Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Read online

  To understand why our contribution was so vital – and so tardy – we need to know a little about the background to the Battle of the Atlantic.

  In 1939 the Navy was ill-prepared to cope with the threat posed by German U-boats. There were several reasons for this. Between the wars senior naval officers had had a battleship, as distinct from a little ship, mentality. This is reflected by the fact that there were, in the words of the naval historian Captain Roskill, “voluminous instructions for the operation of the battle-fleet, but no instructions whatsoever for the defence of mercantile convoys”. There seemed to be a general feeling that the introduction of a convoy system would be enough per se to keep the U-boats at bay; and this over-optimistic view was reinforced by the Navy’s faith in its Asdic (now known as Sonar), an acoustic device for detecting and homing-in on underwater objects. Asdic was indeed a key weapon – if we hadn’t had it, the U-boats would have run rampant – but it had limitations; it was difficult to operate in bad weather, it had a relatively short range, contact was lost at close quarters, and the depth of the object detected was hard to estimate. In short, although the Navy recognized that in the event of war a convoy system would be needed, they lacked the warships, the commitment and the training to ensure that convoys were adequately protected; in particular they lacked even a single purpose-built escort-carrier to provide a convoy with air cover.

  If the allies were ill-prepared in 1939 to defend their merchant ships, the Germans were equally ill-prepared to attack them. It is now known that Hitler hadn’t expected war to break out until 1943. On this assumption, he had authorized the building of a high seas fleet (two superbattleships, two battlecruisers, three pocket battleships and an aircraft carrier) in the hope of challenging British Naval supremacy. U-boats were accorded a low priority. Few were built; and when war did break out – prematurely from the point of view of the German Navy – they had no more than twenty-two operational submarines, several of which could be used only in coastal waters.

  On the first day of war a U-boat, contrary to orders, attacked and sank the passenger liner Athenia; the Admiralty at once introduced the convoy system, and the protagonists settled down to a period of lowkey skirmishing which bore little relationship to the holocaust to come. The Germans had so few U-boats and such unfavourably-placed bases that they were unable to mount a sustained offensive. The allies had so few warships they were hard-pressed to defend their convoys against even such spasmodic attacks as were mounted against them. During this stage of the “phoney” war many merchantmen preferred sailing solo to sailing in convoy, and it is easy to see why. Ships like the Andalucia Star were fine fast vessels, and their captains were experienced seamen used to operating on their own initiative, and impatient of the slow speed and loss of freedom which were the price of sailing in convoy. During the winter of 1939/40 allied ships in the Atlantic got away with the sort of solo voyages and lightly defended convoys which would have been suicidal a year later. It would perhaps be unfair to say that the Admiralty was lulled into a sense of false security by this; it would, however, be fair to say that they failed to address the problem of convoyprotection with the urgency which subsequent events were to prove was called for.

  The skirmishing gave way to something more serious when France fell and the allies withdrew from Norway. For then the U-boats, which had been steadily increasing in number, found themselves presented with a whole chain of ocean-facing ports from the Barents Sea to the Bay of Biscay. To reach allied shipping lanes they no longer had to make long and hazardous voyages from ports like Wilhelmshaven, they were able to get there safely in a matter of hours from ports like Brest. The U-boats stepped up their attacks. Allied losses escalated. And the Navy was now made to pay for the low priority it had accorded convoy-protection duties between the wars. When it was realized that solo-sailing merchantmen were being picked off one by one, all ships were ordered to sail in convoy. This meant that the size and number of convoys increased; and this in turn resulted in an added workload being placed on the escorting warships which were already stretched to breaking point. There simply weren’t enough destroyers and corvettes to do the job. During the winter of 1940/41 the situation became so bad that if a warship guarding a convoy located a submerged U-boat it couldn’t stay behind to hunt it for fear of leaving a gap in the convoy’s threadbare defences. Between July, 1940, and March, 1941, U-boats in the Atlantic sank over two million tons of allied shipping. No wonder German submariners called this “the Happy Time”!

  However, both the Royal and Merchant Navies have a long tradition of resilience. They weathered the storm, albeit at a terrible price, and the Battle of the Atlantic settled down into a long bruising war of attrition. To start with the U-boats had the upper hand; but towards the middle of 1941 counter-measures taken by the allies began to have effect. A special command – Western Approaches – was set up to co-ordinate both an overall strategy against the U-boats and day-by-day tactics. The Ultra cryptographers at Bletchley deciphered the German code, so that transmissions between the U-boats and their headquarters could be not only intercepted but understood and acted on. Corvettes and destroyers (and in particular the Flower-class corvettes) which had been laid down at the start of the war began to come into service. And, perhaps most important of all, Coastal Command was placed under the jurisdiction of the Navy, and long-range Catalinas and Liberators were soon carrying out anti-submarine patrols not only offshore but deep into the Atlantic.

  The Germans also had their successes. They captured two French destroyers which were equipped with Asdic, and this enabled them to assess the equipment’s weaknesses. They altered their transmitting code, and it was some time before Bletchley were able to crack the new one. They brought improved U-boats into service. Some of the latter, like the Type IXc, were able to dive to over 1,000 feet, although the British remained convinced they could only go to 550 feet and continued to set their depth-charges to explode at this maximum depth. As the battle ebbed and flowed both combatants suffered heavy losses.

  Then, at the end of 1941, the killing-ground shifted. America entered the war.

  The US Navy were reluctant to introduce convoys, and throughout the early months of 1942 their warships and merchantmen continued to sail individually. For this they paid a terrible price. The U-boats flocked to the eastern seaboard of the United States and picked off the unprotected vessels one by one. Tankers were an especially favoured target, many of these great ships going down in flames within sight of the shore. When the Americans did at last bring in a convoy system in the North Atlantic, the U-boats moved south into the Caribbean and the estuary of the River Plate, where the slaughter continued. This was known to German submariners as “the Second Happy Time”.

  By the middle of 1942 virtually all allied ships in virtually all parts of the world were sailing in convoy. This had the effect of concentrating the war in the Atlantic into a succession of running battles, with “wolf-packs” of German U-boats (sometimes as many as forty at a time) attacking convoys which were relatively well defended. The result was a bitter, protracted, seesaw battle, fought without mercy but also for the most part without rancour, often in appalling weather, and for high stakes. If a convoy became scattered, it could be virtually annihilated; this is what happened to the ill-fated PQ17, which lost twenty-three out of its thirty-six merchantmen en route to Russia. If, on the other hand, the escorting warships and aircraft managed to keep the U-boats at bay, then the entire convoy might get through without loss. And this, rather than the actual sinking of a U-boat, was the overriding objective of the convoy escorts. They were, to quote C.S. Forester’s analogy, “good shepherds guarding their flock”.

  So when our squadron did, at last, get round to providing air cover for convoys, we saw the merchantmen we were circling as “our” merchantmen, “our” flock to be protected at all costs from the marauding wolf-packs.

  So much for the nature of the work we would soon be doing. But what, specifically, did this work en
tail? What was an anti-submarine patrol?

  From our first operational sortie to our last, the aircraft we used for our patrols were Swordfish: initially the Swordfish Mark II with a crew of three, latterly the Swordfish MKIII with a crew of two. Mark II Swordfish lacked the sophisticated equipment which, in the final stages of the war, enabled us to home on U-boats and circle convoys in the dark relying almost entirely on instruments. Everything at first had to be done visually, and in the early days each of the three aircrew had his specific duties, which included keeping a lookout for surfaced U-boats.

  The observer was very often captain of the aircraft. This was a legacy of the inter-war years when it was thought, with some justification, that pilots needed a navigator when flying over the sea to stop them getting lost, and that, as it was the observer who decided the aircraft’s movements, it was he who should be in command. All Fleet Air Arm observers went through a thorough and demanding training, the basic objective of which was to enable them to keep a dead-reckoning plot: i.e. a chart on which they recorded their aircraft’s course, track and speed, so at any one moment they could tell exactly where they were and their bearing and distance from base. Keeping such a plot was a lot easier said than done. One variable was the wind, which could blow an aircraft – and especially a slow-moving Swordfish – way off course. Another variable were the compasses, which were affected by the aircraft’s individual magnetic field and had to be constantly corrected. Yet another was the pilot, who, through indolence or incompetence, might not be flying the precise course he had been told to. Among an observer’s other duties was wind-finding; this involved dropping a smoke float, flying round it on the four sides of a rectangle, then calculating the wind’s strength and direction from the amount by which the plane had been blown off its starting point. It was also an observer’s job to operate the aircraft’s homing beacon and, on Mark III Swordfish, the radio and the invaluable air-to-sea radar. At first the observer’s cockpit, though open to the elements, was reasonably roomy. However, as more and increasingly sophisticated equipment was loaded into it, the unfortunate observer found he had barely room to sit down and was surrounded by so many devices that he needed double-jointed arms and backward-facing eyes to operate them – hence the evolution of a new species Homo Swordfish (O).

  The pilot was responsible for handling the aircraft and its offensive armament (bombs, torpedos, depth-charges or rocket-projectiles). Swordfish were easy to fly, being robust and reliable – the antithesis of their intended successor, the Barracuda. Although they were slow and had virtually no defensive armament, they were regarded with affection by their pilots: an affection epitomized in The Stringbag Song, sung at many a wardroom party to the tune of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean:

  Homo-Swordfish (O). Fur, bladder and diet as Homo-Swordfish (P). Has vast brain for storing courses, winds, speeds, codes etc. Its eyes revolve on small cranks: a for’ard eye to follow rotations on radar screen; an aft eye (on tip of tail) to enable radio to be tuned. Ears supersensitive to pick up even non-existent signals. Vocal cords well developed to yell at mentally deficient Homo-Swordfish (Ps). Left arm is double-jointed, usually hooked behind back to play with 1460. Right hand has two pointed fingers to form dividers. Legs very short, enabling it to hop round cockpit. Left leg telescopic, armed with heavy boot for kicking ASVX. This species faces extinction.

  “My Stringbag flies over the ocean,

  My Stringbag flies over the sea.

  If it wasn’t for King George’s Swordfish

  Where the hell would the Royal Navy be?”

  Torpedo-dropping requires precision flying and considerable skill; dropping bombs, depth-charges and rocket-projectiles, on the other hand, is mainly a matter of practice. The staid old Swordfish was simply put into a not-toosteep dive and aimed at its target; the weapons were then launched by the press of a button. However, we soon found there was one big disadvantage to this type of attack. The Swordfish was so slow that most U-boats detected our approach on their Metox-tube radar and submerged to a safe depth before they were even sighted. The pilot’s cockpit, like the observer’s, was open; this made flying in the Caribbean extremely pleasant, but flying north of the Arctic Circle less so. The layout was good. Nonetheless in the Swordfish Mark III the pilot, like the observer, eventually found himself with more apparatus than he could comfortably reach. Also, because the later models of the Swordfish were so festooned with equipment, they were aerodynamically less efficient and had to be landed in a “nose-up” attitude; this meant that, approaching the aircraft-carrier, the engine cowling tended to get in the pilot’s line of vision, and to have a clear view of the batsman (the deck-landing officer controlling the plane’s approach) the pilot had to lean out and peer into the slipstream. Hence the evolution of another new species Homo Swordfish (P).

  The telegraphist air gunner occupied the rear cockpit. His most important job was to maintain W/T or R/T communication with base, be it airfield or carrier. For this he was equipped with a T1155/R1154 transmitter-receiver, which was crystal controlled and could be fine-tuned by varying the length of its trailing aerial. In theory this somewhat Heath Robinson apparatus had a range of 100 miles, but in practice it was usually a good deal less. His other piece of equipment was even more archaic: a single gas-operated 303 machine gun. With this cumbersome relic from the First World War he was expected to keep down the heads of the U-boats’ gun-crews as the Swordfish dived in to the attack. Since whenever he fired forward he was liable to shoot off his Swordfish’s wings, if not his pilot’s and observer’s heads, the feasibility of this is questionable!

  A TAG’s training involved learning the Morse Code and flag and semaphore signalling; he had to be proficient in transmitting and receiving all types of radio signals, and was responsible for the maintenance of his equipment. Most TAGs were leading airmen. They faced all the dangers and discomforts of operational flying without enjoying any of the privileges of officer-status. About halfway through the war it was realized that, in Swordfish, they were somewhat de trop; for their radio could be operated by the observer, and their cumbersome machine gun frightened only their fellow aircrew. By 1944 most squadrons were equipped with Mark III Swordfish, in which the TAG’s cockpit was integrated with the observer’s and the TAG himself had been superseded by a complexity of air-to-sea radar equipment. In retrospect it seems a pity that these young men, the cream of the lower deck, all of whom had volunteered for flying duties, were not given greater opportunities. As one of them put it, “With a little training in the essentials of Air Navigation, we could have helped the observers a lot.”

  Homo-Swordfish (P). Fur-covered to keep out cold. Three gallon bladder for long patrols. Diet: cold ersatz coffee and bully beef (when permitted by “Fat Jack”.) Streamlined head situated on left shoulder to see over oiled-up windscreen. For deck-landing, left eye goes out to port to watch batsman, right eye lowered to watch air speed indicator. Ears have built-in volume controls to eliminate unwanted noise (i.e. Homo-Swordfish (O)). Left foot enormous to cope with Oscar. Left arm 5′6″ long and treble-jointed so that RATOG-jettison, oil heater etc. can be operated as well as bomb distributor, throttle etc. Right arm double-jointed to reach fire extinguisher and IFF. This species too is in danger of extinction.

  So our anti-submarine patrols from Palisadoes were like the simplest of the exercises we had done in training. We were given an area somewhere off Jamaica to search; I projected the area on to my chart and worked out the courses we needed to fly and the times we needed to fly them; and Taffy Jones could have done the required flying (metaphorically speaking) with his eyes shut. Visibility was nearly always good. The sun was nearly always shining. Jamaica is a large island, a base which even the most incompetent navigator could hardly fail to return to. The German Uboats were conspicuous by their absence. Few squadrons can have had a more idyllic initiation to war.

  As far as I was concerned, my only moments of danger were a little after take-off and a little prior to landing
. For Taffy Jones discovered that on the suburban patios of Kingston young ladies could frequently be seen sunbathing déshabillé, and mindful of Nelson’s dictum that naval officers should ever engage their targets more closely, he felt duty bound to try some low-level reconnaissance. On one occasion, the sight of a lumbering Swordfish piloted by a libidinous Welshman coming straight at her at a height of less than 15 feet was too much for a pregnant mother; it precipitated a premature (but happily safe) birth. An official complaint brought an official reprimand, and the end of Taffy’s low flying.

  Other members of the squadron found other dangers in Kingston. Taffy Jones, Johnny Hunt and the two Jacks (Teesdale and Parker) went ashore there one evening to settle a bet: to see who could get the best offer from the ladies of the Red Light area. Taffy won at a canter, with an offer to accommodate him for 6d. Only after the bet had been paid did he reveal that the offer had been conditional – a sort of bulk discount: his three colleagues were expected to participate on the same terms!

  I avoided these dangers, though not for a reason I would have wished. And if the incident I am about to recall seems petty, I only mention it because it shows the antipathy that sometimes existed between RN and RNVR(A) officers.

  1. The original Squadron, February, 1942, taken at HAS Buzzard, RN Air Station, Palisadoes, Kingston, Jamaica.

  Back Row L. to R.: Jack Teesdale, Stan Thomas, Barry Barringer, Jack Parker.

  Front Row L. to R.: Johnnie Hunt, Gwynne Jones, the C.O. Johnnie Johnstone, and Robin Shirley-Smith.

  Barry Barringer is the only survivor of this group.

  2. The Squadron, November, 1942; taken at HMS Landrail, RN Air Station Machrihanish.