Operation Boarding Party
On reserve since the Boer War, they are most noted for their attack (with members of the Calcutta Scottish) against the German ship, Ehrenfels. The operation was organised by SOE's India Mission. It was kept covert, to avoid the political ramifications of contravening Portuguese neutrality in Goa, and was not revealed until thirty-five years afterwards, in 1978. The Ehrenfels was known to be transmitting information on Allied ship movements to U-boats from Mormugao harbour in Portugal's neutral territory of Goa.
The Light Horse embarked on the barge Phoebe at Calcutta and sailed around India to Goa. After the Ehrenfels was sunk in March 1943 by the team of British saboteurs, British intelligence dispatched an open message over the wire falsely warning that they would invade Goa. The crews of the other two German ships in the harbour, the Drachenfels and Braunfels, received the message and scuttled their ships in Goa's harbour in the belief that they were protecting their ships from capture by the British. Italian ships in the harbour were also destroyed. In 1951 all three German ships were salvaged.
As the end credits of the 1980 film The Sea Wolves state, "during the first 11 days of March 1943, U-boats sank 12 Allied ships in the Indian Ocean. After the Light Horse raid on Goa, only one ship was lost in the remainder of the month."
Read more about this topic: Calcutta Light Horse
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)