Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 5
How much easier the Battle of the Atlantic would have been, and how many thousands of ships and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved, if we had had half as many battleships and twice as many aircraft-carriers.
835 Squadron played only a very minor role in the exploits of the Furious: we were with her for just the one convoy. But this convoy was, for most of us, our first taste of serious operations — and for Johnnie Johnstone and me it was very nearly our last.
We rendezvoused with part of our convoy during the night – several troopships and three destroyers. We then headed south for the Caribbean, where we expected to pick up more ships before proceeding to the British Isles.
The CO and I took off at 0645 on the dawn patrol. It was fine but misty, and we knew the forecast was not good. As we circled the convoy we eyed our merchantmen much as a sheepdog might eye a flock to be driven, looking for potential troublemakers: the sort of ancient vessel whose top speed was a couple of knots less than everyone else’s, and who was liable to belch out great globules of telltale smoke. However, it looked as though on this occasion we were lucky; the merchantmen all seemed to be large and fast, and we were heading south at a fair rate of knots, each ship leaving behind it a straight well-defined wake.
I liked the dawn patrol; apart from the pleasure of seeing the sunrise, which often seemed more spectacular from 500 feet than from sea-level, it always seemed to give me a good appetite for breakfast. This first patrol was uneventful, and we landed back on the Furious at 0915.
The CO and I were about to sit down to our bacon and eggs when we were called to the bridge. A garbled SOS was being picked up. It seemed that a tanker, about 100 miles to the north, was being shelled by a U-boat. It was decided to send a Swordfish to the rescue; and since none of the other aircrew had experience in this sort of mission, the job was given to the CO and me.
While our plane was being quickly refuelled, I was briefed by the Senior Operations Officer. It seemed to me that since the U-boat was way to the north and the convoy was heading rapidly south, we would need to be especially careful (a) that we didn’t run out of fuel, and (b) that we always kept track of exactly where the Furious was. I therefore asked the SSO if, as a back-up to my dead reckoning plot, Furious would transmit radio bearings (if we asked for them) so that on our return we could get an accurate fix on the carrier’s position. This he said he would do. So we took off and flew north.
After about an hour we arrived in the area where we ought to have found a tanker, but there was nothing to be seen except sea, low clouds, mist and sky. We decided to carry out a square search: i.e. to fly along the four sides of an ever-expanding square, the length of the sides being determined by the limits of visibility. After some forty minutes of fruitless searching, I shifted the axis of our square to the east and tried again, but again without success. It seemed unlikely that in so short a time the tanker could have gone down without trace; so we could only assume her position had been reported incorrectly. Since we had the promise of radio bearings, should we need them, to help us find the carrier, I continued the search until the last possible moment; but eventually a combination of worsening weather and dwindling fuel obliged us to return. I had every confidence in my navigation, and didn’t anticipate my difficulty finding the Furious, but when, at the end of four hours’ flying, we got back to the spot where we expected to find the convoy, it wasn’t there. Once again, we could see nothing but sea, low cloud and ever-thickening mist. For the first time in my career as a navigator, I had to admit I was lost.
Duggan called up the carrier to request the radio bearings we had been promised, but there was no reply. He tried again and again and again, but each request met the same depressing silence.
We threw an aluminium seamarker over the side, and while the CO circled it and Duggan continued his transmissions, I checked and rechecked my navigational calculations. I could find no error. We were where we ought to be. The convoy wasn’t.
To say I was worried would be an understatement. We now had fuel for only about twenty-five minutes’ flying and, while Duggan continued his plea for bearings, and the CO lit yet another cigarette, I had to make up my mind what to do. I decided our best bet would be to head south-east for Bermuda. We hadn’t a hope of getting there; but, assuming we ditched, survived and managed to get into the aircraft’s emergency dinghy, every mile we now covered would be a mile less to paddle.
We had been heading towards Bermuda for about ten minutes when, through the thickening haze, we unexpectedly sighted the convoy, steaming not south but east. We landed-on, after a flight of four hours and twenty-five minutes; and our groundcrew told us, later that evening, that when they checked the tanks there wasn’t enough fuel in them to cover an upended sixpence.
At the end of our debriefing I said to the Senior Operations Officer, “Didn’t you hear us? Asking for radio bearings?”
“Yes,” he said. “We heard you.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you answer?”
He was very matter of fact. He offered no apology – and indeed when I’d calmed down and thought about it, I realized none was called for. “There was a U-boat,” he said, “dead ahead. The convoy had to alter course.”
And Johnstone and I saw at once that, if the Furious had answered our call, she would have revealed the convoy’s position and altered course to the U-boat. The captain was absolutely right not to jeopardize his vessels for the sake of a single plane. This we accepted, but it didn’t make us feel any the less expendable. By coincidence, only a few weeks later, on another convoy, two Swordfish of 836 Squadron, flying from HMS Avenger, were lost in exactly the same circumstances. We were lucky. They were not. War is seldom fair.
During the rest of the day close anti-submarine patrols were flown round the convoy, with Taffy Jones, Robin Shirley-Smith and Johnnie Hunt making their first deck-landings without difficulty. And our constant patrolling evidently kept the U-boats’ heads down, for there were no attacks on the convoy. It is worth recording that only a month earlier, in much the same area, one of our convoys sailing without air cover suffered heavy losses.
Late that night we entered St George’s Harbour in Hamilton, Bermuda, where we remained at anchor for forty-eight hours. Although there may have been U-boats within a few miles of the island, the war might have been taking place on another planet. The beaches were crowded with sunbathers, the restaurants had obviously never heard of rationing, and the shops were well stocked with luxuries – though rather less well stocked with silk stockings and perfume by the time we sailed.
Last to leave the island, as befitted his rank, was our elderly and slightly tipsy Paymaster Commander. As he boarded the pinnace he failed to notice that the bottom rung of the landing-ladder was missing and dropped with an almighty splash into the harbour. The boat’s crew hauled him out and sat him streaming-wet in the stern. One of them handed him his cap and, although this was full of water, in accordance with the demands of naval etiquette, he put it on. It says much for his adherence to the tradition of the stiff upper lip that all the way to Furious he sat rigidly in the sternsheets, apparently oblivious to the ever-deepening pool of water in which he was sitting.
We sailed on 6 April, rendezvoused off the island with our now fully assembled convoy and set course for the Clyde.
We had an uneventful passage to the United Kingdom: uneventful, that is, as far as U-boats were concerned. The weather was another matter.
For three days the squadron flew continuous anti-submarine patrols, circling the convoy at a radius of either 15 or 20 miles, the first plane take-off half an hour before sunrise, the last landing-on in the twilight. We sighted no U-boats. But we soon had another adversary to contend with: the weather. Slowly the wind increased: 30, 40, 50 knots. The waves steepened, until huge rollers half-a-mile from crest to crest and 30 feet in height were thundering down on us out of the north. By 10 April conditions had become so bad that flying had to be cancelled.
Furious was not
a good ship to be in in bad weather. Her flight-deck made her top-heavy, accentuating her every pitch and roll, while, because of her curious open structure, she took aboard vast quantities of water. Soon we were “shipping it green”; several of our ship’s boats were crushed by waves breaking flush on top of them; water came swirling into our cabins, and at times the wardroom was literally awash. But worse was to come. Lashed down in the hangar were a number of American fighters – Corsairs and Wildcats – and the first of the American Avenger torpedo-bombers, being brought to the United Kingdom for trials. A ring-bolt securing one of the Wildcats to the deck of the hangar sheared under the strain and the plane began to break loose. As the maintenance crew rushed to secure it, an oil drum came cartwheeling across the deck, smashed into one of the aircraft and burst open. For several minutes the deck was like a nightmare skating rink as the maintenance crew fought to prevent the Wildcat breaking loose and turning the hangar into a scrap-yard of shattered aircraft. They did it. Luckily our four Swordfish escaped damage. And luckily none of our maintenance personnel was seriously injured.
That evening we passed through the heart of the storm and by the following morning, although conditions were difficult, we were able to resume flying. This was as well, for we were now coming up to the sea lanes north-west of Ireland, a happy hunting ground for the U-boats.
However, once again our Swordfish proved an effective deterrent. No attack was made on the convoy and the only excitement came when, in the middle of a patrol, the CO suddenly found to his horror that our Swordfish wasn’t answering its controls. Somehow he managed to get back to the carrier and land-on. It was then discovered that, while the aircraft had been serviced, a roll of wing-fabric had been carelessly left beneath the floor of the pilot’s cockpit and this had been spasmodically jamming both ailerons and elevators.
In my two-and-a-half years with the Squadron this is about the only case I can remember of our groundcrew letting us down.
In the early hours of 15 April the convoy dropped anchor in the Clyde and our first carrier-based operation came to an end.
We would have been more than happy to stay with the Furious, but it seemed as though the powers-that-be had other plans for us, for we were ordered to RNAS Lee-on-Solent, near Gosport in Hampshire.
The Swordfish flew there via Machrihanish and Sealand; the groundcrew followed by train via Glasgow, London and Portsmouth. The Squadron was then given a week’s leave.
In view of what happened next, it might be stressed that our first taste of operations had been successful. Although 75 per cent of our aircrew had no previous experience of operational flying, we had carried out over 30 anti-submarine patrols from Jamaica and about the same number from Furious (many of the latter in difficult flying conditions) without sustaining the slightest injury to our aircrew or damage to our aircraft. And, what is more to the point, while the Squadron had been flying not a single warship or merchantman in the vicinity had been attacked, let alone damaged or sunk. These were not great achievements, but we reckoned they ought to guarantee us a continuing role in the Battle of the Atlantic – which in the spring of 1942 was not going well.
This, however, was not to be.
3
ADOLESCENCE
Adolescence is often reckoned to be a frustrating time. Ours was. For between May, 1942, and November, 1943, the squadron was moved from place to place no fewer than sixteen times, and only once did we find ourselves aboard a carrier and actually doing the job for which we had been trained – escorting a convoy. The rest of the time we were “working up”.
Working up is an euphemism for advanced specialized training, the idea being that aircrew should polish up their general flying and practise those special skills which are likely to stand them in good stead on forthcoming operations. Many great feats of flying in the Second World War owed their success to meticulous working up – the Swordfish attack on the Italian fleet in Taranto for example, or the Lancaster attack with bouncing bombs on the Möhne dam – and by and large this training was a great help to squadrons about to embark on carrierborne operations. However, working up per se achieved nothing; it was the means to an end, not an end in itself; for there is little point in perfecting one’s skills if one is never given the opportunity to use them. And this is exactly what happened to 835 Squadron. For, the rest of 1942 and the better part of 1943 we were kept, like theatrical extras, ever “waiting in the wings”, at a time when the Battle of the Atlantic was going badly, and we could have made (and knew we could have made) a valuable contribution.
However, in the spring of 1942 we had no idea of what was in store for us. Indeed we rather fancied the prospect of a little working up so that we could turn our reconstituted squadron into an effective fighting unit.
“Reconstituted” because, when we returned from leave to Lee-on-Solent, we found waiting for us six new aircraft, six new aircrew and a new Commanding Officer.
Our four original Swordfish, before we took them over, had been operating from Furious since the early days of the war. Our six new ones were the same Mark but more recently off the assembly line and powered by a Pegasus 30 engine rather than a Pegasus 3. Their numbers were DK 771-A, 769-B, 770-DE, 714-G and 684-H; and glancing, fifty years later, through the Squadron’s Fair Flying Log, I see that we were flying the same faithful old aircraft in the autumn of 1943 as in the spring of 1942, a tribute to their sturdy construction and pilots’ skill. As far as possible, each crew had their own plane, which helped to create a bond between aircrew and maintenance crew.
Our new pilots were, in alphabetical order, Harry (Hank) Housser, a large, flamboyant, somewhat opinionated lieutenant on loan from the Royal Canadian Navy. A barrister by profession, Harry had a slow drawl and a quick wit, and was one of those irrepressible, highly intelligent characters destined to make their mark any time, any place, in any company.
George Sadler was a straightforward down-to-earth Lancastrian who could be blunt to the point of rudeness, but whose judgement could seldom be faulted and who probably had more sound commonsense than the rest of the squadron put together. It was typical of George’s sensible and practical approach that, when he was put in charge of aircrew parachutes, he insisted on going on a training course and becoming himself a most proficient parachute-packer.
Bob Selley was a small unsophisticated Devonian, whose first reaction to the goings-on in 835 Squadron was a breathless “Crumbs!” Harry Housser promptly christened him “Crumbie”, and the name stuck. Bob turned out to be an outstanding pilot, surviving both the boredom of 1942/43 and the hazards of 1944/45. He flew more hours while serving with the squadron and did more deck-landings than anyone else – 562 hours and 207 deck-landings, many of the latter at night and in the most appalling conditions.
Jimmy Urquhart, a Scot, had been brought up in Lima, Peru, where his father was British Consul, and educated at Aberdeen Grammar School. Jimmy was generous to a fault, happy to lend his last penny to any of his large circle of friends. The trouble was he seemed invariably to have spent his last penny, and was forever raising loans on the security of his magnificent Urquhart kilt, which spent most of its life in hock awaiting the next pay day!
Our observers, again in alphabetical order, were John Lang, who was also our new Commanding Officer, a short, chubby-cheeked product of Dartmouth. Lt John Lang RN had seen service off Norway, on Atlantic convoys and in the Mediterranean, and as a result of more than eighteen months’ continuous operational flying he had developed a twitch in his right eye, which led, unkindly but inevitably, to his being christened “Blinkie”. I have to admit that he and I got on about as well as oil and water. I saw him as the personification of those old-fashioned traditions of the Royal Navy which “hostilities only” aircrew like myself found irksome. He probably saw me as the personification of those brash young men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve who preferred beer to pink gin and were prone to pass the port in the wrong direction. If the squadron had been kept busy with operational fl
ying these differences would almost certainly have been recognized as trivial and disappeared. As it was, during long spells of enforced idleness, they festered. To put it mildly, we got on each other’s nerves.
David Newbery was a quiet, handsome young man who, like myself when I first joined a squadron, had to suffer the indignity of being a Snotty or Midshipman. For if a pilot or observer completed his flying training before he was twenty he was commissioned not as a sub-lieutenant but as a temporary acting midshipman. This meant he often had to take orders from men with less flying experience than he had, simply because (in the words of Pitt the Elder) he “was guilty of the atrocious crime of being a young man”.
Last but by no means least was John Winstanley, whose eyes were of a different colour. His comic appearance was something he played up to, pretending to be a buffoon, whereas in fact he was extremely shrewd and a born survivor. As evidence of the latter, he was found one morning after a party fully clothed in a bath of cold water. This was less disastrous than it might have been, because Winnie had almost as many items of uniform as the rest of the squadron put together, including a tropical pith helmet. The existence of this unusual piece of sartorial extravagance was revealed at another and particularly riotous party. Its owner was persuaded to bring it into the wardroom, where it was used for purposes other than that for which it had been designed – “after all,” as someone said with a lisp, “it is a pith helmet, isn’t it!”
To start with working up was fun. With the Battle of the Atlantic going badly, we were keen to achieve maximum operational efficiency so that we would be able and ready to embark on one of the newly built escort-carriers which, we knew, were now coming out of the US yards in ever increasing number. The pilots practised ADDLs (aerodrome dummy deck landings), ALTs (air launching of torpedoes), dive-bombing attacks, catapult launches (not to be recommended after a heavy session at “The Inn by the Sea”!) and air to air firing. Early in May the observers went north to RNAS Arbroath for a week’s training on how to use our new air-to-surface-vessel radar.