Magennis VC by George Fleming History Ireland 224pp, £22,50/ £11.95
I remember my father describing how after weeks of rainsoaked frustration he had lost his temper and recklessly won the Military Cross by knocking out, single-handed, a German machine-gun post. He did not consider his action particularly brave: he had just gone crazy for a few minutes. James "Mick" Magennis, the subject of this absorbing memoir, was courageous in a completely different way, self-sacrificing for hours on end, un imaginably pertinacious in his daring.
He was the diver in a four-man midget submarine which attacked the Japanese heavy cruiser Takao in July 1945 in Singapore Harbour. Darkness, claustrophobia, terror. Even before the action, just putting on a frogman suit in the hot, clammy atmosphere was punishing. Because the submarine was tightly jammed under the Takao, the diver's hatch could not be fully opened. Magennis took a deep breath of oxygen, removed his breathing set and squeezed through the narrow gap. Outside, he replaced his breathing lung. This procedure had never before been attempted by a diver.
The plan was to place limpet mines on the cruiser's bottom. But this was a mass of barnacles on which Magennis tore his hands and cut his suit. He had to scrape the area clean and tie the mines in pairs by a line passing under the keel. "Magennis," the citation for his Victoria Cross reads, "persisted until he had placed his full outfit before returning to the craft in an exhausted condition." One of the mine carriers would not release itself and was preventing the submarine from making its getaway. "Despite his exhaustion, his oxygen leak and the fact that there was every probability of his being sighted, Magennis at once volunteered to leave the craft and free the carrier rather than allow a less experienced diver to undertake the job." This took seven minutes of nerve-racking work.
The entire action lasted fiftytwo sleepless hours. The four men took benzedrine tablets to keep them going. If they had been captured they would have been beheaded. As well as a ferocious enemy only yards away, there was the danger of oxygen poisoning and drowning. This single episode was the apogee of Magennis's life, his ordeal and his triumph, the main (though not the only) reason why we are interested in him. We need to know how an ordinary bloke from West Belfast transformed himself into a hero capable of going to Hell and back.
George Fleming brings to life Magennis's childhood, grim and cramped, the father walking out, the children underfed and menaced by whooping cough, diphtheria, chicken pox. But it was also a colourful world of street games, lamplighters, knockers-up, ragmen's and herring vendors' cries, Fusco's Cafe for fish and chips, Celtic Park greyhound track, escape to the Bog Meadows and the Cave Hill, and, most important of all for the future ace frogman, the Falls Road Swimming Baths where the young Magennis spent most of his spare time. Fleming's prose matches the tangy, poignant photographs which augment the text.
The Royal Navy meant escape from poverty, new clothes for the first time, a healthier diet. There are richly detailed chapters on Magennis's training, general service and first experiences of action when he showed early on how brave he could be. Drafted to the submarine service, he volunteered for the special service Xcraft midget submarines and went on to win the VC. Belfast was for a while proud of its hero, and he enjoyed a brief celebrity. But after that his life was a sad diminuendo.
In Fleming's words: "He became a little guy caught in a strange religious and political mind-trap." Because he was a Catholic, the smug Unionist establishment didn't want to know about him, while his own West Belfast community disowned him because he had fought for King and Country. He left Northern Ireland in 1955 and ended his days in Bradford. A memorial plaque inside Bradford Cathedral commemorates the last Irishman to win the VC. Thanks to the author's campaigning, there are now plans belatedly to erect a memorial to Magennis in his native Belfast. But it is hard to imagine how this intrepid submariner could be better commemorated than by George Fleming's devoted, big-hearted, lovingly re searched memoir.