The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  During the night the wind freshened from westward, and at daybreak, with a heavy westerly swell running, it became impossible to board the Ferm. Seas were now breaking right over her and any boat trying to come alongside under her lee would have been swamped. It now looked to Quine as if the Ferm had been torpedoed aft as well as forward, as he could see she was now sinking by the stern. Another escort offered to try to board the tanker when the weather moderated. It failed to do so, and that evening the Ferm turned turtle and had to be sunk by gunfire from the escort. Both rescue tugs then returned to base.21

  Perhaps that should have been the end of the matter. But there were undercurrents at work against the Dutch, and before long the British liaison officer aboard Zwarte Zee, having already criticised the under-manning of the Dutch tugs, submitted a report to EG Martin. In it he accused the Dutch of being commercially motivated. They regarded themselves ‘as neutral victims of the war and are not actuated by any military or patriotic spirit’. If they weren’t being paid what they should have been – and it seems they weren’t – they didn’t feel obliged to put themselves out.

  The liaison officer reported that Quine had wanted to act to save the Ferm – he was probably aware that she was carrying thousands of tons of precious fuel – but had been dissuaded by Zwarte Zee’s more experienced master. The Dutchman had been equally negative about attempting to save the Beduin, saying the tanker would probably sink and he’d lose his towing gear.21

  Martin forwarded this report to the CCRT and commented that he, too, had doubts about the morale aboard the Zwarte Zee, and about the Thames as well. It was impossible not to feel that their masters were ‘always reluctant to take their ships to sea and welcome any excuse to delay sailing’. He did not think this was true of Captain Kalkman of the Schelde. ‘He has, on occasion, been unable to sail punctually on receipt of orders owing to his men refusing duty; but has always been glad to do so immediately I have been able to complete his crew with British ratings.’

  Such behaviour would surely have infuriated Martin, though he also wrote that he considered Zwarte Zee and Thames ‘the two finest tugs afloat’. There is a suspicion that Martin did not think much of the Zwarte Zee’s liaison officer as he concluded his report by remarking: ‘With regard to the opinion expressed that Ferm might have been taken in tow, I would observe that the weather was rough, and that Liaison Officers serving in rescue tugs have not enough sea experience to enable them to form entirely reliable opinions on highly technical questions of seamanship.’21

  The Dutch certainly annoyed the FOIC Greenock, as he commented that ‘experience of them at Greenock has shown that they only obey orders when it is convenient to themselves’. It appeared there was something seriously amiss with how the Dutch crews were being managed, and the matter continued to exercise the CCRT and the company managing the tugs. Then, in April, the liaison officer aboard the Zwarte Zee submitted another report. In it he pointed out that the ‘system of higher pay and less men than on British tugs means a lot of difficulty over manning the armament and over leave and watch in harbour. The system of higher pay in harbour, i.e. 3s 6d extra “home port money” per day, cannot possibly make officers or men keen on going to sea’21 and that the increased demands being made by the crew was already in the hands of the local union.

  By then the Zwarte Zee was stationed at Iceland, as part of the CCRT’s plan to make more use of it as a base, and the Director of Sea Transport commented that by posting her to the island, the crew would at least be removed from contact with union officials. The Thames was already there and in May her British liaison officer wrote an indignant report, strongly denying the crew had low morale, and described this accusation as ‘astonishing’.21 He listed the work the Thames had undertaken while stationed at Iceland – most of it was humdrum harbour work, quite unsuitable for a rescue tug – and added that the crew had recently donated £175 to assist in the Allied war effort, and had ‘received the congratulations of the Base Accountant Officer’. Certainly, before being moved to Iceland, the Thames had already brought in a total of twelve disabled ships totalling 58,380 tons. This had included bringing in the 3292-ton SS Baltara to Rothesay Bay after the freighter had been torpedoed in mid-Atlantic on 9 March 1941, a tow of some eight hundred miles that took five days.

  The Zwarte Zee also made at least two valuable rescues at that time. The 10,022-ton Norwegian tanker Polarsol was unloading at Liverpool in April 1941 when she received orders from the Admiralty that all ships capable of doing twelve knots or more were to proceed alone, a not unusual order as there was an acute shortage of escort vessels. The Polarsol sailed on 22 April for New York, and on 26 April, when about one hundred and fifty miles south of Iceland, she was attacked at dawn by a Focke-Wulf Condor bomber. It came from ahead and raked the ship with its machine guns before dropping its bombs, which hit the after part of the ship, including the engine room. The chief engineer later described how the door to the engine room was blown straight through his accommodation and out the other side.

  The Polarsol was not adequately armed and could not prevent the bomber returning three times, machine-gunning the decks and dropping more bombs. The tanker was now burning fiercely aft and the crew abandoned ship, but after six hours in the lifeboats they returned, keeping well away from the aft part of the ship, which was still ablaze. Later that evening, the westbound convoy OB-31822 appeared on the horizon and the Zwarte Zee, which was at the rear of it, steamed to the help of the tanker. After the fire had been brought under control, she took the Polarsol in tow. The fire continued to burn for twenty-four hours and it was three days before the crew could get into the remains of the engine room, which resembled a crater. Five days later, the Zwarte Zee brought the tanker into Rothesay, and she was eventually repaired and put back into service.

  The Zwarte Zee then rejoined the convoy. On 10 May, this was attacked by a wolf-pack of several U-boats, south-east of Cape Farewell, Greenland’s most southerly point, and one of them torpedoed the 4986-ton British freighter Aelybryn.

  Her crew was taken off by a corvette escort and when the Zwarte Zee arrived on 12 May ‘she found the ship abandoned and drifting helplessly with her engine room under water’, as Leading Signalman George W Watson, one of the liaison team of six aboard the Zwarte Zee, later recorded.23 ‘The tug put some of her own men aboard the disabled ship: handling heavy towing cables in rough Atlantic weather is hard work… with the help of the trawler escort the towing tackle was secured. The stern of the Aelybryn had collapsed where she was torpedoed, but in spite of the immense risk of bulkheads giving way, the ship was towed all the way back to Reykjavik.’

  Torpedo Annie

  In March 1943, the Zwarte Zee and two other rescue tugs, Frisky and the new American-built, Lend-Lease Oriana, towed an Admiralty Floating Dock (XXIV) from Louisiana, where it had been built, to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to refuel, and then on to Freetown, Sierra Leone. The passage was delayed at Port of Spain when the three rescue tugs were dispatched to assist the victims of a U-boat attack on the northbound convoy BT-6 (Bahia–Trinidad) off the coast of French Guiana. This consisted of twenty-nine ships, many of whose crews had no convoy experience, so they were ‘frequently getting fouled up, showing lights, tooting whistles, sending up flares and even firing rockets, until the escort commander threatened to fire on any vessel that broke the black-out’.24

  Security, it seemed, was also very lax at Brazilian Bahia, where the same impeccable source recorded that ‘Torpedo Annie’, ‘a handsome redhead who consorted with nobody under the rank of master, was suspected of passing to the Nazis such confidences as she was able to extort during hours of amorous dalliance. This La Belle Dame sans Merci owed her unromantic sobriquet to the observed fact that her lovers, shortly after parting, were apt to go down with their ships.’24

  ‘Torpedo Annie’ certainly served her masters well as far as convoy BT-6 was concerned: one Liberty ship was picked off between Bahia and Recife, and in the early hours of 9 Marc
h four other Liberty ships and a British freighter were torpedoed about a hundred miles north of Cayenne. The British freighter sank, but with the help of a local tug, George G Meade was taken to Paramaribo and the others were towed back to Trinidad where the Zwarte Zee beached James Smith at Port of Spain.25 James K Polk, whose master was said to have consorted with ‘Torpedo Annie’, and Thomas Ruffin were declared a constructive total loss, but the others were eventually repaired and returned to service.26 Having delivered the AFD, the Zwarte Zee remained in Freetown, and in May 1943 she towed in another American Liberty ship, Flora MacDonald, which had been torpedoed and set on fire. Zwarte Zee’s decision to beach her in Freetown harbour saved her cargo of rubber, but the ship continued to burn for over a fortnight, and was declared a total loss.27 Then, in July, the Zwarte Zee towed to Freetown the armed merchant cruiser HMS Asturias, torpedoed in the South Atlantic by the Italian submarine Ammiraglio Cagni. In three and a half years as a rescue tug, the Zwarte Zee saved 128,000 tons of Allied shipping.28 Quite a record.

  The immediate situation with the Dutch must have sorted itself out, for in July 1941 the FOIC Greenock reported that the Zwarte Zee had been transferred back to Britain, her liaison officer had been relieved of his duties, and in August the master of Thames was awarded an honorary MBE, for his salvage of SS Baltara.29

  The Dutch Antic

  Some of the Dutch tugs that had escaped from Holland were too small for the Rescue Tug Service, but the experience of their crews was put to use as soon as rescue tugs became available for them. In 1943, two of the new Assurance class, Dexterous30 and Antic, were given Dutch crews, and flew the Dutch flag, but remained under Admiralty orders. It was not a simple transaction, and it exercised the minds of several occupants of the Admiralty for some months, involving as it did Orders in Council and a considerable correspondence.

  But the Dutch, as will be seen, remained idiosyncratic to the end. They certainly gave Chas Stringer, an RN signalman, an unusual induction into rescue tugs. On completion of his training, he was assigned to HMS Edinburgh Castle, the depot ship at Freetown. This initially drafted him to HMS Mercator, a three-masted sailing ship. But as she never put to sea, he was then drafted to the Antic, the duty rescue tug at Freetown, as one of the liaison team, with the task of advising on naval radio (RT) procedures, and helping to decode signals. Unlike the UK-based Dutch rescue tugs, the Antic was managed by the South African branch of L Smit & Co., on the Admiralty’s behalf, while she was based at Freetown, as probably was the Hudson. All this caused Stringer some confusion:

  I was, however, extremely encouraged when the skipper explained to me that although it carried a Pennant number, W.141, for all intents and purposes Antic was a merchant ship, which might at some point have to go into a neutral port. Because I was a naval rating (and therefore technically barred from neutral countries) it was necessary to sign me on as a crew member masquerading as an ‘assistant cook’. For that I would be paid £15 per month, allowed a bottle of gin a month and a bottle of beer twice a week, but without having to carry out any cooking duties! This offer far exceeded my navy pay and entitlements so I was very happy to become a Deep Sea Rescue tugman, but not on T.124T terms, nor a radio officer, but just a very unusual, untypical, Ordinary/Telegraphist RN.31

  Stringer stayed in the Antic until he was demobbed in 1946 at Chatham. At the RN barracks there he was viewed with some suspicion as they had lost all record of him. They were initially reluctant to pay him the three years’ back pay he was entitled to as, thanks to the Dutch captain’s generosity, he had not needed to draw it. However, what he didn’t know until later was that the captain was drawing £30 a month from Smit’s to pay him for being an assistant cook, but only giving him £15 a month!

  But finally and to my delight and surprise they told me that in addition to basic pay I was entitled to a shilling a day for serving on a foreign ship and sixpence a day ‘hard lying’ money because I slept in a bunk and not a hammock!31

  In the spring of 1944, the Antic received orders to return to the UK – for the Normandy landings as it turned out – but she was then dispatched to bring in an American destroyer, USS Barr, which had been torpedoed in the South Atlantic. The Antic towed her to Casablanca, and then helped tow the fighter direction ship HMS Palomares – damaged by a mine at the Anzio landings (22 January 1944) during the Italian campaign – from Gibraltar to Liverpool. By the time she reached Liverpool, the Normandy landings had taken place, though she was in time to tow some replacement units for the artificial harbours constructed there.

  In October 1944, the Antic’s crew took over the Dexterous so that the latter’s crew could rest after their D-Day exertions, and for the Antic to have her boiler cleaned. Later that month, the Dexterous was part of a salvage team that removed the Ole Wegger, a Norwegian whale factory ship that was blocking the River Seine and preventing the use of Rouen docks.32 This accomplished, she returned to the UK, the crews swapped back, and the Antic then stood by during the landings by Royal Marine Commandos on Walcheren Island on 1 November 1944. This proved to be one of the toughest battles of the war as the island, situated in the mouth of the River Scheldt leading to Antwerp, was heavily fortified, for the Germans knew how vital Antwerp – in Allied hands since September – would be as a supply port for the final Allied push into Germany.

  The Antic ended the war rescuing and salvaging mined or torpedoed ships along the convoy route to Antwerp. Champion and Sea Giant were also stationed there, notably extinguishing a raging fire aboard the 4702-ton British freighter Alan-A-Dale, which had been run aground in the Scheldt after being torpedoed on 23 December 1944.

  In January 1945, the Antic’s master complained bitterly about the conditions under which his crew had to work. He finished by saying: ‘At the moment we seem to fall between the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy on the one hand and between the British and the Dutch on the other,’ and though his complaints were brushed aside by the NOIC Antwerp, one can’t help suspecting he had a point.33

  Troubles and tragedy

  The Dutch were naturally worried about their families, and worried too that they might never see their country again, so it is not surprising there were difficulties in assimilating them. An early incident, in June 1940, showed there might be trouble to come. Ten of Witte Zee’s crew refused to sail to St Nazaire, as the vessel was not armed. Under the circumstances, and the proximity of the advancing Germans, this seems not unreasonable, but the local police imprisoned them, and they were replaced by RN ratings. Later, the Dutch skipper of the Antic also refused to conform when he went alongside a naval sloop in Freetown to pump out water the crew had just used to extinguish a fire. He naturally wanted to place the Antic as close to the flooded compartments as possible, but a boat’s boom, to which the ship’s small boats were moored when in harbour, prevented this. The sloop’s duty officer refused to move the boom, so the Dutch skipper came alongside anyway, carrying away the boom and anything that was moored to it.

  The C-in-C America and West Indies also aired the complaints he had about the Roode Zee, which was based in the West Indies, but in April 1942 the Director of the Trade Division wrote urging him to be diplomatic:

  Experience with Dutch tugs in Home Waters has shown that crews require tactful handling. Before rescue tugs are used for duties other than rescue work the matter should be referred to the Admiralty... Request for escort is considered reasonable having regard to the intense U-boat activity off the American coast. Master cannot be ordered to proceed on work of non-rescue nature and persuasion is the only course open.34

  Again, the matter must have been smoothed over, and the Roode Zee assisted several merchant ships in trouble during her time in the West Indies. In July 1942, she rescued survivors from the tanker Beaconlight, which had been torpedoed off Trinidad, and two days later she towed another tanker, SS San Gaspar, into Port of Spain. But by 1943 the crew wanted to be closer to the action and after helping to tow AFD 53 across the Atlantic, the Roode Zee lef
t Gibraltar for the UK on 20 November 1943 and was then transferred to the Ministry of War Transport.

  The following April, the Roode Zee was towing a part of the mulberry prefabricated harbours called a phoenix, a massive concrete caisson, when disaster overtook her. The caisson had to be taken from Tilbury in Essex to the south coast in preparation for it being towed across the Channel to the assault beaches after the D-Day landings. So large were some of these caissons – affectionately dubbed ‘council houses’ – that they had to be towed by two rescue tugs. George Corke, commanding officer of the rescue tug towing with the Roode Zee, takes up the story:

  We had to pass through the Straits of Dover in the dark, to avoid the Germans spotting us. I was towing with the Dutch tug Roode Zee. We had passed the Straits of Dover safely and were approaching Dungeness about 2 o’clock in the morning. E-boats were attacking a convoy ahead of us and our destroyer escort had left us to assist it. Soon after, we were attacked by a single E-boat who luckily for me attacked from the south [Corke’s must have been the inshore rescue tug of the two]. He fired only one torpedo, which hit the Roode Zee in her fuel tanks, and she went up in one flash. I gave the order ‘hard a-starboard’ and circled round the Mulberry to keep it between me and the E-boat. Eventually the E-boat cleared off, leaving me anchored to the sunken Roode Zee and the council house. We cleared up this mess and carried on safely.35

  There were no survivors from the same crew that had left Holland in Roode Zee four years previously.36

  Dutch skills highly valued

  Whatever they lacked in their willingness to conform, the Dutch certainly made up for with their expert knowledge of ocean towage. This the British could not match, although the comments at one TDC meeting in November 1942 showed they would have liked to.37 When the CCRT announced that the Admiralty ‘were of the opinion that greater use should be made of the towing experience of the crews of those Dutch tugs unsuitable for ocean-going operations, and it was proposed to employ them on some of the newly-built Admiralty tugs’, the representative for the British tug owners on the committee protested. He said that as British tug owners hoped to embark on ocean towage after the war in competition with the Dutch, he thought it undesirable they should be given the opportunity of requiring detailed knowledge of the country’s largest and most modern tugs. But the shortage of both rescue tugs, and those with the necessary expertise to man them, was too severe, and the following year the Antic and Dexterous were handed over to the Dutch, and performed admirably.