After a week at Ballykelly and a week at Eglinton, the Squadron suddenly found itself divided into two parts. A sub-flight of three Swordfish, under the command of Lieutenant Shirley-Smith, remained at Eglinton. The other six Swordfish, under the command of John Lang, were flown to the airfield at Sydenham (near Belfast), taxied down to the docks and hurriedly hoisted aboard Battler.
We had, the CO told us, been ordered to join Convoy OS49, bound for Gibraltar.
At long last we had caught up with the Battle of the Atlantic.
* * *
Convoy OS49, from the United Kingdom to Gibraltar, must surely have been one of the least eventful of the war! It was a small convoy, no more than three dozen merchantmen and a dozen warships, its objective being to take aircraft and military equipment to the Mediterranean as part of the build-up to the Allied invasion of Italy. Battler was as much a store-ship as a fighting ship. As evidence of this, there were in our hangar twenty-one Spitfires. These, with their fixed wings, took up a lot of space. And it was because of this lack of space that Battler’s operational strength had been reduced to six Swordfish from 835 Squadron to provide anti-submarine patrols, and four Seafires from 808 Squadron to provide fighter cover.
We rendezvoused with our merchantmen a few miles from Rathlin Island off the tip of Northern Ireland, and almost at once began anti-submarine patrols. Harry Housser and I flew the first, taking-off at dawn on 6 July in difficult conditions, with a lot of low cloud and drizzle. Once airborne, visibility was so bad it was impossible to see all the ships in the convoy at the same time. However, we soon realized that one of our charges was belching smoke and lagging behind. (We later learned that the Maxefjell was unable to maintain more than five knots and almost at once gave up the unequal struggle and returned to Oban.) Conditions were still bad when we returned to land-on at the end of our three-hour patrol and, much to his mortification, Harry missed all the arrester wires and ended up in the barrier. In view of our dearth of Swordfish, it was lucky the plane was no more than slightly damaged.
The rest of the day’s patrols were uneventful, with the convoy maintaining a steady nine knots and the ships keeping station with precision. Moving a whole lot of ships from one port to another in convoy isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially in wartime.
In the early years of the war convoys usually consisted of forty to fifty merchantmen, with anything up to a dozen warships to guard them. The merchantmen sailed in parallel columns, six or seven ships one behind the other. The warships guarded their flanks. In charge of the merchantmen was a Commodore, usually a Royal Naval Reserve officer of flag rank. The debt that the country owes to these tough, knowledgeable, responsible, overworked men has seldom been properly acknowledged. It was they, every bit as much as the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain, who helped win the war. Sailing from Liverpool alone, over twenty Commodores were lost on Atlantic convoys: the official records tell us how:-
“Captain H.C. Birnie, Bonneville, Convoy SC121, torpedoed by U-405; sank in 20 minutes, in rough seas and snow squalls … Vice-Admiral H.J.S. Brownrigg, Ville de Tamatave, Convoy ONS 160; capsized in storm-force winds; all hands lost … Captain R.H. Garstin, Stentor; Convoy SL125; torpedoed by U-509; blinded, last seen telling the doctor tending him to take to the boats … Captain E. Rees, Empire Howard, Convoy PQ14; torpedoed by U-403; last seen in the water clutching a plank of wood and smoking a cigar; his ship sank in less than one minute.”
In charge of warships was a Senior Naval Officer, flying his flag in the most powerful of the escort vessels, usually a cruiser or aircraft-carrier. Although one might have thought such a system of divided command would cause problems, in fact it worked well, for both men were experts in their field and were in frequent consultation; also, most importantly, they were on the spot. It is significant that the most disastrous convoys of the war – “Vigorous” to Malta and PQ17 to Russia – were not controlled by the Commodore and SNO on the spot, but took their orders from a shore-based headquarters (in Alexandria or London) a thousand miles from the scene of action.
In the case of OS49 our Commodore’s task was easy. His ships could all maintain 9 knots, the sea was calm, the enemy conspicuous by his absence.
Over the next few days our Swordfish provided more or less continuous anti-submarine patrols, circling the convoy at a range of 20 or 25 miles. About the only moment of excitement was when Bob Selley and Jack Teesdale found they had a well-defined “blip” on their radar screen. It was evening, and visibility was none too good, with nine-tenths low cloud and mist. The “blip” seemed to be moving very slowly towards the convoy – just as a U-boat might be expected to move – and they homed on it hopefully. Emerging from cloud, Bob spotted an ill-defined grey object on the surface. He was about to dive into the attack, when his “target” suddenly spouted a fountain of water and stale air. They had been stalking a cachalot, one of the great whales hunted by the fishermen of the Azores.
The first few days of our run to Gibraltar were almost devoid of incident. The weather was far from ideal for flying, with poor visibility, virtually no wind and a great deal of haze. Nonetheless it was a benign introduction to operations for our less experienced aircrew. One of them, John Cridland, recalls taking off on his first patrol a few days before his 21st birthday:-
“I remember the walk along the flight-deck to our plane which was parked near the stern of the carrier. My parachute was slung over my shoulder. My observer beside me was carrying his green canvas chart-case and the other tools of his trade; knowing it was my first patrol, he was probably as nervous as I was! We had to be careful not to trip over the arrester-wires, even though they weren’t raised; and it seemed a very long way to the plane. However, once in the cockpit, the ritual of starting up was all I had time to think about: the rigger or fitter turning the inertia starting-handle, while I checked the fuel level and the magnetos. I remember the sweet, warm smell of oil as the engine fired and gradually warmed up … I remember too, when I was flying the dawn patrol a few days later, being much impressed by the beauty of the sunrise. When we took off at 0640 the sea below us was still dark as ink, but the sky above us was pale and filled with irregular rows of fluffy little cumulus clouds. As we climbed towards these clouds, I noticed their undersurface was turning a brilliant pink as one by one they caught the first rays of the rising sun. It came to me that we were seeing the sort of bird’s-eye-view of the sunrise that one never gets from ground level, and I remember thinking it a pity that we in our aircraft were the only people able to appreciate it.”
10. A Skua collides with Hank Housser’s and Barry Barringer’s Swordfish at Machrihanish, 9 February, 1943.
11. A Beaufighter taking Sam Mearnes and ‘Chiefie’ Banham to Casablanca crashes into the cemetery, Gibraltar, 7 September, 1944.
Some of the aircrew:
12. L.to R.: George Sadler (pilot), Stan Thomas (observer), L/A Defraine (telegraphist air gunner).
13. L.to R.: P.O. Armstrong (telegraphist air gunner), Jimmy Urquhart (pilot), Barry Barringer (observer).
14. L.to R.: Dave Newberry (observer), Bob Selley (pilot), P.O. Lang (telegraphist air gunner).
15. L.to R.: Derek Ravenhill (observer), P.O. Wise (telegraphist air gunner), Ted Pitts (pilot).
16. L.to R.: P.O. Sheldrake (telegraphist air gunner), Joe Supple (pilot), Johnny Lloyd (observer).
17. L.to R.: P.O. Tidman (telegraphist air gunner), Bill Buckie (observer), Teddie Elliott (pilot).
Ironically the first suspicion of enemy action turned out to be a false alarm, yet led to tragedy. The convoy was coming up to the Cape Saint Vincent when an unidentified aircraft was picked up on Battler’s radar. Two Seafires from 808 Squadron were scrambled to investigate. The first took off safely. But the second, three-quarters of the way down the flight-deck, started drifting to port. The tip of its wing caught one of the for’d ack-ack guns. The Seafire cartwheeled over the side and crashed into the sea. No trace of the pilot was ever found.
W
hat made the accident doubly tragic was that the unidentified aircraft turned out to be not an Axis shadower but an allied plane which had forgotten to switch on its IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe).
Next day, as we approached Gibraltar, the 808 pilots began flying off the Spitfires which had been in our hangar. Since there were twenty-one of these Spitfires and only three 808 pilots to fly them, there obviously had to be a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing, with Johnny Hunt, Jimmy Urquhart and Tony Costello in their Swordfish shuttling the Spitfire pilots backwards and forwards between the carrier and Gibraltar’s North Front airfield.
That evening (14 July), all the Spitfires having been safely delivered, Battler made fast alongside the mole in the outer harbour.
We were all looking forward to shore leave, but were told that no one could disembark until a staff officer from naval headquarters had come to brief us on what we could and couldn’t do on the Rock. That evening, to mark the successful completion of our first operation in Battler, there was a mild celebration in the wardroom, and in the small hours Hank Housser and Jimmy Urquhart decided to go for a swim. They lowered a jack-ladder over the side, stripped off and plunged gaily into the water. It could well all too literally have been their final plunge. For almost at once they were spotlit by searchlights and launches with guns and depth-charges at the ready bore down on them from all directions. What they didn’t know was that Italian frogmen, operating from the nearby and supposedly neutral Bay of Algeciras, had recently sunk or damaged nearly a dozen allied vessels in Gibraltar; naval launches were therefore on patrol each night, itching to shoot up and depth-charge anything or anybody seen in the water. We heard afterwards that there was an Admiralty enquiry into the incident, and that the staff officer who ought to have briefed us was given an official reprimand for not having come aboard as soon as Battler secured to the mole.
There followed a week in the sun, in a very different atmosphere to that of wartime England. Gibraltar is an almost sheer outcrop of limestone, rising to over 1,390 feet from a promontory overlooking the entrance to the Mediterranean. It is a natural fortress of obvious strategic importance, and ever since the days of the ancient Greeks it has been subjected to endless invasions and sieges. It became a British colony in 1713 and was turned into a naval base which, in spite of its land border with Spain, was reckoned to be impregnable.
It was a strange sensation, in wartime, to be able to walk quite openly into a neutral country. It is true one needed a permit to do this, but Jack Teesdale and I had no difficulty getting one, and crossing the Bay of Algeciras by ferry we lunched magnificently at the Hotel Cristina. Some of the finest sherry in the world, I remember, was 4/6d a bottle. Others in the squadron made their way through the Rock’s impressive labyrinth of tunnels, and emerged at East Beach, one of the few places where swimming was permitted, while yet others paid a visit to a bullfight, and caused consternation among the locals by cheering the bull instead of the matador!
We were just getting used to la dolce vita when shore leave was cancelled, and on 22 June Battler and her escorting warships weighed anchor and stood west into the Atlantic. Our orders, John Lang told us, were to escort a homeward-bound convoy KMS16/XK9
Once again we had an uneventful passage. Looking back, I think a lot of the credit for this must go to 808 Squadron. The convoy had barely assembled and got under way when our radar picked up an enemy aircraft which was obviously trying to shadow us. Two Seafires, piloted by Lt Constable and Sub-Lt Penny took off and managed to make an interception. The enemy aircraft, a four-engined Focke Wulf Condor, was shot down and the two Seafires, returning to Battler, succeeded in landing-on safely in spite of the fact that the sun had set and it was almost dark. So the U-boats remained unaware of our convoy’s course, composition and speed.
Another factor to thwart them was that, from Gibraltar to the Clyde, our Swordfish kept up near-continuous anti-submarine patrols, taking-off as early as 0545 and landing-on as late as 2245. There were U-boats about. During the six days that the convoy was at sea Coastal Command sighted several in the Bay of Biscay and the cryptographers decoding their radio transmissions confirmed that up to half-a-dozen were, at different times, in a position to cause us trouble, but none came near us. One reason undoubtedly was that, as soon as they surfaced, they picked up our patrolling Swordfish on their sea-to-air-radar-type-detectors and were forced to submerge. So the convoy sailed along peacefully, day after uneventful day.
It is possible to attribute our safe passage to several factors. We could, quite simply, have been lucky. It could be that the U-boats had other fish to fry and didn’t consider our relatively small convoy worth bothering over. It could be that our passage coincided with a lull in Dönitz’s offensive and he was regrouping his forces. However, it is, I think, significant that only a few weeks later another convoy which followed much the same route but was without the protection of an escort carrier suffered crippling losses; out of its thirteen merchantmen seven were torpedoed and sunk. On 28 June we dropped anchor in the Clyde.
Our first tour of duty in Battler had been uneventful but by no means unsuccessful. We had flown fifty-eight anti-submarine patrols without serious mishap, and not one of the merchantmen we were guarding had been attacked, damaged or sunk. In spite of her teething troubles Battler struck us as being a relaxed and efficiently-run carrier; we got on well with her ship’s officers, and it seemed reasonable to hope we were on the threshold of a permanent association with her.
The Admiralty, however, had other ideas. On rejoining our sub-flight at Eglinton, we discovered that we had become a composite (combined fighter and TBR) squadron. For there, waiting to join us, were not only our three Swordfish but six Hurricane IIes and five fighter pilots.
The idea of a composite squadron had much to commend it. Intelligence reports indicated that U-boats in the Atlantic were changing their tactics. Their new orders were that, when attacked, instead of trying to escape by diving, they should stay on the surface and fight it out. With this in mind, their anti-aircraft weaponry had been upgraded and updated, and a slow and vulnerable Swordfish lumbering in to the attack was now liable to find it had bitten off more than it could chew. The idea of a composite squadron was that Swordfish and Hurricanes should work in tandem, with the fighter going in first to silence the U-boat’s ack-ack and the Swordfish following up with an unopposed and hopefully accurate attack with depth-charges or rocket-projectiles. One obvious difficulty was that Hurricanes and Swordfish flew at very different speeds – the former at well over 200 mph, the latter at well under 100 – so practice would be needed to achieve the necessary co-ordination. A further and obvious advantage of having fighters in the squadron was that they could provide a convoy with defence against enemy aircraft, being able to drive off both shadowing Condors and attacking Junkers.
However, it was something of a letdown for our newly appointed fighter pilots to find themselves nursemaids to a gaggle of antediluvian Swordfish. They had come from 804, an élite squadron with a fine war record, a high profile and high morale. As well as accounting for an impressive number of enemy aircraft, 804 had the distinction of providing pilots for the CAM (Catapult Armed Merchant) ships. (The once-only flights of these catafighters were, to say the least, hazardous; for most of their flying was done far from land in the lonely reaches of the Atlantic, and once a pilot had been catapulted-off he had no hope of ever being able to land; on completing his mission he had either to ditch in the sea or bail out.)
In the summer of 1943 804 Squadron had been told that they were going to convert to Hellcats, the latest, well-liked and high-performance fighters to arrive from America. Indeed the pilots had actually done a fortnight’s engine-handling course to familiarize them with their new aircrafts’ 2,000 hp Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp power-plant. However, at the end of this course the CO and most of the senior pilots had unexpectedly been given shore appointments and the rump of the squadron had been ordered to Eglinton, where, instead of the hoped-for a
nd modern Hellcats, they found waiting for them half-a-dozen somewhat ancient Hurricanes and a dozen even more ancient Swordfish. It didn’t help their morale when they were told that their new section-leader, who had not yet arrived, was going to be a Lieutenant RN ex-Walrus pilot who had only recently completed his fighter-training course!
It says much for their good nature and adaptability that they buckled to without complaint to learn the new tactics that an unfamiliar type of flying would call for.
Among these recently-joined pilots were three who were to become long-serving stalwarts of the squadron: Sam Mearns, an imposing figure with a piratical manner, a refreshing disdain for formality and a great desire to get on with the war; and two New Zealanders: Pete Picot, popular, eventempered and an outstanding pilot; and Al Burgham, slightly-built and with a dry sense of humour, who was soon to lead his fighter-section with quiet efficiency on some of the most amazing feats of flying in the war.
The fighter pilots had just started to get to grips with thinking in terms of air-to-ground combat rather than air-to-air, when their new section-commander arrived to take over. Lieutenant Wilfred Waller, RN, turned out to be a modest and most approachable person, with an engaging grin emerging at frequent intervals out of a huge black beard. The latter earned him the nickname “Abo”, though I suspect his resemblance to an Australian Aborigine was more fanciful than factual. In spite of his unpretentious qualifications – Walrus are, if possible, even easier to fly than Swordfish – Wilf Waller was to prove a thoroughly competent pilot and a born leader. He quickly won the respect and affection of his fighter pilots, not least because he was aware of his limitations. Although senior in rank to both Al Burgham and Sam Mearns, he realized that they were more experienced than he was; he therefore left much of the day-to-day running of the fighter section to them.
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 8