大象传媒

Title: Our Frank.
Story submitted by Terry McAlinden on behalf of Leading Seaman Francis John McAlinden.
Name of unit: HM Submarine Stratagem, Royal Navy.
Location: Straits of Malacca.

My brother Frank, a lad from Salford, was imbued with a spirit of adventure, excited by the promises of life and looking forward to a career at sea. Soon promoted to Leading Seaman, he was based at Plymouth where he met and married his young wife Margaret. With a baby on the way, he transferred to the submarine service where the pay was better and he could afford to send more money home. It was then that he joined the ill-fated crew of HM Submarine Stratagem.
I was based at Uckfield in Sussex, a sergeant in the South Lancashire Regiment. Coming on leave to my parents' home in Salford, I was met by a neighbour, a friend of the family, who told me the bad news. Our Frank had been reported "Missing presumed killed". I found my mother in a state of shock, a kind of dead-eyed disbelief. For the next three months, she rarely spoke, and the rest of her life was tinged with a sadness that had not been there before. Dad was different. He knew life had to go on and, though every bit as heartbroken as my mother, he did his best to hold the family together.
Eventually I discovered that Frank's sub the Stratagem had sailed to Trincomalee on the 10th of November, 1944, with orders to patrol in the vicinity of the port of Malacca. On the 18th, the Stratagem attacked and sank a Japanese cargo ship the 2000-ton Nichinan Maru. On the 22nd, a Japanese aircraft spotted the Stratagem and directed a destroyer to where it had dived. Just after midday on the 22nd, the destroyer attacked, the first depth charge causing the Stratagem's bow to strike the bottom. The submarine was plunged into darkness and the forward area began to flood. Attempts to close the watertight door to the forward compartment failed and the crew were forced to make their escape. Ten men are known to have left the submarine alive, but Frank was not one of them. One man drowned on his way to the surface, one was unaccounted for, and eight were picked up by the Japanese and taken to Singapore. Three were transferred to Japan where, as they had been in Singapore, they were subject to constant interrogation,severe beatings and ill-treatment, forced to exist on a starvation diet until they were rescued by the Red Cross and taken to a hospital at Shinagawa. These three survived the war. It is known that the remaining five, despite the daily beatings and dreadful conditions, were alive in December 1944. There is no official record of how these men died but they are known to have all died on the same day, suggesting that they were executed.
Our Frank didn't live to see his newborn son, but in view of what happened to the survivors - the torture, the beatings, the starvation at the hands of the Japanese - there may be some small comfort in the knowledge that he must have been in the forward compartment and did not survive the initial blast.

18 July 2005

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