The Widow & Her Hero (3 page)

Much of the Australian autumn and winter he was in
training for this Rabaul mission, which would never take
place. His dreams of invading Rabaul Harbour by canoe
with Jockey Rubinsky and others were ultimately quashed
by General MacArthur's headquarters, which would not
supply a submarine for the drop-off and pick-up.
MacArthur's office had earlier said that it would all be
okay, but then one of the American submarine fleet was
destroyed in those same waters. And in any case, a new
plan was in force to bypass the large Japanese garrison in
Rabaul and to let it wither on the vine. Suddenly Rabaul
was not worth risking any more submarines for. The Americans,
I discovered later, also found it ideologically offensive,
since it seemed to encourage the idea that British
imperialism, even in its more modest Australian variety,
would take up in New Britain after the war from where it
had been in 1941.

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 melee 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.

In any case, Rabaul being cancelled, Leo was ready now
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 lose 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, 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
and
Sahara
. 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
attach 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 the 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 a 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 six miles 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 one was a hefty weight, 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 other vessels. 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.

But what larks, as Dickens would say! On a night like
that a young man – many young men – might mistake their
stylishness for immunity from wounds.

Leo wrote an account of this which ended up in his
office drawer in Melbourne. It was given to me after the
war by Foxhill, one of Leo's best friends in the bureaucracy
of IRD. Needless to say, it is written in the style of
Boys'
Own Adventures
. But what else would you expect? To
convince the authorities to unleash Cornflakes was for Leo
the prelude to our marriage.

Because of the barge anchored beside the destroyer, I wasn't
able to work along the full length of the ship but placed a line
of mines under the bows, deep as my arms would reach – we
didn't want them to be exposed by the falling tide until just
before noon the next day. There were actually men welding on
the wharf, and the guards in their tin hats were discussing
the previous year's Melbourne Cup which they'd attended
baksheesh, for free. Jockey held us good and steady, as I leaned
and reached, putting my own arms deep in the water. There
was a metallic sort of gargle when the limpets attached. It is a
wonderful thing to have an art, as my father used to say when
he made my mother laugh. When I had done it, I put my hand
on Jockey's shoulder so we could go.

We had an effortless row out of harbour on the tide. The
moon had gone somewhere behind Mount Louisa, and our
boats were pretty light now with all the mischief taken from
them. Outside the boom, we turned south to the picnic ground
near the mouth of the Ross River, pulled up our folboats there,
and sat eating a breakfast of compo rations, and we would
suddenly laugh, remembering something from the night's
business.

The Boss organised accommodation for the men at the naval
barracks. He's insisted that he take Mortmain and me to the
officers' club. So a truck arrives for everyone – the same that
dropped us off to the north the other day – how long ago I can
barely tell. And so that's what happened – the officers' club. I
got a very good room with clean sheets – wonderful. And I was
so absolutely done in that I didn't hear all the alarms of the
town nearby go off at ten o'clock, as the three highly placed
fake mines we'd put along the length of a Dutch freighter rode
up out of the water. The area near the wharves was immediately
evacuated, I believe – various kids got a day off school.
But I slept through all that, and I imagine Doucette was only
mildly disturbed.

Sometime after three o'clock in the afternoon, a truck pulled
up outside the same officers' club where we were resting up.
There was a lot of loud yelling and officious orders given, and
boots in the corridors and noise of the kind of soldierly drill
provosts are good at. I got up and looked out my door and saw
guards and a provost officer at the door of the room where the
Boss was getting a rest. Mortmain emerged from his room
wearing a singlet and khaki underpants and – I swear – his
bloody monocle in his eye.

Boss, he called into Doucette's room.

I've just been arrested, cried the Boss from within. These
gentlemen thought I'd slept long enough.

I told you the girl wasn't legal age, Boss, Mortmain yelled
and winked at me, his eye without the glass in it. Could I be
arrested with Major Doucette? he asked the provost.

The provost told Mortmain there wasn't any warrant for
him, and Mortmain said he understood that, but they'd missed
out on arresting him so many times in the past.

Lieutenant Mortmain is my second, I heard Doucette say.
He'll accompany me. Mortmain looked over at me. And you
can come too, Dig, he told me. (He always called me Dig or
Digger in an exaggerated British way.) I got dressed. I have to
say I didn't want to miss out on being arrested either.

I have transportation room only for two prisoners, said the
provost.

We'll squeeze up, said the Boss.

They took us to the harbourmaster's office under Castle
Rock. There were a collection of ship's captains in there, and an
American colonel. One of the captains was a very angry
Dutchman. We should not have dared to touch his ship. He had
recently been attacked in New Guinea waters by Japanese
aircraft, and he was very jumpy. When he stopped talking,
Doucette apologised and said that he wanted to alert people to
the vulnerability of Australian ports. (I think he'd earned the
right to tell that slight untruth.)

And the thin-lipped old Scot who was harbourmaster
asked him in a brogue that could have ground wheat if he
was saying he wanted this outrage reported in the scandal
sheets?

There were some naval officers in the harbourmaster's office
and they all seemed calm, laughing now and then. But the
Boss, Mortmain and myself were careful not to laugh.
Mortmain merely shifted that ridiculous monocle around by
the muscular force of his cheek and eyebrow as if he was
laughing inside. The Australian captain of the
Warradgerry
spoke up and said he was sure this event was merely intended
to be news amongst us.

And Doucette answered, It was a stunt unworthy of public
attention, sir, but useful to those who have ears to listen.

The captain seemed quite jolly given that fake limpet mines
had been put all over his ship. He assumed that Doucette had
authorisation for this exercise? The Boss undid the top button
of his khaki shirt and brought forth some documents which
were wrapped in cellophane. He placed them on the table, not
being too definite about who would pick them up first. The
naval captain did. When the cellophane was unwrapped, two
separate typed letters were visible. The captain read the first
one and passed it to the harbourmaster. Then read the second
and did the same. Then the letters made their way around the
Dutch, the three French and the Australian merchant captains
and were absorbed one at a time. At the end of the line they
were passed to the American colonel. They did not seem to
make a huge impression on him, but his face remained neutral
throughout the whole thing. He excused himself, stepped
through the line of merchant captains and returned the letters
to the Australian navy man in charge of the port without
comment or thanks. Then he resumed his place in the far
corner of the room.

The Australian port commander declared it seemed both
General Wavell and General Blamey had given Doucette
open slather or
carte blanche
, and some of the captains
might be angry and embarrassed, but a greater good had
probably been achieved. He himself didn't seem angry and
embarrassed.