He had survived an encounter with a Channel convoy. They were a menace to all pilots, British and German, incautious enough to come near them, especially so in the latter half of the war when their armament had become formidable. They fired at anything which approached them in what appeared to them to be a ‘hostile manner’; in practice that meant any aircraft anywhere near. The ships took the view that if they fired at the aircraft, they probably wouldn’t hit it first time anyway: that, if British, it would take the hint and sheer off; if German it might be discouraged or at any rate disturbed on its bombing run. And it would not be too unkind to assume that most sailors were vague about the difference between the Wright Biplane and the Graf Zeppelin and that airmen, for their part, might easily confuse a powerful tug with the Queen Mary.
Much unnecessary heat was generated by this, for aircraft and ship recognition were separate and tricky subjects, requiring almost a lifetime of devoted study. People who grew up with ships could tell a. V. & W.-class destroyer while it was still on the horizon, people who grew up with aeroplanes could identify a new German type, first shot, many miles away. And neither could understand the apparent imbecility of the other when operating outside his own special sphere of knowledge.
This situation continued throughout the war, regardless of the considerable efforts made by all three Services to teach the man-on-the-job the elements of his trade. They made not the slightest impression. Ignorance continued, to the end, invincible and unteachable. The R.A.F. dared not give fighter cover to convoys at night, because of the certainty that their aircraft would be fired at, though it was the practice of some D.E.M.S. officers to greet applicants for leave from behind a desk littered with aircraft models and the formula: ‘So you want leave?’
‘Yessir.’
The officer would pick up at random one of the models from his desk. ‘Tell me what this is.’
The gunner would stare, horrified and transfixed, at the little black wooden replica of an aircraft. ‘I dunno, sir.’
‘When you can tell me what it is — you can put in another application for leave. And not before.’
Even if the models and books of silhouettes could be memorised, there was still no real certainty. Aeroplanes didn’t look like that, except when very high, or very far away; and the monoplanes of the second world war were very alike. Much the most distinctive point, incapable of being conveyed by book-learning, was the ‘sit’ — the angle at which the aircraft, so to speak, took the air. The Whitley, with a big, underslung jaw, flew nose down, tail up. The Heinkel 111 flew nose-up, looking like a well-fed shark (except that the rear half of its body didn’t waggle as it went). The Junkers 88 had a distinctive motor-bus appearance, rugged and businesslike. The Spitfire was graceful, all perfect lines and curves — obviously ‘right’. The Hurricane looked rugged but wrong — as a North countryman remarked: ‘That’s t’feller wi’ ’oomped back and straight wings.’ Their opponent, the Messerschmitt 109, was an angular job — apparently designed by a professor of geometry with a passion for straight lines; but his Me 110 seemed to have had a sailplane for ancestor.
Instant recognition in action could only be developed out of an intense interest in aeroplanes, frequent visits to aerodromes, and detailed study of hundreds of photographs. Merely to look at silhouettes and repeat after me ‘The Dornier Do 17 is a high-wing monoplane with two rudders and two engines’ was next nearest to useless, and could easily be dangerous.
It was dangerous, even in the R.A.F. On 3rd March, 1940, Spitfires flying over Kent intercepted a monoplane with two motors and a twin-tail; they shot it down and killed all aboard — unfortunately, it was a Hudson. With its fat, bulky fuselage it was really nothing like the Dornier, which had been aptly named the ‘Flying Pencil’, but the Spitfires shot ‘by the book’. There was no short cut to aircraft recognition.
Exactly the same held good for ships. An R.A.F. pilot, in the early stages of the escape of the Scharnhorst, Gneisnau and Prinz Eugen, when an airborne-radar failure had allowed them to come out undetected, actually flew right over them as they dashed up-Channel. He reported them as destroyers, though it was possible, he thought, that one of them might have had a tripod mast. Mistaking two battle-cruisers and one heavy cruiser, escorted by a swarm of destroyers and E-boats, for a destroyer flotilla took some doing, it might be thought; but he did it.
The fact is that a distant ship has no scale. It is perfectly possible to mistake the Queen Mary for a tug, and vice versa, provided the silhouettes are not too dissimilar. Only if the observer is close enough to make out a standard fitting, such as a lifeboat, can he with any certainty work out the size of the ship that carries it. Not airmen merely, but professional sailors, have been led astray in this way.
In September 1942, while surfaced at night, U-156 sighted a passenger steamer approaching. Hartenstein, one of the U-boat ‘Aces’ was in command. He had a brief argument with his number one, who estimated 6,000 tons. Hartenstein thought it was a trifle larger, probably 7 or 8,000 tons. He fired numbers 1 and 3 tubes at it and waited for the estimated two minutes to pass. Nothing happened, the passenger ship kept steadily on. Two and a half minutes, and still no sign of a hit. Three minutes. The ship was lit up by the moon, a white wash under her bows, going serenely on her way. Hartenstein turned away, furious at his own sudden incompetence. Then there were two vivid flashes and the rumbling roar of the torpedoes striking the ship, and she started to call for help, giving her name.
The U-boat picked up the transmission and her officers thumbed rapidly through their Ship List. Ah. Laconia, Cunard White Star, 19,695 tons. Nearly 20,000 tons! That explained the long wait — they had fired at what they thought was a small ship near to them and what in fact they were looking at was a large ship far away.
That mistake was made by naval officers; by men who were not under strain, had plenty of time, and were thoroughly and professionally used to ships. A pilot, attacking low down, might have only two or three seconds in which to identify the ship he was approaching and to drop his bombs. Small wonder there were mistakes. And small wonder, too, that ships were nervy.
From a distance, there was no difference between a 1,000 ton collier and a 10,000 ton tanker. The silhouettes were identical, the typical types of both classes having the engines at the stern, and usually the bridge as well. Sometimes, the bridge is amidships — on its own, looking rather lonely. Other, non-typical colliers, look like any other merchant ship except that a close inspection would reveal that the hatches were unusually large — to allow large crane grabs to plumb into them, for more rapid discharge. But even an expert, from a distance, could give you no idea of the size of the ship; and if he could, it would mean nothing until you had agreed on the terms of reference — whether gross tonnage, deadweight tonnage, displacement tonnage, net tonnage, or under-deck tonnage. A ship of 5,000 tons gross might have a deadweight tonnage of 9,000 tons; a liner of 20,000 gross tons a deadweight tonnage of only 4,000 tons. Aircrews’ heads began to spin, when confronted with this awful chaos, quite apart from the difficulty of actual recognition.
And this again was complicated by the fact that the Germans had conquered Europe; some of the ships they had captured, and some of them had come over to us. A single ship, sailing unescorted, might be a German ocean-raider slipping through the Channel to the Atlantic — or it might be a straggler from a British convoy. Sometimes they straggled because they couldn’t keep up; sometimes because they were fed up. When seen, they might be reported as anything. Four merchant ships in the Channel, on one occasion, were reported as a squadron of battleships! And in March 1943, the German blockade-runner Doggerbank (ex-British Speybank), returning from the Far East, escaped the vigilance of our naval and air patrols. But she did not escape the German Navy. U-43 sighted and sank her off the Canaries.
By far the best oddentification, however, took place in the Mediterranean in 1941. A tanker, British, met an aircraft, German. The German mistook the British for Italian, and the British
mistook the German for British. The Messerschmitt fell in as escort for the tanker, and the tanker gratefully accepted the offer. Along came a British bomber — a Blenheim — and seeing a tanker escorted by a Messerschmitt assumed it to be Italian, and attacked it. The German fighter then sallied forth to defend the British tanker from the British bomber; and the tanker, seeing the Blenheim come in on a bombing run, thought it was German. They not only fired at it — they hit it. Under attack from a British ship and a German aircraft, the Blenheim near-missed, and fled. Then up came a complete R.A.F. squadron of Maryland bombers, and, seeing the Messerschmitt-defended tanker, dived in to finish it off. At the last moment, their leader spotted the Red Duster flying from the stern, and swerved. By that time, the Messerschmitt had gone home, glowing with the consciousness of duty done.
A more mysterious happening took place off the east coast, where a convoy was met at dawn, the usual time, by a Blenheim. From 6 o’clock until 7.45, the Blenheim circled protectively then put in an attack. The bombs were well-aimed, falling towards the centre of the convoy. Captain Hadlow, of the collier Grangetoft, actually saw the first bomb drop away from the Blenheim. It was an astonishing sight. What happened next was even more astounding. The bomb fell in the usual arc towards the ship steaming next ahead of him — and struck the wireless aerial; and the aerial, tightening like a tennis-net, slung the bomb back! It went up and out, clear of the ship.
It is hardly possible that a Blenheim pilot had made this mistake. It is just possible that the convoy had made a mistake — that what they had taken for a Blenheim was actually a Junkers 88. The types were not too dissimilar, and the German markings might have been removed for the purpose. There was a definite case of this, on 21st September, 1940. A Ju 88 shot down near Bosham, Sussex, into a field by the railway line, seemed to have counted on this similarity in silhouette. It was camouflaged in a neutral brown and green; there were no black crosses on it, no swastika, no markings of any sort except the squadron crest — a red lion on a white shield. On close inspection, it could be seen that the markings were in fact still there — painted over.
Or it might have been a captured Blenheim, taking advantage of the fact that the R.A.F. dared not give night cover to convoys, but usually sent an escort for the two critical times of dawn and dusk. Normal German aircraft did try to pretend they were the escort, coming out to the convoy from over the land; and this in part explains why the ships were so trigger-happy.
Their gunners never did learn aircraft recognition, and the final admission of the fact was made in time for the Normandy landings. There would be about 11,000 Allied planes over the invasion beaches — and about 200 German. It would be disastrous if the ships blazed away indiscriminately, in their usual fashion. They could put up an astounding barrage, heavier than the London guns, heavier even than Scapa Flow.
The first action taken was to ignore the old national markings, which no one could see anyway, and to jazz-up every Allied aircraft taking part with gigantic black and white stripes on all under-wing surfaces, with blazing white, five-pointed stars elsewhere. The final stage was to gather a large number of men from the Observer Corps and embark them in the ships as a guide to the gunners. Mostly old men, too frail for any normal form of active service, they were a mine of extraordinary aeronautical lore. Not for them the Dorniers and Focke Wulfs — kid stuff, that, any young fool could tell one of those ten miles away — no, they really became excited only over the very latest, most obscure and exotic machines — some of them still a rumour. If any men could do the job, they could — if they weren’t seasick.
They arrived, for the invasion, at the former H.Q. of the Channel Guard near Southampton, now a D.E.M.S. Depot, and were greeted by Commander Spencer. There were 350 of them, assembled as on parade before him, and he hardly knew how to address them. They were all in civilian clothes, with brassards; some were barristers, some were road-sweepers and some were Admirals (Retired). He began: ‘Gentlemen, you can do what you like while you are here — but you cannot smoke during working hours.’ They found, surprisingly, that H.M.S. ‘Safeguard’ did have one or two things to teach them; one of them said later that that period was his ‘best fortnight of the war’.
When they went down to the ships, lying covering all the waters of Spithead and the Solent in a vast armada, to take over aircraft spotting, they were greeted by a ‘Thank God for you, chum’ from the gunners. And doubtless the airmen felt much happier, too. On the night of 5th/6th June, with a heavy sea running, they put out for Normandy. The wheel had come round, at last, full circle. What the Germans had threatened only, we would do.
14 - Normandy
ON the night of 5th June, the German radar station on Cap de la Hogue, near Cherbourg, reported shipping echoes round the Isle of Wight. At the nightly Naval Conference, held in Paris just before midnight, the report was considered — and dismissed as just another convoy, perhaps the ‘Coal-Scuttle Brigade’ coming out from the Motherbank. At ten minutes to two, the officers were roused from their beds by a flurry of reports from all the radar stations. They were reporting widespread ‘interference’ — there were so many echoes on the screens that the operators could not believe that they were being caused by ships. But they were.
The Naval staff tried to get in touch with the radar stations by telephone and teleprinter — and found that the lines had been cut. The Maquis were at work. And at 3.30 that morning, 6th June, German Seventh Army H.Q. received via its forward units the ominous report: ‘Parachutists.’
The leading assault craft were three hours away, rolling and plunging in the black night of a June gale, towards the beaches of Normandy. They did not come in a wave, or even in a succession of waves, they came in line ahead in lines that reached back to Spithead. As the first landing craft raced in to touch down on the coast of France, the ships were still pouring out of the great anchorage between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. There were five battleships there, and two monitors, and 19 cruisers and 77 destroyers; there were landing ships and landing craft, coasters and colliers, gunboats and tugs beyond count. A living bridge of ships between England and Normandy. They moved along the swept channels in the minefields like some vast conveyor-belt out of a madman’s imagination — a conveyor-belt held in place by the destroyers and corvettes, their stained hulls rising to the raging swell, their angry guns raking the horizon with each rise and fall of the sea. It was the greatest seaborne invasion in the history of the world. And the minesweepers, patient ploughmen of the Channel, led it in.
Bomber Command had pulverised the gun positions, 1,000 American bombers had drenched the coastal areas. The villages, in that grey dawn along that holiday shore showed shattered roofs and black and empty windows like the eye-sockets of skulls. Smoke drifted away among the houses and spouts of spray leapt from the water as the landing craft came in. The shrill, uneven chatter of Spandaus greeted them from the dunes, from the headlands, from the holiday villages, like crazy xylophonists half-drowned by the continuous wailing, howling thunder of fire from the support craft. Soon, they were joined by the slower steady put-put-put of the Brens, where infantry came up to the beach and flopped among the dunes and behind the sea walls; and soon, that too was gone with the Spandaus as the battle moved inland.
Off Selsey Bill, tugs were raising the Phoenix caissons sunk there long ago in readiness. The great steel boxes were pumped out, rose slowly above the surface. From Langstone Harbour, from the Beaulieu river they were being raised and towed out. The ‘Mulberries’ were getting ready to go to Normandy. Doomed coasters and colliers, low laden in the water, moved slowly out to Normandy; sluggishly and slow, filled with concrete, they wallowed down the ‘Spout’ — the broad, swept channel in the minefields that pointed to the Bay of the Seine, and the left flank of the beachhead. They were ‘Gooseberry’ — to be sunk in a half circle, as breakwater against any sudden Channel gale. Within sound of the guns, they sank until only their upper works showed, a solid barrier to the sea.
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bsp; And in every harbour of the south coast lay colliers and coasters, ready, practised and waiting. Colliers usually carry coal — usually, but not always; this time, they did not. On D+l — 7th June — the Jesmond of Blyth, manned entirely by ‘Geordies’ except for her master, John Wilson, who was a Scot, stood out from Shoreham towards the narrow end of the ‘Spout’. That point, soon to be known as ‘Piccadilly Circus’, was where the ships entered the funnel — at the broad mouth of it lay Normandy; and if you went in, that’s where you came out. You could nearly walk it, from the Isle of Wight to Normandy, there were so many ships.
In her holds, which for four years had carried Northumberland and Durham coal to feed the lights of London, she held this day the men, the Bofors guns, the ammunition and stores of a Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. These she was to spill out onto the shores of Normandy. They had practised embarking and disembarking on an open beach for a month beforehand, and they had it taped. As she came down the ‘Spout’, the little collier — under 750 tons — was passed by ship after ship, larger and faster than she was. Two-thirds of them flew the ‘Red Duster’ of the British merchant navy, less than a third the Stars and Stripes. These were the waters where the British colliers had been savaged in 1940, and now the colliers were going back.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 13