by Ian Dear
The crew of the Griper were to age at the sight before them. The fire had been so instantaneous that bodies lay on the deck where they fell, all over the place. On the after deck only an arm remained visible of a victim still clutching a bucket. The victims in effect were simply ‘kippered’ in the inferno. The Canadian search party were supplied with bins into which the remains were placed.33
Notes
1. Sanders RE. The Practice of Ocean Rescue. Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson; 1947. p.10. The author was a member of the Rescue Tug Service. The US Coast Guard continues to use it as basic reference material on the subject.
2. Dear I. The Ropner Story. London: Hutchinson Benham; 1986. p.96.
3. Williams J, Gray J. HM Rescue Tugs in World War II. Privately printed. pp.122–23.
4. Dear I. The Ropner Story, op. cit. pp.82–83.
5. Williams J, Gray J. HM Rescue Tugs, op. cit. pp.54–55, although another source says forty-four men were rescued. The Admiralty War Diary for January 1943 is in fold3.com
6. ADM 1/17265.
7. Booklet on HMRT Tenacity in DSRTA archive and ADM 1/17266.
8. Davidson B. ‘Warships in Dungarees’ Yank (6 February 1944):8.
9. Evening Telegram, St John’s, Newfoundland, 8 March 1943.
10. London Gazette, supplement 36033, 28 May 1943.
11. Ibid., supplement 36866, 1 January 1945.
12. Daily News, St John’s, Newfoundland, 26 June 1944.
13. Booklet on HMRT Tenacity in DSRTA archive and naval-history.net
14. Butler S. Not For Davy Jones. Bound manuscript, p.23. Courtesy of Peter Butler.
15. There are different versions of this incident. This one is based on the account written by Dr Robert M Browning Jr, which is on the United States Coast Guard website. Also Butler S, Not For Davy Jones, op. cit., pp.22–24.
16. ADM 199/1271.
17. ADM 1/2139 and ADM 1/12028.
18. Ships Monthly, July 1992.
19. ADM 1/12028.
20. Butler S, Not For Davy Jones, op. cit., p.7, describes a box search as ‘searching the area around where the ship in distress is believed to be. It is marked out on a chart as a large square divided into smaller squares. Allowances are made for the direction the ship could be drifting in. The rescue tug would then proceed back and forth until the complete area had been covered.’
21. ADM 1/12028.
22. London Gazette, issue 35586, 5 June 1942.
23. Butler S, Not For Davy Jones, op. cit. pp.30–32.
24. Williams J, Gray J. HM Rescue Tugs, op. cit. pp.67–69.
25. Butler S, Not For Davy Jones, op. cit. p.33.
26. ADM 1/15549.
27. Hull Daily Mail, 19 January 1943.
28. London Gazette, second supplement, no 36062, 18 June 1943.
29. Yorkshire Post Leeds Intelligencer, 23 June 1943.
30. £50 in 1943 is roughly worth £1,900 today: see www.measuringworth.com.
31. ADM 1/15521.
32. Elphick P. Liberty: the Ships that Won the War. Chatham Publishing, Rochester 2001, p.301.
33. Ibid., p.302.
6
Lend-Lease to the rescue
The entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 tilted eventual victory in favour of the Allies, but as in the First World War, it took time for the Americans to gather their resources. While they did so the Lend-Lease Act, enacted by Congress in March 1941, was an essential aid to help underpin the Allied war effort. It authorised the president to lend or lease – or sell – war supplies of all kinds, including food, to the country’s allies, on terms agreed by the parties concerned. This agreement was of crucial benefit to the Rescue Tug Service, which otherwise would never have been able to expand in the way it did.
However, the Admiralty did not rely entirely on Lend-Lease for its rescue tugs, and throughout the war British ones continued to be constructed, adapted from designs of commercial tugs already afloat. As we have seen, the new Assurance class was based on the very successful Salvonia, and in the late 1930s the London firm of Overseas Towage & Salvage Company had decided they must find a new design to compete with the large ocean-going tugs that the Dutch and Germans were constructing. The one they chose was essentially an improved Zwarte Zee, although with modifications suggested by the Thames, Smit’s most modern tug. The firm concluded that the most economical method of powering the new design was with two diesel engines coupled to a single screw. Without a tow, or with a very light one, only one engine was necessary; when a high speed was needed, or when towing a very large ship, both engines were employed.
With this new design still at an early stage, in September 1939 the company’s technical staff began to work with the Admiralty’s Naval Construction Department. The result was the Bustler class, named after the first one to be commissioned in 1942. Compared with the 792-ton, 208 ft Zwarte Zee, the Bustlers were 1100 tons and 205 ft long, the same length as the Flower class corvettes that did such sterling work as convoy escorts. But the Bustlers were far more powerful than any corvette, being equipped with two British Polar-Atlas diesel engines, giving them a pulling power and speed comparable with Zwarte Zee.
The Bustlers had a complement of forty-two and were well armed with a three-inch dual-purpose gun, an A-A two-pounder ‘pom-pom’, two Oerlikons and four Lewis A-A machine guns, and were constructed at the Leith shipyard of Henry Robb. Bustler and Samsonia were commissioned in 1942, followed by Growler and Hesperia in 1943, Mediator in 1944, and Reward, Turmoil and Warden in 1945. Not before time, they were equipped with electric, automatic, self-rendering towing winches.
In December 1944, Lloyd’s Shipping Gazette published a long article about rescue tugs, which included details of three of these powerful vessels:
The Bustler has assisted five ships, totalling 38,894 tons gross, disabled by enemy action or weather, including the Empire Treasure, which was towed 110 miles in gales of up to force 10 in strength. For this fine piece of work the commanding officer of the tug [Lt RE Sanders RNR] was appointed MBE. The Bustler also towed the steamship Durham1 from Gibraltar to Falmouth and assisted and towed five naval craft. For 12 months she was employed on convoy escort work in the North Atlantic.
Another tug, the Samsonia, assisted four ships of about 24,000 tons gross which had been disabled by enemy action or weather; she made 14 North Atlantic voyages in 11 months on convoy escort work.2
The third rescue tug to be mentioned was Growler, ‘which has assisted one ship of 5,000 tons with weather damage, and she was engaged in Atlantic convoy escort work for nine months, making eight voyages’.2
The best known of the class, Turmoil, made her name after the war when she attempted to salvage the 6711-ton freighter Flying Enterprise. The ship was en route for the United States when she encountered a storm off south-west England on 28 December 1951. Her cargo shifted and she began to list, and the ten passengers and most of the crew had to be taken off. Turmoil reached her on 3 January, but the storm was still so bad that, with Flying Enterprise some three hundred nautical miles from Falmouth, the Turmoil could not connect up with the freighter for two days. The Turmoil managed to tow her within forty nautical miles of Falmouth, but the freighter had suffered structural damage to her hull, and on 10 January 1952 she sank.
In 1955 the writer Ewart Brookes published a book about the incident. An ex-naval officer, he had seen rescue tugs at work, and thought highly of them and the men who manned them. In his Author’s Note, he wrote that the Turmoil was ‘the representative of a type of ship sailed by a type of seaman who conceded nothing in quality of seamanship to any other branch in the seagoing world, even of any other generation. They go unsung, often unhonoured, never glamorized.’3 However, he had never seen a rescue tug close to, until his ship lay alongside one late in the war:
She was, to within a few feet, as long as the fighting ship I commanded. But her engines were more than four times as powerful. Whereas we had scarcely enough room to swing a very short cat (
the nine-thonged variety, not the milk-drinking species) on our decks, she had enough room on her towing deck to hold a dance with a fair-sized band to accompany it.3
In 1944, an American armed forces magazine gave the Bustlers an enthusiastic review:
[These] huge well-equipped heavy-duty escort tugs that shuttle back and forth across the North Atlantic today as easily as if they were going from San Francisco to Oakland… Their new-type pumps can remove water from flooded holds at the rate of 800 tons an hour; their fire-fighting chemical jets can extinguish flames from a distance of 60 feet. They are death to an attacking aircraft. And they can take in tow a battleship as easily as a jeep can tow a 20-mm gun. All the equipment on the Bustlers – windlasses, winches, capstans – is electrically operated. So modern and complicated is the machinery that each ship carries a special electrical officer. The Bustler is to the ordinary harbor tug what a Packard is to a baby carriage.4
Two other classes of rescue tug were also built in Britain during the war. The Nimble class was very similar to the Bustler class and was also powered by two diesel engines, but had twin screws. They were the same length, and had the same speed as the Bustlers, but were not quite as heavily armed. Nimble, the first to be commissioned in 1942, was built at the Paisley shipyard of Fleming and Ferguson, as was Expert, commissioned in November 1945. The other two, Capable and Careful, were built by the Aberdeen firm of Hall, Russell & Co. These were not commissioned until 1946, so only Nimble saw any wartime action. She was based at Gibraltar but also stationed at various ports in the western Mediterranean.
The Envoy class was developed after the responsibility for the design and construction of rescue tugs had been moved to the Admiralty’s Department of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repairs in January 1943. The following month its director, Sir Amos Ayre, received a brief from the CCRT for a new class of rescue tug. In it he remarked that the diesel-type rescue tug was not popular as its maintenance was beyond the normal capacity of the crew, while the Assurance type tug had insufficient endurance to take the place of the diesel. What he wanted was a new type of ‘A’ class tug (see Appendix), similar to the Assurance class but with greater endurance, a minimum of twenty days, and this probably meant a two-boiler ship.5
The same month Ayre wrote to Cochrane’s about building a new class along the lines recommended by the CCRT. Cochrane’s replied by warning that ‘we may be starting a vicious circle. The Assurance tugs have been recently so altered and added to that it is nearly time they were entirely re-designed.’ On 9 February, Ayre replied that as Cochrane’s were obviously ready for a new design a new prototype could be constructed, from which Cochrane’s could then build as many as possible, as fast as possible. But he warned that ‘we have to introduce a greater degree of austerity in all we are doing’, and added in a later letter, that ‘provided we can supply everything of a highly seaworthy and dependable nature, there are no longer to be extravagances or frills’. One wonders what frills and extravagances he had in mind.
Commercial opinion favoured a similar design to the Neptunia, which Cochrane’s had designed and built, and this received the backing of the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (U-boat Warfare and Trade). The principal small ship designer in the Admiralty’s Department of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repairs, Mr A Caldwell, re-examined the design of the Neptunia and an order was subsequently placed with Cochrane’s for a vessel, which was in effect a modified version of her, with twin boilers and a single screw. During 1944, six of these Envoy class rescue tugs were commissioned. They have been described as an intermediary class between the Assurance and Bustler classes, but they hardly figure in operational documents.
By January 1943 the number of operational rescue tugs at the disposal of the Rescue Tug Service had risen to fifty-one, and to seventy-seven by January 1944. By the end of 1943 they had towed to safety one hundred and eighty-five British and Allied warships, and merchant ships totalling 2¼ million tons. But this was not achieved without casualties, and fourteen rescue tugs, and a number of personnel, were lost.6
Lend-Lease and shortage of crews
The planned programme could not possibly provide the solution to the acute shortage of rescue tugs, and in numbers they hardly replaced those that had already been lost. What was urgently needed, particularly in the Atlantic, was a large injection of powerful rescue tugs capable of working in the open ocean. It was here that the Lend-Lease Act was of critical help to the Rescue Tug Service. In June 1941, the first of several requests was made under it, and between 1942 and 1944 the Americans provided the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy with twenty-seven rescue tugs.
Twenty-three of these were called the Favorite class, and were powered by twin General Motors diesel-electric engines. Like the Bustler class, they had an electric-powered towing winch, but with the added luxuries of electric water pumps – these were hand-operated on British ships – and even an ice-water fountain on the mess deck, which were perhaps the frills and extravagances Sir Amos Ayre was referring to. They were 143 ft in length with a tonnage of 835. They had an armament of one three-inch dual-purpose gun and two Oerlikons, and had a top speed of fourteen knots.
Most of these vessels were built by the Levingston Shipbuilding Company at Orange, Texas, but three – Oriana, Tancred and Weazel – were constructed by a sister company, Gulfport Boiler & Welding Works, Port Arthur, Texas, and four – Aimwell, Bold, Destiny and Eminent – were built by the Defoe Shipbuilding Company, Bay City, Michigan. Three of the class, Reserve, Sprightly and Tancred, were transferred to the Royal Australian Navy.
Four larger, wooden-hulled ATRs (Auxiliary Tug – Rescue) – Director, Emulous, Freedom and Justice – were also handed over to the British under the Lend-Lease Act. Built at the Camden shipbuilding yard, Camden, New Jersey, they were 165 ft long, had a tonnage of 850, and were powered by a single triple-expansion steam reciprocating engine, which gave a speed of twelve knots.
Thanks to Lend-Lease, the scarcity of rescue tugs began to ease by 1943, but more of them brought another problem: insufficient T.124T personnel to man them. The recruitment by EG Martin of Sea Cadets would have been prompted by this shortage, and it also led to several rescue tugs being manned by civilian crews. Such was the need to increase recruitment that in September 1942 an advertisement, ‘Men Wanted for Rescue Tug Service’, had been placed in a Hull newspaper,7 and in June 1943 the Director of the Trade Division signalled the C-in-C Western Approaches:
It is to be regretted that after full consideration the manning situation does not permit of an additional watch-keeping officer being appointed to Rescue Tugs. Owing to the great shortage of deck officers, two new tugs will have to be manned by Overseas Towage and Salvage Co. The matter is constantly in mind and additional officers will be appointed as soon as the manning situation permits.8
The two new rescue tugs to which the Director of the Trade Division was referring were Assiduous, one of the last Assurance class to be launched (June 1943), and the Bustler class Hesperia. Initially, Assiduous flew the Red Ensign until she was commissioned into the Royal Navy after the Normandy landings the following year.9 Hesperia was based at Campbeltown, and was employed as an Atlantic escort tug in 1943, and in 1944 was stationed with the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee where she was due to stay until 1945.10 However, there was some unspecified disagreement with the crew about this, and she returned earlier, but was wrecked in a storm off the Libyan coast in February 1945, along with the American Lend-Lease AFD 24 she was towing with Empire Sandy.11
The rescue tugs and their tow were routed to pass six miles off Ras Aamer, Libya, the standard eastbound route that enabled ships to make a good landfall after the four-hundred-mile stretch from Malta. The available weather reports to the naval authorities in the Eastern Mediterranean on the evening of 6 February forecast westerly winds force 4–5 for the passage between Benghazi and Port Said, but during the next morning the barometer fell eleven millibars and by evening the wind was blowing force 8–9.
&nb
sp; The weather deteriorated rapidly and the wind then veered to the north, giving the tugs no chance to make an offing. Soon they were forced to head into the gale but could make no headway and were slowly driven to leeward. At about 17.00 Empire Sandy had to slip her tow as she was unable to hold her position and was in danger of capsizing. Half an hour later, Hesperia’s tow rope parted and five minutes after that she and the AFD were driven ashore, and although there was no loss of life both became a total loss.12
Transatlantic convoy escorts
The greater power and endurance of the Bustler class and the Lend-Lease rescue tugs allowed a new method of employing them, which was heralded by an Admiralty signal dated 4 January 1943:
It is intended to attach HM Rescue Tugs to the [Escort] groups of Trans-Atlantic convoys and to establish Tug Pool Base at Campbeltown in UK with Western Base in Newfoundland where administration, rest and recreation can be provided for 2 or 3 rescue tugs.13
Then, in early March, the Admiralty informed the C-in-C Western Approaches, whose headquarters at Liverpool led the fight against the U-boats, that as ‘there may be occasions when rescue tugs can keep up with the convoy while towing, it has been decided that they may sail in Atlantic convoys without special escort’.14
These signals were followed in June by the remarks of the Director of the Trade Division, who wrote in a progress report that it had not been until the spring that enough rescue tugs had become available to sail one in each trans-Atlantic convoy. Doing so provided:
the great advantage that, if a ship became a casualty, she could be taken in tow at once instead of a tug having to be sent out to search for the casualty which, without air cooperation, frequently proved to be a fruitless task.15
However, the C-in-C Western Approaches, while doubtless happy with this new arrangement, was not satisfied with how it was to be operated. He now had two of the new and powerful Bustler class rescue tugs, Samsonia and Growler, allotted to his command, and he suggested that they ‘should now be allocated to me by name and that I should assume complete operational and administrative control of these vessels’.16 This may have caused the CCRT some consternation. If every command made the same demand, there would be precious little left for him to control, and the comments the FOIC Greenock added on 22 April would not have reassured him:
