History Friday – The Secret Voyage of the Kofuku Maru

When I came around to writing a novel set in the World War II timeframe a couple of years ago, one of the main characters spent the war years, first in Malaya and then Australia. This meant a deep dive into the war along the southern Pacific front, and life in Australia during that period. We Americans had Pearl Harbor, defeat of our military in the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, Wake and Midway, Guadalcanal and Tarawa; Australia had the loss of their troops in Singapore and Malaya, the occupation of Sumatra, Japanese air raids on Darwin, and the war next door in New Guinea.

The fall of Singapore struck a particularly heavy blow to the Allies in 1942: so close to Australia, with many personal and economic connections. Refugees from British and Dutch interests in southwest Asia fled in the direction of Australia and India in anything that could float and escape the deadly notice of the Japanese. One of those fortunate vessels was the Kofuku Maru, a 70-ft Japanese-built wooden craft, with a mainsail and an engine. It was constructed in the late 1930s to support the fishing fleet based out of Singapore, bringing water and food out to the fishing fleet, and collecting the catch for sale in the marketplace. Confiscated by British authorities after war broke out, by early spring of 1942 the Kofuku Maru was under the command of a volunteer Australian merchant mariner in his sixties named Bill Reynolds. Reynolds was tasked with evacuating civilians from the Malay peninsula, first to Sumatra, and then to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

During this fraught period, Reynolds met up with a British Army intelligence officer, Captain Ivan Lyon, who was on pretty much the same mission – organizing an escape line from Singapore to Ceylon and India. When it became clear that Singapore would surrender to the Japanese, Reynolds made one last trip, all the way to Ceylon. At some point, someone accustomed to thinking ahead realized the sneaky possibilities in using a relatively slow and decrepit-appearing Japanese-built boat which no one in the maritime Far East would look at twice. Supposedly, Reynolds had already noted that Japanese aircraft attacking refugee boats fleeing Singapore ignored the Kofuku Maru. Perhaps Reynolds said so to Captain Lyon.

Lyon was career Army, from a family of career soldiers. He was driven and intense, rumored then to be connected to the Bowes-Lyon family, whose younger daughter was then Queen of England. (He wasn’t.) Lyon had been stationed in the Far East for nearly five years, long enough to have had an Oriental-style tiger tattoo on his chest. He was very familiar with the territory, having spent a lot of leisure time sailing. He was married to the daughter of a French official in Indochina, with whom he had a baby son. Wife and child were interned after the ship they were traveling on was intercepted and turned over to the Japanese.

After the surrender of Singapore and the occupation of much of the south-western Pacific by Japan, the Kofuko Maru was sent to northern Australia, into the inventory of a shadowy joint Allied intelligence operation that went by the noncommittal initials ZES, for “Z Experimental Station” or sometimes “Z Special Unit”, based at a nondescript compound near Cairns, Queensland. Bill Reynolds and Ivan Lyon also gravitated into the “Z” organization, a varied collection of people with outside-the-box notions about how to fight the Japanese which had been accumulating by a kind of organizational osmosis as 1942 wore on. One of those notions was generated by a member of “Z” who had formerly worked in New Guinea as an oil exploration geologist and knew the territory well. He suggested a strike at Japanese supping in the port of Rabaul, using teams of agents in two-man collapsible canoes, called Folboats, dropped off by submarine at a distance from Rabaul. The teams would hide out on a nearby island, paddle into the harbor at night and attach magnetic “limpet” mines to selected ships, mines timed to detonate hours later. Planning and training for such an attack got underway, but never came off; the fighting bypassed Rabaul, and the “Z” command echelon eventually canceled that project as risking too many resources for not much gain.

But the novel notion of limpet mines and Folboats remained in play – just that the focus of such an operation moved to a new direction: Singapore. About the time that the Kofuku Maru arrived at the “Z” compound – Captain Lyon began recruiting a team, a mixed lot of Australian and English soldiers and sailors. The Kofuku Maru needed a new engine, one which wasn’t held together with spit and bailing wire – and now she had a new name: Krait, after a small and deadly venomous snake common in India.

Recruited to captain the Krait was a veteran sailor and navigator named Ted Carse, who when asked in the initial interview if he could take a ship from Melbourne to San Francisco replied, “I could take her anywhere.” He had graduated as a naval cadet at the end of the first war, served in peacetime for ten years, got out of the service, and then knocked around the world as an able seaman, among several other eccentric career paths. Carse had barely made it back into military service, due to chronic bronchial troubles, but in the war emergency of 1942, warm, breathing and experienced was good enough for recruiters. Another key recruit to the team as Lyon’s second in command was Royal Navy officer Donald Davidson, of whom it was said that if Edmund Hillary hadn’t climbed Mt. Everest first, Donald Davidson would have. He was a maniac for physical fitness and an expert canoeist, an able outdoorsman, and had worked in Burma and the Far East for years. Australian Army Lieutenant Bob Page rounded out the officer cadre on what would be called Operation Jaywick. Page was the son of the deputy administrator on New Guinea, captured by the Japanese, and assumed dead in the sinking of a Japanese prison ship. Like Lyon, Page had very personal reason for animus against the invading Japanese.
(To be continued…. Part 2 is here. This is going to be a three-parter, though.)