We were lucky on the Nairana to have two exceptionally skilled Batsmen: initially Lt(A) Bill Cameron, RNVR, and subsequently Lt(A) Bob Mathé, RNVR. Bob in particular, who was with us on our convoys to Russia, performed what can only be called a succession of miracles in getting our Swordfish and Wildcats safely on to the flight-deck in about the most difficult conditions it would be possible to imagine: wind 70 knots gusting to over 100, waves 40 feet high, and the cold so numbing some of our aircrew were literally frozen into their cockpits. If ever a man earned his awards – a DSC and bar – it was Bob Mathé.
The work of our Fighter Direction Officers was almost as important, if less spectacular. In the words of the naval historian Captain Roskill: “It is no exaggeration to say that in radar development Britain led the world,” and it is now generally recognized that radar was one of the factors which helped us win the war. It helped the RAF win the Battle of Britain and it helped the Navy win the Battle of the Atlantic; for warships equipped with radar were able to spot the presence, not only of other surface vessels, but of approaching aircraft. A Fighter Direction Officer’s job was to detect these approaching enemy aircraft and help our fighters to intercept them. In the early years of the war only Illustrious -class carriers were equipped with radar. Ark Royal, for example, had to receive radar reports in morse from other warships and then pass these on, again in morse, to her aircraft. No wonder that, with the lengthy time lag this involved, few interceptions were made! However, by 1942 all carriers which were being built and/or converted had, as part of their standard layout, a well-equipped Fighter Direction room in their island. A training school for Fighter Direction Officers was set up first at RNAS Yeovilton and subsequently at nearby Speckington Manor. By the time we joined Nairana the business of detecting enemy aircraft and homing our fighters on to them had become an exact (and exacting) science.
Nairana had three Fighter Direction Officers; and one of them, Alan Kerry, writes:
“With the help of our equipment, we were able to build up an ‘Air Scene’. Radar enabled us to determine the bearing and distance of any aircraft that approached us, and this information was at once recorded by plotters in the F.D. Office and transcribed on to a vertical perspex screen; this screen had a spider’s web superimposed on it, the carrier being in the centre of the web. Our problem was that the position of the aircraft on the screen was never its real position; because of the time lag, it had always moved on. However, with the help of judgement and experience, a good FDO could estimate the probable position of an approaching aircraft; and his job was then to help the carrier’s fighters, which usually operated in pairs, to make an interception. It was important to make this interception as far away from the ship as possible, and in advantageous circumstances: i.e. from a greater height, from up-sun or from cloud-cover etc. The secret was never to direct one’s fighters straight at their target; one had always to ‘aim off’; and each interception had its own problems, its own timing and its own particular feel. It helped the atmosphere in the F.D. room if the fighter’s RT could be broadcast ‘live’ so that we could hear the pilot; and an ecstatic ‘tally ho!’ was a wonderful moment for us.”
Our Swordfish too were to some extent controlled from the carrier. Each patrol was meticulously plotted and transcribed on to the “Air Scene”, and if a plane got into difficulties or became lost, our FDOs, at least in theory, could always give it a bearing to find its way back to Nairana.
All this was not only responsible work, but work that broke new ground. As Kerry puts it:
“The Royal Navy had been used to the Captain conning and fighting his ship from the bridge; but the Captain now had to come to terms with the fact that operations were controlled from elsewhere. More than once Surtees [Nairana’s captain in the last few months of the war] came storming into our Fighter Direction Room: ‘Where are my aircraft?’ I remember his hands digging into my shoulders so fiercely that the bruises were there for days … He may have known little about flying. But don’t tell me he didn’t care.”
Another key job was that of our Meteorological Officer, Mike Arrowsmith. Met Officers were usually graduates, who were given six weeks’ basic training, commissioned as sub-lieutenants, then sent on an intensive three-month course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Here they learned how to use the various instruments which were the tools of their trade, and how to put together weather-charts and forecasts from whatever information was available. The trouble was that on a carrier not a lot of information was available, and a met officer was very much on his own.
“Some information,” writes Arrowsmith, “came to us in coded broadcasts received every twelve hours from the Met Office at the Admiralty; but I found that my own observations of wind, sea, temperature, pressure and so on tended to be of greater use.… I soon discovered that my reputation didn’t depend on the accuracy of my forecasts. If the weather was good I was thought to be a good met officer; if it was bad I was thought to be a bad one! However, I remember one occasion when a bad forecast brought me unexpected kudos.
“We were escorting a west-bound convoy through the mid-Atlantic gap. It was winter and we were a fair way north. U-boats were thought to be about, and the captain was anxious to keep our Swordfish airborne and circling the convoy. The trouble was that I felt certain the weather was about to close in and that conditions for flying would soon be impossible.
“‘How long do you reckon it’s safe to keep the Swordfish up?’ the captain asked me.
“‘1315 is the deadline, sir,’ I told him. ‘If you go on flying after that I can’t be responsible.’
“It was lucky he listened to me. At 1300 hours, although the weather didn’t look too bad, the patrolling Swordfish was recalled. At 1310 it landed-on. At exactly 1315 a huge wall of cloud came rushing towards us, and within seconds the island and the barrier had disappeared from sight as Nairana was engulfed in a violent snow storm that lasted the rest of the day!”
Continually compiling weather charts is not the sort of job that catches the eye, but there were times when our lives depended on the accuracy of Mike Arrowsmith’s forecasts.
Equally unspectacular and equally important were the duties of our Operations Officer. His task was to ensure that our routine flying programme (anti-submarine patrols and fighter interceptions) was carried out with maximum efficiency, and that special operations (like our anti-shipping strikes among the Norwegian fjords) were carefully planned and executed.
Nairana’s Operations Officer from March, 1944, until March, 1945, was Lt-Cdr(A) Dick Mallett, RNVR, a well-balanced and sensible man who, at the ripe old age of 24, was regarded by our aircrew as a sort of father figure. Dick was closely involved with our flying. Yet he was a ship’s officer, not a squadron officer, which meant that he could perhaps take a more impartial view of things than some of our pilots and observers. This makes his recollections particularly interesting:-
“When you got in touch after all these years,” he wrote to me in 1990, “I couldn’t sleep for nights. I was so haunted by memories of what we had all been through.… You ask for my impressions of those days. Well, my impression is that for more than a year 835 was almost continually flying in the most appalling conditions, and close to the limit of possibility. There was a tremendous esprit de corps in the Squadron; but towards the end everyone became operationally fatigued. Not round the bend; just totally bloody exhausted. Surtees knew very well that he was driving us to the limit of our endurance – and beyond. However, on the Russian convoys our function was to keep the enemy at bay, no matter what the cost, and it could be that his policy was justified” – a view to which not everyone in the Squadron would subscribe!
One other person had our lives in his hands: Chief Air Artificer Banham, who was in charge of the maintenance of our aircraft. The Squadron’s Sea Hurricanes were old, and with their fixed wings were ill-suited to operate from a carrier, while the Swordfish were soon to be flown without respite for month after month in the North Atlantic
and the Arctic. Under these taxing conditions Banham was expected to keep aircraft serviceable without being able to draw on any of the spare parts which, on an airfield, could be obtained by lifting a telephone. He managed it with the help of our Stores Officer, Jack Teesdale, and his own ingenuity.
When I became CO of the Squadron, which turned out to be a great deal sooner than I expected, I had a long chat with Jack Teesdale about how we could help Banham in his efforts to keep our planes flying. The key was spare parts. Our mobile equipment, which we had carried round with us over the last eighteen months as we moved from place to place, consisted largely of things like chocks, drip-trays, jacks and a plethora of repair tools. This is not what was needed in the middle of the Atlantic. What we needed, above all else, was replacement items like tyres, undercarriage oleo-legs, tail wheels, engine and radio parts, new radar valves etc. But alas, even after four years of war, the Admiralty seemed blissfully unaware that operational squadrons simply had to have such spares. According to KR and AI (King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions), new parts could only be obtained by a laborious procedure which involved requisitioning each individual item as it became needed; nothing new would be provided unless the part that was damaged or unserviceable was returned. Faced with this unrealistic embargo, Jack and I were determined to build up a reserve of spare parts, and we hit on the idea of salvaging what we could from crashed aircraft.
During our first spell of operations in Nairana, we both noticed that planes which had crashed on landing and were badly damaged were sometimes pushed over the side. The reason for this was that, since Nairana had only one lift, there were usually some of our aircraft parked for’ard of the barrier; this meant that, if the landing-area had to be cleared quickly, the only way to get rid of a crashed plane was to tip it into the sea. Our idea was to train a team of squadron “scavengers” who could quickly strip a plane of its most valuable component parts before it was jettisoned.
And the operative word had to be “quickly”, for the whole object of pushing a plane overboard was to clear the flight-deck fast. However, no aircraft could be so disposed of without the Captain’s approval and the signing of Admiralty Form A25. This involved Commander Flying having a quick word with the Captain and getting his authorization; and in the two or three minutes this usually took, our “scavengers” sprang into action. Organized by Banham and led by Leading Air Mechanics Bert Timms and Alf Gibbons, our maintenance crews soon perfected the art of stripping and in next to no time the most useful items – tyres, oleo-legs, tail-wheels, compasses etc. – were extracted from the shattered plane; on one occasion we even managed to salvage a complete Pegasus engine! These valuable spares enabled our aircraft to be repaired and kept serviceable in spite of the parsimony of the Admiralty.
Another example of the sort of improvisation which kept us flying was Banham’s ingenious use of roller-skates. When our fighter pilots saw that Nairana had only one lift and that this was barely wide enough to take one of their Hurricanes, whose wings couldn’t be folded, they realized that moving their aircraft quickly between hangar and flight-deck was going to be a problem, a problem that would be accentuated by the difficulty of manoeuvring planes with such a large wingspan round a small and crowded hangar. Banham, however, hit on the idea of building a number of small trolleys which could be placed beneath the Hurricanes’ wheels. To the underside of these trolleys were fixed pairs of coupled roller-skates, and this enabled the aircraft to be moved this way and that on the proverbial sixpence. It would be difficult to overestimate the amount of time and labour saved by this ingenious device – and time, when there were enemy planes or U-boats about, could be of the essence.
By the end of November most of Nairana’s ship’s company of 800 had reported aboard and, on 12 December, the carrier was officially commissioned. Next day she moved downriver to the Tail O’ the Bank.
The first member of 835 to come aboard was Jack Teesdale who, in his capacity as Stores Officer, had the job of loading and storing our mobile equipment. He arrived on Boxing Day to find a riotous party going on in the wardroom. The Captain was scrambling about among the vents of the air-conditioning, and one of the deck-officers, “Tug” Wilson, suddenly appeared in the companionway, dripping wet. He had, he explained, “walked over the side”! All of which, Jack felt, augured well for a good relationship between ship and squadron officers!
A couple of days later our Sea Hurricanes and Swordfish were flown aboard and, on the last day of 1943, Nairana weighed anchor from the Tail O’ the Bank and stood into the estuary of the Clyde to begin the inevitable spell of working up.
You might have thought that by now we had had our fill of working up, but this time it was different. This time, right from the start, we had the feeling we were on the threshold of something important.
For one thing there were changes to our aircraft and to our tactics which were obviously being made with a specific job in mind. For example, the camouflage of our Sea Hurricanes was altered. They were painted white.
The camouflage of naval aircraft had been standardized between the wars, both fighters and torpedo-bomber-reconnaissance planes being painted green, with the idea of their merging into the colour of the sea. However, experience in the Atlantic had shown that green was clearly visible against a backdrop of cloud, and it is cloudy most of the time in the Atlantic; also that our planes’ conventional camouflage made them stand out against the sea, which was more often grey than green. With the support of our fighter pilots, Edgar Bibby suggested that the Sea Hurricanes were painted off-white. Captain Taylor had his doubts and said that we needed Admiralty approval for such a change. Bibby, however, had the courage of his convictions. One day the Hurricanes were green, the next day they were white, and their subsequent successes undoubtedly owed much to their camouflage, for on more than one occasion they were able to close right in on their target without being seen.
Our working-up that January was unusually demanding. By day the Hurricanes concentrated on air-to-air and air-to-ground firing, and on interceptions controlled by Alan Kerry; this involved 93 hours’ flying, and 88 deck-landings. By night the Swordfish concentrated on homing by radar on to towed targets which were then attacked with live depth-charges or rockets; this involved 302 hours flying and 22 deck-landings. On more than one occasion, even in the Clyde, we were glad of Nairana’s radar beacon to home on; this spelt out the carrier’s identification letters on the observer’s ASV screens.
On 21 January we had a VIP visitor: Rear Admiral Lumley Lyster (Flag Officer Carrier Training). It was Lyster who had masterminded the attack on Taranto, when a handful of Swordfish had sunk or crippled almost half the Italian fleet; and we would have liked to turn on a display to convince him that the standard of flying in the Fleet Air Arm was as high in 1944 as it had been in 1940. It was not to be. We planned a dummy night torpedo attack and the CO and I, together with Urquhart and Buckie and McEwan and Hall, duly took off a little after seven o’clock. Then the weather closed in and the CO decided that conditions were too dangerous for flying and headed for the safety of the RAF aerodrome at Turnberry. The other two pilots found their way back to the carrier and landed safely. Lumley said nothing, but he could hardly have been impressed.
There was, I remember, some discussion next day among the fighter pilots about what had happened and one of them, Norman Sargent, remarked that the CO seemed permanently worried, “as though he has something on his mind” – an observation both shrewd and prophetic.
A couple of days later Nairana was put under forty-eight hours’ notice to sail and the moment this deadline expired we weighed anchor and, together with the Activity, headed for the mouth of the Clyde.
Here we joined the 2nd Escort Group: HM Ships Starling, Wild Goose, Wren, Woodpecker, Magpie and Kite. This was the famous hunter-killer team, led by Captain Walker, which had already accounted for seven U-boats and was about to account for a good many more.
We were now on the threshold of fifteen
months of continuous operational flying, so this seems an appropriate place for an update on our aircraft and aircrew.
The squadron now consisted of six Sea Hurricane IIcs and nine Swordfish IIs. Several long-serving aircrew had left, most of them to take up training duties ashore, and in the previous few months we had been joined by four new Hurricane pilots – Sub-Lt(A) C. Allen, RNZVR, Sub-Lt(A) O.K. Armitage, RNZVR, Sub-Lt(A) C. Richardson RNVR, and Sub-Lt(A) N. Sargent, RNVR; by three new Swordfish pilots – Sub-Lt(A) R.G. McLaughlin, RNZVR, Sub-Lt(A) K. Wilmot, RNVR and Sub-Lt(A) H.R.D. Wilson, RNVR, and by four new Swordfish observers – Sub-Lt(A) G. Arber, RNVR, Sub-Lt(A) W. Cairns, RNVR, Sub-Lt(A) A.R.J. Lloyd, RNVR and Sub-Lt(A) G. Strong, RNVR.
It was these aircrew, together with “old timers” like myself, Bob Selley, Johnny Hunt and Jack Teesdale, who formed the experienced core of the squadron in the hazardous times ahead.
* * *
Captain John Walker, to quote Admiralty records, “probably did more to free the Atlantic of the U-boat menace than any other single officer.” In the late 1930s he had been passed over for promotion, largely because he was impatient of the “big ship” mentality that was prevalent between the wars. He was a “little ship” man, one of the few with the sense to realize that, if it came to a battle against the U-boats, it would not be battleships and cruisers that would give the Navy control of the Atlantic, but sloops, destroyers and corvettes. In 1943 his exploits proved his point. However, Walker had little experience of working with aircraft-carriers, and, before sailing in January in command of the 2nd Escort Group, he had remarked in confidence to his officers that “the flat-tops should be good bait to tempt the U-boats to attack us”. It was as well for the morale of Nairana’s ship’s company that we were unaware of the role for which we had been cast!
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 11