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Three of these sixteen torpedoes achieved hits, throwing up water-spouts beside Haguro’s hull “like a Prince of Wales’s feathers, more than twice as high as her bridge.” Saumarez was now hit again, however. Scalding steam burst through the boiler room, killing several men in the most horrible fashion. A terrified bridge lookout abandoned his post and fled below, which caused him later to be court-martialled, dismissed the service and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for cowardice in the face of the enemy. The captain’s secretary, supposing from the ship’s violent manoeuvres that the helmsman was disabled, engaged the emergency steering aft the funnel. In a spirit which might have won Japanese admiration, an excited petty officer urged the secretary to ram the enemy. Power quickly resumed control, however, and watched Venus put another “fish” into the stricken cruiser, whose decks were now awash.

Errant torpedoes swerved in all directions, narrowly missing British ships. The engineer officer of Saumarez ordered every other man out of the boiler room before manhandling an unexploded Japanese eight-inch shell up to the deck, aided by a petty officer. He then had his little joke, reporting the lethal projectile’s presence to the bridge before adding: “But don’t worry, I’ve thrown it over the side.” The flotilla crowded the Japanese cruiser, “snarling round the carcass like a lot of starving wolves round a dying bull.” At 0206, Venus reported Haguro sunk. The British used searchlights to conduct a perfunctory scan of her resting place without finding any survivors, then hastened away to open the distance between themselves and Japanese airfields before dawn. The slightly damaged Kamikaze later recovered some of the cruiser’s crew.

British submarines operated with increasing energy against Japanese shipping off Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, but the most spectacular exploit was performed by midgets. It was a fantastically dangerous business, conning tiny underwater vessels into enemy harbours. Italians pioneered such techniques, the Japanese used them unsuccessfully, the British refined them. In 1944, Royal Navy “X-Craft” seriously damaged the battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord. When the first “XE-Craft” reached Brisbane in April, the British were crestfallen to discover that the Americans had no interest in promoting their operations. It might be politically necessary for the U.S. Navy to endure a token British presence in the Pacific, but King and his subordinates had no intention of providing opportunities for piratical British adventures—or, as the Royal Navy believed, for the publicity that might accompany successes.

Only in July did the little XE-Craft flotilla get its chance, after a spell of training in which two divers died of oxygen poisoning. Towed by conventional submarines with passage crews, five midgets were dispatched to cut telegraph cables off Hong Kong and Saigon—and, most spectacularly, to attack the heavy cruisers Myoko and Takao at Singapore. Early on the morning of 31 July, having slipped the tows from their parent ships, Lts. Ian Fraser and John Smart steered two three-man boats up the Johore Strait. That afternoon, Fraser took XE-3 under Takao’s hull. His crewman, Jim Magennis, then emerged from a hatch in frogman kit, to dump the boat’s two big mines under the Japanese cruiser.

It was a hair-raising business. First, one charge refused to unlock from XE-3’s hull. Then, when Magennis re-entered the boat, for several minutes it appeared that a falling tide had trapped the submarine beneath Takao’s bottom. XE-1, delayed by encounters with Japanese patrol craft, laid its own mines under the same cruiser. The two little boats made good their escape. That night the charges exploded, severely damaging the cruiser and winning Victoria Crosses for Fraser and Magennis. Strategically, in those last weeks of war their feat was irrelevant. But such small triumphs delighted the Royal Navy, so eager to be seen to contribute to the defeat of Japan.

ONCE OKINAWA was secured and American