The following is taken from Edwyn Gray’s _Submarine Warriors_ (New
York: Bantam Books, 1990 ISBN 0-553-28545-9). Mr. Gray provides an
excellent overview of submarine history from its earliest connotations
through both the First and Second World Wars. The following deals with
a non-traditional role for a submarine — fighting pirates. As always,
questions and comments are welcome. This book is available in paperback
(mine is a used copy) and I recommend it highly.
Edward Wittenberg
ewitten507@aol.com
p.s. For those of you who are interested, I’ve have found a job (much
sooner than I expected) in middle grades social studies and begin work
on the January 20th. Ed.
LIEUTENANT FREDERICK J. C. HALAHAN, RN
“The go-under-water war junk.”
Unlike their more colourful forebears who roamed the Spanish
Main in well-gunned galleons and ravaged the Barbary Coast with
fast-oared galleys, the latter-day pirates of the China Seas were
frequently forced to hijack their victims because they had no vessels of
their own. With little knowledge of seamanship, they would have been
incapable of sailing a ship even had they possessed one. The traditional
pirate vessel was, in fact, something of a rarity in Chinese waters and
its absence made the task of the authorities charged with suppressing
the activities of these sea brigands that much more difficult.
Like modern political terrorists, their methods were brutally
simple. Having selected a promising target, the pirates, disguised as
coolies, with weapons hidden in their bed-rolls or inside their clothing,
would board the chosen ship as deck passengers at a busy port such as
Shanghai or Amoy, confident that the milling mob on the quayside would
make their detection difficult. Once at sea, in response to a
pre-arranged signal from their leader-often a well-dressed businessman
travelling first-class–they would seize the vessel, overwhelm and
sometimes murder the European officers, and take the hijacked ship to a
desolate bay where they could loot the cargo and plunder the
passenger’s valuables without disturbance. On occasion hostages would
be taken for ransom. Sometimes the ship itself would be destroyed, but
usually both ship and passengers would be released unharmed once the
pirates had removed everything of value. It was a lucrative trade with
only a minimum of risk for those involved. And there was no dearth of
eager volunteers for these cut-throat expeditions.
Less adventurous criminals organized protection rackets and
threatened action against ships whose owners refused to pay them for
the guarantee of a safe passage. The demand notes, written in pidgeon
English, were deadly in intention but frequently hilarious in style:
“To the Hang Lee’s illustrious junk to peruse. We have to write
this few words to you and beg lend us $10,000 in foreign banknotes as
protection expenses and to deliver to our Tong at an early date before
starting otherwise torpedo would be used to fight against your junk,
and don’t blame on us for no liberality as well—with compliments.”
Others, like this warning sent to a purser working for Butterfield
and Swire, were more chilling: “We understand your company frequently
ships silver dollars from Shanghai to Hankow. You are requested to let
us know how much is on the way and other particulars of shipment,
such as the name of the steamer, port of shipment, date of departure,
amount of shipment, and probable date of arrival. If you found of
having withheld information on purpose we will mete out proper
treatments to you and you must not say you are not forewarned …. We
have placed the word ‘Death’ before us. If there be any damage to us
and if there is no reply and ff you are indiscreet about the matter we
shall shoot to kill.”
Thousands of pirates also operated on the great rivers of
mainland China, and the more important commercial waterways, such as
the Yangtse, were policed by a multi-national force of gunboats flying a
variety of flags, although the majority of the vessels belonged to either
Britain, the United States or Japan–Britain taking the lion’s share of
the responsibility with a fleet that out-numbered all the other gunboats
added together. But it was impossible to protect every stretch of open
water or to probe each island and creek and, despite the intervention of
these small but well-armed warships, the waterfront gangs carried on
their murderous trade with little hindrance from the authorities.
Strictly speaking, the river pirates of China should be described
as bandits for, under International Law, an act of piracy can only take
place on the “open sea”–a term applicable solely to salt water. Thus
raiders and hijackers operating on fresh-water rivers, however piratical
their methods and intentions, are not, in the strict legal meaning of the
word, pirates. So far as their victims are concerned it is a somewhat
academic distinction!
The unsettled political situation that followed the death of Sun
Yat-sen in 1925 and the subsequent opening of Chiang Kai-shek’s
offensive against the northern war-lords and the Communist forces
under Mao Tse-tung provided a perfect scenario for the growing power
of the pirates, whether they plied their trade along the Yangtse and its
tributaries or on the open waters of the South China Sea. And incidents
were reported almost daily by the English-language newspapers in Hong
Kong and Shanghai.
In August, 1927, the steamship Man On was stopped by the
Chinese Navy’s gunboat Kong Ko in the lower reaches of the Pearl River.
A party of uniformed seamen came aboard and demanded the right to
inspect the vessel’s armoury–a locked case containing rifles, pistols and
ammunition situated in the chart-house. But when the key was produced
the naval boarding-party disclosed their true colours by promptly
seizing the guns and turning them on the Man On’s crew. Emulating the
buccaneers of the eighteenth century, the gunboat’s seamen had
apparently mutinied against the constraints of naval discipline, murdered
their officers and seized the little paddle-powered warship with the
intention of earning their fortunes from piracy. The steamer was taken
under the lee of a nearby island and, after off-loading the cargo and
seizing the Master and twenty-four passengers for ransom, the riverine
pirates allowed the vessel to continue on its way. A few days later the
would-be pirates were ambushed by government forces and the gunboat
was recaptured.
A more serious incident occurred in early September when the
500-ton Hong Kong-registered, and therefore British-protected, Kochow
was hijacked on the Si-Kiang a few miles below Samshui while on
passage from Hong Kong to Wuchow. The pirates had come aboard the
steamer in the customary manner disguised as coolies and, just before
nightfall, they stormed the bridge and the saloon simultaneously. The
Captain, at dinner in the saloon, was shot in the stomach and the Chief
Engineer was gunned down as he ran out into a corridor brandishing a
revolver. Heaving his body ‘overboard without ceremony, the pirates
kept the frightened passengers covered with their guns while other
members of the gang who had stormed the bridge forced the Chief
Officer and helmsman to reverse course and proceed down-river.
A short while later the terrified Chinese coxswain was ordered to
bring the Kochow alongside a small wooden pier at the village of
Taipinghu and, as soon as the steamer was tied up, a fresh horde of
pirates stormed aboard to strip the vessel of its cargo and to herd the
Purser and 160 passengers ashore as potential hostages. Quite by
chance a British steamer had observed the Kochow moving downstream
and her alert captain, realizing that something was amiss, reported his
suspicions to the British river gunboat Moth which found the abandoned
steamer at dawn the following morning, but the pirates and their
hostages had vanished. After medical assistance had been given to the
wounded Master and other members of the crew, the plundered vessel
was escorted back to Hong Kong.
Four days later, with the approval of the local Chinese Admiral,
Chan Chat, three Royal Navy gunboats, the Cicala, the Moth and the
Moorhen, proceeded to Taipinghu and, having given the villagers time to
leave their houses, opened fire on the little township and proceeded to
bombard it with their 6-inch guns until the entire waterfront area had
been destroyed. Then, forming up in line ahead with their battle flags
streaming, the three gunboats moved up-river to Shekki, another
notorious pirate stronghold, and subjected it to a similar bombardment.
It was a punitive expedition redolent of nineteenth century imperialism,
but it was the only way to exterminate piracy in a country whose
leaders were too busy fighting with each other to worry about such
matters as brigandry and murder.
The Colonial authorities in Hong Kong were equally worried about
the growing number of attacks on British ships which were taking place
in the South China Sea and Intelligence Officers had established that
the Chinese hijackers were taking captured vessels into Bias Bay, a
notorious pirate lair on the coast of Kwantung Province to the
north-east of Hong Kong. Several cruisers and sloops were despatched
to patrol the general area of the South China Sea and it was decided to
send a submarine to cover Bias Bay itself, possibly the first and only
time in history that a submersible has been used against pirates.
The boats of the 4th Submarine Flotilla, which was based at Hong
Kong, fascinated the Chinese. After all, most of their efforts were aimed
at keeping their frail vessels afloat. Yet here were the English
deliberately allowing their ships to sink beneath the water and return
to the surface none the worse for the experience. To the superstitious
Chinese the “Go-under-water war junk” was the most frightening
weapon in Britain’s naval armoury–its joss exceeding even that of the
aeroplane. Many looked upon it as being almost divine in origin–for who
other than the Sun God could produce a boat that was able to sink to
the bottom of the sea without drowning its crew?
L-4, the “go-under-water war junk” selected for the Bias Bay
patrol, had been completed in 1918 and was one of the submarines built
by Vickers under the Emergency War Programme. An enlarged and
improved version of the famous wartime E-class, they served the British
Navy well during the immediate post-war period, pending the arrival of
the new Oberon boats in the late ‘twenties and, in fact, a few even
survived into the Second World War. Displacing 890 tons in surface trim
with a ballast capacity of 180 tons, L-4 measured 231 feet in overall
length with a maximum beam of 23 1/2 feet. Her Vickers-built diesel
engines produced 2,400 h.p., giving the submarine a top speed of 17 1/2
knots on the surface, while her electric motors could push her along at
a submerged speed of 10 1/2 knots fox’ short periods. Armed with six
18-inch torpedo tubes and a single 4-inch deck gun carried in a
shielded emplacement forward of the conning tower, the L-4 was a
formidable vessel for her time and her 36-man crew had every
confidence in their boat–and in their captain, Lieutenant Halahan.
Frederick Halahan had graduated from the Dartmouth Naval College
in 1919 and his confidential report for that year described him as being
“distinctly clever and a nice fellow.” The following year Martin Nasmith,
who had won the VC for his exploits in the Sea of Marmora with E-11 in
1915, found the young Sub-Lieutenant to be “energetic, keen, and
reliable.” In a report dated 31 December, 1921, his new Commanding
Officer noted him to be “hard-working, keen, and absolutely reliable. His
ability is most marked, being well in advance of his years… and in
every way a most promising officer;” an opinion readily endorsed by his
Flotilla Captain, C. P Talbot, a wartime veteran who had sunk the
German destroyer V-118 and the U-boat U-6 while in command of E-16 in
1915.