The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  ‘Great volumes of oil started to belch up to the surface. My eyes started to smart and the faces of all the men swimming in the water turned a greasy black. I was caught by a searchlight for several minutes and saw two of my pals swimming alongside me. Later, however, they had cramp and disappeared . . . I swam and swam for I don’t know how long, but I must have gone about a mile and a half when I felt a rock under me. I scarcely remember what happened after that. It was like a nightmare.’

  14 October was the birthday of Paymaster-Lieutenant Harrison from Glasgow:

  ‘I was in the mess at two minutes to one when I heard a minor explosion. I was just about to open a parcel from my wife – a birthday present – but I replaced the string and went up on deck. Three minutes after I left the mess there was a violent explosion. I was pitched forward. Then there came another explosion. I joined a queue and was making to go overboard on the portside when there came a fourth explosion. I managed to get to a canvas lifeboat, but after I clung to it for a while another poor fellow arrived almost exhausted. I hoisted him into my grip on the boat and swam away. A piece of wreckage came along and I used it for a swimming support. Later I bumped into a log, and with wood support under both arms I swam to a drifter and was taken aboard. It was lucky birthday for me.’

  Lieutenants Fritz-Julius Lemp of the U-30 and Otto Schuhart of the U-29 exchange greetings at the Wilhelmshaven U-boat base. Lemp was responsible for sinking SS Athenia on 3 September, and Schuhart had sunk HMS Courageous on 17 September 1939.

  A dramatic photograph of HMS Courageous sinking after being torpedoed by U-29, off the south-west coast of Ireland. On hearing the news Churchill said, ‘We can’t expect to carry on a war like this without that sort of thing happening from time to time. I have seen lots of it before.’

  The loss of the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow came as a great shock to a nation which since Nelson’s time had taken the Royal Navy’s supremacy, indeed invincibility, for granted.

  Florence Speed’s reaction was typical, ‘As I left the station the posters said “Royal Oak sunk”. My heart sank.’ Up and down the country, Mass Observation diarists and observers recorded a welter of emotions on the battleship’s loss:

  ‘Terrible news about the ‘Royal Oak’. My mind flies to Bob, in the Navy. Hope like Hell nothing happens to him.’

  ‘. . . terrible, when you come to think of it. That’s when you begin to realize what a war means. Nearly a thousand dead . . .’

  ‘. . . three captured U-boats are nothing, compared to the loss of a boat like that.’

  ‘First there was that aircraft carrier, and now this: we don’t seem to be having a very easy time of it.’

  ‘. . . a shame. All those men dying for nothing, like that. We might as well make peace and be done with it.’

  ‘. . . so I said, and I say it again now, once they admit one defeat, you don’t know how many defeats they’re hiding from us. Them papers only say what they’re told.’

  ‘. . . we frankly can’t afford it. A boat like that costs more than ten German U-boats; we simply can’t afford it.’

  ‘Terrible thing. Terrible. We simply aren’t giving them our best. If we wanted to, we could smash them to bits in two minutes. There’s something wrong with the organization at the top.’

  While the British people were coming to terms with the ship’s loss, Prien was able to escape undetected back to Germany. There he received a hero’s welcome and the Knight’s Cross from Hitler. Four days after his exploit, Prien and his crew were paraded before the international press corps in Berlin. William Shirer was present when ‘Captain Prien, commander of the submarine, came tripping into our afternoon press conference at the Propaganda Ministry this afternoon, followed by his crew – boys of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Prien is thirty, clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi, and obviously capable. Introduced by Hitler’s press chief, Dr Dietrich, who kept cursing the English and calling Churchill a liar, Prien told us little of how he did it. He said he had no trouble getting past the boom protecting the bay. I got the impression, though he said nothing to justify it, that he must have followed a British craft, perhaps a mine-sweeper, into the base. British negligence must have been something terrific.’

  A view shared by Albert Hird in the Daily Express newsroom, who jotted in his diary the same day, ‘There is a devil of a row at the Admiralty about it. While all praise is given to the submarine crew the feeling is that it ought never to have happened. No U-boat got through the barrier in Jellicoe’s time although he hadn’t the help of the so-called wonderful submarine detecting apparatus.’

  When two of his colleagues thought that someone would be shot ‘over this job’, Hirst was scornful. ‘I disagreed with them to the extent of saying that whoever was responsible would probably be promoted to the House of Lords . . .’

  While the controversy over the sinking of the Royal Oak still continued in Britain, attention there and throughout the world now centred on another vessel. This was the American freighter City of Flint, which under the command of Captain James H. Gainard, had helped to rescue survivors of the SS Athenia on the first day of the war. Sailing from New York to Britain on 3 October, the City of Flint was stopped six days later by the German pocket battleship Deutschland, which put a heavily armed prize crew under Lieutenant Hans Hussbach on board. Hussbach told Captain Gainard and his crew, ‘We are proceeding as a prize to Germany. You will obey your own captain. My soldiers will obey me. Attend to the safety of the ship. If you interfere, I’ll put you in boats and sink the ship.’

  The Germans painted out all American insignia as the freighter made its way to the Norwegian port of Tromso. It arrived on 21 October, but neutral Norway, citing a royal decree of May 1938 forbidding captured ships to be taken to Norwegian ports, refused her entry. She then sailed to Murmansk, the port the Bremen had made for the previous month. Sailing back from there to Norway at the beginning of November, the City of Flint’s command was handed back to Captain Gainard, and Lieutenant Pussbach and his men were interned. Although a storm in the diplomatic tea cup, the City of Flint episode did much to swing both US public opinion and Congress towards favouring the repeal of the Neutrality Act, which could only benefit the Allies. For, as Elsie Warren recorded in her diary, ‘Only England can take advantage of this as she’s Queen of the Sea.’

  * * *

  Back on 19 September in his speech at Danzig, Hitler had spoken of a mysterious secret weapon that Germany possessed. Many, thinking it a bluff on the Nazi leader’s part, laughed it off. At the Finsbury Park Empire, comedian Max Miller came on the stage with his gas-mask cardboard box. He asked the audience, ‘Do you know what I’ve got in here? I’ve got Hitler’s mystery weapon.’ He then opened the box and, to roars of laughter, took out a German sausage. But it ceased to be a joking matter when, on 19 November, the press reported the sinking of the Dutch liner Simon Bolivar in the North Sea with the loss of eighty-three lives. This was the first of a whole series of sinkings, including that of the destroyer HMS Gipsy, attributed to the German’s new weapon, the magnetic mine.

  This ‘latest abomination of German savagery’ caused a tide of indignation in the press and even the usually restrained BBC called it ‘murder’. The Daily Express agreed: ‘Of course the German act is murder. Bloody murder. It is not war at all. Not even the new type of the war.’ While the Sunday Graphic urged, ‘Let us get on with the job of beating up the enemy that is doing his best to destroy us as well as peace and liberty.’

  But many now found it hard to work themselves up into a lather over this latest manifestation of ‘Nazi wickedness’. An anonymous Mass Observer noted in his diary on 23 November: ‘Have not noticed any symptoms of shock over Hitler’s new secret weapon – alleged magnetic mines and mines dropped from planes – these things appear to be cynically accepted.’

  But the reality of the mine campaign was ghastly enough. On the Simon Bolivar, Dr William Besson lost his wife, four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son. He drifted for fo
ur hours in the water with a broken spine and a shattered right arm after trying vainly to save his son. ‘I was thrown high into the air by the explosion as the ship struck the first mine. I smashed my spine and my arm as I landed on the deck. The ship’s boat we clambered into capsized and I was thrown into the water. Clinging to the wreckage I drifted for four hours. Then I saw a rope trailing from the side of a British destroyer. I caught hold of it with my teeth and clung to it. Then using my teeth and my good arm I gradually hauled myself up. I was too weak to shout for help.’

  Dutch shorthand writer Ella Lieutenant told a reporter, ‘I have had some training as a nurse, and helped the ship’s surgeon Dr Ebes, to tend to the injured. One was a child of seven months who was held down by a heavy plank of wood. There was so much oil over everything that we could not get a grip on the wood, and it was some time before we could ease the child’s suffering. The child’s parents were both dead.’

  Three days later HMS Gipsy was sunk. Lieutenant J.A.J. Dennis on HMS Griffin saw how ‘she blew up with an almighty bang and a flash of light. She broke in two right between the funnels.’ Dennis recalled, ‘We spent a dismal few hours trying to pick up survivors in the dark . . . Mingled with the cries of drowning men was the mournful tolling of the channel bell buoy. A fitting requiem for the first of our flotilla to go.’

  More fortunate were the passengers and crew of the Japanese liner Terukuni Maru, who were all saved when she was mined the same day. Helen Swailes from Aberdare, the wife of a Royal Navy chief petty officer, gave her account of the sinking to the Daily Express:

  ‘I was pacing the deck with my dog Nutty, thinking that if we were struck I was at least safe on the upper deck, when there was a shattering explosion in the forward part of the ship. Nutty jumped and yapped with excitement. We were immediately ordered to our stations. There was no panic whatsoever. The oldest British passenger on board, Mrs Huntley, aged seventy, was magnificent. To all passengers she said, “We must remain calm.” While she was waiting to enter the lifeboat she carefully adjusted her hair . . . Nutty was the first to leap into the lifeboat. We were under the care of a Japanese coxswain. I shall never forget that man’s behaviour. Although blood was streaming down his face, he gave all orders quietly and calmly. Within a few minutes we were taken on board a drifter. The crew gave us rum and coffee. Nutty wagged his tail in delight when he was given some meat.’

  By the end of the month, nearly 800 magnetic mines had been laid by surface vessels, U-boats and aircraft. Priority was now being given to counteract the ‘mine menace’. Fortunately, one air-dropped mine was recovered at Shoeburyness. Lieutenant Commander John Ouvry was dispatched immediately to examine it, ‘and when we got there, there was a black cylindrical thing with horns on its nose stuck in the mud, and very horrid it looked!’ By an amazing stroke of luck, Ouvry found the mine’s safety pin, and he and his team were able both to render the mine safe and find out its secrets. For ‘skill and bravery of the highest order’, Ouvry and four others were decorated by the King on 19 December.

  King George VI decorates Lieutenant Commander John D.G. Ouvry with a Distinguished Service Order for his part in the recovery of the first intact magnetic mine. Churchill wrote at this time, ‘when a sudden emergency, like this magnetic mine stunt, arises it is natural that everyone who has any knowledge or authority in the matter should come together, and that a move should be got on in every direction’.

  No posthmous decoration went to Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, commander of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi, sunk on 23 November in an unequal combat with the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Newly-wed twenty-one-year-old ship’s steward Harry Fleming had had only five days’ honeymoon before going to sea on the Rawalpindi. One of only twenty-eight survivors to reach home, Harry told a reporter:

  ‘The Nazis, I estimate, came to within 200 or 300 yards of us and fired at point blank range. One of our gunners scored three direct hits before his gun jammed. When he turned round to call on his mates for assistance he found them lying around him dead . . . Many men were walking or sitting about with severe wounds, refusing to go to the surgeons who were attending to the totally disabled. I saw one man with his arm and shoulder torn off calmly sitting on a locker smoking. When a burst of flame enveloped him he was too weak to get out of its way.’

  Harry was given a hero’s welcome when he returned home to Seabright Street, Bethnal Green on 29 November. He was saved when, as the whole ship blazed from stem to stern, he ‘was thrown into the sea trying to launch one of the boats. Four of us scrambled on to an overturned lifeboat, but gradually one by one the others fell off. Flattened myself against the hull, and when I was picked up unconscious the cold and sea had frozen my body to the shape of the hull. One of my rescuers said they had a job to drag me off the boat, so firmly had I fixed myself rigid with cold.’

  Another survivor, Royston Ledbetter of Stoke-on-Trent, tried to save his brother Jack, whose gun crew had been put out of action in another part of the ship. Royston put a lifebelt round his brother and took him to the boat deck: ‘I left him there to search for a friend. I had no clear recollection of what happened after that, but I did not see either my brother or our friend again. As the ship was sinking I saw a half submerged lifeboat about seventy yards away from the ship. Although, I could only swim a few strokes I jumped into the water and somehow or the other got to the boat.’

  Royston and the others in the boat were eventually picked up by SS Chitral. Kennedy’s taking on the two German capital ships was inevitably compared to Sir Richard Grenville and the Revenge at the time of the Armada. Many thought that Kennedy should have received the Victoria Cross for the action as ‘it was an epic fight in the finest naval traditions’. A view echoed by an anonymous survivor: ‘Against terrific fire from two enemy warships the poor old Rawalpindi had no chance at all. Soon the whole ship was in flames. Yet our men fought their guns to the very last as though they were on manoeuvres. They were great – every man of them. Maybe some people think that the British Navy tradition is some kind of fairy story. Now, that I have watched the Navy fight, I know better. The tradition of the British Navy is something far greater than can be imagined by anyone who has never seen the Navy in action.’

  But the Navy was not just taking punishment, it was giving it out as well. And only three weeks after the Rawalpindi action, came a naval victory which, as Churchill said, ‘in a dark, cold winter, warmed the cockles of the British heart’.

  The pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee under the command of Captain Hans Langsdoff had left Wilhelmshaven to take up battle stations in the South Atlantic a few days before war was declared. On receiving orders allowing for attacks on Allied mercantile shipping, Langsdorff began to sink British merchantmen in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Nine ships were sunk by the Graf Spee before it developed engine trouble. Langsdorff then decided to head for the busy shipping lanes of South America before making for home. And it was off the mouth of the River Plate on 13 December that Langsdorff encountered a British force of three cruisers, HMS Exeter, Ajax and the New Zealand-manned Achilles.

  Hitler, in the presence of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, decorates Lieutenant Guenther Prien with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for the sinking of HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow, 14 October 1939.

  Some of the twenty-seven survivors of HMS Rawalpindi captured by the Germans under escort to a prisoner-of-war camp. The Rawalpindi had been sunk in an action with the two German battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, 23 November 1939.

  Their commander Commodore Henry Harwood decided to split his forces and engage in battle. The eight-inch-gun Exeter was to draw the Graf Spee’s fire while the other two cruisers were to get in close enough to attack the German with torpedoes. Langsdorff, thinking that the British ships were just destroyers, ignored his instructions not to engage enemy warships, and went on the attack. On board the Graf Spee were twenty-three captains and off
icers of the merchant ships that she had sunk. Captain Charles Dove of the Africa Shell heard the order to man action stations sounded then: ‘I and my colleagues were locked up on the mess deck. The Graf Spee opened fire and the Exeter immediately replied. According to our reckoning the Graf Spee was hit at least sixteen times. We played cards, including bridge, throughout the battle. One shell exploded near us, and we kept splinters of it as souvenirs.’

  During the course of the battle Exeter was badly damaged, receiving over forty hits by shells three times the weight of those with which she could reply. Her forward gun turrets were put out of action, and her one remaining gun could only be fired by hand; sixty-four of the cruiser’s complement were killed and over twenty seriously injured; second-in-command Commander Robert R. Graham had fifteen pieces of shell splinter in his body. The dead were committed to the deep by the ship’s padre, the Reverend ‘Bish’ Grove, but there were insufficient Union Jacks to go round and some of the men were shrouded in blankets. In a bizarre contrast to the death and destruction all around, at the height of the battle the ship’s canary laid an egg. When it hatched out, the chick was raffled for sixpenny (3p) tickets, which raised £8 for the relatives of those killed in action. It was inevitably named ‘Graf Spee’. And Exeter’s cat Splinters survived the battle unscathed.

  Eighteen-year-old Seaman Tom Surkitt from Cambridge was the youngest sailor on board: ‘For two hours I sat behind my gun handing out cordite for all I was worth. Altogether we fired ninety-four rounds. We doubled our “action ration” of biscuits and bully beef as we piled into the Graf Spee. After what seemed an age we got the “Cease Fire” signal. I climbed out of the turret into the sun-shine, and I saw the havoc that had been done to our dear old ship. I saw the bodies of pals who hadn’t been as lucky as me laid in rows on the deck. I recognised two special pals lying there among them. That was a bad moment. Then I began to realise the magnificent victory we had gained. I felt proud of Exeter and everybody in it.’