Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Read online

  Our second visit to Machrihanish lasted from 28 November to 18 December, 1942, and included a week’s leave. We were then moved again, this time to RAF Kirkiston. We remained at Kirkiston from 18 December, 1942, to 29 January, 1943.

  Travelling to our new base was no problem. The Swordfish made the journey in less than an hour, while the ground crew, together with all the Squadron’s baggage, mobile equipment and stores, were flown there in the maw of a huge Harrow transport. Kirkiston was a satellite of the much larger RAF Ballyhalbert, which lay close to the mouth of Strangford Loch, a few miles south of Belfast. Nobody seemed to know why we had been sent to this disused airfield, but we could only assume that the Admiralty was running out of accommodation on its own airfields and had decided to farm us out to the RAF. By this time we were finding it hard to maintain our enthusiasm for training, and working up continued in a somewhat desultory fashion, not helped by Kirkiston’s superabundance of seagulls. They were a menace to planes taking-off, and Johnny Hunt and I had a narrow escape when we had to turn back and make an emergency landing after running into a flock of them. As sports officer I did my best to keep up morale by encouraging a keep-fit programme and arranging soccer matches. But even the latter seemed to be jinxed. One afternoon during a practice-game we could see two of Ballyhalbert’s Spitfires high above us in a cloudless sky indulging in mock combat. There was a muffled explosion, a high-pitched whine, and looking up we saw to our horror they had collided, and one of them, minus its tail plane, was plummeting vertically out of the sky. It crashed only a couple of fields away. But worse was to come, for in its wake fell its pilot, his unopened and obviously damaged parachute streaming out behind him like a shroud. We could only hope he had lost consciousness before he too smashed into the field. This was the start of a period in the Squadron’s history when one or two of us began drinking “not wisely but too well”. There didn’t seem a great deal else to do and we were helped by Northern Ireland’s excessively liberal licensing laws. Draught Guinness was in copious supply and available almost twenty-four hours a day. In our local pub in Kirkcubbin the landlord might dutifully call “time” at 2200 hours, but, a few minutes later, invited guests, including as often as not several members of 835 and the local policeman, would assemble in his kitchen and stay there drinking until the small hours. Nor was the wardroom bar poorly attended. And one evening early in January it was, I remember, particularly well attended. There were at Ballyhalbert a large number of WAAFs, some of whom became friendly with 835 Squadron officers (“It must,” an RAF pilot was heard to remark testily, “be their uniform!”) The WAAFs had put on a Christmas pantomime at Ballyhalbert and they suggested they should enliven our New Year by giving a repeat performance at Kirkiston, an offer we accepted with alacrity. On the night of the performance the pantomime party arrived in good time, dressed, for reasons of etiquette, in civilian clothes, and we thought it might be helpful to the young ladies if we limbered them up with a few drinks in the wardroom bar. As a result the pantomime was an absolute riot, with characters entering when they should have exited and vice versa, and the prompter much in demand. The pièce de résistance was a Cossack dance, with the girls ending up in a giggling heap on the floor. As ill luck would have it, the Group Captain from Ballyhalbert chose this inopportune moment to visit his satellite station. He was not amused, and rumour had it that a signal was sent to the Admiralty demanding the removal of the delinquent squadron. There are two ways of looking at this affair of the pantomime, and they sum up the difference between the RNVR way of thinking and the RN way. “No harm was done,” wrote Jack Cramp, “and a good time was had by all.” “It is not to the credit of the squadron officers,” wrote John Lang, “that they allowed their young WAAF guests to become intoxicated.”

  Anyhow, whatever the rights and wrongs, and for whatever reason, we found ourselves back in Machrihanish.

  Our third visit to “Clapham Junction” lasted from 29 January to 8 April, 1943.

  More ADDLs, more night attacks with flares, more long walks along the sand-dunes. Then, on the afternoon of 9 February, at a time when it seemed as though nothing exciting was ever going to happen, the squadron had its first serious accident, though this was hardly of our making. We had been briefed to carry out dummy torpedo attacks on HMS Cardiff, and three of our Swordfish were queueing up at the end of the runway, waiting to take-off. Hank Housser and I, together with our telegraphist air gunner Alec Thompson, were in the leading aircraft. However, instead of being cleared for take-off by the expected green flash from an Aldis lamp, we were given an ominous red. And we soon saw why. A Blackburn Skua which had just taken off in front of us had got into difficulties and, instead of making an emergency landing dead ahead with his wheels up, the pilot decided to try and get back to the airfield and land with his wheels down. Red Very lights started shooting up from all directions as the Skua came hurtling back downwind, out of control and straight towards us. Hank tried to swing our Swordfish out of its path. But about 50 yards short of us the Skua tipped on to its nose. Its engine was torn clean away and went sailing over our heads; and the rest of the plane, with a terrible screeching of metal and fabric, slithered along the runway and smashed straight into us. If its engine had still been in place that would have been the end of us all. As it was, the fuselages of the two planes collapsed in a shattered heap, but there was no seepage of petrol, no explosion, no fire. At least not for the moment. I grabbed the Swordfish’s fire-extinguisher, struggled out of the cockpit, and came face to face with the pilot of the Skua, dangling upsidedown but by some miracle not seriously injured. I was wondering how to free him so that he didn’t drop headfirst on to the runway, when the crash-tender and ambulance came screaming to a halt beside us, and within seconds we were extricated, all more or less intact, and helped to a safe distance from the shattered planes. At least we could no longer complain that nothing exciting ever happened!

  The only other incidents that seem worth recording during this visit to Machrihanish are our success in cross-country running and our somewhat pointless introduction to the decompression chamber. The fierce and balding Commander Sears, who was in charge of flying-personnel at Machrihanish, considered with some justification that his aircrew were indulging in too much drink and too little exercise. He therefore ordered us all out of bed at 0700 each morning for compulsory physical training. Hank Housser and I, who both had a streak of obstinacy, felt disinclined to obey this order, on the grounds that we already got up each morning at 0630 and played squash. We were given special dispensation and, as evidence of our fitness, I later led 835 Squadron to victory in the station 5-mile cross country run. We had, I remember, three out of the first five home.

  A few weeks later we found ourselves seated in a large sealed cylindrical tank, while the internal air pressure was gradually reduced. The idea was to demonstrate the danger of flying at high altitude without oxygen. Since Swordfish never climbed above 10,000 feet and seldom above 1,000, the exercise as far as we were concerned was somewhat academic. However, when the dial in the decompression chamber indicated we were at the equivalent of 20,000 feet, we were told to write the poem “Mary had a little lamb”. The results were instructive. Although we felt more or less normal, our brains were so starved of oxygen that few of us managed to remember even the second line. Perhaps as a result of my keep-fit campaign, I was able to complete the first verse, but towards the end my writing had become completely illegible.

  On 8 April we received the order that we had long been hoping for. The squadron was to embark in the US-built escort carrier HMS Battler.

  Our first visit to Battler lasted from 9 April until 7 May. I found myself once again in charge of the land party, following the now familiar route from Machrihanish to Greenock, and thence by lighter to the carrier which lay at anchor in the Clyde. As we came alongside, the first thing I noticed was the smoothness of her hull. All British warships were rivetted. Battler was welded. It was a difference of some significance.


  Looking back, I can now see that the story of 835 Squadron is very much tied up with the story of these “Woolworth carriers” or “banana boats” as the Battler-class vessels were nicknamed. Their shortcomings were the source of our frustration. These shortcomings, however, were not immediately apparent and our first impression of our new home was favourable.

  The Battler-class warships were hastily-cobbled-together-hybrids, born of the Navy’s need to have stop-gap carriers which could protect the Atlantic convoys until their own warships came into service. The Americans offered to provide such stop-gaps. The thinking was that in US shipbuilding yards, which were free from the threat of bombing and which had unlimited sources of labour and materials, it would be possible to turn merchant vessels into aircraft-carriers by converting their interior into a hangar and their superstructure into a flight-deck. The resulting vessels were known as CVEs (Convoy Escort Vessels), a nomenclature soon changed by their ships’ companies to “Combustible, Vulnerable and Expendable”!

  However, as we came aboard that April, we saw no reason to be critical. The aircrew were impressed by their spacious and comfortable cabins, and by the reassuring width (102 feet) of the flight-deck: impressed too by the plaque in the wardroom recording that a certain young lady, while working on our carrier, had won the title “Welding Queen of the Atlantic”; as evidence of her speed if not her precision a squiggly line of welding zigzagged from deck to bulkhead. The groundcrew were impressed by their folding bunks (instead of the traditional hammocks) and by the promise of hot meals from a cafeteria, and of seven different types of icecream and milkshakes from a soda fountain. The captain was impressed by his compact roman “island” – Battler’s only superstructure – from which the ship and her aircraft could be controlled; in fact the one thing at first that Captain Stephenson wasn’t happy about was the lack of a bath; US warships go in for showers. It was only by slow degrees that Battler’s lack of a bath was seen to be the least of her shortcomings.

  We hoped to sail right away on convoy protection duties, but we ought by this time to have known better. We were to spend the next four weeks working up in the Clyde, although it soon became apparent that this was more for the benefit of the ship than the squadron.

  During the last three weeks of April and the first week of May our pilots carried out 207 deck-landings, sixty-two of them at night, without their Swordfish incurring so much as a scratch. Our observers carried out exhaustive tests on their ASV radar without ever getting lost or failing to find their target, while our telegraphist air gunners got used to their new TR 1304 radio equipment which at last replaced the old wireless transmitters with their Morse keys. There was nothing wrong with the squadron.

  The same couldn’t be said for the carrier. The crux of the matter was that the Woolworth carriers had been built too quickly. At the time there were conflicting views about them. The Americans felt that the British had asked for a rush job and had no reason to complain when they got what they asked for. They also pointed out that the US Navy was managing to operate several of its Woolworth carriers quite effectively, albeit in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic where weather conditions were relatively benign. The British felt that the carriers they took delivery of were sub-standard; most had niggling defects, and because of their lightweight, open and welded construction they were ill-suited to work in the place where they were needed most, the North Atlantic. As evidence of this, the Navy pointed out that after only three months’ service Archer repeatedly broke down and had to be retired to care and maintenance (i.e. she had “defects beyond economical repair”), while Dasher, on only her second convoy, first turned back with engine failure and buckled plates, then blew herself up and sank in the Clyde.

  Perhaps the reaction of 835 Squadron says it all. A brief honeymoon was followed by the gradual realization that our first impressions of our new home had been through rose-tinted spectacles. It wasn’t long before the plaque in the wardroom commemorating the exploits of “the Welding Queen of the Atlantic” mysteriously disappeared. A few days later it was found welded upsidedown to a bulkhead in the officers’ “heads” (lavatories)!

  While working up with Battler there were quite a few changes to squadron personnel. We were allocated two new Swordfish, three new pilots, three new observers and three new telegraphist air gunners; so the enlarged squadron now consisted of nine aircraft and thirty-three aircrew.

  We said goodbye to several old friends: Jack Cramp (who eventually found his way back to New Zealand), Taffy Jones ( who went to train the large number of RNVR pilots now joining the Air Arm) and Jackie Parker (who volunteered to join a night fighter squadron and was tragically killed only a few months later).

  We welcomed five new pilots and three new observers. The pilots were W.E.F. Elliott who, in spite of his impressive initials, was known as Teddy and soon became one of the most popular and dependable members of the Squadron; John Cridland and Joe Supple, firm friends who had gone through flying training together and now found themselves appointed on the same day to the same carrier. John and Joe were reserved but reliable and resilient characters who felt their way with caution in the wardroom of their first carrier. The last of our new pilots, Tony Costello, had no such inhibitions. A most elegant product of Harrow, he got gloriously drunk on his first night with the Squadron and was found on the flight-deck a little after midnight flinging £1 notes into the Clyde with cries of “filthy lucre!” Tony was one of those gifted characters who lived life to the full and who won the respect and affection of all who got to know him. Among his more tangible assets was a superb collection of jazz records. I can never hear Glen Miller or Harry James without remembering the evenings we spent in his cabin listening to what were then the great modern exponents of jazz.

  Our new observers were Lt Bill Buckie, who was both older than me and senior in rank, but had completed his training at a much later date; it says much for his diffidence and good nature that he didn’t demur when John Lang confirmed my position as the Squadron Senior Observer. The other observers were Sub-Lt Stan Smith, a small and cheerful cockney who looked (and acted) a bit like Charlie Chaplin and was not a great favourite of our Commanding Officer; Jack Dalton, an ebullient, belligerent and somewhat overconfident Lancastrian, and finally Sub-Lt MacCormick, who (for reasons best not gone into) was christened by his fellow Scott Jimmy Urquhart as “Micknormac”.

  On 7 May we left Battler and returned to Machrihanish. This, we were told, was a case of adieu rather than goodbye, an interlude in which our long-suffering pilots were to undergo yet more training, this time a rocket projectile course. Rocket projectiles in 1943 were the up-and-coming weapons. Two racks were slung beneath the Swordfish’s lower mainplane, each containing four rockets with solid metal warheads. The Stringbag, being remarkably stable in flight, proved an ideal launching-platform. She was put into a shallow dive of about 25°, aimed at her target, and all her pilot had to do was press a button to fire salvoes of two, four or eight rockets. In mock attacks in the Clyde we accounted for an impressive number of “enemy” submarines. On the way back from one of these exercises there was an incident which could have been fatal. Bob Selley had a sudden and complete engine failure. The Mull of Kintyre is not a good spot in which to have to make a forced landing, but Bob spotted a postage-stamp of a field and managed to glide safely into it and brake to a halt literally inches from a ditch. To give some idea of how small the field was, although the Swordfish was undamaged and was subsequently stripped of every possible piece of extraneous equipment to reduce its weight, it was three weeks before there was sufficient wind for it to be flown out. Bob’s observer that day happened to be the CO, and Blinkie was so impressed with his pilot’s skill that he gave him a well-deserved “Green Ink Recommend” in his log book “for an instance of exceptional flying skill”.

  We returned to Battler on 14 May, and a couple of days later were on the move again for yet another training course. This involved a second visit to Northern Ireland, first t
o RAF Ballykelly, then to RNAS Eglinton.

  From 15 May until 4 June we played what would now be called “War Games”, with models of U-boats, merchantmen and corvettes, the idea being to bring us up to date on recent developments and tactics in the battle of the Atlantic. This was a well-run and instructive course. It brought home to us how complex and technical the war at sea was becoming and how every move of every ship, plane and U-boat was monitored by Western Approaches Command from its headquarters in Liverpool. It also brought home a fact which is widely recognized today, but which, at the time, not everyone had taken aboard: the fact that sea power and air power had, by the 1940s, become inextricably intertwined, and that the Navy couldn’t hope to maintain mastery of the sea unless it recognized that ruling the waves was now dependent on also ruling the air. The Punch cartoon (over page) says it all.