The dive-bomber, though more widely used by the Germans than by anyone else, was not German — it was American. Some of the group of old 1914-1918 war pilots who planned and controlled the re-birth of the German air force visited the United States, and brought back with them this conception of a small, handy, easily-produced bomber, which was accurate enough to knock out a tank, or pillbox; very useful for the new Wehrmacht.
In the end, it was out-dated — except on the Russian front against an antique air force; its function was taken over by the rocket-armed fighter-bombers of the Allies — equally deadly, and very much faster. Against convoys a new technique — of torpedo plus bomb — was also evolved by the Allies, painfully and slowly. But, in its day, for all its limitations, the stuka was just as effective — as the bottom of the English Channel indicates.
9 - Coal from Newcastle
AT Phoenix Wharf, Southampton, the day began just like any other day. George Reid, the wharf foreman, was superintending the discharging of a collier, never an easy job at any time. Time is money to ship-owners, they like a quick turn-round, and that means that the wharf men, organised in their different teams, must work with a blaze of speed; and work in with each other. Now, it was even more important that they should free the ship of her cargo and send her away.
She had to join a convoy which would form up at the Mother-bank, ‘light’, later that day for the long trip back to the coal ports of the east coast. Colliers discharging at Dover or Shoreham were no trouble to their wharves — they had all day. To be precise, they had several days. They were what the Naval Control Service called ‘joiners’ — they would come out to rejoin the convoy as it passed them on the way back. The ships which discharged at Southampton would arrive there long after the ‘joiners’ were snug in Dover, Newhaven and Shoreham, and they would have to leave long before the others did. Every minute counted. If the ship was not completely empty when her sailing time came, she would sail all the same — taking some of her coal back to Newcastle.
So the different teams which made up the wharf labour force were putting their backs into it. At any moment, a raid or an alarm might stop all work for an unknown period — and a ship that had come through the hazards of the east coast and Channel to bring coal for the homes and industry of the south might have wasted her journey or be kept hanging about, empty, for a week. Then the sirens wailed over the River Itchen and out across Southampton Water. The crane drivers came scrambling down from their cabs, it was dangerous to be caught by bombs up there, perched fifty feet above the docks. The trimmers in the hold of the ship carried on for a few minutes. The drivers of the locomotives stopped their engines and got out — if the cranes packed up, they had better pack up. The men on the bagging platforms under the big hoppers kept on filling the sacks with coal and man-handling them onto the row of Army lorries that were loading there. In the office, the clerks looked up; the girl telephonist plugged in a number. Mr S. W. Dennett, a Director of the company, glanced up from his desk. Another alarm. There had been hundreds of them, and rarely did they mean anything.
On the deck of the collier the men were running to their guns. The 12-pdr on the stern elevated and trained round; the Lewis gun on ‘Monkey Island’ was manned. The spotter on the wharf, always the last under cover, signalled: ‘This is it. Take cover.’ There was a thin, high drumming rumble, increasing in volume, coming straight up Southampton Water. A lorry driver dived straight into the dirt underneath his lorry. The office staff crawled under their desks. Half a dozen men, caught far from the shelter, swarmed over the wharf and into a small space underneath.
Directly opposite them, on the other side of the Itchen, was priority one target — two large factories of Vickers-Supermarine, making Spitfires. Alongside them was the Southampton gasworks.
*
It was the 26th September, 1940. Everyone was slightly jumpy, the Germans had been trying repeatedly for Vickers-Supermarine over the river — and what the Germans attempted, they did, even if they had to make two or three attacks. Dead and dying men were still being dug out of the shelters there, after an attack three days before by two dozen Jabos — Me 109 fighter-bombers. The skyline opposite was bare and splintered from the bombs dropped eleven days before by two squadrons of Dorniers, which had ripped down in a shallow-dive attack to 2,000 feet and then picked up their formation again with breathless speed and ease, a prima donna performance. The bomb-aiming had been less perfect, and Vickers-Supermarine still stood. Everyone knew that it was being evacuated; everyone knew that the Germans knew the place intimately, for German pilots had visited it before the war. Their crack liners Bremen and Europa carried a Walrus — the ‘Steam Pigeon’ — built at those works, and the pilots came to collect them from the factory.
A collier lay alongside Phoenix Wharf, one of the ‘regulars’. She was the Tamworth, the ‘Unsinkable Ship’, and she still bore the scars of her mauling off Dover two months before; her master was still Charles Logan Sclanders, her 12-pdr gunlayer was still John Gallagher, now with the B.E.M. About this time Eric Speakman, the Naval rating manning the Lewis, had left her to join another ship doing the same run. The two ships were abeam, opposite each other in the two divisions of the convoy off Beachy Head, when Speakman’s new ship was hit; they saw her go down with all hands. But that was the only way the ships and the men could be stopped — by sinking them.
The grabs were out, discharging her. The cranes rattled round from the hold to the hoppers and back again; the grabs came plunging into the hold, to settle in the coal; cables tightened, and the teeth of the grabs closed upon the coal, then swung up and out, clear of the ship, and round to the mouths of the hopper. They hung there, a moment, then opened; there was a puff in the air like smoke, which was coal dust, as the loads thundered into the hoppers; and the coal dust blew away over the dusty wharf. The trimmers in the hold of the ship had already stepped forward again, with their shovels and rakes, to prepare the coal for the next drop of the grabs.
Along the quay grunted a small locomotive, a long line of wagons clattering and banging after it; it puffed along angrily for a few yards, then stopped. A chute, leading down from a hopper, was directly over the first wagon; a man, standing high up near the top of the hopper and dressed in the oldest of old clothes, pulled a lever — and a shower of coal from Northumberland or the East Midlands went thundering down the chute into the wagon. With another movement of the lever, he checked the fall of coal, and the engine grunted forward a few more yards, with a thumping and banging of buffers, until the next wagon was under the chute.
On the other side a row of Army lorries were feeding from a hopper — some of it was bulk, and some of it was bagged. The men on the bagging platform filled their sacks from small chutes, then they were man-handled over the tail-boards. Other men were operating the grading plant — gigantic sieves, high in the air, incorporated in the hoppers, over which the coal jumped and bounced as the screen of the sieves vibrated. There was continual noise, and hard, high-speed accurate work. The siren sounded, wailing over the Itchen River and out across Southampton Water. In the office, the clerks looked up for a moment from their ledgers; the girl telephonist plugged in a number, not even glancing up. Mr Dennett, the Director responsible for the wharf, wondered how many hours he would lose. Probably only another reconnaissance plane.
The crane-drivers came swarming down fifty feet from their cabs, down the bare, vertical ladders that led to the ground and safety. The cranes were still — like necks of enormous storks they leaned out over the Tamworth. The grunting locomotive came to an angry stop. The men on the bagging platforms looked up, then carried on for a moment. There was a high drumming rumble, increasing in volume, coming straight up Southampton Water. The driver of one of the lorries which was waiting to load from a hopper, flung himself under the chassis. Men caught near the quayside, far from the shelter, swarmed over the edge of the wharf and underneath it. Men pounded along the steel decks of the collier towards the guns. The clerks crawle
d under their desks. The spotter, always last under cover, signalled: ‘This is it. Take cover.’ The last laggards dived for it.
The sky above the Itchen looked like an aerial parade at a Nuremberg Rally. In stately formation, sailing disdainfully through the shell bursts, came fifty bombers. Over them a furious fighter dogfight was taking place, but the bombers came on with contemptuous ease; none of the fighters got near the bombers, the Me 109s brushed them aside, harried them, engaged them in a chaos of diving, curving rocketting machines. The air was suddenly alive with the rising whine of falling bombs, a protest of the air that seemed to pitch up suddenly into an unbearable scream and burst in a great, rumbling series of explosions.
The Vickers-Supermarine works, on the opposite side of the river, seemed — a witness said — ‘to burn up like a piece of brown paper’, a bit of brown paper to which a match has been set, curling up from the bottom and then collapsing upon itself in charred fragments. It was, he said, ‘Precision bombing — and damn good bombing.’ A burning man fell towards the river from 20,000 feet, his parachute dissolving in a wisp and trail of smoke, faint against the sky. He fell towards the surface with frightful force — there was a splash, and he was gone.
The far side of the river disappeared under gigantic, rolling clouds of smoke and dust. There would be no more Spitfires built at Southampton. The cloud went on pouring up, as though feeding on itself, and rose and drifted and smeared the sky down as far as Calshot. Dazed, the men and women on the wharf came out of their hiding places and watched it. There was a grim, approaching rumble from the west, drifting away from the heights; the spotter, last under cover, signalled: ‘This is it. Take cover.’ This time it was.
The office staff got under their desks, the office boy dived for the accumulator pit, a driver and his mate got beneath their lorry. The driver who had previously taken cover under his lorry now ran for the edge of the wharf, where the little party there were again disappearing. It looked safer, there was concrete overhead as protection. The spotter, as usual, was last under cover — this time he beat by a short head an eight-ton railway wagon which was somersaulting through the air.
In ten seconds a hundred and fifty bombs burst on the wharf, on the gasworks alongside, or in the river. The surface of the water simply rose up above the decks of the collier, lying by the quay, with her 12-pdr cracking away and adding to the din. Hoppers, grading plant, briquette works, engine room, weighbridge, offices were gouged, wrecked or blotted out, the Army lorries loading at the bagging platform reduced to scrap metal. The men and women huddled in the shelter, close together, felt the structure not trembling but vibrating, as if it were a mouse which a cat had got by the neck and was shaking. A frightful, elemental force raged over the wharf, and battered the breath out of their bodies. Then it stopped. As they staggered out into the sunlight, expecting to see they knew not what, they found a dim world of dust and smoke — and the whole surface of the wharf seemed to have changed colour and to be moving. It was liquid, and it lapped over their shoes.
It was hot tar from the gasworks, over which lay the silence of death. It was a ruin, breathing out dust and smoke. From this side of the river, too, clouds of it funnelled up from the rubble and began to drift away to Calshot and the Channel. Above it, high above it, the last thirty bombers of the day were flying home. They streamed southwards, in diamond formations of four, disdainfully through the gun smoke, with the whirling condensation trails of their escort writing half-circles in the sky, beating off the British fighters which were trying to get at them. None did.
A policeman came out of the smoke towards the party in the shelter. The raid was not over yet, as far as they knew, and what he asked them for was a volunteer to send a message from the telephone exchange. The girl telephonist volunteered at once, walking calmly off with him as though there was no danger and never had been. The office was wrecked, but the telephone exchange was still in working order. The policeman asked her to put through a call to the A.R.P.; when she got them, he gave her the message to pass: that there was an unexploded bomb — underneath the telephone exchange at Phoenix Wharf. The girl never turned a hair, and calmly transmitted the message. She was later awarded the O.B.E.
All over the wharf, men were sorting themselves out. Those who had been in the shelter, found that it had been straddled by three bombs. No one was hurt. The two men who had crawled under their lorry, staggered out, shocked and deafened — the front of the lorry had been shattered and crumpled in by a bomb which had landed two yards away. The office boy climbed out of the accumulator pit. One of the six men hiding under the wharf had been blown off it, into the mud, and injured. One man did not move. He was the driver who had first hid under his lorry, and then thought it not safe enough. It was not — a steel cylinder had struck it from above, going right down through the driver’s cab. It had had his name on it, and he had escaped it; but he had not escaped, he lay quite silent under the wharf, where a heavy piece of concrete had been blown through, pulping his skull so that he had no head at all. When they tried to move him, he simply fell to pieces.
When men climbed up on the hoppers, to investigate the extent of the damage, they found a bath among the coal, and taps and bits of porcelain. These came from hundreds of yards away, from a works making bathroom equipment and fittings; it was now collapsed, just a heap of bricks, slates and woodwork. Many hours after it was all over, and all the casualties cleared to hospital or the mortuary, an old woman came crawling out of the wreckage, dusty, dirty and furious. She was the caretaker.
The wharf was totally out of action, all the machinery wrecked and the hoppers damaged, but the casualties were very light; in the gasworks it was another story. After George Lewis, the wharf’s first-aid man, had attended to their own people, he hurried over there. Nearly twenty of the men had been hiding in a marine boiler, they had been buried by coal and none came out unhurt. There were many dead and many wounded, many blast casualties lying silent and white, like dusty bundles of old rags. There was very little blood, for their injuries were mainly internal and blast had closed the surface wounds. For many hours, what remained of the wharf’s transport was taking them to hospital. No ambulances had arrived, and the tyres of the cars and lorries were in most cases punctured. For the moment, the work of mercy took precedence over coal.
Outside the Civic Centre, the casualty lists started to go up. Many of the bodies were unidentified, and unidentifiable. A descriptive note, to help recognition of one unknown corpse, read simply: ‘Teeth, not false.’ There were curses among the little groups of people standing by the notice board. But there was no feeling of terror, most people were in good spirits, if a bit sobered.
There was really no need for soldierly exhortations from far-distant politicians. Though they continued to pour forth, from utterly surprising sources, the seaport of Southampton carried on; the work of the battered coal wharves was transferred to other docks, at some cost in efficiency, and the colliers kept on coming.
In fact, the Battle of Britain was nearing its end and a new phase of the war about to open — the Blockade of Britain, with the emphasis once more upon the destruction of the convoys. Invasion had been indefinitely postponed; it was clear, even to junior German infantry officers, as the clumsy river barges wallowed in the surf off the Dutch coast, that if this was what happened in an exercise, then invasion, as an Operation, ‘was simply not on’. The Luftwaffe was left, for a month or so, to fast-bowl the batsman on its own, with the fielders and the wicket-keeper gone to tea.
They bowled well; the coastal aerodromes had been chewed up, the sector stations brought for a time near to disintegration, the aircraft factories near the coast badly savaged. At Southampton alone, Vickers-Supermarine had gone and before that the Cunliffe-Owen works at Eastleigh, where eight dive-bombers caught a shift at work and there were heavy casualties. The sheds of that factory now lay, like burnt-out Zeppelins, on the grass. The bombers had suffered painful loss on the approaches to London, though virt
ually nowhere else; but Luftwaffe operational strength had been reduced only by about one-third. However, there was no future for them in daylight operations, as the bombers could not operate by day beyond the range of their fighter escort — which meant that they could reach London, but could not penetrate beyond, unless Göring was prepared to lose half of them. All of Great Britain beyond that line was safe from them by day; and day by day the factories and shipyards in that part of the country free of them — about nine-tenths of the island — were turning out the means of defence and the cause of their eventual destruction.
So they turned to night bombing, against which Fighter Command was ill-prepared; and the bombers went by darkness to the targets they dared not attempt in the daylight; and they tried to strangle the island by smashing the great ports and the shipping which came into them. They used many new weapons and techniques and, as the autumn gave way to winter the waters of the Thames Estuary suddenly erupted with a new menace.
10 - E-Boat Alley
CAPTAIN POTTS, of the Betswood, stirred restless in his sleep. Blinking, and vaguely uneasy, he glanced out of the port-hole. What he saw there sent him out of his bunk and running in desperate haste for the bridge ladder. He had seen a ship, with the seas breaking over her.
The officer on duty looked round in surprise at the sudden appearance of the master. Potts rapped out:
‘Full astern: Hard-a-starboard,’
The telegraphs rang, and the wheel went over, the Betswood stopping, then going astern and turning, regardless of any confusion to the other ships of convoy F.S. 69, then steaming down the Norfolk coast for London. His desperate action saved the ship, but other masters were not so wide awake; they blindly followed their leaders.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 8
