He announced we were floating on the main deck which in the quarterdeck messdeck was showing signs of collapse upwards.
It was shored down and counterflooding soon had the list corrected.
An American tug took her in tow and slowly the Warspite edged out into the Bay of Naples. Two more US tugs were called in and, at a speed of four knots, the Warspite set off for the Straits of Messina, a screen of destroyers gathered protectively around her.
Inside the Warspite there was an eerie silence. Warships never sleep, their vital systems providing a background noise to which crews become accustomed. Now, with all her machinery deprived of power she was completely silent and it was most unnerving. When night came, battery-powered lights flickered. With no possibility of preparing a hot meal, lemonade, bully beef and ships biscuit were passed around to her sailors.
Completely blacked out, Warspite crept by Valiant blazing away with her full anti-aircraft barrage. From time to time one of the escorting destroyers would let rip with a barrage too, making Warspite’s crew jump.
Exhausted by their efforts to keep her afloat, the Warspite’s sailors didn’t know if their ship would make it through the night. They seemed to be losing the battle against flooding, even though 200 of them were on baling-out duty at all times. At any moment the crippled battleship could be found by a U-boat or a Junkers torpedo bomber.
A British warship blazing away with all her anti-aircraft guns off Salerno, as seen from HMS Warspite. Jack Hockley Collection
Petty Officer Banks was puzzled: ‘Why the German air force didn’t attack us I’ll never know, for we were absolutely helpless.’
Captain Packer’s diary noted his crew were really feeling the strain but still determined to get the battleship back to Malta.
With the dawn the situation had worsened and there was much fatigue for no one had had much stand-off during the past few days, and since the hit everyone was on their feet, either at the guns, hauling in wires, bailing, pumping or shoring up. Men were beginning to sit down and rest and drop off to sleep as they sat.12
More tugs arrived but their hawsers frequently parted and, pushed by the strong south flowing current, Warspite passed through the Straits of Messina sideways on.
Midshipman Corbett recorded the scene:
Ahead of us we could see the glow of Mount Etna. It was an amazing spectacle. As we entered the straits a terrific wind sprang up from astern and an exceptionally strong current caught us. We swung to port and nothing would move us back again in spite of all efforts.
Captain Packer wrote in his war diary:
When we struck the tide-rips and whirl pools the ship became unmanageable. From midnight until 5.00a.m. we were completely out of control and going through the straits broadside on with all tows parted except one. However just as the tide turned off Reggio to take us back up the straits again, I got a tug alongside each side aft and straightened her up sufficiently for the tugs forward to go ahead and get some way on the ship.13
Despite being a superb sitting target throughout 17 and 18 September, as she slowly crawled towards Malta, no enemy aircraft or submarines came across the Warspite.
She reached safe harbour on 19 September and was cheered in. Captain Packer’s diary noted:
All the ships’ companies turned out to see us go past and I got many signals. There is no doubt there was great anxiety that we should not get back. Well, we have. So, for the second time in 27 years, I have limped into port in Warspite heavily damaged.14
Three men trapped in Number 4 boiler room throughout the trip back to Malta were grateful to be released.
It was soon plain Malta’s dockyard facilities could do very little for her. In the meantime the Salerno beachhead was stabilized and the Germans, badly knocked about by the guns of bombarding battleships, were pushed back. In his journal Midshipman Corbett noted that Warspite’s fatalities were low – two men were killed when the bomb hit, four died later from burns caused by not wearing their flash gear. Other ships hit by German glider bombs had suffered much worse, including the US Navy cruiser Savannah, with 200 dead, and the Royal Navy cruiser Uganda, on which eighteen men were killed.
Aboard HMS Warspite major efforts were made to discover how the bomb could have homed in so well after being dropped from such a height. Midshipman Corbett revealed in his journal:
We have gathered together various pieces of the bomb in the hope of discovering its secret. Some are covered with writing and look very promising.
One thought was that the bombs rode in on a warship’s radar. In reality the glider bombs were radio controlled by an aimer sat in the mother aircraft using powerful glasses to keep track of them on their way to the target. It struck Midshipman Corbett that Warspite might be so crippled she would never sail to war again and he might end up going to another ship. He wrote in his diary:
I don’t want to leave the ship if it means going to Nelson or some old, slow ship. Besides, Warspite has found a place in my heart. It would have been dreadful if we had lost her.
By late September it looked as if Midshipman Corbett’s worst fear might be unfounded. He told his journal:
Numerous experts have been rushed out from England by air and have been inspecting the damage. There seems no doubt they consider the ship worth repairing.
A large part of the Warspite was uninhabitable and a vast amount of the crew’s clothing, bedding and private possessions had been ruined. The ship’s bathrooms and toilets were out of action and so a makeshift area, screened carefully from the Maltese, was rigged up on the forecastle. Great efforts were still being made to pump out boiler rooms flooded with water and oil. But, a few days later, Midshipman Corbett reported: ‘Our efforts to pump out Number 5 boiler room have failed. The submersible pumps failed at the vital moment...’.
The journey to Gibraltar where the dockyard was standing by to carry out major repairs would be a slow one. Midshipman Corbett would not be with her, for he had received confirmation of orders to join HMS Nelson. After his transfer he told his journal:
I was very sorry to leave the Warspite. There was something about her which gave her an air of supremacy. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the spirit I noticed when I joined her and, at first, disliked. It was as if her crew were saying: ‘We are the Warspite, nothing can touch us.’ That attitude stood her in good stead when we were hit. The men were so much above it all, as if it just couldn’t happen to the Warspite. There was no question of ‘will we get back’, but ‘at what time do we get back in’. The crew never realized just how badly we were damaged and perhaps it will be a good thing if they do not know. I hope now that they take the chance to repair her and do other essential refitting.
The changing silhouette of HMS Warspite 1915 -1937 from the journal of Midshipman John Corbett. J. Corbett.
Midshipman Corbett hoped Warspite would have her 6-inch guns removed and replaced by more modern weapons. He felt she needed her anti-aircraft guns improved and more modern fire control equipment. Her hydraulics should also be renewed so Warspite could then go to the Far East and finally give the Japanese a good hiding.
If this is done I do not doubt the Japanese will regret their lie about sinking her at the Battle of the Coral Sea and regret they were late arriving at Sydney Harbour.
The Warspite started her dangerous journey under tow to Gibraltar on 1 November.
Captain Packer had left to join Admiral Cunningham’s staff, so she was now commanded temporarily by her Executive Officer, Commander the Hon. D. Edwardes.
Four tugs undertook the tow to Gibraltar and there was a quartet of destroyers on escort duty. With the Allies having virtually uncontested air supremacy over the Mediterranean, fighter cover was always close at hand to destroy any torpedo bombers cheeky enough to make a run at her.
Warspite under tow from Malta to Gibraltar, November 1943. C. Pearson Collection
Imagine her fate if the same journey of over 1,000 miles under tow had been attempted in 1941. Initi
ally Warspite could raise steam on one boiler and proceeded at seven knots, but her engines soon failed and she had to rely on the tugs. But before the battleship could enter harbour at Gibraltar she had to sort out a tricky problem with her 15-inch guns which was down to Petty Officer Pearson’s department to handle.
Some of the 15-inch guns still had their shells up the spout from Salerno. To get them out we started up some diesels to give us enough auxiliary power to operate the turrets and guns. The turrets were turned safely out to sea, the guns elevated and we put quarter charges up. As my turret wasn’t involved I was on the upper deck watching. The guns were fired and, because they didn’t have much charge behind them, the shells tumbled over and over. The ricochet when they hit the water was quite spectacular.
More than a week after leaving Malta for the last time the Warspite finally reached Gibraltar and was put into dry dock four days later. Petty Officer Banks managed to get down into the dry dock and take a look at the damage the battleship had sustained.
How the Warspite stayed afloat I will never know. For, without exaggerating one bit, you could have driven a double-decker bus through the hole in the ship’s bottom.
On 10 October, Petty Officer Banks got his orders to head home after being recommended for promotion to officer. ‘I said farewell to the beautiful ship that had been my home for four-and-a-quarter years.’
On 10 December, having been kept fully briefed on his former flagship’s dangerous moments, Admiral Cunningham took time out from his busy schedule as the new First Sea Lord to visit Warspite at Gibraltar, touring the ship to see how her repairs were progressing. Eighteen days after Cunningham’s visit the Warspite was released from dry dock and started some limited work-up with a virtually new crew. However, her departure was suddenly postponed and she didn’t head back until March 1944. A brief call to the Clyde was followed by a trip around the top of Scotland to Rosyth for yet more substantial repairs, as two of her turrets were still out of action. Arriving on 16 March, the battleship received Captain M.H.A. Kelsey as her new Commanding Officer.
Admiral Cunningham during his visit to Gibraltar Dockyard to see how repairs to Warspite are progressing. C. Pearson Collection.
One of her new Midshipmen was Andy Hamnett who joined the Warspite at Rosyth in April.
As a midshipman, I was the lowest form of life in the Navy. I knew absolutely nothing and was really very frightened of life in this enormous metal box called Warspite. One of my main concerns was to find my way to and from the heads safely.
Throughout April and May, as Midshipman Hamnett became slightly less worried about life on a battlewagon, Warspite rehearsed for her role in the biggest amphibious assault of all time – the invasion of Normandy. She would be without her impotent 6-inch guns which had been removed and plated in.
Able dog Pluto, who was run over while Warspite was at Gibraltar for repairs. C. Pearson Collection
Notes
1 Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey.
2 Joy Packer, Deep as the Sea.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 The Malta Times, 19 September 1943.
6 Ibid.
7 Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey.
8 Reuters report carried by the Malta Times, 22 September 1943.
9 Joy Packer, Deep as the Sea.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
Chapter Ten
SWANSONG
Hammering the Atlantic Wall
Age and injuries of war were catching up with the Warspite. She set sail to take part in the D-Day invasion with her X turret permanently out of action and with a huge concrete caisson moulded over the large hole in her hull made by the glider bomb explosion. Though the crews of the Royal Navy’s battleships did not realize it quite yet, the era of the battleship was drawing rapidly to a close. The British fleet had fought its last battleship versus battleship action during the Battle of North Cape on Boxing Day 1943, when HMS Duke of York played the leading role in sinking the Scharnhorst. The honour of fighting the last fleet action involving combat between battleships would fall to the Japanese and American navies. At the battle of Surigao Strait in late 1944, elderly US Navy dreadnoughts salvaged from the bottom of Pearl Harbor utterly destroyed a Japanese force including the battleships Yamashiro and Fuso. But Surigao lay several months in the future as Warspite embarked on her journey to D-Day. Midshipman Hamnett was still a worried young man:
We sailed for Greenock via Scapa Flow and the Minches where we undertook gunnery practice and all sorts of other things which I did not understand. My action station was with the Commander in the After Conning Tower, which was the emergency position of command in case the bridge was knocked out.
The Warspite left Greenock on 2 June. Together with the battleship Ramillies, the 15-inch gun monitor Roberts, cruisers Mauritius, Arethusa, Danae, Dragon and Frobisher plus destroyers, she was to make up the Eastern Task Force. HMS Warspite was by 5 June off the south-west peninsula, almost within sight of Plymouth. By that evening the Warspite was just one of several thousand vessels waiting for the green light off the Isle of Wight, in dreadful weather which threatened to force cancellation of the whole enterprise. Petty Officer Charlie Pearson didn’t envy the invasion toops:
Standing on the upper deck you could see the landing ships passing by and you felt sorry for the troops inside them who were sick as dogs.
The Eastern Task Force sailed across the Channel behind a large force of sweepers clearing a path through minefields so they could get in as close as possible to carry out their fire missions. The troops were being landed early the following morning over a fifty mile front, on five beaches which were coded as follows: SWORD and GOLD, British, JUNO, British and Canadian, OMAHA and UTAH, American. The Eastern Task Force was to provide support for the British 3rd Division landing across SWORD beach, with the Warspite’s special mission knocking out gun batteries near Le Havre.
Warspite’s mighty 15-inch guns roar. Sutherland Collection.
Sailors standing on one of Warspite’s 15-inch turrets gaze at the D-Day invasion fleet astern. Topham Picturepoint
At 11.00p.m. they entered the eastern-most channel, between the lines of lighted buoys which the minesweeper flotillas had laid like street-lamps across to France.1
To Warspite went the honour of being the first ship to open fire on D-Day, her shells pummelling a German shore battery which showed signs of life. At 5.30a.m. the whole bombardment fleet fired - an awesome ribbon of flame providing the German occupiers with the rudest of awakenings. Lunging out of a smokescreen laid by Allied vessels to protect their seaward flank came three German torpedo boats from Le Havre. The young commanding officer of one was stunned:
The Warspite Ordnance branch poses for a ‘team photo’ in 1944. Petty Officer Charles Pearson is back row, second from left. C. Pearson Collection
The crew of one of Warspite’s 4-inch guns take a cigarette break during the bombardment of the D-Day beachhead. Ray Pattenden is far left, back row. R. Pattenden Collection.
The sight which he saw when he came through the smoke amazed him, prepared though he was for something extraordinary. Straight ahead of him, in the early light of dawn he saw six battleships or heavy cruisers, and so many minor warships he had not time to count them; and yet, to his further surprise not one of them opened fire.2
The Germans launched seventeen torpedoes and it wasn’t long before the British warships reacted on seeing the splashes. The torpedo boats turned around and made a speedy retreat back through the smokescreen, passing three of their own armed trawlers coming out to have a go. Using radar, the shells of Warspite and other Allied warships followed the torpedo boats back through the smoke. One of Warspite’s scored a hit and instantly sank a trawler.
In the meantime the German torpedoes had claimed a Norwegian destroyer, but otherwise found no victims, one of the tinfish passing harmlessly between Warspite and Ra
millies. The old battlewagons had survived the only naval surface action of D-Day.
Able Seaman Ray Pattenden, who was on one of Warspite’s 4-inch guns, gave this verdict:
We did a lot of firing but I don’t know what at, or if we hit anything, because we were under the gunnery director. We just followed the instruments.
Throughout the day Warspite conducted fire missions – often without the benefit of an observation aircraft or a forward observer. She pounded enemy infantry and vehicle concentrations, a command headquarters and gun emplacements.
Not long after the Warspite’s guns had announced the seaborne part of the invasion of Europe, overhead flew the second wave of gliders carrying soldiers of the British 6th Airborne Division. Captain Kelsey drew the crew’s attention to the spectacle. Over the tannoy he said: ‘All personnel not on full Action Stations can come up on deck to witness a sight you will never see again in your lifetime.’
Petty Officer Pearson was one of those able to take advantage of the Captain’s invitation.
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