The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  Undoubtedly, the Dutch were highly valued by the Admiralty, and for their work during the Normandy landings in June 1944 the masters of Thames and Amsterdam were mentioned in despatches, and the masters of Dexterous and Zwarte Zee were each awarded the DSC.38 The latter’s decoration was also for assisting the 6034-ton American freighter SS Antinous, after she was torpedoed near Trinidad on 23 September 1942, and for rescuing her crew after the freighter had been attacked for a second time.

  Notes

  1. Letter from Messrs JD McLaren to J Olyslager dated 8 October 1943. Courtesy of Willem Pop.

  2. Stewart W. A Mate in HMRT in Wartime. Privately published booklet, in DSRTA archive. p.2.

  3. ADM 199/1239.

  4. ADM 199/1238, memo from CCRT, 9 February 1941.

  5. ADM 199/1239. From Commanding Officer’s report, 4 June 1941.

  6. 13 September 1943.

  7. ADM 1/12332.

  8. The London Gazette, 9 June 1942.

  9. Ibid., 10 July 1940. The other commanding officer was Lt. GMM Robinson RNR.

  10. ADM 199/2134.

  11. Van der Vat D. Stealth at Sea. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1994. pp.202–204.

  12. Report of an interview with Captain JC Walker, ADM 199/2134.

  13. Strowger was a third generation fisherman from Kessingland on the Suffolk coast, and was Salvonia’s skipper in 1941 when she salvaged SS Royal Crown. He was awarded £19 salvage money, rather more than the 15/- he had earned as a fisherman for three weeks at sea. From a letter by a relative in an unidentified newspaper in DSRTA archives.

  14. This narrative is based on: Lund P, Ludlam H. The Night of the U-Boats. London: Foulsham; 1973.

  15. Masters D. In Peril on the Sea: War Exploits of Allied Seamen. London: Cresset Press; 1960. pp.96–97.

  16. When Light returned to civilian life he became an underwriter at Lloyd’s, owned a shipyard in Holland, and eventually retired to his villa on Mallorca to sail a yacht he had designed himself.

  17. ADM 199/1238.

  18. ADM 199/1237, 7 August 1941.

  19. ADM 199/1129.

  20. This report, written by Captain Louis (Johnnie) Colmans, is in the DSRTA archives. Courtesy of Mrs Elsie Colmans.

  21. ADM 199/1239.

  22. OB-318 will be remembered for the capture of U-110 by three of the convoy’s escorts. An intact Enigma cipher machine and other material was found on the U-boat, which proved a vital breakthrough for Bletchley Park in deciphering U-boat signals.

  23. Thomas D. The Atlantic Star, 1939–45. London: WH Allen; 1990. p.83.

  24. Morison S. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Vol. I. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press; 2001. pp.387–88.

  25. From a letter in Shipping, July 1991, written by ATM Hawkins, a signalman aboard Zwarte Zee. In DSRTA archive.

  26. Elphick P. Liberty: The Ships that Won the War. Rochester: Chatham Publishing; 2001. pp.212, 299.

  27. www.uboat.net has a detailed report on this incident.

  28. War Intelligence Report No. 189 22.10.43: ‘A Dutch Tug’s Record’.

  29. ADM 1/11425.

  30. There is a description of the Dexterous’ war record on www.worldnavalships.com/forums

  31. ‘HMS Buccaneer’ by Jack Philip-Nicholson, Towrope, 2008 (Xmas issue): 20–21. In DSRTA archive.

  32. Ole Wegger had an interesting wartime history, which can be found on www.warsailors.com

  33. ADM 199/1632.

  34. ADM 199/2165, 3 April 1942.

  35. George Corke memoir. Courtesy of Mrs Joanna Barron.

  36. Information from Dutch tugs’ logs in red file B marked HMRT in DSRTA archive.

  37. TDC meeting held on 19 November 1942, in MT 63/152.

  38. ADM 1/30115.

  5

  The Assurance class and the Battle of the Atlantic

  The first of the new Assurance class was launched from Cochrane’s of Selby, Yorkshire, in May 1940. Rescue tugs were desperately needed and the Admiralty committed itself to an open-ended building programme. There was no time to design from new. Instead, the class was modelled on the Cochrane-built Salvonia, which had been launched in 1937 and was the most recent ocean tug for which the shipyard had plans. Twenty-one were built, but were steam-powered as it was impossible at that stage of the war to obtain diesel engines. A serious drawback was that none of them was fitted with towing winches, which decreased their efficiency and quite unnecessarily increased the crew’s workload. However, unlike the Saint class, they were equipped with motorboats to take a boarding party to abandoned ships to connect up.

  At 156ft 6in overall, the class was slightly longer than the Salvonia, had a speed of twelve knots, an endurance of eighteen days and a displacement of 700 tons. Their armament was a three-inch dual-purpose gun, two Oerlikons and two Lewis guns. Their principal defects lay in their inadequate endurance and their lack of power for heavy, protracted towage. As one expert put it, ‘they were not man enough for the arduous task of towing large, badly damaged vessels single-handed through the winter weather of the North Atlantic. The fact that this was frequently achieved speaks volumes for the determination and seamanship of the men who manned them.’1

  Extreme weather proved too much for some of them: Adherent foundered while on convoy duty in the North Atlantic in January 1944 with the loss of two officers and ten ratings; and besides Horsa (see here), two others were wrecked: Assurance in Lough Foyle in October 1941 and Adept in the Hebrides in March 1942.

  Assurance, the first of the class to be commissioned, had a difficult start to her short career when in bad weather she was dispatched to find the 9568-ton freighter Fishpool, owned by the Ropner Shipping Company of West Hartlepool. The Fishpool was on her maiden voyage when on 14 November 1940 a German bomber deluged her with incendiaries, setting her on fire and killing all those on deck.2 The survivors abandoned ship, so there was no one aboard to help connect the tow when the Assurance arrived. Instead, the mate, Edwin ‘Tubby’ Turner, used the rescue tug’s motorboat and managed to get aboard the freighter and connect up, quite a feat under the circumstances. Later, he was given his first command, aged just twenty-one, almost certainly the youngest commanding officer the Service had. ‘Physically he was a large and strong man with a temperament to match when the occasion arose,’ a contemporary wrote of Turner,3 and we shall be meeting him again later.

  The Fishpool was towed safely into Greenock and repaired. She was the latest addition to what was known as ‘Ropner’s Navy’, so called because of the impressive record of the firm’s ships striking back at their attackers. The nickname originated from the First World War when the Ropner freighter Wandy, after a fight that lasted three-quarters of an hour, sank a U-boat with her single gun. But it wasn’t until the Second World War that the phrase became common currency. In November 1939, the House of Commons was debating how best to operate the country’s merchant fleet and one MP rose to say that the government should take total control of it. At once, Colonel Leonard Ropner was on his feet to oppose this suggestion (he didn’t succeed, the Merchant Navy came under the Admiralty’s orders for the duration of the war). Recording this exchange, The Times ended its report:

  He paid a tribute to help given to merchant shipping by the Royal Navy. Two of his company’s ships had been sunk by submarine; two others were attacked but gave such a good account of themselves that they disabled two German submarines, both of which were finally sunk by destroyers within a few hours of breaking off with the Mercantile Marine. At the Admiralty ‘Ropner’s Navy’ was almost as well known as that of his Majesty (Laughter and cheers).4

  In the First World War, Ropner’s lost twenty-one of its fleet of fifty-seven ships; between 1939 and 1945 it lost thirty-four of its fleet of forty-five, with the loss of more than six hundred men. A prime example of the heavy losses suffered by the Merchant Navy during both world wars.

  The last of the Assurance class, Sesame, was launched in October 1943, by which time t
he others had been distributed to all parts of the world. Two of them, Tenacity and Frisky, were stationed at St John’s, Newfoundland. They were chosen because of the strength of their bows, essential when rescue work was conducted where pack ice was common, and the Admiralty War Diary5 for January 1943 shows a glimpse of just how hazardous operating so far north could be.

  In November 1942, the American motor tanker Brilliant, bound for Belfast in convoy SC-109, was torpedoed but managed to make St John’s. She was patched up and was being towed by the Frisky to Sydney, Cape Breton, for permanent repairs when a gale – combined with a blinding snowstorm – sprang up, and on 20 January the tanker broke in two. The fore part sank immediately, taking with it eleven of the crew, and that day’s War Diary notes that the escort signalled that she was unlikely to be able to keep in touch with the tanker’s remains during the night and that Frisky was ‘not in company’. An Admiralty report duly recorded that the escort had lost touch ‘at 2100 and proceeded to St John’s short of water and badly iced up. On 1230Z/21 she reported that Frisky was ice-bound and unnavigable and had to run before the sea; her main wireless apparatus was iced up.’5

  The stern section of Brilliant, with thirty-three men aboard, was adrift for several days before the Frisky found it after the weather moderated. She rescued those aboard the wreck, and managed to get a tow line aboard, but on 25 January she was given permission to sink it with gunfire as it was a hazard to navigation.5

  Service off Newfoundland

  St John’s was Newfoundland’s principal harbour. A narrow entrance made it easily defended with boom defence nets, but difficult to enter when towing a large ship. Anchored in the harbour was a captured German tanker, renamed RFA Empire Salvage, which was used to refuel the rescue tugs based there. When both rescue tugs were in harbour, one was on twenty minutes’ notice, the other at four hours’ notice, alternating daily. If one was called out, the other went on to twenty minutes’ notice until the first returned, or she was herself called out.

  St John’s was close to the departure points of the Atlantic convoys, now being attacked by U-boats having a second ‘Happy Hour’ off the east coast of the United States. When Tenacity returned to Campbeltown after her first tour there, her wardroom was decorated with twenty-four small flags representing the two dozen British, American, Danish and Norwegian ships she had towed to safety.

  One of the first she assisted, on 30 March 1942, was the tanker Imperial Transport, which, it will be remembered, had returned to service with a new bow after being torpedoed in February 1940. This time, while in convoy ON-77, the tanker, which was in ballast, was hit by two torpedoes on the port side. At the time she was about five hundred and thirty miles east of Newfoundland, and she was towed to St John’s by one of the convoy’s Canadian escorts. She was then handed over to a tender and a small tug to take her through the narrow harbour entrance. The only available tow line was connected to the tanker but this broke, and Tenacity was dispatched from the harbour to finish the job.

  It was a tricky operation, as the heavy swell that was running made it impossible, until the last minute, to shorten the tow in order to take the tanker safely through the narrow entrance. Doing this took time – remember, it all had to be done by hand – and needed fine judgement to keep the tow under control so that the ship did not end up aground and blocking the entrance. The truth was that Tenacity should have been equipped with a modern towing winch, something her commanding officer, Lt AM Leckie RNR, did not fail to point out in his report.6

  Another British tanker the Tenacity towed in was the 10,627-ton GS Walden, part of convoy ON-115, attacked by a wolf-pack about three hundred miles from St John’s in early August 1942. The convoy’s commodore took evasive action by ordering a series of sharp course changes, but one of the convoy’s columns could not follow the manoeuvre and ‘romped’ away from the other ships. The U-boats focused on them, sinking one and damaging two others, one of them GS Walden. She was torpedoed in the boiler room, flooding her engine room and disabling her steerage gear.

  A sudden deterioration in the visibility saved her from the U-boat’s coup de grâce and she was taken in tow by two Canadian warships. They towed her for thirty-four hours, but only managed to cover fifty miles before the Tenacity arrived on the scene. Lt William McNaughton RNR was now in command, as Leckie had recently been promoted to lieutenant-commander and appointed maintenance officer rescue tugs at the expanded rescue tug base at St John’s. McNaughton immediately took over the tow and within seventy-two hours had brought the damaged ship two hundred and fifty miles safely into St John’s. It was a good example of how powerful modern rescue tugs were needed on these occasions.7

  Tenacity’s highest profile operation during her time at Newfoundland was to tow in the crippled US Coast Guard cutter Campbell. Campbell had been transferred to the US Navy as a convoy escort and was one of the first American warships to be fitted with ‘huff-duff’, which was of such value in the fight against U-boats. In February 1943, she was escorting a westbound convoy, ON-166, when she became a casualty during one of the seminal convoy battles of the war. At the time there was the highest-ever concentration of U-boats in the North Atlantic, one hundred and twenty of them, and two wolf-packs totalling fourteen U-boats attacked the convoy, having been alerted to its position by B-Dienst.

  On 22 February, Campbell spotted a U-boat on her radar, which had been damaged by an earlier depth charge attack and forced to surface. Campbell closed the contact and opened fire before ramming it. The U-boat sank, but in doing so ripped the cutter’s hull open below the waterline, flooding her engine room and cutting all power. Campbell lay helpless, wallowing in the swell, and the Tenacity was dispatched from St John’s to bring her in, steaming the eight hundred and fifty miles to the cutter without an escort, as none was available.

  ‘Ignoring the signal that there were other U-boats in the vicinity,’ one report recorded,8 ‘and that the Campbell should be left alone to sink, the Tenacity came alongside and made fast a tow line. It put its big modern pumps to work aboard Campbell; then, with the cutter in tow, headed to St John’s.’ The report concluded by saying that while being towed, the cutter was almost continuously awash, and the tow rope developed a layer of ice six inches thick. But Campbell was brought in safely. She was repaired and returned to service, and went on to have a long and illustrious career.

  Of the forty-nine ships in convoy ON-166, fourteen were sunk and seven damaged. One of those damaged was the Dutch motorship Madoera, which was lucky to survive when a torpedo almost tore off her forefoot. She managed to make St John’s under her own steam and was eventually repaired and put back into service, but it was one of the worst losses inflicted on a convoy during the Battle of the Atlantic.

  However, by the end of May 1943, the mid-Atlantic air gap south of Greenland had been finally closed and the deployment of the long-range Liberator bomber gave convoys air cover across the entire width of the North Atlantic. By then Admiral Dönitz had suffered such heavy losses that he withdrew most of his U-boats to await an improved acoustic torpedo. Once this was available, he proposed to introduce a new tactic: the convoy escorts would be attacked first before the wolf-pack turned on the convoy itself.

  Within thirty-six hours of returning to St John’s, the Tenacity again put to sea, this time to bring in a small sealer, the 684-ton Neptune, carrying coal to St John’s. It had run into trouble in bad weather some miles off the Newfoundland coast, and in an interview with a local paper McNaughton described what happened: ‘We saw her about 150 fathoms off our port bow. She was rolling very heavily. Must have been a 45-degree roll and the sea was breaking over her decks.’9

  He had manoeuvred to a position under the Neptune’s port bow to pass a heavy towing line on board her when Neptune’s captain shouted that he had no steam to work his winches to haul the tow line aboard, and McNaughton was forced to back off. ‘I had 100 fathoms of 5-inch wire,’ he said, ‘and I decided to take a chance towing him with it. It w
as easier to handle than the heavier lines and could be hauled in by hand with [the help of] our windlass.’9

  He closed again and, despite the high seas that were running, held Tenacity to within six feet of the sealer. The wire was passed and secured to her foremast, and the tow to St John’s began. McNaughton kept his speed at about two knots, as any greater strain on the tow could have pulled the sealer’s mast right out of her. They arrived off the harbour entrance shortly before midnight, and Neptune was allowed to drift while the wire tow was shortened for the run-in.

  Just as this had been done, shouts were heard from the sealer to come alongside. Tenacity closed and it could be seen that Neptune’s decks were awash and that she was, in the newspaper’s words, ‘just about done for’. McNaughton jammed Tenacity’s quarter up abreast of Neptune’s foredeck and her crew of twenty, plus the master, came sloshing through the water that was running across the sealer’s deck, and scrambled aboard. The last few had to jump from the built-up fo’c’sle as the rest of the sealer had become submerged.