大象传媒

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Sure enough, the Haguro had been sighted by a British submarine as she left Singapore to head up the Malacca Straits to evacuate the garrisons in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that we had just been bombarding. Our force had two battleships, three cruisers, four small carriers and eight destroyers - quite a lot to deal with one cruiser and one destroyer but war is not a game. A cat and mouse game followed. Jap aircraft sighted us - the cruiser turned back - we went well south to avoid redetection - the cruiser turned north again - the destroyers were sent on ahead to cut her off.

The weather was very tropical. Line after line of squally thunderstorms, blinding rain and lightning had the strange effect of giving freak radar conditions. A destroyer would normally expect to detect an enemy at about 25 miles but an operator saw an echo at 35 miles and refused to be talked out of it. This allowed the destroyers to spread across the Haguro's line of retreat. The subsequent melee was messy but effective - the general idea was that the destroyers would come in from all around their powerful opponent and fire their torpedoes at the same time so that whichever way he turned he would be hit. Suffice it that several torpedoes and a great many shells finally sank the Haguro.
It was not long before dawn, the battle had finished well south of Penang and some very vengeful Japanese aircraft could be expected so Captain Power withdrew towards safety in the West. We, meantime, had been hastening East to give air defence and force protection and were soon well into the Straits.

As expected the Nips (Nipponese=Nips and was our current jargon for them) attacked furiously and one of the destroyers was damaged, with casualties. After so much high speed work the destroyers were very low on fuel and all had to take from our oiler before we could head back to Trinco which we entered on 21st May.

That turned out to be Queen Elizabeth's last battle.

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