Remarkably, our captain allowed Lord Haw Haw’s weekly ravings to be played over Valiant’s loudspeaker system, known as the tannoy. We’d hear a sharp click as the tannoy came alive, there’d be a brief hiss of static, and then an exaggerated plum-in-the-mouth voice would try to put the wind up us.
‘Oh, I see that HMS Valiant is making ready to go to sea now,’ Lord Haw Haw would say. ‘Well, we’ll be waiting for you when you get out to sea, boys.’
‘Bullshit!’ we would yell in unison, and follow up with cheers, whistles and crude insults.
‘We’ll be watching everything you do. Absolutely everything,’ the traitor said.
‘Bullshit! Turn the bastard off!’
We thought it was hilarious. No way was he going to frighten a bunch of 18-year-olds about to sail off on their first great adventure. We dismissed Joyce as a fool who’d chosen the wrong side. Apprehension lurked in each of us, though. But it was just butterflies in the stomach. There wasn’t any fear.
At last the great moment came. Shepherded by a reassuring group of destroyers, we steamed out of Plymouth Sound one night into the English Channel, heading west into the unknown. I was on duty with five other lookouts on the bridge as we went out. I couldn’t believe it. Only a few months before I’d been at home in Liverpool, living an ordinary life with my family. Then I was off to war on the bridge of one of the Royal Navy’s most powerful ships, rugged up in a seaman’s duffle coat with a pair of binoculars glued to my eye sockets. And goodness, was I keyed up! As the ship’s lookouts we had to report absolutely everything we saw, and woe betide us if the officers on the bridge spied something before we did. So there was an endless stream of calls from the lookouts.
‘Bearing red two zero five, a light,’ someone reported. That was probably a buoy in the channel.
‘Bearing green zero nine zero, a headland.’
‘Bearing green one seven five, a fishing smack.’ Although the war had started, the fishermen were still out there working in their little boats, braving the Channel at night.
And so it went on.
‘Bearing red two seven zero. A fun fair.’ Stunned silence followed that report from a young seaman called Glover. He was about my age.
‘A what?’ an incredulous officer demanded at last.
‘One very big fun fair, sir. Bearing red two seven zero, sir,’ Glover repeated. A stifled snigger or two rippled around the bridge.
‘I think you’ll find, seaman, that it’s a neutral ship with all its lights on,’ came the officer’s exasperated reply.
‘Aye aye, sir. A ship with lights, sir.’ I was relieved it was Glover who’d made a fool of himself and not me. Still, it was early days. Before long we became accomplished observers, our confidence rising as we settled into life on board our great battleship.
As we left the Channel and steamed into the Atlantic, the tempo of ship life grew faster. We were busy all the time, with every station on high alert, especially for submarines. They were the big worry, it seemed to me, and even as Valiant made her way westwards, our destroyer escort would occasionally drop a brace of depth charges. There’d be huge explosions as they detonated below the surface, sending up massive spouts of water. All false alarms. We took all this in our stride after a while as we slipped into the routine of our four-hour watches.
I was always dog tired when I stumbled off my watch, too tired even to unroll my hammock and hang it in the mess. I didn’t bother. I got into the habit of sleeping on a stool in the corner, tin helmet on my head and gas mask at the ready on my lap. I found it quite comfortable and far more convenient. It saved time because I didn’t have to worry about stowing and unstowing my hammock all the time. Besides, if we came under attack, I wanted to get to my action station fast.
There was still no word over the tannoy about where we were going. The tannoy’s click, hiss and crackle began to make us nervous. We never knew what was coming. Often it was a bugle call, with different calls for action stations, air raids, colours and so on. Sometimes it was just a routine announcement of some kind. But eventually the words we’d been waiting for were broadcast throughout the ship.
‘Captain speaking,’ came the voice of command. ‘We are proceeding for our working-up trials and our destination is Bermuda.’
The captain then told us what needed to be improved aboard Valiant. Our general preparedness was good, but we would have to be much faster getting to action stations. He reminded us that we were at war, which seemed to be stating the obvious. But at least we knew where we were going.
This is all right. My first ship in the Royal Navy and I’m off to sunny Bermuda. Sounds pretty nice to me.
But the work on board grew even more demanding as the ship and her crew went through their paces. Exercises went on, day and night. Calls to fire stations. Calls to action stations. Everything was done under the stopwatch and the officers were never satisfied. We had to do it faster, they said. Always faster, always better, always reminding us that there was a war on.
When they called ‘Action stations!’ I would have to bolt from the bridge and fly down a series of steep stairs to reach my turret on the port side. But while I was going down, hordes of other seamen were going up to their action stations, so everyone was jostling and bumping into everyone else in this mad scramble to beat the clock and please the captain.
With all the drills, we had precious little time to ourselves. But there were moments when I could just stand out on deck and watch the sea. It was incredibly beautiful, no matter what the weather was like, and I was awed by the power of the waves and the spectacular sunsets. Seen from the deck of a ship many hundreds of miles from the nearest land, those fiery sunsets were an unforgettable sight. I loved being out there with the sea all around me. I loved every moment of it.
On one occasion as part of our ongoing training, we were allowed what was called ‘a trick on the wheel’, the naval term for steering a ship. Valiant wasn’t steered from the bridge, but from a small room directly below it that was lit only by dim red lights. It took a while for the eyes to adjust to their eerie glow. A group of us were given our trick on the wheel under the critical eyes of the chief quartermaster and the chief petty officer, and my goodness it was a delicate business. The wheel was about the size of a car steering wheel and we had to steer the ship on the exact heading called down from the bridge by the officer of the watch. I was all over the place like a mad woman’s custard. I couldn’t keep Valiant on the required heading for more than a few seconds. The trick, it seemed, was to start the ship turning onto the required heading, then bring the wheel in the opposite direction almost straight away. This anticipated the long delay between turning the wheel and the ship actually changing course. I went back to my watch on the bridge to an earful of sarcasm from the other young seamen.
‘Was that you doing your trick just then, Mac?’
‘Yes,’ I said proudly.
‘Well, we were pretty safe while you were down there.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘You had us bloody zigzagging so much a submarine couldn’t possibly have hit us.’
I just grinned and ignored them. I’d been steering one of the world’s most powerful, complex machines. Not very well, but I’d steered it. Life was pretty damned good as far as I was concerned.
As we continued southwest across the Atlantic toward Bermuda, we sailed through the Saragossa Sea, an expanse of thick brown seaweed stretching from horizon to horizon. There seemed no end it. It flattened the sea so much it gave the impression that the ship was cleaving its way through solid land. Valiant took two days and nights to steam through this vast, gently heaving brown carpet.
We’d just put the eerie calm of the Saragossa behind us when a hurricane ripped the sea into a savage frenzy. I’ll never forget it. We knew it was coming well enough, but that didn’t prepare us for its ferocity. Valiant might have been a battleship of more than 30,000 tons but the waves treated her with contempt. She heaved, pitched, twisted and
heeled over with unimaginable violence. I was hanging on for dear life on the bridge, and I had to stay up there after my watch had finished because it was too dangerous to move.
The view from the bridge fascinated and terrified me at the same time. Those waves were easily 70 or 80 feet high, perhaps even higher. Absolute monsters. Valiant’s bow would explode out of the water as she came shuddering off the top of a wave, then go careering down the other side into a seething trough. When we reached the bottom we’d look up and see the next wave looming and rushing toward us. It would crash on the bow, submerging the foredeck and the 15-inch guns, then come thundering directly at the bridge, a fearsome battering ram of grey-green water that seemed to stop the ship dead in her tracks. The noise was horrific, a nerve-piercing, relentless shriek like the world had gone mad. On the bridge we had to yell to each other to be heard. I was frightened out of my wits and wasn’t alone in that.
Our escort of destroyers, all much smaller than Valiant, got pounded far worse than us and I’ve always been amazed that some of them didn’t go down. With the towering waves breaking over them, if sea water had flooded in through their funnels they would have gone straight to the bottom. Eventually the destroyers had to leave us to our own devices and staggered off to safer waters. They eventually found refuge in New York. So there we were, totally unprotected in that awful hurricane, but its fury was probably our protector. A submarine would never have been able to attack us in those conditions. A sub would have to run deep beneath the turmoil while any German surface ships would find it impossible to bring their guns to bear on us. Eventually, after more than 24 hours of constant battering, we came out of the worst of it. The ship was chaotic inside. We found the crockery in pieces across the mess deck and it took ages to get everything ship-shape again because the sea remained rough for a number of days.
During this rough spell I was taking my turn as cook. Just before lunch one day, I was carrying a tray full of prunes and custard down the stairs between the galley and the mess deck. The stairs were wet and so were the sea boots I was wearing, so I was a disaster waiting to happen. I had mastered the naval tradition of scurrying down the ship’s steep and narrow stairs frontward, without hanging on to the side rails. This left the hands free for carrying trays of prunes and custard. However, this time my boots slipped from under me and I crashed to the mess deck, launching the prunes and custard on a horizontal trajectory that coincided perfectly with the arrival of the officer of the day as he passed the stairs. In an instant I was lying in an unprofessional heap on the deck, and the prunes and custard were decorating one side of the officer of the day’s neatly pressed uniform. I was mortified, but he was a quiet, gentlemanly type, so he passed it off as an unfortunate rough-weather incident.
We were relieved to reach the tranquillity of Bermuda. As we steamed into Hamilton Harbour in brilliant sunshine, Valiant looked bedraggled with her superstructure damaged and her grey paint encrusted with salt. It looked like patches of snow had been dumped on her. An American cruise liner, the President Roosevelt, was berthed in the harbour. A cruise ship seemed strange to us in wartime, but of course America wasn’t in the war yet. As we steamed by, her passengers lined the railings and cheered us. It gave us a good feeling, that did.
We lay up in Hamilton Harbour for a couple of days in mid-December while we licked our wounds and got Valiant ready for sea again, straightening damaged structures and tidying up the paintwork. I went ashore with my shipmates, too. In addition to Johnny, Charlie and Freddie, my mates from HMS Drake, I’d also teamed up with two other young sailors, a tall, skinny chap called Peter Rimmer and another lad truly called Davey Jones. Davey Jones was an ironical name for a seaman if ever I heard one, because of the age-old nautical reference to Davy Jones’s Locker, the mythical place at the bottom of the ocean where all drowned sailors reside! The six of us went ashore together in Bermuda. There was something odd about the place.
‘Notice anything?’ I asked.
‘I notice there are no beautiful girls rushing out to meet us,’ Peter complained.
‘Yeah, I noticed that as well,’ Davey said.
‘No, not that. Listen. There are no cars,’ I remarked. The others listened and everyone agreed Bermuda was very quiet.
‘No cars and no girls,’ Johnny moaned.
That’s the main thing I remember about Bermuda, apart from it being warm. There didn’t seem to be any cars, only bicycles, which were everywhere. But it was quiet and peaceful, and the grim war mood of England seemed remote. Even though we’d had a few submarine alerts and heard the occasional Boom! Boom! of depth charges, the war hadn’t touched us yet.
While we were in Bermuda, news came through that a German raider, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, was lurking in the South Atlantic off South America. We weren’t an awfully long way from that ship, and I’ve often wondered since if the reason Valiant got sent in that general direction was in case the Graf Spee became a threat. As it turned out, the German ship was badly damaged in a fierce action against three British cruisers, which saw her withdraw to the harbour of Montevideo in Uruguay, where her crew scuttled her. We weren’t called on to help our cruisers in that skirmish, so we left Bermuda and sailed up the east coast of America to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. We continued our working-up trials along the way, practicing our shipboard drills day and night, especially our gunnery. There was no let-up.
It was freezing in Halifax, snow and ice everywhere. Hard to take after balmy Bermuda. But the weather was calm, so we went ashore and walked about carefully on the icy streets. There were groups of pretty young girls skating on the roads, skylarking about. They called out to us cheekily, as young girls do when they see sailors. I went to a dance hall and saw people doing the jitterbug. I’d never seen or heard anything like it in England. It was terrific fun, so fast and full of life and utterly carefree.
From Halifax we joined a Canadian convoy as part of its escort to Britain. It was carrying food and other war supplies, I believe, and there were Canadian corvettes sailing with us in the escort group, too. We were on high-alert during that trip, crossing the Atlantic on the way back to England. The closer we got to home, the greater the threat from German submarines and aircraft. We weren’t attacked and, even though we thought of ourselves as ready for war, I wasn’t disappointed by the lack of action.
After we’d seen the Canadian ships safely to their ports, we continued on to Orkney in Scotland, joining the Home Fleet in Scapa Flow, where the poor old Royal Oak was lying on the bottom. We stayed there for what seemed like an eternity. It was a dismal place, Scapa Flow, cold, windswept and surrounded by bare hills. Valiant’s crew got bored up there with nothing to do except routine duties, painting and general maintenance. Sailors from other ships gave us a fair bit of mouth while we were lying idle. ‘Big-ship sailors doing precious little,’ they’d sneer at us, trying to start a fight.
There was always strong rivalry between the crews of big ships and small ships, but the Royal Navy wasn’t about to risk a big battleship like Valiant unless there was serious work for her to do. So we sat there, ignoring the remarks, biding our time until, in February 1940 we became involved in the Norwegian Campaign, on escort duty mainly, coming and going from Scapa Flow in support of British operations off the Norwegian coast. We’d leave Scapa, sail past Shetland and continue to the Norwegian Sea, where life began to hot up.
The German ship Altmark, which had once been the Graf Spee’s supply ship, was known to be transporting 300 British merchant navy prisoners through neutral Norwegian waters to Germany. The prisoners were battened down below decks and Winston Churchill, who was still First Lord of the Admiralty at that early stage of the war, was having none of it. He ordered that the Altmark be boarded by force and the prisoners released, even though she was in neutral waters. So a raiding party was cobbled together from sailors of the various Royal Navy ships in the area, including Valiant.
There were many unforgettable characters on Val
iant, believe me, but probably the most outrageous was a bloke in the mess next to mine. His name was Tom Cox, a huge, dark-complexioned man who’d been in the Royal Navy forever. He had a black beard and a moustache that curled up at both ends. He looked like a Spanish pirate and was without doubt Valiant’s most outstanding seaman. Whenever we had an air raid, Tom would go out on deck to scream abuse at the Germans flying overhead. ‘Bugger off, you bastards!’ he’d yell, shaking his fists at the enemy aircraft. He’d once been a petty officer but had been repeatedly demoted for various misdemeanours and was back to the rank of able seaman. But with his strength and ferocious appearance, he was a natural choice to represent our ship in the raiding party.
Tom, to our utter amazement, set off for this dangerous task armed only with a cutlass. After much violence on board the Altmark, the British prisoners were freed and the buzz went around that he’d played the leading role. We gaped as he climbed back on board our ship with his cutlass clenched between his teeth, swaggering a bit. He did it as a lark, to stir the officers up, but this extraordinary sight left a lasting impression on the teenage seamen like me. We thought he was larger than life, and more than a little frightening come to think of it. The officers despaired at Tom’s undisciplined behaviour, but they were reluctant to get rid of him because he was so good at all he did.
In April, after the Germans had invaded Norway, we were part of an escort for three liners carrying Britain’s Guards Brigade to the little port of Harstad in Andifiord, the northern approach to Narvik above the Arctic Circle. The German battleship Tirpitz was known to be lurking in the fiords of Norway and it was our job to shield the troop-carrying liners.
I’ll never forget the beauty of that fiord. We steamed into it in perfectly clear weather, blue skies, mirror-calm sea, snow shining on the tops of the mountains on either side. It was wonderful. We were in the land of the midnight sun, but even as I admired the beauty around me I was aware of the danger. What were we doing bringing a huge battleship into a fiord like this with land towering on either side, and only about an hour of twilight before it was day again?
One Common Enemy Page 3