In fact, many of the British and Germans seemed to be afraid of each other; convinced now that it was going to be a long war, that it wasn’t their war, and that they were going to survive it. Many of the bravest, naturally, were dead; the survivors went about their job methodically and carefully, but without much interest. The brave days, when war was new and exciting and they were all feeling their oats, were long over; this was no longer the first breathless time, but the hundredth. They intended to live, if they could.
At night, particularly, the strain — the year-long strain — was intense; the night magnifies all peril and one imagines dangers which are not there. On one occasion a convoy passing Flamborough Head was crossed by high-flying bombers, heading west and dropping flares. The convoy went to action stations ‘with a clang’, as the witness expressed it. Every man, almost, was convinced that this was it, that the bombers were after them. Yet, in fact, nothing at all happened and the planes were probably just dropping flares to check their position on crossing the coast. It is a help if you can put yourself in the position of the poor, miserable enemy — but not all men can do it. In fact, in many men’s minds that incident would be recorded as an air attack, as a definite example of peril; just as an army clerk in Normandy sent beetles home to his relatives to prove the horrible conditions which he had to endure. No matter that it was not an attack, it would seem so.
The men who came off best, and lasted longest, were those who knew exactly when to worry, and shut their minds to danger at all other times; and they were fortunate. And there was danger, all the time; mostly the danger of mines, about which you could do nothing and where only fatalism was of use; and the danger of E-boats, as they neared the Norfolk coast, where a gunner needed to be quick off the mark. Very few men saw an E-boat — the attack came in darkness, was carried out at such speed, and lasted such a short time that it was hard to swear that there had been, in fact, anything there at all. In many cases, there wasn’t.
There was a famous Canadian Army cartoon showing a soldier leading in by the leg a small pig from no-man’s land, remarking to a Bren gunner in a slit trench that this was the German patrol he had repulsed last night. This is true of all night actions. It is a breathless eerie business to stare out into the night and know that there is an enemy out there, and that he may be coming for you. In the case of the east coast convoys, as they came to the coast of Norfolk in the dark, it expressed itself in a conviction that there were E-boats waiting, tied up to Sheringham buoy, listening for their approach. And an E-boat can slip a torpedo into a merchantman as easily as you can put a knife into the belly of a pig — with much the same effect. Close-range defence was almost always too late. Therefore, when Motor Gun Boat flotillas were formed, they usually operated in defence of the convoys far out to sea; they, too, lay stopped on the routes by which the E-boats must come, in ambush. Many savage little battles took place around Brown Ridge, halfway to Holland, often at dawn, as the E-boat crews crept home exhausted and nervy after their night of strain, and inclined to relax lookout.
But, if there were long, rakish motor craft lying in the swell off Sheringham, waiting for them, there was nothing much the merchantmen could do about it. It was much too late.
The Germans waited inshore of the convoy, alongside the buoys — the witnesses all swear they must have tied up to them — so that they simply started their engines, picked their target, fired torpedoes, and went slap through the convoy at 35 knots or more — headed for home, out of range almost before anyone had a chance to see them. In these waters, the escort fanned out to seaward of the convoy, not to protect it, for that was impossible, but to catch the E-boats as they came through and try to knock one or two for six. It seemed a futile business, to them, but that was not the German impression. Their war diary recorded the comment: ‘The British destroyers on the south-east coast know their job.’
On the other hand, they had a poor opinion of the Motor Gun Boats, as indeed the Motor Gun Boats had of them. Neither E-boat nor M.G.B. carried really damaging armament, and in the few seconds for which an engagement lasted, no vital damage could be done; though each side thought they had done it. After a time, they even started ramming each other, in sheer desperation — and that didn’t do it. Both sides went happily home, under tow and low in the water, sieved with bullet-holes, to celebrate in the mess the imagined demise of the other. It was fun, but the destroyers were war.
For the merchantmen, just big, bulky, vulnerable targets, it was war indeed. It was very much the same routine in every case. A Naval officer’s impression, on one such occasion, was of a lot of indiscriminate firing, with the destroyers putting up starshell and going out to sea as quickly as possible, to catch the speeding E-boats as they came clear of the merchant ships. There was much belching of black smoke, as the firemen piled it on, with the rattling and banging of engines as 8-knot ships started to do 11 knots. He was in one of the merchantmen at the time, and a torpedo was reported to him to be passing ahead. He didn’t see it, but it may have been a torpedo, for this was no imaginary attack; a big Dutchman blew up astern, but kept afloat and kept going, at reduced speed. Then it was over — the E-boats had passed through, fired at by the destroyers, and were heading for Holland at top speed, miles away. He never saw one, nor did he see any torpedo tracks. But there was no doubt they had been there.
Another incident was described by a merchant navy gunner. It was 1941, and British M.G.B.s and the motor-launches were helping to escort the convoy. Some of the E-boats were ‘hanging on to buoys’ inshore of the convoy, but the main attack was from outside. There was a battle going on there, where the British motor-craft were mixing it with the Germans, but it was all too far out to see anything — just tracer and gun flashes flickering over the sea. One E-boat came chasing round the stern, but he couldn’t see the thing, only hear it roaring and snarling away as it bumped over the fairly heavy sea then running. Nevertheless, he swung his gun round to where it was going, and then saw in the wash, just a flicker of white moving fast in the darkness. He got away three rounds in a hurry at it, there was a big flash, and then it was all swallowed up in the darkness. He couldn’t claim it, of course, but felt in his bones that he’d got it.
Somewhere, one of the convoy was burning — he seemed to remember that the cargo was whisky; and on the bridge a young Lewis gunner of the ‘Maritime’ was struggling to load another drum. The bridge was going up and down and pitching, with the motion of the ship in the heavy sea, the soldier was sea-sick and vomiting, almost in tears because the heavy 100-round drum was too much for him in those conditions. He called out to ask where the other gunner was, and the young lad at the Lewis said he thought he was below.
So he was. He was lying down on his bunk, resting. ‘Did you hear the alarm, chum?’ they asked him. He said yes. ‘Did you hear the guns firing?’ Yes, he had. But it wasn’t his watch, and he wasn’t going on deck. The man was a conscript who had dodged his first call-up by going to Eire; he was also very pro-Russian. They reported him to his unit, and — it may have been coincidence only — he was later sent on a Russian convoy. His was an exceptional case, for the ‘Maritimes’ were very good — they knew their job and they did it.
At the other end of the scale was a ‘Maritime’ gunner who went to sea three times running — and was sunk on each occasion; the first time by bomb, the second by torpedo, the third by mine. After the third sinking, he was sent home on survivor’s leave — and was bombed there, the house being destroyed. He survived that, too; and came up smiling, ready to go to sea again.
In between these two extremes came the mass of sailors in the convoys, most of them civilians still — though the Essential Work Order now gave them regular employment and regular pay, which they had not had before, being ‘free’ labour. That is, of course, what they were — labourers, electricians, cooks, and so on — not fighting men at all, but committed nevertheless to lose more than a quarter of their number in the face of the enemy.
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42, they were hitting back. As one master said, ‘We were that well gunned we did not mind what came along.’ Most of them kept on sailing, though ship after ship might be damaged or sunk under them, even before authority made it illegal to leave the sea, and at a time when they were little better than targets for the Germans to practice on, as a result of authority’s adult delinquency in neglecting the nation’s defences. Once properly armed, they got their own back. Captain Hadlow, for instance, whose ship, the Dona Isabel, had left him earlier in the war during an E-boat attack, was now master of another collier, the Grangetoft.
Their convoy was repeatedly attacked, one day in 1942, by three German aircraft which dived down out of low cloud to bomb, then went up again and circled round for another go. One stick of bombs hurled up the water in foam a hundred feet over on the port bow; then the aircraft came in again to make a job of it, running in at them from the port side low down — about 200 feet above the sea. It was too much for one man who had been bombed and mined and torpedoed for years without a chance to reply. He was the Second Engineer. He pushed the gunner of an Oerlikon out of the way, and grabbed the gun himself, sitting in behind the sights. The Oerlikon was a beautiful gun — you could pop off toy balloons with it, first go.
He let the German plane have the whole drum as it ran up to them and thundered overhead. It started to slant down before it had even crossed the ship and went slap into the sea in a shower of spray a hundred yards out on the starboard side. They saw it settle in the water, and fall astern of them, with a man climbing out of it, and balancing on the half-submerged fuselage. As the ship next astern passed the wreckage, she fired a long burst and the German crumpled up, his machine vanishing under the water.
It was not cricket, but it was war, illustrative of the pent-up feelings of men kept helplessly under fire for long periods.
Both the other German machines were shot down into the sea, one by a merchantman, the other by a destroyer. Afterwards, the destroyer signalled: ‘Good shooting!’ But what it was referring to, was anyone’s guess.
11 - Escorts on Top
ALTHOUGH that area off the Norfolk coast round Sheringham and Yarmouth was known as E-boat Alley — and earned its name — the Germans used the full length of the coastline they had captured to switch attacks from east coast to south coast and back again, whenever it looked as if the escorts were really getting their measure.
In February 1942 the destroyer escort of a southbound convoy came suddenly on a group of eight E-boats up to no good — they were busy laying mines in the path of the convoy. The startled E-boats started off for the horizon in a cloud of smoke, but one, torn to pieces by the destroyers’ shells, was sunk, and another was badly damaged. A month later three M.G.B.s of the 7th Flotilla were lying out in the North Sea at night 20 miles off the Dutch coast, when they received reports, thick and fast, from an east coast convoy under E-boat attack. They moved away from the convoy, closer in to the E-boat base at Ijmuiden, and intercepted five of them on the way back. They came back to Lowestoft with M.G.B. 87 flying the Nazi ensign under the white, and eight prisoners on board.
Up to this time the E-boats had been thoroughly enjoying themselves as, apart from the risk of an unlucky brush with a destroyer, there was nothing on our side fast enough, and at the time sufficiently well-armed, to destroy them. But now, an outer screen of M.G.B.s and M.L.s lay to seaward of the convoys, through which the E-boats had to come and return. There were not many of them, and production was small, so that a steady loss of one or two boats a month was serious. In June, they moved from their Dutch bases to Cherbourg, in preparation for a surprise attack on a western convoy.
On 7th July, they caught a westbound convoy in Lyme Bay and obtained complete surprise, sinking six of the ships, a total of 12,356 tons. Most of them moved back to Holland, hoping to find the defences off the east coast denuded to protect the south, and there were many savage little night battles, but no smashing success until December. Then, they crept through the outer screen undetected, attacked the northbound convoy F.N. 889, and sank five of them.
But after that, the scales began steadily to tilt against the Germans and it was time to think of reversing 1940 — of attacking them and eventually carrying out our own invasion. To put the German attacks on the east coast convoys in perspective, it should be remembered that the Channel convoys had lost one third of their number, on average, during the worst period of the Battle of the Channel. Losses off the east coast by enemy action from the beginning of the war to mid-November 1942, were 0.247 per cent. 63,350 ships had sailed, and the enemy had managed to sink 157 of them.
A German would not recognise the word ‘E-boat’, which is hardly surprising, as the term is exclusively English, standing for: ‘Enemy War Motorboat’. To him, they are ‘S’ and ‘R’ boats, two quite distinct classes. The Schnellboot was a fast, torpedo-armed craft capable of 40 knots, equivalent to our M.T.B.s. The Raumboot was slower, used for minesweeping, patrol and Air-Sea Rescue, equivalent to our M.L.s. in other words, ‘fast-boats’ and ‘sweeping-boats’. They were low, grey-painted, graceful craft; at dawn, a flotilla of them passing along the horizon was an unforgettably thrilling and beautiful sight. A Coastal Forces officer has described them as looking like ‘a flock of widgeon’, but he was keen on birds; there was a deadliness about them, too, that would immediately strike an unbiased observer. At slow speed, on a turn, they seemed to hang in the wind on top of the water, only the screws and rudders submerged.
In the beginning, they had to be met by very old destroyers, including some of the ‘S’ class produced under the Admiralty Emergency War Programme of 1917, as the Emergency War Programme for 1939 had not yet taken effect. The Sardonyx, in particular, often escorted Channel convoys through the Straits in 1940. On the east coast many of the ‘V. & W.s’ (Emergency War Programme 1916-18) kept to the seas in all weathers; old, but once the best destroyers of their time, they herded the merchantmen up and down the swept channels, collecting and delivering them at the various ports. The crews worked exhausting watches, four hours on and four hours off, with ‘action stations’ constantly sounded. In winter, the mountainous seas buried the bows deep under and swept the men on the bridge with the shock of bitterly cold water; down below, in the mess decks, there was chaos, with kit and gear slopping about in a mass of sea-water, and somebody’s shaving brush falling from a rack, like a well-thrown dart, into the jam-pot; and the tea thrown into the men’s laps. There was nothing that was not moving, nothing that stayed still; the world heaved and rolled all the time; on the bridge the look-outs would be soaked to the skin and the men below would be continually banged against the sides of the ship and any sharp projection that was handy.
When they had seen the convoy safely in, they would enter the harbour, usually at mid-day; there would be a few hour’s leave for the off-duty watch, ashore, on something that wasn’t pitching and rolling, while the duty watch refuelled and provisioned the destroyer. Then out to sea again at midnight, to shepherd another convoy through the darkness; perhaps passing a convoy steaming in the opposite direction, with big ships suddenly coming out of the blowing darkness of the gale, and looming high above them. That was the most of it, but to some of them came the roar of mine or torpedo — and ‘abandon ship’ in a raging sea off a bleak coast. The Vimiera and the Whitshed were both mined off the east coast early in 1942, and sunk. In March, the Vortigern was sunk by a torpedo from an E-boat. They bore the brunt of it until the new destroyers were ready.
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The original supply of volunteer gunners for D.E.M.S. had long ago been used up; most of them now had commissions. To ensure that high standards of efficiency were kept up, inspecting officers from the D.E.M.S. staff took periodical trips in merchant ships. One of these officers, Lt-Comdr H. Ruddy, R.N.V.R., took passage in a Channel convoy leaving Southend for the Straits. As the coaster steamed out into the estuary ready for forming up, and the battered wrecks went past on either hand, he left the bridge to inspect the g
unners; to see what sort of a watch they kept, how they kept their guns, and how good they were with them.
The guns were there all right, and probably they would have fired, in spite of the dirt; but there were no gunners near them. So he went in haste to their quarters — but they weren’t there either. He climbed the bridge ladder in a fury, to ask the master where they had got to. The master looked quite blank, then pointed to a sailor standing in the wing of the bridge — a not-too-clean young man in a football jersey with red stripes. ‘There’s one of ’em,’ he said.
On another occasion, testing the capacities of a man with a gunner’s badge up, he discovered that he did not know how to strip the gun. He told him to stay on the gun platform until he had found out. It took the ‘gunner’ two hours, but he did it in the end. The trouble was that some of the conscripts, unlike the volunteers before them, simply couldn’t be bothered to carry on learning the job on their own. Tom, Dick and Harry were drafted in a hurry to do the job, and though Tom and Dick might be all right, Harry preferred to take it easy, even at the risk of his life.
But the worst job he ever had to do was with the best gun’s crew he ever saw. The Acting Petty Officer in charge was smart as a whistle in peaked cap and brass buttons, the gun’s crew were quick and alert, the gun was spotless, and they knew how to handle it. The Petty Officer’s pride in himself and his uniform had obviously helped him in his job and braced the morale of his men; clearly, they could be in action within split-seconds in waters where split-seconds mattered. But the P.O. was not entitled to his uniform. He had the rank, but as a ‘Hostilities Only’ man, he was not allowed to wear the cap and brass buttons and had obviously bought them himself out of his pay. If the uniform went, some of that split-second polish might go, too; but it had to be done. It was the hardest decision he had ever had to take.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 10
