From Ice Floes to Battlefields

by Anne Strathie

  The rain was pouring down in torrents … flares were lit and two searchlights endeavoured in vain to penetrate the dark drifting clouds. Like drowned rats the mechanics ran around the machine … ‘You cannot fly tonight, sir, it’s impossible,’ said my fitter.

  Gran, ignoring the advice, took off into the rain and hail:

  Then suddenly everything turned into a chaos of fog and darkness in which only my instruments could be seen. My machine was terribly chucked about and for a moment I completely lost control … I was flying upside down and with terrible speed … The following three quarters of an hour seemed to me to be like years … [suddenly] it was quite clear … I remembered my orders to patrol the line between London Colney at 12,000[ft] for three hours … For two hours I kept going backwards and forwards and the faint colour of day started spreading over the horizon. Then everything went quiet … the engine had stopped and nothing would make it start again …Then suddenly the clouds disappeared and I saw the earth … and glided into [a] grassy field.

  Gran clambered out of his cockpit and ran to the road where some locals told him that the nearest town was Hull. Gran had some difficulties in taking off again but he arrived back at his base to the warmest welcome he remembered ever receiving. It had been a close shave.

  A series of Zeppelin attacks on Thames estuary towns in early June suggested a full-scale aerial attack on London might be imminent. On 13 June Gran, in an aircraft which carried three guns and was nicknamed ‘The Fortified Terror’, took off towards Maidstone to join a daylight sortie against German bombers:

  I saw in the direction of Southend an enemy formation of about six machines. Two British scouts seemed to be attacking continuously, but apparently without any result whatsoever. I tried to get up to the enemy formation, but … after some minutes I lost [them] out of sight … [I then saw] a little formation of aeroplanes which I first believed to be British machines. When I saw dots of smoke appearing around the formation it became clear that I was mistaken and made for them … Undetected I came up in position behind the last one of the enemy fliers and with the sun on my back I managed to approach as near as 50 yards …

  During the skirmishes Gran’s aircraft was hit several times but he landed safely; whilst waiting for a replacement machine he spent a few nights in a London club. Not long after his arrival he received an urgent telephone call advising him that German aircraft were ‘swarming across the channel’:

  A few moments later I was working like a madman at the starting handle of my car … Had my car been of German origin, I could have understood that patriotic motives made the machinery strike, but [it] was a full-blood French racer … I was suddenly pulled together by the sound of half a hundred of the London guns coming into action … [and] saw over the roofs in a northerly direction a formation of enemy machines.

  Gran could see shells exploding all around the twenty or so German aircraft but they stuck to their course. By the time his car motor finally fired and he returned to his base, he was too late for the action, so settled down to enjoy the remainder of a baking hot summer’s day.

  On 24 July Gran’s unit was transferred from 39th Squadron into a newly formed 44th Squadron:

  I do not believe that the world has ever seen a finer body of fliers … acrobatic fliers were inferior to none … when [an] alarm signal went eighteen first class Sopwith Camels took the air in a most distinguished formation.

  Gran, like others, sometimes succumbed to the temptation to show off:

  We looped the loop, we spun and flew with head down. The air over London made us quite wild and intoxicated … [At] the flying ground … I could not resist the temptation and put my machine into a rolling spin. Downwards it went with lightning speed and very soon the earth was no more than 1,000 feet under me.

  Gran tried to neutralise the rudder and pushed the elevator control stick forward to its limit:

  But no, round and round went my bus and I thought I was a gonner. Then I remembered … I put my throttle full on and to my delight the aeroplane came under control again. However the earth was already there and the next moment I heard a bang, saw stars and went out in the land of dreams. When I woke up all the boys were standing round me.

  One of Gran’s comrades told him he had ‘the luck of the devil’ – his aircraft was ‘smashed to atoms’ but he had escaped with only slight concussion.

  In early September 1917 Gran arrived on the Western Front and joined the RFC’s 70th Squadron, which had been recently re-equipped with brand-new Sopwith Camels which worked ‘to perfection’. One evening Gran met Frank Bickerton, who had travelled with Mawson but decided, after taking part in air tractor trials, not to go south with Shackleton on the eve of war.4

  Bickerton had been in France since the early summer and had recently been flying over the Ypres salient, supporting British troops around Passchendaele and other points in the front line. He suggested that Gran join him and Clive Collett (a New Zealander who was the squadron’s top ‘ace’) on a ‘a little expedition’ during which they might ‘manage to shoot a few penguins together’.5

  On 8 September Gran, Bickerton, Collett and their comrades relocated (in the midst of a major bombardment) to a new base at Poperinghe. Shortly afterwards Collett’s luck finally ran out. His little finger (required to operate aircraft controls) was shot off during a dogfight and he was invalided home. He had shot down fifteen aircraft since July. On 20 September Bickerton was seriously injured; he also lost his little finger, but managed to retrieve it (and the signet ring on it) from the wreckage of his crashed aircraft.

  Gran soon discovered that flying over Ypres was a dangerous business:

  our leader suddenly … changed course and started climbing; in the next minute I heard shooting behind me and … saw my friend engaging two hostile machines … Our leader with a lightning manoeuvre, a sharp right hand climbing turn, placed himself and his gun on the tail of one of the German Albatros. I saw the centre of the German machine smoke and fire. Like a dead leaf [it] fell and then suddenly it dived straight down and disappeared like a burning torch … we continued after this little episode in the direction of Ypres … [but] seven more Germans caught up in firing range astern … the German formation divided and turned. Suddenly I saw in front of me at close range a Hun. I gave a round from both my guns and he dived …

  Gran felt almost sorry as he watched his opponent, apparently a ‘beginner’ like Gran, crash to the ground. Like others in the squadron Gran respected German air aces such as Hermann Goering and Maximilian von Richthofen, whose brightly painted machines were regularly seen wheeling around the sky over the front lines.6

  But there could also be danger on the ground, as Gran and his messmates discovered one evening during ‘a most excellent supper’:

  The music stopped … suddenly someone shouted; ‘Hurrah, Huns overhead,’ and everybody rushed out of the hut. A few searchlights searched the sky with their beams. Nearer and nearer came the moaning of the motor and … and [there] rose a huge smoke column of smoke and flame from the outskirts of the aerodrome.

  We ran and threw ourselves down among the trees. Again came a terrible concussion, another one and now not very far away … something burst with a violent noise almost in our middle. A column of fire almost blinded us and earth and stones were thrown over us between the trunks of the trees. A few minutes afterwards we were all sitting again in the Mess, all of us agreeing that something ought to be done to stop these German fliers careering about on these beautiful moonlight nights.

  By late autumn Gran had transferred to 101 Squadron, with which he took part in seventeen (largely successful) night bombing raids. On 30 November, during a low-level night attack on a German column near Cambrai, his aircraft’s undercarriage was shot away and he was seriously wounded in the leg. But he and his young observer managed to coax the aircraft back over enemy lines before crash-landing at an emergency landing-ground near Arras.7

  Gran was treated in a casualty clearing station before
being transferred to the Royal Free Hospital, London, where his leg was operated on – and he found out what it was like to be on the receiving end of a night bombing raid:

  It was just before Christmas, a wonderful moonlight night; after dinner had been served the alarm went … A young VAD came over to my bed and asked why I did not get the orderly to carry me downstairs. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘the war has made me believe in fate.’ In the same moment the guns of the outer London barrage got into action and before we actually knew what had happened, a blinding flash came through the windows and the house trembled as if an earthquake was going on. The young girl stood pale up against the wall and I in spite of my wounds crawled up in the corner of my bed.

  By January 1918 Gran was walking on crutches. He was granted two months’ ‘rest and recuperation’ leave in Norway, where he learned that he had been awarded a Military Cross for his work on the Western Front. By the end of April he was fit enough to return to duty.

  Just before doing so he married Lilian Johnson at the registry office in the Strand.8 Gran’s bride was a well-known actress (her stage name was Lily St John), whose latest success had been in Yes, Uncle!, a long-running musical comedy at the Prince of Wales Theatre, near Leicester Square.

  Flight magazine reported the wedding of ‘Captain Grant of the Royal Air Force, formerly Lieutenant Tryggve Gran of the Norwegian Navy’ and noted that his best man, fellow pilot Lieut. J.W. Jackson had formerly worked as stage manager at the Alhambra Theatre.

  Sharing the page with announcements of Gran’s and other weddings were articles devoted to tallies of enemy aircraft and balloons ‘downed’, details of fatal crashes and lucky escapes and information on those who had died recently. The latter included the sons of newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere and of firework manufacturer Arthur Brock.

  Life in the air could be dangerous but Tryggve Gran’s luck had held long enough for him to keep the promise he had made to his friends Oates and Bowers on the Antarctic ice shelf in 1911.

  Arctic region, showing Spitsbergen, north Russia, Norway and other surrounding countries. Map © and courtesy of Michael Tarver and Mike Goodearl.

  Notes

  Quotations from Gran are, unless otherwise stated, from Gran’s journals as reproduced in Gran, Under the British Flag, and Barfoot, ‘Notes of a Norwegian Warbird’. Other information is from Gran’s war records (National Archives, WO 339/103746).

  1. Meares to Spengler, undated, but probably April 1916, given references to ‘Mrs Evans’ (who married Evans in January 1916) and fruit tree blossom in southern England.

  2. Dennistoun to Pennell, 21 December 1913, RGS/HLP/2/22; Dominion, 2 February 1914; Alpine Club (London) membership records; Dennistoun, The Peaks & Passes of J.R.D., pp. 245–59.

  3. George Dennistoun, when serving as captain of the Gwendolen, captured the Hermann von Wissmann and (after renaming it HMS King George) used her to ferry British troops and supplies up and down Lake Nyasa.

  4. Haddelsey, chapters 1, 7, 8.

  5. Gran, Under the British Flag, pp. 58ff.‘Penguins’ appear to refer to aircraft or to ground troops who (like penguins in Antarctica) would be relatively easy targets from the air.

  6. When Gran met Goering after the war they compared flight logs. Gran wondered if he might have shot Goering down on 8 or 9 September 1917, but it could not be verified.

  7. Gran landed the damaged aircraft with assistance from his observer. The RFC ‘Casualty Card’ (RAF Museum, Hendon) suggests Gran was not blamed for damage to his aircraft.

  8. Flight, 2 May 1918.

  17

  Northward Ho!

  When Ernest Shackleton returned to London in April 1918, he was eager to find a suitable opportunity to serve his country in the war. One of the possibilities suggested to him was working with Allied troops based near the Arctic Circle at Murmansk and Archangel. They had initially been sent there to provide support and supplies to the Russian army; since the Tsar’s abdication in 1917, they had been supporting the Tsar’s supporters and other ‘White’ Russians against their ‘Red’ Communist opponents.1

  The situation in Russia had changed again when, on 3 March 1918, Russia’s new Bolshevik government signed a peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. Now British and Allied forces were protecting their supply bases and supporting the ‘Whites’ in a bitter civil war.

  Shackleton’s Endurance stalwarts Frank Wild and James McIlroy had been based in Russia since returning from Antarctica. They were, as far as Shackleton knew, alive and well but several of his Endurance men had died since signing up for war duties.

  Timothy McCarthy (brother of Terra Nova helmsman Mortimer McCarthy) had been killed in March 1917 when the oil tanker SS Narragansett had been torpedoed and sunk with all hands off Ireland. James ‘Scotty’ Paton, who had served on the Morning, Nimrod, Terra Nova and Aurora, was presumed lost with the Aurora when she disappeared after apparently striking a German mine off Australia. Frank Wild’s brother Ernest, a member of the Ross Sea Party, had died in March 1918 on a minesweeper in the Mediterranean.

  While Shackleton waited for details of his new posting to be finalised he was approached about the possibility of leading a short expedition to Spitsbergen. Shackleton had considered visiting Spitsbergen in 1911, but had been diverted back to his Antarctic activities.2 During the war, British prospecting activity on Spitsbergen had virtually come to a halt, but Norwegian and Swedish mining companies had continued to extract coal and other minerals. In 1916 Northern Exploration Company and the Scottish Spitsbergen Syndicate approached the British Government about protecting their interests in Spitsbergen. They pointed out that Russia had attempted to annex the island in 1912 and Germany already had a meteorological station there.3

  When, in early March 1918, an article appeared in The Times pointing out that an appendix to the Brest-Litovsk treaty obliged Russia to ‘carry out the organization of Spitsbergen … in the sense of German propaganda’, everyone seemed to become interested in Spitsbergen.4

  On 11 March 1918 The Times published a letter from NEC’s company secretary, J.K. Maples, pointing out that the combined claims of NEC and its Scottish counterpart were, at over 3,000 square miles, threefold those of all other countries combined.5 It would, Maples concluded, be a ‘catastrophe’ if Spitsbergen and its minerals fell into German hands.

  The expedition Shackleton was asked to lead had been organised by NEC (of which Shackleton’s friend, Harry Brittain, was a director) with support from the Admiralty and the Foreign Office. Shackleton secured the release of Frank Wild from his duties in north Russia; James McIlroy, an Endurance expedition doctor, also turned out to be available after being invalided out of the army. By way of incentive, NEC offered Shackleton and Wild shares in the company, something which appealed to Shackleton’s entrepreneurial spirit.6

  The Admiralty’s representative on the expedition was Lieut.-Comm. Norman Craig (RNVR), Member of Parliament for Thanet. The Admiralty provided an armed merchant ship, SS Ella, and the services of a Trinity House pilot; the Foreign Office arranged all necessary permissions and diplomatic contacts in Norway.7 NEC was represented by its recently appointed managing director, Frederick Salisbury-Jones, company secretary Maples and Noel Davis, son and spokesman of NEC’s chairman and major shareholder, Welsh coal magnate Frederick Davis.

  Salisbury-Jones, a well-connected ‘Africa hand’ had, since joining the company, overseen a threefold increase in NEC’s share capital to £500,000. He had attracted several new investors, but funds were still required to finance an early resumption of mining operations. Salisbury-Jones wanted to obtain photographic evidence of Spitsbergen’s mineral riches and other facilities to show to interested parties. As Shackleton’s Endurance cameraman, Frank Hurley, was now photographing Australian troops in Europe, Shackleton contacted Herbert Ponting – who had, by happy coincidence, held shares in NEC since 1913.8

  Ponting, like Shackleton, was above the age limit for active service, but keen to serve his count
ry. During the war his Terra Nova expedition films had, gratifyingly, appeared to appeal to people’s patriotic spirit, and he had donated copies of the films to the army so they could be shown at the front. These screenings had, according to Rev. F.I. Anderson, Senior Chaplain to the Forces, been a great success:9

  I cannot tell you what a tremendous delight your films are to thousands of our troops. The splendid story of Captain Scott is just the thing to cheer and encourage out here … The thrilling story of Oates’ self-sacrifice, to try and give his friends a chance of ‘getting through’, is one that appeals at the present time … We all feel we have inherited from Oates and his comrades a legacy and heritage of inestimable value in seeing through our present work.

  In early August, Ponting and his companions, armed with new passports, left Britain on the Ella, sailing in convoy. When they arrived in Tromsø Salisbury-Jones heard rumours that Norwegian and other prospectors had been trespassing on NEC’s claims. He and Craig immediately travelled to Christiana to discuss matters with the British Minister to Norway and officials at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. While the other members of the expedition waited in Tromsø, Shackleton became ill. He refused to let McIlroy examine him properly but decided to return to Britain where he had work to do preparing for his forthcoming mission in north Russia.

  Shackleton arrived back in London to discover that Alf Cheetham, who had crossed the Southern Ocean fourteen times during four expeditions, had died in the North Sea. Cheetham had been serving as second mate on SS Prunelle when, on 22 August 1918, she was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank with all of her crew. Alf left his wife Ella with nine children. After their son William had died in 1916, there had been ten, but since then their youngest daughter, Ella, had also died. Another of the couple’s sons, the Hull local paper noted, was currently in France, serving at the front.10 Alf Cheetham had died while trying to keep Britain’s supply lines open in time of war.