The World at War (13 page)

PILOT OFFICER WILFRID OULTON

Coastal Command

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties the techniques of over-water flying and navigation, and all the necessary techniques for Coastal Command were certainly being practised. But only in very, very small numbers and generally speaking they were steered towards cooperation with the Navy and not in the anti-submarine field, which was not part of the requirement laid on Coastal Command. You cannot switch from one role to another at five minutes' notice: it needs the development of equipment, the development of training methods, the development of tactics and it takes time to do all these things. So at the beginning of the war Coastal Command had a small number of very, very competent people and an enormous dilution of only partially trained people. So naturally the overall result to begin with was not what one could hope for.

VERNON MINER

I've no idea what the government paid for the tramp steamers. I should imagine they probably would have paid any price because we needed the ships, but I would suggest that they paid a lot more than the actual scrap value of the ships. I've no doubt that some of the ship owners were unscrupulous. Freight rates rose very rapidly because of the possibility of loss, but I'm afraid the increase in freights did not come the way of the seamen in the way of benefits and better accommodation. There's many millionaires who are around today who made their money through shipping in either one or both the world wars through the very high insurance on the ships because of the freight rates being raised and because of the possible loss of the ship, and through not paying sufficient attention to the upkeep of the ships, to the maintenance.

ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

Firstly, in these years before 1939 the U-boat was very less suited for the underwater torpedo
attack. We also knew that the British had an invention, the Asdic, with which they could hear underwater submarine already by a distance of some thousand metres in every case. It was true that this instrument picked up all the other noises, for instance the sea waves and the noise of their own ships. This made it difficult to find the noises of German submarines so the British Asdic had its advantage but did not make an underwater attack by a U-boat impossible in every case. Secondly, the German U-boats in 1939 had a higher surface speed than they had in the First World War; that is why they were on the surface more manoeuvrable than before, and that is why they were very appropriate for surface torpedo attack at night. The U-boat had only a small silhouette consisting only of the conning-tower and that is why the submarine could only be seen with difficulty during a night attack. Gradual development in communications meant the submarines were no longer obliged to fight alone, but they could attack together. This enabled us to develop the wolf-pack tactics which became very useful against the British convoys.

COMMANDER GRETTON

After a tremendous amount of discussion between the wars it was eventually agreed that convoys would be the
system used for trade protection. But unfortunately the ships set aside for trade-protection duties, instead of being used to escort the convoys, were organised into hunting groups and during the first few months of the war they spent a lot of useless time steaming many miles searching for U-boats without any success whatever.

VERNON MINER

The first time I was under attack I was on the wheel, I was steering the ship when the lookout reported that there was a U-boat on the starboard beam. The Chief Officer who was in charge of the watch ordered me to alter course to bring the U-boat astern of us. My feeling was one of excitement. This is it, I'm going to come home covered with glory – decorated – I'll strangle these submarines with my bare hands. Then the firing started and the first shell that hit the ship, the ship shuddered. There was a loud crack from it rather than a bang. There's a feeling that God is on your side but he certainly wasn't, and this is the period when it's frightening, the moment of truth. The order to abandon ship eventually comes and you look down on that grey North Atlantic, which doesn't look all that bad from the deck of a ship about twenty feet above the water but down at lifeboat level it looks rather ominous, and that's frightening also.

WILLIAM CLARK

Merchant seaman

When I saw all the other ships of the convoy going past and leaving us I did have a sickening feeling that this was going to be for a long time, because it was what I had done with other ships, like known they were torpedoed and we'd gone on, and I hadn't heard whether they'd been picked up. They always did say that there was a sort of straggler in the convoy that was picking these chaps up so I did hope that this was going to happen to us. But I didn't feel so good when I saw them all passing. Anyway, after a few hours
HMS
Sunflower
arrived on the scene and picked us up. It was quite exciting then getting on board and they made us as comfortable as they could because it was very crowded with other survivors and immediately you went into action. You was on deck at the time and before you could say very much you sighted this U-boat and attempted to ram it. Everybody thought we'd cut it in half. I was very surprised years later to find that it had survived. There was so much action during the few days I was on the
Sunflower,
depth-charges would make it ring like a bell, you know, and it was such a fragile ship it just seemed it couldn't take all that punishment. I had a really good view from the funnel where I took up my living space because I didn't want to be shut down below when the action started and I took to living by the funnel – warm, and you could move around and see what action was going on.

CAPTAIN THOMAS D FINCH

Merchant Navy, SS
San Emiliano
^*18

I had plenty of water, plenty of food so I wasn't worried on that score, but I had in the boat some injured people and no medical supplies. After a short while, to my horror, the first one to die was the young First Steward – he was only seventeen. He hadn't complained at all during the night of pain or anything. I went to him, took the blanket from him and his whole stomach had been ripped away, his intestines were hanging out. We had to bury him so we wrapped him in the blanket and slid him over the side and continued on our way. It was a terrible thing to have to do that. The next one to go was not long afterwards – he was in a terrible state, I've never seen anything like it as far as injuries. We buried him and carried on a wee bit and about ten o'clock we heard some sounds of an aircraft and sure enough one appeared very low and flew over us two or three times and opened the bomb doors and was trying to signal to us but we couldn't make out what he meant. I tried to signal back to him that I wanted medical supplies, pointing to the other injured people that were lying in the boat wrapped up, I wanted help for them, and he waved his hand and seemed to understand and came back later and dropped a wooden cask of water and as soon as it hit the sea it burst so we signalled to him that was no use and off he went again. We did use the parachute: we cut strips up because most of us were naked, we just had wisps of clothing left on, and we used the parachute cloth to soak in the sea water and bind these burns up to keep them cool and moist, and to make a shelter over the wounded just to keep the sun from them. Just about dusk he appeared again and this time he dropped what seemed to us a milk can and this had some food and some cigarettes but no medical supplies. But there was a message to say help was coming so we thought let's hope it does. We continued on our way and shortly after the Second Officer died, this must have been about eleven o'clock and we put him over the side the same as the others. By this time it was a boat-load of misery, pain and death. The young Senior Apprentice was terribly burned and he was singing away but I think this was more or less in an unconscious sort of way. He was singing with the hope of raising the morale of the people but he died about midday.

LIEUTENANT RAYMOND HART

Commanding destroyer HMS
Vidette

The ship I was commanding was designed for the North Sea and for short World War One sorties by the Grand Fleet. She was certainly not designed for the Atlantic weather. One had to handle her very carefully in bad weather – it was extremely worrying with very heavy seas and I've known occasions where one literally had not been able to turn the ship around when she had very little fuel, with a very small metacentric height. On one occasion I found myself five miles from the convoy in the morning as I didn't dare risk turning round at night for fear of literally broaching to. The other anxiety in a ship that age was the metal fatigue we suffered. Frequently the plates used to split a little – it wasn't particularly dangerous but on one occasion I had only forty tons of usable fuel because salt water got into the fuel tanks.

SEAMAN BUTLER

One particular instance I remember when we went over during the winter and the spray and the seas were coming over and it was freezing – the ice was freezing on everything on the upper deck and the captain had to turn all hands to chip it off because it was fast becoming over top weight and there was a very severe danger of the ship capsizing. So we had to work during the night, in complete darkness as well, to get the ice off.

COMMANDER GRETTON

Convoy
defence is not a very glamorous affair and between the wars, I think rather naturally, the Navy were inclined to concentrate on more glamorous activities like great mass torpedo attacks and that sort of thing. All the information about the lessons of World War One were available and for those who bothered to read them the lessons were there. But I'm afraid no one bothered and as a result trade defence as a whole was very badly neglected. It's easy to say this now, but I was as bad as anyone else at the time and I speak entirely in the light of hindsight.

ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

As the war against England had come contrary to the wishes of our political leaders, now we had to do everything to create our missing naval armament for a sea war against England. When the war began we only had twenty-six submarines which were able to go far into the Atlantic Ocean, of these boats only one-third on average would be operating in the Atlantic, because the other boats would be sailing to or from port or at home being repaired. With this small number any decisive success was not possible. That's why it was necessary for the building of submarines to get first place in the German armament plan. But this was not done in spite of all the requests made by Admiral Raeder, Chief of the German Navy. So in February 1941 we still only had twenty-two submarines which could go in to the Atlantic Ocean because our construction of new U-boats had not even replaced the losses we suffered in the war so far.

PILOT OFFICER OULTON

Coastal Command stations were sited on the outer edges of the land – in Cornwall, in Iceland, on little islands off Scotland, in Northern Ireland – and they were all in remote cow pastures with a village alongside, a little cluster of Nissen huts, a runway which was often not adequate and not very good support facilities. So the crews were living under poorish conditions despite the efforts of the administrative staff and operating without the aids which today you would expect aviation to have. So the problems of simply getting to the patrol area and back again, never mind any interference with the enemy, were daunting and really a triumph every time a sortie was accomplished. And particularly for young and inexperienced aircrew this was really a very severe task indeed. As time went on they became more skilful and better equipment was brought in. Navigation aids were introduced – the introduction of radar helped a great deal – and with improved training it took about three years to reach a reasonable standard of performance.

LIEUTENANT HART

I think that if the weather was reasonably good one didn't have very much on one's mind except to ensure that the crew were as well looked after as possible. We exercised action stations and our communications were good, and the next anxiety was when one had to refuel at sea. This was an art we hadn't developed very seriously before the war. I think it was something we neglected and it was quite an operation and quite an evolution. This certainly worried me very considerably: if one hadn't got fuel one would just have got stuck in the Atlantic and have to be towed home, so this was an operation we began to worry about twenty-four hours before it happened.

COMMANDER GRETTON

It took nearly two years before we had anything like the right sort of cooperation between ships and aircraft, which was inexcusable. It was a disgrace and a tragedy that so many ships were sunk and so many lives were lost unnecessarily during those first few years.

CAPTAIN WILLIAM EYTON-JONES

Merchant Navy, SS
Ben Vrachie

I don't think the Merchant Navy's role was recognised – it's a silent service. We lost one out of every three men and without them this nation wouldn't have survived more than three or four months. They did a wonderful job of work and I can't praise them highly enough, wonderful people. Sometime after, on another ship I was rejoined by the old boatswain and other men from the lifeboat and I asked, 'How was it you all came back with me, you men from the lifeboat?' He said, 'Captain, if you hadn't done right we wouldn't be here.' It shows you how these men relied on you and trusted you; it was a great thing to think about.

CHAPTER 5
FALL OF FRANCE AND DUNKIRK

The Phoney War ended on 10 May 1940 when the Germans launched the latest version of the much amended invasion plan 'Case Yellow'. In its final form (informally termed 'sickle-cut' or 'Sickle Stroke') this was intended to achieve a decision in the West by attacking out of the difficult terrain of the Ardennes to cut in between the Franco-British forces that the Germans knew would advance into Belgium once active hostilities began and the static Trench forces in the Maginot line. What has become known as blitzkrieg (though no such unified doctrine actually existed in the German forces at this time) sliced through the Trench positions covering the River Meuse and by 24 May the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the northern Trench forces were trapped against the Channel, principally concentrated around Dunkirk and Lille. A hastily prepared evacuation plan, known as Operation Dynamo, was devised by Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay in Dover. It included an appeal for all civilian vessels that were able to cross the Channel to help to ferry the troops from the beaches to larger ships offshore, or to evacuate them completely.