Operation Jaywick: the raid fought by 14 men in a fishing boat

On the night of 26 September 1943, seven Japanese ships lay sunk or badly damaged in Singapore Harbour, struck by limpet mines placed hours earlier by a small team of Allied commandos who had slipped into the heavily guarded port disguised as Asian fishermen. It was one of the most daring special operations of the war, carried out by just 14 men. The raid, codenamed Operation Jaywick, was the work of Z Special Unit, a specialist Allied reconnaissance and sabotage force formed largely of Australians, alongside British, Dutch and New Zealand personnel. It was commanded by Major Ivan Lyon, a British officer who had escaped Singapore ahead of its fall to the Japanese in February 1942. He returned using a captured Japanese fishing vessel, renamed MV Krait, to get his team back in. The crew trained in secret for months at Refuge Bay on New South Wales's Hawkesbury River, learning close combat, night navigation, and the use of folding canoes and limpet mines. Aboard MV Krait were Lyon, Lieutenants Hubert "Ted" Carse, Donald Davidson and Robert Page, Corporals Andrew Crilly and Ronald "Taffy" Morris, Leading Seaman Kevin Cain, Leading Stoker James McDowell, Leading Telegraphist Horace Young, and able seamen Mostyn Berryman, Frederick Marsh, Arthur Jones, Andrew Huston and Walter Falls. Krait departed Exmouth, Western Australia, on 1 September 1943, her crew disguised as Malay fishermen for the six-week round trip. Nearing Singapore, six men paddled into the harbour by foldboat canoe under cover of darkness, attaching magnetic limpet mines to the hulls of Japanese vessels moored there. Seven ships were sunk or badly damaged, without a shot fired by the raiders and without a single Australian casualty. Krait recovered her exhausted canoeists and made the long journey home, arriving back at Exmouth on 19 October 1943. Before that voyage, Krait had travelled north from New South Wales via Darwin, and after the war she returned there, operating as a coast watch and intelligence support vessel and later commissioned as HMAS Krait in 1944. Z Special Unit kept a Darwin base at the old Quarantine Station, disguised under the name Lugger Maintenance Section. This reporter has a personal connection to that history. While posted to Darwin in 2012, I had the honour of accompanying Bombing of Darwin veterans around the city's wartime sites. One of them, Merv Fox, later honoured at the Australian War Memorial in 2016 as one of the last surviving members of Z Special Unit, took me to East Arm, once home to the Catalina flying boat squadron, and recalled working there as a messenger, once carrying a message to the Krait before she departed for Exmouth. Z Special Unit's service went unacknowledged for decades, its records unopened until the 1980s. Not until 1 August 2016 did the unit receive its first national commemoration, with a permanent plaque unveiled at the War Memorial. The unit numbered about 1700 members, deployed in small teams across more than 80 operations in the Pacific and South-East Asia. Senior AWM historian Dr Karl James described its members as "amongst the bravest of the brave." Success came at a bitter cost a year later. A follow-up raid on Singapore, Operation Rimau, attempted in 1944 by many of the same men including Lyon, Davidson and Page, ended in disaster: the entire team was killed in action or captured and later executed.