by Sam Moses
Hill had been assigned to command the Ledbury while she was being completed at the Southampton shipyard. He rode up on the Norton on an ugly January night and climbed to the unfinished bridge, where he imagined he was shooting down Stukas: ack-ack-acking with an invisible Oerlikon at the drizzly sky. He also had the capture of a U-boat and its crew all worked out in his mind. After forcing it to the surface with depth charges, the Ledbury’s gunners would hold down the sub’s hatch with tracer fire while a boarding party would scramble onto its deck, open the hatch, and herd the surrendering Germans with machine guns. Hill would climb down into the sub himself and claim its Enigma decoding machine, the ultimate trophy. “I peopled the Ledbury with lusty, happy sailors ripping out the shells at an unprecedented rate of fire,” he said.
Hill’s third fantasy was ramming a German battleship. It was an especially daring dream because the little Ledbury was only a 1,010-ton Hunt-class destroyer, although she was being used for the work of a larger Tribal class, because so many Tribals had been sunk.
“He wasn’t very popular with the ship’s company, you know,” said the doctor, John Nixon. “The crew called him ‘Phyllis.’ It wasn’t a term of endearment, and I’m not going to say any more than that. But that was in Scapa Flow, a very dreary place. He used to get very worked up, as many a captain did, trying to maneuver a small destroyer in that place. He used to get tantrums, swearing at the ship’s company and the gunnery officer, Musham. That doesn’t go down very well. It’s better for a ship’s captain to keep his cool, if he can.”
“Still, he possessed the element of luck in full measure, and the men knew it,” said Robin Owen, his cadet.
It may have been true that there were times when Hill’s heart flopped onto the sleeve of his woolen peacoat, but that’s because it was like a lion’s and it needed some room. As the Ledbury steamed to meet Operation Pedestal, he was both depressed and angry.
One month earlier, the Ledbury had been part of the infamous PQ17 convoy to Murmansk. Tracking the convoy from London, First Sea Lord Dudley Pound had incorrectly and singularly believed it was about to be attacked by the German battleship Tirpitz—he had seen phantoms, possibly a symptom of the brain tumor that would kill him. So he ordered the Royal Navy escorts to scatter, leaving the merchantmen to be slaughtered by German bombers and U-boats that the warships could have fought off.
“The dismal tale of each ship or little group of ships, some of them accompanied by one or more of the smaller escort vessels, became a saga in itself,” said Churchill. “Of the 34 ships which left Iceland, 23 were sunk, and their crews perished in the icy sea or suffered incredible hardships and mutilation by frostbite. Fourteen American ships in all were sunk. This was one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war.”
The disaster of PQ17 made Operation Pedestal all the more important to Churchill. His use of the word “melancholy” is suggestive—and profound. He was plagued by bouts of depression he called “marauders” or the “Black Dog”; the main reason he kept Dr. Sir Charles Wilson by his side was to keep the demons away. After the consecutive devastating defeats of Operation Harpoon, Tobruk, and PQ17, Churchill knew that one more loss might mean a vote of “no confidence” from the House of Commons. The prime ministership was riding on Operation Pedestal.
When the warships returned to Scapa Flow after PQ17, the Royal Navy sailors were met with hostility. Some of the Ledbury’s men got drunk and had a fight with some Yanks from a cruiser who called them yellow Limeys. “The feelings of the Americans from the cruisers and destroyers which had been on PQ17 ran high, and there were some serious fights ashore,” said Hill. “In fact, there were some deaths, I heard.”
Before the Ledbury left Scapa Flow to join Operation Pedestal, Hill had told his men that he intended to disobey any order to leave the survivors of a sunken merchant ship in the water. But he doubted that such an order would come, this time. He knew that Admiral Syfret was a fighter, having years earlier served under Syfret’s command on the cruiser Caradoc, based in China, eight hundred miles up the Yangtze River.
But PQ17 wasn’t the only reason Hill’s emotions were raw. His kid brother, a twenty-one-year-old Royal Marine officer, had been killed in November when the battleship Barham was torpedoed in the Mediterranean; she had capsized within five minutes and been on her side when she blew up, killing 862 men.
It was easy for a man of Hill’s emotion and imagination to program himself to leap into the ocean to rescue survivors, as if the seawater would get the bitter taste of PQ17 out of his mouth. That’s what he did when a Sunderland flying boat crashed into the water near the Ledbury out in the Atlantic.
The Ledbury was one day ahead of Operation Pedestal, escorting another convoy. The pilot of the antisub Sunderland had made the rookie mistake of flying low over the convoy in a fog; three of the merchantmen had failed to recognize the friendly aircraft and opened fire. The Sunderland passed over the Ledbury with one engine on fire, diving toward the sea. Hill raced through the fog and found the crashed plane on the water with the crew sitting on one wing. The Sunderland sank, and there was an underwater explosion.
The Sunderland’s depth charges had been set to explode at fifty feet, and the pilot had failed to eject them before the plane hit the water.
“When the spray from the explosion had settled, leaving a bubbling circle of foam, the crew of the plane were scattered all over the place. I thought the quickest way would be for me to fetch the most distant man, since I was a fast swimmer,” said Hill.
He turned to his cadet and declared, “Take the helm, pilot, I am going after that man!” And he leaped off the bridge, thirty or more feet into the water, furiously stroking toward the man, whom he saved.
Eight of the nine Sunderland airmen died from the concussion of the depth charges. “It looked like their buttons had been pressed in by a thumb,” said Don Allen, a radar operator on the Ledbury bridge. The dead airmen were sewn up in hammocks, weighted down with boiler bricks, and buried at sea.
Captain Hill knew that his superiors wouldn’t approve of his diving overboard and leaving his ship in the hands of a cadet. The words “Take the helm, pilot, I am going after that man!” sounded more foolish than gallant to the Royal Navy.
Charles Henry Walker, still built like a bull at age ninety, was the cook on Ledbury and captain of its water polo team. He dived into the water behind Hill to make sure his captain didn’t drown. “Afterward, the captain looked me close in the eye and said, ‘Walker, you didn’t see nothing, did you?’ and I replied, ‘No sir.’
“The navy never did like Roger Hill’s ways,” he adds. “He was still a lieutenant commander when he got out. They should have made him a ‘Sir.’”
CHAPTER 21 •••
OPERATION BERSERK
Day and night, warships joined the convoy and took their place in the formation, until there were about sixty ships of all kinds. Each day at high noon, from the bridge of the Santa Elisa, Fred Larsen took a reading of the sun with his sextant, plotting the convoy’s course just for practice. He read the stars from the bridge during his watch from 0400 to 0800 and plotted the course again.
The master of each merchant ship had been given a thick book of twenty-four cruising dispositions, with instructions on how to merge from one to another, but only a few of the formations applied to the merchantmen, and the masters were thankful for it. The basic freighter formation was four columns, with the two big battleships, Nelson and Rodney, leading a fifth center column made up of the aircraft carriers, none of which was planning to go all the way to Malta. The carriers were the convoy’s wide backbone, with freighters on each side. The seven cruisers covered the freighter columns, port and starboard, and a wedge-shaped ring of destroyers screened the outside against U-boats and enemy aircraft.
For days, the ships practiced zigging, zagging, merging, turning, shooting, signaling, and more, sometimes at top speed and often in darkness. Admiral Syfret was pleased by how the merchantmen learned the mo
ves. They would make a total of twenty-seven emergency evasive turns, many of them actual U-boat alerts, with destroyers dropping depth charges in the direction of unseen submarines.
“Bump-bump-bump, they went,” wrote a young merchant sailor named Desmond “Dag” Dickens, the son of a cousin of Charles Dickens, “and for every bump a colossal fountain of white spray would heave itself out of the calm blue water.”
“They’re dropping them at random,” said Captain Thomson. “The idea is that the depth charges will keep the U-boats at a distance. Everybody knows they’re out there, waiting for a chance.”
Late in the afternoon of August 5, Admiral Burrough broke away from the convoy in his swift cruiser, Nigeria. Her ungainly Walrus antisubmarine patrol plane was launched from the steam-powered catapult in the aircraft hangar high amidships, and it flew ahead of the cruisers in slow circles, looking for subs. Burrough ordered the Nigeria cranked up to 30 knots and disappeared toward the pink sunset, skipping over the sun-kissed waves like an offshore powerboat racer at Key West. He was in a hurry to get down to Gibraltar, to work out the logistics for the final day of Operation Berserk, as the ongoing exercises on the way down to Gibraltar were so aptly named.
There were now five aircraft carriers with the convoy. “When Indomitable joined my flag it is believed to have been the first occasion when five of Her Majesty’s aircraft carriers have ever operated in company at sea simultaneously,” said Admiral Syfret. The Indomitable had steamed around Africa from Madagascar, where Syfret had used her in Operation Ironclad. But because she had been a day late leaving Freetown, she had had to race to rendezvous with Pedestal and needed fuel when she got there.
The oiler Abbeydale was there for that purpose but had never refueled an aircraft carrier before, so the attempt didn’t go well, and Indomitable would have to go ahead into Gibraltar to refuel and then back out into the Atlantic to rejoin the convoy. In fact, none of the warships in the previous Malta convoys had ever needed refueling at sea, because Malta had always had enough to get them back home.
“In this case Malta had no oil to spare,” said Syfret. “The problem of oiling three cruisers and 26 destroyers at sea, under enemy observation and in U-boat-infested waters, was an anxious one, failure of which could have seriously upset the whole plan.”
On Saturday night, August 8, there were seven ships from Operation Pedestal refueling in Gibraltar, enough that Admiral Burrough called a midnight meeting of their captains. In the nearby neutral Spanish town of Algeciras, two Royal Navy officers finished their late dinner and on their way out passed a German sitting at a table.
“Today we see you,” the German told the officers with a knowing smile. “You sail out and you sail back, you sail out and you sail back. Then you will sail out and don’t come back. Then we go out and get you.”
On the blistering hot Sunday afternoon of August 9, as Winston Churchill was firing General Auchinleck in Cairo, the convoy was still out in the Atlantic Ocean just west of Gibraltar, preparing for the closing exercise of Operation Berserk. It was time for the war games.
On the Santa Elisa, Captain Thomson posted the signal from Admiral Syfret.
To all ships:
Commencing at 1700 this evening mock warfare exercises will be held. One half of the carrier-based aircraft will take off at 1700 and will simulate an air attack on the convoy. The attack will be performed in the following order: 1715 dive bombing, 1730 torpedo bombing, 1745 strafing, 1800 high and medium level bombing, 1815 combination all types of attack. At 1830 all planes will return to their carriers. During these exercises unloaded anti-aircraft weapons may be trained on the aircraft.
It was a thrilling hour and a half, especially the final fifteen minutes, “combination all types of attack.” Larsen and Dales each manned an Oerlikon, at their battle stations on the forward and after port bridge wings. Planes screamed over the ships’ bows and masts as gunners tried to keep them in their sights, with their fingers held away from the triggers. Men on the monkey decks dodged imaginary strafing from Hurricanes and practiced imaginary launching of the parachute-and-cable rockets. They all tried to memorize the features of their own Spitfires, Hurricanes, Martlets, Fulmars, and Albacores. Larsen and Dales had already been to the school, so that part was just review for them.
Admiral Syfret had attempted to coordinate this grand finale while maintaining wireless and radio silence, because they were within reach of German electronic ears in Morocco and Tangier, but he soon saw it was hopeless. The exercise “did entail a great volume of W/T [wireless] and R/T [radio] traffic which must have been very apparent to enemy or enemy-controlled listening stations,” he reported, but added, “This risk to security was considered acceptable when balanced against the benefit to be derived from the practices.”
The sun sank into the sea like a flaming red beach ball. Darkness exposed the glittering lights of two shores, Spain to the north and Morocco to the south, divided by the Strait of Gibraltar, narrowing to eight miles wide. A fog fell on the moonless night, and the Rock of Gibraltar rose from a ghostly mist, as the convoy slipped through the strait as invisibly as sixty ships can. Only the greenest or most optimistic believed that they were still unseen by the enemy, even in the foggy night. There was a German observation post in Algeciras, and on the African side, at Spanish Cueta, an Italian agent lived in an apartment with a view over the strait.
The ships squeezed between the continents in two very long columns, somehow missing the fishing boats. “I think the whole Spanish fishing fleet was out there, lit up like Christmas trees,” said Larsen. He was still on the bridge when the fog lifted, later in the night. The Santa Elisa’s radio was picking up Spanish communication.
“Much to our horror, signal lights from North Africa and Spain were lighting up the convoy, sending messages back and forth about our arrival,” said Dales. His jaw dropped when he heard what he thought were the words “Santa Elisa.”
By sunrise, the convoy was clear of the Strait of Gibraltar and the Spanish and African coasts and was steaming at 15 knots. The shadows of Spanish mountains rose out of the morning mist. Admiral Syfret sent out a final signal in the calm before the storm:
You may be sure that the enemy will do all in his power to prevent the convoy getting through, and it will require every exertion on our part to see that he fails. When you are on watch, be especially vigilant and alert, and when you are off duty, get all the sleep you can. Every one of us must give of his best. The garrison and people of Malta have been defending their island so gallantly against incessant attacks by the German and Italian air forces. Malta looks to us for help. We shall not fail them.
PART V •••
INTO THE MEDITERRANEAN
CHAPTER 22 •••
OPERATION BELLOWS
When this war is a misty memory in the minds of old men, they will still talk of the convoy for Malta which entered the Mediterranean early in August 1942,” wrote Norman Smart, the war correspondent for the London Daily Express, on board the cruiser Cairo and carrying a pen and a crystal ball. “With its vast escort it was ten miles across. It was more than 50 ships. Almost to the blue bowl of the horizon stretched this armada, hurrying to succor Malta.”
The pilot of an Air France flying boat, on a flight from Paris to Algiers, looked down at the wide armada. The unwritten rule for noncombatant commercial pilots from neutral countries was simple: stay out of it, and you won’t be shot down. But the Vichy pilot was unable to sit on the astonishing sight and radioed home that he could see thirty-two ships. Within minutes, Comando Supremo and the Luftwaffe had the information.
The Indomitable picked up the Air France pilot’s message, and sent up a Hurricane, which flew alongside the airliner. Larsen listened in as the Santa Elisa’s radio received the Hurricane pilot’s voice. “The passengers are looking very uncomfortable,” he told Indomitable. “Shall I shoot the bastard down?”
The answer, this time, was no.
If the convoy’s presence
and location were now known, its intentions remained a mystery to the Italians. It seemed too big to be merely taking supplies to Malta. General Ugo Cavallero, commander in chief of the Italian High Command (Comando Supremo), thought this might be an invasion of North Africa, and he canceled a trip to Africa because he believed there would be a huge air and naval battle in the days ahead. Admiral Luigi Sansonetti argued that with five aircraft carriers, it had to be a massive flying-off of aircraft to Malta, and if so it must be stopped at all costs, as an RAF offensive from Malta would ruin them. Others thought that some of the convoy must be headed for Alexandria, to build up the fleet there. Admiral Arturo Riccardi ordered reconnaissance aircraft from Sardinia to snoop around when the convoy got within range.
There were five Italian and three German submarines waiting in the western Mediterranean, patrolling between Algiers and the island of Formentera off the east coast of Spain, a distance of about 120 miles. A dozen destroyers ran interference for the convoy, in a bending row that was nine miles wide. They kept the subs at bay that night, but just before dawn on August 11, 60 miles south of Ibiza, the Italian Uarscieck launched three torpedoes at the aircraft carrier Furious. They missed by a mile, but a destroyer saw the torpedo tracks and dropped some depth charges. The submarine captain heard the exploding depth charges and reported back that the Furious was sunk. The news was on Italian state radio that night, mentioning Furious by name, which gave the convoy sailors a good snort, but Syfret had to send a message to London asking the Admiralty to notify the families of the Furious sailors that their men were still alive and well.
So far things were going well, but there was one big logistical problem that upset Admiral Syfret. Just before the convoy had left the Clyde, the Admiralty had informed Syfret that Operation Bellows, the flying-off of more Spitfires to Malta from Furious, had been added to his carefully laid Pedestal plans. Syfret had nearly snapped the stem of his pipe between his clenched teeth. He cited the trouble it caused in his report, including the “general unsettling effect on all, which last minute changes always cause.”