Operation Creek

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, three German freighters operated by the DDG Hansa, the Ehrenfels, the Braunfels and the Drachenfels, took refuge in the harbour of Mormugao, Goa. They did so because Portugal was neutral during the war while the British territory of India was not. In 1940, they were joined by a vessel from Italy, the Anfora. All British citizens onboard were permitted to disembark. However, the crew soon ran out of supplies. This led to some abandoning the ships to pursue odd jobs in Goa for money. While the British were aware of the presence of the ships, they did not perceive them to be a threat since they were merchant ships.[2]

However, in 1942, the India Mission of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at Meerut intercepted coded messages to the U-boats, relaying detailed instructions to the German Navy on the positions of the Allied ships leaving from the Bombay Harbour in the Indian Ocean.[1] Following this, during autumn that year, forty-six Allied merchant ships were attacked.[3] The SOE then discovered that a Gestapo spy, Robert Koch (known as the "Trumpet") was living in Panaji, the capital of Goa, with his wife Grete. SOE agents Lieutenant colonel Lewis Pugh and Colonel Stewart went to Goa in November 1942 and kidnapped Robert and Grete Koch on 19 December. The couple was taken to Castle Rock, Karnataka, for questioning as part of Operation Hotspur, where they were then allegedly murdered. The SEO thus suspected the Ehrenfels to carry a secret transmitter that was used to guide the U-boats against the Allied ships, with instructions from Koch.[1][4]

In the first week of March 1943, German U-boats sank twelve American, Norwegian, British and Dutch ships in the Indian Ocean, a total of roughly 80,000 tons.[5] The British could not infringe on the neutrality of Portugal by openly invading in its territory. The Calcutta Light Horse had been on military reserve 1,400 miles (2,300 km) away in Calcutta and now comprised middle-aged bankers, merchants and solicitors. The SOE chose fourteen members of the Light Horse and four others of the Calcutta Scottish to perform the covert operation of capturing or sinking the Ehrenfels, led by Pugh.[3]

Some of the eighteen members of the assault team (consisting of the Calcutta Light Horse and the Calcutta Scottish) embarked on a hopper barge, Phoebe, at Calcutta and sailed around India to Goa. The remaining members took a train from Calcutta to Cochin and joined the crew on board the barge there. Around midnight of 9–10 March 1943, the town of Vasco da Gama, where Mormugao harbour is located, was celebrating the last day of the Carnival.[2] One member of the Light Horse used SOE funds to throw a large party in Vasco, to which the crew of all ships in the harbour were invited, successfully leaving behind only a small crew on the Ehrenfels.[6]

Due to a "coincidence", the lighthouse and the luminous buoy of Mormugao harbour were not working that night, allowing the Phoebe to enter the harbour in darkness. The British officers then attacked the Ehrenfels,[1] killing its captain. The ship was captured along with the transmitter, but the crew of the Ehrenfels had opened the sea valves of the ship, sinking it. The crews of the other merchant ships in the harbour, the Drachenfels, the Braunfels and the Anfora, saw the attack of the Ehrenfels and scuttled their ships to protect them from capture by the British. As the Phoebe left Mormugao harbour, it transmitted the codeword "Longshanks" to the SOE headquarters to indicate that all Axis ships had sunk.[6] Five crew members of the Ehrenfels were reported dead (including the captain), with four more reported missing.[1]

After the attack, the thirteen U-boats operating in the Indian Ocean only sank one ship, the Panamanian Nortun of 3,663 tons, throughout the rest of March. In the following month of April, they only attacked three ships.[5]

The crew aboard the four Axis ships had jumped overboard and swam to the shore, where they were captured by the Portuguese and held in Aguada jail. Local news reported that they had mutinied. On 1 October 1943, the Judicial Court of Mormugao stated that there had been no attack by a foreign ship and convicted the crew members only for the scuttling of their ships, until the end of the war.[1] While in jail, they lived a good life, bribing the authorities and even roaming freely in the compound.[2] While some infiltrated into British India and then escaped to their native countries after being set free, some of the Germans settled down in Goa and started families there, facing an uncertain future in Germany.[7]

Since the attack was a secret, the members of the British assault team received no official recognition of their part in the war effort. The members of the Calcutta Light Horse designed a memento for themselves: a seahorse. The Light Horse and the Calcutta Scottish were decommissioned in 1947 following the independence of India. It was only in 1974 that the British Government declassified documents of the operation.[1][6]

In 1951 the remains of the four merchant ships were salvaged by the Mormugao Port Trust, the port at the site of the battle, with the help of one the Germans who chose to stay behind in Goa.[2] In 2017, the port announced that it would salvage the remnants of the ships for scrap.[8]

In 2002, records released from the British National Archives revealed that three of the Axis crew members had surrendered to the British and had joined the SOE's operations in India, where they worked until they were allowed to go back to their country after the war ended. The records also suggested that Operation Creek was meant to capture the Axis ships, which they could not do so only because their respective crews had scuttled them.[1]

The world became aware of the exact events of the operation only in 1978, when the story of Operation Creek was told in the book, Boarding Party, by journalist James Leasor.[5] It was dramatised in the 1980 film The Sea Wolves starring Gregory Peck, Roger Moore and David Niven.[9][10]

In the foreword of the Boarding Party, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma wrote:

This book tells how fourteen of them, with four colleagues from the Calcutta Scottish, another Auxiliary Force unit, volunteered for a hazardous task which, for reasons the author makes plain, no-one else was able to undertake. This happened shortly before my arrival in India in 1943, as Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, and immediately saw how valuable were the results of this secret operation. I am pleased that at last credit may be given to those who planned and carried it out.[5]