X.1. by Roger Branfill-Cook

Author:Roger Branfill-Cook [Branfill-Cook, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473820951
Publisher: Seaforth
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Analysis of the Mayers affair

The tragedy of the affair, which impacted heaviest of all on Mayers himself, is that apparently he was not driven by malicious intent, but merely trying to make a living outside the Navy, which he felt had passed him over, by employing his considerable talents elsewhere. Submariners – who by their very nature were independently-minded, and with a wartime tradition of individuality in dress habits and discipline matters – could be their own worst enemies when it came to advancement inside the peace-time ‘Silent Service’.

Mayers’ skills lay in technical analysis and training. His Staff duties would not have given him much opportunity to indulge in heroic actions. As a ‘technical expert’ he may have been one of the last victims of the traditional Navy suspicion of ‘engineering’ officers. He could be accused of naivety in offering his services to the Japanese, but it is by no means clear how much the newly-perceived threat posed by the Japanese Navy in the eyes of the Admiralty had actually percolated down to officers of Mayers’ rank. Historical precedents would all have pointed to the fact that the Japanese Navy continued to be one of our closest allies.8

After flirting disastrously with French designs, the nascent Imperial Japanese Navy had firmly decided to copy the British model. We supplied them with their successful early pre-dreadnoughts, which had given them the edge over Russia, and the heavy guns of their first home-built dreadnoughts. The magnificent Kongo class battlecruisers were a Vickers design, and the lead ship was built in Barrow. In the early 1920s, retired Lieutenant Commander Frederick Bernard Fowler, RNAS, who pre-war had founded the Eastbourne Aviation Company, led a team of pilot instructors to teach the Japanese Navy how, of all things, to operate torpedo bombers and fighters from the deck of their first aircraft carrier, the diminutive Hosho. The design of Hosho herself owed much to the plans of HMS Argus which the Royal Navy had freely provided to Admiral Iida in 1918.9 And up until the early 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Navy continued to be the best customer for rangefinders produced by Barr & Stroud. Little surprise, then, that Mayers innocently believed he could continue to work with the Japanese.

Unfortunately, reading between the lines, it is possible that Mayers’ non-British parentage may have gone against him, at a period when class distinctions were still set in stone, especially within the main state institutions. Police investigations discovered that one of his parents was Dutch, although the file showed a question mark as to which one. By his name it is likely that it was his father who was of Dutch nationality, probably from neighbouring Dutch Guyana. It is likely he was also Jewish.

The ultimate outcome of the Mayers affair was that Britain lost the services of a talented submarine officer, who might have made a significant impact on the tactics of the Submarine Service during the Second World War, especially if he had had the opportunity to examine the tactics and attitudes of Japanese submariners through close working contact with them.

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