One night in 1942, in the Malacca Straits off what is now Malaysia, Johnnie Murray-Jones had a problem. He wanted to drop baskets of chickens and ducks, newly plundered from a Japanese junk, down the
Johnnie Murray Jones
Lieutenant Commander Johnnie Murray Jones, who has died aged 99, was a submariner in the Far East during the Second World War and later founded a global money broking firm and the security company Guardforce.
In June 1944 Murray Jones’s submarine Truculent had attacked a Japanese convoy and landed special forces on Simalur island, west of Sumatra, when she sailed from Trincomalee with orders to “capture some Sumatrans to help with intelligence”.
Murray Jones was on watch on the surface at the southern end of the Malacca Straits, “the night as black as only a moonless tropical night can be”, when he saw through his binoculars an even darker patch of night which was the sail of a junk lying becalmed on the glassy sea.