Coconut Islands Mutiny
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The Cocos Islands Mutiny (English: Cocos Islands Mutiny ) took place during the Second World War in May 1942 on Horsburgh Iceland in the Indian Ocean instead. The mutineers were Ceylon artillerymen . It was the only mutiny after which British forces carried out death sentences during World War II .
The Cocos Islands are located between Australia and Sri Lanka , about 2768 km northwest of Perth , 3685 km west of Darwin , 900 km southwest of Christmas Island and about 1000 km southwest of Java and Sumatra .
On Horsburgh Island, one of the many Cocos Islands, a unit of the Ceylon Garrison Artillery with two 6-inch breech-loading guns was stationed as a forward post to repel Japanese attacks on the telecommunications cable station of the nearby Direction Island , on which the Ceylonese infantry was stationed.
prehistory
Fifteen Ceylonese gunners, led by the bombardier Gratien Fernando, intended to fire on the night of August 8th / 9th. May 1942 arrest the commanding British officer George Gardiner and his second lieutenant Henry Stephens, a Ceylonese.
Relations between George Gardiner and his subordinates were poor. He wanted to discipline her and his methods were hated.
The Ceylon Garrison Artillery presented the opinion Peter Stanley, the chief historian of the Australian War Memorial , an example of the decline of British colonialism is the unit was a mixture of different religions and ethnicities. European and Euro-Asian officers commanded Buddhists , Catholics and Protestants as well as Sinhalese , Tamils , Portuguese , Dutch and English .
The unit also knew that the situation at that time was precarious for the Allied forces, because the Japanese were successful. They had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 , sunk the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse on December 10, 1941, and thus conquered the supremacy in this sea area. The British land forces were defeated in the Battle of Singapore from January 31 to February 15, 1942, and Christmas Island was captured on March 3, 1942 . On April 5, 1942, the Japanese Air Force bombed Colombo in Sri Lanka, the home of the mutineers.
On March 3, 1942, Direction Island was shelled by a Japanese destroyer, the cable station caught fire, but the technology and the cables were not damaged. The British Department of War broadcast the message that the station had been destroyed. The cable station was then given fantasy names for camouflage so that the Japanese believed the destruction to be believable. While the Japanese coding of the radio messages was being decrypted, the messages between Australia and Great Britain could be exchanged unencrypted and tap-proof via cables. This cable station was important to the war effort in Asia; it had already been attacked by the legendary small cruiser SMS Emden during the First World War , which led to the loss of the German cruiser as a result of this conflict. The cables had been laid in the Indian Ocean in 1901 and connected South Africa via Mauritius and Cottesloe in Western Australia . The station's cables also went to Jakarta and Darwin .
The soldiers were informed of the progress of the war by radio news from Tokyo Rose , BBC and Radio Manila. They also knew how badly prisoners of war are treated by the Japanese.
Out of this conglomerate of interests, fears and hopes, the mutineers planned to hand over the Cocos Islands to the Japanese; but they also believed that Asia belonged to Asians and were in favor of the liberation of their country from British colonialism.
course
The mutiny failed because Gardiner could not be disarmed and other soldiers attacked the mutineers with weapons. The soldier Samaris Jayasekera was killed by the mutineers.
The then Commander in Chief of the Allied American, British, Dutch and Australian Forces ( ABDACOM ) Archibald Wavell , who read the report on the mutiny, wanted to send the mutineers back to Ceylon.
Seven mutineers were sentenced to death by a British court martial in the Cocos Islands; three of them, namely the Ceylonese soldiers Gratien Fernando, Benny de Silva and Carlo Gauder, were executed in early August 1942 . Another four soldiers were sentenced to prison terms.
Individual evidence
- ↑ environment.gov.au : Six Inch Guns, Horsburgh Island, EXT, Australia , in English, accessed September 15, 2011
- ↑ a b abc.net.au ( Memento from January 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive ): Noel Cruez: Cocos Islands Munity , in English, accessed on September 10, 2011
- ↑ a b awm.gov.au : Peter Stanley: Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands mutiny , Journal of the Australian War Memorial, Fremantle Arts Center Press, Fremantle 2001, in English, accessed September 10, 2011
- ↑ a b sundaytimes.lk : T. Perera: A burst of gunfire and all hell broke loose The Cocos Mutiny, 66 years on, as recalled by (Donny) Vincent Ranasinghe, the last surviving member of the Ceylon Garrison Artillery (CGA) who served on the island , accessed September 10, 2011