Now the guns, in their first shoot, had clean missed a large convoy of dead-slow colliers steaming slowly and in formation under the cliffs of Dover. They had fired 145 rounds at ships steaming at 6 or 7 knots; they hadn’t hit them, they hadn’t even stopped them, or thrown them out of formation. The unharmed passage of the ‘Coal-Scuttle Brigade’ cast serious doubts on the practicability of the entire invasion plan.
Also, the English fired back. A single 14-inch gun, on the cliffs above Dover, it represented no real threat to them; but it was a warning that, if they wanted to come, they were not in for a quiet stroll through the Kentish countryside. They could huff and puff, but unless they could blow the house down, there was little chance of occupying it. And this was a very poor return for all their efforts, which were considerable.
From August, 1940, until early in 1943, gun salvoes were a regular, nerve-wracking and expected feature of the passage. They were still firing in August, 1944, but with less enthusiasm. It really was very difficult to hit a small ship at a range of twenty miles. Also, the rifling of the barrels wore out very quickly and were expensive to replace. The cost of keeping a convoy under fire throughout the passage of the Straits was something over £100,000.
Dover, being larger, was easier to hit, and a good deal of damage was done; in September alone, it was shelled six times; on the worst day, the 9th, over 150 rounds were fired. But, as the population was down to about one-fifth of its pre-war level, casualties were not in proportion. However, in spite of its four-year ordeal, the town was not reduced to a heap of rubble, or anything like it.
Shellfire is not at all the same thing as bombing. To start with, a shell is not dropped, it is fired. To stand the shock of the discharge, it must have a strong, thick casing — it therefore contains a smaller amount of explosive, for its size and weight, than a bomb; and the explosive, before it can get to work on a house or a ship, has first to blow open the thick casing, thus wasting part of its force unproductively. The splinters, naturally, are much more solid than those from a bomb casing.
The real talking point of the gun is not explosive power but accuracy; and not merely accuracy, but repetitive accuracy. Once a battery has the range, they can keep putting 90 per cent of their shots slap on it until they run out of ammunition or the barrels wear out. And of all gunnery, coastal gunnery is the most accurate, because the gun platform is stable and its position known. Nevertheless, the guns on both sides of the Straits, British and German, rarely hit each other’s convoys.
The gun is a delicate, precision weapon — very costly to make — unlike the blundering bomb; but its accuracy falls off markedly at extreme range. And Dover, and the swept channel outside, were at extreme range even for the most powerful of the German guns.
It was this sort of projectile which fell around the colliers, with their wafer-thin sides, and into Dover — on to houses and not on to massive armour plate. It was a terribly destructive, penetrative force — but limited in area. In proportion to the weight, there was not much blast. The shell went deep before exploding, then spent a great deal of its energy on earth or water.
It had one other awkward characteristic — there could be no preliminary warning, such as the siren for an air raid;[7] and no warning from the projectile itself. You simply couldn’t hear it coming — not, that is, when it was coming at you.
This was the measure of the ordeal suffered by Dover and her slowly-passing ships for four years. At any time, wherever you were and whatever you were doing, you might be wiped out, or maimed, without even the few seconds’ warning scream of a bomb or an ordinary shell which gave you just enough time to drop flat or dive for cover. In Dover, there was no cessation of strain; you were in danger all the time — for four years. People did make a joke of it, but it was really no joke.
The strain, in a collier passing the Straits, was far greater; not only were they powerless, but they were the actual target; and for those down below it was worse than for those on deck. Working amid the gleaming, thumping machinery and surrounded by steam pipes, with only wafer-thin plates between them and the sea outside, they did not know when they would be fired at, only that they would be fired at. When the shells arrived, they could hear and feel the shock of them through the hull; and they knew that if the ship was hit they would instantly have the flesh stripped off their bones by the explosion of the super-heated steam; if by some chance they survived, perhaps terribly scalded and blind, there was still the long climb to the upper deck.
No ship that continually passed the Straits could long escape damage. The Betswood, which did the trip more times than any other collier, was several times damaged. The nearest she came to final disaster was off Dover, when two shells pitched close alongside, bursting twenty feet above the water with a red flash. She came to a stop, burning, with thirty holes ripped in her hull and superstructure.
Her master, Captain J. H. Potts, stopped his engines and then ordered the damage control partly over the side. As they got their ladders out, he listed the Betswood, to bring the underwater damage above the surface of the sea. The collier lay in the Straits, heeled over and drifting, as the crew swarmed down the ladders laid over the side, with mallets and wooden plugs, and began hammering them into the jagged gaps torn in the plating by the hot steel. Meanwhile, in the blazing magazine, a tragi-comedy was taking place.
The fire-precaution in the magazine was a sprinkler; in order to work it, a man had to get on top of the magazine, and risk being blown sky-high while he did it. The man detailed to work the sprinkler was a member of the crew. He took one look at the proposition and declined. ‘Not my ammo,’ he said. ‘That’s Navy ammo, that is; let them look after it. Not my job.’
The magazine continued to burn furiously and a ship’s officer pointing out that a little more time wasted in argument would see them all trying to get past St Peter. ‘All right,’ flung out the sailor, as he disappeared into the blaze and smoke of the magazine. ‘But I’m doing it under protest, mind.’ And do it he did.
After she had repaired damage and put out the fire, the Betswood got the bone between her teeth again, and carried on down Channel to her destination.
For four years the ordeal went on, the ships usually steaming through the bursts from exploding shells, unscathed except for fittings and crockery broken by near-misses and holes punched in their sides by splinters. It was not until 1944 that Captain Potts, of the Betswood, saw a hit on another ship in the convoy.
The heavy shell pitched straight onto number three hatch, and then the collier vanished. There was a huge cloud of what looked like black smoke hanging low over the sea, and a patch of furiously disturbed water below. The black smoke was not smoke at all — it was coal dust, blown hundreds of feet up from the explosion of the 15-inch shell in the hold. Of the collier there was no sign, she had gone completely and instantaneously, with all her crew.
On the British side, too, heavy guns were installed; and, in 1940, there was something of a race to see who would be able to open fire ‘firstest with the mostest’.
Under Churchill’s spur the Navy, and to a lesser extent, the Army rapidly fortified the Straits. By the beginning of September, a 14-inch Naval gun had been added, as well as two 9.2-inch railway guns and four smaller Naval guns. The old battleship Iron Duke had been bombed and beached at Scapa; two 13.5-inch guns were taken out of her and set up at Dover on railway mountings, as well as four 5.5-inch guns from the battlecruiser Hood. But, for every gun Churchill whipped into position, the Germans set up ten; and by the time Churchill’s guns were ready, to fire them would be to court an altogether unequal duel.
Even without an invasion, these guns were frequently in action, barring our side of the Straits to E-boats in daylight and making life hazardous for the minelayers which used to slip across and try to mine the swept channel used by the convoys. The E-boats did try several times to repeat the attack they had made on 25th July, when the destroyers had been there to see them off. Now, there were no destroyers, but
the shellfire so upset them that, unsure of what was happening, they began to fire among themselves. After that, they transferred their operations east and west of the Straits.
As radar developed, fire could be opened on unseen targets in bad visibility or at night. One cloudy day in 1942 the sets picked up signs of shipping movement in the deep-water channels on the other side of the Straits, so much of it that something big was clearly about to happen. Then the coast-watching set at Fairlight burnt out a valve, and the screen went dark. A R.E.M.E. officer was sent in some haste to Fairlight, carrying a replacement valve. On the lonely Romney Marshes his car broke down. The Scharnhorst, Gneisnau and Prince Eugen were coming up Channel at 32 knots, but he didn’t know that. Nevertheless, when an Army lorry full of infantry passed him, he stopped it, bundled out the infantry, got in and tore across the marsh for Fairlight, leaving the stranded infantry standing in the middle of the marsh, cursing all ‘bloody officers’.
The set came on again in time to pick up the three big German ships and their escort — they were in range for precisely 17 minutes. In that time, 33 rounds were fired at them from Dover, but, though they landed near the ships, there were no hits.
Later, two 15-inch guns were installed — ‘Jane’ and ‘Clem’ — which were to score on demand, a most amazing bulls-eye, at a range of over 40,000 yards — they got a direct hit on one of their opposite numbers sited on the French coast.
5 - A Shilling a Month
‘This ’ere’s the hoven door —
Number two hopens the hoven —
Number three slams dinner into hoven —
Number one squeezes the trigger,
Hand away goes the fucking dinner!’
THE instructor paused. ‘Got that?’ The group of men round the 12-pdr nodded. Sometimes they would be Naval ratings — young men, obviously ‘Hostiles’ (Hostilities Only), or older men, with ‘Royal Fleet Reserve’ on their cap bands; or Marines. And sometimes they would be civilians — men of the Merchant Navy. In any case the drill — and the ‘patter’ — was much the same. Defensive Equipment, Merchant Ships was in operation.
Technically, a merchant ship should be defensively armed only, otherwise she was liable to internment in any neutral port; and defensive armament, by long usage, fired astern — at a pursuer. This was old when Nelson was young.
The rule was that the guns of a merchant ship must not be able to fire ‘abaft the beam’ — in other words, the guns could fire, roughly, broadside and astern, but not ahead. D.E.M.S. had to find the guns, fit them, and then find gunners to serve them.
To begin with, most of the guns came from store — where they had lain, heavily greased, ever since 1918; and the men to man them came from the merchant navy, members of the ship’s crew, with perhaps a Naval pensioner shipped aboard to train them, or an ex-Marine. The crew members chosen would be those who were least essential to the working of the ship — the steward, for instance.
After three weeks’ training he passed as seaman gunner; and after a further ten days, as gunlayer. In peacetime, in the Royal Navy, that process would have taken five years. When the battle-front moved to the Channel, the training was cut still further; large numbers of gunners were wanted, and quickly. In practice, this sometimes meant that a civilian would report to a Naval Barracks on the Monday, get his hair cut on the Tuesday, be documented, kitted and jagged, and on the Saturday put on a train to a Naval gunnery school. There he would receive two weeks’ training in the theory of gunnery, with a little practical handling weapons — mostly the heavier type which he would not in fact expect to use — from instructors who, though sound enough, had had their grounding in the first world war and were not particularly up-to-date on aircraft.
He would then be posted to a merchant ship, and signed on as a member of the crew — though wearing Naval uniform and receiving Naval pay — at the nominal rate of ‘one shilling per month’. Everyone carried by a merchant ship must sign on — even the Captain’s wife — and his children, if they accompany him.
The Naval rating now had to train some members of the crew to help him with his job of manning the guns; and it was extremely difficult for him. He was not a sailor — for he had never been to sea; he was, despite his uniform, no Jack Tar — for Naval tradition is not learnt in three weeks; and he had no discipline — for this, too, is not installed in three weeks; and he was hardly a gunner at all. And if the ship sailed in the morning, he might be in action in the afternoon.
If he was ever going to be an efficient gunner, he would have to learn the job in the face of the enemy; the triumphant enemy which had swept over all Europe, crumbling nations and armies into the dust; and his lessons were likely to be bitter ones.
Still, he looked like a sailor — and the nation has always had faith in its Navy. It was not misplaced.
*
In addition to fitting the merchantmen with guns and gunners, D.E.M.S. had to build accommodation for them, in a hurry; and despite the hurry, some colliers still retain these structures to this day, the crew having found them very useful. D.E.M.S. was the equivalent at sea of the Home Guard; except that the Home Guard never saw action, whereas D.E.M.S. sailed right into it. There hardly was a typical armament; they got what was going, when it was going — when they were in port. The turn-round of the ships could not be delayed for the benefit of D.E.M.S. — for that would reduce the convoy system to hopeless chaos. A Lewis was no great matter; but a heavier gun might need more time to install than was available — in that case, it might have to be fitted in stages.
In any case, the masters did not like it. When they looked at the guns, they saw — not protection from dive-bombers — but heavy weights, placed high up. The epitaph of many colliers, even today, reads simply: ‘Last seen floating bottom upwards’.
Colliers have always been dangerous ships, and they are dangerous still. The cargo is loose and in bulk; so that a heavy sea on the beam, consistently heeling the ship over more to one side than the other, will pile up the coal or coke on that side. The ship will take on a list; and if the sea continues and nothing is or can be done about moving the cargo, the list will increase until the ship turns over.
But it is not necessary for it to turn right over before disaster comes; for if the scuppers on one side are level with the water, the sea will break over the hatches; if they are not steel, it may break them in. The hatches are always the vulnerable point with colliers — to allow of rapid discharging they are much larger than in other merchant ships. The gradual introduction of steel hatches had one important bearing on the war — a ship so fitted which was struck by an E-boat’s torpedo usually remained in one piece, even if it eventually sank; whereas a collier with wooden hatches usually broke in two, and went down like two halves of a stone.
The D.E.M.S. ratings came aboard — and like as not found other gunners already there; these were the Merchant Navy Gunners who were picked from the crews of merchant ships to help man the guns. They wore a peaked cap and an armband as their ‘uniform’. The prestige accorded among sailors to a peaked cap can hardly be realised by landsmen, particularly if it goes with a jacket and brass buttons.
D.E.M.S. ratings had been in the Navy only a short time — hardly long enough to learn its traditions and thoroughly identify themselves with it; they looked like sailors, but they didn’t feel like it. And some had been told to take over the gun in style; to hold proper drills — to fall in the gun’s crew smartly, number them off, and generally put a spark in it.
The nation had not been prepared to pay, in peacetime, for a powerful Navy; and, in wartime, it did not get one. Not, at any rate, to begin with. And in comparison with the Navy, the needs of the coasters had to take second place. Besides this, by a series of miscalculations remote from the ships, Hitler was now on the Channel instead of locked behind the Rhine.
That sparked off in turn a trail of events which was to bring two types of gunner into the coastal convoys; both of these came under D.E.M.S., but were sharp
ly distinct from the D.E.M.S. gunners who were posted, as we have seen, to a particular ship and stayed in that ship all the time, teaching members of the crew to assist them in handling the fixed armament of the ship.
Both organisations came into being during the Battle of Britain, as a direct result of the slaughter of the convoys; so that the guns’ crews of a collier, by September 1940, might be made up of Naval ratings serving permanently with the ship; Naval ratings who just came along for the trip, and brought their guns and ammunition with them; infantrymen who did the same; supernumery members of the crew enrolled as Merchant Navy Gunners in their own ship; and anyone else who felt like lending a hand, and had the time for it. It might seem that Fred Karno had gone to sea.
The scene around the guns of a collier would have provided a splendidly amusing situation with which to begin a West End farce. But it wasn’t a West End farce; it wasn’t a farce of any kind. It was the future of the world.
The German Army had broken every one of its opponents at lightning speed and with confident ease; the coal-scuttle helmets had reached the Channel. What the Kaiser could not achieve in five years, Hitler had accomplished in five weeks.
It is hard now to recapture the magic invincibility which then clothed the Wehrmacht. It was the high point of German arms: the peak — did he but know it — of the Führer’s career. From now, the road led downward, into the shadows, to the bunker near the Brandenburg Gate. The Germans could be stopped.
But we did not know it then.
6 - The Channel Guard
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 5