Operation Creek

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Operation Creek, also known as Operation Longshanks, was a secret British mission in World War II. On the night of 9 March 1943, 18 men from the Calcutta Light Horse and Calcutta Scottish, trained by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), carried out a covert raid in Mormugão Harbour, Goa (then Portuguese India).

The plan was to stop German U-boat transmissions by either capturing or sinking the German cargo ship Ehrenfels, which had been relaying information to U-boats. The assault team boarded Ehrenfels from a barge named Phoebe, entering the port under cover of darkness because the lighthouse and buoy were not working that night. The German captain and some crew were killed, and Ehrenfels, along with its transmitter, was captured. Afterward, the German crew scuttled the ship, and the other Axis ships in the harbour—Drachenfels, Braunfels, and Anfora—scuttled themselves to avoid capture.

The raid was a British success and caused a temporary halt to many U-boat transmissions in the area. The British suffered no casualties. The codeword “Longshanks” was sent as Phoebe left the harbour to signal success.

In the aftermath, the thirteen German crew members who survived were captured by Portuguese authorities and imprisoned. Some mutinied in Goa but were released later in the war. Because the operation was secret, the participants received little immediate recognition; it only emerged to the public in 1978 through a book and was later depicted in a film. Wrecks of the four ships were salvaged in 1951, with plans for further salvage discussed in 2017.