The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  As a result of considerable experience of rescue tugs in the Greenock Sub-Command, and after full discussion with Naval Officer in Charge, Campbeltown, I consider that the present arrangements for the administration and maintenance of rescue tugs in this area are not entirely satisfactory.16

  In his opinion, the general organisation of the Rescue Tug Service, as originally laid down, had envisaged a large measure of centralisation:

  [But it was] indefinite in regard to local responsibility. The result of this in practice has been that the Rescue Tug personnel are to some extent left in the air and do not know to what extent they are being administered by the Admiralty, the local Rescue Tug organisation, or the local Naval authority. Frequent complaints have been made recently by Rescue Tug Commanding Officers that they are now ‘nobody’s children’. Within the last few days a Dutch Captain volunteered the information that he was ‘nobody’s darling’. The large majority of these vessels fly the White Ensign and are Naval vessels and should be treated as such [author’s emphasis]. In the past, every effort was made to impress on the officers and men that they were an integral part of the Royal Navy, but this effort has been largely nullified recently.17

  He suggested this was at least partly due to an Admiralty Fleet Order (AFO) that had been issued on 28 January 1943.18 This stated that all engineering matters concerning the Rescue Tug Service would be divided into four geographical areas under marine superintendents – a term only used in the Merchant Navy – who would report to the chief marine superintendent at the Admiralty:

  Morale has deteriorated in recent months and the attitude of some of the more experienced Captains towards their administration is definitely critical. I would strongly urge that the administration of these tugs should be decentralized to a greater extent than at present, and that any tendency to organize or administer them as a separate service should be severely repressed.

  When tugs are allocated to a Command, the local Naval authority should be responsible for their efficiency and welfare, assisted by the Rescue Tug maintenance personnel, whose specialist knowledge is invaluable. Similarly, emergency repairs to these very important ships should be dealt with by the local Naval authority in just the same ways as any other Naval vessel, and should not be delayed for authority from London before being taken in hand.

  It is fully appreciated that many matters such as the allocation of tugs, appointment and drafting of personnel, and technical questions peculiar to Rescue Tugs, must be centralized in the Captain in Charge of Rescue Tugs, Admiralty, but as far as possible, the operational efficiency of tugs and the welfare of their personnel should be left in the hands of the local Naval authorities concerned.19

  The C-in-C Western Approaches forwarded this memorandum to the Admiralty with the attached note:

  I concur that the existing arrangements are not entirely satisfactory. Since the policy of sailing rescue tugs with Trans-Atlantic convoys has been implemented, these vessels become virtually a part of the Escort Group and work in the closest cooperation with their own attendant escort trawlers. This, in my opinion, emphasizes the importance of stressing the fact that these vessels are an important integral part of the Royal Navy [author’s emphasis].20

  As the C-in-C Western Approaches was no less a person than Admiral Sir Max Horton, the principal guiding hand in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, this showed unequivocally the commitment the Royal Navy had to the Rescue Tug Service. It was one of its own and should be treated as such.

  The new GNAT torpedo

  The policy of allowing the more powerful rescue tugs to accompany Atlantic convoys worked well if the salvage of a torpedoed frigate by a Lend-Lease rescue tug is a typical example.

  At the end of August 1943, Admiral Dönitz returned to the North Atlantic with a wolf-pack of twenty-eight U-boats. Some were armed with the latest version of the GNAT acoustic torpedo (T5), and with this Dönitz employed the new tactic of attacking the escorts before the wolf-pack turned on the unprotected convoy. The westbound convoy ON-202 departed Liverpool on 15 September and was intercepted by the wolf-pack five days later, shortly before ON-202 combined with another convoy, ONS-18, some six hundred and fifty miles out into the Atlantic. The battle lasted several days. It cost Dönitz three U-boats; six merchant ships and three escorts were also sunk. As the escorts were the primary targets, it was a poor return for Dönitz, but the score was slightly improved when one of the escorts, the frigate HMS Lagan, had her stern blown off by one of the new acoustic torpedoes, which resulted in her never seeing action again.

  The Lagan was torpedoed in the early hours of 20 September 1943, and such was the force of the explosion that her commanding officer later reported:

  A large quantity of debris was thrown high into the air and began to rain down upon the ship. A large tangled mass of steel, 12 feet by 6 feet (which was probably a part of the deck of the after provision room passage) dropped onto the fo’c’s’le head, cutting the starboard cable and causing other minor damage. Three depth charges landed on the boat deck, damaging the motor-boat, and the Carley floats. Pieces of metal of various sizes, and quantities of tinned food, fell on the upper deck, including a moderate amount of the compass platform.21

  The torpedo also caused heavy casualties amongst the crew and threw their bodies all over the ship:

  Shortly after the torpedoing, the body of a rating, whose action station was on the quarter deck, was found on the port side of the fo’c’s’le immediately abaft the breakwater. Another was found in the dinghy on the starboard side of the boat-deck. A further two bodies were found, one hanging over the guardrail on the port side of the quarter-deck and one at the forward end of the quarter-deck. The following day another body was recovered from amid the wreckage of the quarter-deck… Subsequent searching revealed a further body wedged amid the wreckage in an inaccessible position of vertical portion of the quarter-deck overhanging the starboard quarter.21

  Altogether, one officer and twenty-eight ratings were killed.

  The following morning, the Lend-Lease rescue tug Destiny, commanded by Lt RE Sanders RNR, which was part of ON-202’s ocean escort group C2, arrived with her trawler escort and, the frigate’s commanding officer wrote, ‘was skilfully manoeuvred close to the stem’ so that two hundred and ten fathoms of 5-inch wire could be connected. Towing commenced and good progress was made until the following evening when the tow line parted. The towing gear was recovered by the escort and Sanders suggested that connecting up again should be left until the morning:

  But as the weather appeared threatening, he was persuaded to try again in the dark. With further skilful manoeuvring a new tow was passed; at 0055 on 22 September towing was again commenced, satisfactory progress being maintained during the remainder of the day.21

  Inishtrahull Light was sighted abeam to starboard the following evening, and at 20.00 on 24 September the Destiny and her tow and escort arrived off the entrance of the swept channel to the River Mersey, having covered six hundred and eighty miles in eighty-five hours at an average speed of eight knots. If she’d had to sail from Campbeltown, where she was based, to bring in the Lagan, the operation would have taken twice as long. The C-in-C Western Approaches ended his report on the battle to the Admiralty with the remark that the Destiny ‘performed her duties very well in the face of numerous difficulties’.22

  Although not particularly successful, Dönitz persisted with his tactics of attacking a convoy’s escorts first. In the battle for convoy ONS-224 the following February, two of the convoy’s escorts, part of Captain Walker’s famous Second Escort Group, were attacked five hundred miles west of Cork when a U-boat fired its bow and stern GNAT torpedoes at them simultaneously. One missed Walker’s sloop, HMS Starling, but the other destroyed the stern of the sloop HMS Woodpecker, which had been credited with helping to destroy six U-boats and was an invaluable member of the escort group. The Assurance class rescue tug Storm King was dispatched and for a week nursed the stricken sloop towards Devonport. Howe
ver, the rescue tug was eventually foiled by the weather – as they so often were – when Woodpecker capsized and sank in a gale near the Scillies, though the skeleton crew was saved.

  Notes

  1. This 10,393-ton cargo ship was one of the cripples discussed in Chapter 8 after she hit a mine off Pantellaria in the Mediterranean in August 1941. She was taken to Gibraltar where she was torpedoed by an Italian one-man submarine, and had to be beached. She was refloated and drydocked for temporary repairs before being towed to Falmouth the following September.

  2. Lloyd’s Shipping Gazette, 18 December, 1944.

  3. Brookes E. Turmoil. London: Jarrolds; 1956. pp.10–11.

  4. Davidson B. ‘Warships in Dungarees’, Yank (6 February 1944): 10.

  5. Letter from Captain Bateson, 3 February 1943, in ADM 1/15352, as is all the other relevant correspondence quoted. The Lend-Lease diesel tugs did seem to have a propensity to break down, and Eminent caught fire twice.

  6. Signal in ‘Trade Division History’ in DRSTA red folder.

  7. Hull Daily Mail, 28 September 1942. Because so many volunteers for the Rescue Tug Service came from the city it was nicknamed ‘Hull’s Navy’.

  8. ADM 199/2165, 17 June 1943.

  9. From information supplied to Len Reed by Tom Osborne, who served as a galley boy, aged fifteen, in the Assiduous during the Normandy landings. Also Towrope 1999 (October)1:10. Courtesy of Len Reed.

  10. ADM 1/16284.

  11. See www.empiresandy.com for her wartime – and post-war – career.

  12. Letter from secretary, Rescue Tug Section, to Paymaster Rear Admiral Manisty, 4 April 1944, in ADM 199/2165.

  13. ADM 199/186 Loss and damage HM ships, 1944–45.

  14. ADM 199/2165, 2 March 1943.

  15. ADM 199/2165, 1 June 1943.

  16. ADM 1/15548, 17 March 1943.

  17. Ibid., 22 April 1943.

  18. AFO 331 in ADM 162/113.

  19. ADM 1/15548, 22 April 1943.

  20. Ibid., 2 May 1943.

  21. ADM 199/2069.

  22. See www.warsailors.com/convoys/on202.html

  7

  The Mediterranean and beyond

  On 10 June 1940 Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, declared war on France and Britain, having waited to make sure Germany had the upper hand over both of them. He invaded eastern France immediately and in September launched an attack into Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya to capture the Suez Canal.

  Opposing him at sea in the Mediterranean were powerful British naval forces, based at Gibraltar in the west and Alexandria in the east, with Malta – roughly equidistant between them – being a vital staging post. The island was of critical importance to the Allies, as it was from there that submarines and aircraft were able to intercept the convoys that supplied Axis forces intent on capturing the Suez Canal.1

  So intense were the Axis air attacks on Malta, and on the ships that supplied the island, it seemed that the island would be starved into surrender. Once North Africa fell to the Allies in May 1943 and Sicily was captured in August, Axis aircraft became less of a threat – though, as will be seen, they caused one of the worst tragedies of the war at sea in November 1943 – but in the early years of the conflict they closed the central Mediterranean supply route, forcing convoys to be diverted around the Cape of Good Hope. As a consequence, rescue tugs were based at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere on the Sub-Saharan coastline.

  From the start, Mussolini’s vainglorious attempts to build a new Roman Empire went badly awry, and Hitler was soon obliged to support his ally by dispatching aircraft to the Mediterranean and by underpinning Italian forces in Libya with Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Also, much to the displeasure of Dönitz, Hitler ordered some U-boats to be withdrawn from the Atlantic and redeployed in the Mediterranean. But while German bombers were ideally positioned to attack Allied Mediterranean convoys from Axis-held territory, and did so very effectively, U-boat operations were never as lethal as they were in the Atlantic – but lethal they were, as will be seen.

  The Italian Navy had between sixty and eighty operational U-boats, some of which patrolled outside the Mediterranean, but nothing like that number were active simultaneously and their tactical expertise, compared with the Germans, was low. German U-boats only entered the Mediterranean after September 1941, and rarely exceeded twenty at any one time. The tactics of both sides varied from those employed in the Atlantic: The confined waters of the Mediterranean precluded diversionary moves by convoys and the use of wolf-packs by U-boats, which relied instead on patrolling Allied convoy routes individually. At the end of 1943, the Allies began to employ ‘Swamp’ tactics where, if enough Allied A/S aircraft and escorts were close enough to make it economically worthwhile, a U-boat was hunted to exhaustion, a technique that by September 1944 put an end to U-boat activities in the Mediterranean.2

  Unlike the Battle of the Atlantic, the war at sea in the Mediterranean did not entirely revolve around convoys, as it was where the Allies first mounted large-scale amphibious landings. First, on 8 November 1942, they invaded the French North African Vichy-controlled (pro-Nazi) colonies of Algeria and Morocco. From there, the Anglo-US armies moved eastwards, and by May 1943 the whole of the North African coastline, including Libya, was under Allied control. An amphibious assault on Sicily followed in July 1943; and when the island had been liberated, the Allies moved on to mainland Italy, with one pincer crossing the Strait of Messina (3 September 1943), while the other landed at Salerno, south of Naples (9 September 1943). When these operations failed to achieve a swift advance northward, a third major landing was launched at Anzio (22 January 1944), south of Rome. Lastly, as part of the attack on Hitler’s northern European citadel, the Allies landed on the French Riviera on 15 August 1944.

  All these operations involved the Rescue Tug Service. Working with American rescue tugs, it escorted the convoys that supplied the men ashore, towed off stranded ships and landing craft, and removed to safety warships that had been damaged during the pre-landing bombardments and in the gunnery support they subsequently gave the troops ashore.

  Gibraltar’s rescue tugs

  One of the earliest U-boat successes in the Mediterranean was sinking the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which was torpedoed thirty miles from Gibraltar on 13 November 1941. She took on an immediate list of ten degrees, which quickly increased to eighteen degrees, and the captain ordered an accompanying destroyer to take off most of the crew, including the animals aboard. The canaries were let out of their cages and made their way to land, and an enormous ginger tomcat was taken aboard the destroyer in the arms of a marine. Counter-flooding reduced the list, and gradually steam was raised. The Dutch rescue tug Thames arrived from Gibraltar in the evening, after returning from a vain attempt to tow in the destroyer HMS Cossack, which had been torpedoed west of Gibraltar.

  The Thames connected to the carrier, and soon the ‘Ark’ was making two knots towards Gibraltar, though unfortunately there was a one-knot current running against her. The arrival of the Saint class rescue tug St Day from Gibraltar soon afterwards raised hopes that Gibraltar could be reached, but in the early hours of the following morning a fire broke out in the port boiler room, bringing all salvage work to a standstill. The carrier’s list increased again, and soon reached twenty-seven degrees, and the fire continued to rage. When all hope had gone of saving the ship, every available rope was taken forward and secured inboard, abreast of the St Day, so that the two hundred and fifty men on board could leave quickly and cross the rescue tug to reach a destroyer, which was also helping with the tow. This was safely accomplished and shortly afterwards the ‘Ark’ turned turtle. She remained bottom up for some minutes and then sank from sight.3

  The St Day spent most of the war at Gibraltar, and her time there was clearly recalled by a member of the crew, Charlie Ghent, one of the 215 Newfoundlanders who volunteered for the Rescue Tug Service:

  I joined St Day in Gibraltar in April 1942. We ‘dodged’ behind the Malta
convoys, and also patrolled the Straits of Gibraltar checking what cargoes ships had. The shipping was mostly Spanish.4

  After the North African landings, Charlie remembered:

  [St Day] spent some time towing landing craft off the beaches after troops had been landed ashore. Xmas day was spent in Algiers. On to Philippeville docking ships in the harbour. On New Year’s Eve we towed a tanker that had beached trying to get into Bougie harbour. After securing the tanker to the docks, it was bombed that night. We spent the next day pouring water on to her to put out the fires.

  We spent some time docking ships in Bougie and then Bône. Where we were docked in Bône the Captain decided to move the St Day to the next dock round the corner to make it easier for sailing the next day. We were having dinner when an air raid started. A German plane was shot down by a Spitfire and crashed into the water where the St Day had been berthed before we moved her!

  While at Bône we had a ‘near miss’ when a bomb exploded alongside us. It caused a crack in the bunker tank so we kept the pumps going as we returned to Gibraltar in convoy. On the way a torpedo crossed our bows and hit a merchant ship. We picked up all 30 crew who were later transferred to a destroyer and taken to Gibraltar.4

  The St Day was part of the naval forces supporting the North African landings on 8 November 1942. One of the ships she assisted was the American attack transport USS Thomas Stone, which had been hit aft by an aerial torpedo on 7 November while bound for the Algiers’ beaches with tanks and fourteen hundred troops. Rudderless, but in no danger of sinking, the Thomas Stone launched her landing craft and sent all but two of them, loaded with troops, to the Algiers’ landing beaches one hundred and forty miles away. The convoy corvette assigned to protect her went with them, leaving the two remaining landing craft to circle round the damaged transport ship as an anti-submarine screen.