TAWAU GUARDSHIP
In the 1960s the evil and diseased Indonesian megalomaniac Sukarno decided to take his oppressed people's minds off their privations by pretending to have a war with the infant Federation of Malaysia. This was marked by various military adventures and much rhetoric, but we and the Australians and the New Zealanders had to lay on a big military and naval effort to keep the Indons' heads down.
The game in Borneo had been cranked up one notch in February 1965, when a battalion attack by Indon paratroops nearly succeeded in taking out an under-manned Parachute Regiment company base in Sarawak. This reverse was only prevented by the amazing courage of the Paras' Company Sergeant Major. One lesson learnt was that some of the Indon troops were of very high quality and a part of this was due to the excellent training many of them had received from ourselves, even at our Jungle Warfare School in Johore. To counter them we deployed thousands of Commonwealth and Ghurkha troops, working with the incredibly brave and loyal Iban and Dyak aboriginals who lived in the forest. Sadly, ultimately the Ibans and Dyaks were handed over to the Malays and that has doomed their culture. In this way, as usual in the scuttle from Empire, we let down our true friends and others inherited the gains won by British blood. It was salt in the wound that exported British arms and munitions would be used against us.
In Sabah (ex- British North Borneo) a very large force of Indon Marines (KKO) was deployed against much smaller, even tripwire numbers of British troops. The KKO had shown their teeth in a major incursion in 1963. The crucial area was Wallace Bay where a small gang of Old Etonians lived a Somerset Maugham existence running a logging concession, comfortably housed in the middle of nowhere with swimming pools, club, servants galore and a good library service. The received opinion was that they were all raving mad. The border snaked around in the jungle, cutting across the many navigable rivers and creeks that ran out of Indonesia into the bay, and was perhaps less well defined to us than if our charts had been of a later date than 1895. Indeed I once met a chap called Wardroper whose great-grandfather's name appears on the cartouche of the main Wallace Bay chart.
Besides infantry and artillery units gradually going loco in the mangrove swamps, to counter this threat the Navy stationed a destroyer or frigate off Tawau, on a four-weekly or so rotation (perhaps cunningly timed to ensure nobody served the thirty days to qualify for a BORNEO clasp on their General Service medal). The idea was to be instantly ready to put down an immediate gun bombardment on whatever confluence of streams or rivers would be used by any enemy incursion, and by night to search all the native kumpits - small motor boats of about fifty tons - which for generations had traded unimpeded between Sabah and the rest of Borneo, and which might now be used for smuggling arms or Indons. The frigate also acted as a support ship for the various minesweepers and small craft that we also operated in the area.
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In March the duty ship had been relieved by HMS Loch Fada, now jokingly referred to by her people as "the rusty ghost of the Borneo coast" (a pun on the Commando Carrier HMS Albion, "The Grey Ghost ditto") but in her day a valiant and successful frigate, which sank two U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. She was such an antique that she was the last ship in the Royal Navy to have lugged joining shackles in her anchor cable. This may sound an arcane point of seamanship but the lugged shackles can tend to jam. The cable will then haul taut and perhaps snap with the loose end flailing across the forecastle. A smack on your leg from a heavy anchor cable will leave you hopping on the other one. Just this had happened on board Loch Fada and her Gunnery Officer, the forecastle Officer, had been removed to hospital with a broken leg. Her Captain screamed for a relief for him for the remaining two weeks of his patrol. News of this reached HMS London on 4th April while we were anchored at Pulau Tioman enjoying a Sunday afternoon's swim and bronzie. When our Gunnery Officer told me about Loch Fada's problem I figured that I was being sounded out. Mindful of the traditional dictum that them as is keen gets fell in previous, I therefore improved the shining hour by shooting off to the Captain's cabin and eagerly volunteering. Actually I relished both a break from the London (and from him) and also a slim chance to see some action or at least to get a bit closer to it, and as ever there was the lure of an unusual bit of sightseeing. London was due to be back in Singapore on 6th but in fact returned on 5th. I put out feelers as to when I should fly and was told 6th, night stop at Labuan, and onward routing Wednesday 7th to Tawau. I was then told to pack and fly at 0615 on 6th, which was a surprise. More were yet to come. |
As dawn broke on 6th I was creeping up to Changi in a pusser's bus behind a vast trailer that was crawling along carrying a dead Sea Vixen. Our driver managed to circumnavigate this obstruction by taking a path through the jungle and so we got to Changi in a bus that had been nearly rattled to pieces en route. After a breakfast in what the RAF considered to be Officer accommodation I was shepherded out to the aircraft, certainly the oldest Hastings I'd ever seen. And the journey to the front was on.
Jungle Greens and red berets, rifles and webbing, I felt very much a tourist as the plane filled up with soldiery and all their impedimenta. Almost as soon as we took off, rifles and kit started tumbling out of the overhead racks. I rather hoped nothing was loaded. It took four hours to fly to Labuan. When we arrived we found that the once tired, neglected strip had been hardened and was surrounded by practically every type of aircraft the RAF possessed, including Javelin fighters. The deeper one went into Sabah the more this air of "a strong man armed" became noticeable. The soldiery headed into a reception hut and started sinking cool beers but I was whisked away by one of COMNAVBOR's staff. No night stop for me, I was to grab my lunch and go on via Borneo Airways afternoon flight - "they want you in a hurry". So I left the colourfully-hatted warriors - no white soldier in Borneo seemed to wear an ordinary blue beret - and went foraging in the RAF mess, which was full of Crabs stocking up on duty-free to take home to their married quarters in Singapore. The lunch was predictably ghastly.
Borneo Airways were very couth, with much smarter Dakotas than the crates that plied the Channel at home, and Oriental hostesses whose grace and solicitude for one's comfort could not be bettered. I chummed up with an Army colonel and had a happy trip exchanging cool beers and stories about the RAF. Three more hours of flying, via Jesselton (now Kota Kinabulu), Sandakan and Lahadattu, brought us to Tawau, where a Land Rover was waiting to take me to the jetty. I will ascribe my fatigue to my seven hours in the air.
Borneo was pleasing to look upon. Whatever was not impenetrable jungle seemed to be mangrove swamp with a multiplicity of rivers pouring down from the high inland mountains, spreading and diverging and leaving behind larger and larger islands till they became the shallow South China Sea. The effect was beautiful and strangely not monotonous - the settlements on stilts in the water, the isolated huts and bungalows, the lines of fish traps, and the riot of flowers and brightly coloured birds combined to yield continual interest. Fruit and fish abounded, the climate was drier than that of Singapore, and lumber and rubber provided work and exports. Here and there Chinese beavered away getting rich.
Tawau was a trading centre. The main trade was in copra, smuggled out of the Philippines and Celebes (Sulawesi) in kumpits and shipped out in Japanese cargo ships. Back to deprived Indonesia went smuggled tobacco, electronic goods, and luxuries. Also in this trade were Jongkongs, which were sailing boats, smaller than the kumpits. I had been brought up on tales of what marvellous seamen these natives are. The reality was that every boat I was to come across was an unseaworthy and unseamanlike lash-up that I would not trust in my bath. The crews did not know how to splice a rope, nor even what to do with the end of a rope thrown to them when they were coming alongside, and a kindly description of their boat handling would be to call it manifest incompetence. They sailed around the ocean with a plastic Woolworth thing, the size of a half-crown, for a compass and were usually out of fresh water when we came across them. Because the traders were technically smugglers they had a hard time from the somewhat inhumane management at the Indon end of the run. They therefore carried arms for self-protection, but also smuggled arms to the Celebes where a very promising rebellion had been going on for some time. In Singapore one of our guests in the wardroom was an Officer who had been one of my Divisional Officers at Dartmouth. He told me how we were stoking up this little problem to give Sukarno something to do at home.
Loch Fada was backing up a force that included 42 Commando, police and other boats run as a private navy by a (English) Malaysian RNVR chap, a battery of Malaysian artillery with Royal Artillery spotters and Army Air Corps bods to fly the spotters and other people about, and all sorts of other bodies. The chief Gunner was a major RA who lived the life of a Big Game Hunter only with human (well, Indon) targets. He lived in a tent, could never get a bath because of shortage of water, and never had ham, pork or bacon to eat because his gunners were all Muslims. He solved these problems by visiting the Etonians at mealtimes and frequently liaising with the Tawau guardship so that he could use her Officers' bathroom and beg a bacon sandwich. The Resident Naval Officer ashore acted as a base, signal centre, and dogsbody. The guardship performed all the active co-ordination of the multifarious people listed above, running a private war on a sort of old-boy net. The RAF were represented but since they needed days of notice for anything they were generally ignored. They flew random maritime patrols and were responsible for freighting people's stores about.
I scrambled up her jumping ladder to find Loch Fada just about to set out for her night's work. After dumping my kit I went down to the wardroom, to see the beaming face of Leading Steward Wu welcoming me from the hatch. Wu bore no ill-will for the antics he had had to clear up after when he looked after HMS Newfoundland's Gunroom when I had been Out East as a Midshipman in 1956.
There was another familiar face as ever now in this club of a Navy. The Navigating Officer was an old Portland minesweeping chum who told me later that he had been privily asked by the CO whether Gunnery Officers knew how to navigate and whether they could stand a watch. The explanation of this was that the CO was an aviator and a bit out of touch - he had only come back into fish-headery a month before. I got on very well with him and I think he enjoyed having someone to chat to who was not in his regular chain of command. He was a clubbable fellow and clearly did not enjoy the loneliness of the cuddy. That is an aspect of Command that must have a very depressing effect on gregarious people who have always got on well in their Wardroom. This seemed to keep me up late most evenings.
For the first and last time in my career I found myself with a loaded revolver and a box of ammunition in my cabin drawer. This was necessary because one had to turn out at the drop of a hat to manage interception and boardings on deck. The drill was to get the kumpits alongside aft and order all the crew out onto Loch Fada's quarterdeck so that they were, in some sort, hostages. I covered their chief man with a pistol while the Midshipman rummaged the kumpit. There was never anything to find except for one man whom we stopped repeatedly who had a terrible rusty .303 in a sack with somewhat corroded ammunition. This was clearly for his own protection so we let him keep it. The kumpit people realised this was all a great game if they were on the level, so I could never get them to take my pistol seriously. It is difficult to look fierce if the other bod thinks it is all a big laugh. The Indon sailors themselves were scrawny, small, very lightly built fellows who looked as if a square meal might not come amiss.
One thing that was not a big laugh was a loud bang from the starboard bridge wing. On each side we kept a Bren gun manned to cover the kumpits' approach and boarding. My first night the Bren gunner let fly a round by mistake, which whistled past uncomfortably close to his chum and the people on the bridge. Thank goodness that happened when I had only been on board a few hours as otherwise I would have been in the frame for the subsequent inquisition. We had a busy night putting the searchlight on everything that moved, not helped by a large palm tree that had a frond sticking up that looked exactly like a lateen sail in the moonlight, and which sloshed around the bay, turning up in different places each night, all the time I was in Loch Fada.
We needed to be on the top line for bombardment as in this sort of war you have to let the enemy fire first, although you just pray he is off-tune and will miss. To this end various trees had white blazes painted on them as markers. This was a brilliant idea of the Gunnery Officer of HMS Chichester when he was on Tawau duty. He had his Gunner's Yeoman go out in a boat day after day painting palm trees. The paint ran though, and which tree was which was quite unclear. The whole bombardment deal was tricky because there was hardly any sea room and that rather vitiated work done ranging on river confluences and so forth, because the position of the firing ship is key and its manoeuvring was difficult. I set about a ranging shoot and two 4" shells whistled off into Indonesia. This was rather embarrassing. I discovered that the range dial on the mounting had the most enormous amount of backlash in its fitting. Fortunately the Indons did not notice the splashes or we might have had a serious war on our hands. We had a pretty good idea of their plans as a boat with their brigade staff in it had overturned a few weeks previously and the bodies, with various document on their persons, had usefully floated down into our possession. Also, of course, the KKO had had to grow a new brigade staff. The joker in the pack was that Sukarno was riddled with syphilis and dying of kidney failure and was even more unpredictable and irrational than he had earlier been. He was really a right little Hitler. On board I was much more comfortable than in the London and the Chinese cooks and stewards were ace. Down below Loch Fada's engineers worked two miracles a night to keep the old saturated-steam reciprocal engines going, with continual bursts of condenseritis as salt water forced its way into the feed system from innumerable tiny rusty holes. In fact we did most of this last two weeks of the patrol on one shaft so it was just as well she had two.
The nights were busy but we sometimes got time off by day. On the Sunday we steamed over to Mabul - a small but lovely island - for a banyan (picnic) and swim. A coral reef protected its beaches from sharks. When I got ashore the locals were earning a quiet dollar by climbing palm trees to get coconuts for the sailors. The water was blissfully warm and filled with the greatest variety of coloured fish, coral, sea-anemones and sponges. Not a colour that existed but there was a fish to match it; I was very glad I had put my mask and flippers into my bulging kit bag. The deep purple mouths of the clams, the grace and elegance of the fish, and beyond the reef the indigo drop into the shark-filled bay delighted, as did the brilliant sunshine on the turquoise lagoon and the welcome shade of the palm trees on the beach. Oh what a lovely war!
On the Tuesday we put into Wallace Bay itself to show ourselves to the locals and also advertise our continuing presence to the Indons. There was a Swedish timber ship anchored there, loading teak, which threw a party in the evening for the locals and the army and ourselves. Her passengers were a weird lot but then anyone who goes from San Francisco to Sydney via Wallace Bay must be a bit different. The Swedish captain was a giant, full of bonhomie, who laid on a superb buffet supper culled from his native cuisine with some Chinese Chow included. Foo Yung Smorgasbord. We gorged ourselves and the Etonians got tight. One of their wives was clearly pretty fed up with this and also somewhat stimulated by the other male company, and was clearly looking for help to put her inebriated husband to bed. However only our postman was allowed trips to the shore. The next morning I went back to the Swede for clay pigeon and .22 shooting, which was great fun, potting the necks off bouncing floating beer bottles using our host's very good competition ammunition. His passengers were off up the jungle with the army shooting down coconuts with .303s.
On Easter Saturday, 17th, the Malaysian frigate Hang Tuah (ex-HMS Loch Insh) appeared on the horizon, come to relieve us. We unloaded our Bofors, locked up the small arms, and quite regretfully sailed away, tracing our track between the islands north of Borneo past lush scenery and isolated settlements and back into the South China Sea. On Wednesday 21st we were back in Singapore and in pouring rain I went back onboard the London. The next day I was 28 years old. I like it when my birthday falls on a Thursday - as it did in 1937 - Thursday's child has far to go!
RJH Griffiths, Lieutenant HMS London
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