The Coal-Scuttle Brigade
Alexander McKee
© Alexander McKee, 1957
Alexander McKee has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1957 by Souvenir Press Ltd.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Foreword
1 - Black Thursday
2 - Action this Day
3 - The Battle of the Channel
4 - Hellfire Corner
5 - A Shilling a Month
6 - The Channel Guard
7 - Soldiers at Sea
8 - Eagle Squadron Strikes
9 - Coal from Newcastle
10 - E-Boat Alley
11 - Escorts on Top
12 - Wheezing and Dodging
13 - Oddentification
14 - Normandy
Foreword
The strange thing about this story is that some of the fiercest convoy battles of the war could take place literally on England’s doorstep — a few miles off shore — and yet remain almost unknown except to those ultimately concerned, who took it anyway for granted. I didn’t — and this book is the result.
The accounts thus far published are meagre in the extreme, rarely more than a paragraph or two in books or magazines devoted to some other subject. The survivors possess a few action reports, diaries, photographs and faded newspaper cuttings; but the bulk of the story remained locked in the memories of those who took part and to whom I am indebted for the courtesy and eagerness with which they helped my investigations. In many ways it was like a detective investigation for, though events were well remembered, dates were often lost.
In particular, I should like to mention the help given me by Captain J. H. Potts, M.B.E., Captain C. L. Sclanders, M.B.E., and Captain F. Hadlow — all collier Masters — and J. R. Gallagher, B.E.M., formerly a Merchant Navy gunner. For the Navy and Army contribution to the convoys, both on board the merchantmen and in the escorts. I am indebted to Captain R. K. Spencer, V.R.D., R.N.V.R., Lieutenant-Colonel H. P. Stephenson, O.B.E., Commander F. C. Broderick, R.N. (Retd), Lieutenant-Commander A. J. G. Matthews, D.S.C., M.M., R.N.V.R., Lieutenant-Commander A. M. Kinnersley Saul, R.D., R.N.R., Mr W. C Parncutt, Mr G. Glover, and Mr F. Duke. For research into events at the coal wharves I must thank Mr G. R. Baynton, of Dover; Mr T. J. Hay and Mr A. Duke, of Portsmouth; Mr S. W. Dennett, Chairman of the Phoenix Coal Co. Ltd, Mr G. I. F. Thomas, Mr A. Reid, and Mr W. Downie — all of Southampton; and many others, too numerous to mention.
I wish also to thank the Department of the Chief of Naval Information, the Admiralty Record Office, and the Queen’s Harbour Master’s department at Portsmouth for their cooperation in supplying many details not to be found in the brief outline given by the official history. This has enabled me to check dates, facts and figures which witnesses warned me were only approximate, as they were given from memory as much as seventeen years after the events.
It was, to me, surprising that these recollections proved extremely accurate, erring if at all on the side of underestimation. It seems that the most striking incidents have been, so to speak, embalmed by constant repetition and so preserved, much as folk tales are, at least during the lifetime of those who took part. Though much of the detail may have been forgotten, this book will have served its purpose if it preserves, at least in part, what is in many respects an epic story of the sea.
For the contused actions — the various running fights — I have tried to find more than one witness and have usually succeeded in obtaining the testimony of half a dozen; but for any errors of fact or transcription there may be, and for all opinions expressed, I must take sole responsibility.
ALEXANDER McKEE.
Rowlands Castle,
September, 1957.
1 - Black Thursday
DURING the summer of 1940, the sea route between Southend and Southampton became the most bitterly contested stretch of water in the world. By no coincidence whatever, it was also the area selected by the German Army for their landings, with the line Thames Estuary-Portsmouth listed as ‘Operational Objective No. 1’.[1] The first essential for the crossing was to establish absolute and unquestioned dominance of the Channel in that area. By aircraft and guns, it was to be swept clear for the invasion armadas carrying the German 9th and 16th Armies to the assault.
It was the traditional crossing point of armies into England. Two Caesars had taken this route; so had William the Norman with his armoured horsemen and pre-fabricated castles carried in his assault craft; the Spaniards had intended it, and so had the French. Now, once more, one of the world’s decisive battles was to be fought here. And into the battle, through the heart of the waters which must be made German if Hitler was to land in England, sailed — not warships bristling for battle — but grimy little colliers, carrying coal and coke for the factories and homes of southern England.
*
The designation of the collier convoy that passed the Straits of Dover on 25th July was C.W.8. That is, number eight collier convoy bound to the west. Convoys travelling to the east were designated C.E. There were, to start with, twenty-one merchant ships — small, and stained with the dirt of many years service in a grimy trade. They looked hardly worth defending. The armament of many of them consisted of a single Lewis gun. As they came out of the Thames from Southend, their lookouts saw a single ‘snooper’ plane keeping watch from seaward. Messages would be passing back now to the dive-bombers on their forward aerodromes behind Calais.
*
The convoy kept steadily on down the coast of Kent, to the slow beat of their engines. And some of those ships were very slow. They rounded the North Foreland in two divisions and turned down towards the Channel. The ‘snooper’ plane turned away — its job done. At four in the afternoon, with the convoy fairly in the Straits, John Gallagher, merchant navy gunner in the collier Tamworth, saw a horde of specks flying over the French coast — flying parallel to the coast, westward with the convoy, and climbing. They were getting height into the sun. He turned to the Second Mate, and reported: ‘Enoch, there’s a swarm of bees away to port.’ The Second Mate answered, derisively: ‘You’ve got specks in front of your eyes’.
Gallagher pondered a crushing reply, but before he had the words sorted out it was clear enough that the bees were of the stinging kind. The klaxon horn alarm for ‘action stations’ blared through the ship, and out across the water to their mates in convoy. Astern of them, the collier Leo of Hull was already closed up. They waved to the gunners of the Leo. And the men of the Leo waved back.
What happened next was very fast, very confusing; and spread out over many miles of sea and sky. No one saw it all, and no one afterwards could quite remember the exact sequence of events. There was the tearing howl of the dive-bombers plummeting down out of the sun, peeling off from their formation one after another, like divers from a board. There was a lot of smoke on the water. There were solid walls of spray bursting up from the Channel. A motor craft came out of the spray and smoke, and it didn’t look like one of ours. It looked like an E-boat. The Tamworth’s stern 12-pdr trained round and tired, and the motor-boat went back into the smoke.
Gallagher looked over to where a Dutch ‘scuffler’ had been keeping station in the convoy, and saw men rowing; he wondered what fishermen were doing, so far out in the Channel; and said so. Someone replied: ‘It’s the “scuffler”. They’ve abandoned ship. She’s gone.’
Four Junkers 87s came rocketting over the waves towards the Tamworth, coming in on the starboard quarter, machine-guns going — and hitting. Apparently attacking, they were making a low-level get-away, an
d covering their flight with machine-gun fire, to discourage the British gunners. But, though the stern 12-pdr wouldn’t bear, Eric Speakman on the bridge, hemmed into his concrete emplacement behind twin Lewis guns, was grinning his head off as he blazed away. Then the planes were over them, and gone; vanished with that lightning speed which so astonished men unused to it.
And astern the scene looked different. There was no Leo of Hull steadily shouldering the waves behind them. Instead, there was the bottom of a ship rolling in the water, with two men standing on the propeller shaft, and the upturned hull drifting slowly astern of the convoy.
The Tamworth stopped at that moment, as though she had hit a cliff. She rose, in a great wall of water, out of the water; and then fell back, to lie silent and wallowing in the Channel, engines stopped, and out of control. A stick of bombs had burst in the water, underneath her keel. And down came the next flock of dive-bombers.
There were bombers falling on them from above; and bombers pulling out of their dives, slow and vulnerable for a few fleeting moments, as the pilots pulled up the dive-brakes. There was no question of picking a target, but simply of taking them as they came. Gallagher saw the next one — he even saw the head of the pilot — and it meant nothing to him at all. There was neither emotion nor calculation — no time for theory of gunnery, for estimating the amount of deflection to give, for aiming off. Useless to fire at an aircraft, for you only hit where it has been; you have to fire in front — at where it will be when your projectiles get there. But there was no time for brain-work now; it was the time for instinctive firing, like a shot-gun swung from the shoulder at a flock of partridges. And Gallagher fired.
But it was not a shot-gun — it was a 12-pdr. There was a stunning noise in his ears, and then he was being kicked and slapped, and there were voices yelling in his ear. Above the ship, a few hundred yards up, was a cloud of smoke and fragments. Dazed with noise, and a slight wound, Gallagher couldn’t make out what had happened. In fact, the men around him were shouting: ‘You got it, you got it, you got it!’ — and jumping with glee. The Junkers 87 had blown up; probably the petrol tanks had exploded.
There was a shout from the bridge: ‘Stand by to abandon ship!’ The collier’s deck, just forward of the bridge, was buckled and humped up; the bulwarks were twisted; the engine-room ladders wrecked, and the main engines damaged, with steam escaping.
Between them and the French coast was an ever-lengthening wall of smoke — a ‘B’-class destroyer was laying the screen for the Tamworth and the other lame ducks that lay stopped on the water. One small ship was crawling away to beach herself; a bomb, bursting in her cargo of cement, had covered her with it. Astern, the Leo had gone. They heard later that her crew had twice abandoned ship, after being hit; but the first time, remembering that their ‘number ones’ were still on board, they had gone back for them; then rowed away for the last time, as their ship turned turtle. The ship directly ahead of the Tamworth had gone, too, and the Tamworth herself was crippled in the water, waiting for a tug to come out from Dover; and as she waited, more dive-bombers came out from France; and as they attacked, from all the British ships, cripples included, came the answering stab and rattle of gunfire.
The watchers at Dover — the cliffs were black with them, and the rooftops and top windows of buildings — watched the battle breathlessly. Half the world’s press was there, and they have recorded how ashamed and futile it felt, merely to be a spectator of life-and-death in that vast natural arena under Dover cliffs.
One ship was beached under Shakespeare Cliff; then the Tamworth came in, wallowing behind a tug.
Dover Harbour is formed by two long breakwaters, reaching out in an arc; the Tamworth was towed to the coal wharf on the western arm. Two other vessels crippled in the attack were towed here; first a British ship, very low in the water, which — just as she was secured by the mooring lines fore and aft — lurched, and sank to the bottom; and besides her, a damaged Norwegian which lasted only a little longer. Moored to seaward of the Tamworth, she was hit a few minutes later in another bombing attack, pressed home under Dover cliffs; and sank.
It was now about 4.30 p.m. Two British destroyers were leaving harbour; and they were going out like speedboats, the white wash piling up under their stems. The convoy was still in sight — away towards Folkestone. It no longer steamed in two long, proud lines, for nearly half the ships were gone. And now the Germans were making a last, determined effort to destroy it utterly; this time their attack was on the surface. The message that had reached the destroyers was: ‘E-boats coming out of Calais: go and clobber them.’ Or words to that effect.
This Destroyer Flotilla was based on Dover as an anti-invasion striking force, and to give distant cover to the convoys. Its role was offensive: to patrol Calais and Boulogne at night and, if the invasion armadas came out, catch them with their pants down, on their own doorstep. The crews had no doubt they could do it. In case of some assault craft getting through in foggy weather, an auxiliary Patrol of miscellaneous yachts and motor-boats patrolled on our side, close in shore. The destroyers habitually operated on the other side; but not in daylight, for their anti-aircraft armament was weak. The single pompom of one of the destroyers now going out habitually jammed every fifth round — a sharp blow on the breech with a mallet bringing it to its senses — so it fired in distinctive rhythm pom-pom-pom-pom-pom — bonk! — pom-pom-pom-pom-pom — bonk!
From the rooftops of Dover, through field glasses, the enemy was already in sight — dark specks crawling across the sea, outwards from the French coast. They only appeared to crawl; actually, they were racing over the surface at 40 knots, almost invisible behind their bow waves, their engines growling and snarling at top revolutions, the sea wildly disturbed behind them. Their pendants snapped in the wind and their torpedo tubes, like metal eyes, pointed at the battered merchantmen. Not only the world’s press was watching, but the womenfolk of Dover — housewives left the sink and chambermaids dropped their brooms, to run to the windows and watch in fascinated horror the conflict of the gladiators.
The British did not send the whole flotilla — the enemy was not big enough for that — they sent Brilliant and Boreas. Within a minute of the message being received, they had slipped their buoys, gone curving out of harbour, and stepped on everything. At 35 knots they went slap for the E-boats, their sterns sunk low in the water and the stern-waves streaming higher than the deck. If the E-boats could get among the colliers it would be rather like a professional pug slamming an innocent bystander; but they couldn’t. The destroyers got there first and at 5 o’clock, with impact fuses, they opened fire. The range was two miles.
The white water-spouts crept lazily up among the racing E-boats, and the splinters shrieked overhead. The Germans drove on through the fire; then there was an abrupt change in silhouette — they were turning; and as they turned, they made smoke. It rolled in drifting clouds across the water, and in it burst the destroyers’ shells, and now and again could be seen the bobbing hull of an E-boat, tearing along. And then the silhouettes changed again — they were showing their sterns; they were going back to France. Wisely, for a destroyer is the E-boat’s deadliest opponent. And now it was the turn of the destroyers to face unequal odds.
As the damaged E-boats retired, German guns on Cap Gris-Nez opened fire on the two destroyers. It was small-calibre shellfire, for the heavy cross-Channel guns were not yet in position, and it was ineffective. Lieutenant-Commander Broderick, the senior of the two destroyer captains, was then told to return to Dover.
The Brilliant and the Boreas turned for home, their thin hulls trembling with the drive of their 34,000 horsepower engines. They were out in mid-Channel, far from the protection of the Dover guns and the British fighters. There was a swarm of specks coming out from the French coast, rapidly overtaking them. About two dozen Junkers 87s, stepped up in echelon, ready to peel off for the dive from 10,000 feet.
Standing by the chart-table on the bridge of the Brilliant wer
e the Navigator and the Yeoman of Signals, William Parncutt. They saw the first stuka press its attack to the last possible moment — right down to mast-height — they saw the bomb leave the aircraft’s belly and come straight at them. It seemed bigger than the ship, expanding all the time in the few seconds of its fall. That was the impression it gave; and few people could have been so close to a falling 1,100-lb. bomb and survived to describe the sensation. They both put their heads under the chart table.
But the deck was already heeling over, the ship seeming to spin round almost in its own length, for the captain — Lieutenant-Commander Broderick — had judged his moment with razor-edged accuracy. With just enough time to avoid the bomb, but with insufficient for the German pilot to alter his aim, he had given: ‘Hard-a-starboard.’
The watchers on the cliff saw the sea open in a solid-seeming spurt of spray and smoke, hundreds of feet high, the rapidly-turning destroyer momentarily lost to view. A deluge of water swept the chart room, soaking Parncutt and the Navigator to the waist; then the Brilliant was racing on, engines still thundering at top revolutions, her guns hammering away at the successive plunges of dive-bomber after dive-bomber.
After the stukas came a shallow-diving swarm of Dornier 17s; and time after time the watchers on the cliffs saw vast walls of water go up, blotting out the ships; and always, out of the falling water and drifting smoke, when it seemed they must have gone, the knife-bows of the Brilliant and the Boreas. It was off-putting for the pilots. But they were as professional as their opponents. They put two bombs through the stern of the Brilliant, which didn’t explode and went right through; and they got a direct hit on the bridge of the Boreas, killing or wounding about thirty-five men. And they kept on attacking, right up to the moment of entering harbour, with stukas once again.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 1
