For Five Shillings a Day by Dr. Richard Campbell-Begg Dr. Peter Liddle

Author:Dr. Richard Campbell-Begg, Dr. Peter Liddle [Dr. Richard Campbell-Begg, Dr. Peter Liddle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, General, Vehicles, World, Social History
ISBN: 9780007555826
Google: 3GgpAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2013-12-19T03:35:01+00:00

John Hickley

However, with the attack on Pearl Harbor early on 7 December, the fat was really in the fire then, and within a very short space of time the Japanese military advanced pretty damn quickly right down the Malay Peninsula. And there was a scare that there was a landing of the Japanese somewhere on the east side of the Gulf of Siam.

And then Repulse and Prince of Wales sailed to compete against the Japanese invasion forces, which were thought to be there. And the destroyer escort was going to be supplied by HMS Express of the same class as Encounter, and one of the old Australian V&Ws, Vampire I think it was. The Express was fitted with a contrivance on the quarter-deck called TSDS, two-speed destroyer sweep. The destroyer streams these two paravanes from each quarter and it is a method of sweeping mines. I had been in Acheron as a sub where we were fitted with TSDS. So the captain of Express, Cartwright, he knew that I was available because Encounter was in dry dock at the time. He got the captain to allow Hickley to go to Express to give them an idea how to run this minesweeping gear. So we duly sailed with the two capital ships at fairly high speed and streamed the TSDS gear, and then it worked for a bit and then eventually it parted, the sweep parted. It didn’t really affect the price of beer.’

In fact, the news of the Japanese landings in Siam and at Kota Baharu in Malaya had reached Admiral Tom Phillips in Prince of Wales at midday on 8 December, and he had sailed with his two capital ships later that afternoon, intending to attack those transports. There was no air cover. When the force was sighted by Japanese planes on the evening of 9 December, Admiral Phillips turned to the south and headed back to Singapore. That night he received a signal from Singapore reporting a landing at Kuantan, which turned out to be erroneous, but which he decided to investigate with the results now described by Lieutenant Hickley:

‘And I can remember the landing at the supposed place was a bit of a red herring – there was nothing there at all – and then Express was sent close in shore to have a dekko to see if it was a fact. And we went in very close and, of course, there was nothing doing here. Came back and rejoined the capital ships and within a few minutes we looked into the heavens and saw high-level bombers appearing from the south. And indeed they were high-level bombers and they attacked those two ships, which had been dispersed to act independently, and within a very short space of time they had scored direct hits on both of these poor ships, followed then by wave after wave of torpedo-bombers, which were brilliant. Although they lost one or two, they again scored hits, which very soon reduced the speed of these lovely ships and finally they were sitting ducks.

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