D.E.M.S. grew rapidly from about 2,000 men to 35,000 in a short time and, besides inspecting officers in the ships, a lot of weight was put in at the top to ensure efficiency. The Inspector of Merchant Navy Gunnery was now a Vice-Admiral, or even a full Admiral, with under him a gunnery Commander; also another Commander whose job was to interview the masters, if they had survived, of every ship sunk or damaged, in order to keep continually in touch with German methods and the effectiveness of the counter-measures.
One inspecting officer was most unfortunate in his choice of ship. It was a collier, sailing from the Thames with an experienced pilot, a lean, quiet man who looked as if he knew his job, which indeed he did. However, another ship came suddenly straight across their bows, so that they could do nothing else but hit it. Repairs took one week, and the master was very cast down; although it was not his fault, it was his first time in command and he felt it very keenly.
When they sailed again, the convoy met thick fog in E-boat Alley and they lost sight of the other ships. The vessel shivered slightly, then glided on; there were several more harsh bumps under the keel, and it came to a dead stop, the screws threshing the water unavailingly. They were firmly on the dreaded Haisborough Sands which, as everyone knew perfectly well, had claimed seven ships in one night, with the loss of thirty-seven men. On this occasion, too, there was a heavy sea running, and the crew expected her to break up at once. It was a dreadful moment for a master, on the first voyage in his first command; and at that moment some of the crew, without waiting for any orders from him, started to lower away a boat.
A short, choppy sea was pounding the ship and her plates were groaning under the strain; foam was hissing over the sands, and all around them stretched a vicious chaos of tossing, spray-torn water. The boat lasted less than two minutes, rearing and plunging violently, then it turned over. By desperate exertions, they saved the men in it, but the boat, waterlogged, was driven away to be pounded to pieces on the sands. That, too, would be their fate, they felt, but there was nothing now to do but wait for the end.
However, the fog lifted shortly after, and they could see that, far from being hopelessly stranded on the sands, they were only a few hundred yards from the channel. With a little careful manoeuvring and a lot of full-speed astern, they slipped off quite easily. But the master was in a fit of despair; holding his head between his hands, he lamented the damage — at the very least the double bottom must have been ripped and the hull in a terrible mess, with started plates everywhere. It would be his last command.
When the collier was dry-docked, inspection revealed that not one single rivet had been started, and there were no complaints about that. There was, however, an unholy row about the lost lifeboat !
*
Many colliers, of course, such as this one, never normally went to the south coast at all; they plied steadily between the coal ports and London. Battersea Power Station alone consumed enormous quantities of solid fuel and a fleet of colliers was required to supply it. There were many foreigners among them, sometimes as high as 20 per cent of the ships were not British; and this added spice to the verbal exchanges, by loud-hailer or plain shouting, with which the escorts and the merchantmen enlivened the danger and tedium of the passage, especially as Tyneside-manned colliers were virtually incomprehensible even to an Englishman. As the ships steamed along the east coast at an average speed of four knots, stragglers catching up in the darkness would hail the next ahead: ‘Any Geordies aboard that ship?’ And get, perhaps, the reply: ‘Naw — only North Sea Chinamen!’ If the other vessel was a foreigner, mutual bafflement could follow, as in the case where a Geordie hailed a Norwegian collier, the Anna.
From the Tynesider came: ‘What ship?’ and from the Norwegian: ‘An-nah!’ Puzzled, the Geordie repeated: ‘What ship?’ and the Norwegian promptly replied ‘An-nah!’ At which the Geordie bellowed out, exasperated: ‘Ar knaw, yer knaw, but we divn’t!’
The tones of the escort, rounding up stragglers or pointing out faults, were quite different; professional destroyers were well-educated and preferred best to score off each other with an appropriate Latin tag or judiciously selected reference to a particular paragraph in the Bible. This was no help at all as far as the colliers were concerned, who dearly loved to put the proper Navy out of its stride. On a night when thunder boomed over the seas and lightning intermittently lit up the ships, most of the balloons caught fire and were lost; nevertheless, in the morning, an escort vessel came rolling alongside the convoy, from ship to ship, asking what had happened to its balloon. The second ship to be asked, a Tyneside collier, caught on quickly and answered at once: ‘Ar swopped it for a couple of jam jars last night.’
This same collier, going on to the Channel in a convoy which was caught by fog at night, was forced to anchor not far from the German-held coast. It was 1942, and the Germans were still sending over minelayers to our swept channels. At first, there was nothing to be heard out in the fog except the normal dismal sounds of the sea at such a time, and every noise they made seemed magnified. Then they heard a ship approaching slowly from the direction of the French coast. It, too, seemed baffled by the fog and hung about near them. Nothing could be seen but the swirling banks of vapour, but they could hear voices from the other vessel. They were certainly not English, the language seemed very like German; but the chilling point was that the stranger was obviously a warship. The various orders came crisply, and to a set pattern; the replied flicked back smartly.
The collier master ordered every man to take off his shoes and walk about in his socks, so that the stranger, whoever he might be, should have no clue to their presence. Promptly a fireman dropped a shovel — in the tense stillness aboard the fog-bound collier, it sounded like a clap of thunder. There was a surprised howl of: ‘Quiet!’
But, in spite of all their efforts, the strange vessel had heard them. For, when the fog cleared at dawn — to reveal a Norwegian warship almost alongside — her commander popped up on her bridge and observed, politely: ‘I think we have been lying alongside you all night, Captain!’ The collier master’s reply was brief: ‘I think you — have!’
The colliers were often led out by a row of trawler minesweepers but, by 1943, when the tide had turned, some of these were employed for deception purposes and as convoy escorts. Their job was at the other end of the scale to that of the M.G.B.s of Coastal Forces, whose task was not too exacting, fun, and well publicised. Coastal Forces were the prima donnas, and the minesweepers the patient ploughmen, of the Channel. The irksome point was that a really high standard of skill was required of the minesweepers whereas anyone, within reason, could handle and navigate a big, fast motor-boat. If the navigator botched it, and was half a mile out, it hardly mattered; but if a minesweeper was only yards out it could mean the end, for the minesweeper, or for someone else. Furthermore, the work of Coastal Forces was aggressive and exiting as well as dangerous; the work of the minesweepers was deadly dull, and deadly dangerous.
Two types of men commanded the minesweepers. The R.N.V.R. officers, drawn mainly from the people who messed around in boats for pleasure, were highly intelligent, with plenty of education and theory. They were extremely conscientious and worried away at their problems. The R.N.R. officers, drawn from people who had always made their living by the sea, never worried, they just went at their problems head down, like a bull at a gate. They had no idea at all of scientific navigation; they just guessed; and they guessed right. It wasn’t luck, it was a sixth sense. Their motto was: ‘Down anchor — down head’. In a tumult of tossing water, off a lee shore, they could find a little haven in between the banks, and lie there all night, snug as a bug in a rug. One very nearly came unstuck, when the anchor parted from the cable and the trawler drifted steadily towards the rocks with everyone aboard sleeping soundly. With fifteen minutes to go, before they were due to be lost, they all came yawning on deck, and hauled in the anchor cable — to find a frayed end and no anchor! They had got away with it again, as they usu
ally did.
The collier master and his officers were of this breed; but, being in convoy, no longer had the opportunity to use to the full the skill and knowledge bred in them, they merely had to follow like sheep.
Sometimes a sweep had barely started, before they began to put up mines, far and near. Once the armed trawler Hornbeam put one up before it had started at all. Her captain, Lt-Comdr Matthews, D.S.C., M.M., R.N.V.R., had been a soldier in the first world war. As the leader started to flash: ‘Open out and sweep,’ he had his head over the chart table. Standing beside him was a Liverpool lawyer, accompanying him for skipper experience before taking over his own trawler. And at that moment the trawler went right over to starboard, from the impact of a mine that had gone up 100 feet away on the port side. Matthews and the lawyer, who was well-built, cannoned violently together. The Hornbeam slowly righted and as she did so a mass of water from the mine explosion thumped down on the forecastle, and poured off down the small hatch that led to the crews’ sleeping quarters. Most of them were down there, eating, shaving or sleeping. The water came down on them solidly, and most of them thought they were on the bottom already, there was so much sea bursting in.
They came up that hatch like corks out of a bottle. One had a shaving brush in his hand, his face was lathered; another was holding a slice of bread and jam; and a third was in his pyjamas; and they were all scared stiff, believing themselves in need of submarine escape apparatus.
The trawlers’ work was methodical, accurate, and usually done in company. They went to the channel to be swept in line ahead and then opened out into sweeping formation, sweeping first for magnetics, then for acoustics — and taking care to switch on the sweep before they came to the suspected area, to avoid sending one up underneath themselves. There was no telling where an acoustic mine might go up, it depended on the setting. If the mine was set for a small ship, then the powerful impulse of the sweep might put it up two miles away; but, if set to catch a big ship, the trawler might be on top of it before the thing reacted. This uncertainty turned a sweeper into a pariah, whose company was shunned by all.
For instance, an M/S trawler was flashed by a destroyer: ‘Are you acoustic?’ When the sweeper replied that she was, the destroyer flashed back: ‘Keep away from me!’
There were, however, advantages in being a sweeper. On one occasion the Hornbeam flashed to a destroyer: ‘You are in our course.’ There was no reply, and the destroyer kept on as before. Regular R.N. officers, said Matthews, were usually ‘gentlemen and diplomats’, but some of the jumped-up ones were ‘pigs’. This one was a pig. He ignored repeated signals, then the sweep unexpectedly put up a mine a few hundred yards from him, and ‘you couldn’t see his stern for dust’.
The fishing trawlers encountered off the east coast and elsewhere were often literally asleep. Once one of them ignored the sweep balls flown by the minesweeper to indicate that she was at work; ignored signals, flashes and hails — and when the sweeper closed with her, she found the decks deserted; the crew were all below, with their heads down! The reason was that all the best men had been taken out of the fishing fleets for the Navy, those left were very careless. One of them happily picked up a mine and beetled over to the nearest destroyer, to shout at it through a megaphone: ‘Hey, mister, I’ve got a mine on deck — what shall I do with it?’ To which the destroyer loud-hailed back: ‘Give me five minutes start — and you can do what you like with it!’
The gadget used for sending up acoustic mines consisted of a ponderous ‘A’ frame and hammer fitted to the sweeper’s bows. One of the new motor minesweepers was coming into a lock, at Liverpool when, so the skipper said, he ordered half astern and got half ahead. The ‘A’ frame and hammer went slap through the lock gate, and the sweeper bounced back from the impact. An old boy stuck his head out of a hut ashore and observed: ‘If you’d told me you wanted to come in, sir, I’d have opened the door for you. Heee-e!’
All sweepers got very fat on fish, and the crews were very keen on it, due to the wartime scarcity. The putting up of a mine was usually followed by the time-hallowed ritual of: ‘Put a boat over, sir?’ followed by an instantaneous affirmative. The Hornbeam’s captain, acting on a sudden instinctive premonition, once refused, with a sharp: ‘No, nothing doing.’ The crew were very incensed, as the trawler circled the vortex of troubled water where the mine had gone up, thinking of all the fish it must have killed. Then the water rose up in a great spurt to the sky — another mine!
Then, some distance away, they saw something huge and white, flapping in the water. It was safe now to put the boat over, and what it towed back was a giant cod, stunned by the second explosion. They had to hook him through the gills to get him on board — he had seven flatfish inside him and he weighed 34 lbs.
The Hornbeam’s captain was once introduced to the King and Queen. All ships in dock had been painted — on one side only; the men to be introduced had been briefed — ‘Your Majesty’ the first time, ‘Sir’ thereafter; and Lt-Comdr Matthews stepped forward very smartly to be introduced, and stepped backwards equally smartly afterwards, but unfortunately too far, almost into the dock. The King shot out his hand, grabbed him by the shoulder, and hauled him back with a: ‘Look out, man, you’ll be over!’ Then he asked him what his job was and when Matthews replied ‘Mine-sweeping’, the Queen interjected: ‘A dangerous job.’
The King turned to her and explained: ‘Dangerous and monotonous; they have to sweep every channel at least fifteen times.’
That one sentence put up the morale of the minesweepers a hundred per cent. It was monotonous, that was the deadly, depressing part of it; but to realise that the King actually knew accurately the details of their job bucked them up wonderfully, particularly as the local C-in-C (Max Horton) had been reported as saying, contemptuously, ‘Oh, have we got minesweepers, too!’ when the list of ships was put before him.
*
By 1943 the situation was well under control and it was possible to release some of the sweepers for other work. A great deception plan was under way, to fool the Germans about the coming invasion, the real preparations for which were going on everywhere along the south coast. These trawlers, the Hornbeam among them, put in to Tilbury to collect barges which they towed through the Channel, trailing them under the noses of the Germans in the Straits and delivering them to Portsmouth, Poole, Portland and other likely invasion harbours. When the trawlers returned, they did so as escort vessels to the colliers and other coasters in the various convoys bound to the east.
Larger ships were now using the Channel, Plymouth was once more in use as a major naval base, and big events were under way. The Germans knew very well what was impending, and did their level best to harry the convoys.
But the main worry of the trawler captains was lack of sleep. Normally, they only carried two officers, the junior staying in the ship until he became efficient — and then being sent away to take over his own command — so that the captain had to start again from scratch with a brand-new ‘Number One’ just out of King Alfred. It was the same, even with the cooks: as soon as they were up-rated, they were off. So the captain carried a tremendous responsibility.
There was no-one to turn to, if he himself was unsure. He had to give the appearance of confidence, of knowing exactly what to do, even if he had no idea what was going to happen next, or what to do about it. He couldn’t confide in anyone, and he couldn’t relax. And he was the ship’s doctor as well.
The armed trawlers came out of Tilbury very early in the morning, at about 6 o’clock, after the captains had already attended a conference on shore. A tug brought out to them their two barges. These looked very like the real thing — but they weren’t. They were ordinary barges, with the bows cut out to take ramps, exactly the sort of vessels the Germans had assembled for their intended invasion — and virtually useless for that purpose. The real, specialised craft for the landings were quite different.
The captain was on the bridge all the way down to the Goodwins,
as it was impossible to hand over in those difficult waters to an inexperienced First Lieutenant. At the Goodwins, he was still on the bridge, for this was where the westward and the eastward convoys crossed. He was still on the bridge at Dover, because of the danger of E-boats and fighter-bombers. Fighter cover was good now, but the Germans used often to watch when the patrolling planes turned for home, and take their place — coming at the convoy from the landward side, perhaps unidentified until the last moment.
The balloons would be pulled down, to avoid giving the guns a ranging target. The racket of the shelling was unnerving — but nothing worse. The sound of our own guns firing overhead was more unnerving than that of the enemy’s, particularly as the captain would be jumpy from lack of sleep. After Dover, he turned in — for a few hours.
His sleep might be interrupted in any number of ways. Radar watched the Germans closely, and if E-boats or suspicious aircraft came over, they would warn them of possible mines — and that meant alterations of course. If he was not interrupted, he would come on deck again when they were approaching Selsey Bill. They came in close to the land, with many treacherous sandbanks in the vicinity; also, the fighter-bombers liked this area. When off Hayling, radar might warn: ‘Air attack coming in now’. And right on the heels of the warning an Me 109 or F. W. 190 would come from the north, screaming over the holiday camps and the barbed wire and concrete blocks on the beaches, to blast with cannon and machine-gun fire at the trawlers and the barges it was trailing as a coat.
The lookouts would have to be watched; since they looked, but did not see. They were inexperienced, mostly conscripts, and could easily miss a buoy or an aircraft, even when gazing at it. In this way, they carried on down to Portland and delivered the barges. At Portland, they would pick up an east-bound convoy and sail back with it, as additional escort.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 11
