Missing Pieces: - Royal Australian Navy

214 Missing Pieces
vessel and fired to stop it: an Indonesian officer and two soldiers were captured. 686 On
13 December, Teal intercepted two boats off Raffles Light. The boats separated and
refused to stop, firing at Teal when illuminated. Fire was returned and three Indonesians
of a crew of seven were killed. An Indonesian Marine officer was among those arrested,
and a quantity of arms and explosives was captured. 687
Singapore had an array of tempting infiltration and sabotage targets for Indonesia,
including airfields and aircraft, radars, the naval dockyard, warships and other
military facilities. 688 The attempts detected by Teal, among others, caused COMFEF
to temporarily reduce the extent of Borneo patrolling in 1965 and boost the number
of ships available in the Singapore Strait. 689 Up to 50 vessels could be on patrol in the
Singapore and Malacca Straits on a single night. It was not true, as the apocryphal
story had it, that one could walk dry-shod from Raffles Light to Malacca Strait on the
decks of Commonwealth warships, but the patrol line certainly was tightly packed at
the time.
The minesweeper HMAS Teal