World War II: The Autobiography

by Jon E. Lewis

  He came at us for about a quarter of an hour, very obligingly thinking that we were a couple of destroyers in company with Exeter. That covered the rather unpleasant stretch of water in which he could outrange us.

  He scored a pretty little straddle after twenty minutes and his HE burst on the surface of the water and the pieces peppered us. There weren’t as many casualties as one would expect. Our captain acquired a sizish hole in both legs and the chief yeoman on the bridge had a leg smashed up. In my DCT we had rather more than our share. Six pieces came inside. With my usual fantastic luck three pieces impinged on my ample anatomy (and I regret that it grows even ampler as the years go on despite my efforts to squash it out), but caused me little inconvenience, apart from a certain mental vagueness of the ensuing minute or two. Three died quite quickly and definitely, two of whom were actually in physical contact with me, and three were wounded. I don’t expect that names mean anything to you at this distance of time, but one of the casualties was an old “Diomede”, Archibald Cooper Hirst Shaw. E.V. Shirley, another old “Diomede”, was one of the very severely wounded. The others had the common misfortune of being imperial ratings (NZ).

  The survivors behaved just as one expected and hoped. They took no notice of the shambles (and it looked more like a slaughter-house on a busy day than a Director Control Tower) and took over the jobs of those who had been put out as if nothing had happened. One youngster had to seat himself on the unpleasantness that very shortly before had been a very efficient GO’S writer and carry out his job. He was a little wide-eyed after we had disengaged but otherwise unmoved. A splinter had jammed the door and prevented the medical parties from reaching us. The wounded never murmured. Shirley quietly applied a tourniquet to himself and saved his life thereby. A sergeant of Marines who was sitting right alongside me never let on that he was wounded. I didn’t discover it until the first lull, an hour later, when he nearly fainted from loss of blood.

  I learnt this lesson – though it’s a difficult one to put into words – that one can wish for nothing better than these troops of ours. They may be a bit of a nuisance in the easy times of peace, but one can’t improve on them when things get a bit hot. A spot of trouble of this sort completely changes one’s attitude to the troops. I felt very proud of my fellow countrymen. [Washbourn is a New Zealander.]

  Exeter, as you know, bore the brunt. We had the attentions of the 5.8s all the time, but they weren’t very effective. I think that we shot up their control fairly early on, and put at least two of the starboard battery out of action.

  Tactically my only criticism is that we should have gone in earlier, but that certainly would have meant more damage and casualties than we actually received, and we did achieve the object of the exercise without it.

  It was a plain straightforward scrap, with none of the “hit-and-run” tactics which the Yellow Press credited us with. We hammered away for an hour and a half, and then hauled off under smoke. I must admit to a certain feeling of being baulked of my prey when we were ordered to turn away, because the last twenty minutes at really effective range had been most enjoyable. It turned out to be the psychologically correct moment. We had damn little ammunition left and, as it proved, the job was done. It didn’t seem like it at the time. I was very depressed. We had expended most of our bricks and our enemy looked disappointingly undamaged. The after turret was temporarily out of action, and we had seen one fire on board, and he was running like a frightened rabbit, but his fire was distressingly accurate, and his speed was the same as ever, and there was no sign of structural damage.

  We shadowed all day. Once or twice we ventured a bit too close and he swung round and let us have it, but he was out of our range and we didn’t reply.

  In the evening we gave the Uruguayans the thrill of their lives by another little brush just at sunset when we were closing the range to keep him in sight as the visibility lessened. Four times later, during the advancing twilight, he took exception to our presence, but these last Parthian shots were merely gestures.

  The morale was magnificent while we were waiting for him to emerge from his hole. The fantastic fleets that Winston, ably aided and abetted by the BBC, built up outside Montevideo gave us great pleasure. We were pleased to see Cumberland, not for any great confidence in her fighting abilities, but from the point of view that she would again provide the first target for Graf Spee’s attentions.

  We stayed at action stations all night, with the usual “Hula” parties keeping us amused and awake with their Maori songs. Do you remember Gould, with his guitar and his indiarubber hips?

  On the Sunday evening we three went in to finish the job off. Graf Spee was just visible at sunset when Ajax’s aircraft reported that she had blown herself up. Another big moment. We steamed up close past Ajax, who was leading us in. Both ships had ordered “All hands on deck”, and were black with bodies who had emerged to see the last of the old enemy. Another big moment. We shouted ourselves hoarse, both ships. The “Diggers” did their “Hakas”, and sang their songs, and the Ajax cheered in reply.

  And that was that.

  SURVIVAL, THE ARCTIC, 8–11 JUNE 1940

  Ronald Healiss, Royal Marines

  At 4.30 p.m. on 9 June the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, returning from the Narvik landings, was intercepted by the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Ninety minutes later Glorious was no more. Of her 1,700 crew many were already dead, but hundreds took to the icy waters grabbing hold of any floatable device they could or scrambling aboard life rafts.

  Around me, those who had survived the shelling were laughing and swearing as they peeled off their outer garments and prepared themselves for the shock of the icy water.

  Down below me, men were already struggling in the water, reaching out for the few floatable things we had been able to throw overboard. The ship’s propeller blades, half out of the water, were churning slowly right underneath me. But it was my turn to go and I had to jump from where I was.

  I took a deep breath and shoved against the deck with all my strength. Then I sailed out in a great arc above the propeller.

  The thirty feet down to the water seemed like a thousand. There was a terrific jolt, then I was going down with an icy hand slowly squeezing the breath from my lungs. Things grew a little muddled.

  I broke surface and gulped air. The icy water was already taking a grip on me and I looked around for something to float on.

  The sea, calm a few hours before, now boiled with a sort of cold fury. As the waves lifted me I saw hundreds of my shipmates floating round me. The chances of finding a place on a raft seemed slim, but mechanically I began to swim, held up by my lifebelt.

  After about five minutes I saw an air-cushion from one of the lifeboats and made for it as fast as my failing strength would allow. As I bobbed up and down I saw that four other men were swimming toward it, too. Three of them reached it with me. The fourth just disappeared.

  We floated around on that air-cushion for about an hour, while the cold and cramp ate into us. Then I caught sight of what I thought to be a Carley float. My three companions hanging on to the cushion already had cramp and couldn’t move their limbs, so I began to strike out in a sort of mad frenzy with one hand, using the other to drag the air-cushion behind me with the others hanging on.

  I knew I was attempting the impossible in those seas. After a long, futile struggle with the waves, against which I made no progress, I told the others that I was going to make a try on my own. I let the cushion go and struck out for the float.

  The distance was only about fifty yards. It seemed like fifty miles. My strokes became slower and weaker as the cold bit deeper. I knew I couldn’t carry on much longer.

  Then I heard a voice I knew. “Wotcher, Tubby! Trying to swim home?” it said.

  I looked up and saw a fellow Marine clinging to an oar. He grinned cheerfully and I grinned back – and the strength came back into my arms.

  The “float” turned out to be one of our mot
or-boats, badly damaged and well down in the water. Somehow I clambered over the side and flopped down inside it, rigid with cold.

  There were already about twenty men in the boat, including the Surgeon-Commander, the Surgeon-Lieutenant and a couple of Marines I knew.

  They had lashed themselves with rope to avoid being carried away by the heavy seas which were breaking over them. I followed suit, leaving enough slack on the rope to keep me on top of each wave.

  In the next four hours I saw all those men die.

  Many of them were already far gone from exposure when I clambered aboard and, as we floated helplessly around with the seas breaking over us, they became more and more silent.

  I watched them go, one by one, sliding silently into death, glassy-eyed and motionless, except when the waves lifted them in their ropes and flopped them back into the boat.

  The Surgeon-Commander was the last to go. I watched him silently as his movements grew slower. The cold now had bitten into my own body and it was getting increasingly difficult to brace myself against the waves.

  I began to wonder which of us death would leave until last, but when the Surgeon-Commander answered my unspoken thought I was shocked beyond measure.

  “I’ll be the next to go, lad,” he said. “Do what you can for those others. Cut them loose and let them go to their final rest. And do the same for me when I’m gone.”

  He watched while I summoned all my strength and dragged myself about the boat, cutting the bodies free one by one and letting the waves carry them away.

  As the last one sank into those black waters, I heard the Commander mutter: “Good lad, now – do it – for me.” When I reached him he had gone, and a wave had carried him over the side.

  I cut the rope wrapped round his wrists and his body glided gently beneath the surface. I was alone.

  Boxes and bits of wreckage floated by. The Huns were still shelling what remained of the Glorious. I lost count of time.

  At last the bits of flotsam thinned out, then ceased to float by. There was nothing but sea and cold silence. The intolerable loneliness ate into me as much as the cold.

  I don’t know how long I’d been alone in that boat when I saw what looked like a couple of floats, full of men, drifting about a mile away. The sight of human beings in that waste of water did something to me. On an impulse I decided to try to reach them.

  I deflated my lifebelt so that if cramp or exhaustion overtook me I shouldn’t linger, then cut myself loose and went over the side.

  I seemed to be swimming for hours. My legs gradually grew stiff, first at the feet, then the calves, the knees, the thighs. My stomach seemed knotted with an intolerable pain. I knew, as I rose and fell in the waves, that my time had come.

  It’s true that when you see death approaching your past life passes before your eyes. I remembered my boyhood, the day I joined the Royal Marines. I could see my mother clearly. And the girl who would have been my wife in a few short days.

  In my trouser-pocket there had been a little leather case in which I always carried a picture of my parents and my girl. I felt about me with a frozen hand. The case was still there.

  I took it out while I floated, intent on bidding them goodbye. But I couldn’t. The faces were too real. The sodden photographs smiled up at me and I knew I couldn’t die without seeing those three people again.

  I thrust the wallet back in my pocket and struck out again with fresh strength.

  Then a wave lifted me and, as I floundered on top of it, I saw the rafts not ten yards away. Somebody shouted to me. I reached one of the rafts – I don’t know how – and was dragged aboard.

  I wanted to cry, but I was too cold. I closed my eyes and thanked God for deliverance.

  There were a lot of us on board the raft that first night. As the Northern Lights flashed around us, we discussed among ourselves the chances of being picked up.

  The Signal Boatswain was aboard and told us that distress signals had been sent off before we abandoned ship. We started guessing how long it would be before help came. The optimists said twelve hours. The pessimists had no hope at all.

  I judged it was about midnight when the first of my comrades started dying from exposure. In the next hours many more of them followed. Only two of us had enough strength left to thump each other to keep the circulation going.

  At first we moved about the raft as our shipmates died and passed them over the side to their final resting-place. But our own strength was soon too far gone and we could do nothing but watch them die and let their bodies rest at the bottom of the float.

  And so another day and another night passed. People ask me how it was that I survived those terrible hours. I can’t tell. Time had no real meaning. The bodily agony became something remote. I just knew that whatever happened I had to stay alive.

  On the third morning, only three of us were left alive, and one was already demented. He writhed and shouted while the other two of us made feeble efforts to quieten him.

  But there was nothing we could do for him. We watched, horrified, as he suddenly raised himself to his feet on the side of the raft and hurled himself into the black water with a scream that haunts me still.

  My fellow survivor was a Fleet Air Arm pilot, Petty Officer Leggett. As that last awful day dragged by he tried to work out our direction of drift. According to his deductions we were nearing the Gulf Stream, which would carry us down toward the Norwegian coast.

  Some hundreds of yards away we could see another raft. Several times we waved, but there was no response and at last we gave up trying to establish contact with what were only too obviously dead bodies.

  The weather now had calmed a little and once, through the slight haze, we thought we could see the British Fleet. But it disappeared and our hopes sank again.

  Then, miraculously, there was the drone of an aeroplane. It sang out of the blue sky and roared over our heads while we waved and shouted like maniacs. I could see it was a Walrus such as we had on the Glorious. But it banked away and in a few seconds was lost to sight.

  We settled back on the float, stupefied with disappointment.

  After a while, another Walrus passed overhead, but we had convinced ourselves that it was just imagination – the first signs of the madness that had already claimed one of our shipmates.

  We told ourselves we could last another day at most, and then took it in turns to snatch our first sleep for three days, in spells of a few minutes each. In that temperature, any lengthy inaction would have stilled the blood in our veins for ever.

  As I lay there watching the spout of whales not far away, something else attracted my attention – something wispy and indeterminate on the horizon. I sat up and peered hard. There was no doubt about it. Smoke! We thought it might be a German ship, though we didn’t care much. But as the masts and then the hull appeared we saw it was a trawler. Frantically we waved.

  Twice that ship stopped and changed course while our hearts choked us, but at last there was no doubt that she had sighted us. Oh, the delicious agony of those last moments as we saw her steaming straight for us!

  The rest is any shipwrecked sailor’s story. A rope ladder came over the side and the husky Norwegians dragged my fellow survivor aboard. I remember trying to climb the ladder myself, then I passed out.

  When I came round I was lying in front of the galley fire. A sailor passed over some hot spirits and I drifted back into unconsciousness for many hours. When I awoke, it was to find myself in a bunk with another survivor, a stoker.

  Altogether, I believe that ship picked up about thirty men – the bulk of those who survived.

  It took us three days to reach land – three days that seemed like three weeks. We drank the ship’s freshwater supply in twenty-four hours and then they started making it for us down in the engine-room. None of us could eat solid food, not even the soup those fine fellows made for us.

  We were a sorry lot when we made the Faroe Islands. Some were able to walk ashore between two sailors.
Others, like myself, came off on a stretcher.

  It isn’t possible to describe how we felt as each stage of our rescue brought us nearer and nearer to home and those we loved, and I’m not going to try. Nor can any of us express our thanks to the many people, Danes, Norwegians, Scots, English, who looked after us with such care as we passed through their hands.

  For my part, I spent fourteen weeks in hospital with hands and feet badly frost-bitten, swollen to twice their normal size and blistered into shapelessness.

  But it was a small price to pay for deliverance. The pain that still sears periodically through my feet and the bitterness of my soul when I think of those three awful days are nothing.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of my shipmates of the Glorious who did their duty, simply and straightforwardly as I tried to do mine, perished in those frightful waters while the Hun sailed by, unmoved.

  I am alive. I thank God for it, though I do not pretend to understand His ways.

  U-99 ATTACKS A CONVOY, THE ATLANTIC, 18–19 OCTOBER 1940

  Kapitan-Leutnant Otto Kretschtner, U-99

  Kretschmer was the leading U-boat ace of World War II, sinking 350,00 tons of Allied shipping. Below is Kretschmer’s log detailing U-99’s initial attack on convoy SC7. The U-boat did not operate alone but in concert with several others – a classic example of Donitz’s “wolf-pack” tactic.

  18th October 9.24 PM. Exchange recognition signals with U123. Convoy again in sight. I am ahead of it, so allow my boat to drop back, avoiding leading destroyers. Destroyers are constantly firing starshells. From outside, I attack the right flank of the first formation.

  10.02 PM. Weather, visibility moderate, bright moon-light. Fire bow torpedo by director. Miss.

  10.06 PM. Fire stern tube by director. At 700 metres, hit forward of amidships. Vessel of some 6,500 tons sinks within 20 seconds. I now proceed head-on into the convoy.