With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, three DDG Hansa cargo ships, Ehrenfels, Braunfels and Drachenfels, took refuge in the port of Mormugão, Goa.
[2] However, in 1942 the India Mission of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at Meerut intercepted coded messages to German Navy U-boats, relaying detailed information on the positions of Allied ships leaving Bombay in the Indian Ocean.
[1][5] Attacks in the Indian Ocean continued, and in the first week of March 1943, German U-boats sank twelve US, UK, Norwegian, and Dutch ships, totalling about 80,000 tons.
The SOE chose fourteen volunteers from the Light Horse and four more from the Calcutta Scottish to perform a covert operation led by Pugh: to capture or sink the Ehrenfels.
[3] After being armed and trained by the SOE, some of the eighteen-member assault team embarked on a hopper barge, Phoebe, at Calcutta and sailed around India to Goa.
[7] Due to a "coincidence", both the lighthouse and illuminated buoy of Mormugão harbour were not working that night, allowing Phoebe to enter port in darkness.
[2] While some infiltrated into British India and then escaped to their native countries after being set free, some of the Germans settled in Goa and started families there, facing an uncertain future in Germany.
[9] In 2002, records released from the UK National Archives revealed that three of the Axis crew members had surrendered to the British and joined the SOE's operations in India, where they worked until they were allowed to go back to their country after the war ended.
[10][11] In the foreword of Boarding Party, Earl Mountbatten of Burma wrote: This book tells how fourteen of them, with four colleagues from the Calcutta Scottish, another Auxiliary Force unit, volunteered for a hazardous task which, for reasons the author makes plain, no-one else was able to undertake.
This happened shortly before my arrival in India in 1943, as Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, and immediately saw how valuable were the results of this secret operation.