Close to the Wind

by David B Hill

  Conditions in the city were so dire that most protocols had been modified, if not actually abandoned. The idea of a black-out was redundant now the city was on fire. People fiddled while the city burned. The sailors hoped that they might be allowed into what was an officers’ mess. But no, they weren’t going to get past the Doorman.

  ‘Fuck them. I’m off to the Mayfair, mates. Who’s coming with me?’ called out Jackie, confident he would not be doing so alone.

  ‘Count me in, Jackie. I fancy a nice bowl of prawns,’ said Len, who’d developed a genuine taste for the local delicacy.

  Others weren’t so enthusiastic for the food.

  ‘It’s a beer for me! Or two,’ added Tim.

  ‘And a woman for me,’ shouted Jock. ‘Or two!’

  ‘Good on ya, Jock.’ They all cried out in unison.

  Strangely, there was plenty of alcohol available in Singapore. While all stocks had been ordered to be destroyed, some Customs bond stores had been broken open by bombing and sacked of their contents, and a surprising amount of liquor had found its way onto the streets.

  At the Mayfair there was liquor, there were still prawns, and there were the women, of course. Inside, little, if anything, appeared to have changed. Len was a cautious drinker, but he was learning. He was also a slow starter when it came to women. He rather liked to watch people’s social behaviour. Tim was a watcher, but for a different reason. She was called Ava. The two were talking quietly to each other, about the extra machine guns that were to be fitted to their boats and the likely meaning of this, when the air-raid sirens began to wind up.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Tim. ‘Just when you’re beginning to relax!’

  Len went over and shook a couple of the men from their group awake. They reached for their glasses one more time. As the sirens reached the height of their wail, the men who had been upstairs, including an embarrassed Charlie, came back down the stairs, dragging on shirts and doing up belts. The women hustled the sailors to the door and accepted flamboyant gestures of affection and farewell. One last pat on the backside, one last wave – and the sailors were gone, heading back towards the Padang, looking for a ride.

  They weren’t so lucky this time. The bombing was intense, and the incendiaries were designed to incinerate the wooden city and its defenders. They walked much of the distance and hitched short rides, standing on the running boards of passing vehicles. At one point, when one pattern of the bombing tracked straight at them, they were obliged to dive into the storm-water ditch by the roadside. The blast scattered dust and grit over them, and the ditch water was foul, but they were safe. When the wave of bombing passed, they got up and moved on.

  When they finally reached the docks, they showed their passes to the MPs and headed to where they had left their dinghies, tied up under one of the piers. In doing so, they had to pass through go-downs that had just received a direct hit and were burning fiercely. The heat was so intense that at first they considered another route – but there was none. So they held bits of iron and planking over their heads like umbrellas and raced past the hot spots. The go-down at the end of the wharf had been breached in the attack, and half of it was burning. But the other half offered a better route to their dinghies, and so they took it.

  Sirens wailed an All Clear.

  As Len and Tim led the way through the debris, they stepped on material that felt like marbles under foot. Len stooped to inspect whatever it was, and stopped. He picked some of it up. ‘Have a look at this, mate.’

  Tim stooped down beside him and picked a piece out of Len’s hand. He looked closely at it.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  The others stopped. Len rolled two stones in the palm of his hand for all to see. They glistened yellow in the enflamed light. Others reached down and picked up bits of the stuff.

  ‘It looks like gold. This is gold. Look at it! It’s bloody gold.’ Tim was almost shouting.

  ‘Bollocks. Give me a look,’ responded a sceptical Johnno.

  The men started to look around, prodding at the shambles with their feet, turning over bits and pieces of debris, inspecting them like policemen looking for clues at a crime scene. In the kaleidoscopic light of a night on fire, they were looking at small ingots of metal about the size of a thumbnail strewn across the floor of the burning warehouse. The fire had caused some of the more exposed lumps to heat up, and a couple of the men who had picked them up yelped in surprise and dropped them straight away. Others turned into better light. It was difficult to tell, but it became clear, as each of them took the opportunity to look more closely, that this was gold. Small ingots of bright yellow twenty-four-carat gold of the sort favoured by Orientals to fill teeth or make jewellery. They traced it to a series of damaged crates.

  ‘Jesus. What do we do now?’

  They stood in a circle around the mess of crates, heads bowed, staring into the lustre scattered at their feet. Mesmerised.

  Broken shopfronts and burst warehouses everywhere offered easy pickings to any passer-by. Shore and military police were preoccupied, protecting evacuation zones and what was left of military assets. Nobody was giving a damn about much else these days. What if? Even if the men did pocket the stuff, things were so bad they’d be bloody lucky to survive. So … what the hell? And besides, they had taken their fair share of risk. Were they going to leave this for the Japanese? They were all having similar thoughts. Then Johnno seized the initiative.

  ‘Come on. Grab a crate and see if we can get it to the boat,’ he instructed.

  It took two men to lift one crate comfortably: each weighed about a hundredweight. In the end, it was pretty obvious they could only cope with two crates. At least they had two dinghies. With a great deal of effort, they lugged the crates as far as they could, through the go-down and over to the ladder where the dinghies were. Getting the crates down and into the dinghies was a precarious exercise that nearly failed more than once, but the incentive was more than sufficient. In the end, they paddled back with their prize towards the two Fairmiles, shrouded in nets at their moorings.

  As they approached the launches, they held a whispered discussion. Where were they going to hide the gold? They did not want the officers to know about it – they were good blokes, but would be duty-bound to take it seriously. They quickly agreed to follow Jack’s suggestion to secrete it in the transom of 311, where there was an empty paint locker. Everybody on board 311 appeared to be asleep still, so they distracted the watch and gently lowered the crates into this stowage and closed it. As they were performing this task, the men said nothing. They simply shook their heads in amazement, grinned and patted each other on the back. Then they split up and tried to find some sleep.

  That night, however, sleep was not something any of the sailors got in any quantity. First thing in the morning, the boat was repositioned in order to fix supplementary armaments to it. The Fairmiles had been designed and built to be adaptable. Weapons and equipment could be reconfigured speedily, bolted to steel strips fixed to the decking, and men now fitted half a dozen extra machine guns to the decking of both vessels. Len helped bring sandbags on board and positioned them around each new fitting, to provide some basic protection. By the late afternoon, when the extra ammunition had been loaded, the vessel was sitting a little lower in the water.

  The men anticipated the call to action, but it did not arrive immediately. The Staff Command was still equivocating over where to deploy its resources, and Percival still did not buy into the idea that he was most at risk in the west. He dismissed the initiatives offered by his Chief Engineer, Brigadier Ivan Simson, who recommended a wide range of creative defensive measures. One such involved cannibalising motor vehicles and using the headlights to illuminate the Straits against the possibility of an amphibious assault. Instead, Percival removed a lot of material that had been positioned for the defence of the west and moved it east. Shenton Thomas, the Governor of the Straits Settlements, made his own facile contribu
tion to morale invoking sport as a motivating image, saying ‘We are all in the hands of God, from whom we can get comfort in our anxieties, and the strength to play the man.’

  It was decided that there would be no Naval activity in the Straits at night, to leave open fields of fire to the army should an attack of some sort occur. For this reason, the launch flotilla lay idle for a couple of days. The circumstances were tailor-made for an intelligent, resourceful and experienced enemy to attack.

  On 08 February, Japanese troops did cross the Straits, and from the north-west, as Wavell had predicted. About 13,000 of them, in two waves. By the following evening, the crews on both Fairmiles were alert and active, stripping the boats for action. The enemy occupied both sides of the Straits, and was preparing to launch another amphibious crossing, and the two Fairmiles were about to sail right into him.

  Several members of the same independent company whose officers had made the previous reconnaissance then boarded, to man the extra guns. The sailors on 310 welcomed them with solemn handshakes, and while Charlie provided mugs of hot tea, the launch slipped her mooring. Len looked across to the other Fairmile as both picked up a little speed to meet their ordained start point in time, and saw Jack Kindred in the gloom working on the aft deck. He gave an exaggerated wave, to which Jack responded in kind, and both returned to their tasks with a smile on their faces. It was going to be a while before either could smile again.

  Len turned back into the wind and made his way forward to his gun. Tim appeared beside him, slapped him on the back and set about loading. As was his habit, Len ran his hands over the barrel, then over the gun’s breach – first open, then closed. He leaned his right shoulder against the gunstock and reached forward with his right hand for the trigger grip, brass and cool in his grasp. He squinted through the gun sight into the darkness and trained the weapon port and starboard of the bow. Then he brought the safety back a notch and stood easy, wiping his hands.

  Behind the two Fairmiles, an eerie light prevailed. There was an overarching glow of orange reflecting off the dense cloud of oil smoke that blanketed the sky. Their passage this time took them down the middle of the strait, at slow speed. To starboard, on the island, the horizon was lit by the city’s fires, but in the middle distance, disturbingly, they saw other flames flickering in the jungle canopy, surely signs of recent combat. Occasionally the bloom of an explosion rose skywards, followed sometimes by a faint report. Len stole a look up at the bridge, where he could see Johnny, Malcolm Henderson and Richard Pool, who had been assigned the role of Gunnery Officer at the last minute. Out in the channel, from where last night’s invasion force had come, it was becoming unfathomably black. Those who manned the port-side guns strained their eyes for any movement. Len swung his gun around and pointed the barrel into the darkness. There was enough movement in the air to make hearing difficult. That, and the low rumble of engine noise. Occasionally there was the sound of a frightened bird beating its way across the water, and from the jungle on the island, the disconcerting crackle of gunfire.

  They crept further along the coast. Only half their anxiety for the task was about finding the enemy and destroying him. They had seen his work, and were keen to make him pay. The other half was for their survival.

  Len was frustrated – no, irritated – that he had been a target in so many ways and had yet to even see his enemy.

  Then suddenly, like an apparition, several small native craft – kolehs – full of armed men appeared from out of the gloom heading towards the island, and forged right across their bow. None of the men in any of the boats had time to think. Those in the kolehs looked up in horror as 310, following agreed procedure, simply rammed the kolehs, which immediately sank. The men on board were flung into the water. Len just had time to train his gun on one unfortunate craft before it disappeared under the Fairmile in two halves. The image of Japanese struggling silently under the weight of their equipment before they too disappeared beneath the water was not one he had anticipated.

  The two vessels continued on, cautious and undetected. The Straits were getting narrower, and they were getting closer and closer to the blown causeway and the need to turn back.

  Where was the enemy now?

  Disquieted, Len wound the safety off. They continued to glide quietly through the water.

  The light from the burning oil tanks now made a difference. As they reached the mouth of the Kranji River, flowing from the island into the Straits, they faced a wide stretch of open water. Flames, leaping high into the air at times, occasionally illuminated the whole area. After probing along the waterway for three hours, they were now obliged to turn back. Every man on board knew the risks would now heighten. Len worked his gun’s breech, an act of reassurance. He belted on his harness, hitched the stock to his shoulder and spread his feet. There was no armour on the gun because, in the initial haste to get the MLs seaworthy, the bulletproof shielding had never been fitted. He stood fully exposed on the foredeck, ready for anything, his right hand clamped onto the pistol grip. One of the things that appealed to him as a gunner was that this ‘pistol’ shot a three-pound shell.

  The launches made a wide-arced turn across the Straits and reversed direction. Now they were closer to the northern shore. The road from Johor Bahru followed the coast west. From the water they could see movement: a truck convoy, lights shielded, carrying men and material inevitably towards assembly and embarkation. Johnny called for more speed and ordered his Coxswain to track closer and closer to the road. Then, before the enemy was alerted, he ordered fire onto the convoy, but there came no response. Richard Pool had mislaid the whistle with which he was supposed to give the signal to fire! Johnny immediately yelled out, ‘Fire at will!’

  At once, a stream of bullets and shells raked the road. Behind them, 311 followed suit. The three-pounder could deliver twenty rounds a minute. Len – almost gleefully – loosed off a cluster of shots: more than he’d fired in his entire war so far. He felt the wana flood his veins, and he and his weapon became one. He could see his own shots striking the shore. All he had to do was adjust his angle. Vehicles stopped, some clearly hit, one exploding in a fireball from which small-calibre ammunition began to shoot out in every direction. Men, some of whom were themselves on fire, could be seen jumping from their trucks. Len sent another half a dozen rounds into the enemy convoy.

  Something whanged off his gun barrel. He ducked impulsively.

  The boat held its course. There was a shout from the bridge. ‘Starboard, one twenty! Range five hundred. Bring fire onto that building, before they find our range!’

  The building they could see as a dark shape on a rise overlooking the road. Len swung his gun right around and fired a cluster of shots shoreward. He watched with satisfaction as they stitched a pattern of explosions across the face of the building. Suddenly, from the shore, a searchlight began to flare, and then a second. As the lamps gathered their intensity, they swung down and swept the water, seeking out the attacking launches. Now the danger from returning fire was acute.

  Len didn’t need any orders. He swung the gun around, aiming at the base of the lights. He sent a ranging shot away at a low angle and saw the shell strike in front of the lights. He raised his sight a little and sent off a second shell, but this had no discernible impact. While the sea state was effectively calm, the movement of the boat imposed little handicap. Without hesitation, Len now loosed a fusillade of shells towards the searchlights, and the lamps disappeared in a cluster of explosions. Tim slammed another magazine into the breech. Johnny gave instructions, and Jock brought the launch to full throttle and swung away, reducing its profile from both shores. The Fairmile ducked and weaved until it was obvious that they were hidden by the darkness and out of range. Behind them, the burning trucks, strung out along the northern shore, receded into the distance.

  The crew now worked to ready themselves in case of further action. Len was surprised to look down and discover a pile of empty shell casings strewn across the deck ben
eath his gun. He had been so focussed during the action that he had heard little and seen nothing other than his gun barrel. He kicked the casings over the side. Miraculously, no damage was reported. The boat slowed back to a more stealthy speed and continued to head back towards safety. ML311 was somewhere in the darkness.

  In returning, they came to the location of their earlier encounter, running into debris, a section of a smashed boat, material and a single body floating in the water. They stopped and briefly inspected the scene. Then, satisfied that there were no other infiltrators, they motored on without incident for Keppel Harbour, and eventually tied up beside Laburnum.

  As 311 tied up alongside them, Johnno emerged from the engine room and came up on deck, breathing deeply and wiping his hands on his overalls.

  ‘Jesus. That was a bit of fun,’ Tim said, to nobody in particular.

  ‘Oh yeah? Come and have a look at this then,’ Johnno replied.

  His words had an urgency about them, as well as an air of mystery. A couple of the men, including Len and Tim, peered down into the mess room.

  ‘Jesus,’ Tim said, under his breath.

  On the mess-room table lay an unexploded shell.

  A call went out for Johnny, who turned out to be in the wardroom preparing to write his report. In response to the men’s summons, he, Henderson and Pool stepped into the mess.

  ‘How the hell …?’

  Johnny was expressing what everybody else was thinking. But in fact, nobody gave a damn about how the shell had got there. They were suddenly very interested in how to get rid of it.

  ‘Len’s had a bit of experience with bomb disposal, sir,’ Tim suggested.

  Len shot Tim a look. They had both helped Lofty get rid of the last one.

  Len picked it up. Johnny turned the shell over in Len’s hands. ‘Made in Birmingham’ was clearly stamped on it.