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The Krait and the Tiger: The True Story of Operation Jaywick and the Tragedy of Operation Rimau
Paperback
Australia & OceaniaSoutheast Asian HistoryWorld War II
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 4 2026
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Fourteen men. One captured Japanese fishing boat. The most audacious commando raid of the Pacific War.
In September 1943, a small force of British and Australian commandos sailed the Krait - a sixty-eight-foot Japanese trawler salvaged from the wreckage of Singapore - over four thousand miles through enemy waters. They stained their skin brown with vegetable dye to look Asian. They threw nothing European overboard. Beneath an Imperial Japanese flag, they slipped past patrol boats and reconnaissance aircraft and dropped anchor eight kilometres south of the most heavily defended port in Asia.
In the small hours of 27 September 1943, six men in three folding canoes paddled into the heart of Keppel Harbour and stuck limpet mines on the hulls of seven Japanese ships. By dawn, thirty-nine thousand tons of enemy shipping was on the bottom or burning. Every man returned to Australia. No casualties. No prisoners. Operation Jaywick.
A year later, Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Lyon led a follow-up - Operation Rimau - and it went catastrophically wrong. Spotted by a single collaborator's launch hours before the attack, the mission collapsed. Twenty-three men scattered across the Riau Archipelago, hunted by patrol boats, aircraft, and informers. Thirteen were killed in action or died in evasion. The remaining ten were tried in a Japanese court at Outram Road Gaol and beheaded by sword on a cleared patch of ground at the corner of Reformatory Road on 7 July 1945 - five weeks before Japan surrendered.
This is the story of those two raids: of the brilliant commander who pulled off the impossible once and could not bring himself to leave it there, of the small wooden boat that has somehow outlived them all, and of the long road by which a handful of men rowed into an empire and left their names behind on a granite marker in Singapore.
The smallest and bravest ship of the Pacific war.
A meticulously researched work of narrative non-fiction - for readers of Hampton Sides, Antony Beevor, Ben Macintyre, and Lynette Ramsay Silver.
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