Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Read online

  Back Row L. to R.: Bob Selley, Jimmy Urquhart, David Newbery, John McCormick, George Sadler, Johnny Hunt, John Winstanley.

  Front Row L. to R.: Jack Teesdale, Jack Cramp, Gwynne Jones, Hank Housser, the C.O. J.R. Lang, Robin Shirley-Smith, Barry Barringer, Stan Thomas, Jack Parker.

  3. The fighter pilots of 835 Squadron—early 1945.

  L. to R.: Pete Blanco, George Gordon, Sam Mearns, Al Burgham, Bill Armitage, Ken Atkinson.

  Squatting: D.J. Edwards, Norman Sargent.

  4. HMS Nairana with four white Sea Hurricanes ranged for’ard of the barrier.

  5. HMS Battler.

  6. HMS Furious in heavy seas.

  Some of the aircraft flown by the Squadron:

  7. Fairey Swordfish II.

  8. Hawker Sea Hurricane IIc.

  9. Grumman Martlet II (Wildcat).

  One evening Taffy Jones and I had been flying an anti-submarine patrol. On landing, I supervised the securing of the aircraft, cleared the signals log and hurried into the wardroom for dinner dressed in informal but immaculately clean white tropical rig. About the first person I almost bumped into was the duty officer, a Lieutenant RN, dressed in the formal stiff-necked No. 10 white dress-uniform, known to the initiated as “death by choking”. He told me I was improperly dressed, and ordered me to “get into the proper rig”. In the argument that followed he got more and more pompous and I got more and more angry until I was rash enough to tell him to “bugger off”. Next morning, inevitably, I was summoned to the Captain’s office. I could detect some sympathy in Captain Hawkins’s eyes; but I had been grossly insubordinate, and he had no option but to punish me. I found myself duty officer for the rest of our stay in Palisadoes, barred from leaving the airfield.

  Luckily this was by no means an arduous chore. Nor did it last long. For on 12 March we received a signal ordering us to Norfolk, Virginia.

  Our first thought was that we would be embarking on one of the newly built US escort-carriers.

  Then we saw that the signal ended: “and proceed HMS Furious”.

  * * *

  Moving a squadron lock stock and barrel (aircraft, personnel, equipment and weapons) 1500 miles by sea and land over unfamiliar terrain calls for careful planning. Since our CO had ensconced himself in the luxury of the Myrtle Bank Hotel in Kingston, the move was master-minded by our more than competent Stores Officer, Jack Teesdale.

  Jack and I decided that we needed a sea-and-land contingent and an air contingent. The former, consisting of two observers, most of the squadron’s ground crew and all of its weapons and stores, would proceed to Jacksonville on the coast of Florida by sea, and thence to Norfolk by train. The latter, consisting of four pilots flying the Swordfish, with two observers, two TAGs and four maintenance personnel as passengers would fly to Norfolk via Puerta Camaguey, Havana, Miami, Jacksonville, Charleston and Pope Field.

  If any of the sea-and-land party had visions of another Andalucia Star-style cruise, they were quickly disillusioned. They were told they would be sailing in the SS Allister, a very small and very ancient merchantman which had been built on the Clyde a good many years before the First World War. The Allister had ended up in the Caribbean, ferrying soft fruit between the islands and the mainland of the United States. Since Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into the war, she had lain at anchor off Kingston, becoming filthier and filthier because the harbour authorities refused her permission to dump rubbish into the harbour. She had recently been chartered by an American speculator to run a cafgo of bananas to Florida, and 835 Squadron had been added to her manifest as an afterthought.

  The Squadron stores were packed into twenty-seven crates and given a bill of lading. Jack then discovered to his dismay that he was also expected to take with him four torpedoes, which had been left behind by the Furious. He was given a crash course in handling, slinging and storing torpedoes and their warheads, and the fearsome-looking “fish” were loaded into special cases. For security reasons, these cases were labelled “Request 137”, which was the US Navy’s job number for the refit of the Furious; they were not mentioned in the bill of lading, an omission which was soon to cause some panic.

  On 18 March Jack and I went to the docks in Kingston to supervise the loading of our stores onto the Allister, only to find our way blocked by decidedly militant pickets who told us the dockers were on strike. My reaction was to enlist the help of an RN Chief Petty Officer – a species well able, if the need arises, to eat pickets for breakfast – and six able seamen. However, by the time my reinforcements had arrived, Jack had had a good-humoured chat with the dockers’ union leader and had been given permission to bring the stores onto the quay and load them ourselves. The union leader, Jack said, was “a very pleasant fellow called Mr Bustamente” – he later became Prime Minister of Jamaica.

  The stores were swung aboard, the sea-going party embarked, and at dawn next morning the Allister set course for Jacksonville. At the last moment Jack was handed a somewhat inauspicious signal. It read: “You are to organize anti-submarine lookouts to keep watch in whatever West Indian ports you touch, and at sea.”

  The moment the Allister cleared Kingston harbour Jack Teesdale and his second-in-command Jack Parker set about cleaning up their cabins; the maintenance personnel set about cleaning up their quarters in the fo’c’sle, and by the end of the day the ancient merchantman was looking positively spick and span. The squadron then settled down to a leisurely six-day passage to Jacksonville.

  The sun was warm; the sea was sapphire-blue, the passing islands emeraldgreen. What could have been more pleasant? Although the round-the-clock watch for U-boats was a reminder of potential serpents in paradise.

  Jack Teesdale got on particularly well with the Allister’s captain, who, like all his crew, was a Cayman Islander. They spent long hours together on the bridge, with Jack learning navigation the practical way. To his amazement the captain used neither charts nor sextants; nor did he have a radio; he said he simply “knew the way”. And his lack of conventional aids certainly didn’t impair his efficiency. For he made accurate landfalls off Port Morant and Port Antonio to take aboard more bananas, and a couple of days later off the southernmost keys of Florida. Jack admitted later that, as they headed up the Florida coast, he was extremely nervous. For in the seaboard towns there was no sort of blackout; life appeared to be going on as though the war was iooo miles away; and as the Allister wallowed slowly northward she must have been silhouetted against a blaze of neon and arc lights. Jack could only assume she was too small a target for the U-boats to waste a torpedo on her.

  The squadron were thankful to arrive safely at Jacksonville on the Florida/Georgia border.

  What followed was the stuff of comic opera. First to come aboard was the British Consul, an excessively polite young man who said he had not the slightest idea what Jack Teesdale’s orders were but that he had been told to give him as much money as he needed to carry them out. Jack was sorely tempted to tell him the Squadron was en route for Sydney!

  Next to arrive were a gaggle of US officials who began asking somewhat awkward questions about the Allister’s cargo. Jack told them firmly that he was on operational duties and needed to get his personnel, his stores and his torpedoes unloaded without delay. The mention of torpedoes caused consternation – indeed panic – since they had not been included in the Bill of Lading. The head of the local fire department was hastily summoned, and the Allister was even more hastily moved to the remotest possible berth. This, however, caused a problem. The dockers working at the remote berth belonged to a different union to the dockers working at the original berth; neither was pleased by the altered arrangements for unloading, and both downed tools and went on strike. The weather got hotter and hotter and more and more humid. The bananas started to rot. This was the cue for the Port Health Officer to get in on the act. He declared the bananas a potential health hazard and ordered the crew to unload and destroy them. Eventually the Alliste’s deck was sufficiently clear for Jack
to get at his torpedoes, which by this time were awash with molten banana. Surrounded by great clouds of flies, the torpedoes were swung ashore, while the local fire brigade stood apprehensively by, hoses at the ready. Jack then had the dreaded “fish” hosed down and loaded on to a specially chartered train.

  The squadron maintenance personnel, meanwhile, had been given fortyeight hours leave, and had descended en masse on Jacksonville, where the good citizens feted them right royally, under the misapprehension they were fighter pilots. For that evening the local newspaper had a headline reporting that “a flight of British Spitfires” was passing through en route to Norfolk – probably the only time in the war our ancient biplanes were mistaken for the world’s most elegant monoplane fighter!

  Next morning the ground party, some of them decidedly the worse for wear, left by train for Norfolk, with Jack Parker in charge. Jack Teesdale tidied up the bureaucratic odds and ends, made sure the British Consul had paid all the bills, then – taking a leaf out of the CO’s book – followed his ground crew on the same train journey but in the comfort of a Pullman coach.

  While this saga was unfolding, the air party were getting ready to fly from Kingston to Norfolk.

  Our route lay via Camaguey and Havana (in Cuba), across the Straits of Florida to Miami, then via Jacksonville, Charleston and Pope Field to Norfolk. My first job was to try and get hold of an Admiralty chart for the Caribbean part of the flight. However, much to my consternation, I was told no such charts were available. I had therefore to borrow an atlas from the local school and project from it an extremely elementary map by which to navigate. As a back-up, I told our telegraphist-air-gunner to establish contact on a commercial wavelength with Pan American Airlines who I knew operated out of Camaguey and Havana.

  With these somewhat tentative arrangements, our four Swordfish took off in the early hours of 22 March and headed in loose V-formation for Cuba.

  It was a sunny but hazy morning, made hazier still by the CO’s addiction to chain-smoking while he was flying – which was not only against regulations but highly dangerous. Nor was my concentration helped by our eccentric TAG, Petty Officer Duggan, who insisted every now and then on taking off his flying boots and sticking his bare feet out of the cockpit and into the slipstream. This, he said, was good for his “desert feet”: an euphemism, I suspected, for athlete’s foot. In spite of these distractions, I had no difficulty finding Cuba. Finding Camaguey, which was somewhere in the middle of the island, was another matter. The haze seemed to be thickening; my primitive chart was useless, and since there seemed to be neither roads nor towns I had little idea over which part of Cuba we were flying; it all looked depressingly similar – mountainous and heavily wooded – not the place for an emergency landing. I asked Duggan to request bearings from Camaguey, but he got no reply. I was beginning to get a bit worried when I spotted an airliner above the haze. It seemed to be losing height and I reckoned it might be making for Camaguey. We followed it, and ten minutes later the airport emerged out of a miasma of cloud and mist.

  A quick lunch, while the Swordfish were refuelled, then we were on our way to Havana.

  This was an easier, though slightly longer, flight. All we had to do was follow the north coast of Cuba until the capital appeared over the rim of our engine cowlings. We landed a little before dark, to find ourselves metamorphosed by the local press and radio to “a squadron of Spitfires”. This was almost certainly the origin of the misconception about our maintenance personnel when they arrived a couple of days later in Jacksonville. Anyhow, the CO now came into his own. He gave curt instructions to the Cuban airport officials to look after our planes, disdainfully waved away the customs officers and told the British Consul that only the best accommodation was good enough for his aircrew. So we found ourselves ensconced in the luxurious Hotel Nacional, in those days undoubtedly the best in Havana. It was Sunday. There was, inevitably, a festival. The streets were full of cafés, people, processions, floats, music, dancing, girls. Perhaps it was our transformation to Spitfire pilots. Perhaps it was our unfamiliar and exotic uniform. Perhaps it was simply Cuban joie de vivre. It was a night to remember.

  Next day we crossed the Straits of Florida and landed at a US training aerodrome near Miami. The monoplanes which the US pilots were learning to fly were a good deal faster and more modern-looking than our archaic biplanes, and as our four aircraft waddled round the perimeter-track they were subject to the sort of incredulous stares accorded to the dinosaur skeletons in a museum. That evening, however, we pointed out to our hosts that a Swordfish could carry almost as heavy a bomb-load as a Flying Fortress, and that twenty of them had crippled half the Italian fleet in Taranto Harbour. Since the American fleet had just suffered a similar mauling at the hands of the Japanese in Pearl Harbor, this silenced criticism.

  We spent 48 hours in Miami, staying in yet another luxury hotel. It was called the McAllister; and as though to underline the coincidence, on the night we stayed there the rest of the squadron were only a couple of miles away en route to Jacksonville in their old banana-boat the Allister. The names may have been similar, but the standard of accommodation could hardly have been more different.

  The penultimate airfield we touched down at was Pope Field, a US Army Air Force base devoid of both character and comfort. We could only get into our rooms – which were dusty and poorly ventilated – by inserting coins through a slot in the door, and everything had to be paid for on the spot in US dollars. Maybe we had been spoiled by the luxury of the Nacional and the McAllister, but we left Pope Field without regret, and that evening arrived at our destination.

  Norfolk, Virginia, lies at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay and is one of the older and more attractive home ports of the US Navy. Its ship-building and repair yards are among the finest in the world, and in 1942 they were working at full capacity. Many allied warships in the Second World War – like the Furious – limped into Norfolk crippled and left whole. Virginia has a tradition of hospitality; and certainly the naval officers with whom we liaised couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful. They went out of their way not only to see we had everything we needed but to make us feel at home.

  Our ground party and stores had reached Norfolk the day before. We were glad to have the squadron reunited and once more a coherent unit. And on 29 March we were ordered to embark in the Furious.

  The carrier lay berthed in the repair yards, the contractors’ scaffolding still clinging to her like matchsticks to a leviathan. There was clearly no possibility of flying-on the Swordfish; they would have to be hoisted aboard by crane; and the supervision of this somewhat complex operation was entrusted to Jack Teesdale. For once he made a mistake. And what a mistake!

  It was agreed that the Swordfish (with wings folded) would be taxied to a nearby quay and lowered into a lighter; the lighter would then be towed alongside Furious and the aircraft hoisted aboard. Jack was ordered to beg, borrow or steal a lighter and crane to carry out this move. Logically enough, he decided that the ideal thing would be to get hold of a lighter-and-crane combined; so this is what he asked the Americans for. He had a hard time persuading the US admiral in charge of the dockyard to provide this particular equipment, but eventually a huge floating-crane which had been installing gun-turrets into a US battleship stopped work and was towed by five tugs halfway across the harbour to the quay where the Swordfish were waiting. When the captain of the Furious saw what was happening he nearly had a fit. What he had expected Jack to get was a small (or in technical terms a “dumb”) lighter, and to use a small (or dockside) crane to lower the Swordfish into it, then to use the carrier’s own crane to swing the Swordfish aboard; but our unfortunate stores officer had produced an extremely large sledge-hammer to crack a very diminutive nut! Happily the captain was fair-minded enough to blame not Jack but the lack of technical clarity in his orders. How he placated the US admiral, the captain of the battleship sans turrets, the captain of the floating-crane and the captains of the five tugs is not known
. However, since no formal complaint was recorded, it seems that these gentlemen must have had a sense of humour!

  While the squadron settled down into what for most of us was our first operational carrier, the contractors’ débris was cleared away. On 2 April Furious did a test run in the Norfolk Roads. Next day we put to sea. It looked as though our participation in the battle of the Atlantic was about to begin.

  * * *

  Our new home could best be described as “historic”.

  Furious had been laid down in 1915 as a giant cruiser. However, after a couple of years her gun turrets were replaced by a wooden flight-deck and she was handed over to the Royal Naval Air Service for trials. On 3 August, 1917, Squadron Commander Dunning successfully landed his Sopwith “Pup” on her flight-deck – the first ever landing to be achieved on a ship underway. One might have thought that, having pioneered this basic step in naval aviation, Furious between the wars would at least have been able to keep abreast of progress in her specialized field. Unfortunately the RAF, who controlled the purse strings, wanted to see naval aviation downgraded not upgraded; no funds were made available for new equipment; and in the early 1930s, at a time when all US carriers were fitted with efficient arrester-wires, the Navy’s premier carrier was having to put sandbags across her flight-deck to stop her aircraft, on landing, from toppling over the bow. She was downgraded to training and in 1939 had aboard only six Swordfish and four Skuas.

  Nevertheless and in spite of her age, Furious had a fine record in the Second World War, She helped in the search for the Graf Spee, took part in operations off Norway, escorted a quite incredible number of Atlantic, Russian and Malta convoys, ferried aircraft to Africa and played a leading role in air strikes against the Tirpitz. It has been claimed that she covered more miles on active service than any other allied warship: all things considered a remarkable achievement, although you may think it a reflection on the Navy’s planning that their most overworked warship in the Second World War was a makeshift aircraft-carrier which had been cobbled together from an unwanted cruiser in the First.