The Great Cat Massacre (13 page)

Even after the Japanese defeated the British forces on the mainland, Singapore was most definitely not expecting an attack from that direction. For one thing, all the British guns were pointing out to sea – they could be turned to face the mainland, but the ammunition was designed to attack shipping, not land forces. For another, last-minute defences against boats carrying hostile troops from the mainland had not been completed because of a wages dispute with the labourers – not an isolated problem, since many of the Australian troops stationed there had ‘withdrawn their labour’ over pay and many others were drunk for a substantial proportion of the time.

In addition, British intelligence had dismissed any threat from the Japanese Air Force because they had reports saying Japanese men’s bodies were too small and frail to withstand the G-force of aerial manoeuvres. Even when Japanese bombers started to hover ominously over the city, the lights stayed on because no one could find the master key to turn them all off. The Post Office, on the other hand, messed up in the opposite manner – by cutting off all phone calls to the front line after the wartime regulation three minutes.

In the end, 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops surrendered to just 35,000 Japanese. It is generally considered the worst disaster in British military history.

The military authorities might also have been criticised for ignoring a specific warning of the attack on the Malay mainland – along with details of the simultaneous attack on Pearl Harbor as an added bonus.

Stationed at an RAF base in northern Malaya, as it was then, was the 18-year-old Air Technician Peter Shepherd, who had signed up to the Air Force at the tender age of 15 when war was declared. On 4 December 1941 he was told that he would be taking a trip in a Dutch East Indies civilian plane as the Dutch engineer was ill. He described what happened in his book,
Three Days to Pearl: Incredible Encounter on the Eve of War:

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.