Ian Edward Fraser

Born in Ealing, Middlesex, on 18 December 1920 to a marine engineer, Ian Edward Fraser spent his earliest years in Malaya before returning to England to attend the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe and train aboard the school ship HMS Conway in the River Mersey. Fraser held no enlisted service number; as a commissioned officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, his appointments and seniority were recorded directly within Admiralty officer registers and the official Navy List. He commenced his seafaring career in 1937 as an apprentice aboard Blue Star Line merchant vessels before taking an RNR commission as a midshipman on the eve of hostilties in 1939. Mobilised into the Royal Navy, he saw immediate surface combat, surviving the heavy air attack and disabling of the destroyer HMS Montrose off the beaches of Dunkirk during the 1940 evacuation, before spending a year escorting Atlantic trade convoys aboard HMS Malcolm, where he took part in the depth-charge destruction of U-651 in June 1941.

Seeking more aggressive service, Fraser volunteered for submarines in 1942, training on P35 and H43 before joining the new S-class boat HMS Sahib as First Lieutenant under Lieutenant John Bromage. Based out of Holy Loch, Gibraltar, and Malta with the 10th Submarine Flotilla, Fraser navigated Sahib through seven operational war patrols across the Arctic and the Mediterranean. Operating along Axis maritime supply routes to North Africa, Sahib sank numerous transports and carried out surface gun actions, culminating on 21 January 1943 off Corsica when she torpedoed and destroyed the German submarine U-301. For his bravery and skill during these patrols, Fraser was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, gazetted on 6 April 1943. His continuous deployment with Sahib ended abruptly when a heavy brass ashtray, thrown during wardroom celebrations aboard the depot ship HMS Maidstone in Algiers, broke a bone in his foot. This injury grounded him ashore and spared him from Sahib’s eighth patrol in April 1943, during which she was sunk off Sicily and her crew captured.

Upon recovery and promotion to lieutenant, Fraser responded to an Admiralty call for hazardous duty with the 14th Submarine Flotilla, assuming command of the midget submarine HMS XE-3. Transported to the Pacific aboard the depot ship HMS Bonaventure, XE-3 was deployed from Labuan on 26 July 1945 for Operation Struggle, an audacious penetration of Singapore Harbour to neutralise the 10,000-ton Japanese heavy cruiser Takao. Towed by HMS Stygian to within forty miles of the target, Fraser slipped the tow on 30 July with a four-man crew consisting of Sub-Lieutenant William Lanyon Smith, Engine Room Artificer Charles Reed, and diver Acting Leading Seaman James Magennis. Fraser navigated eighty miles of heavily mined and hydrophone-monitored shallows, slipping through an anti-submarine boom to reach the cruiser’s berth in the Johore Strait. Finding the Takao resting on the seabed at bow and stern, Fraser forced his craft into a slight depression beneath the cruiser's hull, allowing Magennis to squeeze through the diver's hatch into weed-choked water, scrape barnacles from the hull plates, and attach six magnetic limpet mines. When a two-ton side charge jammed on its release gear, Magennis re-entered the water to lever it clear with a spanner. Fraser then manoeuvred the stuck craft out from under the settling cruiser on a falling tide, making good his escape to open sea. The resulting explosions blew a 65-by-33-foot breach in the hull of Takao, immobilising her permanently as a constructive total loss.

Both Fraser and Magennis were awarded the Victoria Cross, gazetted in the Third Supplement to The London Gazette on 13 November 1945 (Issue 37346, Page 5529), with the citation reading verbatim:

"Lieutenant Fraser commanded His Majesty's Midget Submarine XE-3 in a successful attack on a Japanese heavy cruiser of the Atago class at her moorings in Johore Strait, Singapore, on 31st July, 1945. During the long approach up the Singapore Straits XE-3 deliberately left the believed safe channel and entered mined waters to avoid suspected hydrophone posts. The target was aground, or nearly aground, both fore and aft, and only under the midship portion was there just sufficient water for XE-3 to place herself under the cruiser. For forty minutes XE-3 pushed her way along the seabed until finally Lieutenant Fraser managed to force her right under the centre of the cruiser. Here he placed the limpets and dropped his main side charge. Great difficulty was experienced in extricating the craft after the attack had been completed, but finally XE-3 was clear, and commenced her long return journey out to sea. The courage and determination of Lieutenant Fraser are beyond all praise. Any man not possessed of his relentless determ...."

In November 1946, the Crown granted Fraser unrestricted permission to accept and wear the United States Legion of Merit in the Degree of Officer. Leaving full-time naval service in 1947, he applied wartime frogman techniques to peacetime salvage, founding Universal Divers Ltd and leading early commercial scuba operations. He remained an active officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander, earning the Royal Naval Reserve Decoration with Clasp, and sitting as a magistrate on the Wallasey bench until retiring to the Wirral, where he died on 1 September 2008.