By Himanshu Bhatt

I RECENTLY came across a television documentary about the activities of U-boats, as German submarines were called during the first and second world wars. It reminded me of an incredible story I once covered about U-boats actually coming to Penang during World War II as part of an amazing but little-known cooperation with the then Japanese occupiers of Malaya.

In early 2006, I met Englishman Dennis Gunton who had served at the British Council in Kuala Lumpur during the early 60s. Gunton was the first person to unearth the activities of the terrifying Axis – Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the main aggressors in Europe and Asia respectively. Understandably, the two sides had the potential to form a devastating partnership.

What made the story fascinating in the Malaysian context was that Gunton’s research revealed that the only place in which the Germans and Japanese fully cooperated during the war was Penang. They did meet in other places like Lorient in France and in Singapore, but the scale of the joint activities in Penang has never been known to occur anywhere else in the world.

Gunton began his research in 1962 at the age of 33, and it took him eight years to finish. He found that, in all, 45 German submarines had set out for Penang during the war. Many were later sunk by Allied forces led by the British and the Americans.

In fact, it began with Adolf Hitler himself sending a U-511 German submarine which secretly docked in Swettenham Pier in Penang on July 15, 1943 as a gift to imperial Japan.

The U-boats that followed brought latest German weapons technology with plans, blueprints and drawings. The Japanese responded by giving the Germans quinine which was used on soldiers to repress malaria. Each submarine returning to Europe also brought back rubber as well as essential metals like tin, tungsten and wolfram – all supplied by the Japanese.

In fact, Gunton told me that the Germans, being way ahead in the development of the jet engine, passed the technology on to the Japanese. The Japanese then incorporated the jet engines for their own planes and flew these only a week before the war ended in August 1945.

Gunton even stumbled on documentation which indicated that German officers in Penang and their Japanese counterparts used to drink side-by-side. A few places in George Townwere known to serve as clubs for members of both navies. One of these was the now demolished Shanghai Hotel in Kelawei Road.

In 1946, a “lady-in-charge” from the Shanghai Hotel told a war crimes investigation about how the place had been turned into a club for Germans while the premise next door became a club for Japanese.

When he had completed his findings in the late 60s, Gunton wrote to the City Council of George Town where its 27-year-old assistant secretary, Anwar Fazal, got the council to publish the research in a book. (It was a much older Anwar who in 2006 introduced me to Gunton.)

Entitled The Penang Submarines, the book was the only comprehensive record to detail the joint German-Japanese collaboration of that period in Penang.

If not for Gunton’s curiosity and Anwar’s initiative, the record of this extraordinary cooperation in world history may not have been made public at all.

The collusion ended as British and American intelligence managed to crack codes transmitted in Morse and gained insight into the activities in Penang. On the night of Oct 27, 1944, a squadron of 15 British Liberator bombers based in Kharagpur, India, made a 3,000 mile round trip to Penang to lay 60 mines in the north channel here.

As the waters were no longer safe, the Germans were forced to evacuate Penang on Dec 1, 1944, and the last U-boat, the U-843, sailed out.

Since then, like many other aspects of our official history, this sensational affair has been largely hidden and not given its due in our own books. One can only wonder at what other significant incidents have also been left unheard of, like this pivotal but obscure event that occurred during the greatest war on Earth, on our very own shores.

SOURCE : http://m.thesundaily.my/news/183122