The Great Cat Massacre

by Gareth Rubin

  Later in the day the pilot took me to a restaurant to eat. There were only the two of us. The pilot went off into the back of the kitchen to do some business, probably about the cargo. I was only eighteen and stranded in a strange country in civilian clothes. I thought I could be shot as a spy, so I was fairly frightened as you can imagine, and kept my head well down.

  At the restaurant, an Oriental came up to me and offered me some of his Tiger Balm for my mosquito bites, which were pretty bad. He started to talk, but I could hardly understand a word. I gathered from his mixture of broken English and sign language that he was a Jap civilian and some sort of aircraft engineer himself. After all, ‘engineer’ sounds the same the whole world over. He thought I was a French aircraft engineer. He seemed very pleased about something and kept trying to talk to me. He was pretty drunk, mainly on cognac. We communicated in a weird mixture of sign language and place names and eventually he pulled out his diary and a map and tried to tell me where he had been and what he was doing there.

  He indicated that he had sailed on an aircraft carrier from Japan to Hitokappu Bay north of Japan and had seen a huge armada assembled there. On the 24 November he had been flown south to Phu Quoc Island to supervise some urgent operational modifications on the bomb racks of the Japanese planes based in southern Cambodia.

  He seemed very proud of what he was doing and what he had seen and indicated that we were the only people who knew about the fleet, and that it had been planning to sail on 26 November to obliterate the US fleet in Pearl Harbor and to launch a simultaneous invasion of Malaya and Singapore. He explained this with lots of signs and ‘boom, booms’. When I indicated surprise, he dragged out a kind of diary book and even showed me a few rough sketches of some of the naval ships that he said he had seen moored the week before to convince me.

  I realized it was important, so when he staggered out to the lavatory, I stole the drawings from his book. He got even more drunk after he came back, and when the pilot told me it was time to go I left my new friend vomiting over the verandah rail.

  On returning to Malaya the next day, 5 December, I immediately reported all I had been told to the RAF Station Intelligence Officer. Later that morning I was flown down to Kuala Lumpur where I was interrogated by two civilians whom I took to be intelligence officers. I handed over the sketches that the Japanese engineer had drawn and went through all the details yet again. During the course of my interview I said that I believed the Japanese to have been telling the truth as he saw it, and we agreed that if all the details of his story were true, then the time of the supposed attack would probably be in three days on 8 December [7 December Hawaii time, because of the International Date Line]. I flew back north to Sungei Patani that afternoon with strict instructions to keep my mouth shut once I got back to the station.

  Nothing happened after I got back. Despite the state of emergency the airfield never even went on full war alert, much to my surprise, and the next thing I knew was when a bomb blew me through the concrete doorway of the aircraftsmen’s showers at 7 a.m. on the morning of 8 December during a surprise Japanese air raid.

  As a result of my serious injuries I was evacuated from Malaya to Batavia and then Karachi and didn’t pay much attention for the next two years while my wounds healed. Then I was invalided out of the RAF back in the UK in early 1944.

  I often wonder what happened to the information I gave to those intelligence officers at Kuala Lumpur. To this day I can’t understand why Malaya Command didn’t go on a war alert that morning, let alone attack the Jap shipping which we all knew had been detected offshore.

  KEEPING A CODEWORD A BIT TOO SECRET – ALLOWING THE GERMAN FLEET TO ESCAPE, 1942

  In 1941 the British Navy and a fair whack of the RAF were engaged in attempting to destroy the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which were docked in Brest on the French coast. From time to time, the Air Force would drop bombs on the ships, and the Germans had little choice but to sit there and take it. Although the RAF had failed to sink them, the vessels had sustained substantial damage and the German authorities wanted to move them into German waters, where they would be better protected by the Luftwaffe. The British knew this and were on the alert for a sudden departure from Brest and back to Germany.

  There were two options for the Germans – the long way round, going around Ireland, Scotland and past Scandinavia; or the ‘Channel Dash’, through the Straits of Dover, then the North Sea. The second route would seem like suicide for the Germans, bringing the boats in range of Britain’s coastal guns, as well as the Navy and the RAF. Their only chance, it was felt, would be to try it under cover of darkness but it would still be very dangerous.

  The sheer absurdity of a daytime Channel Dash was just why the Germans went for it. The surprise, they hoped, would be enough to wrong-foot the British, rather like attempting to kick the ball into your own goal during a football match. The plan was to pass through the Straits of Dover on 12

  February 1942 with a heavy bodyguard. The battlegroup would consist of the two warships, an escort of destroyers, cruisers, dozens of torpedo boats and no fewer than 280 fighters providing air cover in rotations of at least 30 planes in the air at any one time. The Germans were most concerned about the threat from mines and British torpedo planes, which had recently helped sink the battleship Bismarck.

  But the British forces were going to be a lot lighter than the Germans expected. This was partly because the Royal Navy refused to send heavy battleships into an area where they would be as vulnerable to British sea mines as to German ones – not to mention the Luftwaffe’s French airbases. The Admiralty declared they were more than up for a fight off the coast of Scotland, but anything that happened in the English Channel would be the RAF’s bag.

  In fact, the body with the greatest chance of sending the Germans to the bottom of the sea was the RAF Coastal Command, who had the perfect weapon: the Beaufort torpedo-bombers. They even had a plan for activating these aircraft in the case of a daylight Dash. It was codenamed ‘Operation Fuller’. In the case of the German ships being spotted afloat, the codeword – ‘Fuller’ – would be relayed from the detection base to the airfields, the planes would be scrambled and the Nazis sunk.

  Unfortunately, this codeword was so secret that the RAF kept it a secret from those who needed to know what it meant and what they had to do with it. ‘Are you ready for Fuller?’ an officer in a radio station might have enquired of his contact in Coastal Command. ‘Ready for what?’ would have been the answer. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ would have been the officer’s reply, while tapping his nose and winking.

  Without the Beauforts, the British response would be restricted to nine low-grade torpedo boats, six destroyers (already decades old) and, incredibly, six Swordfish torpedo biplanes which had last seen service during the First World War and were popularly known as ‘Stringbags’ – their pilots were, encouragingly, told they were being put on ‘suicide alert’ because, if sent out, they knew that they wouldn’t be coming back. They would be swatted out of the air by the hundreds of German aircraft and the heavy guns on the ships below.

  The pilots’ bravery, it must be said, is as astonishing as how badly planned the operation was.

  On the night of 11 February the Germans set sail. As they moved through the dark waters, they were extremely lucky not to be spotted by a nearby British patrol plane, whose radar had blown a fuse. The hours passed and their luck seemed to hold, until, as dawn broke, the Germans, surprised not to be under attack, approached the Straits of Dover, where they began to suspect they were being led into a trap.

  It was then that the secrecy of the codeword ‘Fuller’ became important. Radar stations identified a large squadron of German aircraft, possibly providing air cover for a flotilla. Squadron Leader Bill Igoe at Biggin Hill airfield realised what was afoot and phoned his HQ to activate the secret plan.

  ‘Fuller, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Afraid not, old chap. Wrong number,’ was the response. />
  ‘No, it’s Fuller.’

  But the old chap at HQ had no idea who this Mr Fuller was. Igoe gave up and decided to scramble a reconnaissance plane himself to check the situation. It was piloted by Squadron Leader Oxspring and carried Sergeant Beaumont for an extra pair of eyes.

  In fact, the Germans had already been spotted because at the same time a Spitfire was returning with all speed to base after coming across the enemy battlegroup by accident. But instead of radioing through the urgent information the pilot had stuck to the rules and maintained radio silence, giving the Germans a few more vital minutes of safety.

  Oxspring was not such a prig and broke the rules to radio Biggin Hill and inform them what was going on. But he did not know the secret codeword, Fuller, so his report was ignored. In fact, all that happened was it tipped off the Germans, who overheard his report.

  When they got back on the ground, Beaumont rushed to inform an intelligence officer that he had spotted the Scharnhorst, which he had recognised from a briefing lecture about German vessels. But he was only a sergeant, so couldn’t really be trusted to have any idea about anything. The officer sent a man urgently to fetch a book of ship silhouettes to make sure. The man stopped off at the canteen for a cup of tea.

  At this point frustrated by the delay, Igoe and Oxspring tried to leapfrog the layers of military bureaucracy by contacting Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of their section, directly. But they were informed that he was busy handing out medals and his aide-de-camp dismissed Oxspring’s report, telling him: ‘You saw fishing boats. We are not going to bother the AOC over this.’ By this time, the Germans had had 12 hours of pleasant cruising.

  When, sometime later, more reports came in that confirmed what Oxspring was saying, the shocked British officers realised their earlier errors and activated the official plan: It was time for Fuller.

  It was just a pity that even those who knew what Fuller was had no idea what it really entailed. Of course, the plans were all written down. They just needed to look at the papers. But where were they?

  They were locked in a safe at Biggin Hill and the man with the key was on holiday.

  Across Britain, pilots rushed to their planes; unfortunately, neither they nor anyone else had the faintest idea what they were supposed to do in them. The only people who had some sort of view on the matter were the crews of the six Swordfish. They had an idea what was going to happen: they were going to die. They were supposed to have an escort of five Spitfire squadrons, which would protect them from the scores of German fighters while the Swordfish concentrated on the ships, but in the end only ten planes turned up. In such small numbers the Spitfires would have no more chance than the pilots of the Swordfish. Yet, despite knowing well the odds, they flew on to their target.

  When the RAF planes approached, the Germans genuinely thought it could only be a suicide attack such as the Japanese Kamikazes went in for – there could be no other explanation. The commander of the Scharnhorst later described it in his log: ‘The mothball attack of a handful of ancient planes, piloted by men whose bravery surpasses any other action by either side that day’. All the Swordfish were shot down and all but three of the 18 crewmen died. None of their torpedoes hit the mark.

  After their loss, the rest of Operation Fuller finally staggered into action. A few Beauforts joined the fray hours later, but were hampered by the fact that they were under-strength due to some of their squadron having been armed with bombs instead of torpedoes (no one knew that ‘Fuller’ was a naval operation). In addition, a number of their fighter escort had failed to turn up because their command base was trying to communicate with them in Morse code, but the planes had recently switched over to radio telephones and no one had mentioned it to the base, so it was like writing a letter to a blind man. Altogether a massive 675 planes were nominally involved in Fuller. Of them, only 39 attack aircraft sighted the enemy and dropped their bombs. All missed and 15 planes were shot down.

  It could have been worse, though. The Royal Navy was not entirely absent from the battle – the British destroyer Walpole engaged the enemy and was attacked by two aircraft. It was especially surprised by the fact that they were RAF Wellington bombers, which flew out of a cloud and aimed their bombs at their naval colleagues, luckily missing their target. The commander of the Wellington must have been even more astonished to see a squadron of fighters arrive and chase away the British, considering the heroic guardians who continued to escort and safeguard the Walpole were equally confused Luftwaffe Me-109s. Soon realising their mistake, the Germans withdrew, unsure what to do next.

  The greatest damage to the German fleet came from a mine that the Scharnhorst hit soon before it arrived back in Germany.

  OUT OF DATE, OUT OF TIME – ALLOWING BURGESS AND MACLEAN TO ESCAPE, 1951

  The Cambridge Spy Ring will go down in British history as the debacle that will forever undermine the image of British intelligence officers as suave, tough or brilliantly cunning, and replace it with a caricature of effete, effeminate chaps without the faintest idea of what they are doing or what they came into the room for.

  The five spies (one of whom has never been identified for certain) were all high up in the British intelligence and diplomatic services. For decades, they fed the Soviet Union information that often had British agents killed.

  Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were the first to be unmasked as traitors but they were tipped off and fled for France on 25 May 1951, on their way to mother Russia. Their attempt to escape had a hitch, however – they had been recognised boarding a ferry to the French port of St Malo by a customs officer at Southampton. After he informed the authorities, an MI5 officer was dispatched to head them off. He was to fly to St Malo and arrest them – he just had to run home to get his passport first. When he did so, he noticed that he had forgotten to renew it and he wasn’t going anywhere. He could only return to the office with his tail somewhere between his legs. He was later knighted and made chief of the Security Service.

  ARGY-BARGY – THE ARGENTINES INVADE THE FALKLANDS TOO EARLY, 1982

  In 1983 a government inquiry, the Franks Committee, partly blamed the Falklands War on Margaret Thatcher’s decision in 1981 to withdraw the Royal Navy’s only ship patrolling the South Atlantic, HMS Endurance. As Britain’s sole vessel in those waters, removing it had sent a message to the Argentine military junta that the UK was not interested in defending the Falklands, the Committee declared.

  The funny thing was that that message sent to Argentina was quite true. Although the Endurance was withdrawn simply to keep in with Thatcher’s ‘good housekeeping’ financial policy, the British government was also planning an orderly withdrawal from the Falklands. In 1981 Nicholas Ridley, one of the Foreign Office ministers, told a journalist: ‘We have 13 colonies left. It is my job to get us out of them. After Honduras [British Honduras, now independent Belize] the Falklands are next on the list.’

  Later that year he designed a sale-leaseback deal which would hand sovereignty over to Argentina, so long as the islanders could remain there under a British administration. Thatcher had wanted rid of the islands too and was drastically scaling back that part of the Navy that could defend them – the aircraft carrier Hermes was to be scrapped, as were two assault craft; and the carrier Invincible was being sold to the Australian Navy, which was preparing to take delivery when Argentina invaded.

  Had Endurance not been withdrawn, it is unlikely that Argentina would have thought it could stage an unopposed military takeover. For that matter, had Argentina waited another year before its incursion, Britain might well have voluntarily handed over the islands – and even if it hadn’t done so the Royal Navy would not have had the vessels needed for the counter-attack. Withdrawing Endurance saved £2m; the war that it led to cost £3bn.

  And the war was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, in 1982, one foolish mistake nearly turned the whole thing around.

  The British media are a pugnacious lot. According to them,
the government is always venal, wrong and amateurish, and they always know better. But does anyone listen? Nope. Still, there’s one time when they all fall into line – when the nation is at war. Publishing stories that would actively help the enemy is considered something of a no-no, even in Fleet Street (well, with the sole exception of the Guardian, anyway). Despite this, in 1982, at the height of the war, the Ministry of Defence sent out a press release. It was good news of Argentine naval failures and the BBC happily ran an item based on it. The BBC’s report sang: ‘Following the Argentine air attacks on 21 May two unexploded bombs on one warship have been successfully defused and a further one dealt with on another warship. Repairs are being carried out on the other warships.’

  In fact, the problem with the report was that it was absolutely true. British craft were being repeatedly hit by Argentine bombs which were failing to explode, most probably because the Argentine pilots were flying too low over their targets, so that when they dropped the bombs the fuses didn’t have enough time to arm the device before it hit the ships. Nearly three-quarters of all the ordnance dropped on the British ships was failing to detonate and the British Navy wanted to keep it that way. The last thing they wanted was for the Argentineans to cotton on, and start flying a bit higher up, because the sea was the real battleground when it came to the Falklands. On land, British troops entirely dominated, but on the water things were more evenly matched and the Argentines sank a number of British boats, drowning many of the crew.

  Had the Argentine pilots been able to treble their effectiveness simply by realising they were flying too low, the entire campaign might have been reversed.