Adventurer steered midget sub in attack on Japanese cruiser
William Smith Naval officer b December 1, 1922 d December 2, 2018
In the murky waters off the Straits of Johor, submariner William Smith inched along in a midget submarine on a dangerous mission: to take out a Japanese cruiser in Singapore harbour.
Smith was second-in-command of the submarine XE3 during the August 1945 attack, codenamed Operation Struggle. It was a fraught trip in a cramped sub through mined waters, which Smith recalled they navigated purely by eye.
His job on the mission, commanded by Lieutenant Ian Fraser, was to control the hydroplanes throughout the 171⁄2-hour journey. Their target was the Japanese cruiser Takao, berthed at the naval base below the causeway in Singapore, while another midget sub was deployed to attack a second Japanese vessel.
He and his crew were tasked with immobilising or sinking the ship to stop it from using its guns on Allied troops about to land on the Malayan Peninsula. Using an underwater bomb and limpet mines, they sank the ship in shallow waters.
On their return they were told the attack on the second ship had failed. Smith and Fraser agreed to go back and sink it in another risky mission – but on the day they planned the attack, the atom bomb was dropped.
‘‘That put paid to our going back, thank God,’’ Smith later recalled.
He was appointed a companion of the Distinguished Service Order for his part in the operation, with the citation praising his ‘‘gallantry, great skill and endurance’’.
Years later, the New Zealand Navy named its dive school and marine operations building after Smith in recognition of his bravery.
William James Lanyon Smith was born in Gore to Mildred Wilhemina Mitchell. She was unmarried and forced to give up her baby. Smith, who never knew his father, was fostered to the Ginn family in Christchurch. But his birth mother remained a part of his life, meeting Mrs Ginn in Hagley Park to play with her son. Later, when he was 9, he lived with his mother while he was a pupil at Cathedral Grammar School.
He was still at the school when war broke out in 1939. At 17 he was commissioned in the army and became a gunnery officer in the 19th Field Regiment.
His entry into the navy was a little unorthodox. After a few afternoon pints with a mate, both agreed they wanted to go overseas and the navy was their best chance. Traipsing down to naval headquarters, the pair volunteered their services. The officer who greeted them suggested if they were serious they should return the next day, sober.
He was soon posted to the Ruahine and sailed to England, where he was given the position as lookout on the crow’s nest of HMS Duke of York. After three months he was moved to the shore-based ship King Alfred for further training. Not long afterwards, Smith was at the cinema when a news flash told of the crow’s nest on the Duke of York being badly damaged and the lookout killed.
In 1943 he volunteered for ‘‘special services’’ and was posted to HMS Dolphin at the submarine headquarters in Portsmouth. Special services turned out to mean offering himself up to be a human guinea pig, he recalled in a 2005 oral history interview.
In particular, he and other volunteers were used to see to what extent they could cope with underwater explosives.
‘‘At the far end of this torpedo range they were letting off quantities of explosions while we would dive to see what effect it would have on the human being,’’ he recalled. ‘‘We discovered the reason for this afterwards – they were preparing the Royal Marines who were going to be ferried across to the Normandy beachhead area to do their reconnaissance – so the tests were to see what effect it would have on them if mines went off. It was to see what their capacity was to absorb the pressures.’’
He went on to train as a midget submarine operator, and in 1944 headed out to Southeast Asia.
After his part in Operation Struggle, Smith returned home and transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy with the rank of lieutenant. Over the next two decades he served on various ships, including the Bellona, Hawea and Lachlan, rising to the rank of commander.
In the mid-1950s he went to the Antarctic as part of a New Zealand team, including a young Edmund Hillary, doing an early reconnaissance to decide where Scott Base would be, and what possibility there was of going from there to the Polar Plateau, and ultimately to meet Sir Vivian Fuchs and his British expedition.
‘‘I actually wanted to become part of the trans-Antarctic expedition, but Sir Edmund and I didn’t see eye to eye,’’ Smith said. ‘‘I don’t think he was particularly enamoured with servicemen. He asked, ‘What is your mountaineering experience?’ I said, ‘I have little or no mountaineering experience.’ I then said to him, ‘What was the point of mountaineering experience? Sir Robert Falcon Scott wasn’t a mountaineer.’ So that was the end of that.’’
In September 1956 Smith married Natalie Phyllis Vale, after meeting at one of the many social events her parents hosted for the navy at their home in Ilam Rd, Christchurch. They had one daughter, Victoria, who survives him.
In 1968 he was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire.
It was only about 25 years ago that Smith told his daughter of his adventures in the war. ‘‘My initial reaction was ‘You must have been mad’,’’ she said. ‘‘And without a beat he replied, ‘I still am!’ ’’ –
Sources: Victoria Daniel; Oral history interview with Lt Cmdr P.Y. Dennerly RNZN, naval historian, Devonport.