Blitz Kids (41 page)

Eventually he got away. He clung to some netting that gave him some support, thinking, ‘If this bugger goes down, I'm going with it.' Getting as far away as possible, Albert turned to look as the
Prince of Wales
stood upright and then slid beneath the surface. He noticed there was a motorboat not far away and swam towards it. He spotted that the ship's gunnery officer was onboard: ‘He was standing on the stern of this motorboat with the tiller between his legs, and all he had on was a shirt. No trousers and no underpants! For one of our senior officers to be like that, it struck me as funny – even at the time.' The smile was soon wiped off his face when he noticed that the water was full of injured men – many of them badly scolded: ‘You couldn't touch them – the skin would come off in your hands.' The motorboat came closer and loaded as many survivors as possible.

Unable to take any more men, the motorboat moved away to unload the men on to a nearby destroyer. Albert waited in the water for a further two hours before the boat returned to pick him up. By the time it returned there were very few other survivors in the water around him. Surprisingly, he was not overwhelmed with fear: ‘You haven't got time to think of yourself. If you are feeling well, you get a sense of well-being.' He had good reason to feel confident, he was a good swimmer, young, strong and uninjured. Most importantly, he hadn't swallowed any of the oil. In other words, he was in a better situation than so many of the others who had gone into the water that day.

Eventually, he was picked up and transferred to the destroyer. There the survivors were crammed on to the red-hot decks. There was hardly any room to sit, and anyway the steel deck was too hot to sit on – especially since many of them were naked – but it hardly mattered. They were alive. As Albert Riddle recalled, all he could think was: ‘That was a close call.'

Although Albert had got away safely, twenty-five boys were lost on the
Prince of Wales.
A further twelve were lost on the
Repulse.
Five days later, another seventeen boys were lost when HMS
Galatea
was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. Two days later, twenty-seven boys lost their life on HMS
Neptune
, when it entered a minefield in the Mediterranean. There was just one survivor from the 764-man crew. December 1941 had been a bad month.

The ordeal for the boy survivors of the sinking of the
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
was far from over. Arriving in Singapore, the survivors were marched to the nearby shore establishment, HMS
Sultan
. For Albert it felt like a ‘walk of shame': he, and many of the others, were black with oil and still naked. Reaching the base, their first task was to try to get clean. It wasn't easy, there was little hot water and not enough soap to go round. So they scrubbed and scrubbed in a desperate effort to rid their skin of oil. Even when they were clean, they struggled to find enough spare uniforms to get dressed.

The survivors of
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
remained in Singapore until the Japanese started their attack on the city. First came the aerial attack. Coming so soon after the sinking of the ships, many of the survivors were seriously affected by the bombing.

The effects were shown as soon as the sirens sounded on the base:

Once recovered, the survivors were given new duties and Albert was one of the lucky ones. He was sent to a golf club where the commander-in-chief had established his headquarters. There he worked as a signaller, although effectively he was little more than a messenger since he spent most of the time running messages around the HQ. He noticed that some of the defences were just dummy gun emplacements, with holes containing angled telegraph poles, designed to look like heavy guns from the air. It didn't give him any confidence in their situation.

When the city fell to the Japanese in February 1942, Albert, along with staff from the HQ, was sent to the docks and boarded an escaping boat. Arriving at the docks he noticed British and Indian troops trying to control crowds of Australian soldiers who were attempting to storm the port to board the remaining ships. He realized the desperate situation when the British and Indians were forced to open fire to control the crowd. Glad to be out from the chaos, Albert soon realized the boat he was on was not going to get them very far. It broke down and he was transferred to a ship that escaped. Another group of the boys boarded a merchant ship, the
Ping Wo
, as it left Singapore on the day the city fell to the Japanese. For sixteen days, they sailed through heavy seas that damaged the ship's steering gear. Eventually they reached the safety of Freemantle in Australia.

Others were less fortunate. Eight boys were killed when the Japanese captured the shore establishment of HMS
Sultan
. Some of the boys who had survived the sinking of the two battleships – including Albert Riddle's friends – were formed into a shore party that was armed and sent to the front to fight the Japanese. Those who survived the fall of the city spent the rest of the war as prisoners, building the infamous Burma-Siam railway. Many never returned home.

Also part of the desperate escape from Singapore was the merchant ship
Empire Star,
whose eight-man crew included five boys between the age of fifteen and eighteen. When she left Singapore the cargo ship, designed to carry just twelve passengers, was carrying over 2,000
refugees from Singapore, including civilians, soldiers and RAF personnel. The day after leaving Singapore, she was attacked by Japanese dive-bombers. Two bombs struck the ship, killing some twelve of the military personnel onboard and wounding many more. The crew immediately set to work extinguishing the fires that broke out, aided by volunteers who were led by two cadet officers, seventeen-year-old Redmond Faulkner and fifteen-year-old Raymond Perry. The two Liverpool lads were both commended for their bravery in helping extinguish the fires. The initial attack by six bombers was followed up by a two-hour assault by a total of forty-seven Japanese planes. Through a combination of good fortune and brilliant
seamanship
, the
Empire Star
somehow avoided the bombs and made its way safely to West Java. Eight months later, the
Empire Star
finally met her end, torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. Among the casualties was Cadet Raymond Perry, who was last seen onboard a lifeboat that disappeared at sea.

After escaping from Singapore, Albert Riddle was taken to
Indonesia
, then to Colombo in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. After a period of rest, he was sent to the Maldives, where he worked on a small supply ship. The twenty-seven-man crew were given the task of supplying the Royal Navy positions around an atoll, which was defended to prevent its use by the Japanese. Though the job was boring, and he never saw a woman in the whole sixteen months he was there, Albert relaxed and was able to clear his mind. After a year of danger and disaster on a battleship, it was exactly what he needed. He eventually returned to England in 1944, just in time for D-Day, and was posted to a warship supporting the invasion.

In March 1942 Royal Marine Bugle Boy Len Chester left HMS
Iron Duke
and returned to Eastney Barracks. Three years earlier he had been a new boy, uncertain of what to do and how to behave. He returned as a veteran, a sixteen year old who the younger recruits looked up to as ‘an old soldier with many a tale to tell'.
2
He knew how to clean and polish, could strip his bed with ease and had earned badges of which the young recruits still dreamed: ‘We lorded it over the new recruits coming in. We were “old seamen”. We knew the ropes.' For the next six months his time was filled with parades and fundraising events in which he played with the band. One of boys still
training when Len returned to Eastney was Robin Rowe, who had volunteered aged thirteen following the death of his brother on HMS
Hood
. He recalled how Len appeared so old and experienced following his two years on the
Iron Duke.
The new boys were particularly impressed by that fact that he was wearing a pre-war uniform and carrying pre-war equipment. It was a sign that he was of an earlier generation and the new boys could learn much from him.

In June 1942, now aged fourteen, Robin Rowe joined HMS
Howe
, a newly commissioned battleship. Prior to joining her, he went on leave and underwent the traditional rite of passage for boys going to war: his father took him to the pub and gave him a beer. Arriving at the ship, he realized the crew was to be a mixture of newly trained men and experienced seamen. As he went to board the ship, he struggled to carry his equipment, since he had two kits bags, the larger being just nine inches shorter than him. Once onboard, he went through the routine of learning the rules of living on a mess deck, complete with historical idiosyncrasies such as marines never sitting or lying on a mess table, whilst sailors were allowed. The rules were strict: never wear a hat on the mess deck; always wear a shirt at mealtimes; never touch anyone else's equipment; never clean equipment at the table. Heading out to sea, Robin Rowe quickly learned the realities of life as a Royal Marine. He learned that in wartime rubbish was only dumped overboard at night, so as not to alert enemy submarines. He noticed how the sea changed colour from grey-green to blue-green as they moved out into deeper ocean waters. The fourteen year old soon realized that the marines maintained strict standards in order to show they were different to the other services: they believed they could soldier as well as any unit in the Army and were just as good sailors as anyone in the Royal Navy.

September 1942 saw Len Chester, at the grand old age of seventeen, posted to HMS
King George
V. There was one pleasant change onboard the battleship. The
Iron Duke
had carried a crew of regular sailors and endured harsh pre-war discipline. On the
King George
V
many of the crew were ‘hostilities only' who would never accept the same harsh standards. Another good thing was that the ship was fitted with a tannoy. Rather than run around the ship sounding calls, he remained on the bridge and sounded the bugle calls into a microphone.

His first trip was a sea-going convoy to the Arctic, escorting merchant ships to Murmansk. They seemed to be constantly under observation by long-range German aircraft and under constant threat of air attack. His life became an endless round of ‘four hours on, four hours off' watch duties on the ship's bridge: ‘You didn't have time to think about the dangers. When you came off watch all you wanted to do was sleep. Then you have something to eat and go back on watch again.' The old world of precise creases and perfectly tidy uniforms had gone. To make life bearable they wore whatever they could find, anything to keep out the cold. After two years on a static ship, the winter seas were a shock: ‘The waves were as high as the bridge. You'd look out and see them. A forty-foot wave doesn't sound much, but every wave has a trough. So in the trough, the wave is eighty feet above you.' Even when he was off duty and safely ensconced below decks, he could not escape the sound of waves hitting the side of the ship. It gave him a sense of mortality to think there were just three inches of steel between him and a torpedo – and certain death.

His worst experience was when the ship encountered hurricane conditions en route to Russia, escorting Convoy JW-53. The ship took such a battering that even the men below decks suffered:

The experience gave him an enduring admiration for the merchant seamen who sailed the route:

HMS
Howe
sailed as escort to the same convoy, giving Robin Rowe his first taste of extreme conditions. All men were cleared from the upper
deck and all doors and hatches were closed to prevent flooding. Robin watched as the fo'c'sle was buried by wave after wave, sending a great torrent of water along the decks. He listened as the ship shuddered, its propellers coming clear of the water as they rode the tops of waves. He noted how it was almost impossible to use the ‘heads' since the downward motion of the ship threw him from the toilet seat in a state of near weightlessness. If that was not enough, a valve preventing the return of water failed, meaning the sea surged through the drainage pipes, soaking those seated on toilets. Whilst on duty, Robin stood on the bridge, marvelling at the sight, but shivering from the cold. All he could do was listen to the terrible shriek of the wind and pray the storm might pass soon. At one point, the temperature was so low that the bugle froze to his lips, tearing away the skin when he had finished his call.

During breaks between convoys, the
Howe
moored in Iceland, where the teenage bugler received his introduction to small arms. So far he had fought the enemy with no more than a bugle. In Iceland he was trained on a Thompson sub-machine-gun and a Boyes anti-tank rifle. The first time he fired the Boyes, he realized it was misnamed as its recoil propelled the boy firing it three feet backwards.