Enter the Royal Navy

The infantry-lean, navy-poor Southeast Asia Command last week recorded its first major kill at sea: a British submarine had destroyed a 5,100-ton Japanese cruiser almost within sight of Jap-held Sumatra and Malaya. It was the most successful invasion of enemy waters by a British submarine since H.M.S. Truant torpedoed two Japanese ships on its historic, 80,000-mile cruise through the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific in 1942.

The Admiralty referred to the submarine as a unit of a new "Eastern Fleet," which presumably includes warships withdrawn from the Mediterranean. The action was a promise for the indefinite future, when the Royal Navy can fulfill Prime Minister Churchill's pledge to join U.S. Pacific forces in the final attack on Japan.

Hero of the attack was Lieut. Commander L. W. A. Bennington, commander of a submarine force (the "Porpoise Carrier") which kept Malta alive at the height of its blockade. In the Pacific, his submarine crept through the grey-green waters of the Bay of Bengal, past the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which screen the Singapore-Rangoon sea lanes, scouted the narrow (225 mi.) northern approaches of the Malacca Straits. He attacked and sank three large cargo vessels, sighted the cruiser and closed at full speed.

If the Royal Navy is moving in any force into the western Pacific, the Japs will have to divert naval strength to protect their sea lanes to Rangoon and north Burma.

. . .

A Chungking spokesman reported that crewmen from a U.S. submarine had landed at Newchwang, Manchuria, and purchased fresh fish from the natives. To reach Newchwang, at the northern end of the Gulf of Liaotung, the submarine would have had to penetrate the string of islands off the southern tip of Japan, cross the Yellow Sea, creep past the Jap naval base at Port Arthur, lie off nominally Jap-occupied territory. Total Pacific bag of U.S. submarines to date (including twelve more merchant sinkings announced last week): 408.

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