by Ian Dear
‘We got away from her then,’ McNaughton said, ‘and left her astern of us. I made a turn around her, lost her for a while in the darkness and then picked out a light that was still burning in the wireless cabin. Suddenly the light went out. That was the last trace of her. We steamed over the spot but the ship had vanished.’9
Tenacity’s time at St John’s was neatly summed up by a signal she received from the FOIC Newfoundland: ‘I congratulate you and your ship’s company on your excellent service this year in salving USS Campbell and numerous other well-executed assignments under most adverse weather conditions.’ On his return to Britain, McNaughton was awarded the MBE.10
By 1944, Tenacity was back at St John’s under a new commanding officer, Lt Ian Taylor RNR. On 24 June 1944, a massive fire broke out at the Imperial Oil premises on the harbour front. This threatened to raze part of the port, and Tenacity’s role in getting it under control earned Taylor a well-merited OBE.11 A local newspaper described the rescue tug’s contribution to fighting the fire:
Real heroism was displayed by the men of HMRT Tenacity. With the nose of their tug jammed as close as humanly possible to the jetty the sailors stood upon the forepeak, and, wreathed in smoke and blasted by terrific heat, continued to heap streams of water on the flames.12
One of Tenacity’s last tasks of the war was to tow in the destroyer HMS Highlander, which, on 15 April 1945, hit ice while escorting an Atlantic convoy. The ice carried away twenty feet of the destroyer’s forward structure below the waterline, disabling her, and Tenacity towed her stern first into the Canadian Navy’s base at Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, for temporary repairs.13
Frisky in the North Atlantic
Frisky (Lt Harry Tarbottan RNR) also assisted a US Coast Guard cutter while she was stationed at St John’s. On 15 January 1942, Alexander Hamilton joined an assorted group of Canadian and US naval warships to escort convoy HX-170 from its Newfoundland rendezvous to the MOMP (Mid-Ocean Meeting Point) south of Iceland. From there, Royal Navy escorts would take over escort duties while the original escorts refuelled at Iceland before picking up their next westbound convoy.
Before the handover, Yukon, a store ship in the convoy, broke down and Alexander Hamilton, escorted by a destroyer, began towing her towards Reykjavik. Frisky was ordered to the scene and took over the tow, but soon after she did so a U-boat that had been shadowing them fired a spread of torpedoes. One hit Alexander Hamilton amidships, destroying the engine room and killing twenty-six of the crew. The survivors abandoned ship and were picked up by the destroyer escort, but before doing so they managed to counter-flood her to keep her on an even keel, and she remained afloat.
While Frisky was towing the Yukon into Reykjavik, another Assurance class rescue tug, the Restive (Lt JW Evenden RNR), arrived from Iceland and tried to take the cutter in tow. But it was now dark and the sea very rough as it invariably was off Iceland in winter. This made launching Restive’s motorboat problematical, though by now a technique for doing so had been perfected. Restive’s second engineer, Stanley Butler, described how it was done:
The motorboat would be swung out, and the engine started just before it entered the water. While this was going on, the rescue tug would be steaming in a port turn so that the motorboat could be dropped into the calm stretch of water created on the port side of the rescue tug.14
Once aboard the abandoned cutter, each member of the party had his job to do: the coxswain would be responsible for getting the towing gear on board, making fast, and ensuring the towing wires would not fray; the engineer officer would check the ingress of water; a pump would be manhandled aboard to dry out any spaces that would increase the ship’s buoyancy; and all watertight doors would be closed.
When Frisky returned the next morning, she and Restive took Alexander Hamilton in tow. But by now the cutter’s list had increased to nearly twenty degrees, her bows were out of the water and the sea was breaking over her aft. After being towed eighteen miles towards Iceland the cutter turned turtle, and the destroyer escort had to sink her with gunfire.15
In July that year, Frisky had better luck when she assisted the 8093-ton British motor tanker British Merit. The tanker was on her maiden voyage when, some days out from the Clyde, a wolf-pack of ten U-boats attacked the convoy she was in (ON-113). The tanker was struck by two torpedoes, but was in ballast so there was no explosion of high-octane fuel that so often ripped such ships apart, killing their entire crew. It was also lucky that she was streaming anti-torpedo nets as these prevented one of the torpedoes hitting her, but the other struck her on the unprotected port quarter in the engine room, killing one of the crew. ‘Engine room flooded immediately,’ the master wrote in the ship’s log, ‘and ship entirely out of control, swung round with wind and sea on port beam.’16
As a precaution, the master ordered the lifeboats to be lowered and manned. He gave orders for the port side ones to move to the lee side, but in the strong winds and the heavy seas that were running, this proved difficult, and two of the lifeboats, with thirty-three men aboard, drifted astern. The master reported this to one of the escorting destroyers, which signalled a corvette would be sent to help. ‘The wind freshened to moderate gale early morning of 25th inst.,’ the master noted, ‘with heavy sea and continuous rain. Vessel rolling heavily and continuously. At break of day (about 4am) 2 corvettes arrived.’16
The corvettes picked up the men in the lifeboats, and one of the corvettes signalled the master to ask if he intended to abandon ship. ‘We replied, “Not if there is any chance of being towed.” The corvette replied that there was every chance of someone being sent to our assistance.’ On the evening of 27 July Frisky arrived from St John’s.
‘We had some difficulty in connecting up,’ the master recorded, ‘but at 11.37pm the towing wire was fast to our starboard [anchor] cable.’ In the weather conditions, it was a long and laborious task before the ship was properly connected and slowly manoeuvred round, but by 12.45am on 28 July Frisky was towing her steadily towards St John’s, escorted by one of the corvettes. During the night the weather improved and the tanker only occasionally sheered off course. Even so, it took until the afternoon of 2 August for Frisky to bring her safely into harbour.
The thrice-abandoned tanker
Prudent was another Assurance class rescue tug that had a spell working out of St John’s, and her involvement in trying to salvage the 8106-ton Anglo-Saxon oil tanker Diala is an example of the enormous effort that was taken to save every ship possible. The tanker was attacked on 15 January 1942 after her convoy, ON-52, had become dispersed by storm force winds. She was in ballast some three hundred miles south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland, and proceeding at her maximum speed of twelve knots when two torpedoes hit her simultaneously on the port side, opening three of the port wing tanks to the sea.
Diala immediately took on a list and a distress signal was sent, but was apparently never received by anyone. As the engines had been stopped and the engine room evacuated, the master gave orders to abandon ship. Two of the lifeboats were launched successfully, but a third drifted away almost empty. The release gear of the fourth lifeboat jammed, capsizing it, and its eight occupants were drowned. The chief officer, an apprentice and some of the Chinese crew launched a raft, paddled to the capsized boat, righted it and climbed into it. Despite the master’s order that the lifeboats were to stand by the ship, they all became dispersed during the night and were never seen again. The master was now left stranded on the ship with his fifth engineer, a naval gunner and five Chinese members of the crew, and had no means of leaving his ship even if he had wanted to.
In the early evening the tanker was again torpedoed, this time on the starboard side, which had the curious effect of righting her. Four hours later a fourth torpedo hit her where the first two had struck. This blew what remained of her bows off forward of the No. 9 tank, but there was no apparent damage further aft, and the tanker remained floating buoyantly on an even keel. The next day, 16 January, the damage was ins
pected and the fifth engineer reported that the engine room was intact, but he had not been able to restart the engines. Regular messages continued to be sent on an emergency W/T set, but this only had a short range.
On 17 January, another fierce gale set in, but Diala rode it out without difficulty. Two ships passed near her on 18 and 19 January. Their offers to take the men on board were declined, but they were asked to signal for naval assistance. With the gale still raging, the second ship stood by Diala overnight before proceeding, and by the next day the gale had abated. That evening, a third ship appeared. This time the master accepted the offer to take him and the remainder of his crew aboard, as there was no sign of help arriving. In doing so he ordered Diala to be abandoned for the second time.17
Coming up behind ON-52 was another westbound convoy, ON-56, comprising forty-one ships and a close escort of four corvettes and one sloop, and this, too, ran into trouble. ‘During the course of the third day,’ wrote MT Dodds, an apprentice aboard the 12,000-ton British tanker Athelcrown, ‘depth charge explosions could be heard intermittently, indicating a submarine under attack.’18
A fog did give some relief from the attacking U-boats, but it became impossible to keep station, and those aboard Athelcrown could soon only see two other ships from the convoy. The following evening, 22 January, just as everyone had decided any further attacks were unlikely, there was a loud explosion, the lights went out and the engines stopped. The crew was ordered to prepare to abandon ship, and as they assembled by their lifeboats a second torpedo hit aft, destroying one of the lifeboats. The master now ordered the ship to be abandoned and the other three lifeboats managed to get away before the tanker sank. After two days of extreme discomfort, the survivors in two of the boats were picked up by another ship in the convoy.
Aboard the third lifeboat was a senior apprentice, Colin Baptist, the chief engineer, the ship’s carpenter and nine others, five of whom were injured. After a week they sighted a derelict tanker, and worked down to leeward towards her. In a sworn statement, Baptist wrote:
[H]er bows were badly damaged. The foremast was hanging over the starboard bow into the water. The after bulkhead of the forecastle was standing fairly erect but all structure forward of that had disappeared with the exception of odd frames and bits of plating. Light could be seen through the ship’s bows from side to side. Passing to the port side it could be seen that the ship’s side some 10 feet or more abaft the forecastle had a very large hole, big enough to take a boat through. In view of the condition of the ship the wounded men in the boat refused to board her and the boat drifted away.19
At dawn, two days later, the derelict was sighted again and it was decided to board her. Being to leeward, the exhausted survivors had great difficulty reaching the ship. However, about midday they came along the tanker’s starboard side, which was low enough in the water for them to board. The carpenter went round the abandoned ship with Baptist and said he thought she would stay afloat. The chief engineer examined the main engine and found it intact and in working condition, but the survivors were too exhausted to raise sufficient steam. About six nights later, a ship’s lights were seen and distress rockets were fired. The vessel, a neutral Swedish steamer, stood by until daylight and then took the survivors on board. The derelict ship, now abandoned for a third time, was, of course, Diala.
In the meantime, the naval authorities at St John’s had dispatched the Prudent to search for Diala. The weather was excellent and when the abandoned wreck was found a party was put aboard her to connect the tow. But there was no anchor chain to attach it to as it had been blown away with the tanker’s bows, so she had to be towed stern first, a tricky undertaking as the after part of the ship was almost awash. However, Prudent’s boarding party managed to connect up, and they remained aboard the wreck, but during the middle watch the tow parted, and by the time Prudent had retrieved her towing gear, Diala, along with the rescue tug’s boarding party, had disappeared into the darkness.
The Prudent was now joined by Frisky, which had been sent from St John’s to help, and both rescue tugs began a box search20 that lasted eight days, but without success. Frisky started a second search, but Prudent, short of fuel, returned to St John’s where, to her crew’s relief, Diala’s boarding party was on the quay to greet them, having been picked up by the trawler escort.
On her second attempt, Frisky found Diala, but signalled that she was unable to board because of the weather, and that ‘situation almost impossible with 1 tug unaided’. She, too, was now running low on fuel and was forced to return to harbour. So it was that Diala was abandoned for the final time, and on 23 March 1942 a fifth U-boat torpedo finally sent what remained of the tanker to the bottom – a fact, of course, that remained unknown until the reports of U-boats were examined after the war.
At a Board of Enquiry held at Cardiff on 31 March 1942 into the abandoning of Diala, a surveyor assisting its members had this to say about Baptist’s deposition:
I formed the opinion that Mr Baptist, aged 21, was a young man with initiative, good self confidence and observation, although quite unassuming. His description of the damage was more detailed than I expected it would be, considering the physical condition of them all in the boat… Mr Baptist’s narrative was quietly told and I certainly admired his conduct.21
The board found that the master of Diala had been justified in ordering his ship to be abandoned, little knowing when it came to this decision what efforts had been made to save her.
Ghostly apparition
By the end of April 1942, Prudent was at Ardrossan, where Stanley Butler joined her as chief engineer, and soon afterwards she became part of a convoy bound for her new base at Gibraltar. Her commanding officer was Lt Guy Quine RNR, who later that year was awarded the MBE.22 One of his first tasks after reaching Gibraltar was to bring in the 5372-ton freighter Lavington Court, which was torpedoed on 19 July 1942 about two hundred miles north of the Azores while part of convoy OS-34. Seven of the crew were killed and the remaining forty-one were taken off by one of the convoy’s escorts. Butler had a strange experience with this abandoned vessel, which showed how easy it was for the eyes of even the most experienced seaman to be tricked at night.
The Prudent found Lavington Court at dusk on the fourth day, having covered one thousand five hundred miles. The weather was fine with a smooth sea, but as it was a bright moonlit night – ideal conditions for an attacking U-boat – it was decided to do nothing until the following morning, but to circle the wreck at a distance of about one and a half miles. ‘At about 2130 hours the CO sent down a message for me to come to the bridge,’ Butler later wrote.23 When he reached the bridge Quine asked him if he believed in ghosts, and Butler advised him that he was open-minded about the subject:
The Lavington Court had been torpedoed in her stern just forward of the sternpost, so that she had lost her rudder and propeller. Her cruiser type stern containing the crew’s quarters was distorted so that it pointed downwards at about 15 to 20 degrees. The after deck house was on this section with a gun mounted on top – the barrel of which was pointing down to the sea. The bows of the vessel were pointing roughly to the north-east and, at the time we were discussing ghosts, the moon was fairly high and to the south.23
As the Prudent approached the ship’s stern, Quine told Butler to look carefully at the port side of the sloping deck house. This was out of the moonlight and under the extended gun platform, which made that area quite dark. ‘As we came round he said, “Now watch carefully, Chief, and you’ll see a moving whitish glow.” Sure enough we did. It was very uncanny indeed.’
After watching the phenomenon several times, they decided to turn in and investigate the next day, and before dawn the rescue tug’s motorboat was launched to take the mate and some of the crew to connect up the tow rope. Butler went, too, to have a look at the engine room and the damage aft where the ‘ghost’ had been seen:
It is very eerie aboard an abandoned ship, particularly when down below. The fi
rst hour or so aboard is the worst until one locates and becomes accustomed to all the strange noises. Much depends on the weather. In calm weather there is usually a swell causing some movement to the vessel so that a form of creaking takes place, which is more evident when below in machinery spaces, or a hold. In bad or heavy weather it was the noise of the wind through the various guys and ropes, masts, and derricks, in addition to the sea slamming into the side of the ship, and even breaking across the decks.23
After inspecting the engine room, Butler moved aft to look at the damage done by the torpedo and found a motor launch (ML) mounted on chocks secured to the deck with wire tightened by bottle screws. Thinking the launch might be useful as a lifeboat if the ship was torpedoed again, he undid the bottle screws so the launch would float free if the ship did sink. He then came to the entrance door of the crew’s accommodation:
It was still fairly dark and my torch was getting dim. After stepping over the weather step into the passageway, I took a few steps before tripping over an obstruction. I found myself full length on top of a very dead man.
He shone his torch to the accommodation below and could see more bodies lying there. The alleyway where the sailor lay had entrance doors at both port and starboard ends. Both doors were painted white, and Butler realised that the ‘ghost’ was nothing more than the reflection of the moonlight off the white paint, with the ship’s motion causing the movement of the ‘ghost’, while varying the angles of reflected moonlight.
The mystery solved, Butler and the others began the standard procedure for preparing a ship for towing by ensuring all portholes and doors were closed, and collecting all personal items of any value and locking them in the ship’s safe, or in a locked cabin. The eighteen-inch manila tow rope was then connected, always a complicated business that took time and care even in good weather.
