Black May

by Michael Gannon

  Gretton exempted himself from that labor and crawled ahead at convoy speed, anxious about his fuel remaining, and deciding what to do about it. Because of the still heavy seas, topping up from British Lady was out of the question; and the weather forecast did not allow for any calmer surface ahead. What oil he had left in his bunkers was sufficient to make Newfoundland only at economical speed. If he stayed with the convoy, the likelihood was that he would go dry and have to be towed. If the enemy was still in touch, his powerless ship would invite easy attack. As for transferring his command of B7 to another ship and sending Duncan and her crew to St. John’s, that, too, was not an option: the appalling weather made transfer by boat or jackstay impossible. So Duncan would have to go, and Gretton with her—at a time, he grieved, when ONS.5 was still in jeopardy, and just at the beginning of a story that Gretton later would describe as “probably the most stirring of convoy history.”47

  At 1600, by R/T, he handed over command as Senior Officer Escort to Lt.-Cmdr. Robert Evan Sherwood in Tay, changed course, and proceeded at best economical speed, which was 8 knots, toward St. John’s.48 Though emotionally depressed—“thoroughly ashamed of ourselves,” he would say—Gretton understood rationally that the reason for his withdrawal lay not with any inadequacy of himself or his crew, but with the Royal Navy strategists and engineers who decided in the 1920s what ought to be the fuel endurance of a destroyer. In fact, that night and the next morning three destroyers of the Support Group similarly left the convoy because of fuel depletion, first Impulsive to Iceland, then Panther and Penn to Newfoundland. Also, on the 4th, Sherwood detached Northern Gem with her McKeesport survivors to Newfoundland. And at the same time, he signaled CinCWA that unless the weather cleared enough to make oiling from U.S.S. Argon practicable, he would have to detach destroyers Offa and Oribi no later than Wednesday morning the 5th.49

  Helped by unexpectedly fine weather and a boost from the Labrador Current, a disappointed Duncan made St. John’s with four percent of fuel remaining. Left behind in the sea lanes was a severely diminished convoy escort with four of its once seven-strong destroyer force already removed from the screen, facing now the threat that it would lose two more destroyers on the morrow. That would leave ONS.5’s escort a predominantly corvette force. And at just this juncture Tay’s asdic went out and was pronounced irreparable.

  But the new commander Sherwood had at least three reasons for optimism: for one thing, CinCWA ordered First Escort (Support) Group at St. John’s, consisting of the Egret class sloop H.M.S. Pelican; Commander Godfrey N. Brewer, R.N., Senior Officer; the River Class frigates H.M.S. Wear, Jed, and Spey; and the ex-U.S. Coast Guard Lake class cutter H.M.S. Sennen, to “Proceed at best speed through position 47 North 47 West and thence to reinforce ONS.5”; for another, the winds subsided to Force 6 and the seas abated somewhat, with the result that convoy speed advanced during a twenty-four-hour period from 3 to 6 knots; and, for still another, ONS.5 incredibly had passed through most of the dreaded Greenland Air Gap without sustaining a single attack.50

  Yet 4 May was a day when lifted spirits also had their troughs: HF/DF receptions, which had been for a while still, became active again and gradually increased in number, indicating to Sherwood that U-boats, whether from the last group or from a new one, were reacquiring contact from port bow and beam. Convoy ONS.5 was not yet beyond jeopardy.

  Sherwood’s credentials for leadership were longstanding and well-tested. At sea since 1922, when he served with the Merchant Navy, he joined the Royal Naval Reserve in 1929, became a sublieutenant in minesweepers, and served nine months on the battleship H.M.S. War-spite. While continuing a member of the reserves, he resumed Merchant Navy duties with Holyhead-Dublin steamers until the outbreak of war, when he took an asdic course, spent a short stint with the Dover Patrol, and transferred to corvettes, assuming command in 1940 of H.M.S. Bluebell, among whose fifty-two-man crew he found only three or four who were “capable of any real action of any kind at all.” In time he trained them to a high degree of seamanship and technical proficiency, and of himself he said that it was good training to have held command early of a vessel as difficult to handle as a “Flower” class corvette, a ship type that struggled against every wave and swell. The Bluebell, he said, “would do everything except turn over.”51 Advanced to command of Tay in 1942, he was assigned to Gretton’s escort group, with which he captained the first ship on which B7's Senior Officer Escort embarked.

  Described as being of medium height and stocky build, Sherwood framed bright, humorous eyes within a full naval beard. Not very well spoken, one of his fellow Captains said of him, and lacking in the kind of presence that Gretton generated, he was nonetheless a fine seaman whose command decisions were swift and firm. Though he was a reservist and lower ranking than Gretton, the Support Group regulars accepted his orders. On every fighting bridge there was confidence that Sherwood had mastered Gretton’s painstaking game plan of search and sink. Now, as ONS.5 groped toward the unknown, with HF/DF contacts growing more numerous, and with all the original B7 group that remained damaged and worn by bitter weather and a running fight, it would take all of that mastery to see the convoy into port. Sherwood’s concern would have been all the greater had he known that fewer than 70 nautical miles dead ahead as large a wolfpack as any of the war would assemble to meet him.

  * All times are expressed in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted.

  5

  COLLISION OF FORCES

  The Battle for ONS.5

  We have fed our sea for a thousand years

  And she calls us, still unfed,

  Though there’s never a wave of all her waves

  But marks our English dead:

  We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest

  To the shark and the sheering gull.

  If blood be the price of admiralty,

  Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  And two things have altered not

  Since first the world began—

  The beauty of the wild green earth

  And the bravery of man

  T. P. CAMERON WILSON

  THE DESTROYER, WITH ITS SPEED, armament, maneuverability, and capacity to keep the sea, was the traditional and deadly enemy of the submarine. The even better ASW vessel, the destroyer escort, was not yet available in numbers from American yards, where volume construction began in April. Much good could be said as well for the performance to date of the “River” class frigate (301'6” long overall, displacing 1,370 tons, speed 20 knots) and the “Black Swan” class sloop (299 feet long overall, displacing 1,300 tons, speed 19¼, knots). But the surprise of the ASW war was the smaller and relatively slow “Flower” class corvette (205 to 208 feet long, displacing 950 to 1,015 tons, speed 16 knots). These perhaps most famous of British ships of the war—fame engendered in great part by the fictional corvette Compass Rose in Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea—owed their name to World War I “Flower” class sloops that were based on a whale-catcher design and used in that conflict for minesweeper and utility duty.

  Their namesake successors, produced originally by the same yard, Smith’s Dock Company at Middlesbrough, and designed by the same naval architect, William Reed, were produced, beginning in 1939, for minesweeping and ASW work in the North Sea and Channel. Their immediate ancestor was Reed’s and Smith’s Dock Company’s commercial whaler Southern Pride, whose specifications were closely followed, though somewhat enlarged, because of that craft’s ability to keep the sea. In adapting for naval use an already existing mercantile vessel design, and one that was simple to construct, the Admiralty ensured that the new single-screw “Flower” class “corvettes,” as they were to be known, could be produced in non-naval yards throughout the U.K. Altogether 221 “Flowers” and “Modified Flowers” would be built in Great Britain and Canada. (Only one “Flower” exists at the date of this writing: H.M.C.S. Sackville, launched in 1941, which helped to escort convoy ON.184
during the fateful month of May 1943; fully restored, she is on display at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Halifax, Nova Scotia.)

  Corvettes, which, as Monsarrat wrote, “would roll on wet grass,” were not designed for deep ocean work, but that, ironically, became their primary service as Britain desperately sought escorts for her trade lifeline, and “Flowers” accompanied all but one of the non-carrier-escorted HX, ON, ONS, and SC convoys that crossed the northern sea lanes during the months of April and May. Though well proven as seaworthy in midocean escort, the corvettes’ lively dipping and wallowing in heavy seas placed a pronounced strain on ships’ companies. Said seaman Cyril Stephens of H.M.S. Orchis: “Sick … yes, that was the first baptism of a corvette…. It was like a corkscrew. About the third dip and you’d get tons and tons of water come over the fo’c's’le…. You had wet clothes on steam pipes trying to dry, you had water floating around all over the place, people being sick…. It was awful.”1

  Not restricted to courses that headed into heavy seas, to avoid damage or capsizing, as was the case with built-for-speed destroyers, the corvettes could show their broad beams to hard seas with ease and confidence. Not given to slamming, either, as destroyers were want to do in sea states of 5 and upward, the early short-forecastle corvettes did pitch and heave violently, and it was the resulting vertical acceleration that caused seasickness—in combination with poor ventilation, a dank ambiance, and the unbalanced diet of RN messing. As naval architect David K. Brown pointed out recently, vertical acceleration, which varied linearly with wave height, also led in its severe phases to impaired judgment and performance, hence impaired fighting effectiveness (although Sir Robert Atkinson, who commanded Pink, told the writer that he experienced no such adverse mental effects). In an attempt to resolve that problem, later ships of the original class were given a lengthened forecastle deck, extra sheer and flare to the bows, and various bridge improvements. The short length of the corvette had one advantage, and that was a small turning circle, assisted by a good-size rudder in the propeller wash, that enabled the ship to get her stern quickly over a submerged U-boat contact.

  The number of D/Cs carried on board increased during the war from twenty-five to fifty. Crew numbers similarly increased, from twenty-nine to over eighty. Endurance was rated at 3,850 miles at 12 knots on 233 tons of fuel, the average convoy run being 3,000 miles, though actual endurance was uniformly less. Throughout the war corvettes appeared in the so-called Western Approaches camouflage scheme, which was an all-white ship that merged with the skyline, on which were painted panels of light sea blue or light sea green that blended with the sea. The flower names that adorned these vessels occasioned some ribaldry among seamen in larger RN ships, but no one could doubt the stamina, fighting spirit, or comradeship of the men who sailed them.2

  A half-century afterward, Lieutenant Harold G. Chesterman, Captain of Snowflake, remembered:

  We were asked [when he and other corvette officers were serving as consultants to the head of Smith’s Dock] what was a corvette like? We said, “Well, for the first six weeks you know you haven’t a hope in hell of getting over that next wave, and then maybe, after the next six weeks, you think, well, maybe we will, and then after that you know nothing the Atlantic can throw at you will hurt you.” And he said, “Mr. [William] Reed will be interested in that,” and asked his secretary to ask Mr. Reed to come in. A venerable gentleman. And [the head] said, “Will you repeat what you said about the corvettes?” We were puzzled, but we did and this Mr. Reed said, “You’re being very kind to me.” And we looked a bit blankly at each other and he said, “You know I designed them,” which of course we didn’t, and he told us the story then of how he had been asked by the Admiralty, I think probably 1939, to design a highly maneuverable, small, anti-submarine vessel for the North Sea, five-day duration. And he was a very successful designer of ketches, and so he designed the “Flower” class corvette for the North Sea, five-day duration. And then they had to go into the Atlantic because the Germans got down the French Atlantic ports as well and he told us that he protested strongly, and said, “You can’t send them in the Atlantic, they’re far too short, you must put a minimum of thirty [more] feet in them.” And the Admiralty apparently said, “We can’t, there’s a lot of yards in Britain can build a ship two hundred feet long, but no longer, and so I’m afraid they’ll have to go in the Atlantic.” And so he looked quite surprised, when we told him how good they were. Uncomfortable and lively and wet, but safe. And it didn’t matter what the weather was, we could go up the gale, across the gale, down the seas, and when merchant ships were heaved-to with the wind on the port bow, or starboard bow, they could only run with it, we could go anywhere. They were wonderful little ships…. We never lost a man overboard in the whole of the war, not one man washed overboard from a corvette…. I had two Newfoundland lumberjacks, powerful men, one was called Charles the other Harold, and very, very strong men, magnificent eyesight. They’d go up on lookout, they’d sit on the cross trees, they wouldn’t go in the crow’s nest, they’d sit on the cross trees. Anyhow, Charles, I think it was, he was on the after depth charge thrower [one day] when one of the blokes on the for’d depth charge thrower [went overboard…. Snowflake] rolled, the sea came in, the sea went out, he went out with it, and Charles just leaned over the side and grabbed him as he went past and pulled him back in again, one handed. Very strong man.

  Chesterman deserves a word more here. Like Lieutenant Robert Atkinson, commanding Pink, he had served in the North Atlantic from the beginning of the war, first on an ASW trawler, then on the corvettes H.M.S. Zinnia and Snowflake. On Zinnia he was first lieutenant to Lt.-Cmdr. Charles Cuthbertson, R.N.R., on whom Monsarrat based Lt.-Cmdr. Ericson, one of the principal characters in The Cruel Sea. An event involving Chesterman also figured in the novel. Zinnia was part of the Escort Group 5 screen for outward-bound Gibraltar Convoy OG.71 in August 1941, when five U-boats, initially directed to the convoy by German Focke-Wulf Kondor aircraft, began a four-day assault on the 19th, sinking eight small ships from the convoy proper, including the S.S. Aquila, which went down with twenty-one Wrens and one naval nursing sister. On the 23rd, Zinnia herself was torpedoed. Her magazine exploded, and it was reported that she went under in twenty seconds. Cuthbertson and Chesterman were flung overside, where Chesterman swam through oil until he found one of Zinnia’s smoke floats for flotage. Even then, he despaired of rescue and was about to give himself to the sea when he thought of his wife Caroline and how much he wanted to see her again. Summoning the strength to hold on, he was soon after rescued by a boat from the corvette H.M.S. Campion. Of the ship’s company of eighty-five, only seventeen, including Cuthbertson and Chesterman, survived. Monsarrat, who was aboard another of the convoy’s corvette escorts, stated that the attack on OG.71 was his worst experience of the war, and his description of the loss of H.M.S. Sorrel in the novel was based on the Zinnia event. When Cuthbertson went on to command Snowflake, he requested Chesterman to be his first lieutenant again, and when Cuthbertson was given a destroyer command, Chesterman was promoted from No. 1 to Snowflake’s Captain. Upon his death at age seventy-nine in February 1997, a eulogist said of him: “Chesterman was a professional seaman to his fingertips. He had tremendous physical stamina, and was able to keep his bridge for days at a time in all weathers.”3

  Howard O. Goldsmith was Leading Sick Berth Attendant on Snowflake:

  I suppose the nearest thing we ever came to was on ONS.5. We had probably the worst trip weather-wise of any…. There were times there when the convoy was literally stationary because some of the merchant ships just couldn’t make headway against the wind and the sea. And although the engines were turning, the screws were turning, we were just sitting there stationary. And to give you an idea of what it was like, the upper deck was out of bounds. The skipper put the upper deck completely out of bounds. The only people allowed above decks were the bridge crew, and they were told to use the Captain’s companionway, which was inboard, to g
et to the bridge, otherwise out of bounds completely. This seaman was a Newfoundlander who’d been brought up on schooners, and he said, “Well you don’t get weather like this every day. I’m going up the mast, see what it’s like.” And he did, he went to the top of the mast in that sea, right to the cross trees, above the crow’s nest. And when he came down he said when we were in the trough he couldn’t see over the top of the waves. So he was talking, what, seventy foot waves, that’s big. And we had this for the whole trip…. The damage to the ship was incredible. People don’t realise the tremendous power of the sea, unless you’ve seen what it can do. But I mean, for instance, all the fo’c's’le stanchions, which were inch-thick iron stanchions, carrying the guard wires round the fo’c's’le, they were all bent at right angles to the deck. They’d just been as though a giant hammer had hammered them over to a right angle. One ship’s boat had completely disappeared. One was stoved in. Just the waves had stoved it in, smashed it in. We used to have meat lockers which were welded to the deck. They were on the upper deck to keep the meat fresh, no fridges, you see, and they were welded on the deck and to a superstructure above the deck, welded top and bottom, with wire mesh sides to them, so that the air could flow through, and after that storm, not only had they gone, all the meat had gone, and there were just the weld spots on the deck and above, that’s all that was left. That’s just the force of the wind, the force of the sea, carried all that away. Deck lockers that were bolted and welded down just disappeared, just went, we never saw them go. Incredible power.4