The Coal-Scuttle Brigade

by Alexander McKee

  From all along the south coast, they converged upon the Nab. From the west and from the east they sailed, from under Dunnose cliff and past Selsey, to meet in the waters where Convoy C.W.9, four years ago, had been blindly harried to destruction by the E-boats and the Stukas. There, they converged, and there they turned, hundreds of them — turning their bows for France.

  To seaward of the ‘Spout’, and on both sides, the M.T.B.s of Coastal Forces reared and plunged in the Channel waves, watching for the E-boats that never came; and the minesweepers busily swept and re-swept the channel and enlarged it. As the coasters steamed on, there was a shaking in the air. At first, no sound at all, hardly more than a distant vibration; and then nearer, clearer, and unmistakable — the sound of the guns in France, as the battle rolled forward through the bloody bocage. It was made up, too, of the cracking broadsides of the battleships and cruisers, as they stood off the beachhead and hurtled their shells miles inland, onto some dusty Norman village, into some lazy orchard, at some distant cross-roads and left a plunging chaos of screaming horses, suddenly disembowelled, and burning, blazing Wehrmacht trucks. The Courbet was there, her 12-inch guns pointed at her own country, firing on the land from which she had fled in June 1940. For now, it was June 1944. Now, it was our turn.

  Overhead the bombers flew. When they came, they stretched for two hundred miles, formation after formation, so that while the leaders were turning for home, with the great bomb carpets spurting up and shrouding the rolling Norman countryside, the last formations were still over England, flying out to the Channel, the faint stutter of machine-gun fire drifting down from them, as they tested their guns.

  The coast of France was a thin grey line, on a grey day. Hard to believe, but there it was — at last. Woods and hills could be made out, and two church spires standing close together in a cluster of houses; and ships lying off the beaches. Ships that no one could count. They lay along the coast for twenty miles, they poured down the ‘Spout’ to Normandy, more of them, and still more. Of merchant ships alone, there were 6,488. The ‘Red Duster’ rode, virtually unopposed, upon the waters.

  Red wreck flags stuck out of the water, close inshore. There were landing craft down there, and men, moved by the tides as the tides moved. There was oil upon the water — oil fuel — and wreckage. Compo boxes floated past and bits of aeroplanes, and dead, drowned men. A parachute unfolded over the beach-head; watched by thousands, it drifted down — to collapse in a field of corn, beaten flat, behind the beach defences. The emplacements still stared out to sea, unbroken by the bombardment, but smothered and stunned by it, so that in most places — though not all — the assault troops had gone over them with a rush. Not all. On those headlands and in those dusty fields torn to ribbons by the tracks of tanks and wheels of vehicles there were rifles. Mounds of earth, with rifles driven muzzle-first into the soil at their head, and a helmet slung carelessly on them and jingling in the wind, British, Canadian, American, German — and little tins and jam jars with pathetic bunches of wayside flowers, too, placed there by children.

  The Mulberry jetties were being placed in position — tugs in a continuous stream were towing them over from England. Each one would form a harbour as large as Dover. Off the shore, miles out, the warships stood, and hammered the morning. Closer in lay the big Liberty ships, bulky and arrogant, that had easily caught up and passed the coasters on the run across. But now it was the coasters’ turn.

  From the big ships a swarm of lesser craft ferried ashore to the beaches their packed cargoes of men and guns and vehicles. The colliers and the other coasters did not wait for that.

  The Jesmond drove straight for the beach. She was a coastal collier, built to operate in shallow water. As she came in to Normandy she slowed, and slowly grounded, below the high-tide mark. For four weeks she had practised; daily the soldiers had got their guns ashore in conditions just like this, near Shoreham. In minutes, they were ashore, and the Bofors went bouncing up the beach, past the staring eyes of an undamaged gun emplacement, part of the West Wall, into a gap in the dunes, and out of sight; the men a little tense, excited, standing a little straighter, with that tight feeling at the back of the neck that you get when you know there’s an enemy ahead, and you’re going to meet him. They were gone, to be swallowed up somewhere in the bocage, in the battle for Tilly or Carpiquet or Falaise.

  The sailors waited for the tide; then full-speed astern and they drew off — and back to England for more. They loaded more Bofors guns, more men — R.A.F. Regiment this time — and set course for the ‘Spout’.

  Within an hour of leaving the coast two fighters ripped down on them, machine-guns and canon blazing at the collier. The Mate, George Atkinson, went down with a bullet in the leg; thirteen of the R.A.F. men were hit. With rough and ready methods, they probed for the bullet in the Mate’s leg, found it, removed it, and bound up the wound. He carried on, limping, and the Jesmond carried on to Normandy.

  In the first fortnight after the invasion she went four times to Normandy, carrying men and guns and equipment. But, while the little coastal colliers were ferrying to France, much bigger colliers had now entered the Channel. 6,000 tonners were now operating. The conveyor-belt of ships between France and England was anchored to Spithead and the Solent. Many of those ships were coal-burners, and they had continually to be re-bunkered. Large stocks of fuel had already been brought through the Channel and stored in the Portsmouth area, and these had to be kept up; supplies had also to be taken out to the ships lying at anchor off the northern shores of the Isle of Wight. There were thousands of them, so many that it was impossible for them to come into harbour to fuel. They had to be bunkered where they were, and a fleet of small craft took out to them their coal, their oil, and their provisions. They lay from Spithead in the east right round to the Needles in the west — a forest of masts.

  As a matter of sheer organisation, it was fantastic. Everything was pressed into service. There were big colliers like the Kingsborough and the Kingsland, bringing in huge supplies of bulk fuel; there was even the Chemong, under Captain Landreth — an ex-Lake Huron steamer, built in Montreal. And there were little dredgers, like the Lypta I, which used their cranes to shift coal into the invasion fleet instead of collecting sand for air raid shelters or mud dumping. Every big ship had a swarm of little ships, supplying her wants on the spot, like flies round the honey. In no other way could the conveyor-belt be kept turning endlessly. Even the tugs, busy off Sesley, raising and then towing over to France the hundreds of sections of ‘Mulberry’, had their essential needs like any larger ship, they had to be supplied with oil fuel and water and provisions.

  When 70 merchant ships appeared in the Straits on 9th September, 1940, steaming on the German side of the Channel, and moving from Boulogne towards Calais, people in Dover thought the invasion was imminent, that the menacing sight portended the landing of field-grey troops that night or the next night. Those 70 ships could have anchored at Spithead, any time in the summer of 1944, and no one would have noticed that they were there.

  That armada, largely a British armada, carried to Normandy in the first fourteen days after the landings 638,045 soldiers, 97,668 vehicles, 224,636 tons of materials and supplies. And the scenes at Spithead and in the Solent were precisely half the problem. They had not only to load, they had to unload — across open beaches, with no harbours at all, except those we had ourselves constructed and towed across. The coasters went straight in to the beaches — at least those did that were captained by skilful and determined masters, as most of them were — but the big ships had to lie off. From them the specially-designed landing craft — from tiny assault craft to cumbrous ‘Rhino’ rafts — ferried guns and vehicles, workshops and stores, millions of different items, so that the fields of Normandy were one vast ordnance park and it was difficult to find any room there at all.

  The German blitzkrieg of 1940, brilliant though it undoubtedly was, had never confronted its planners with any such problems as these. And t
he truth of the German invasion plans of 1940 is that, flushed with triumph, they thought they could throw a force across the Channel, until slowly it was borne in upon them that they did not possess even so much as one of the essential requirements. They were a land-animal trying to get across the seas at a sea-animal, and they had no luck. It was not to be expected.

  It was the sea, far more than the Germans, which threatened the Normandy landings; and again, that was to be expected, for the sea was the real problem. Forts can be cracked open by high explosive, grimly determined defenders can be shocked and stunned into temporary ineffectiveness as the defenders of the West Wall largely were stunned; but the sea is a different matter. On D+13 it rose and hurled itself against the beaches, it smashed against the ships and landing craft, it drove them from their anchors and hurled them stranded on the shore. It broke in a white, foaming fury on the sunken, cement-laden coasters of ‘Gooseberry’ — but they held. It smashed at ‘Mulberry B’, the British-built, British-erected artificial harbour — and it held. It smashed at ‘Mulberry A’, British-built too, but American-erected, carelessly, in a hurry, badly maintained[11] — and ‘Mulberry A’ was smashed to fragments and thrown up on the shore, to lie there to this day. Mines broke loose and, floating through the storm-tossed seas, among plunging ships, sank some of them. The gale was so tremendous that convoys off the English coasts were driven back to port. On the shores of Normandy 800 ships and landing craft were stranded. Only the slow, methodical work put into the erection of the British ‘Mulberry’ and the protection given by the sunken colliers of the ‘Gooseberries’ prevented an utter disaster and the driving of our forces into the sea.

  But they did hold, and we recovered, and the build-up went on. More Divisions, armoured and infantry, were coming — and a Channel convoy, in July 1944, was a mightily different matter to the hard-fought passage of the little colliers four years before.

  *

  The convoy which cleared Southend on Sunday, 30th July, 1944, differed also in one minor respect from the ill-fated C.W.8 which had sailed to its destruction in the Straits of Dover on ‘Black Thursday’, 25th July, 1940. It contained passengers, and they had nothing to do except eat, sleep and enjoy the sunshine and sea air. Their tanks and trucks and half-tracks were stowed in the holds, and for four days they were on holiday. Some sat on deck and read a book, others washed their dog, and one kept a diary. He had so much time, he could keep it minute by minute.

  In July 1940, it was forbidden for any man of the Royal Navy or the Merchant Service to keep a diary. It was probably forbidden in 1944, but no one cared. The warships logged incidents as they occurred, for no one can accurately remember a rapid sequence of such events even an hour or two later, and from those logs the action reports were made out on which the official histories would later be based. But these reports were necessarily spare and bleak, the framework of the battle, but not the feeling of it or the sight and sound and smell of it. For the most part, all that survives of the Channel Battles of 1940 is the memory of them, recalled 17 years afterwards, And yet these prove surprisingly accurate, when checked against such meagre records as have been published. The merchant navy gunner who sailed with C.W.8 remembered the ambulance planes which dogged them and recalled that he saw one which had been shot down, lying wrecked at Dover. A photograph, published at the time in the aeronatucial press, shows this aircraft floating under the harbour wall with most of its wings missing. What men remembered, they remembered with considerable accuracy; but memory is selective, some things must have been forgotten and will remain therefore forever lost.

  *

  All Saturday the convoy, the largest since D-Day, was forming up off Southend; the big, packed troopships moving slowly down river from Tilbury. They had sailed very early in the morning or late the previous night. They were carrying the 1st Polish Armoured Division to their rendezvous with death.[12] The Poles knew they were going to die — it could be heard in their singing, in their tones, in their conversation, seen in their attitude and in their faces, and in the way they held themselves. They were trying to return to their own country, with the German Army barring the way and the Red Army already letting Warsaw die, and they knew it was a dream. They formed choirs and sang, beautifully, hauntingly. They sang ‘Tipperary’, and it sounded sad and beautiful.

  As they came down river in the night, singing, the doodlebugs came speeding across the sunset with yellow flame at their tails, like comets. There was a stream of them, fleeting across the docks; as each one fell, spluttering to silence, the yellow glow sank slowly towards the darkening rooftops of London, then slanted down with an increasing steepness. It moved remorselessly down towards the houses where families sat at supper and lovers held hands in the cinemas. It touched them — and there was an ugly orange-red glow that spread for an agonising two or three seconds; then a slow, curling column of smoke and brick dust billowing upwards.

  Shortly, the moonlight cut a path upon the water and shone in the silver fire along the gun barrels of the ships, upon the high gun-platforms that studded their decks like toadstools. And then, when the blind robots fell into the great city, the masts and derricks of all the ships were lit blood-red.

  At dawn, they pass through the outer balloon line, guarding London, and hear the sirens wailing from the shore. Ships jostle and pass each other. A Yankee tank landing craft comes up the Thames, with three bold swastikas daubed on the bridge, and men cheer across the water; another Polish troopship passes them, crammed with men and vehicles and guns — and the cheering echoes and re-echoes between the ships.

  By tea-time, there were forty 8,000-ton transports lying at anchor off Southend, and in the haze, beyond counting, a maze of big landing ships, frigates, and balloon ships. They lay there all that day, in the sunshine, with the angry guns sprinkling the sky with black shell-bursts, like currants, and Kent a sunlit patchwork of woods and wheat going down to a sea of blue and green. It was golden weather, as the great convoy lay poised between the Battle of London and the Battle of France.

  All that night, too, they lay there, crammed to the last inch with tanks and guns and men; the British among them joked about the Altmark, so close-packed were the hammocks, so small the chance of ever reaching the gangway if anything should happen. There were so many men in that doomed Division they had taken a day to pass through London, the great convoys roaring endless through the capital — the tanks, the half-tracks, the command vehicles, the tracks, the guns, with the men sitting in them feeling themselves already off to some gigantic rodeo, with web equipment across their shoulders and cartridge pouches at their belts, and inn-keepers standing free drinks to the few British soldiers they saw.

  On Sunday, 30th July, smoke began to roll up from the convoy. The Captains were coming back from the Commodore’s conference. The dull roar of depth charges rolled in from the open sea — a few U-boats were operating in the Channel, now that they had the Schnorkel which made them less vulnerable in shallow water; now that the targets were no longer small colliers but ships well worth the risk, and now that the fate of the world depended on stopping them. Between July and December, 1944, they sank 60 ships around the coast, in the Channel, and off the invasion beaches.

  At two o’clock precisely, the signal flying from the Commodore’s ship became executive; that is, it came fluttering down — meaning: ‘Proceed’. And then, precisely, one after the other — and not in a gaggle — the Liberty ships hauled up their anchors, and steamed in single file through the ‘Gate’ in the boom. There, the masts of a sunken ship pointed skew-wiff out of the water, drunkenly slanted. To port and starboard the mass of the convoy lay, waiting their turn to go out; ahead, an attenuated line of ships stretched as far as eye could see, their hulls showing above the horizon and black funnel smoke rolling across the endless water. A butterfly flew across the bows of one of the transports, the last trace of England.

  To port and starboard the calm sea stretched blue and green, holding in its surface silver and pi
nk reflections of the afternoon clouds; astern it was burnished and brilliant, and the black and shiny bodies of porpoises broke that silver surface, as they played. The gunners were uncovering the Oerlikons now; as the jagged hull of a wreck went by to starboard, they began to test the guns, the cannon shells screaming out over the water in pink points of fire. A wrecked ship went by to port; and there were the leaping water spouts and thunder boom of the escort testing heavier armament. From here and there in the convoy, smokescreens went billowing away, as ships tested the canisters; the single mast of another sunken wreck went past to port, and two Spitfires circled the convoy like high-flying gulls. They were close escort, and that meant: ‘Special convoy’.

  Mile upon mile stretched the lines of ships, against a red-tinged sky, in which floated great cumulus clouds, like icebergs, casting their image in the sea. As the convoy rounded the North Foreland for the run into the Channel, the colour of the sea changed to a cold blue; an escorting corvette passed down the lines of ships, her crew waving up to the soldiers lining the rails. The leading warship turned still more to starboard, hull and upperworks hardly visible now in the sunset haze, the winking signals flashing from her bridge. A great half-circle of ships came turning into the Straits, with an Air-Sea Rescue launch passing through their ranks, homeward bound.

  As the moon came out over the sea there was the dull thumping sound of explosions from the rear of the convoy, and a momentary spurt of tracers, far away. A half-hearted air attack. From the leading ships, it was hardly visible.

  Above Dover a single searchlight swept the sky and the white cliffs were faintly visible; to port the Pas de Calais was shrouded in moonhaze. The black shapes of the convoy, huddled closer for protection against E-boats, seemed to strain forward, as if to clear the Straits in a bound. Many bore on hull and bridge the scars of shelling from the cross-Channel guns. No shells came, the only sound was the melancholy message of the bell-buoys; yet it was as if each squat, slow-riding ship was leaning forward, like a horse about to clear an obstacle. Every soldier was under orders to stay below decks, but one or two were lurking in the shadow of the ventilators, in order to savour the moment. As midnight passed and nothing happened, they went below.