by Neil Oliver
All of this—from the Queen Mary to the Alisa—happened well within a lifetime. Generations of Scots grew up hearing about the Clyde shipyards. They always sounded like a constant, something proud and permanent and vital to the body of the nation—like an arm or a leg.
But of course they were anything but permanent. The Clyde is a dead river now and the only ship plying up and down with any regularity is an ocean-going paddle steamer called the Waverley. She takes tourists on day trips to Largs and Rothsay, past the skeletons of derelict shipyards that once employed tens of thousands of men.
More than places of work, the Clyde shipyards were part of the identity of Scotland and of Great Britain. We would never have survived World Wars I and II without the warships and merchant ships that we built to keep ourselves alive.
Out of another Clyde shipyard came a ship that became an unforgettable legend of heroism and manliness. She was a Black Swan class sloop, built by the Alexander Stephens and Sons yard at Govan and launched on May 7, 1943. When World War II was over she was reclassified as a frigate.
By April 1949 she was on China’s Yangtze River near Shanghai. Her name was HMS Amethyst.
There had been civil war in China since the 1920s. But by 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s communists had the upper hand and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists were bowing to the inevitable. At the British Embassy in the city of Nanking, as elsewhere, staff and other British and Commonwealth nationals were on standby to evacuate the territory. Standing guard nearby was the destroyer HMS Consort, a reassuring presence. By the middle of April she was running low on fuel and orders had been sent to the HMS Amethyst, anchored downstream at Shanghai, to steam up to Nanking and relieve her.
Since the 1858 Treaty of Tiensin, the British Royal Navy had enjoyed the freedom to navigate any and all Chinese waters. British warships had been a familiar sight for nearly a century, but Mao Tse-tung’s communists saw things differently. While the nationalists had quietly honored the treaty, Mao was of the opinion that since he hadn’t signed it, he was absolved of any need to respect its terms. More to the point, he was hostile to the possibility of British imperialist warships being at liberty, in his hard-won territory, to prop up the ailing nationalist forces.
The timing for the Amethyst could not have been worse. The communists were already in control of the river’s north bank and were now looking hungrily toward the south. A temporary truce between the two sides had maintained a peace of sorts but it was due to expire on April 20. Although the communists expected to cross the river unopposed, they were prepared to do it the hard way on April 21 if the nationalists got in their way.
And so the Amethyst was entering treacherous waters when she slipped her moorings at Nanking early on the morning of April 19 and headed upriver at a sedate 11 knots. To this day it’s unclear whether the British Navy was still within its rights—but Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner could have been forgiven for thinking his ship was unlikely to face any real threat.
After a first day’s journey of around 100 miles they dropped anchor at Kiang Yin. The Yangtze River was notoriously difficult and dangerous to navigate in darkness, and the rest of the trip would be tackled the following day. There was no real sense of urgency, far less of danger.
By just after five o’clock on the morning of April 20 the Amethyst was under way once more. For around three and a half hours she steamed peacefully toward her destination—when all at once a burst of heavy machine-gun fire from somewhere on the north bank reminded Skinner and his crew that they had entered a war zone. The rattling burst was followed in short order by 10 or a dozen artillery shells from a shore battery, all of which flew well wide of the ship. The sailors were not alarmed. They assumed the firing—surely too wayward to be aimed at them—must have been part of routine bombardment of the nationalist positions on the south bank by the communists in the north.
Skinner had earlier had his men paint two large canvases with Union Jack flags, and just to be on the safe side he now ordered both to be slung over the side of the ship. Around an hour later, just about 9:30 a.m., the situation changed dramatically and permanently. The Amethyst was approaching the village of San Chiang-ying when a communist shell passed over her bow, much too close for comfort. This wasn’t communist against nationalist—this was communist against the Royal Navy.
Skinner ordered action stations, and in a bid to distance themselves from this much more accurate shore battery, the ship’s engineers battled to wring full power out of the turbines. It was not to be. Before they could clear the field of fire a shell tore into the Amethyst’s wheelhouse and exploded. Leading Seaman Leslie Francis was at the wheel and somehow managed to stay on his feet, trying to stay on course. A second shell hit the bridge, killing or injuring every man. Skinner had suffered multiple wounds and was barely conscious, but managed to give the order to return fire. First Lieutenant Geoffrey Weston, bleeding heavily from a chest wound, tried to relay the order but found that the explosions had cut communications between the bridge and the rest of the ship. As more shells found their target the Amethyst ran aground on a mud bank off Rose Island. It was just 9:35 a.m.—barely five minutes after the first explosion. Further hits took out the generator, the port engine room and the sick bay. In desperation, Weston made it to the ship’s radio and sent a terse message to anyone listening:
Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx position 31.10 degrees North 119.50 degrees East. Large number of casualties.
Dead and dying seamen lay all around, and now the Amethyst was a near-helpless sitting duck, within point-blank range of her un declared enemy. To make matters worse, the position in which she’d run aground meant she couldn’t retaliate with the two great guns on her foredeck. Only the stern turret remained in operation, and the gunners managed to get 30 shells away toward uncertain targets before a direct hit by the enemy destroyed one of the two remaining guns. Hoping that by holding fire he could persuade the communists to do likewise, Weston ordered the stern turret to fall silent. Unimpressed and unmoved, the enemy kept pounding shells through the Amethyst’s armor-plating.
Fearing the worst, Weston ordered some of the uninjured men to crawl into sniping positions, armed with rifles and Bren light machine guns, ready to repel boarders. Seeing men on the move on deck, the communists turned to heavy machine guns to rake the Amethyst from stern to bow. There was carnage aboard now. What had been a peaceful river-trip just minutes before was now a hell of dead and injured men strewn throughout the ship. The decks were awash with blood.
With Skinner mortally wounded and drifting in and out of consciousness, Weston had to assume command. Like the rest of the crew he knew the best chance of survival lay elsewhere—as far from the ship as possible in fact. He ordered most of the able men over the side into the water. The south bank and the nationalist forces offered the only hope of salvation, and it was either swim for it or die here aboard the stricken ship. Non-swimmers and wounded men scrambled into the only lifeboat still serviceable and began rowing south.
There was yet more hell to go through—machine-gun fire and heavy artillery were turned on to the men in the water and more were cut down before they could make much headway. In all, 59 sailors and four Chinese kitchen boys made it on to the south bank, where they were given medical treatment in a nationalist army hospital before being transported in trucks back to Shanghai.
It was an isolated and desperate band of brothers left aboard the Amethyst. Weston had slivers of shrapnel in his liver and lungs and was later dosed up on a combination of morphine and Benzedrine to simultaneously dull his pain and keep him awake. The communist shore batteries had fallen silent but any movement aboard ship still attracted the attention of the machine-gunners.
So far there were 17 dead and 25 seriously wounded and the situation was hardly expected to improve any time soon. Only around 80 men were still fit for active duty but they were trapped like fish in a barrel. The Amethyst herself was holed above and below the waterline, more like a Swiss cheese
than a ship of war. Men scrambled to plug holes with hammocks and mattresses and anything else that came to hand, but she was in a pitiful condition.
Hopes were pinned on the arrival of the Consort, now well aware of their plight and steaming toward them. Out of sight of the enemy machine guns, men prepared a tow-line at the stern of the ship so the destroyer would have at least some slim chance of coming in close and pulling them clear of the mud bank that held them. It was the roar of communist guns that told them she was making her approach. Up on deck they caught their first glimpse of their would-be savior. Flying three Union Jacks and seven white flags, she was steaming toward them at a mighty 29 knots—the fastest speed that had ever been achieved on the Yangtze River. Her funnel was belching plumes of black smoke and all her guns were blazing fire toward the communist shore batteries.
Aboard the Amethyst men cheered as their ally knocked out one shore battery after another, but she was also coming under terrible fire herself. Her Commander, Robertson, wanted to make a rescue attempt—and sent an urgent transmission to that effect. Weston feared such an action would only cause the loss of a second ship and replied she was putting herself in too much danger. Initially undeterred, Consort made a first pass of the Amethyst and then wheeled around hard, still punching shell after shell toward the communist positions.
She was taking too many hits, though—that much was now clear even to the stubborn Robertson—and with 10 of his men dead and three seriously wounded he wheeled around once more and headed downstream out of range. The trapped men could only watch as she steamed out of sight.
Desperate attempts to free the Amethyst from the mud banks of Rose Island were finally successful and she was able to limp a couple of miles upstream, out of range of the communist batteries that had so tormented them, where she dropped anchor at a place called Fu Te Wei.
All the while, Weston and his men had fought to free their ship, a further rescue attempt was under way. The transmissions from the Amethyst had been picked up in Shanghai and Vice-Admiral Madden was quickly on the move. Shortly after daybreak on April 21 two Royal Navy ships set a course for Amethyst’s last known position. They were the cruiser the London and the Amethyst’s sister-ship, the Black Swan.
The news was transmitted to Weston along with the instruction, “Be ready to move.”
With hope rekindled, the men watched the ships steam into view—but the communist guns found their range almost at once, severely punishing both almost from the start. Neither the London nor the Black Swan had any success returning fire and, having taken many serious hits and with dead and wounded on both ships, they were forced to withdraw. Madden sent a typically straightforward signal: “Am sorry we cannot help you today. We shall keep on trying.”
It must have come as cold comfort to the men left aboard. How much longer could they hold out? What to do now?
As it was, a new commander was already making his way toward them along 70-odd miles of rough road from Nanking in a borrowed jeep. He was Lieutenant Commander John Simon Kerans, the British Embassy’s Naval Attaché, and he was determined to get things moving again come hell or high water. By the time he made it out to the Amethyst aboard a Chinese landing craft, some time in the afternoon of April 22, Lieutenant Commander Skinner had died of his wounds. In fact, Kerans climbed aboard a ship that was as much a home to the dead as to the living. Corpses wrapped in hammocks lay in neat rows upon the stern gun-deck, and elsewhere wounded men suffered in steadily worsening conditions without proper medicines or painkillers.
Taking command, Kerans ordered Weston to go ashore with those others of the wounded who could still be moved.
(When I told my dad I was writing about the Amethyst, he told me he’d known a man who served aboard her during the Yangtze Incident. He said it was someone he’d met at his golf club years before and he’d never thought to mention it. I asked him to tell me what he knew and the first thing he said was that he didn’t want me to give the man’s name. In fact he wouldn’t even say it to me. “He wasn’t the type who would want that,” my dad said. “He only mentioned it in passing once or twice. It wouldn’t be right, he wouldn’t have liked it.”
And so it goes with the men caught up in stories like these. You come close to them at times only to have them slip away once more, elusive to the last.)
On April 23 Mao’s communist forces finally crossed the river. Their nationalist enemies had melted away before them and now they controlled both banks. The Amethyst was completely surrounded.
Three days later Major Kung, the local communist commander, opened formal negotiations by inviting Kerans to go ashore for talks. In no mood to trust the man who’d provoked the fight in the first place, Kerans chose to stay aboard. Instead he sent one of his officers, Petty officer William Freeman, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant commander. Kung boasted to Freeman that it was his own shore battery that had caused so much death and destruction aboard the Amethyst during those first minutes. He even demanded the British admit to having opened fire first. With considerable presence of mind under the circumstances, Freeman refused point blank to make any such admission—and even managed to persuade Kung to send fresh supplies of food to the ship.
A stalemate then ensued—with neither side ready to back down and no end to the crisis in sight. By May 18 Kung’s demands had become even shriller—with him insisting that Kerans accept that the Amethyst had “invaded” Chinese waters. The British ship had done no such thing, of course, and Kerans quietly told him so again and again.
And all the while, the tense stand-off had to be endured by the crew. They’d been trapped for weeks in hostile waters, enduring stifling heat and humidity as well as round-the-clock uncertainty. To make matters worse, the supplies from the Chinese were always inadequate and by the middle of May the men were existing on what amounted to half rations. Work provided the only relief from the boredom and tension. Kerans ensured the men were kept occupied repairing the worst of the shell damage and making every effort to keep the ship as clean as possible. The British Navy, like the rest of the armed forces, has always understood the value of discipline and routine—the last redoubt for men under pressure.
While Kerans played the game of diplomatic cat-and-mouse with the communists surrounding him, he had another option in mind. The Amethyst’s position looked bad, there was no denying it. But in spite of all the circumstances she was still a fighting ship of the British Royal Navy. They were not officially prisoners of war—since no war had been declared—but to all intents and purposes they were being held against their will.
“Move your ship and we will destroy it,” Kung had told them.
But the principal duty of all POWs is…escape.
Kerans sought continual updates from his officers regarding the state of the ship. Most frustrating of all was the news that the Chinese embargo on fuel was depriving them of the potential to make a dash for Shanghai. Kung was so confident the ship was hopelessly disabled, however, that he authorized a delivery of oil to the Amethyst during the second week in July. Now Kerans faced a dilemma. For the next three weeks they would have enough fuel in their tanks to make an escape attempt; wait any longer than the end of the month and they would have used too much oil just idling at anchor. The question was: should he risk the lives of the starving and weakened men who depended on him for the right decision? He kept the answer to himself at first, but he was never in any doubt.
Without telling anyone the reasons why, he issued some unusual orders. First, the anchor chain was to be covered in blankets smothered in oil. Second, the outline of the ship’s superstructure was to be obscured by great sheets of canvas draped over her most distinctive parts. Kerans told the men it was to solve the problem of incomplete blackout at night, but at least some of them must have suspected the truth. With just days to go before the deadline, Kerans told his officers what he had in mind—as if they didn’t know—and on July 30 the rest of the men were told it was time to leave.
Once it was
fully dark, the muffed anchor chain was pulled up and the Amethyst floated free from her moorings for the first time in months. A Chinese vessel was spotted and it was taking the line they needed, downstream toward the open sea. As stealthily as was possible for a ship weighing more than 1,350 tons, she slipped in behind the merchant vessel and began her flight to freedom. Each man aboard knew what was expected of him—and all understood that detection now would bring about their doom.
Their secret remained intact for less than an hour before the communists realized their prisoners had made a break for it. The lancing beams of searchlights cut up the sky and flares exploded overhead as they sought their prey. With the night illuminated now, the Amethyst’s temporary invisibility was torn away. Having found her once more, the shore batteries opened up, filling the air with shells as they battled to find their range. It seems that in the confusion, it was the merchant vessel that initially drew the worst of the fire. Kerans ordered his own gunners to return the fire—the better to maintain the general air of chaos that arched across the Yangtze that night—and for some little while it seemed to work. It couldn’t last of course, not with so far left to run, and soon the communist shells began to find their mark. Now the telegrapher sent a familiar message: “I am under fire and have been hit.”
But there was nothing for it now but to keep on running as long as her men, hull and turbines held out. There could be no second imprisonment and no real hope of surrender. This time they were running for their lives.
And this time, the fates ran with them. After three hours of bombardment they saw they were approaching Kiang Yin, the last safe anchorage they had enjoyed before their ordeal had begun. Kerans chose his line past the guns, and with the darkness aiding their flight they made it out of range. By three in the morning they were within 50 miles of the sea.
