Able Seaman Moss Berryman
Commando who joined Operation Jaywick, a daring secret mission to blow up ships off Singapore
ABLE SEAMAN MOSS BERRYMAN, who had died aged 96, was the last survivor of Operation Jaywick, perhaps the most long-ranged and audacious special forces raid of the Second World War. On April 7 1942, as soon as he could, Berryman volunteered for the Royal Australian Navy. He and his friend Able Seaman Fred Marsh were still under training in Melbourne when they heard that a British officer was looking for volunteers to do something special.
Sent to Refuge Bay on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, they discovered that they were members of Z Special Unit, or “Z Force”, commanded by Major Ivan Lyon and part of Special Operations Australia, formed to operate behind Japanese lines in Southeast Asia.
“My mate and I looked sideways at each other,” he recalled. “We were basically Sunday-school boys. We had no idea how we were going to learn to kill people.”
However, on September 2 1943 Berryman, now a fully trained commando, sailed north from Exmouth Gulf, Western Australia, in the 70 ft Krait, a former Japanese fishing vessel, with seven other British and Australian commandos from the Army and the Navy, and six boat’s crew.
Only once at sea did Lyon tell them that they were off to Singapore, some 3,500 miles away, “to blow up a few ships”.
Berryman knew that the Japanese did not have a reputation for treating prisoners well, but, he said, “we were young ones, we thought we were indestructible, just like they do today”. Lyon maintained morale by insisting: “This isn’t dangerous, it’s exciting.”
“Still,” recalled Berryman, “I think if we had known earlier some of us may not have volunteered. There were definitely times we thought, ‘What the Hell are we doing here? We’re getting five bob a day for this?’”
The two-week voyage though Japaneseoccupied waters was uncomfortable. They flew the Japanese flag and posed as Malay fishermen, wearing sarongs and constantly applying foul-smelling brown dye to their skin. Berryman spent much time at the top of the mast with binoculars looking out for other craft, which would be given a wide berth. When occasionally a Japanese float plane flew over, members of Z Force would wave and stand in a circle pretending to unpick fishing lines.
On September 18 Krait arrived off Singapore – which was ablaze with lights, and where the Japanese thought themselves safe – and offloaded six commandos in three two-man canoes. Much to their disappointment, Berryman and Marsh were told to stay behind. “Of course, we put on a bit of a turn – ‘We’ve done all the training, sir, why can’t we be in it?’ – and he said, ‘Nope, you two are going to be babysitters and look after Krait’ .”
The canoeists established a base in a cave on a small island, and on the night of September 26 they paddled into the harbour to attach limpet mines to seven vessels, sinking or damaging 37,000 tons of shipping.
But when Krait reached its rendezvous, the island of Pompong, 50 miles off Singapore, on the night of October 1-2, only one canoe was found. Lyon had told Krait to leave that night no matter what – but “being good old Australians, we decided we’d break the law and go back in two nights later”, when the other two canoes were recovered. On the return voyage, at a few minutes to midnight on October 11, a Japanese patrol boat intercepted Krait the Lombok Strait.
As Berryman crouched low with his Bren gun trained on the warship, Lyon, who had packed Krait’s bows with high explosive, prepared a suicide ramming which would have destroyed both vessels, but after the longest 15 minutes of Berryman’s life the warship drew away without switching on a searchlight or hailing Krait. “It was pure luck,” said Berryman. Krait entered Exmouth Bay after a 48-day mission. Berryman was Mentioned in Despatches for gallantry, skill and devotion to duty in a hazardous enterprise.
When, later in 1943, Lyon asked Berryman whether he would care to return to Singapore as part of a larger, repeat mission, he carefully considered the proposal for two seconds – before declining. All members of Operation Rimau were killed in action or executed by the Japanese.
Instead, Berryman completed his war service in the destroyer HMAS Vendetta, and was demobbed in February 1946.
Mostyn Berryman was born at Kent Town, South Australia, on November 9 1923, and was brought up a Methodist: his father had fought as a teenaged signaller in the Australia Imperial Force on the Western Front in the First World War.
Postwar Berryman returned to the stockbrokers SC Ward & Co, where he had been a clerk, and remained there until his retirement 46 years later.
Berryman was aboard Krait when she entered Sydney in 1964 to become a museum ship, and in 1993, on the 50th anniversary of Operation Jaywick, he met Lyon’s son – “the spitting image of his father” – at Kranji War Cemetery. Lyon’s French wife, Gabrielle Bouvier, and their baby son, had spent the war in Japanese internment camps, and together Berryman and the son cried that the son had never met his heroic father.
For many years Berryman was owed the five-bob-a-day danger money which he had been promised, and which the government topped up to A$5,000.
Operation Jaywick, one of the most successful clandestine raids in Australian history, left a bitter aftermath. Lyon had intended that Jaywick be publicised to rattle the Japanese and boost Allied morale, but senior commanders decided against this as they wished to conduct similar raids in the future. Not having the slightest idea of how the attack had been mounted, the Japanese inflicted savage reprisals on Singaporeans, whom they suspected of aiding the attack. “Sometimes,” a troubled Berryman mused in later life, “I feel that we shouldn’t have done it because they murdered untold numbers of people trying to find out who did.”
He married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Cant, who predeceased him in 2018, and he is survived by their four daughters.
Moss Berryman, born November 9 1923, died August 6 2020