We never got sent to Canada, but in the last week of March, the Royal Navy sent Valiant and the other ships of our force to intercept an Italian fleet assembling in the eastern Mediterranean. Acting on an air reconnaissance report from their German allies, the Italian ships had sailed from ports in Italy to attack a large British convoy. Our job, together with the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable, HMS Warspite and Admiral Cunningham’s flagship HMS Barham, was to protect the convoy.
During the night of 29 March, the tannoy in Valiant clicked on, hissed and crackled like it always did, and the captain told us that we were going to be engaging in a naval battle with ships of the Italian fleet. Just like that. A matter of fact.
A naval battle? That can’t be right. I’m just a Liverpool lad, people like me don’t take part in naval battles!
A bugle trumpeted over the tannoy, sounding the call to raise the battle flag, the only time I heard that rare call on a warship. It was followed by the more familiar bugle call to action stations, so I rushed to my gun turret.
Valiant was the only ship in our force with radar, one of the original radar systems used at sea during the war. It had a range of about 100 miles, pretty good for those days, but as it turned out we didn’t need any such range on the night of the 29th. Just after 10 o’clock the radar detected three Italian cruisers, Pola, Fiume and Zara, a mere six miles away. They were steaming with their guns pointing fore and aft, oblivious to the ships of our force approaching. The weather was quite good that night, so to this day I’ve never been able to fathom why their lookouts didn’t see us.
Still undetected, we steered onto a parallel course within 4000 yards of them, and swung our 15-inch and 4.5 guns broadside to the Italians. Warspite did the same. On Valiant’s bridge, Prince Philip was coordinating our searchlights. He caught the enemy ships in a blinding, blue-white illumination, and we were given the order to fire. Those poor Italians didn’t stand a chance. Our armour-piercing shells pummelled them and caused devastating damage. The three cruisers sank within a few minutes. They didn’t even have time to fire a single shot back at us. Another two Italian destroyers were also lost in a different engagement in the same battle. Some 2400 Italian sailors lost their lives.
It was over in no time at all and I was glad to get out of that without being fired on. The thought of being sunk filled me with horror. But it was another job done, so we turned for Alexandria, all the while expecting to be attacked from the air. Nothing happened, so we got away with it nicely.
And that was the Battle of Matapan. As an ordinary seaman on a battleship, it’s possible to take part in a naval engagement without even realising that it might be historically significant. The ship is so big and complex, with so many people doing hundreds of different jobs, that no one is ever told all the details that make up the big picture. An ordinary seaman doesn’t know why it’s happening, or how a situation has come about. He’s just told the bare facts. He’s a very small player in what is actually a deadly game of chess played with opposing ships on a huge area of sea, with the opponents mostly out of sight of one another.
Back in harbour I kept thinking about those Italian ships going to the bottom, packed with sailors like me. The tension was building in me terribly. But I couldn’t dwell on it because the Germans suddenly invaded Greece and Crete, so they sent us to Crete during May.
Dear Lord, here we go again.
We went into Suda Bay, the harbour on Crete, and once again we were sitting ducks. The RAF never seemed to cover us, and the Germans were only about 90 miles away with their aircraft and paratroopers. Suda was a volcanic place where the water was the clearest I’d ever seen. I could see the bottom of the harbour below the ship’s bilges when I looked over Valiant’s deck railing.
Why do they keep sending us into places like this? They’re really pushing our luck.
The Germans bombed us nearly every day and night while we were in the harbour. We were constantly called to action stations. It seemed the Luftwaffe had started a shuttle service. They came over from Greece, dropped their bombs, went back to Greece, refilled their bomb bays and came out to attack us again.
One day in Suda Bay, a snarling swarm of Stuka dive-bombers singled Valiant out for some close attention. We rushed again to action stations, elevated our 4.5 guns and commenced firing. It was bedlam closed up inside our turret. My head was reeling from the din of the gun firing and the clatter of empty shells spilling onto the deck. The attack lasted for about 15 minutes before we were given the order to cease firing. We emerged from our turret to find the quarterdeck in chaos. Two bombs had exploded there but, by some miracle, no one was killed. A few of the crew aft on the upper deck were wounded, though. I knew one of the blokes who got hurt, Tubby Herks, a big round-faced Scot. He was badly shaken up and other sailors in that part of the ship were trying to sort out the smoking wreckage. They looked dazed and ashen. Holed up in our turret, we hadn’t even felt the bombs explode.
Although the damage to the ship was slight, this attack was enough to convince the Royal Navy that we shouldn’t be in places like Suda Bay where the Luftwaffe could bomb us at will. So we made some hasty repairs and steamed back to Alexandria. As soon as we got ashore we set course for the Fleet Club and had a few settling drinks.
Conversation in the Fleet Club often got around to the sailors who suddenly vanished from the ship after reporting sick. I don’t know what became of them, whether they were sent to jobs ashore in Alexandria or got shipped back to England. But they were removed from the ship very quickly, because uncontrollable fear in one person can spread to others.
‘Where’s so-and-so?’ someone might ask, mentioning a sailor we all knew.
‘He reported sick.’
‘Bomb happy,’ someone else would say. That explained everything.
‘Poor bastard.’
No one ever blamed those men, or thought any less of them. We were all struggling in silence with our own anxieties. I had begun to notice the strain on the faces of the other young seamen around me. They looked older. I wondered if I looked like that. I was determined to keep going because I didn’t want to let my mates down, and I knew they didn’t want to let me down. That’s what being part of a ship’s crew is all about, a sense of mutual obligation. But we were all riding an emotional roller coaster.
The lows were sometimes horrific. When we weren’t at the Fleet Club, escorting convoys or doing other jobs at sea, we’d spend long periods on the ship as she rode at her mooring in Alexandria Harbour. This meant we were available to go aboard any battle-damaged ships to help clear up. Once I was assigned to a working party when one of our cruisers struggled into harbour after taking a direct hit during an air raid. A bomb had crashed through the steel deck of the bridge, and exploded in the mess deck far below. The carnage was unspeakable. There were bits of bodies scattered everywhere and the stench was nauseating. It was the smell of death and the memory of it lives on for a lifetime.
None of us wanted to be part of it, but we were ordered to get the job done and not talk about what we’d seen. Every single member of that working party was shaken to the core. It was soul-destroying, heart-wrenching and desperately sad. These days, I dare say the men of such a working party would receive counselling. But there was nothing like that then, nobody at all for us to talk to. That was how it was, and not just for people in uniform. Civilians were ‘cleaning up’ after their neighbours’ houses had been destroyed in air raids, their own families were being bombed and killed as well, at home in England, here in Africa, wherever the battles were being fought. Like the sea, bombs don’t make any distinctions.
Fortunately, there was also plenty to keep us laughing. On Valiant, many of the lighter moments were provided by a dishevelled Canadian sailor called Banjo Bailey, a misfit, hostilities-only volunteer from Saskatchewan. Whether he had been in catering as a civilian I’m not sure, but he worked below decks in the galleys. No amount of navy discipline seemed to convince Banjo to tidy himself up. His ha
t was never straight and he always looked unshaven. Once, when I was on watch, Banjo presented himself on the bridge with a side of meat slung over his shoulder. Everyone looked at him in astonishment.
‘What’s that then, Bailey?’ an officer enquired.
‘It’s a side of meat, sir.’ He spoke with a slow drawl.
‘I can see that, man. But why in God’s name have you brought it up here?’
‘I was just told to take it to the bridge, sir.’
A pause while the officer worked it out. ‘I think you’ll find you were ordered to take it to the fridge, Bailey.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ Banjo said. He about-faced and left the bridge, as confused as everyone else.
Without fail, we all got our rum issue every morning at 11 o’clock. It was beautiful rum, too, good stuff with a lovely dark, reddish colour. One morning, while we were escorting a convoy to Malta, we were at action stations when ‘Up spirits!’ came over the tannoy. But because we were all closed up in the turret, no one in our gun crew could leave their post to collect the rum issue. So Banjo was sent below to get it for us. He returned empty-handed.
‘Where’s the rum, Banjo?’
‘Couldn’t find any,’ he drawled.
‘There must be a rum issue down there somewhere.’
‘I didn’t see any.’ He seemed perplexed, as always.
‘Well, what was down there, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? What about on the mess table?’
‘Oh,’ Banjo said, his memory jogged. ‘There was this thing, a big container.’
‘And …’ we chorused helpfully. We were desperate for our rum ration. It was always in that container.
‘I looked in it but it was only cold tea, so I chucked it away.’ Banjo was lucky to escape alive.
Apart from lifting the spirits and keeping us warm, rum was also valuable currency. The rum was for drinking there and then, according to the navy. But by building up a supply, blokes could use it for barter. Get someone to cut their hair, do their washing, things like that. I always drank my rum straight away, though. Like I said, it was good stuff. And it always made me incredibly hungry. Once I’d downed my rum I could eat my way through a stack of the corned beef sandwiches that were always available on board. Even when we were at action stations the galley crew would bring us corned beef sandwiches. The best sandwiches ever, they were.
Our convoy duties dragged on through 1941, with no indication that we’d be going home any time soon. About the only highlight was when I turned 20 in October.
Then, in the last week of November we sailed from Alexandria in the company of our sister battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Barham as well as eight destroyers. We were to join up with a bigger Allied fleet and intercept two large Italian convoys believed to be making for Benghazi in Libya. On the afternoon of 25 November our group was patrolling south of Crete when, without any warning, Barham was hit by three torpedoes fired from a German U-boat that had skilfully penetrated our line of defending cruisers. Surely fate was at work for me here. That submarine commander could easily have fired at Valiant, with me closed up at action stations below my 4.5 turret, but instead he selected Barham through his periscope.
When the torpedoes hit her, Barham rolled on her side almost immediately. We heard a dull rumble, then a massive explosion as her store of ammunition blew up. Less than three minutes later she had completely disappeared, dragging more than 850 men with her to the bottom of the Mediterranean. There is a famous piece of film showing Barham rolling over with some of her desperate crew massing on her upturned side. I don’t know who shot the film, or what ship he was on when he captured Barham’s last moments, but it is spellbinding and chilling. It could have been me and my shipmates clinging to Valiant’s hull, with just seconds to live before she blew up. Amazingly, about 450 crewmen survived and were rescued.
Immediately after firing her torpedoes, the U-boat erupted from the water right in front of Valiant. This happened sometimes when a submarine, cruising just beneath the surface, relieved itself of the weight of its torpedoes. The lookouts on our bridge watched incredulously as the sub’s conning tower passed right down the side of us. She was so close that we couldn’t depress our guns far enough to fire at her. Valiant immediately began to turn around with the intention of ramming the U-boat on the surface, but our turning arc was huge and by the time we’d come around, the enemy vessel had managed to crash dive. We passed harmlessly over the top of it.
After that job we went back to the relative safety of Alexandria harbour where, early in December, I was promoted to able seaman. Maybe I’ll be sent home for Christmas with my family. No such luck, though. The war had other ideas. Early on a calm Mediterranean night, I was in our mess when the quiet of the evening was punctuated by a bugle call that a sailor never wants to hear.
‘Clear lower deck! Clear lower deck!’ Something was seriously wrong. No one waited for an explanation. We just rushed to the upper deck.
‘The enemy has attacked our ship here in the harbour,’ the captain told us in his usual matter of fact way.
In harbour, we always had Royal Marine sentries on board, patrolling the decks. The sentry on our bow had spied figures clinging to Valiant’s mooring buoy in the darkness and a small boat had been dispatched to investigate. The figures turned out to be Italian navy frogmen. They were captured and brought aboard the ship where, under questioning, they admitted to attaching limpet mines to Valiant’s hull.
‘These gentlemen seem reluctant to tell us where exactly on the hull these mines are located,’ the captain said. ‘So to encourage them to do so we are going to put them down in the lower deck.’
Shortly after the Italians had been taken below, muffled explosions came from deep in the ship. No one was hurt but, in an instant, our great battleship was disabled. She was down at the bow. This courageous attack by the Italians shocked us all, especially because Valiant’s sister ship Queen Elizabeth, moored near us, had suffered a similar attack and was already listing badly to starboard. Even in harbour, we realised, there was no escape from war.
With Valiant disabled, a group of my shipmates and I were told to report to the master-at-arms’ office. We were going to be drafted away from the ship.
Perhaps this is it. Maybe we’re going home.
I began to cheer up at the prospect, as I hadn’t been home since November 1939, but I was handed a written draft chit posting me to shore duties at Port Said in Egypt, at the entrance to the Suez Canal. Johnny, Charlie, Davey and Peter were all posted with me but Freddie had orders to remain on Valiant. Peter packed his collection of dubious photographs in his duffle bag.
‘We’ll be a bit safer in Port Said.’
‘Maybe,’ Johnny said doubtfully. ‘But it might be a hell of a lot more dangerous.’
So in January 1942 we reported to Navy House, a big building overlooking the jetty at Port Said. This would be our accommodation. I was put on general shore duties, which meant patrolling the quayside on foot, protecting the British military installations there.
‘Protecting them from what?’ I asked.
‘Egyptians in boats,’ I was told.
‘What do I do if I see Egyptians in boats?’
‘Shoot them.’ I must have looked alarmed. ‘Don’t kill them, just scare them off. Don’t let anyone approach the quay.’
Well, this was certainly different from being aboard a battleship. All that training in seamanship and here I was, a sentry with a rifle and orders to shoot at Egyptians approaching in boats. It wasn’t terribly exciting, but that suited me fine. We did have a few air raids, and I had to make a dash for cover occasionally, but they didn’t come to much. The only Allied aircraft we saw were RAF Wellington bombers fitted with huge metal rings that completely surrounded them. The rings created a magnetic field that exploded enemy mines, so the Wellingtons would fly low past the quay on their way to make the Canal safer for Allied shipping.
Each of the n
avy sentries patrolling the quay was assigned an interpreter. Mine was a Greek civilian called Minoli Kambouris who spoke excellent English and perfect Arabic. On my instructions, he’d call out to any small boats that approached, warning them I’d shoot if they didn’t bugger off. Minoli was a lovely man. He taught me snippets of Greek and Arabic, and from time to time he’d take me to his home in Port Said to spend time with his family. They were a very kind, welcoming lot. I enjoyed doing that, meeting new people and going into a family home. It was a break from the boredom.
After I’d been on sentry duty for a couple of months, Johnny Hennessey and I were assigned as an armed escort taking some British soldiers to an internment camp at Ismailiya, which is on the Canal about halfway between Port Said and Suez, near the Bitter Lakes. They had committed various crimes and were to serve their sentences at that dreadful place. Johnny and I presented our papers to the sentry at the camp gate but as soon as we’d handed the soldiers over, they were set upon by a brutal bunch of military policemen. I was shocked. They’d barely set foot in the camp and already they were being mercilessly kicked and punched.
‘You can’t treat those blokes like that!’ I protested.
‘On your way, sailor,’ one of the MPs snarled. ‘It’s none of your bloody business. Go on, piss off.’
By this time I’d just about had enough of all things military. I left feeling disturbed, churning inside. Utterly fed up, I went back to patrolling the quay with Minoli. At the end of June I got another draft chit. This time, together with Johnny, Peter and Davey, I was detailed to escort a contingent of Italian prisoners-of-war to Durban in South Africa. Our hopes soared.
‘This is more like it,’ Davey said.
‘Durban’s a long way from the hot spots.’
‘Better than all the bullshit at Navy House.’
We sailed to Durban with the Italian prisoners on a Polish passenger ship, going via the Suez Canal to Port Suez, then through the Red Sea for a brief stop in baking-hot Aden. Then we sailed into the Indian Ocean, calling in at Mombassa, and finally down the east coast of Africa. The Italian prisoners gave us no trouble at all and we arrived in Durban around the middle of August.
One Common Enemy Page 5