Томас Кенэлли: The Widow and Her Hero

The news came down to Leo that the operation had been cancelled. As delightful as that would have been for me, had I known, he was of course desolated. The war had been going for so long, and he had the capacity to infiltrate, to observe, to tumble, to extinguish life. But IRD was proving a mêlée of cancelled good intentions and projects which did not work – often because the Americans were singing from a different hymn sheet, and one which in time would be graced with God’s evident blessing.

After Rabaul was cancelled, Leo was ready to join Doucette as a tamer of Australian personnel. He wrote me another letter. He expected still that we would be reunited about October, maybe November at the latest. Would I have lost interest by then in a plain, uncultivated fellow like him? he asked.

It was easy to wait. Lots of girls in my office were waiting. A number had absent boyfriends, soldiering banally somewhere in Northern Australia, or at greater peril in New Guinea or North Africa, or flying in bombers in Europe. We compared notes, we drank tea together, and wandered in a mist of God-given and state-sanctioned longing. All this gave our plain jobs, the yellow folders of acquisitions I consulted and added to and filed all day, a holiness they would otherwise not have had. We went to the pictures on Thursday nights to have our heartache further teased by tales of heroic acts but heroic longing as well. Action in the North Atlantic, So Proudly We Hail, Desperate Journey, Mrs Miniver, Sahara , and the war set to music in Hollywood Canteen . We emerged chattering like birds. I think only my shyness prevented me from a sort of crazed morbidity which afflicted some of the girls in the department.

In the meantime, without my being aware of it, Doucette was preparing to take Leo deeply into the oceans of the enemy. Doucette had already inspected a Japanese fishing boat confiscated by Australian authorities in Townsville at the start of the war. Pengulling , Doucette named it. The animal in whose honour it took that Malay title was the pangolin, a large anteater, many-spiked. Cornflakes was the operational name decided on for what would be done via Pengulling . Why? Because, on the morning after his proposed Singapore raid the Japanese would be too distressed to eat their breakfast!

The fishing boat was brought up to Cairns by coastal steamer and was moored by a naval workshop on the south end of Cairns, near the Yarrabah Aboriginal reservation. She was packed with the necessary limpet mines, on models of which the men had trained in the darkest nights around their camps. And so, on a May morning, Doucette and all his Argonauts – Leo amongst them – set off brimming with clever training, skirted Cairns harbour and headed up Australia’s long north-east coast.

After a day, his engineering officer contracted malaria and was put in a hammock on deck. Under the inexperienced care of a rating, the engine block melted down, and the Pengulling and its heroes drifted, called for help, and had to be towed back to Cairns. All Charlie Doucette’s personnel, skilled in so many now irrelevant aspects of the craft of infiltration, were scattered back to their regular army and navy postings. Only Doucette and Rufus Mortmain and a highly frustrated Leo remained in Cairns. Major Doxey of IRD put out a call to find Pengulling a new six-cylinder 105-horsepower Cascade diesel engine, with its spare parts, but the latter were apparently as rare as the Tasmanian tiger. Leo and the others were aware that Major Doxey, and the Allied generals to whom he reported, were now losing interest in Operation Cornflakes.

Conversations over evening drinks in the officers’ mess in Cairns showed Leo that Doucette had absolutely no doubt that Cornflakes would go ahead. His wife and child being still lost and perhaps drowned, he clung to his Singapore dream. He kept writing for his new engine and the return of his crew, but Leo himself feared it might never happen. Leo had dreams, he told me later, in which his father, always a severe man, chided him for leaving him a prisoner.

So Charlie Doucette, the Boss, decided on an exploit to bring the efficacy of laying mines from folboats and onto shipping to the attention of their superiors. They would lay limpets to the Allied ships in the larger port of Townsville. Doucette, Mortmain and Leo prepared everything – the entire plan – but disguised it as a training exercise.

Doucette was able to gather a number of his original young men, Australians, and a Kipling-esque duo of Geordie and Welshman who had originally escaped from Singapore with Doucette, and took them south from Cairns on the train. Trucks loaded with their gear and with further members of the old group met them in late afternoon by the railway lines north of Townsville, and there Doucette’s people got down and then waved the coastal train and its passengers on towards Townsville. The trucks took them on a timber trail through the bush and to a stream named the Black River. Doucette’s group spent the night and much of the day paddling and portaging down the river until it disgorged onto a wide-open and deserted beach. They paddled then for the high mass of Magnetic Island, where they rested in the bush behind the beach.

The next day they spent plotting through a telescope the positions of a dozen Allied ships at anchor in Townsville, and then at midnight set off in a series of folboats across the ten kilometres of sea. Leo’s partner was again the little Russian Jockey Rubinsky. One of the folboat teams attached dummy magnetic mines to two ships anchored in the roadstead, waiting for a mooring. The other four, including the team of Leo and Rubinsky, came on a current through the narrow entrance and past the navy’s mine control point. It was so easy, a token of how easy Singapore might be.

The tale of this monkey business would tickle them for the rest of their mostly short lives; in fact, IRD people in general had some dreadful times ahead of them, and needed to have triumphs to sustain them, stories of impudent nights like this. Under, of course, their impudent cavalier, Charlie Doucette.

I know from Lydon’s book rather than from anything I heard directly from Leo that attaching limpets to ships was done in this way: the man in the bows of the folboat attached a magnetic holdfast to the side of the ship. The man in the stern – Leo always took the stern position – used a foldable rod he carried in the bottom of the boat to pick-up a limpet mine from the cargo space in front of him and set it against the boat’s hull, as deep as he could get it below the water. Each folboat carried nine limpets, and each limpet weighed over a hundred pounds, so that to lift one from a sitting position required great strength in chest and arms, which Leo my beloved possessed. I had judged him strong, I had dreamed of being the client of that strength. Yet still I had probably underestimated it.

Needless to say, a sort of delicacy was also required to place a holdfast and three magnetic mines against the hull of a ship in which all sound resonated. But most of Doucette’s men had by now been practising that technique for the better part of a year. Leo and Jockey placed theirs as ordered, three to each of three ships. There was a great deal of welding going on along the wharf, and up against one of the ships, a destroyer named Warradgerry , lay a lighter, a manned repair barge. But Leo set his magnetic training mines, incapable of doing damage to these friendly ships, without difficulty.

Upright in their slivers of canoes and without being detected from the wharves, Charlie Doucette’s men put their strings of pretend fatality on the Dutch freighter Akabar , on the Australian freighter Katoomba , on two of Mr Roosevelt’s American Liberty ships, and on a series of destroyers and corvettes. One of the Boss’s crews, made up of two sailors, were attaching their mines soundlessly to the Katoomba when they saw a man on deck smoking, looking down at them. Just out for a row, mate, they told him, and he took it as a reasonable explanation and went to bed.