Operation Creek in Goa

On the night of 9–10 March 1943 an old hopper barge, used to carry away river dredgings, slipped without lights into the port of Mormugão in Portuguese Goa. On board were eighteen middle-aged Britons – bankers, merchants and lawyers from Calcutta, members of the volunteer reserve units the Calcutta Light Horse and the Calcutta Scottish. Their target was the German merchant ship Ehrenfels, which had lain in the neutral port since the outbreak of war. The action, prepared by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and code-named Operation Creek, lasted barely a quarter of an hour. It ended with the sinking not of one Axis ship but of four, and for more than three decades it remained a secret.

Ships in a neutral port

In September 1939 three ships of the Bremen shipping line DDG Hansa – the motor vessels Ehrenfels (7,752 GRT) and Braunfels and the steamer Drachenfels – took refuge in the roadstead of Mormugão, off the small town of Vasco da Gama. Goa, like the whole colony of Portuguese India, belonged to a neutral state: the government of António de Oliveira Salazar took care to give neither side a pretext for intervention, while not breaking Portugal’s old alliance with Britain. After Italy entered the war in 1940 the Germans were joined by the Italian freighter Anfora. For years the crews lived in limbo; some of the sailors went ashore and looked for work in the colony. The captains remembered that in 1916 Portugal, under pressure from London, had requisitioned the German ships lying in its ports, and they agreed to scuttle their vessels if anyone tried to seize them.

During the first years of the war the British did not regard the ships in Goa as a threat. That changed in 1942, when part of the submarine war moved to the Indian Ocean. After the Japanese raid on Colombo and the British landing on Madagascar, German U-boats appeared off the coasts of East and Southern Africa in the autumn of 1942, while Japanese submarines were also active in the western part of the ocean. Allied shipping losses mounted; in the first week of March 1943 alone – according to accounts based on SOE documents – a dozen or so ships totalling some 80,000 tons were sunk in these waters.

The SOE mission in India (the so-called India Mission, based at Meerut) intercepted coded messages which, it believed, were passing information to submarines about ships leaving Bombay. The trail led to Goa: in Panaji lived a German named Robert Koch, whom the British regarded as an agent of German intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Pugh and Colonel Stewart of SOE abducted him and his wife on 19 December 1942 and took them to British territory; what became of the Kochs afterwards is uncertain. The British concluded that a hidden radio transmitter on board the Ehrenfels was being used by the Germans in Goa to pass information to the submarines. Whether this suspicion was fully justified remains disputed: it rests mainly on the accounts of participants and on a book published many years later, and the available documents do not show how much information really flowed by this route.

The volunteers from Calcutta

An open attack by regular armed forces on a port of neutral Portugal was out of the question. The economic and political contest for Lisbon’s favour – on which depended, among other things, supplies of wolfram (tungsten) and, soon, the question of bases in the Azores – was too important. SOE therefore decided on an operation the British government could disown. To carry it out it chose men who did not look like soldiers at all: members of the Calcutta Light Horse – a reserve cavalry unit made up of civilians working in Calcutta – and a few volunteers from the Calcutta Scottish. Fourteen men from the first unit and four from the second went through a short course of training. Pugh was in command; the Light Horse volunteers were led by their own commanding officer, Colonel Bill Grice.

The operation used the Phoebe, a hopper barge from the port of Calcutta that normally carried spoil from the dredgers. Part of the group sailed round the subcontinent in her; the rest travelled by train to Cochin and boarded there. The barge then steamed north along the west coast to Goa.

Night at Mormugão

The date was chosen with care. On the night of 9–10 March the carnival was coming to an end in Vasco da Gama. One of SOE’s men, paid from operational funds, threw a lavish party in the town to which sailors from all the ships in the roadstead were invited; according to later accounts they were also drawn by free passes to the local brothels. Only a small part of the crew remained aboard the Ehrenfels. By chance – or, as some suggested, with someone’s help – the harbour lighthouse and the lit buoy were not working that night, so the barge entered the port in darkness.

At around midnight the Phoebe came alongside the Ehrenfels. The attackers forced their way aboard; the Germans resisted, and the ship’s captain and several sailors were killed in the fighting. The figures vary between sources: according to some, five men were killed and four were listed as missing; according to others, nine died. Some of the crew managed to open the seacocks and set the ship on fire; the British, who according to some accounts had wanted to capture the vessel rather than sink her, had to abandon her. Pugh took the radio equipment with him, although the codebooks had been destroyed. The attackers lost no one, and a few suffered minor injuries.

Seeing the Ehrenfels burning and sinking – and, according to the German version, misled by British radio broadcasts suggesting that the colony was about to be occupied – the crews of the other ships scuttled the Braunfels, the Drachenfels and the Italian Anfora themselves, so that they would not fall into enemy hands. The Phoebe left the port unnoticed by the Portuguese and signalled the code word “Longshanks” to SOE headquarters, meaning that all the Axis ships had been destroyed. The barge then made her way to Bombay.

Aftermath and secrecy

The sailors from the sunken ships swam ashore and were detained by the Portuguese. The local press wrote of a mutiny, and on 1 October 1943 a court in Mormugão ruled that there had been no attack from outside and sentenced members of the crews for scuttling the ships; they remained in prison until the end of the war. Some of them later stayed in Goa and raised families there. Documents released in 2002 by the British National Archives indicate that three sailors went over to the British and worked for SOE in India until the end of the war. The wrecks were raised in 1951.

Supporters of the radio-transmitter theory pointed out that for the rest of March the U-boats operating in the Indian Ocean sank only one ship, and in April attacked three. A causal link cannot, however, be proved: the German submarines operated mainly off the coasts of South Africa and Mozambique, far from Goa, and the fall in their success coincided with the end of their patrols and their return to base. For SOE, what may have mattered more was that the last Axis ships in the Indian Ocean – ships that could have supplied submarines or tried to run the blockade – were gone.

The men who took part received no decorations – officially, nothing had happened. As a memento they designed their own badge bearing a seahorse. The Calcutta Light Horse and the Calcutta Scottish were disbanded in 1947, after India gained independence. The operation’s documents were declassified in the 1970s. The world learned of it in 1978 from the book Boarding Party by the journalist James Leasor, with a foreword by Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who a few months after the action had arrived in India as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia. The book was the basis for the film The Sea Wolves (1980), starring Gregory Peck, Roger Moore and David Niven, which fixed in the public mind the version of a radio transmitter directing the U-boats.

Its place in the war

Operation Creek was a minor episode on the fringes of the war, but it illustrates the war’s secret side well: the struggle between intelligence services in neutral countries, in which the limits of international law were quietly bent so as not to break off diplomatic relations. The British, who had been fighting the Battle of the Atlantic since 1939 and were struggling to protect the routes across the Indian Ocean – which supplied India, the Middle East and the army of Archibald Wavell – were ready to risk a quarrel with Portugal in order to shut down a suspected source of leaks. Portugal did not change course: in August 1943 it agreed to Allied bases in the Azores while remaining formally neutral until the end of the war. The action itself became a legend only thanks to the book and the film, which – as so often happens – turned it into a simpler story, and one more certain of its own justification, than the sources allow.