At about this time there were more changes among the Swordfish personnel. We lost one stalwart and gained two. Harry Housser left us to join another squadron which was being equipped with Grumman Avengers. His replacement was Eric McEwan, a handsome and soft-spoken young Scot who had started his career at sea in the Merchant Navy. Eric was one of those people who find it a great deal easier to make friends than enemies – indeed I reckon he was about the only member of the squadron that nobody ever had a cross word with! He teamed up with a new observer, Paddy Hall, an Ulsterman who quickly settled into the ways of the squadron.
After a couple of weeks at Eglinton we rejoined Battler. We were, rumour had it, about to provide air cover for another convoy.
There followed the usual spell of working up in the Clyde, with the Hurricanes perfecting their deck-landing by day and the Swordfish by night. In a fortnight of decidedly hectic flying there was only one incident worth recording and this involved our gallant aircrews’ efforts to come aboard Battler by means other than landing on the flightdeck.
The carrier had dropped anchor off the Tail O’ the Bank; twenty-four hours leave had been granted and “liberty boats” were busy ferrying the off-duty watch between ship and shore. Jack Teesdale, Teddy Elliott and I paid a visit to Glasgow and, returning that night to the quay at Greenock a little after 2230 found to our chagrin that we had missed the last of the liberty boats. Loth to spend the night ashore – which five of us had done once before, sleeping top to toe in a not very salubrious boardinghouse – we managed to get a “distress” signal to Battler’s officer of the watch, and, much to our relief, he agreed to send a jollyboat to pick us up. A jollyboat is a diminutive clinker-built cutter, able to carry five or at the most six people: not the sort of craft to be out in at night in bad weather. And unfortunately for us the weather now began to deteriorate – rapidly. By the time we had been picked up from the quay and had made our way to the carrier, the waves were so high and the wind so strong that we found it quite impossible to come alongside the gangway. With more valour than discretion, we asked to be hoisted aboard. This involved lowering the falls, hooking-up the jollyboat fore and aft (with its occupants of course still in it) and having it raised by a derrick on to the quarterdeck. Jack and I managed to hook-up successfully, and all seemed to be going well until we were almost halfway up the ship’s side. Then the shortcomings of “the Welding Queen of the Atlantic” came home to roost. A joint in the derrick snapped, and the jollyboat fell with an almighty crash into the water.
Jack Teesdale and the only other occupant of the boat, its coxswain, managed to grab hold of and cling to one of the falls; they clambered aboard the carrier, shaken but safe. Teddy Elliott and I were thrown into the sea. I struck out for the gangway. It was less than a dozen yards away. But I was wearing my greatcoat. Made of doeskin, it was heavy dry and even heavier wet. For a few terrible seconds I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Then my hand closed over the bottom step of the landing-ladder and I was dragged aboard, panting and gagging.
The three of us were put under a hot shower and, with the help of several tots of brandy prescribed by the ship’s doctor, made a rapid recovery. But what had happened to Teddy? Nobody seemed to know, and, as time passed and nothing was heard of him, we began to fear the worst. Then, in the small hours of the morning, he miraculously reappeared. He told us that his first reaction on surfacing had been to grab hold of anything that was solid. The nearest solid object was the jollyboat, which was drifting away full of water but the right way up. He caught hold of it, hauled himself into it, and found he was being swept seaward by a combination of wind and an ebb tide. It was a wild night, and with the howl of the wind and the roar of the sea he reckoned his shouts for help might not be heard.
“I was lucky,” he told us. “In one of the lockers in the jollyboat I found a ship’s bell. I rang it for all I was worth.”
The bell was heard by a vigilant officer of the watch in HMS Nelson. The battleship lowered a longboat and Teddy was rescued and towed back, ignominiously but safely, to the Battler – an escape which called for yet more tots of brandy!
A couple of days later something more vital than a derrick gave way in our accident-prone carrier. We were doing high-speed trials when the upper part of our mast broke off and came crashing down on the flight-deck, narrowly missing those on the bridge.
And a couple of days after that, there occurred what was for us an even more shattering event. We were once again disembarked, this time to the RAF aerodrome at Ayr, while “our” carrier sailed without us, in her hangar not a squadron of Swordfish to protect merchantmen in convoy but a squadron of Seafires to protect troops in Italy. Looking back, it made sense. But at the time, to say that we felt unwanted would be an understatement.
The next few months were not a happy time for the squadron; for once again we were shunted every few weeks from pillar to post for no apparent reason. We remained at Ayr from 30 July until 9 September. The aerodrome was large, bleak, bespattered with Nissen huts and shared between the Navy and the RAF. It would not have been much fun in winter, but in the height of summer it had quite a lot going for it, not least the Tarn O’Shanter, the famous old Inn once frequented by Robbie Burns, and now frequented with equal enthusiasm by most of 835.
Only a few days after our arrival we came within a hair’s breadth of suffering our first fatality. Eric McEwan describes an incident that was as sudden and unexpected as it was tragic:-
“I was flying back one evening from Machrihanish to Ayr, with a Lieutenant Wilkinson, RN (senior pilot from another squadron) as passenger. The weather was bad, with low cloud and poor visibility, so we were flying at no more than 500 feet. Suddenly the engine cut, stone dead. There wasn’t a hope of reaching land, but I managed to ditch safely some miles to the south of the Isle of Arran. The Swordfish sank almost at once, though not before we had managed to free the inflatable dinghy from her wing. To our dismay it was useless, punctured by splinters from the shattered wing. No one appeared to have seen what had happened to us except a farmer and his family living on Arran, who lit a bonfire on the shore to guide us towards land. However, the shore was a very long way away.
“It was getting dark, and the sea was rough and extremely cold, as Wilkinson and I struck out towards the light of the fire. Unfortunately, in the heavy seas we soon became separated. It took me over three hours to reach the shore, by which time I was at the end of my tether and suffering from hypothermia. The farmer and his children dragged me up over the rocks and carried me to their farmhouse, where I was first plunged into a hot shower and then put to bed covered by an enormous number of blankets – in spite of which I couldn’t stop shivering. A few hours later a Naval doctor, complete with ambulance, arrived from Lamlash. His first thought was to get me, as fast as possible, to a Naval Sick Bay. However, the farmer, Peter Craig, and his wife reckoned I would be better off with them, and to this the doctor eventually agreed. He departed, leaving behind instructions and a bottle of ‘medicinal’ brandy.
“The family, meanwhile, had been searching the shore in the hope of finding Wilkinson. But sadly he was drowned; his body was washed up on the coast of Arran in the small hours of the morning.
“By the following afternoon I had stopped shivering and was well enough to be transferred by ambulance to the Sick Bay at Lamlash. I think I must have been their only patient, because I was given VIP treatment. Each of the nurses, I seem to remember, visited me at least once during the night with a cup of cocoa! I also remember, on my return to Ayr, being greeted on my first night at dinner by a WRAF steward’s astonished: ‘I thocht youse wis deid!’ It was the same girl, incidentally, who complained that one of our officers kept winking at her – poor Blinkie. So often misunderstood!”
On 9 September the squadron was again moved and again split up. Most of the Hurricanes embarked in HMS Ravager for yet more deck-landing training, while most of the Swordfish embarked in HMS Argus to carry out tests on a new type of buoyancy bom
b.
Argus was unbelievably old. She was already old in 1918 when, as the passenger-liner Conte Rosso, she was purchased from the Italians and converted into an aircraft-carrier. Every trace of her superstructure was removed and, instead of discharging smoke through a funnel, she discharged it through vents in her stern. It was this which led to her being described during inter-war naval manoeuvres as “a small hulk, on fire aft … floating bottom up”! But for all the rude things said about her, Argus did valuable work in the war as a deck-landing-training carrier, and she now continued with these duties while 835, supervised by three boffins from Whitehall, tested the Allies’ Latest Top Secret Weapon: the buoyancy bomb.
The thinking behind this new device was that it could be used to dive bomb vessels at sea. The theory was that the attacking aircraft should go into a dive and release its bomb well ahead of its target. The bomb would then perform a parabola underwater, and, because of its buoyancy, would come up to the surface and explode against the keel of its target – the keel usually being a vessel’s weakest spot. The CO put me in charge of the tests, and throughout the latter half of September our Swordfish carried out dummy dive-bombing attacks with these new weapons. We carried out sixty-six attacks in all, each time dropping our bomb almost exactly where we had been told to, then landing back safely on the Argus. As far as we could tell, the attacks were successful. However, at the end of a fortnight the three boffins went back to Whitehall without saying a word to anyone and nobody ever heard of the buoyancy bomb again!
Instead of returning to Greenock at the end of each week’s flying, Argus would sometimes drop anchor in Lamlash Bay off the coast of Arran. Twenty-four hours’ shore leave was usually given and one Sunday afternoon several of the squadron set off to walk along the coast to Whiting Bay. Here we found a hotel. Knowing that Scotland was “dry” on a Sunday, we went in and asked for tea – a request which obviously surprised the hotel’s elderly retainer.
“Haven’t you walked from Lamlash?” he asked us.
When we confirmed that we had, he said, “As you’ve come more than three miles, you’re bona fide travellers. So long as you sign the register, you can drink what you like.”
The register was promptly signed and the orders for tea superseded by orders for something stronger. In the weeks that followed we more than once took advantage of this loophole in the otherwise strict Scottish licensing laws, some of us going to the lengths of keeping old bus or train tickets to prove we had indeed been travelling.
At this somewhat chaotic moment in our history, with some of us at Ayr, some aboard Argus and some aboard Ravager, John Lang left us to take up a new appointment. He had had the misfortune to command us during a difficult and frustrating period, and, looking back, I think we may have blamed him unfairly for some of our trials and tribulations. I have since learned that he did in fact try very hard to get us assigned to operational duties, even suggesting to the Admiralty that if no carrier was available we should be given the job of minelaying. It was sad that, because the Squadron was so fragmented, he left without the usual farewell party and without ever meeting his successor, Wilf Waller.
On 6 November we moved again, this time to HMS Chaser, one of the many “Woolworth” carriers now swarming into the Clyde like bees to a hive. If only they had been as reliable as they were numerous!
We were welcomed aboard by Chaser’s commanding officer, Captain McClintock, who said he appreciated that we had been badly messed about. But all that, he told us, was in the past. From now on 835 was his squadron, Chaser was our ship, and we could expect a good long spell of operational duty together.
Three weeks later, after the usual working up in the Clyde, we were again disembarked, this time with such haste that it was apparently impossible for the carrier to put to sea to enable us to fly off. Our aircraft had to be immediately lowered into lighters, ferried ashore and taxied to the nearby airfield at Abbotsinch. Chaser, we gathered, had been earmarked for an urgent overhaul, followed by duties other than convoy protection.
It seemed a strange decision. For that month (December, 1943), in the Atlantic alone, the Allies lost some thirty merchant ships, totalling well over 150,000 tons. It seemed to us that convoy protection was needed and doubtless the large number of merchant seamen who died in the ships that were lost would have agreed.
Our disembarkation had its lighter moments. First to be offloaded were the Sea Hurricanes, and our CO told Al Burgham to rig up a derrick to swing the aircraft over the side. Al had never seen anything remotely resembling a derrick aboard the carrier and was somewhat disconcerted to be shown what appeared to be a heap of rusty lengths of scrap-iron, with the duty watch standing round it and looking at him hopefully for instructions. Kiwis are renowned for their practical skill and ingenuity, but Al hadn’t the slightest idea where to start. He was much relieved when Wilf Waller himself appeared on the scene: “And in no time flat [according to Al] the heap of scrap iron was transformed into a derrick with a Hurricane dangling from the top of it. My opinion of our CO, already high, rose even higher.”
One by one our seventeen aircraft, with their pilots sitting somewhat apprehensively in the cockpits, were lowered over the side of the carrier and into a lighter, ferried to the landing-stage, swung ashore, and taxied through the docks to RNAS Abbotsinch. So, by the end of an extremely busy day, we found ourselves once again dumped on to an unfamiliar airfield, with nobody knowing why we had been sent there or what we were meant to be doing.
Abbotsinch in winter was not a good place to be dumped in. It was bitterly cold that December, and everything within a dozen miles of Glasgow and its airfields was shrouded in near-perpetual and near-freezing smog. The so-called “coal” with which we were expected to warm our Nissen-hut-cabins consisted of dull-grey and unburnable slate; icicles hung from the hot water pipes. We were thankful to learn that this was not to be our permanent home, but that, as soon as the weather cleared, the Squadron would reassemble at Eglinton in Northern Ireland.
It was a week before the smog lifted, but on 16 December a patch of clear blue sky appeared in the west, and the meteorologists’ forecast was favourable. Hoar frost was scraped off the wings of our Hurricanes and Swordfish; engines were started up and the squadron prepared, in several sub-flights, to head for Eglinton.
First to get airborne were a pair of Hurricanes, piloted by Al Burgham and a relative newcomer to the Squadron, Bill Armitage. Visibility when they took off was poor, but once they had climbed through the smog they found themselves in bright sunlight and a cloudless sky. Although they couldn’t see the ground, they had their compasses to rely on and settled down to what promised to be a pleasant flight. After a while Al was surprised to get a call from his fellow pilot who was in formation beside him:
“Leader! Is the sun in the right place?”
Al suddenly realized that the sun, which should have been to his left, was to his right. He was steering a reciprocal to his intended course i.e. he was heading due east instead of due west! Once this little error had been rectified, the rest of the flight was uneventful, and in due course the whole squadron arrived safely at Eglinton.
In the last few days of 1943 there were yet more changes to our personnel. In particular we acquired a new chief telegraphist-air-gunner and a new commanding officer.
Petty Officer (Air) J.W. Armstrong, DSM, probably had a more distinguished war record than anyone else in the Squadron. For it was his ingeniously transmitted signal which set in motion the sequence of events which led to the sinking of the Bismarck. The German battleship was of course sunk before 835 Squadron was even formed, but, to my mind, Armstrong’s role in this not unimportant event is worth recording because it says something about the standard of airmanship in the Fleet Air Arm.
Towards the middle of May, 1941, the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen moved into a position among the Norwegian fjords from which they could at any moment break out into the Atlantic. This, for the Navy, was a nightmare scenario. German U-boats w
ere already sinking our merchantmen at the rate of half-a-million tons (some 150 ships) a month, and if the most powerful battleship in the world had broken out into the Atlantic and caused further carnage among our convoys this would have had a serious effect on the course of the war. So the Navy, that spring, had one objective only: to sink the Bismarck. To this end they stripped the convoys of escorts and assembled warships not only from both sides of the Atlantic but from the Mediterranean. However, to sink the great battleship they had first to locate her; and to do this it was essential that they knew exactly when she left Norway and headed into the Atlantic. On 20 May reports were received from the Norwegian Resistance that Bismarck was heading north up the Skagerrak, and the following afternoon she was sighted by a reconnaissance aircraft of Coastal Command in Kars Fjord to the south of Bergen. Coastal Command was given the job of keeping her under surveillance. However, on the morning of 22 May the weather took a turn for the worse. A low front came to rest in the middle of the North Sea, and Coastal Command aircraft found that they couldn’t get through to Kars Fjord. Every plane that tried was forced to turn back, unable to penetrate the curtain of mist and low cloud that shrouded the Norwegian coast. By mid-afternoon Coastal Command was grounded. The Admiralty were in despair. And it looked as though they were about to pay a high price for their neglect of their Air Arm, for the Navy had no long-range reconnaissance aircraft capable of reaching the Norwegian coast and returning to the British Isles. It was now that Captain Fancourt, commander of RNAS Hatston in the Orkneys, came up with a suggestion. Among his aircrew was a Commander Rotherham whose reputation as an observer was second to none; also a Lt-Commander Goddard with the same sort of reputation as a pilot. He asked them if they thought that they could get through where Coastal Command had failed. They agreed to “have a go”, flying one of the unarmed and obsolescent Maryland bombers used at Hatston for target-towing, but they pointed out they would need a telegraphist-air-gunner to operate the radio. “Willy” Armstrong volunteered.
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 9