Meanwhile Italy had annexed Albania at the beginning of April. Britain and France decided to respond to this threat by underwriting the security of Greece and Romania which feared Mussolini would move against them next.
The dockyard at Malta was still the fleet’s main maintenance and repair facility because there were problems with the support services at Alexandria.
Anti-aircraft defences were woeful, there was no support airfield for the carrier aircraft to fly to for maintenance and repair when not at sea, warship berths were limited and storage areas – particularly for ammunition – were scarce or non-existent. Docking and repair facilities had to be improved radically if Alexandria was to truly become a war base for the Warspite and the rest of the fleet. The biggest ship that Alexandria’s Gabbari dock could take was a cruiser. Cunningham set about implementing improvements including deep-water berths and storage facilities. The Admiral had also been involved in discussions about transferring a floating dry dock capable of taking battleships from Portsmouth to Alexandria.
With time before hostilities so obviously running out, Admiral Cunningham was very keen for his flagship to take an opportunity for a docking period at Malta in July. The following month, as German troops began their final preparations for the invasion of Poland, Warspite set sail from Malta on an important mission to Istanbul. Cunningham embarked on a round of high level social visits aimed at fostering a feeling of friendship between Britain and Turkey and was later involved in official talks with Turkish leaders.
Meanwhile the crews of Warspite and escorting destroyers enjoyed amazing hospitality ashore, including plenty of beer and a troupe of dancing girls at a party hosted personally by the British ambassador.
On 6 August the Warspite and her escorts left the Bosphorus. Cunningham observed: ‘Our mission had been an important one, and from what we heard later it undoubtedly did a lot of good.’3
Turkey was to stay neutral during the Second World War. Warspite made a call at Cyprus and then headed for Alexandria, carrying out some 15-inch gunnery practice on the way.
Back in Britain Royal Naval Reserve sailor H. Banks had, early in 1939, managed to find a good job as a conductor with South Shields Corporation Transport. ‘I believe I was the first person employed by them to be called up, on Wednesday August 23 to be exact.’
A relief conductor was lined up, the ‘weekend sailor’ said goodbye to his wife, family and friends and, after reporting for orders to HMS Satellite, the drill ship berthed on the Tyne in North Shields, he headed south.
I was in Chatham Barracks, 300 miles away that same night and next morning I went through the mobilization routine again wondering if this time the balloon would really go up.
In late August Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, so paving the way for Russia and Germany to divide up Poland. This shrewd move also guarded Germany’s flanks and rear if she made any moves towards the north or west. In the meantime, the Royal Navy wasted no time in sorting out reinforcements for its Mediterranean Fleet warships to bring them up to fighting strength. The draft for Warspite, including H. Banks, was swiftly processed at Chatham and put on a ship across the English Channel. H. Banks remembered:
After a very rapid train journey across France, we embarked onboard HMS Shropshire, a County Class cruiser, at Marseilles which took us to Alexandria, stopping only at Malta to pick up mail. The cruiser arrived at Alexandria on Thursday,
31 August. The Warspite was at sea.
The next day Germany invaded Poland from the west while Russia steamed in from the east.
On 2 September, Warspite and the Mediterranean Fleet returned to harbour to await the official declaration of war. Britain honoured her commitments to Poland’s security and, on the following day, declared war on Germany. A signal was sent from the Admiralty to Cunningham aboard Warspite. It read: ‘Total Germany’. A messenger took the signal to the Admiral in his day cabin where he was discussing the possibility of bombarding Tobruk with his staff officers. Cunningham reportedly read the signal then asked the bearer: ‘Not Italy?’4 Italy was staying out of the conflict until she saw which way the cards fell. The bombardment of Tobruk would have to wait.
One of the sailors who had seen the signal come in was Albert Cock, who had just passed for Leading Telegraphist.
We were excited by the prospect of war as we had been training like mad. Before hostilities, although much of the signals traffic needed deciphering, some of it was in plain language. Once the war started it all came by cipher. But, even though we were at fighting pitch and eager, Italy was not in the war so it became a sort of ‘Phoney War’.
At the outbreak of hostilities the impact aircraft would have on naval warfare was not appreciated by the Royal Navy. It had never faced massed aircraft attack and many officers found it hard to believe a battleship could be sunk by aerial bombing. HMS Warspite would soon find out exactly what it felt like to be under attack from the air and an officer who was shortly to join Cunningham’s staff aboard her was to bring some valuable insights into the new threat.
William Lamb was, by September 1939, on the staff of the Royal Navy’s gunnery school at Portsmouth.
The declaration of war was no surprise at all. My job at that time was to be Officer-in-Charge of the Anti-Aircraft firing range. It was an interesting job because, on the whole, I think insufficient attention had been given in the training of people to use close-range AA weapons. The big guns were the important ones and the small ones mattered less. There was a feeling of nakedness in our close-range AA gunnery abilities so I felt I was in a job where there was a lot to do. When it came to close-range, the main weapon was the Chicago Piano, an eight-barrelled 2-pounder gun. It was used to fill the air with explosive little shells and hope some of them might find an aircraft target.
It was a weapon Warspite would be calling on a great deal in the conflict.
The French Navy soon agreed to cover the western Mediterranean while the Royal Navy took the eastern end. The battleship FNS Lorraine was based at Alexandria with a quartet of cruisers and a trio of destroyers to help out. The Anglo-French forces presided over a placid arena. But, while it might have been very quiet in the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet faced the daunting task of containing Germany’s formidable force of modern heavily armed battleships. The Home Fleet had settled in well at its Scapa Flow war anchorage but disaster struck in mid-October 1939. A U-boat skippered by Kapitän Leutnant Gunther Prien sneaked in through patchy defences and sank the battleship Royal Oak at her moorings, with large loss of life.
Following this calamity, reinforcements were needed for home waters and, at the end of October, HMS Warspite was called back to join the Home Fleet, where operations against the Germans would soon land her in Prien’s sights.
Notes
1 A Warspite veteran writing in Anchors Aweigh, the journal of the Warspite Association.
2 D. Auffret, Sound Archive, Imperial War Museum.
3 Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey.
4 S.W.C. Pack, Cunningham The Commander.
Chapter Six
TO NARVIK
Hunting Nazi Raiders
After some maintenance work in Malta dockyard, Warspite next called at Gibraltar where she received new orders to sail for Nova Scotia. It was feared German surface raiders had broken out into the Atlantic so Warspite was to escort Convoy HX9, composed of thirty ships, leaving Halifax on 18 November 1939. During the four days Warspite was at Halifax taking on stores and ammunition for the escort mission, Able Seaman Gunner H. Banks had an opportunity to get ashore.
Of course, having come from the Med, none of us had suitable clothing for the climate, which was very cold. On top of that the pay of an Able Seaman did not allow me to afford Canadian prices. We were definitely the poor relations as far as the Canadians were concerned.
Warspite joined her slow convoy out of Halifax and hit heavy weather. Royal Marine Arthur Jones, a gun layer in Y turret, was surprised to find he was
invulnerable to it. ‘It was dreadful weather, the merchant ships were really wallowing and the Warspite was burying her bows but I never felt seasick once.’
Six days into her first, and only, transatlantic crossing Warspite was diverted away from the convoy to try and intercept the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which had just sunk the British Armed Merchant Cruiser Rawalpindi.
Boy Seaman Ray Emmington in X turret was tasked with a job not many would want.
On northern patrol we closed up at dawn and dusk and this is where an odd job arose. The 15-inch shell had a fuse fitted in its base set differently at night and day. So, as we closed up, I had a heaving line tied to my leg and had to claw my way in the barrel with a special spanner to set the fuse. When the job was done, I was pulled back out of the barrel. Another boy looked after the left gun. The 15-inch gun barrel is more than fifteen inches diameter, in fact the explosion chamber was eighteen inches, so it was easy for a small boy to do the job. We came out faster than we went in.
Warspite battered her way through the Denmark Strait seeking to encounter the enemy but made no contact. At the scene of the Rawalpindi’s last know location she found no survivors. Seaman Gunner Nichol scanned the horizon from his trainer’s position on one of the 4-inch anti-aircraft guns. ‘All we found was an empty lifeboat, he said’ Sweeping down the western side of Scotland, Warspite met only friendly ships. Marine Jones recalled one of these encounters:
We went to action stations because someone had spotted a destroyer which failed to respond to any Aldis lamp signals. The Skipper, realizing it couldn’t be easy for such a small warship in that weather, told them to signal her again. This time the destroyer replied, so she was obviously one of ours and we didn’t need to open fire.
In the atrocious weather the German ships had slipped through the Home Fleet’s fingers. They were aided by intercepts of coded British naval signals the Kriegsmarine was finding easy to break, enabling them to steer clear of Royal Navy hunting units.
Calling in at the Clyde, which had become the main Home Fleet base while Scapa’s defences were improved, Warspite was expecting to head for Portsmouth. However, as HMS Nelson had just been put out of action by a German magnetic mine, it was decided Warspite should replace her as Home Fleet flagship. By the following March the Orkneys were secure again and Warspite found herself back at the old familiar anchorage of Scapa.
Able Seaman Banks was introduced to the ‘Dummy Fleet’.
Practically every major ship was duplicated by merchant vessels with wooden superstructures and guns. They were exact replicas of the real Royal Navy ships, but in later years it was found the enemy knew all about the fakes. That might explain why they were never attacked during numerous air raids.
Royal Marine Arthur Jones found Scapa was as bleak and unwelcoming for the young servicemen of the Home Fleet as it had been for their forebears in the Grand Fleet of the First World War.
HMS Warspite at Scapa, 1940. Specially commissioned painting by Dennis C. Andrews.
HMS Warspite in Norwegian waters, 1940. Specially commissioned painting by Dennis C. Andrews.
It was very primitive. There was a canteen ashore and you got there by using a drifter which took you in and landed you on the mud. You had these tickets to exchange for chocolate bars, sweets, toffee and you took your own glass for beer which was five pennies a pint. That was the beginning and end of entertainment ashore at Scapa Flow.
During this period Warspite was sent on many fruitless patrols of Arctic waters which numbed her crew. Able Seaman Banks:
At this time my job was range-taker in A turret. Often, due to the very bad weather, it was impossible to gain access to the turret, which in my case was in the forecastle - for the uninitiated, the sharp end. Instead we had to descend four decks and climb up into the turret via a ladder in the trunk. Before doing so, it was necessary to get permission from the Officer of the Turret so that the guns did not train round during our ascent, as this could result in a rather nasty mess, to say the least. Naturally permission was never given during an alert, and unless you could get in via the upper deck, then your relief just had to wait, though I cannot remember anyone waiting for more than a few minutes. On the other hand, if the ship was at action stations there would be no relief.
Norway was retaining neutrality but feeding the Nazi war effort by allowing the export of Swedish iron ore via the Arctic port of Narvik. If this wasn’t galling enough, the British were certain German vessels were using Norwegian territorial waters to avoid interception while slipping out into the Atlantic. The British response was an operation to mine Norwegian territorial waters. But, even as this was being mounted in early April 1940, German troops invaded Norway and Denmark. Narvik was one of several Norwegian ports where German forces were landed, with 2,000 mountain troops carried 100 miles up the Vestfiord and Ofotfiord by ten large destroyers.
While all this was unfolding, Warspite was on her way back to the Mediterranean, where she was to be flagship again. However, she suddenly found herself redirected to Norwegian waters. On her way to rendezvous with the Home Fleet, Warspite weathered her first German dive bomber attack which was ineffective, but demonstrated the worth of her extra anti-aircraft defences.
In the meantime, having finally realized the Germans were in possession of Narvik, a flotilla of British destroyers was sent up to disrupt them and sank two of the German warships during a battle on 10 April. The remaining eight German destroyers remained at Narvik because of lack of fuel and some were almost unseaworthy due to battle damage. Their fuel and ammunition resupply tanker was intercepted and blown up by British destroyers.
HMS Icarus, one of Warspite’s hunting pack of destroyers at the Second Battle of Narvik. Goodman Collection.
Having a significant force of German destroyers – in fact almost a third of the Kriegsmarine’s entire destroyer force – trapped in the confines of Narvik was just too good an opportunity to miss. The Royal Navy decided to attack them with overwhelming force. A hunting pack of destroyers – HMS Cossack, HMS Eskimo, HMS Bedouin, HMS Forester, HMS Hero, HMS Icarus, HMS Kimberley, HMS Foxhound and HMS Punjabi – was assembled around HMS Warspite.
The leader of this force was to be Vice Admiral William ‘Jock’ Whitworth – commander of the Battle Cruiser Squadron – who swapped his flag from HMS Renown to HMS Warspite in the early hours of 13 April. The night of 12-13 April was bitterly cold, with an uncomfortable swell and ice coating the battleship’s decks. Deep inside her hull the fuses of 15-inch shells were altered to non-delay. The sheer weight of the one ton shells meant if they weren’t set to explode instantly on contact, they might go off after coming out the other side.
Another member of the Narvik hunting pack - HMS Hero. Goodman Collection.
Battleship Warspite storms up the Norwegian fjords, her 15-inch guns blazing. Specially commissioned painting by Dennis C. Andrews.
At 5.00 a.m. on 13 April the Warspite started her journey to Narvik, with three destroyers steaming ahead of her using minesweeping gear to clear the way.
Others were posted evenly around her, all of them eager to attack the enemy. With oppressive clouds pressing down, and snow flurries swirling off the steep sides of the fiords, visibility was around ten miles at best. Signalman Donald Auffret, whose action station was the wireless office on Warspite’s bridge, remembered:
As we came to the entrance of the fiord we could see the mountains on either side, all grey, with snow and it looked a very, very grim place.1
On the battleship’s forecastle, while they were waiting for something to happen, the crews of A and B turrets relieved tension with an enthusiastic snowball fight. Soon the gunners were called back into their turrets, shells were rammed up the guns and the Warspite accelerated, the vibrations of her engines clearly felt underfoot. As the battleship gathered pace a U-boat carefully stalking her, collided with a rock and was temporarily exposed. HMS Eskimo chased the submarine off with a shower of depth charges.
&n
bsp; A Swordfish floatplane from the battleship was launched to scout ahead and soon reported two enemy destroyers not far away. They greeted the plane with a storm of anti-aircraft fire but failed to score any hits.
Skimming over Narvik, the Swordfish sighted another German destroyer in harbour and then flew up the Herjangsfiord to the north. Petty Officer Pilot Frederick ‘Ben’ Rice spotted something interesting: ‘We got up the top of the fiord and my Observer said that we may as well turn around and go back. I replied “hang on, there’s a U-boat”.’
This dramatic find was U-64 moving away from a jetty at the small settlement of Bjerkvik. Petty Officer Rice put his ungainly aircraft into a dive.
With floats on a Swordfish you couldn’t carry a torpedo. What we carried was 250lbs armour piercing bombs, two 100lb bombs and an anti-submarine bomb. I decided to use the two armour-piercing bombs.
As Petty Officer Rice released the bombs, his Wireless Operator/Gunner, Leading Airman Pacey, hosed the German submarine down with machine-gun fire. The U-boat replied with a 37mm anti-aircraft gun mounted on its conning tower. One of the Swordfish bombs hit at the base of the conning tower, making short work of the submarine, as she sank by the bows in less than thirty seconds, drowning a dozen of her crew. This was the first U-boat to be sunk by a British naval aircraft in the Second World War. Petty Officer Rice was glad the majority of the enemy survived:
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