The Betswood was near the Nab, in company with some other ships. Her master, Captain J. H. Potts, thought there must have been several hundred German aircraft — although it was nothing like as bad as it seemed, for many of the planes were fighters. But what happened was still sufficiently spectacular. ‘The scene changed,’ he said, ‘in an instant, from a perfectly flat sea to a typhoon.’
The Betswood was a small collier of 1,350 tons, just over 200 feet long. At this time, her sole armament was a single Lewis gun on the bridge. She steamed through untouched, as if she bore a charmed life. She was one of the few colliers of the ‘Coal-Scuttle Brigade’ to survive the war and she was to gain in the end the Channel ‘Blue Riband’ for making more wartime passages of the Straits of Dover than any other merchant ship. Her master was awarded the M.B.E.
The battle raged for several hours, between the Nab and Dunnose, a great cliff on the south shore of the Isle of Wight, until all this stretch of sea was littered with sinking and damaged ships. Some ships were hit, time after time.
The collier Empire Crusader was struck simultaneously by a bomb which hit the foredeck and another which exploded in the sea, two or three feet away, punching the water at her with crushing force and making her destruction certain. As she reeled from the shock, flames leapt up from the cargo — a bomb had landed in the coal, blown a crater in it, and splintered the hatches to matchwood. The mainmast was down, the engine room skylights broken and all the steam pipes burst. The whole front of the bridge had been blown in and the Second Mate was lying on the deck, seriously wounded. The Germans continued to attack.
Down below, amid the scalding chaos of escaping steam, Chief Engineer Joseph Cowper stopped the ship’s engines; then he went up to the bridge, to see if there were any survivors. He found the Second Mate lying in the wreckage, too badly wounded to move. He called to an Able Seaman, William Robson, and together they began to carry the heavy body of the badly-injured man across the skylight towards one of the lifeboats. As they struggled with their load, the Germans were diving on the ship, machine-gunning it. There was a sudden series of tearing slaps — a brief whine ending in a whip-crack — and Robson stumbled, hit by a bullet.
The Empire Crusader was rolling sluggishly, and was very low in the water; there was no time for further search, and not much hope even if there had been time. Cowper went back to the lifeboat; it went running down into the water; and they pulled away from their sinking, burning ship. For the officers, and for many of the crew, a ship is their home; it is sad to see it go, even when it isn’t taking the bodies of your friends down with it.
There were a good many tragedies like that, that day, for scattered over many miles of sea, under the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight and perfectly visible from shore, ten merchantmen were caught by the bombers. Two were caught alone, without any ship near them and without escort of any kind; they foundered, in a flurry of spray. The Coquetdale and the Ajax had gone to join the Empire Crusader on the seabed. The water was littered with cripples, stopped and drifting helplessly — or crawling slowly back to St Helen’s Roads. They were not all British ships, as their names indicate — the John M, the Scheldt, the Balmaha, the Veenenburgh, the Omlandia, the Surte, and the Tres. The Tres was Norwegian, one of the many foreign ships whose captains had come to England rather than serve the Germans. A tug put out from Portsmouth dockyard to take her in tow; she was brought in to St Helen’s Roads, so shattered that she sank at her moorings the following night.
But the casualties were not only to the merchantmen. The dive-bombers, roaming over the area at will, picked out the armed trawlers and armed yachts which had been part of the escort or had been sent out from Portsmouth to reinforce it. One of these was H.M.S. Wilna.
The Wilna was a rich man’s toy — a powerful, converted motor yacht of 450 tons. Her main armament, like that of the trawlers, was an old-fashioned 4-inch gun designed to engage surface targets only; it would not elevate beyond 45 degrees. It could engage an aircraft flying low down some distance away, but since the shells were fitted with percussion fuses, they would explode only if they hit the aircraft directly — a million to one chance. Against dive-bombers there wasn’t a chance at all, for the gun wouldn’t bear. The Wilna brought to the battle only her anti-aircraft armament — a twin Lewis. 1914 against 1940.
She rounded Bembridge Ledge,with Culver Cliff rising out of the sea to starboard, and came across traces of the battle. She passed a water-logged lifeboat; it was riddled with bullet holes, woodwork gashed and splintered; and it was empty. Another half-sunken object floated by — a ship’s wheelhouse. Off Dunnose lay an escort trawler, the Kingston Chrysoberyl; and no other ship in sight. There was only the wreckage, drifting half awash among the waves.
All this time the Germans had been booming about overhead, the deep, undulating growl of their motors striking down from the heights; from time to time there were bursts of machine-gun fire and the sheet-tearing noise of diving fighters. A sudden commotion directly overhead caused the crew of the Wilna to look up and then dive flat on the deck. As the 4-inch gun would not bear, the gun’s crew lay down, too. Everyone, except the man behind the twin Lewis, lay flat. And he, squinting up into the sun, saw a stepped-up line of bombers heaving as if it had been kicked. Wings gleaming in the sunlight, the stukas peeled off, one by one, from 10,000 feet and came plunging down with a rushing roar, a kind of shrilling thunder made of engine noise and the howl of air round the dive-brakes. The noise broke no bones, but it was terrifying to hear. The twin Lewis clattered its reply.
The sea around the Wilna exploded in great gouts from the bombs and in hundreds of smaller splashes where splinters of bomb casing tore upwards to the surface. There were no direct hits, only near-misses, but the bombs bursting close alongside sent a shower of splinters tearing through the Wilna at deck level. The carpenter was lying face downwards on the planking — a bomb fragment, ripping through the low bulwarks, tore him open from chest to belly. Bullets and cannon shells sprayed the yacht. On the bridge was a box-like air-raid shelter, for just such an emergency as this — but a bullet went in, and took a man through the head. The nerve-wracking howl of dive-bombers and the tornado-thunder of the explosions seemed, to the Wilna’s men, to last for ten minutes; but it was probably much less than that. Then the stukas were haring for home.
The Wilna lay stopped in the water, drifting helplessly under Dunnose, with her mast over the side, three men dead and six wounded. Two of the wounded were in extreme agony; if they were to live they needed skilled medical attention at once. There was no chance of rowing them ashore — the lifeboat seemed to consist more of holes than of planking, though it was later patched up. They looked across at the Kingston Chrysoberyl, but she had been attacked at the same time and was lying stopped, half hidden in a cloud of steam.
While they gave what attention they could to their own wounded, the Wilna’s men waited for a tug and gave thanks that their ship was not coal-fired. The scenes aboard the Kingston Chrysoberyl, which was a coal-burner, were horrifying; with steam bursting up from below through every nook and cranny, every gap opened by the bombs — and the screaming of terribly scalded men. The bursting of the steam pipes had meant a terrible death for many of the crew, and her casualties were much heavier than those of the Wilna.
Her companion ship, the Kingston Olivine, suffered in much the same way, as did two other armed trawlers, the Cape Palliser and the Stella Capella, as well as another armed yacht, the Rion. The reason they lost so heavily was that they were all equipped as anti-submarine vessels, not flak ships (a later innovation). And this, in turn, was because of the sudden appearance of the Germans on the Channel, forcing us to a type of war we were not ready to deal with. In fact, the Channel was hardly used by German submarines, being something of a deathtrap for them on account of its shallow depths and the presence of so many small craft equipped for anti-submarine work; indeed, the U-boat was not a factor to be reckoned with by the coastal convoys.
; All that day the Portsmouth tugs were going out to the damaged ships and bringing them into the Dockyard for repair. The losses, for that day’s work around the Isle of Wight, were in all three ships sunk and 13 damaged, as well as three sunk and two damaged by or because of E-boats between Beachy Head and the Nab during the morning hours of darkness. It was a formidable total. Seen in perspective, the day’s work was a nasty knock — but it was nothing like a knock-out blow.
Fighter Command had been out over the battle, though the ships were largely unaware of it, No. 145 Hurricane Squadron bearing the brunt of the fighting. At 11.45, for instance, they had been told to head off German aircraft coming in over Beachy Head, found six Me 110s there, were then informed over the R/T that there was a battle going on south of the Isle of Wight, and altered course in that direction. It took them ten minutes to get there; they saw the convoy, but no Germans. Later, they did intercept, and one pilot saw that a German pilot had joined the mêlée of crippled ships; he was sitting in his dinghy, looking rather lonely, the water around him tinged green by the release of chemicals carried to aid recognition and rescue.
The Air Ministry communiqué claimed that 400 German aircraft had taken part in the day’s operations against the ships, and that 60 had been destroyed for the loss of 16 British fighters. The actual exchange rate was 28 German aircraft and 20 British. And on 11th August there were further attacks on convoys, as well as on Dover and Portland, with air losses very nearly equal — 35 German to 32 British.[4]
The German claims of shipping losses inflicted on the British were astronomical. The IX Air Group alone reported that they had sunk 950,000 tons, by direct attack and by minelaying, by 31st July.[5] This Group was a part only of Luftflotte 2, which was in turn a part only of the Luftwaffe. In fact, sinkings by mine were heavier than those by any other cause; but, though the losses by direct attack had risen sharply, they were still only 24,000 tons during the period 10th July-7th August. Nevertheless, during the peak phase of the Battle of the Channel, the coastal convoys had lost on an average one third of their number, sunk or damaged beyond repair.[6]
This ordeal for their crews was now over, for on the following day, 12th August, the Battle of Britain began. The fight was pushed beyond the convoys, to the ports and coastal aerodromes; and then, much later, inland; and finally, to London. The convoys were to be attacked in the future, sometimes heavily, but never again were they to be so consistently the target; to sail through no man’s sea, in front of our own barbed wire, while the enemy’s preliminary barrage beat down on them, their protection virtually limited to that of their own guns.
4 - Hellfire Corner
As the bombers and fighters of Air Fleets 2 and 3 droned back from the first day of the all-out assault on England, there was a momentary series of flashes from the French coast opposite Dover — winking sheets of light, gone in an instant. They came from heavy guns. The muzzles were not pointed at Dover — but reared up almost vertically. The projectiles slammed upwards, far above the bombers, reached the top of their arc — miles high — and began to slant downwards. They fell into Dover much faster than the sound of their passage.
There was no warning; no howl or whistle. Merely a heavy crraack! The earth trembled. And three or four billowing towers of smoke and dust rose up above the houses. Dover was under shellfire.
These were ranging shots. Batteries were being set up on the opposite cliffs, and as they came into position, so they fired ranging shots at the most obvious target — the nearest town on the other side of the Straits. For some batteries it was Dover, for others Folkestone. There was no barrage yet.
Elsewhere, the German blitzkrieg had fallen upon small countries with stunning force; the blows appearing to be delivered with brutal confidence and power, helping to build up the legend of German invincibility. It did seem, to neutrals many thousands of miles away, that nothing could stop the Wehrmacht; that their onrush was irresistible; that unprepared England must go down before them like a stunned calf. In terms of fireworks, the first day of the assault had been spectacular. Clouds of smoke and dust blotting out the arrogant face of England, bomb flashes winking like fireflies across the docks and aerodromes, shaking the comfortable islanders out of their centuries-old invincible calm. So it seemed to the German crews as, hot with the taste of death and danger, they flew back at noon under the high sun. It had been a breathless business for them; not so easy as attacking under-armed and ill-escorted convoys out of range of the shore guns. The rocketting plunge of the dive-bombers had been shaken by the opposition. Not much, for those pilots had verve and courage, but enough to make all the difference in pin-point bombing such as this.
In battle, men are both excited and afraid at the same time — a delicate and precarious balance. The one thing they never tell of their experiences is the cold, sober truth; because they are neither cold nor sober — but highly charged with emotion.
There had been no weight behind the attack — only about 30 bombers directed at Portsmouth, with perhaps 10 more for the Isle of Wight, and the bombers themselves carried a comparatively light bomb-load. It was a rapier attack, and everything depended on getting the point home.
There was no comparison whatever between this and the later Allied attacks by between one and two thousand British and American aircraft, carrying much heavier bomb-loads. With these, it hardly mattered where the bombs fell, as long as they fell on the right city — sometimes they didn’t — because the ‘carpet’ of bombs would take care of everything. Their greatest success, in terms of death roll, was at Dresden, where 70,000 people were killed in a series of attacks spread over 14 hours. The Germans’ best effort in this line had been Rotterdam, with 25,000 killed in 2½ hours. The civilian casualties in Portsmouth, on ‘Eagle Day’, amounted to 13 killed.
It was a matter, not only of weight, but of method. The Germans were not, at this point, interested in causing civilian casualties; rightly, they believed that it paid better to hit the nerve centres — but they had hit only one, the radar station on the Isle of Wight, and that was soon repaired; they had near-missed the others. Their aircrews, fascinated by the evidence of fires and explosions, went back to report success; and the process of self-delusion began.
But for Dover, 12th August was a significant date. On the seafront now is a plaque presented to the town by the people of Calais; it had been taken from a German gun, part of the Sangatte Battery, and on it the gun’s crew had recorded their score. They had fired 2,224 shells at the Dover area — that is, at the town and at convoys passing Dover. The town, and the convoys, were now to be shelled consistently for four years.
Although Dover is officially credited with being the first target, there were mysterious explosions in Folkestone some days before 12th August. There were rumours of shell-fire whispered in the town — whispered because it might be thought that they were spreading ‘alarm and despondency’.
For ten days, from 12th August, ranging shots were fired across the Straits. Then, on 22nd August, appeared the apparently perfect target. A convoy of eighteen ships, creeping along close inshore at little more than the pace of a man walking. They were moving up channel, bound for Southend. The Germans opened up, for the first time, with a barrage, the convoy being passed on from battery to battery as it moved slowly through the Straits.
There was no warning; merely the thud-crraack! of the shells bursting — and great, towering columns of water rising high above the ships, spreading, falling, subsiding in a swirling vortex; with splinters whining away out of the spume and smoke.
Some of the sailors scanned the sky, looking for the bombers which, they thought, must have taken them unawares; others, catching sight of flashes winking from the vicinity of Boulogne, assumed that the R.A.F. were out in daylight, hammering the invasion fleet. There had been two groups of three flashes. A minute later, with a rumbling roar and flash, six geysers sprang up alongside and in front of the ship. ‘Never mind,’ said one Master, ‘they never put ’em in the same plac
e twice.’
It was a beautiful day, with long lines of marching clouds that sent long dark ripples of shadow across the calm sea. A ripple of flashes from the French coast — a count of 50 or 60 seconds — the winking red heart of the shellbursts — and once again the columns of water, rising up, stately, dreadful, and subsiding in upon themselves with a final splash upon the water.
Destroyers tore down the columns, making smoke; and the dark clouds pouring from their funnels rolled slowly over the water, masking the slowly-driving ships; and the guns still firing, at long, spaced intervals, into the smokescreen, salvo after salvo. As the Boulogne batteries fell silent, the range lengthening, the Calais guns took up the barrage. It was a long drawn out ordeal for the merchantmen.
To the Germans, the day must have been a great disappointment. The guns had not been installed in order to sink colliers; they were there as part of the invasion plan. Their task was, in the absence of a substantial German surface fleet, to close the sea flanks of the beachhead. The first wave might well get across without opposition. Indeed, the Royal Navy made no rash promises to stop it. What they did promise was to cut it off from all reinforcements and supply, so that the first wave would wither in the beachhead like a flower snipped off at the stalk.
The German invasion fleets were a laughable improvisation on Gallipoli lines; if the Navy got among the fat troopships and clumsy barges, the disaster would rival Gallipoli. The German heavy batteries were set up to prevent this, by sinking or driving off all British ships trying to interfere with the proposed seaborne conveyor belt between the Pas de Calais and Kent. With the help of the ‘Flying Artillery’, which had now been withdrawn from the battle — partly because of losses, partly to assist in this operation — and with the additional aid of minefields, the Germans really thought they could close the flanks of the beachhead and bar the Straits to all comers, though their main targets would be thirty or so fast destroyers.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 4
