Читать книгу They Were Just Skulls - John Johnson-Allen - Страница 11

HMS London was a heavy cruiser of the same class as Devonshire, Sussex and Norfolk, and very close in design to Berwick, Cumberland, Kent and Sussex. They had all been designed by Sir William Berry, and had all been launched between 1926 and 1928. London had been built in Portsmouth Dockyard and launched on 14 September 1927. Over the years she had been the subject of much alteration: when Fred joined her in December 1940, she had been in refit since March 1939. Major modifications had been made to her original design: amongst other changes she had a new bridge built, new aircraft hangars and an aircraft catapult, and new engines. The changes increased her displacement by over 1,000 tons. Although these were major improvements, it became apparent that her hull could not cope with the additional strains put upon it as a result of wartime service; further changes were made in 1942, when Fred left her, as the earlier alterations had caused stress damage. She was heavily armed with eight 8-inch main guns, eight 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, various smaller guns and eight torpedo tubes. When new, her top speed was over 32 knots.

Three of her sister ships made names for themselves in the early part of the war: Cumberland was part of Rear Admiral Sir Henry Harwood’s South Atlantic Squadron that took on the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, although she was away from the squadron when the action took place but returned in time to join the blockade off the River Plate. Norfolk and Suffolk were in the Denmark Strait in the action to find and sink the Bismarck, and were the first to locate her and then shadow her, enabling the successful action to take place, ending in her destruction.

On 3 September, only hours after war had been declared, a signal went out to the fleet: ‘Winston is back’. The Navy was delighted, as Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, returning to the post he had held from 1911 to 1915. He had been a very dynamic first lord, to the extent that he had been criticised for being too hands-on and involving himself too much in what would now be called micro-management, and also for having some grand, but unsound, ideas. The latter culminated in the disastrous attempt to force the Dardanelles in order to attack Istanbul.

The German navy in 1939 was not ready for war. It was still small, with only five battleships – three of which were pocket battleships – plus five cruisers, some destroyers and fifty-six U-boats, not all of which were suitable for service in the Atlantic. By contrast, the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet alone had five battleships, two battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, and sixteen cruisers, destroyers and submarines. Also stationed in British home waters were a further two battleships, four cruisers and over sixty destroyers. There were yet more British ships in the North and South Atlantic commands. Although this sounds a huge numerical superiority, many of the ships were old, veterans of the First World War, and not fast enough to catch the recently built German ships. And although the British also had aircraft carriers, the aircraft that flew from them were obsolete, and the Fleet Air Arm remained starved of modern aircraft throughout the first years of the war.

The war at sea had started on 3 September – the very day war was declared – when the cargo/passenger liner Athenia was sunk in the North Atlantic, just west of Ireland, with the loss of over 100 lives. She had been hit by two torpedoes from U-30, commanded by Fritz Julius Lempe. Exactly two weeks later the aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk by U-29 in the Bristol Channel, with a loss of over 500 of her crew. A month later, the U-47, commanded by Gunter Prien, managed to find its way into the Home Fleet base at Scapa Flow and sink the battleship Royal Oak. Over 800 were killed. The U-boat made a successful escape. The third major naval loss in the autumn of 1939 was that of the Rawalpindi, an armed merchant cruiser, which encountered the two German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau whilst on patrol in the Denmark Strait. The lightly armed Rawalpindi stood no chance, with her elderly 6-inch guns pitted against the 11-inch guns of the Scharnhorst. Only 38 of the Rawalpindi’s complement survived.

Much to the Admiralty’s relief, the tables turned somewhat in December, in the South Atlantic. HMS Achilles, HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter, under the command of Commodore (later Rear Admiral Sir) Henry Harwood, were trying to locate the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. She had been attacking merchant ships in the South Atlantic, with some success. Harwood considered that the numbers of British merchant ships entering and leaving the River Plate, many of them fast, modern ships carrying chilled meat to the United Kingdom, would be an attraction to the Graf Spee. He was proved right, as she was spotted on 13 December, and the three cruisers went into action against her. Cumberland, one of London’s sister ships, was also part of the squadron, but at the time was at the Falkland Islands for repairs. Although the cruisers were heavily outgunned – their main armament was only 6-inch guns, against Graf Spee’s 11-inch guns, which inflicted significant damage on them – the Graf Spee broke off the action, turned away and took refuge in the port of Montevideo, in Uruguay, on the north side of the estuary of the Plate. Four days later, on 17 December, Graf Spee sailed out into the muddy waters of the Plate, where she was scuttled, settling on a sandbank. Captain Langsdorff, her commanding officer, committed suicide three days later.

The Admiralty was jubilant. After the losses of Athenia, Royal Oak and Rawalpindi, it was a triumph, and ended 1939 on an altogether more cheerful note for the Allies.

The Graf Spee episode was not completed until February 1940. The Altmark, which had been the Graf Spee’s supply ship, then arrived in Norwegian waters, and anchored in Josing Fjord. The Royal Navy had been tracking her progress, and soon after her arrival she was boarded by sailors from the destroyer HMS Cossack, under Captain Philip Vian. The 299 merchant seamen held prisoner on board, who had been captured by the Graf Spee and transferred to the Altmark, were set free. This incident was followed by the German invasion of Norway and the battle of Narvik, in which a small force of destroyers entered the Port of Narvik and encountered a much larger force of German destroyers. Two of the British ships were sunk and two more heavily damaged. The commander of the British force, Captain Warburton-Lee, was killed, and was awarded the first posthumous VC of the war. Revenge came shortly afterwards, when the battleship Warspite, with supporting destroyers, steamed into Narvik and destroyed all German warships that were in port there.

The winter of 1940/41was particularly cold, so when Fred joined London at Chatham, where she was being refitted in the dockyard, he found her cold and unwelcoming and definitely not cheerful, as none of her services were operating:

I joined her in December 1940. We were getting her all prepared while she was in the dockyard. Her captain was Captain R.M. Servaes. I joined as a boy seaman, and they kept us on our toes. There were about 35 of us all in one mess, the lower mess, two decks down, right forward. We were then sleeping in hammocks; I found them very comfortable. You made your stretchers out of pieces of wood with a bit cut out at each end. We were still under instruction from a petty officer, as well as work, mostly cleaning, polishing and scrubbing. We scrubbed the decks with long-handled brushes and hoses. We were in three watches – four hours on, eight hours off – even though we were in the dockyard. There was the middle watch, 12 to 4, then there were two dog watches and then the first watch, from 8 to 12; and then there was a 4 to 8 in the morning and evening. We had a few air raids while we were there. On occasions we used the 4-inch anti-aircraft guns. At that time the only other guns we had were the 0.5 machine guns and 2-pounder pom-poms. Later on, we went into dock and had the 0.5s taken off and several Oerlikons installed. We never had Bofors. They kept the pom-poms instead. I was a sight-setter on one of the 4-inch guns and communications operator to the director who directed the fall of shot.

The London’s refit was completed towards the end of January 1941, and she was commissioned on 7 February. She sailed from Chatham on 5 March and, after anchoring overnight in the Thames, sailed for Scapa Flow the next day, out into a North Sea gale, which taxed the sea legs of the newly joined ship’s boys. After she arrived at Scapa Flow, she went out into the North Sea to undertake exercises, including with her main guns. She also acted as a target for gunnery director practice for some of the battleships that were based there.

Fred was one of about 60 boy seamen on board. Not all were like Fred; some had come from borstals or had had very tough upbringing. Some of the boys did not accept naval discipline – and their more serious offences were punished by caning.

After working up and being found fit to join the fleet, London sailed from Scapa Flow on 2 April to escort the aircraft carrier HMS Argus through the Bay of Biscay and as far south as Lisbon. Argus was ferrying fighter aircraft to the Mediterranean. London stayed in warmer waters, as after joining the blockade of Brest with the battleship HMS King George V, to keep the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau out of action in port, she was then sent to convoy escort duties, based on Freetown, in Sierra Leone.

In May she was part of the escort for a convoy leaving Gibraltar for the United Kingdom, which included the Union Castle Line’s ship Arundel Castle, which had on board civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Whilst on passage they received the news that HMS Hood had been sunk by the Bismarck. Hood was an iconic ship, and her loss was a major blow which was felt throughout the Navy. Only 3 of her crew of over 1,400 survived the sinking. Later that day London received orders to leave the convoy and join the hunt for the Bismarck, which had been found by aircraft from Ark Royal. Their torpedo attacks damaged her steering; this enabled the battleships Rodney and King George V to come up with her on 27 May. Her final destruction came from torpedoes fired by HMS Dorsetshire, a ship of the same class as London.

London was diverted from her part in the Bismarck operation after only 24 hours, and was dispatched to find and destroy the supply ships that were to have supported her, and some other German warships and submarines operating in the South Atlantic. London found the German tanker Esso Hamburg on 4 June. The heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which had been with Bismarck but had escaped before the final battle took place, had been refuelled by Esso Hamburg shortly before she was sighted by London.

Esso Hamburg was sunk and her crew abandoned ship to lifeboats. As she was burning, a huge plume of black smoke from her cargo of fuel oil made a beacon for U-boats for miles around. The crew of London was somewhat uneasy, as they were stopped in the water picking up survivors – an easy target for a torpedo. The survivors taken on board were found to be mainly German naval personnel with some merchant seamen. The next day the London found the German supply ship Egerland, which was flying the Panamanian flag as a disguise. She was scuttled. Her crew abandoned ship and were also taken on board London, which now had the crews of Esso Hamburg and Egerland on board. Their accommodation was in the seaplane hangar on the upper deck. This was now completely full, to the point of overcrowding, so she sailed to Freetown to put them ashore, where they were put into prisoner of war camps. She then sailed back into the South Atlantic to carry on the search for German supply ships. Two others had been located and sunk, one by HMS Sheffield and another by aircraft from HMS Eagle. On 21 June London found the Babitonga, which was disguised as a Dutch ship with the false name of Japara.

They sent us off into the South Atlantic, where we found three of Bismarck’s supply ships. They were the Esso Hamburg, the Egerland and the Babitonga, which we found on 21 June. All three ships had Panamanian registration. We thought it was wonderful how we pinpointed the ships – later on, we found it was through the Enigma system: the ships were in touch with Germany, and we found out where they were. The German crews had all taken to the boats, so we had over 300 prisoners on board. We took the Walrus seaplanes out of their hangars and put the prisoners in. They were on board for several weeks, and while they were on board there was an outbreak of food poisoning and they all went down with it. They thought we were trying to get rid of them, but some of our people caught it as well – it was some bad meat I think. We dropped the prisoners at Freetown. The army took them and presumably put them in a camp.

[After that] I was on the boarding party for the Babitonga. We rowed across to her in a cutter. We were armed with cutlasses. The petty officer and the officer had a pistol each. The officer found that they had opened their seacocks and she was settling gradually. When we were in Sierra Leone all the boys were taken across to a place to go swimming – the trouble was, there were plenty of sharks about so we had to keep our eyes open. While we were there on London we painted ship in Freetown. We were on stages, two of us painting the side, and I looked down and there were sharks’ fins floating around beneath us. We were painting down and getting closer to the water level. When we got down to the bottom there was a boat there to pick us up. Then we went back on board and they shifted the stage and started again. We were doing it all day, and most of the seamen were all at it. We were painting a dazzle pattern. Our feet got fairly close to the water. We were doing that for a couple of days.

We shot down a Vichy French aircraft while we were there, which had come from Dakar. It was observing us, I suppose. A lucky shot brought it down.

From the warm waters of the South Atlantic London was dispatched to the seas off Iceland, in the mistaken belief that another surface raider was about to enter the Atlantic. After that, she was part of the escort protecting a convoy of troop ships bound for North Africa. She then returned to Iceland.

Iceland was of major strategic importance to the Allies, as it extended the air cover that could be maintained to help protect convoys against U-boat attack, and provide surveillance over sea areas including the Denmark Strait. But in the early days of the war there were few suitable aircraft available for this task. Apart from the Sunderland flying boats, which had a range of over 2,000 miles, none of the other suitable and available aircraft had a range that was enough to provide significant cover. This situation was only alleviated when America entered the war, and the Sunderlands were joined by long-range American Liberator aircraft, which also had a range of over 2,000 miles.

The use of Iceland as a base for aircraft did not become possible until Britain sent a Royal Naval task force to Reykjavik on 10 May 1940 to take control of the country. The Icelanders had not been warned in advance, and naturally were not happy about the matter; however, the need for the Allies to secure Iceland and deny it to Germany was of more importance to the British War Cabinet than the outraged feelings of the Icelanders. In May 1941 President Roosevelt offered to replace the British troops in Iceland with an American force. Following discussions with the Icelandic government, the American force landed an advance party on 8 July, which was followed eventually by a force of 40,000 men. The Americans did not endear themselves to the Icelanders at first: as Jonathan Dimbleby quotes in The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, ‘United States troops on sentry duty had a tendency to be “too quick on the trigger” …within the first few weeks two Icelandic civilians had been shot and killed, one of them a 12-year-old boy.

London sailed from Greenock and arrived at Hvalfjordur on 2 August.

After that we were at the occupation of Iceland. We went to Hvalfjordur, near Reykjavik. We were escorting troopships, as part of a convoy. There were sloops protecting against submarines. While we were in the fjord the U.S. Navy came in, including the battleship USS Texas, and they invited all the ships’ boys across for ice cream, so we all went over and had a look round. It was a First World War battleship, but it was still very spruce. They all had bunks – I never saw any hammocks. They took us round different parts of the ship, then some of them came aboard us later. It was a bit more drab than that ship – I think we could get pop, but not ice cream! I never remember having ice cream on board. That was in the summer, but after that we went off to Russia.

The London’s trip to Russia came against the backdrop of the worsening situation in the Russian fight against Germany, which had invaded Russia on 22 June 1941, inflicting huge losses on its aircraft and men on the very first day. The situation continued to deteriorate rapidly as the Germans advanced. In response to demands from Stalin, America and Britain had accepted that aid to Russia was necessary: from 22 June, the day of the invasion, as Richard Woodman notes in Arctic Convoys, Churchill had complained that

the Soviet Union’s first impulse and lasting policy was to demand all possible succour from Great Britain and her Empire … They did not hesitate to appeal in urgent and strident terms to harassed and struggling Britain to send them the munitions of which her armies were so short.

Churchill and Roosevelt held a meeting on board HMS Prince of Wales (the battleship which was later to be sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Malaya), in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941. The result of that meeting was a telegram to Stalin, to reassure him that the United States and Great Britain were cooperating to provide him with the supplies that he was demanding – demanding in unfriendly terms; in Lord Beaverbrook’s words, ‘surly, snarling and grasping’. So as to coordinate supplies and formulate a joint policy with the Russians, a conference was set up in Moscow. From the Allied side, an Anglo-American Supply Mission was sent, led by Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averell Harriman, accompanied by British and American military staff and civil servants.

They boarded London at Scapa Flow and sailed for Archangel on 22 September. Fortunately for the members of the mission, it was a calm trip and devoid of German attack. London had sailed without escorts, so the fact that the Germans did not find her was very fortunate. She arrived at Archangel on 27 September. The delegation was then escorted to Moscow. On the following day, London sailed from Archangel as part of the escort for a small convoy carrying timber to the United Kingdom. The fog and low cloud that surrounded the convoy prevented German aircraft, which were heard overhead, from attacking; as it was a designated slow convoy, with a top speed of 6 knots, that was very fortunate. On 2 October London handed over her responsibilities for the convoy, and returned to Archangel to collect the members of the mission after the completion of the conference. This time they anchored outside the harbour, and the members of the mission were ferried out to her on a Royal Naval minesweeper which was based in Archangel. The weather conditions were bad, with a heavy sea running. This made the transfer from the minesweeper to the cruiser very difficult, but all were eventually transferred successfully. The weather soon abated and the return to Scapa F low was uneventful.

[W]e went off to Russia. We took with us Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averill Harriman; they were going to Moscow to meet Stalin. When we went to Russia we had an admiral on board, Admiral Hamilton. That’s because we had the VIPs on board, although we didn’t see much of them. They joined the ship in Scapa Flow and we sailed from there to Archangel. The weather was a bit choppy, but when we got to the ice floes the spray started coming over and they had us on the decks with chipping hammers.

In conditions where spray – and in some cases, when the bow went down into a wave, solid water – was coming over the side, ice formed very quickly on the decks, on the handrails and on all the fittings. This had to be cleared, as the additional weight would rapidly affect the ship’s stability to an extent that would make capsize a serious risk. In addition to the crew out on deck with chipping hammers removing the ice, all wearing every piece of cold-weather gear they had, including gloves –flesh freezes to ice very quickly – all steam-powered winches and capstans had to be kept turning to prevent the steam in the pipes freezing and bursting them.

We weren’t attacked on the way up there, but we were on the way back. When we tied up alongside in Archangel they put guards on the gangway so that nobody could be allowed off. All we could see were several women with axes over their shoulders who were cutting down trees and that. There were a few buildings on the jetty. We were only there for a few days and we weren’t allowed off. We took a convoy back [part of the way].

London then returned to Archangel to collect the diplomatic mission and return it to the United Kingdom. This time she did not go into the port, but instead anchored outside in gale force winds and a very rough sea. This caused problems, as the members of the mission were taken out to London on a Royal Naval minesweeper which was based in Archangel. The small size of the minesweeper, compared to London, caused the transfer of the mission to be fraught with risk; it was, however, completed without loss or injury. After returning the mission, London spent some months in the Arctic, including the Denmark Strait. The sea conditions there were notoriously bad, and the result of a period in those conditions was to cause damage to London’s hull which necessitated a further refit.

It was one of the early convoys up there. We were attacked by German torpedo bombers; I don’t remember that there were any submarine attacks. We weren’t the sole escort; there were corvettes as well. We were lucky because we ran into fog, and so we got through without much incident. We didn’t have radar at that time, though; it was installed later. I think we were in the middle of the convoy. We streamed paravanes in case there were any mines about. On the way back, I was made an ordinary seaman because I was 18. I was still part of the 4-inch gun’s crew. We were firing at the torpedo bombers. Although we didn’t get any of those bombers, there was one incident later when we were up in the Arctic and we had a near miss with a bomber. We went up there once more, going up into the Arctic Ocean, but we didn’t go around into Russia but turned round and went back. The convoy after that was the PQ-17. We went back to Scapa Flow, and then they sent us to Newcastle for a refit. There was a problem because she was very unstable because of the extra armour that they had put on, and she rolled a lot. I’d applied to do a sonar course and I left her there.

The refit in Newcastle was needed because the works that had been carried out just before Fred joined her in Chatham had added additional weight to her superstructure. During her pursuit of the Bismarck and her subsequent time in the Arctic Ocean in her role as a convoy escort, following her trip to Archangel with the Anglo-American Supply Mission, cracks had appeared on the upper deck and on her hull, and various rivets were leaking. This result of her rolling and pitching heavily in the violent seas that she had encountered made it seem that the effect of adding extra weight to her superstructure had not been properly calculated.

When Fred reached 18 and was rated up to ordinary seaman from boy seaman, he was able to choose the specialisation he wanted to follow in the Navy. Sonar, as he refers to it, was usually called Asdic in the Royal Navy in the war years, and was the means of detecting submarines underwater. Fred was interested in the element of the training course that studied electricity, and as will be seen after he left the Navy, it proved a very good choice.

The base for Asdic training was at Dunoon in Scotland, at the requisitioned Glasgow and West of Scotland Convalescent Home. The training base had been moved there in 1941 from Portland in Dorset. The base was called HMS Osprey.