by Ian Dear
After her crew was replaced, the Marauder was stationed at Campbeltown. It was from there on 6 June 1940 that she went to the assistance of HMS Carinthia – a Cunard White Star Liner converted to an armed merchant cruiser (AMC) – that had been torpedoed west of Galway Bay. The signals that followed,23 passed through Malin Head on the emergency wireless to naval authorities, give some idea of the kind of emergencies that rescue tugs, and those they were attempting to assist, had to cope with:
‘Torpedoed by submarine in vicinity in position 53 degrees, 13 minutes N, 10 degrees, 39 minutes W,’ the Carinthia signalled at 14.20. ‘Unable to proceed. Submarine in vicinity. If planes can be sent to keep submarine away I think ship can be got in.’
The response was no plane could reach them before about 18.15, but destroyers and a rescue tug had also been dispatched. A periscope was sighted and fired at, and at 1435 the U-boat again tried to sink the Carinthia. The torpedo missed, but her crew spent four anxious hours waiting for the U-boat to attack again.
Then at 18.23 the first aircraft appeared and signalled: ‘Do you need help?’
‘Help is being sent,’ the Carinthia replied. ‘Am glad to see you. Last saw submarine at 1430.’
‘How long can you float?’
‘We hope to be towed into harbour as we are not making any more water.’
For the next five hours, one or more aircraft kept watch on the crippled ship, and at dawn the next day the first of four destroyers arrived. By that time the ship was beginning to fill aft, and the captain decided that the majority of his crew should be transferred to the destroyers, leaving a skeleton crew on board. ‘As most of the ship’s company wished to remain,’ the captain reported later, ‘the working party was in reality a hand-picked one.’
The transfer was completed at 10.35 and soon afterwards the Marauder appeared.
‘What possibilities of salvage may I report?’ she signalled the Carinthia at 11.11.
‘Fifty-fifty if weather holds,’ was the reply.
There was trouble connecting the tow rope, but at 12.12 the Marauder began the tow, working up a speed of about four knots, with a course being set for Tory Island, off the north-west coast of Ireland.
At this point, though water was slowly rising in the compartments abaft the engine room, the Carinthia’s captain still had hopes of saving his ship. However, he realised that if the water reached ‘C’ Deck, or near it, the position would become critical and he had three of his officers constantly monitoring the situation. One of them ‘visited the boiler room at intervals to keep in check by pumping the foot or two of water that was passing through engine room bulkhead at the electric cable glands. At one time, to obtain tools from a store room, he had to break down the door with an axe, and wade up to his waist in water.’
But it must have been obvious to the rescue tug that their efforts were not succeeding, for at 12.30 she signalled: ‘Should you fear she is going, endeavour to slip my rope before abandoning [ship].’
‘We cannot slip,’ the Carinthia replied. ‘You must make preparations to slip in an emergency.’
At 13.00 the trawler British Honduras arrived to render assistance.
‘Act as submarine screen at your discretion,’ the Carinthia signalled the trawler. ‘I should like you to remain fairly handy so that in case of emergency you could come alongside and remove the balance of crew I have left on board.’
The weather must then have started to deteriorate, for at 16.20 the Carinthia signalled the Marauder: ‘I think the position will arise when I shall have to temporarily abandon the ship without abandoning the tow. Should the ship stand the altered conditions, it may be possible to return. In any case I shall not be able to steer very many hours as emergency engine will be giving out. I will ask you to slow down when we leave.’
At 19.25 dense fog enveloped the area. Carinthia’s captain must then have realised he had no alternative but to abandon ship, for at 19.57, after requesting the Marauder by megaphone to slow down, he ordered the trawler to come alongside and take off the remaining crew, which she did. The Marauder continued to tow the crippled ship – perhaps hoping to beach her at the nearest suitable spot – but at 21.40 she broke up and sank in a matter of seconds in sixty fathoms of water. The Marauder’s crew would have been standing by with axes to sever the manila tow rope, and they must have acted with commendable speed to escape the tug being dragged under. At 20,277 tons, the Carinthia was one of the largest merchantmen to be torpedoed during the war.
The Marauder seems to have been one of those ships with constant problems. In May 1941, she attracted the wrath of the base engineer officer at Campbeltown who was also acting, on a trial basis, as engineer officer, rescue tugs: ‘As some three months have now passed since I was appointed Base Engineer Officer Campbeltown and additional for duty with Rescue Tugs,’ he wrote to the NOIC Campbeltown, Captain Addis RN, ‘I feel it a duty to urge that Rescue Tug Service efficiency is susceptible to considerable improvement.’24 He went on to claim that the Marauder, in particular, was a waste of valuable resources, ‘which amounted to adversely influencing the war effort’. This was, perhaps, over-egging it a bit.
The problem was a lack of guidance by a responsible engineer officer. It was a matter that ‘calls for urgent remedy or the whole of the rescue tug new construction may tend to suffer a similar fate. The Marauder’s condenser trouble, boiler salting, general piston rod condition, rusted-in tunnel door, savage treatment of towing winch ratio gearing screw, the absence of spare gear for fan engines, the casual abandonment of oil for stern tubes, and the disgraceful condition of spare gear generally, are conclusive evidence of long continued neglect of reasonable engineering practice.’
That wasn’t all. ‘The Rescue Tug Engineers, in spite of their RNR rank, are of the type known as working engineers, that is to say those who, customarily, are expected to carry out running repairs without the aid of artificers.’ They had to be given the opportunity to carry out routine examinations and repairs. Instead, the writer seemed to be implying, they went on leave, and that this had to be looked into as well.
The situation was obviously unsatisfactory, and the CCRT agreed that the trial showed it was essential to have two separate posts. However, as there was an acute shortage of engineer officers, there was no alternative but to leave things as they were.
Freebooter
The last of the Brigand class to be launched, Freebooter, was the only rescue tug to be equipped with ASDIC and depth charges, and so carried two additional crew, an ASDIC rating and a torpedo rating. Although she had a pennant number painted on her bows, which all warships of the same class had to differentiate one vessel from another, Freebooter also displayed a skull and crossbones on her bridge.
Freebooter’s commanding officer, Lt Lionel Greenstreet RNR, wore the white ribbon of the Polar Medal, a rare distinction Greenstreet had earned when serving as first officer aboard the Endurance during the 1914 Shackleton Expedition to the South Pole. After commanding Freebooter, Greenstreet was sent to Washington, DC in January 1942 as rescue tug equipment officer in charge of the US shipbuilding programme of rescue tugs for the Admiralty, which were acquired under the Lend-Lease Act the US Congress had passed in March 1941. Later he worked as an adviser to the Admiralty at Henry Kaiser’s shipyards on the West Coast, which built many of the famous Liberty ships, before returning to the UK in July 1944. That October he replaced EG Martin as Commander Rescue Tug Base, Campbeltown, when Martin retired, and was awarded the OBE.25
The prominent journalist and war correspondent Godfrey Winn described a voyage aboard Freebooter while she was helping to tow a 20,000-ton Admiralty Floating Dock (AFD) from one unknown port to another – no names, of course, it was wartime – and his book is an interesting example of propaganda.26 It is also interesting that the authorities decided rescue tugs were a suitable subject for Godfrey Winn’s expert pen. It certainly included some unusual facts: for instance, Freebooter’s eighteen-inch manila tow rope – one hu
ndred and twenty fathoms long and costing £400 new – stretched an extra nine feet in the first two days of the voyage.
Towing an AFD was a tricky business. Towing a massive block of concrete – which Winn graphically described as like being pursued by Tower Bridge – and controlling it in any kind of heavy weather, needed impeccable seamanship and a cool head. Throughout the war, it was one of the more exacting tasks of the rescue tugs to deliver these essential pieces of kit wherever they were needed. That included the other side of the world, and Brigand and Marauder were two of the five rescue tugs and two escort ships to take a massive 978 ft, 98,000-ton AFD from Bombay to Malta as soon as peace returned. The whole operation was aptly described, because of the number of ships employed, as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’.
Winn wrote:
‘I was thinking of the other trip I had done in one of these ocean-going tugs, far out into the Atlantic; of all the trips that these rescue tugs have performed in the war, salvaging hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping. I was thinking of the German aircraft that the skipper of one of the other tugs in our tow had destroyed by holding everything, including his fire, until the last moment. I was thinking of the tug, suitably named the Englishman, which gallantly went down with all its crew, in the course of its duties.26
The first incident Winn was referring to above was when the Seaman was bombed and strafed by a four-engined Focke-Wulf Condor bomber south of Rockall in January 1941. The bomb missed the Seaman, but the strafing wounded the second mate. The aircraft circled, and this time attacked from ahead. According to one newspaper,27 Mate Jimmy Ryan kept a watchful eye on the bomber while carefully rolling a cigarette. When it began its run in, Ryan lit his cigarette, opened fire at just the right moment, and knocked the huge aircraft into the sea.
A more recent description of this incident is less dramatic but gives an assessment of its importance:
By the end of January 1941, the surge in Condor attacks had sunk 17 ships of 65,000 tons and damaged five others. In return, the British had destroyed only a single Condor – the Fw 200 C-3 flown by Oberleutnant Burmeister – who incautiously decided to conduct a low-level strafing run on the rescue tugboat Seaman on 10 January. Although only 369 tons, the Seaman was extremely well armed against low-level attack with one of the few available 20mm Oerlikon guns, a 12-pdr and two .50cal machine guns. Burmeister was surprised to run into a wall of intense flak that holed his plane and forced him to ditch near the tugboat. He and two other survivors of the crew were captured and revealed under interrogation a great deal about Condor operations, which allowed the British to begin developing effective countermeasures. The tiny tugboat Seaman had not only struck the first blow against the Condor, but it had accomplished what larger warships had failed to do, and thereby set the Royal Navy upon the path of reversing the Condor’s ascendancy.28
One of the interesting facts that Burmeister revealed under interrogation was that German aircraft had ‘orders to single out ocean-going tugs for attack’.29 Unfortunately, these orders were carried out only too successfully when, in the second incident Winn mentions, the rescue tug Englishman was bombed on 22 January 1941 and sank with the loss of all hands. The day before the attack, she had been accompanied by one of the new Assurance class rescue tugs, Restive, but the two had lost contact during the night as the weather was bad. Stanley Butler, who was an engineer officer aboard the Restive, remembers that ‘about mid-morning the next day our wireless people picked up a message from Englishman that she was being attacked by enemy aircraft. The message was not finished, and nothing more was ever heard of the Englishman or her crew.’30
In fact, the Englishman did turn up again. German records reported her as having been sunk near Tory Island off the north-west coast of Ireland, and the Admiralty accepted this without further investigation. However, during the 1980s, while a survey was being carried out on a U-boat sunk in the North Channel in 1945, the remains of the Englishman, including her bell, were found nearby, some six miles west of the entrance to the Mull of Kintyre.
Awards and decorations
For his bravery under fire, Ryan was subsequently awarded the George Medal; and for his seamanship Seaman’s captain, Lt-Commander Owen Jones RNR, received the OBE.
There was, as the war progressed, considerable dissatisfaction about awarding civilian decorations to Merchant Navy personnel. In 1916, Merchant Navy officers had been made eligible for the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC), awarded for ‘gallantry during active operations against the enemy at sea’. However, when the Order of the British Empire was introduced in June 1917, and later divided into civil and military divisions, King George VI, in June 1940, approved that the civilian division be used to decorate Merchant seamen for acts of bravery, but not in the face of the enemy. In the case of the Seaman this was obviously nonsense – as it was in many cases – and Churchill, for one, strongly disagreed with this policy. While First Lord of the Admiralty, he minuted:
It is idle to suppose that civilian decorations are not regarded as inferior to military decorations or that newly instituted decorations [which had been mooted for the Merchant Navy] can have the same prestige as those which have a long succession of brave deeds associated with them. I regret very much that the DSO [Distinguished Service Order] and the DSC cannot be gained for acts of equal courage by the Merchant Service. The awards should be proportionate to the action and not to the status of the actor.31
However, for various reasons, including the case of Captain Fryatt,32 he agreed to continue with the existing policy ‘for the time being’.
Aware of the inconsistencies in the granting of awards, both the C-in-C Western Approaches and the C-in-C The Nore pressed for changes, and it is interesting but probably a coincidence that they commanded areas where the Rescue Tug Service was most active. However, the Admiralty chose to prevaricate, being reluctant to abandon the idea that as the Merchant Navy was a civilian organisation and the Royal Navy a military one, they should not be awarded the same decorations – despite the fact that the Merchant Navy was serving under the Royal Navy and the Rescue Tug Service was part of it. The Admiralty’s illogicality became even more apparent when it was pointed out that the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM), the lower deck equivalent of the DSC, had already been awarded to twenty-four merchant seamen during the evacuation of Dunkirk.
In April 1941 Churchill, now Prime Minister, showed he was also dissatisfied with the number, as well as the type, of awards being made to the Merchant Navy. Having asked for figures, he scribbled in red ink on the memo: ‘Aim at doubling the number of awards and report to me when this is achieved, in order that a further advance may be made.’ In June, an increase was submitted and Churchill circled the number allotted to July 1941 and scribbled: ‘Good, but more are needed. Press on.’33
In September 1941, one correspondent involved in the ongoing debate also highlighted the discrepancies between the number of awards for the two services, pointing out that during a recent, and successful, operation involving six merchant ships, fifty-two awards had been made to Royal Navy personnel and only ten to merchant seamen:
It is true that the Royal Navy did the fighting, but the Merchant Navy personnel, under the orders of the Navy, took, I think, more than a ‘civilian’ risk. However that may be I feel that the above is the line of criticism we may expect to have, and if it is made publicly, it can only be harmful to the feeling between the Merchant Navy and Royal Navy, and that is what I am concerned about.34
Eventually, the Admiralty was forced to concede, and it also agreed that Merchant Navy personnel could be ‘mentioned in despatches’. Later in the war, several DSCs were awarded to rescue tug officers and a number of officers and ratings were mentioned in despatches.
Notes
1. ADM 199/2165, minutes of the meeting held on 11 September 1939.
2. Lund P, Ludlam H. Nightmare Convoy. London: Foulsham; 1987. The title comes from a quote by Nicholas Monsarrat who was an officer aboard one of t
he escorts, and he based his novel The Cruel Sea on some of the incidents and personalities of this disaster. ‘Whenever I think of war, I don’t remember the happy things, but this convoy. It is my particular nightmare.’
3. ADM 199/1708.
4. ADM 199/905.
5. Williams J, Gray J. HM Rescue Tugs in World War II. p.37 (privately printed) and the wartime operations of HMS Javelin on www.naval-history.net
6. Williams J, Gray J. HM Rescue Tugs, op. cit. p.44.
7. ADM 358/1157.
8. Western Morning News, 17 March 1943.
9. This was not the first time St Olaves had run aground. In April 1941 while on passage from Holyhead to Bangor she bounced off several sand banks in the Menai Straits before grounding in Friars Bay. See ADM 199/1239.
10. ADM 187/5. Pink lists recorded the stations and movements of Allied and RN ships, and were issued every three or four days. Red Lists (ADM 208) recorded the disposition of minor war vessels in home waters and was printed weekly.
11. ADM 199/1238.
12. Tennyson J. The Saga of San Demetrio. London: HMSO; 1942. pp.40–62.
13. ADM 199/1238.
14. ‘HMS Buccaneer’ by Jack Philip-Nicholson, Towrope 2008 (Xmas issue):23–27.
15. Harry Tate’s navy was the name given to the trawlers of the Royal Naval Patrol Service (RNPS) manned by reservists. Harry Tate was one of the best-known comedians of the era, so the RNPS, which did invaluable service during the war, was presumably regarded as comical by the regular navy.