The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  Ordinary Seaman Brockman, someone wrote on the report, was just sixteen years old.

  The ammunition now started to explode again, hurling burning debris high into the air, but at 5.45pm Lady Brassey beached the collier off Lydden Spout Battery west of Dover. By now the fire had spread to No. 2 hold on the fore side of the bridge, and the ammunition was exploding much more frequently, with pieces of shrapnel falling on the rescue tug’s deck. Because of the extreme heat of the fire and exploding ordnance, Lady Brassey’s towing equipment could not be retrieved and she returned to Dover without it. ‘As the nearest onlooker,’ the trawler’s commanding officer concluded his report, ‘I have the highest praise for Lady Brassey’s seamanship and resource, and for the endeavours of her crew in a most dangerous operation.’

  Four days later, on 28 June, Lady Brassey and Lady Duncannon went to the assistance of another burning cargo ship, the 825-ton SS Dalegarth Force, which had been hit by German shell fire while in convoy between Dover and Folkestone. Three of the crew were killed and others, including the master, were wounded. Later, he and the second engineer were awarded the OBE for their bravery under fire and refusal to leave their ship. Shells were still falling on the convoy when the Dalegarth Force was taken in tow by Lady Brassey, while the crew of Lady Duncannon extinguished the flames and helped save the burning ship, which was towed into Dover.

  The skill and courage shown by the crews of the tugs in these two incidents was duly recognised: the two masters were awarded the MBE, and four of Lady Brassey’s crew, including Ordinary Seaman Brockman, received the BEM, as did two of the crew of Lady Duncannon. Brockman was also awarded Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea.

  In recommending these awards the FOIC Dover, Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell, pointed out the outstanding services the crews had rendered during the period, 1941–44, including their contributions to moving parts of the mulberry harbours:

  In my opinion these services have been quite unique, carried out as they have been in the proximity of the enemy coast and often under fire from the enemy’s guns… it is difficult to speak too highly of the conduct and bearing of the crews.33

  At the conclusion of neptune, the achievements of the tugs on both sides of the English Channel was duly recognised when the Rear Admiral commanding mulberry and pluto, Rear Admiral William Tennant, wrote in his report:

  The work of the tugs has been magnificent. They have worked under conditions to which the majority of the crews were unaccustomed. Nevertheless, their pride in their job as tugmen has been such that they have never failed to give of their best and to hold on to and deliver tows in circumstances which they could not have been blamed for giving up.34

  the shores of normandy

  (Tune: ‘The Dawning of the Day’ or ‘Raglan Road’)

  In the cold grey light of the sixth of June, in the year of forty-four,

  The Empire Larch sailed out from Poole, to join with thousands more.

  The largest fleet the world had seen, we sailed in close array,

  And we set our course for Normandy, at the dawning of the day.

  There was not one man in all our crew, but knew what lay in store,

  For we had waited for that day, through five long years of war.

  We knew that many would not return, but all our hearts were true,

  For we were bound for Normandy, where we had a job to do.

  Now the Empire Larch was a deep-sea tug, with a crew of thirty-three,

  And I was just the galley-boy, on my first trip to sea.

  I little thought when I left home, of the dreadful sights I’d see.

  But I came to manhood on the day, that I first saw Normandy.

  At Arromanches, off the beach of Gold, ‘neath the rockets’ deadly glare,

  We towed our blockships into place, and we built a harbour there.

  Mid shot and shell we built it well, as history does agree,

  While brave men died in the swirling tide, on the shores of Normandy.

  Like the Rodney and the Nelson, there were ships of great renown,

  But Rescue Tugs all did their share, as many a ship went down.

  We ran our pontoons to the shore, within the Mulberry’s lee,

  And we made safe berth for the tanks and guns, that would set all Europe free.

  For every hero’s name that’s known, a thousand died as well.

  On stakes and wires their bodies hung, rocked in the ocean swell.

  And many a mother wept that day, for the sons they loved so well.

  Men who cracked a joke and cadged a smoke, as they stormed the gates of Hell.

  As the years pass by I can still recall, the men I saw that day,

  Who died upon that blood-soaked sand, where now sweet children play.

  And those of you who were unborn, who’ve lived in liberty,

  Remember those who made it so, on the shores of Normandy.

  ©Jim Radford (Shantyman, folksinger, and ex galley-boy, Empire Larch)

  Notes

  1. ADM 199/2165, 28 March 1944.

  2. Ibid., 13 March 1945.

  3. Roskill S. The War at Sea, 1939–45. Vol. III. Part 2. London: HMSO; 1954–61. p.29.

  4. RAM/P Report, Encl No. 7, p.200 in ADM 199/1616.

  5. Details of each tug taking part in towing the MULBERRIES can be found on www.thamestugs.co.uk

  6. See www.royalnavyresearcharchive.org.uk

  7. ADM 199/1616, Chapter 9, para 61.

  8. Roskill S. The War at Sea, op. cit. p.126.

  9. Con Harris, a signalman aboard Emphatic, wrote that one of Emphatic’s tasks was to tow the First World War monitor, HMS Erebus, into her bombardment position. Emphatic was also assigned the unpleasant task of landing dead bodies found in the water. From an article submitted for publication in Towrope, DSRTA archives.

  10. DSRTA Newsletter, 2000; 1(3): 2–3.

  11. Towrope, 2005 (Christmas); 5(18): 15–21.

  12. ADM 199/1637.

  13. Towrope, 2001: 3(10): 18–21. The account has been slightly abbreviated here.

  14. ADM 199/1637.

  15. Extracts from Dutch tugs’ logs in red file B marked HMRT in DSRTA archive.

  16. COTUG memorandum, dated 24 September 1944, in ADM 199/1631.

  17. Report by Sir Walter Monckton in ADM 199/1617.

  18. If Monckton’s remarks sound partial today, Force Mulberry by Commander A Stanford USNR, who was Clark’s deputy for force Mulberry A, describes how Clark drove his men – and himself – to exhaustion to finish the American harbour ahead of schedule.

  19. ADM 199/1619.

  20. See Litwiller R. White Ensign Flying. Toronto: Dundurn Press; 2014 for a history of HMCS Trentonian.

  21. ADM 199/1618.

  22. ADM 199/1637.

  23. Letter to Len Reed from Bertie Neilson, 28 November 2001, in DSRTA archive.

  24. Harpagus was taken to the Tyne where a new forepart was built for her, and she was renamed Treworlas. See www.tynebuiltships.co.uk/H-Ships/harpagus1930.html

  25. After the war, Turner transferred to the Royal Navy and then served in the Marine Branch of the Royal Air Force (see supplement to The London Gazette, 18 August 1959, p.558). After retirement, he continued to go to sea and, as a civilian, was master of a protection vessel during the Icelandic cod wars of the 1970s.

  26. Lloyd’s List and Shipping Gazette, 6 November 1944.

  27. ADM 199/1637.

  28. One of the official reports in ADM 199/1637 described it as a WHALE Link, the other called it a ‘WHALE Unit No. S.513’.

  29. Describing the incident many years later in Towrope, 2001; 3(10): 17, Barnes said Sesame was towing a PHOENIX. Aged fourteen, he must have been the youngest member of any ship’s crew at Dunkirk when his tug, Sun King VII, went to the aid of Allied troops on the Dunkirk beaches. See Towrope, 2006 (Summer); 7(29): 21.

  30. ADM 199/1637.

  31. Dover Express, 11 November 1918.

  32. ADM 1/29724.

  33. I
bid.

  34. RAM/P Report Enc. No. 7, p.199, in ADM 199/1616.

  Envoi

  After Germany surrendered, the Rescue Tug Service was able to turn its undivided attention on the war against Japan. By that time quite a number of rescue tugs were already stationed in the Far East. But it was a different kind of conflict, where they were employed in more routine, but essential, matters such as towing AFDs and other heavy equipment like floating cranes. Lariat, for instance, with the help of Saucy for part of the way, towed AFD 17 from Iceland to Sydney, an eighteen-thousand-mile voyage lasting six months.

  She then became the only rescue tug at that time to be officially attached to the British Pacific Fleet after it was formed from the Eastern Fleet in November 1944. She went with it to Thursday Island, New Guinea and the Philippines, and finally to Hong Kong where the Royal Navy accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison on 30 August 1945, after Japan had surrendered on 15 August. By then, the Rescue Tug Service, for the loss of twenty tugs, ‘either by mine, torpedo, bomb, or stress of weather’ had saved nearly three million tons of merchant shipping and two hundred and fifty-four British and Allied warships.1

  A fitting end to this book is the one last battle by a rescue tug, not with the enemy but with that equally dangerous, and more frequent, opponent, the weather. It comes more or less verbatim, but abbreviated, from an article published in the South China Morning Post, on 9 November 1945, which was written by Lariat’s second mate, Sub-Lt AHC Smith RNVR:

  One of the Fleet Train tankers, Wave King, had developed engine trouble and needed to be towed back from Okinawa and Lariat, which was commanded by Lt GV Reakes RNR, was sent to retrieve her. One typhoon had already struck the area a few days earlier and the tanker had narrowly escaped being driven on to a reef. But by the time Lariat had arrived on 25 September 1945 and taken the tanker in tow the weather was balmy and for the next three days she covered one hundred and thirty-eight, one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty miles.

  Another typhoon had been reported but appeared to be travelling well to the north-west. However, by the end of the third day a gentle swell had started to appear and the wind had increased to twenty knots, and a new forecast predicted that the typhoon was heading Lariat’s way. Overnight, the wind increased to forty knots and the barometer, which had been steady until then, started to fall. The wind continued to blow from the north, and in the morning the sky overhead was still clear, though clouds were gathering all around the horizon. There was nothing unduly spectacular about the sunset, but a few small birds sought sanctuary on the ship, which had started to roll rather heavily, and the gunwhales were occasionally awash.

  All watertight doors, ports, etc. were now closed and everything likely to move had been secured. Because of the increasing strength of the wind, the tanker’s bows kept moving into the wind, increasing the strain on the towing wire, and a further fifty fathoms was let out. From then on the wire had to be let out every fifteen minutes to prevent undue chafing, as both ships were rolling and pitching heavily. Occasionally there would be a heavy rain squall and strong gusts of wind, reducing Lariat’s speed through the water from six knots to a meagre two knots. By midday on 30 September the wind was north by west and had increased to fifty knots, making Lariat unable to keep the tanker on her course of two hundred and forty degrees.

  By the Sunday afternoon the seas were mountainous, with dark clouds hanging low above them. Lariat occasionally rolled so heavily that the ship’s bell just forward of the bridge kept ringing every few minutes. Meals were taken standing up, with our bodies jammed against a doorway. Most of the articles we had secured below were now strewn about the cabins. The barometer was now falling about one point an hour and was down to 29.0 inches (982 mb), and by the evening the wind had increased still further, to sixty knots. The waves were now higher than the rescue tug, which was rolling at forty degrees most of the time, with an occasional roll of fifty to sixty degrees, and we could only head three hundred and twenty degrees. Visibility was only a few yards and we had not been able to see Wave King for several hours. Another sixty fathoms of towing wire were let out, and we eased out a couple of feet every five or ten minutes.

  By 7pm the wind was a steady eighty to ninety knots with gusts of hurricane force, which made the whole ship shudder and vibrate. The ship’s bell was ringing practically all the time, the wardroom furniture had all come adrift, water was coming in everywhere, and the awnings around the bridge ripped and banged, and finally blew away. As Lariat went down in the trough of the waves, the wind whipped the tops of the waves off in a driving, flying sheet of spray and spume. It was also raining hard.

  In the dark everybody just hung on to anything in order to keep balanced. We all got bruised in our efforts to do this and it was very tiring. The ship’s head was three hundred and sixty degrees and at any minute we were half expecting to beach on the rocks south of Formosa. We had no idea of our speed, and no radar. Our only communication with Wave King had broken down, as water in the radio room had put out of action every transmitter and receiver.

  Some of the rolls we did were terrific and we thought were going to turn over. There was still tension in the wire, so we knew that Wave King was at the other end but did not know what her heading was.

  At 9.20pm both engines stopped and we rapidly headed round to sixty degrees. The engine room rang up to say that water had got into one of the control boxes (she is diesel electric) and whole lot had gone up in flames. Fortunately, after about ten minutes the prompt action of the chief engineer, Sub-Lt J McLaughlin, and his other officers managed to get the port engine going again. Slowly we got our head back into the wind. The water was getting into the engine room faster than they could pump it out, despite the fact that they were using a fire pump that was capable of pumping one hundred tons an hour over and above normal pumps.

  We were now left with one engine and one generator to supply steering, gyro, light, pumps, etc. At 11.40pm, after one terrific gust of wind, the wind suddenly dropped and, apart from a confused mountainous sea, which pitched and rolled in every direction, all was quiet. The barometer read 28.01 inches (948.5 mb).

  We now managed to head back to two hundred and seventy degrees and probably made some progress, but early on the Monday morning the wind commenced again. Although it did not quite reach its previous speed it was still a steady seventy knots or so, with strong gusts. The pressure jumped up to 29.10 inches (985 mb) and remained steady until dawn. We still got occasional squalls making a lot of movement on the ship, but the sea did not look so angry. The barometer continued to rise and the wind to moderate. The temperature had also dropped to seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, from the eighty-four degrees it had been when the barometer had been dropping.

  We were now able to assess the damage. The awnings of course had gone, so had all the gun covers, most of the signal flags; and the signals locker was flat on its face on the opposite side of the bridge. The sights of the Oerlikons had gone, so had one of the Oerlikon shoulder fittings. The platform above the bridge for taking bearings was clear of everything except the gyro repeater and the standard compass, the metal cover of which had gone. A large metal navigation desk had also disappeared; the lifeboat had come loose at its davits; and the guards around the steering rods had all come adrift. The port steering rod was bent badly, wireless aerials were down, most of the halyards had gone, as had the ensign and its halyards.

  Belowdecks was real chaos. The typewriter had been thrown across the captain’s cabin and smashed a large wooden panel below his bunk; strangely enough not damaging the typewriter. As the galley chimney had blown off, and the ship was still rolling heavily, it was impossible to make hot drinks or to cook any food. Actually, from Saturday to Wednesday the ship’s company lived on biscuits, bully beef and water.

  Later we found out that during the forty-eight hours, Saturday to Monday, we had found from Wave King’s radar that we had gone astern in a semi-circle within three to nine miles of some ro
cks. We tried hard to get away, but we did not appear to make any real headway until Monday night, when we steered various courses between two hundred and two hundred and forty degrees according to the strength of the wind. Meanwhile, a signal had been received that help was at hand in the form of the Canadian cruiser Ontario and the rescue tug Integrity, and on Friday 5 October Lariat arrived back in Hong Kong.2

  What the article didn’t mention was how the Lariat, at the height of a typhoon, ‘was troubled,’ as a Rescue Tug Service document put it with typical British understatement, ‘with water down her funnel’.

  Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, C-in-C of the British Pacific Fleet, acknowledged this epic when he signed a letter of commendation. It read:

  On 26 September 1945, HMRT Lariat left Okinawa for Hong Kong with RFA Wave King in tow. On 29 September 1945 the wind began to increase steadily until at 2200 on 30 September it had reached force 12. At 2230, fire broke out in the engine room, and although this was quickly got under control, the starboard engine was put completely out of action, and HMRT Lariat had to proceed with the tow on one engine. In spite of these unfavourable and difficult conditions, the tow was successfully completed at 0800 on 3 October 1945.

  For skill and determination throughout this successful towing of a 10,000-ton ship through an active typhoon area, I commend Lieutenant GV Reakes RNR, Commanding Officer of HMRT Lariat, and Sub Lieutenant J McLaughlin RNR, his Engineer Officer.3

  Notes

  1. Correspondence and amendments from CCRT’s secretary to Paymaster Rear Admiral Sir Eldon Manisty, 23–30 November 1945, in ADM 199/2165. After the defeat of Germany the CCRT stated, in an undated document in ADM 199/1632, that the Service had rescued 2,814,178 tons of shipping.

  2. Smith AHC. ‘Story of a Tug in a Typhoon’, South China Morning Post, 9 November 1945, p.2.

  3. Towrope, Spring 2004; 6(19), 19.

  Appendix

  From CAFO 796 April 1942 And CAFO 339 February 1944