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Divine Winds

1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

The Japanese made less effective use of intelligence than any other warring nation between 1942 and 1945. But in the months before they went to war, their decisions were significantly influenced by an extraordinary British indiscretion. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs Violet Ferguson’s tea set, scarcely a masterpiece of the potter’s art, caused Japan to attack the British Empire. But the incident in which it played a part was an example of an intelligence coup that helped to decide the fate of nations.

On 11 November 1940 SS Automedon, a humble 7,528-ton British merchant ship of the Blue Funnel Line, exotically named for Achilles’ charioteer, was ploughing a lonely course for Penang, in a stretch of the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra far from any active theatre of war. Nonetheless, at 7 a.m. when the officer of the watch spotted a distant ship, he woke his sleeping captain. ‘The old man’, veteran seafarer William Ewan, quickly made his way to the bridge, just forward of the ship’s spindly funnel. Ewan peered hard through his binoculars, decided that the stranger was a Dutch liner, and held course. At 8.03 the other vessel was less than a mile distant when it broke out the international flag hoists ‘Do not raise the alarm’ and ‘Stop’, then fired a warning shot across the bows of the freighter, which had left Liverpool on 24 September, just as the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz, carrying a mixed cargo of aircraft, cars, machine parts, microscopes, military uniforms, cameras, sewing machines, beer, 550 cases of whisky, 2.5 million Chesterfield cigarettes, and six million dollars in newly printed Straits currency.

The interloper was the disguised German armed merchant-cruiser Atlantis, one of the most successful commerce raiders of the war, which had already captured and sunk twelve Allied vessels since leaving Bremen on 31 March. The ships’ 11 November meeting was not a matter of chance. The Atlantis’s captain, forty-one-year-old Bernhard Rogge, had captured a set of British Merchant Navy codes aboard the freighter City of Baghdad on 11 July, which assisted him in intercepting other vessels thereafter. Moreover, an Italian intelligence unit in the Mediterranean forwarded decrypts which helped to pinpoint the freighter. Automedon’s bridge crew failed to read the German flag hoist, and the ship’s radio-operator began tapping out an ‘RRR’ emergency signal. The doughty Captain Ewan shouted ‘Hard on the wheel!’ and his ship began to sheer away. He then said, ‘Come on everyone, let’s do it – we’re going to fight.’ On the stern deck of the merchantman was mounted a single elderly 4-inch gun. Unfortunately for the British, however, Atlantis carried five 5.9-inch guns and a sophisticated fire-control system. Having intercepted the British ship’s distress call, the Germans started shooting in earnest. The first shell of Atlantis’s opening salvo, fired at point-blank range, smashed into the bridge, followed by a further succession of hammer blows which brought down the wireless antenna, killed or wounded almost a score of men and transformed Automedon’s upperworks into a tangle of twisted steel interrupted by gaping holes. By now Atlantis was so close that when a British seaman ran aft, a German officer called through a loudhailer in English, ‘Do not approach the gun, or we will blow you out of the water!’

Second Officer Donald Stewart regained consciousness on the bridge to find his captain lying dead beside him. First Officer Peter Evan, knowing that protracted resistance was impossible, had dashed for the ship’s safe to destroy the confidential papers as soon as the enemy opened fire, but fell victim to the same shell that killed Ewan: Evan collapsed seriously wounded on the threshold of the captain’s cabin where the safe key was kept. In all, six crew members were now dead and twelve others wounded. Both ships stopped. Stewart and the deckhands watched grimly as a launch bore a boarding party from Atlantis to Automedon. A stream of shocked and scalded Chinese firemen emerged from a hatchway leading to the freighter’s engine room, where blast had caused steam leaks.

The Germans had planned to commandeer Automedon as a supply ship, but on seeing the scale of damage caused by their shells, instead they began to set scuttling charges. Lt. Ulrich Mohr, Atlantis’s adjutant, made a hasty tour of the capture during which he blew open its safe, removing cash and confidential papers along with a weighted green canvas bag found in the chartroom, which Automedon’s dead officers had been tasked to throw overboard in any emergency. The Germans enlisted the aid of British seamen to shift frozen meat, whisky and cigarettes to Atlantis, before the crew was transferred to the German ship. Personal money was confiscated, though their captors issued receipts for the contents of each man’s wallet. Captain Rogge was not only an excellent seaman and tactician, but a man of honour who took pains for the welfare of prisoners from the ships he seized on his remarkable eight-month cruise. Among the British personnel transferred to Atlantis were three passengers, including a chief engineer of the Straits Steamship Company named Alan Ferguson, and his thirty-three-year-old wife Violet, on passage to Singapore. Encountering the Atlantis was only the latest of several unfortunate adventures that had befallen Mrs Ferguson since her marriage in 1936, including a miscarriage and an enforced flight from France in June 1940 aboard the last ferry out of Bordeaux. Now, intensely emotional, she went to Captain Rogge and pleaded with him through tears to save her luggage – two trunks which contained almost all her worldly possessions, including a prized tea set. The German took pity. He signalled Mohr, still on the doomed Automedon