England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  At the beginning of the war the German ace Gunther Prien, later lost with all his crew, had entered the British anchorage at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak. But of the three Axis navies, the one that had given the most thought to submarine attacks on defended harbours was Japan’s.

  They had developed two-man midget submarines launched from Surcouf-sized mother ships. These Ko-Hyoteki class midgets carried two torpedoes and could go down to 100 feet. They were 78 feet long but at 10 feet high and 6 feet across were almost as cramped as a coal face. Five of them had been used at Pearl Harbor though only one might have done any damage and even that was disputed by Japanese aircrews. None of them returned to their mother ships: two were definitely sunk, two disappeared, and one ran aground. Her petty officer drowned but the lieutenant in command swam ashore to become America’s first Japanese prisoner of war, thus missing out on the Hero God status bestowed by the Emperor on all his dead comrades.

  Certainly the usual Japanese preference for death before even honourable capitulation applied to most of these volunteers who were not official kamikaze but accepted that their chances of survival were slight. Nothing more was heard of the Ko-Hyoteki until the Australian evening of Friday, 29 May when three of them managed to slip into Sydney harbour though they did not remain undetected for very long. Two cornered crews had killed themselves by detonating their 300-pound scuttling charges, one after their craft became enmeshed in an anti-torpedo net. The only pair that managed to hit something and return to their mother ship missed with the torpedoes they fired at the US cruiser Chicago, which instead sank a nearby floating barracks killing twenty-one Australian sailors.

  About the time this was happening at one end of Japan’s military endeavour there had been a portent for Admiral Syfret that something nasty was about to occur at the other. At 10.30 p.m. on the 29th, a small and silent seaplane had glided down from under Madagascar’s moon and seemed for a moment to be about to settle near the Ramillies. Then its engine had coughed abruptly into life and, banking steeply, it vanished into the darkness, flashing some unintelligible reply to an enquiring Aldis lamp challenge just long enough to keep the pom-pom crews off their triggers. Identification books were consulted but, though the little Glenn seaplane that operated as a scout from the larger Japanese submarines was in them, nobody was sure. It could have been Vichy, Japanese or German.

  Syfret ordered extra vigilance. Next day, long before dawn, Ramillies started steaming up and shortly after sunrise had anchored at a new position in the lee of the Antsirane lighthouse. A newly arrived South African Air Force squadron equipped with Marylands and Beauforts took a good look at the western fringe of the Indian Ocean which appeared as innocent as their day was long. The two remaining corvettes increased their patrols of the Orongea Pass but the gap they guarded was a mile wide and a Ko-Hyoteki had a beam of 6 feet.

  Saturday, 30 May was a beautiful evening. Like a paper lantern an almost full tropical moon hung above the anchorage. At Antsirane’s Hôtel François the usual crowd were gathered around their tables in the courtyard when at 8.25 a heavy explosion rocked the ground beneath them. Quartered nearby in an old stone-walled French barracks, where the bed bugs were driving him crazy, Bombardier Bailey of 455 Light Battery thought it was an earthquake. But the diners at the François were close enough to know differently and some were already running towards the harbour. About half an hour later Dr Patterson had found himself a good position on a bandstand overlooking the water from where the moonlit silhouette of the battleship Ramillies had now developed an obvious list.

  Corvettes were chasing about. I saw depth charges going up all over the harbour. A tanker was moving broadside to me and watching her I saw an almighty flash just forward of the engine room and, before the noise reached me, she clearly settled by the stern and the well deck was awash. This was 40 minutes after Ramillies had been struck, so the sub was still alive. A corvette tore past the sinking tanker and threw out a fan of depth charges. They went up with a colossal thump and after a few seconds there was a monstrous bubbling and boiling.

  Two men were responsible for all this. Lieutenant Akeida Saburo and Petty Officer Takemoto Masami of the Imperial Japanese Navy had sneaked into the anchorage in a midget launched by its mother ship I-20 from a position about 9 miles east of the Orongea Pass. A little further out 1–20’s flotilla mate 1–16 sent a second midget which does not appear to have played an active part in the attack. A body that could be identified as a member of the Imperial Japanese Navy was eventually cast up in a remote cove near the island’s northern tip and the submarine is presumed to have foundered long before she reached the harbour entrance.

  But the first submarine had navigated Mozambique’s shoals and sudden sand bars well. Her first torpedo blew a hole 20 feet in diameter in the Ramillies port bow under her forward 15-inch gun turret. The loss of half her ordnance and shock waves from the explosion played havoc with the trim of the lightened submersible. Before they knew what was happening Akieda and Takemoto found that they had bobbed to the surface. Their conning tower was spotted by a lookout on the nearby tanker British Loyalty which was manned by Indian seamen, mostly from Bombay, under British officers. Somebody got to an anti-aircraft gun in time to give it a burst but the Japanese managed to submerge before he got his eye in. On the Ramillies all the interior lights had gone out. Some magazine compartments were flooding and the old battleship had taken on a list of almost five degrees before watertight doors and pumps stopped her going any further. Then the lighting came back on and it was discovered that nobody was seriously hurt.

  The Royal Navy’s reaction was painfully slow. The Ramillies’s own picket boat, a large motor launch armed with depth charges though without sonar detection gear, was already in the water but had strayed some way from the ship’s new location. It took her fifteen minutes to get to the vicinity where the gunner on British Loyalty had spotted the submarine and start dropping her drums of amatol. Shortly afterwards she was joined by the two corvettes depth-charging as guided by the sonar pings from their British Asdic systems. Possibly there was too much depth-charging and not enough listening. In any case, Asdic was far from perfect and, in the shallower waters of an anchorage, all that pinged was not a submarine.

  At 9.02 p.m., the Ko-Hyoteki was still sufficiently intact for Akieda and Takemoto to come up to periscope depth and fire their second torpedo at the Ramillies. Compared with conventional submarines their main weapon was of a narrower circumference with a reduced warhead – 772 pounds instead of 1,213. Even so, one more might well have been too much for the battleship’s old frame. Instead it hit the British Loyalty which strayed into its path while manoeuvring slowly astern as a first step to making herself a moving target. Five of the Indians working in the engine room were killed. The rest of the crew abandoned ship and the tanker sank slowly by her stern into almost 70 feet of water so that only the tip of her funnel was showing. At about the same depth Akiedo and Takemoto headed back towards the open sea. Above them the sky was filled with tracer as one anti-aircraft gunner after another swore he saw something break the surface. On shore some drunken Commandos arrested and beat up a drunken Frenchman who had dared to break the curfew.

  Ramillies moved to shallower water so that if she did sink she would settle on the bottom and her top deck and superstructure would remain dry. But it soon became apparent that prompt action had made this unlikely. Her own shipwrights and electricians worked around the clock to make her seaworthy again. Eight portable pumps arrived from Durban which, to improve anti-submarine defences, also sent three Asdic-equipped converted trawlers. Two destroyers dashed back from the Maldives. A corvette arrived from the South Atlantic. All they lacked was something to depth-charge.

  It was still unclear who was responsible for torpedoing the Ramillies or even that the culprit was not a conventional submarine, for the lookout on the British Loyalty had caught only a moonlit glimpse of her conning tower and could be no judge of her size. Then,
two days after the attack, an excited Malagasy came rushing up to some of 5 Commando who were patrolling the coastal area north of Diego Suarez. He spoke heavily accented French and appeared to think he knew something they would be willing to pay for.

  It turned out that he came from the nearby village of Anijabe where, at about eleven o’clock that morning, two dishevelled Chinese gentlemen had turned up asking for food and water. They were different from any Chinese people he had seen before in that they both had pistols in their belts and one carried a curved sword. They explained that they were friends of the French people and wished to avoid the English who were their enemies. They had just sunk one of their ships.

  After they left the anchorage Akieda and Takemoto had headed in a north-westerly direction for their rendezvous with 1–20 off Cape Amber, Madagascar’s northern tip, where it would wait for two days. But the battery of their Ko-Hyoteki had run down and the submariners beached their craft on a small island where they were kindly treated by the local Malagasy who paddled them across to the mainland. By the time the Commandos had them cornered at Amponkarana Bay on the morning of 2 June they had covered a total of forty-eight miles on foot and were not far from the pick-up point.

  They were called on to surrender but took cover and there was a short gunfight. Then two single shots announced that, as required by the cruel medieval code most of the Japanese military aspired to, these brave men – both married with children – had killed themselves rather than submit to capture. Among the personal possessions recovered was Akieda’s samurai sword, a watch, Imperial Japanese Navy-issue cigarettes and a short report to the commander of the 1–20 submarine recounting all they had done in Diego Suarez. The next day, some forty-eight hours after the rendezvous deadline had expired, the 1–20 surfaced off Cape Amber and tried once more to contact her missing offspring by sending radio signals and firing flares. It was a loving and irresponsible thing to do, jeopardizing over 100 men to any passing British plane loaded for submarines. Then around dusk she submerged with the sinking sun and went on her way.

  It was several days before the Royal Navy could get anyone to Madagascar with enough Japanese to be capable of reading Akieda’s papers. Not that there was any longer any doubt who had holed the Ramillies, now Durban bound and facing several months of repairs. As salvage divers set about raising British Loyalty, which became a fuel storage tank in the Maldives until a passing German U-boat torpedoed her again, Smuts seized his chance and cabled Churchill that these losses proved his case for occupying all of the island.

  Attack must have been made by Vichy submarines or by Japanese submarines acting on Vichy information and advice. It all points to eliminating Vichy control completely from whole island as soon as possible. Appeasement is as dangerous in this case as it has proved in all others, and I trust we shall soon make a clean job of this whole business.

  Of course, as Smuts knew full well, it had nothing to do with appeasement. Churchill’s reluctance was about scarce resources and his unwillingness to squander them against the Vichy French when the Germans, Italians and Japanese raised more pressing issues. Then the Japanese submarines gathered around Madagascar started sinking the ships supplying the army trying to halt Rommel’s advance into Egypt.

  Commodore Ishizaki had under him five big ocean-going craft of which three had carried Ko-Hiyoteki midgets (the third had been unable to launch) and two Glenn scout planes. One of these had been the aircraft making the moonlight reconnaissance of Diego Suarez before the Ramillies was torpedoed. There were also two well-armed support ships, the Aikou Maru and Hokoku Maru, which carried their munitions and supplies. In the space of thirty-five days, between 5 June and 10 July 1942, Ishizaki’s squadron sank twenty-three merchant ships. Doenitz’s U-boats had rarely matched figures like these. Most were torpedoed in the Mozambique Channel. The 1–10 was the top scorer with eight. The 1–20, Akeida and Takemoto’s mother ship, was runner-up with seven. East of Madagascar even his supply ships joined in sinking one ship and capturing two more. There was little the British could do to halt this massacre. Short of the number of escort ships and aircraft needed to even the odds, they advised ships’ masters either to hug the coast or go east of the island and chance the long way around.

  Ishizaki’s rampage had been of great benefit to the Afrika Korps. Then it stopped as suddenly as it began. Off Midway Island in the Pacific the US Navy had ended six months of Japanese victories by sinking four of their aircraft carriers for the loss of one of its own. Tokyo felt that it had done its German ally enough favours and, though its confidence in final victory was undiminished, wanted most of its assets closer to home. But as far as Madagascar was concerned, the sinkings had begun to persuade Churchill that, one way or another, Smuts was right: they needed to make a clean job of it.

  There was another, almost equally pressing, reason why the British were coming round to the idea of taking the rest of the island. Within days of Japan entering the war de Gaulle, realising that Madagascar was a French card he could play in this new theatre, had proposed that his Free French be landed on the island. Confronted six months later by the fait accompli of an exclusive British action, his outrage had been compounded by what he perceived as Churchill’s new-found willingness to try to make deals with Vichy functionaries such as Annet. There were even threats to transfer Free French headquarters to one of its African bastions, Chad or the Cameroons, which must have been worrying news for those kepied staff warriors who already found the French pub in Soho exile enough.

  Anthony Eden was sympathetic. Churchill’s Foreign Secretary wanted to ‘clear out the rot’ and install a Free French governor in Madagascar without delay. As a first step Laurence Grafftey-Smith, a First Secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo, was sent to Diego Suarez where he was styled Chief Political Officer and charged with keeping the military from making any embarrassing accord with Annet. By now neither London nor Vichy wanted any kind of deal with each other over Madagascar. At the beginning of July Annet made a plaintive request for ‘modern aircraft to unsettle the warships at Diego Suarez’ and asked: ‘Is it not possible to execute reprisals, especially on English colonies on the East African coast?’

  What sort of reprisals he had in mind and where they might be staged from is unclear. The nearest Vichy base was French Somaliland under Governor Pierre Nouailhetas, which had British-occupied territory on all its land borders and the Royal Navy patrolling its Red Sea coast. It is possible that Nouailhetas possessed a few aircraft that might have staged a hit-and-run raid on British-occupied Addis Ababa or even Nairobi but there would have been sharp retaliation. The Vichy Foreign Ministry clearly did not consider Annet’s question merited a reply. Instead he was urged to resist any British advance into the south ‘by using guerrillas, scorched earth etcetera’.

  And so the stage was set for the completion of the British conquest of Madagascar, though during the high summer of 1942 it did not seem anywhere near as certain as this. Not to Armand Annet, sitting in his hilltop home in Tananarive sipping a drink and watching the sun go down over the rice fields and wondering about guerrillas and a scorched earth. Or a bit further down the hill to Berthe Mayer, relieved to have heard from Lionel Barnett on his return from Diego Suarez that Percy was safe and well but wondering how long it would be before Annet’s police came for her. Sometimes there were local power failures and people said it was the Deuxième Bureau working with the electricity company to locate a secret transmitter by discovering which district was switched off when it went off the air.

  Yet, apart from the power failures the city appeared to be quite untouched by the war. There were all sorts of rumours. But as Berthe Mayer and anybody else with quite an ordinary radio set could testify, they were rarely as depressing as the contents of the average BBC news bulletin. There was no doubt that the war was going badly for all the Allies and particularly the English. There had even been a ‘no confidence’ vote in the House of Commons over Churchill’s leadership. Admittedly it had been d
efeated by 475 votes to 25 but it was startling to think that it had ever happened in the first place.

  On the heels of the Japanese whirlwind, June, July and August had brought fresh humiliation from the Germans. First 33,000 men had surrendered at Tobruk, most of them white South Africans under General Klopper. After this the Afrika Korps had chased the British right back into Egypt’s Western Desert. They had not stopped running until they reached the coastal railway stop of El Alamein. Nor was there any comfort from the Russian front where Kleist’s First Panzer Army had crossed the Don and threatened the Grozny oilfields and the Caspian Sea, while further north another armoured pincer was on the Volga and nearing Stalingrad.

  Partly to take the pressure off the Russians, in August there had been the disastrous Operation Jubilee. This had been a large-scale raid on the northern French port of Dieppe. It was much bigger than the one on St Nazaire but with ill-defined objectives. Most of the infantry were a Canadian division, in Britain for two years and yet to fire a shot in anger and among them the Fusiliers Mont Royal, volunteers from French-speaking Quebec despite the strong Pétainist sympathies there. The rest were British Commandos who successfully suppressed two German gun batteries that would have made the slaughter even heavier. As it was, in less than three hours the Canadians had over 900 men killed. Not because they were green but because it was a stupid plan. At Madagascar there had been much better preparation against a much weaker enemy. Well over half of the 6,000 men who went ashore at Dieppe failed to return, most of them captured when they were pinned down on the beach or not far off it.

  Afterwards Maréchal Pétain had congratulated the German Army for ‘cleansing French soil of the invader’, a remark he would come to regret. Then, referring to what he called ‘the most recent British aggression’, he asked that French troops might be allowed to garrison coastal defences alongside Germany’s soldiers. All this was music to the ears of collaborators like Fernand de Brinon who reported that in Vichy the talk was all about manning ‘a French crenellation in the Atlantic wall’. Not suprisingly the Wehrmacht did not share their enthusiasm. Instead, as a reward for not providing the Canadians with an instant fifth column, not that there had been much opportunity, Berlin radio announced that Germany was releasing 750 sons of Dieppe held captive in Germany since 1940. But by far the best propaganda were the Dieppe pictures of the Calgary Regiment’s brand-new Churchill tanks knocked out on the beach and lines of crestfallen men in British battledress and soup-plate helmets with their hands up, une promenade des anglais.