The Cocos Islands mutiny

On the night of 8/9 May 1942, on tiny Horsburgh Island, one of the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, some of the men of a Ceylonese coastal artillery battery took up arms against their own officers. The mutineers, led by Bombardier Gratien Fernando, intended to imprison the British battery commander, seize the two six-inch guns and signal to the Japanese that the islands lay waiting for them undefended. The mutiny collapsed that same night. One loyal soldier was killed and an officer wounded, and after a trial by field general court martial three ringleaders were hanged in Ceylon in August 1942. Long little known outside Ceylon, the episode is most often remembered today for one reason: these were, as is usually stated, the only Commonwealth soldiers executed for mutiny during the Second World War.

An atoll at a crossroads of cables

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are two coral atolls lying roughly halfway between Ceylon and Australia – about 2,700 kilometres from Perth and about a thousand kilometres south-west of Java. From the 19th century they were run like a private estate by the Scottish Clunies-Ross family, owners of coconut plantations worked by Malays brought in for the purpose. Formally the islands belonged to the British colony of the Straits Settlements and came under the governor in Singapore; after the fall of Singapore in February 1942 they passed to the administration of Ceylon.

The islands’ importance lay not in copra but in communications. From 1901 a submarine cable station operated on Direction Island, a junction of the lines linking Africa, Australia and Asia, and from 1910 a radio station as well. In 1914, during the First World War, the station was wrecked by a landing party from the German cruiser Emden, which immediately afterwards fell victim to the Australian cruiser Sydney in the Battle of Cocos. In 1942 the cables were again of great value: they allowed messages to pass between Australia and Britain without risk of interception, and the islands also served Allied radio monitoring.

The defences were in the hands of a small garrison. On Horsburgh Island, which sheltered the anchorage, stood two six-inch guns manned by the Ceylon Garrison Artillery, the coastal artillery of the Ceylon Defence Force, mobilised on 2 September 1939. The cable station on Direction Island was guarded by a detachment of the Ceylon Light Infantry, and there were also a few signallers, some of them Australians. The whole Ceylonese contingent numbered about 75 men. It was commanded by Captain George Gardiner, before the war an accountant with an export firm in Colombo, who had received a wartime commission.

The war draws near

By the spring of 1942 the men on Horsburgh had reason to consider their position hopeless. The Japanese had taken Malaya and Singapore, then the Dutch East Indies. On 3 March a Japanese naval force shelled Direction Island; the station manager then sent a message saying that the installations had been destroyed, although they in fact worked throughout the war – a ruse that probably discouraged the Japanese from landing. On 31 March Australia’s Christmas Island, some 900 kilometres from the Cocos, fell. On 5 April, Easter Sunday, aircraft from Vice Admiral Nagumo’s carriers bombed Colombo, the home town of most of the gunners, and in the following days sank British cruisers and the carrier Hermes during the Indian Ocean raid. On the radio the men listened to the BBC, but also to Japanese propaganda proclaiming “Asia for the Asians”.

Against this background a conflict was growing within the battery. According to the Australian historian Peter Stanley, reviewing Noel Crusz’s monograph on the mutiny, Gardiner was unable to treat with respect the young volunteers who had joined up with enthusiasm, and his disciplinary methods aroused general resentment. The battery was in any case a motley mixture: European and Eurasian officers commanded gunners who were Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants, Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers – descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch.

The leader of the plot was Bombardier Wathumullage Gratien Hubert Fernando, born in 1915, a former pupil of a prestigious school at Mount Lavinia and the son of an official of the Ceylon telegraph service. He belonged to no party, but he read the anti-imperialist pamphlets of the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) – Ceylon’s first modern political party, banned at the start of the war for its opposition to the British war effort. Its imprisoned leaders escaped from jail in April 1942, in the confusion after a Japanese air raid, and made their way to India. Fernando argued to his comrades that loyalty to the British was loyalty to an occupier, and that the Japanese would bring Ceylon freedom.

The night of 8 May

The plan was for the mutineers to arrest Captain Gardiner and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Henry Stephens, disarm the soldiers loyal to the Crown, then turn the guns on the Ceylonese infantry on Direction Island and make contact with the Japanese on Christmas Island. The Japanese knew nothing of this. The number of participants is uncertain: some authors write of about fifteen mutineers, others of thirty out of the 56 gunners on the island.

During the night of 8/9 May the conspirators opened fire. They proved poor shots, however. Gunner Samaris Jayasekera, who had not joined the mutiny, was killed – according to some accounts hit by accident as he ran to answer the alarm. Lieutenant Stephens was wounded. At the decisive moment the only Bren light machine gun, with which Fernando was aiming at Gardiner, jammed. The captain would not be disarmed, the loyal soldiers resisted, and the attempt to turn the guns on Direction Island failed. By morning the mutiny had been put down; infantry from Direction Island helped to disarm the conspirators. Jayasekera was buried with military honours on Horsburgh on the evening of 10 May; after the war his remains were moved to Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore.

Trial and executions

Justice came quickly. Fifteen accused stood before a field general court martial on the islands themselves, presided over by Gardiner – the very officer the mutineers had meant to seize. Stanley observes that the haste and such procedural irregularities later weakened the authorities’ position, although no one disputed the guilt of the accused. Seven were sentenced to death and several to imprisonment. The condemned men were taken to Ceylon. Their families and Ceylonese politicians pleaded for clemency with the Civil Defence Commissioner Oliver Goonetilleke, the Governor, Andrew Caldecott, and Admiral Geoffrey Layton, Commander-in-Chief Ceylon. Four death sentences were commuted to several years’ penal servitude. Fernando refused to seek a pardon; he is said to have told his family that petitioning the British would dishonour the cause. He was hanged on 5 August 1942 in Welikada Prison in Colombo, and on 7 and 8 August Gunners Carl Gauder and Benny de Silva followed. Fernando was buried in an unmarked grave.

The claim that these were the only Commonwealth soldiers executed for mutiny in this war is repeated by the Australian War Memorial and most authors. It should be understood literally: it concerns sentences for the offence of mutiny itself. Other mutinies, such as the one at Salerno in 1943, ended in death sentences commuted to imprisonment, and soldiers of the British forces were hanged in those years for other offences, above all murder.

Significance

The mutiny did not change the military situation. The Japanese made no attempt to take the Cocos Islands, confining themselves to reconnaissance flights and a shelling from a submarine on Christmas Day 1942. Towards the end of the war airfields were built on West Island, from which British and Dutch bombers flew against Malaya and Sumatra.

The political consequences were more serious. The British sent no further Ceylonese combat unit to the front; Ceylonese continued to serve mainly in auxiliary units, including in North Africa. The Cocos veterans were denied promotion and refused war service medals. The island, which after the loss of Malaya had become the Empire’s main source of natural rubber, was garrisoned by strong British forces, and food rationing was arranged so that Ceylonese were better supplied than the people of neighbouring India, swept from August 1942 by the Quit India movement. Most Ceylonese politicians, led by Don Stephen Senanayake, chose cooperation with the colonial authorities in return for a promise of self-government, and Junius Richard Jayewardene’s soundings of the Japanese were quickly broken off. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party, by contrast, invoked the mutiny in its anti-colonial agitation.

Ceylon gained independence as a dominion on 4 February 1948, without an uprising and without a war. The Cocos Islands were transferred to Australia in 1955. Gratien Fernando, a mutineer to the British army, became to some Sri Lankans a hero of the struggle for independence, and the story of the mutiny – described at length only in 2001, by Noel Crusz – remains a rare testimony to the tensions that the Japanese victories of 1942 aroused in the colonies of the British Empire.