October 2002 Volume 83 Number 10 "serving the protectors"
Edited by John Ballantyne

Kill the Tiger: The truth about Operation Rimau

Peter Thompson, Kill the Tiger: The truth about Operation Rimau.
Sydney: Hodder Headline Australia, 2002.
Rec. retail price: $29.95

In the last few months of 1944 a group of Australian and British commandos were selected for the biggest behind-the-lines operation in the Pacific War.

Operation Rimau (Malay for “Tiger”) was an ambitious plan to penetrate Singapore Harbour in top-secret one-man submarines called “Sleeping Beauties” and launch an attack on 60 Japanese ships at anchor.

The mission was inspired by the success of an earlier operation – Operation Jaywick – which sunk seven Japanese ships at harbour.

Led by the same man, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Lyon, Operation Rimau was designed as a body blow to the Japanese. But, as the commandos infiltrated Japanese-occupied waters near Singapore, things went horribly wrong.

Kill the Tiger tells the story of the Rimau operation from its beginnings to its tragic conclusion. In vivid detail the authors capture the early planning and success of the mission, the men’s courageous fighting in Malayan waters, and the bureaucratic red tape and official lies which betrayed the men in their hour of need.

It names the men who betrayed them and uncovers the political chicanery which hid the true story behind red tape and bureaucratic lies for years to come.

More than just a war story, Kill the Tiger also gives an insight into the personal lives of the men, and the anguish felt by their families.

The story is an important part of Australian history. Yet political and military forces in Australia and Britain covered up the truth about Operation Rimau for 30 years or more because of the perceived embarrassment over the failure of the raid but also for fear of offending Australia’s postwar trading partner, Japan.

Kill the Tiger is investigative journalism at its best.

Robert Stove, The Unsleeping Eye: A Brief History of Secret Police and their Victims.
Melbourne: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.
Avail. from News Weekly Books (www.newsweekly.com.au) for $32.00 (plus p & h).

Robert Stove – one of Australia’s most brilliant young writers – has written a fascinating, macabre and unforgettable book, which delves into some overlooked corners of history.

Stove looks at five centuries of secret policing, spanning from Elizabeth I’s secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham in the sixteenth century to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the twentieth.

Particularly interesting are the chapters on the reigns of repression and terror unleashed by revolutionary regimes.

Police chief Joseph Fouché, a product of the 1789 French Revolution, was so fanatical in safeguarding the new regime that he saw enemies everywhere and once had a nun put to death for praying to God in public.

Lenin’s Communist takeover of Russia in 1917 – like the French Revolution before it – purported to usher in a new era of brotherhood, peace and humanity.

But its new secret police – the dreaded Cheka (forerunner of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB) – rapidly grew into a murderous and lawless organization.

Headed by a lapsed priest, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka between 1917 and 1923 performed an estimated 200,000 executions (compared with a mere 94 executions during the last third of the preceding century, under the “repressive” old Imperial Russian regime).

The Cheka’s reign of terror, however, was only a small foretaste of the slaughter of millions engineered by Lenin’s successor, Stalin.

Stalin’s most repulsive secret police chief was L.P. Beria, a sadist and pervert with a sexual appetite for under-age girls, “the younger the better”.

Beria bore a striking physical resemblance to his Nazi German counterpart, Heinrch Himmler – perhaps not surprising given that they were both brothers in crimes against humanity.

People all too readily forget that Soviet Russia – the self-proclaimed Workers’ State – was, during the first two years of World War II, the firm ally of Hitler’s Third Reich.

During this time the secret police of both regimes collaborated closely and copied each other’s ideas and methods of repression.

Pete McCarthy, McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland.
Sydney: Hodder Headline Australia, 2002.
Rec. retail price: $24.95

Until I was fifteen, I spent every summer of my life in Ireland and, although it is statistically impossible in a country as moist as Ireland, I’m certain that the sun always shone.

Now when I return I feel as if I’ve come home, as though this is where I belong. But the world is full of descendants of the expatriate Irish. Do we all feel like this, or is it just me? Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place you’ve never lived in, but your ancestors have – or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement befuddled by nostalgia, Guinness and the romance of the diaspora?

Born in England to an Irish mother and an English father, Pete McCarthy has long held a deep love for his mother’s homeland and admits that, despite the many exotic places he has visited, nowhere can match the particular magic of Ireland.

In McCarthy’s Bar, he journeys from Cork to Donegal, experiencing the unique atmosphere that enchants visitors from all over the world. Ireland, he realizes, is a country with many stories to tell, some of which are true.

Travelling through spectacular landscapes, but at all times obeying the rule “never pass a pub with your name on it”, he encounters McCarthy’s bars up and down the land, meeting fascinating, friendly and funny people before pleading to be let out at four o’clock in the morning.”

McCarthy’s Bar is a wonderfully funny, affectionate portrait of one of the most popular countries in the world.

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