XD Operations

by C Brazier

  The seventh day brought further cold and foggy weather, with the expedition still steaming north. During the day, final arrangements for disembarkation were completed and Russian and Norwegian interpreters were attached to all parties, all secret instructions destroyed and final operation orders given to Group Commanders. Speed was reduced to 8 knots and they dropped anchor in one of the fjords the same evening. A large school of whales in the vicinity proved to be the main item of interest – an entirely new experience for most of the ships’ company.

  An idea of the background may be gained from the following brief description of this strange northern land. It is light for the whole of the twenty-four hours in the summer and this perhaps is the most unusual feature. At home one punctuates one’s existence by day and night but out there you wake up at midnight, look at your watch which says twelve o’clock. You look out of the porthole to find it is broad daylight and that leaves one in the uncomfortable position of not knowing whether it is midnight or high noon. The island of Spitzbergen, or more correctly the Spitzbergen Archipelago is between 10 degrees and 35 degrees E. longitude and 74 degrees and 81 degrees N. latitude. The biggest island is almost the size of England and Scotland, with two others to the east and west respectively, each about the size of Ireland; these are separated from the central mainland by channels. The first view reveals a barren mountainous region, utterly devoid of vegetation of any kind, snow-capped hills and numerous deep navigable fjords running inland. Glaciers reflect the light even more brilliantly than the snow covered wastes. The sea is bright and broken by ice floes, and at places, is frozen over and merges with the land. The air is crisp and clear with a blue sky in which birds wheel and skim the surface of the sea and land. Everywhere divers, gulls, puffins, geese and eider ducks abound.

  Ashore seams of coal can be seen running horizontally and also outcrops on the sides of the hills, hence the mining settlements of Norwegians and Russians. These communities live in separate towns and do not appear to mix to any extent. The seasonal presence of whales in these waters brings the whaling fleets and the whale oil industry onto the island; the only other occupation, save for a few trappers working inland. These trappers were later brought in to the coastal towns by messages dropped by an aeroplane and they turned up loaded with pelts. Blue fox, white fox, polar bear and reindeer being their quarry. These beautiful skins represent in themselves a great story of hardihood, courage and adventure, before they reach their market as luxury clothing to adorn the women of many lands; many months of dark skies, gales and blizzards weed out all but the strongest of men and beast alike.

  The day of arrival, the ship anchored in deep water off the Russian settlement of Barentsburg; from here the outcrop of coal on the mountainside was easily visible. The ninth day saw the disembarkation and landing of the troops, who, right from the first, were received in the friendliest manner by the inhabitants. The commander of the force met the civilian officials, and made arrangements for the complete evacuation of the entire population of the island. Our party was given its objectives, and split up accordingly, one section going to the Russian settlement of Grumantly and the others to Pyramiden about four hours steaming from there.

  Going ashore in naval pinnaces, the party was met by the Russians who seemed overjoyed and expressed their feelings by clapping hands. They gave the troops cigarettes and chocolates, with which they seemed to be better supplied than most NAAFI canteens at home. Meanwhile stores were unloaded, and after a brief reconnaissance, tasks allocated. All demolition here was completed in eight hours, after which the sappers, with their new found friends the Russians, embarked in HM ship and took passage to Barentsburg arriving at four o’clock the following morning.

  The sappers then went to their next port of call, Ny Alesund, where further work of demolition and scorched earth had by now become a matter of daily routine. Our second party had worked continuously for twenty-four hours, destroying the mines and coal stocks at Grumantly and they then re-embarked for food and sleep. The first party went to Barentsburg to assist in the general evacuation of the place prior to certain final demolitions.

  The sight of those vast coal stocks, burning furiously against the high background of the snow capped mountains and glaciers as they withdrew, was truly remarkable. Just picture thousands of tons of coal on fire in that Arctic setting . . .

  The eleventh day they arrived back at Barentsburg and met those who had been to Ny Alesund and Sveagruva. But life is more than houses and machinery, there were live stock, horses, cows, pigs and domestic animals which could not be just abandoned and had to be slaughtered. The sappers thought that this was perhaps the toughest job of the lot. The depressing sight of this deserted town with the slaughtered animals lying there, for these had been shot, was an unpleasant memory although they were able to enjoy a meal from a huge beast which was roasted in the embers.

  The evacuation of the inhabitants was very thoroughly organized, even to the extent of planes flying inland over miles of barren and desolate snow covered wastes, to warn trappers to return to town.

  The work of demolition was systematically carried on at Ny Alesund and the Norwegian settlements of Longyearby and Sveagruva, Pyramiden, Grumantly and Barentsburg. All fuel stocks were fired; possibly a quarter of a million tons. Mining machinery and similar equipment was blown up, and rendered useless. Large stocks of mine explosives were destroyed; in one case as much as eight tons.

  Before the large dumps of coal could be ignited it was necessary to cut adits or galleries leading into the pits, so as to ensure an adequate supply of air for combustion. As these huge heaps were above ground and frozen, this job was rather like working inside a refrigerator. It was literally like cutting one’s way through a conglomeration of coal and solid ice. The labour involved was considerable, and although the operation turned out to be unopposed, the task was an arduous undertaking for the troops, as the weather was at times severe and at the very best, cold. At night, at some of the anchorages, the sea froze and ice floes were a fairly common sight. Amongst the new experiences, at least to our men, in this strange and barren land, was the sight of arctic seals, polar bears, reindeer and arctic fox at Sveagruva.

  Towards the end of this brief occupation, an incident occurred which might well have proved disastrous. In the early hours of the morning, the wooden town of Barentsburg caught fire. Troops were sleeping in some of the houses and turned out to fight the flames. For a while it looked as if the flames had been isolated, but eventually they spread and the whole place was burned to the ground.

  Towards the end all equipment and stores, including as much as possible of the belongings of the Norwegians and Russians, were ferried out and put aboard the troopship; no small task in itself. The trappers refused to be parted from their dogs, nor was it conceivably possible to destroy them, so they were evacuated with their fellow human beings. They came aboard like well disciplined troops, their masters directing them with a few laconic commands of ‘right, left, stop’ and so forth. This caused great amusement amongst the troops who all agreed that there must be a training battalion somewhere for huskies.

  The last scene in the drama was the final departure from Longyearby, which was carried out with traditional ceremony; the Norwegian flag was hauled down and the last post was sounded. Whereas for some days past the hills had shuddered with the reverberations of demolitions, now the ghostly echoes of those final notes came back from the hills as if to indicate a happier future in the days to come.

  Eventually at eleven o’clock in the evening on the eighteenth day from home, the expedition weighed anchor and headed southwards. About 200 Free French officers accompanied the party on their homeward voyage. They had escaped from concentration camps in Poland and crossed the frontier into Russia. They were overjoyed at the prospect of rejoining their compatriots; several spoke English and told tales of cruelty and hardship at the hands of the Hun and then talked of the people who write to our papers at home about the ‘poor Germans’ as
if to distinguish them from the Nazis. One of these Frenchmen told a crazy story of how he got into Russia disguised as a peasant by driving a herd of cattle over the border before Russia had entered the war. So great was the Russian sense of neutrality that they interned him but politely returned the cattle to the Germans.

  During the voyage home the weather was fine, the sea calm and with the increasing warmth spirits rose until, at 11 p.m. on the twenty-second day, the anchor was dropped in a home port. The job is perhaps best summed up by the chance remark of a Canadian, overheard just before disembarking; ‘Funny job this dropping salt on the tails of the Herrenvolk’.

  Chapter Fourteen

  GIBRALTAR

  It was while in Ireland that an order was passed through our HQ fixing the time and place for me to meet the GOC.-in-C. Gibraltar, in London. Within forty-eight hours a small party left for an unknown destination on a mission. They were commanded by Paul Baker, recently promoted to major, with three subalterns, Lieutenants Roy Meyler, Don Terry, and ‘Shorty’ Wells and five good NCOs who were drawn from across the Field Companies under protest from their OCs ! The nature of the mission that could not be revealed to the men until they left England, was to advise and train the garrison of Gibraltar in the techniques of destroying bulk fuel installations.

  The party travelled to Gourock and was embarked on HMS Maidstone, a submarine depot ship due to take up station on the Rock. Baker’s description of the departure was as follows:

  Before we left Gourock a team of officers was sent out to scour the town to buy ginger ale for the Wardroom bar to mix with brandy in ‘horses’ necks’, which were very popular. The odd thing was that the ginger ale cost more in the Wardroom than the duty free brandy! When we sailed we joined a convoy and for a time as we passed through the North Atlantic one of our escorts was the mighty battleship King George V, known as KG five. I remember thinking as she followed us that her beam looked like a destroyer crossing our course at right angles.

  Soon after embarking the party was impressed into the ship’s crew. All had previously experienced more than one passage with the Royal Navy and could avoid the more obvious pitfalls set for the unsuspecting soldier aboard ship but this was different. They not only had to avoid any reference to the sharp or blunt end, they had to be sailors; it was not sufficient merely to be careful to refer to ladders or companionways as such, and not as stairs.

  Baker played around with division lists, quarter bills, action stations for military personnel and generally became entered as apprentice to ‘Jimmy-the-One’. Furthermore, they helped man the ack-ack guns and kept anti-submarine lookouts throughout the voyage so this time they felt part of the ship and not on the ship as landlubbers as they were usually described.

  ‘Jimmy-the-One’ was also the gunnery officer and would frequently exercise gun teams. Now sappers are sappers and gunners are gunners, that is in the army, but this did not mean a thing to the naval officers. At first our party meekly suggested that it ‘warn’t their trade’ but this was brushed aside. Then they threw themselves heart and soul into the job because they couldn’t let the army down. Before the end of the voyage they achieved the impossible and those sappers were gunners, hopping round at their stations and obeying orders for change of targets like any matelot wearing a gun on his sleeve. As one NCO put it ‘Aint it all right, chum, you have to do everything in the navy, gunner and all’.

  Many alarms relieved these watches of any tendency to boredom. Every distant gull seemed like a plane in sight and the humble porpoise invariably appeared like a submarine to the unaccustomed eye.

  Every morning at dawn the Tannoys would summon the watch to action stations, where they were compensated by witnessing the splendour of the rising sun over the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes calm and comparatively cloudless, but at others it would appear angry and tempestuous as the light spread across the watery expanse. In either case it gave one a sense of proportion, and man’s efforts dwarfed into insignificance against this background of sea and sky with the rising of the sun. But the reverie was soon ended for there was much to be done each day.

  The spells off duty were spent either on a hand of cards or swapping yarns, whilst the NCOs tried out the possibility of investing the ‘old mud hook’ at Crown and Anchor, only to find that if it provided excitement, it was not too good a pastime from the financial point of view. The Royal Navy are great hosts and the time passed pleasantly enough. At one period they ran into heavy weather, when the troops were rather shaken, particularly at breakfast time when heavy rolling landed them either in the scuppers or under the mess tables with their breakfast wrapped round their necks. The routine during the voyage was a change for the party who quickly fell in with the traditions of life afloat; after all, they had worked under Naval Command in many of their ‘jobs’ and the White Ensign figured in most of their recollections. They came up smiling for meals, in spite of the weather and learned to sleep in a hammock. An amusing indication of our close association with the sea for some months is that many in the unit had got into the habit of ‘making signals’ in preference to sending messages; this produced an inquiry while on an exercise in Ireland from a brigadier who asked whether we were ‘blankety, blank’ Marines!

  The days at sea passed quickly and one morning the Spanish and African coasts came into view. These blue hills, misty and distant, merging at places with the sea and sky, told of the end of the journey. It was not long before that huge bluff, the rock itself, was discernible, dominating and impressive, standing sentinel over the entrance to what the chief dago was wont to refer to as mare nostrum. I know of no spectacle more impressive or more typical of our solidarity as an Empire than the first glimpse of Gibraltar as one approaches from the sea. The key position of the Rock at the western end of the Mediterranean is at once evident when approaching from the Atlantic. The massive block of grey rock rising steeply to 1,400 feet in grim and imposing outline gives a vivid idea of the military importance of the place. The north and east faces are particularly steep, but elsewhere the sides descend in terraces to sea level.

  Baker continued:

  We had a comfortable trip and duly took up quarters on arrival. I then reported to the Garrison HQ and explained our mission. Practically all the sappers on the Rock were tunnellers, mostly former miners, and a tough lot. The rest of my party were introduced to them and got on with a programme of training in demolitions under Don Terry, boatmanship under Roy Meyler with Wells and the NCOs helping out as needed. As a change from tunnelling they found this most acceptable and we heard that there had eventually been some keen competition to get into one of our raiding parties.

  The amazing collection of barracks, casemates of bygone ages, modern fortifications, a Moorish castle, and countless other works of the military engineer, tended to give the place an intriguing outline. It may be said that the Corps of Royal Engineers had its origin at Gibraltar in the late eighteenth century as soldier artificers.

  The outstanding impression of those first contacts with the garrison was that everyone tried to convince them that there was no escape from the Rock for the duration. Once you set a foot ashore, you were there for keeps, seemed to be the local outlook and any suggestion that one might return to England was the subject of merriment and derision.

  The naval base and dockyards bring the two services close together at this outpost of the Empire. It will be recalled that Gibraltar was taken by the British in 1704 and has been a colony of the Crown ever since; small wonder then with its dominating position and historical importance if the Nazis should cast covetous eyes on it. The indigenous population are descendants of Italian, Spanish or early Genoese settlers, but of course are British now and highly patriotic subjects of His Majesty. Local legend says that British rule will last as long as the monkeys flourish. This refers to the small colony of Barbary apes found on the Rock who are officially on the ‘ration strength’ of the garrison and a bombardier has a full time job as their minder.

  The party was
accommodated in Nissen huts up near the frontier on the isthmus. Little or no blackout was in force – that was a minor thrill. It was quite exciting to see the lights again at night, their only previous similar experience since war was at Nantes just before the fall of France, and those more recent weekends in Dublin.

  The work of the mission was hard, at first often taking up long hours, but once accomplished it became a matter of waiting for the passage home, not too easy a matter in those days. During this period of waiting several of the officers and NCOs did spells at sea with the anti-submarine patrol. Imagine leaving the trawler base, ‘pens’ as they are known, and pushing out to sea early on a wet and cold morning, as likely as not into the teeth of a Levanter. Life aboard these hard little ships is tough going at the best and hell at other times. With a small crew commanded by a lieutenant, they go out to hunt, fight and destroy the King’s enemies above and below the sea. On these spells at sea our men would muster and carry on as part of the crew. They learned the secrets of the Asdic by which they listened to the grating of the surf miles away inshore, or the thump, thump of some distant coaster’s screw plugging along on her lawful business. They would keep watch either above or below deck in the engine room and generally share the rough and the smooth with those cheery young men in these ships. One of our NCOs went to the lengths of replumbing the hot and cold water pipes to the galley with such crowning success that both the hot and the cold water came out of their appropriately labelled taps when the job was done! Action stations and alarms came frequently enough to convince the most bloodthirsty that there was plenty of excitement to be had in these small but active vessels of the Royal Navy.

  The Rock, because of its size, only had a limited garrison, a fair proportion of which were RE tunnelling companies including one RCE from Canada. These were engaged in hollowing out even more of the interior of the Rock to provide shelter for the garrison in the event of air attack. In the end total living space was provided including a hospital and all the necessary facilities for a long stay. New gun emplacements were constructed covering the isthmus joining the Rock to Spain. The spoil from all the recent work was tipped into the sea adjoining the narrow neck of land connecting the Rock to Spain and this was used to form a landing and take-off strip for fighter aircraft; as the tunnelling progressed so the airstrip runway was extended.