Once, they came into a belt of very thick fog; they could see nothing, but kept the same course and speed, hoping that everyone else would be doing the same and that there would be no collisions. Somewhere off West Bay, firing began. They could hear the rattle of machine-guns and cannon, and now the escort were helpless. The fighter-bombers were circling above the fog-bank and diving to fire at the masts which they could see sticking up through it; but no-one could see them and there was no target and no chance of an accurate reply. One of the trawlers was badly shot up, punctured everywhere. A cannon shell went through the minesweeping gear, another wounded a seaman, and a third ripped into the Captain’s cabin. He was dressing when the attack began, and hadn’t hoisted up his trousers; but the cannon shell took no notice — it slapped through the side of the trawler, skimmed where his trousers ought to have been, and went out of the trawler by the other side.
This convoy was a mixed bag — not all colliers, and not all British, either. Many of them either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand signals. When they came to where the Needles ought to have been, there were no Needles — just fog. This was where some of the convoy should have dispersed into the Solent, the remainder — and possibly ‘joiners’ from the Motherbank — carrying on up Channel. Near them, a Dutch ship came in sight; she positively refused to stop and carried on alone, obviously fed up with the dangers and delays of the convoy. A large number of ships were loose in the fog, unable to anchor in the swept channel for fear of being kicked up the stern by someone else’s bow, afraid to move out to sea because of the protective belt of our own minefield, and with their masts sticking up above the fog bank as an open invitation to the fighter-bombers to ‘come and get me some time’. The Dutchman was well out of it, scuttling on to Shoreham as fast as he dare go.
If any man was wounded, it might be a long time before he saw a doctor; in the meantime the Captain was expected to see to him. Once, they saw a ship go up on a mine and were first on the spot. There were three bodies floating in the water. There was the Captain of the ship, but he was dead, and two members of the crew who had been down below when the explosion occurred. Curiously, no one who had been on deck had survived, but these two had. One of them, a stoker, had a big gash in his wrist, which needed attention. They managed to transfer him to a larger ship, which had a doctor. Most ships did not carry them, but a Surgeon Probationer or even a steward was better than the Captain’s semi-practised skill, for he loathed the job. But, in a trawler, he was the only one who knew anything at all about it; though that didn’t seem to worry the crews.
A man would roll up with a fish-hook in his hand, to be anaesthetised in the Nelson fashion. The only modern touch was that the fluid was not rum but whisky; after he’d had a couple of straight glasses he wouldn’t feel much. The skipper whispered for a bowl of hot water and (very low) a pair of pliers. When they were brought, he turned to the man with the fish-hook and advised him to put his hand in the hot water to remove the dirt; as he did so, breathing whisky from both nostrils, the skipper grabbed him by the arm, got a grip of the protruding part of the fish-hook with the pliers — and pulled! Out came the fish-hook, as well as a lot of blood and flesh, but the job was done — and the man had felt little or nothing.
For the Germans the writing was already on the wall. As early as May 1942, the convoys had had evidence of it. On the night of the 30th/31st, an eastbound convoy was passing through the Straits of Dover, with above them a small stream of German bombers flying inland and another stream of bombers pouring endlessly out from England towards the continent, bound for Cologne as part of the first thousand-bomber raid. Strictly speaking, though the German effort that night was a raid, the R.A.F. operation was an assault. And when one ship of the convoy opened up at the German bombers passing overhead, some of them abandoned their more dangerous target inland and came down on the ships. The convoy was shaken up, but no real damage was done.
In the first half of 1943, the E-boats sank two ships (6,580 tons) and lost two of their number, one to the destroyers, the other to the M.G.B.s. It was not a favourable rate of exchange. The Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, had said of some merchant skippers he had met in 1942:
‘Their courage and determination is beyond all praise. Week after week, year after year, they go plugging up and down the Channel, never knowing when a dive-bomber or an E-boat is going to appear and send them to the bottom. Great men!’[10]
That ordeal was now drawing to its close; the period when, ill-armed or unarmed, we defended ourselves. Now we were going over to the attack, and with the assault forces were to go the colliers.
The great deception utterly failed: it was a bait which the Germans did not take — they watched the barges go by in stony silence. Other activity they did not notice, or misinterpreted, not knowing what to look for and with their eyes anyway turned always to the Pas de Calais. That, they were convinced, was where the invaders would land — the shortest sea route, well within fighter range, the route they themselves had chosen. Hitler himself fancied Norway. But the real centre of gravity of the invasion lay in the area of the Portsmouth Command. In the backwaters of the Beaulieu river and in the mudflats of Langstone Harbour and on the shores of Hayling Island a horde of dredgers were at work. They were digging pits in the mud and sand — and tugs fussed in, towing big, floating oblong blocks, huge steel boxes, which they manoeuvred into the berths dug in the mud. And there, they were sunk. Off Selsey Bill, feverish activity was taking place under the gaze of a few holiday-makers who lay in the sun on those once-crowded beaches. What was taking place looked to them like a mirage. A line of masts, or what seemed to be masts, stretched out into the Channel from Selsey Bill, pointing towards the French coast. Even at that distance, they seemed enormous, and there were more of them behind the hills of the Isle of Wight. They were moving slowly all the time, with balloons flying above them, and all along the water was a mass of giant objects, also moving slowly. They stretched out from Selsey Bill like the arm of some gigantic meccano harbour conceived on a fantastic scale; and that is exactly what they were. Next day they were gone. They lay on the bottom, on the sand banks off Selsey, awaiting their hour, their day. And that day would be D-Day.
12 - Wheezing and Dodging
A VIVID flash shot out from the stern of the French collier, rolling in convoy, and a dirty great cloud of oily smoke went spouting up the sky. The ships were under air attack, and it seemed to her consorts that the collier must have been mortally hit by a bomb. Yet she steamed on, seemingly unperturbed, her speed unreduced. No one else knew at the time, that the tremendous roll of smoke was from a new and secret anti-aircraft weapon with which she had been fitted.
It is a problem to imagine who was the most terrified — the German airmen at whom it was fired, or the crew of the ship which fired it; but the probability is that it was the latter. An extremely spectacular weapon, it had been developed by the Army under conditions of the greatest secrecy. The Admiralty became interested and an officer from D.E.M.S. received orders to take a train from Waterloo to the testing area. Virtually blindfolded and handcuffed, he was at length brought to the secret weapons testing site.
Here, he was shown into a room where he was issued with gum-boots and then led out into what had once been a field but was now an indescribably smelly mess of mud and oil, mixed. The ‘Thing’ stood in front of him. It looked like an exact, true-scale replica of the funnel of Stevenson’s Rocket. That is, it was a long black tube with a fringe at the top. Out of it, when fired, came flame and smoke — the latter in great quantities. The weight, he learned with interest, was one ton.
After seeing the secret weapon in action, he went back and wrote a lengthy report to the Admiralty, which may be summarised briefly as: ‘No, No, a Thousand Times, No!’
But the Admiralty, forward-looking, and perhaps not wanting to be held up to further ridicule in the popular press as unprogressive retrogrades, decided that the weapon should at least be given the courtesy of a trial; and
two of them were, in fact, fitted to merchant ships. The masters of both ships noticed, with interest, that the weight was one ton. They also used a lot of bad language, but that has no place here.
One of the two ships so fitted — alas, no one now can recall her name — made only one trip with the ‘Thing’ on board. When the ship discharged her cargo, she also discharged the ‘Thing’. It was discovered, much later, sitting quietly in an obscure part of the docks — as secret as it could possibly be. The Admiralty took the hint — much to the relief of the merchantmen.
The fact is that the British people had risen to their great crisis in 1940, not only as people, but as individuals. Burning to strike a blow in this, their finest hour, they had taken any means that came to hand. Actual participation in the battle was impossible. You couldn’t very well build yourself a Spitfire in the back garden, fill it up with low-grade petrol syphoned from your neighbour’s car, and thunder off to join the fight. But the will to do so was there.
It was a period of killing Hitler with your mouth, since there was really very little else to slaughter him with. Some few dedicated individuals, however, and some of them even before the war, went further: with feverish ingenuity they dreamt up novel weapons which should take the place of the conventional articles of which we had not nearly enough. Far away then were the days when we had more Bofors guns than the Germans had aircraft. In any case, conventional weapons were under something of a cloud at that time. It was widely believed, quite erroneously, that the German successes could be due only to strange, new, and utterly outlandish weapons which had confounded their enemies by the stunning shock of surprise and terror. Actually, the Germans had used only conventional weapons — quite a proportion of their Divisional transport was moved by that product of high-powered modern science, the horse.
The tank — we invented that; paratroops — the Russians invented those; the dive-bomber — copies from the Yankee ‘Helldiver’ — there had even been a Hollywood epic about it; the E-boat — Lawrence of Arabia and the Power Boat Company had been first there (the Germans were trying to sell us E-boats in 1939 — we weren’t interested). Nothing was new but the use — and even that had been predicted and urged upon both the British and the French by some of their own generals. Nevertheless, the barrage of accusations hurled, quite rightly, against old-fashioned methods did create a climate in which new-fangled weapons were regarded with rather more interest than they would otherwise have been.
Some of these bore fruit; some didn’t. And there were many borderline cases with which the front-line merchantmen, long-suffering as ever, were inflicted. At best, perhaps they were better than bare hands; perhaps some German pilots were slightly off-put, or did not press on down to low level because they knew that the perfidious, egg-headed English had entanglements ready for them.
There was really quite a bright idea known as the Holman Projector, virtually a compressed-air mortar, cheap and quick to build, using a projectile already in quantity production — the ‘36’ grenade. The grenade — oval and rather larger than a cricket ball — was highly conventional, having been used as an infantry weapon in two world wars. As millions of men know, you just pull out the pin, count three or four according to the strength of your nerves, chuck it, and four seconds or so later comes the bang.
With the Holman Projector, the gunner picked up a ‘36’ grenade, pulled out the pin, popped the grenade down the barrel of the Projector, pressed a switch with his foot, and a blast of compressed air and steam hurled the grenade up into the path of an attacking bomber where — after an indefinite number of seconds — it burst.
The grenade didn’t go very far, and if the Chief Engineer was mean about the steam, it went even less. It might even, if he had been particularly mingy, roll lazily up the barrel and collapse with a sigh upon the deck — due to explode in about five seconds from now. Holman Projector gunners got very adept at the footballer’s side-sweep. With plenty of practice — and they got it — the grenade could be kicked over the side with at least two seconds to spare before it exploded.
Additionally, in the heat of action, with stukas hurtling at the ship and bomb splinters screaming round the gun position, it was easy to miss the barrel altogether. For real effectiveness, the Projector relied on a perfect stream of grenades sailing up into space and bursting just underneath the Jerry pilot’s pants. To get this rate of fire, the drill was: out pin, drop, press — swoosh! — out pin, drop, press — swoosh! — and so on, in rapid sequence. Many a time the loader — gazing up at the swooping plane and with machine-gun bullets crackling round his ears — in fact, working at speed and under stress, missed his stroke completely and dropped the armed grenade on the deck. For a few seconds, there would be chaos, with a crowd of amateur footballers trying to heel the thing over the side before it burst.
Because we are a Soccer-playing nation, casualties from this cause were almost unknown — and so were German. What was wanted, to really make the inventor’s dream work, was lots of practice: and many gun crews did in fact manfully put in many hours, tiring potatoes out of the Projector — until the cook discovered what was happening.
There was also the P.A.C., invented shortly before the war. The initials do not mean what they mean in the Army — they stood for Parachute and Cable Projector. Two were usually fitted, one in either wing of a merchantman’s bridge. They were fired by a lanyard — if the gunners kept the cartridges dry; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t. But if they did, a long length of wire cable went snaking prettily up into the sky. At the top of its trajectory, a little parachute burst merrily into view on cue, and lowered the cable ever so gently onto the sea. German pilots were supposed to run into it, and wrap the cable round their props. There is a recorded instance of this actually happening — at an aerodrome during the Battle of Britain.
Stories about the P.A.C. always end with the one about the man — drunk or sober — who fired the thing and wrapped himself in several hundred yards of cable and a parachute. The only variant is by a minesweeper which wrapped it round her screw and nearly sunk herself. Such stories, of such unanimous complexion, are extraordinarily significant, the equivalent of the soldier’s judgement on the Sten — that it only fired when you put it down.
The official histories skate delicately over the subject, piercing to the heart with faint praise. The fact is that no-one really liked the wheezes and dodges; not even thoughtful effort to give bridge protection were appreciated. At first sight, the development of plastic armour for the ship’s officers, sailors and gunners exposed on the bridge seemed to offer a great improvement. Unfortunately, in hot weather, some types of plastic armour literally melted away; others, if disturbed by a bomb, swept the bridge with lethal fragments.
The weapon really needed, which the colliers got in the end, was the Oerlikon — an 0.79-inch quick-firing cannon; virtually a large machine-gun, firing a small shell. There was nothing fussy about it, no trace of wild genius; it merely did the job. Put a bad gunner behind an Oerlikon, and he became at that instant a good gunner; put a German in front of it, and he was likely to become a dead German in short order. It was thoroughly conventional, but because it was a precision weapon it could not be produced in a hurry, unlike ‘gas-pipe guns’.
But, before they could get the magnificent Oerlikon, ship’s gunners had to make do, not only with the weird and wonderful, but with a long procession of basically unsuitable light machine-guns. There was nothing much against the Hotchkiss, except that if the barrel-locking nut wasn’t very carefully watched, the barrel fell off; nor against the Lewis, except that if not carefully maintained and the drums very carefully loaded, it jammed; there may have been nothing wrong with the American Marlin — intended for a different purpose, hurriedly whipped out of aircraft and sent across the Atlantic under Lend/Lease — but the British gunners never did get the hang of it; and there was certainly nothing wrong with the Bren — except that this also was an L.M.G., with neither punch nor range. The most one could reaso
nably expect was a deterrent effect. The enemy, being a human being, was likely to flinch if fired at; he would be less likely to press home his attack, less likely to hit.
The Lewis-gunner who did shoot down an enemy had every right to be pleased with himself — it was incredible, and should not have happened. The successes we have recorded tend to be as misleading as reading a succession of fighter pilots’ combat reports on the monotonous theme of: ‘Wacko — and another Nazi bit the dust.’ One feels sorry for the poor, miserable enemy; one forgets that these are the reports of men who came back — not of those who didn’t; for the dead are dead, and tell no tales. If they could, it would not be of victory.
Most gunners never killed. They fired thousands of rounds and lessened in some degree the danger of enemy attack; they did what they were expected to do, and many — whose tales will never be told — were still doing it when the ship rolled over and went down. And these, too, were not without honour.
13 - Oddentification
THE Beaufighter was low down over the water, racing for home. A few feet above the canopy, and perhaps fifty feet above the water, was the cloud base. Clammy fingers of mist, lower than the rest, appeared ahead, shot past, and were gone. The water below was cold, grey, sullen. It lay in a circle around the aircraft — at least, that is what the pilot saw. His view, restricted in any case by nose, engines, and wings, was limited below by the mist to a circle of grey sea perhaps 150 yards in diameter. And that circle of visibility was moving with him towards the English coast at 250 m.p.h.
Straight ahead, the side of a ship appeared, leaping from a dark shadow to a high rust-streaked hull, shedding tendrils of fog, in a second or two and seeming, to the pilot, to come at him at 250 m.p.h. A thoughtful man would have considered, soberly, what to do — and would have been dead. The pilot did not think, he pulled the stick right back in one convulsive movement and, fascinated, saw the ship’s wireless aerial go down just below his flashing airscrews; then he eased forward gently to where the circle of visible sea was coming into view again; and went through the inner line of ships with hardly a shot fired at him, and those more in warning than in anger.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 12
