabbed his tommy-gun just as a hail of fire spattered into the water around them.
They had forgotten the second lundwin, which had sheered off towards the middle of the river. It was now heading directly for them, obviously intent on ramming them. To increase its speed, or perhaps its manoeuvrability, some of the Japanese were using large sweeps.
‘I’ve never engaged a fucking rowing boat before,’ muttered Timber. ‘They must be fucking crazy.’
With one swift movement Tiller extracted his commando knife from its sheath and severed the kedge rope. For an agonizing moment the canoe hung motionless in the water. Then the current sluggishly caught its bows and swung it round towards the oncoming lundwin.
‘Grenades!’ Tiller shouted at Timber. Timber stopped firing and reached down into the canoe.
Bullets sang overhead and one pinged loudly off the engine’s vertical exhaust. The engine came to life with a heart-stopping cough and then spluttered quietly into action. Tiller pulled the rudder hard over so that the canoe began to swing downstream just as the lundwin was upon them. It hit the port outrigger, swinging the canoe hard round and one of the lundwin’s sweeps snapped in two. Tiller looked up and saw a Japanese leaning over its side. As the man brought his rifle up to his shoulder to shoot Timber, who was busy extracting a grenade’s safety-pin with his teeth, Tiller, still holding his knife, instinctively reversed it and threw it at the man. It hit him in the face and bounced off.
Surprised, the Japanese dropped his rifle and clapped his hand to his face, and Tiller swung up his tommy-gun and shot him. The soldier toppled over and fell into the water, just missing the canoe, which was still grating along the lundwin’s side. The soldier went under and Tiller did not see him come up. Then, as Timber threw one grenade and then a second, the canoe scraped free. The lundwin’s high counter loomed for a second above the canoe. The grenades curved through the air and at the same time Tiller turned and fired a burst at the Japanese perched high on the stern, steering the lundwin with a sweep. He saw him fall and moments later the lundwin was rocked by one explosion and then a second. Out of control now, the boat slewed round, hit the bank and came to a stop. Then it burst into flames as a third explosion rocked it from stem to stern. Shadowy figures, outlined by the flames, leapt from its bows on to the bank; others jumped into the water.
‘Bring her round, Tiger,’ Timber yelled as he fitted a new magazine to the K-gun. ‘Bring her round, for Christ’s sake.’
But the port outrigger had been almost torn off by the collision with the lundwin and try as he might Tiller could not get the canoe to turn into the current. Instead, he turned it downstream and was relieved when it began to answer to the helm. He bent down and opened the engine throttle and the bows of the canoe began to swing towards the bank.
Timber opened fire in short, conservative bursts, neatly picking off the figures outlined by the fire that now raged aboard the lundwin. Tiller let the canoe drift downstream slightly and then forged back up, trying to keep as steady a platform as possible for Timber, who continued to fire until there were no more shadows to fire at. By the time he had stopped, the lundwin had burned down to the water-line, and the flames flickered and spluttered and died.
For a moment they relaxed and Tiller thumped his number one on the shoulder.
‘Good shooting, Timber,’ he said.
Instinctively, they looked away from the dying embers of the burnt-out boat to preserve their night vision and it was then that they saw it upstream of them, emerging out of the mist that still hung over the river.
‘Jesus, look at that,’ said Timber. ‘Fucking Japs must have got hold of the fucking Queen Mary.’
Coming from Liverpool, Timber knew his ocean liners.
15
They watched in awe and some trepidation as the apparition emerged slowly out of the mist. It took Tiller some moments to realize that much of the boat’s sheer bulk was created by a huge square sail rigged on its single mast, above which were set two smaller, square topsails. Even so, he calculated it must be twice the size of the lundwins.
‘A laung-zat,’ he murmured to Timber. ‘The Burmese use them on the Irrawaddy.’
‘But why the fucking sails?’ hissed Timber.
‘Makes sense,’ whispered Tiller. ‘Surprise attack. They’ll want to get downstream as quietly as possible.’
He shook his head at the amazing persistence of the enemy. Those aboard the laung-zat must have heard the previous exchange of fire and must have known they were sailing into an ambush. Yet they were making no effort to avoid it.
‘And what about getting back up river again?’
‘Japs don’t think like that,’ said Tiller, realizing that he was at last coming to grips with the enemy’s psychology.
‘Kind of one-way ticket, is that it?’ Schooled in the backstreets of Liverpool, Timber did not disguise his disdain for an enemy who failed to follow the elementary rules for survival.
The laung-zat was still some distance from them.
‘Exactly. You can’t retreat across the bridge if you burn it behind you.’
‘Christ, I hope we haven’t burnt ours,’ Timber muttered. ‘What do you reckon we do to stop that bastard?’
Tiller wondered how the crew could manage such a huge area of sail even in the soft breeze that was presently carrying it so sedately downstream.
‘We don’t,’ he replied quietly. ‘We’ve lost our port outrigger, so there’s not much we can do. I’m going to call down a stonk.’
Timber nodded his agreemen
t and Tiller picked up his walkie-talkie.
The SBS canoe teams had been specifically given permission to call on the division’s regiment of artillery in such an emergency and a stonk – gunners’ slang for a block of concentrated fire on a prearranged grid reference – was the only way to deal with such a large vessel.
Tiller spoke urgently into the walkie-talkie as the huge boat approached and then slowly and gracefully ghosted past them. Even though it was near the middle of the river, and the river was shrouded with thin wisps of mist, they could see it was packed with soldiers.
Tiller followed the laung-zat’s stately progress for a couple of minutes and then started counting distances into the walkie-talkie. ‘Three hundred . . . two hundred . . . one hundred . . . fifty . . . twenty-five . . . fire . . . fire . . . fire.’
Silence enfolded them as they watched the vessel continue to recede into the distance.
‘Some . . .’ Timber started to speak, and then stopped as white spumes of water began spurting up all round the laung-zat. As thunder follows lightning, the crack of the guns came seconds after the shells began straddling the native craft.
The concentration was so great that the boat almost disappeared among the welter of water and smoke that rose around it. Then the mast toppled and seconds later they heard a muffled explosion. When the smoke cleared there was no sign of the laung-zat. It was as if it had never been.
‘Check, check, check,’ Tiller said into the walkie-talkie. ‘Target destroyed. Many thanks. Over and out.’
He put down the walkie-talkie. ‘There’s nothing more we can do up here without a frigging outrigger. We’ll go downstream and join the others.’
He put the canoe’s engine into gear and steered it at slow speed as close as possible to the river’s edge. Without its outrigger the canoe was unbalanced and they had to move with the greatest care. They passed through the area where the laung-zat had sunk and saw chunks of it floating in the water. Bodies were scattered everywhere, some of them already dismembered by the crocodiles which churned up the water around them.
The two SBS men averted their faces from the gruesome sight and minutes later the next canoe down came through on the walkie-talkie to guide them to where it lay.
The crew of the second canoe were elated, for they had attacked the lundwin with the mortar and had driven it ashore, but they said the third and fourth canoes wanted some action. Tiller had planned to rotate them anyway, so he contacted them by walkie-talkie and sent them both upstream.
Still the Japanese kept trying, this time in motorized sampans, but they, too, were driven ashore or sunk by the SBS canoes and most of the soldiers in them were either killed or drowned. A few very determined soldiers even tried to float down on logs but were spotted and eliminated. None got anywhere near the crossing zone and by the following evening the fighting elements of the Indian division were across the Chindwin and fanning out eastwards towards Mandalay.
Their task accomplished, the SBS teams returned to their base and the following day began dismantling their canoes to load them into the trucks that would transport them back to the forward air strip. They were just about to leave when they saw a jeep flying a large red pennant approaching. It screeched to a halt and out jumped Llewellyn. Grayson called them all to attention and saluted smartly, but Llewellyn asked him to get them to stand easy.
‘I just wanted to say,’ he said in his soft Welsh accent, ‘that you’ve done a fine job and we’re all very grateful to you. But if you think you’re going back to Ceylon to lie on the beach you’ve got another thing coming. You’ll be pleased to hear that on my recommendation you’re going to be moved down to the Irrawaddy. It’s even bigger than the Chindwin and a lot muddier. Too many Japs are escaping across it for our liking. You’re going to have to stop that. And you’ll probably be helping another division to cross when the time comes. For these operations you’ll be reinforced by two sections of SRU. Good luck to you.’
‘Who are the SRU?’ Timber asked Tiller when Llewellyn had driven off.
‘Sea Reconnaissance Unit.’
Timber laughed in disbelief. ‘You mean that crowd with paddleboards that hung around Hyatt’s Ferry for a while? Rather them than me. At least we’ve got a canoe between us and the crocs.’
It was one of the first questions that Tiller put to a member of the SRU when, the following week, the two units met up at Pakokku, some twenty miles below where the Chindwin joined the Irrawaddy.
‘They’re like sharks, we reckon,’ said the Marine corporal Tiller had questioned. ‘We won’t attract them if we’re moving quietly and smoothly. It’s panic movements and blood that draw them.’
Grayson asked the unit’s CO, a Canadian naval commander, to explain the SRU’s origins and its present functions to his assembled B Group. The commander explained that his idea for a special unit to attack enemy shipping in harbour had come from an illustrated article he had read about the abalone divers of California, who used paddleboards, diving masks and swim fins. He had put up a proposal to form a force using this equipment which had ended up on the desk of Mountbatten, who was Chief of Combined Operations at the time. Mountbatten backed the formation of the SRU, but it was only when he became Supreme Commander in the Far East, and decided to form the Special Operations Group, that the SRU became operational – not as a force to attack enemy shipping but for reconnaissance purposes. The commander then showed B Group the twelve-foot paddleboard the SRU used.
‘Notice the pointed stern, very different to the square ones of the boards used for riding the surf in California. And unlike surfboards, the paddleboard is hollow, not solid. So it draws hardly any water and is fast and manoeuvrable across it. It is propelled entirely by hand and special scoops are fitted to the hands for this purpose. We use our fins only when we are swimming in through surf to land on a beach. We call ourselves frogmen.’
Tiller knew of the naval commander and his ideas as he had worked with the Royal Marine Boom Patrol Detachment at Portsmouth just before Tiller had joined it. In those days the commander’s unit had been called ‘operational swimmers’. Tiller had never heard the word ‘frogman’ before. It seemed an appropriate enough description.
‘I can tell you one useful thing about this method of approach to an enemy-held position,’ the commander said. ‘A swimmer emerging from the sea gives off no scent at all, so guard dogs cannot detect him. The swimmer can retain this advantage by coating himself in dry sand by rolling in it while still wet.’
Below the point of the Irrawaddy where the SBS and the SRU sections set up their base, both banks were still held by the Japanese. To attack the Japanese crossing points the SBS therefore had to adopt methods similar to those the Japanese had used on the Chindwin: they had to float down on their targets, unheard and unseen, until they chose to attack. But unlike the Japanese, they had also to give thought to the best method of escape.
After some experimentation Tiller and Timber developed a new type of attack craft from an abandoned Japanese motor boat that had been found by a patrol. It had been badly damaged below the water-line and the engine wrecked. Once the boat was repaired, and the engine replaced by a powerful 22hp outboard, the two SBS men built a platform across the bows on which they mounted two Bren guns. Bamboo poles were then rigged either side of the boat amidships to which were attached smoke generators to cover their retreat.
This new floating war machine was manned by five SBS men: the two Bren gunners in the bows, who also acted as lookouts on the way downstream and activated the smokescreen on the way back; the CO and his observer, who were both armed with hand-grenades with shortened four-second fuses; and the helmsman, who operated the outboard clamped to the boat’s counter.
Tiller, not happy with the accuracy of his weapons at night, decided to experiment. He removed the stock of his tommy-gun and taped a torch to the top of its barrel so that he could depress its signalling button with the forefinger of his left hand while squeezing the tommy-gun’s trigger with
the forefinger of his right. Zeroing the beam on a target ensured the accuracy of the tommy-gun when he fired it. To maintain rapid fire, two of the weapon’s magazines were taped together so that when one magazine was exhausted he had only to unclip it, turn the magazine around and insert the full one.
When intelligence was received by the SBS that the Japanese were crossing the Irrawaddy in increasing numbers some miles downstream, it was decided to see how efficient the boat was. So instead of sending the normal patrol of two Mk VI canoes, they launched the boat at dusk. The outboard could not be used, as it was not silenced; instead the boat was borne down on the current and was steadied when necessary by paddles wielded by Tiller and Timber, who acted as his observer.
Within an hour they had moved past the British-held west bank into no man’s land and then to the part where both banks were known to be still held by the Japanese. As they approached the village of Nyaungu on the eastern bank, Tiller paddled the boat into dead water and waited for what might appear.
After an hour they saw headlights on the far side of the river and heard the rattling of empty oil drums being unloaded and rolled into the water. Then the headlights of the lorries were shone on the river’s edge, where the SBS men could see a team of Japanese at work.
‘They’re building a raft of some kind,’ Timber whispered to Tiller. ‘A big one too.’
As they watched, they heard the rumble of moving vehicles on their side of the river just below where the boat was lying, but from their position they could not see how many there were or what they contained. When the raft was finished ropes were sent across by small boats and the raft was then pulled across the river with them.
At a whispered command from Tiller the boat was gradually eased forward until they could see the vehicles. There were six or seven of them, all drawn up nose to tail on a dirt road which ran parallel with the side of the river for about a quarter of a mile before curving away across the dry plain. One had an anti-tank gun in tow, another had a searchlight, while a third was crowded with soldiers.
