Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea

by E. E. Barringer

  I didn’t have much option. Indeed I didn’t have any option. So I called the Squadron together, told them what Captain Taylor had said and asked them to give me all the help they could. This, throughout the eventful months to come, they unfailingly did. And I certainly needed their help. For I was barely twenty-three; I had less than a year’s seniority as a lieutenant, and I hadn’t been given any sort of training to fit me to take command of a squadron.

  The rest of our passage home was lacking in incident, and on 12 February we delivered our seventy-odd merchantmen into the safe waters of the Clyde.

  For the Squadron it had been an eventful and somewhat costly initiation to the battle of the Atlantic. We had carried out almost 100 patrols, searches and interceptions, many of them in difficult weather; this had involved over 220 hours’ flying. On the debit side, one Swordfish and its crew had been lost and four Swordfish and two Sea Hurricanes had been damaged; and we had, alas, sunk no U-boats and shot down no enemy planes. On the credit side, not one of the merchantmen we were guarding had been attacked, let alone damaged or lost. This was a pattern to be repeated on more than one occasion during our operations in the Atlantic.

  When we berthed at Greenock one of the first people to slip quietly ashore was Lt-Cdr Miller. I felt sorry for him. It was hardly his fault that he had been asked to do a job that was clearly beyond his capabilities, and it seemed to me that the sad little story of what happened to him proved two points. It proved firstly that, even in this comparatively late stage of the war, the Navy was still having to pay for the way it had neglected its Air Arm; for there was now a serious shortage of aircrew with both operational experience and the required seniority of rank to be given command of a squadron. It also proved the value of our working up. In the last year we had worked up ad nauseum. We were heartily sick of it. But there can be no denying that all our trial deck-landings, navigation exercises and dummy attacks had honed our flying skill to the point at which we could (to quote our Operations Officer) “fly almost continually in the most appalling conditions and close to the limit of possibility”. Miller had done no working up. He was more senior than any of us. He had more flying hours in his log book than any of us. But he had not flown operationally for a long time, and he had lost the flying skill that the job demanded. And he knew it.

  At the time my appointment as CO came as a considerable shock; but looking back I suppose I was better prepared than poor Miller.

  The few days we spent at Greenock were a busy time for me. My first priority was to get replacements for the aircraft that had been lost or damaged beyond repair. In this, my right hand man was Jack Teesdale, who flew from airfield to airfield, meticulously testing and checking the aircraft that were available. The last thing we wanted was more suspect compasses. As a result of his efforts, our strength was soon restored to ten Swordfish and six Sea Hurricanes. No sooner were the aircraft aboard than we set off on another assignment – escorting a convoy to Gibraltar. We got to know Gibraltar pretty well in the next few months, for we escorted no fewer than four outward bound convoys to the Rock, and four homeward bound convoys from the Rock and back to the United Kingdom.

  The Gibraltar convoys were neither the most important in the war nor the most hazardous. However, without them the Allied landings in North Africa, Italy and the South of France would not have been possible, and they did have their own particular problems. At the approaches to the Bay of Biscay (which the convoys had to cross) the seas were nearly always high, while the weather tended to alternate between calms with sea mist, and storms with high winds – not the best conditions for flying. Also the Bay of Biscay was the route by which large numbers of German submarines, from their pens on the west coast of France, moved into and out of the Atlantic; the enemy were never far away.

  The official file on Nairana, compiled by the Historical Branch of the Admiralty, reads:

  “On 24 February 1944 HMS Nairana, with HMS Activity sailed from the Tail O’ the Bank to provide air protection for Convoy OS69/KMS43 to Gibraltar. No enemy air attacks were intercepted, no U-boats were encountered, and the convoy arrived safely at Gibraltar on 6 March.”

  However, from the point of view of the squadron there was more to it than that.

  Our first problem was that somebody at the Admiralty had come up with the not very bright idea that we should carry Fulmars which could be used as night fighters. We were therefore saddled with three of these antiquated aircraft from 787 Squadron. The Fulmars took up much-needed space in our already overcrowded hangar and in the event they did no night flying at all, and only six daylight patrols during which they managed to write off two out of their three aircraft. It was all a bit of a fiasco.

  In fairness to the pilots from 787 Squadron it has to be said that flying conditions were difficult. For much of the trip our Hurricanes were confined to the hangar, while our Swordfish were only kept flying by the skill of their pilots. Throughout the first part of the voyage the swell was not only heavy but was at right angles to the direction of the wind. This meant that whenever Nairana turned into wind to enable her planes to land-on, the carrier was rolling and corkscrewing. This in turn meant that, as a plane neared the flight-deck, the stern of the carrier would suddenly disappear from sight into the trough of a swell and roll away from the approaching plane. Again and again “Bats” had to wave the Swordfish away. Sometimes as many as ten approaches had to be made before a plane got down safely. Landing in these conditions was particularly difficult at night, when several pilots reported that the deck-landing lights appeared to go on and off as the ship pitched into the swell. On the night of 29 February Lou Wilmot crashed on landing. However, the crew were unhurt, and at least there were pickings for Banham and his scavengers!

  A couple of days later there was another near-disaster, this time with one of the Sea Hurricanes. An enemy aircraft had been picked up on Nairana’s radar and, although conditions for flying were not good, Al Burgham and Charles Richardson took off to attempt an interception. There was, however, too much cloud about for them to catch sight of their quarry. When they returned, they found Nairana pitching wildly, and Al had one of his rare crashes. There was nothing wrong with his approach, but, just as “Bats” gave him the signal to cut, the stern of the carrier suddenly reared up some thirty feet. The main wheels of the Hurricane landed squarely on the flight-deck, but its tail wheel just caught the end of the roundown. The impact broke the plane’s back. It flipped on to its nose, skidded along the deck and became enmeshed in the arrester wires. So Al joined the exclusive group of pilots who have managed to land by picking up the first arrester-wire not with their tail-hook but their propeller!

  A couple of days after this, on the evening of 4 March, we suffered not a near-disaster but an all too real one. There was a heavy swell and a gusting wind and, although Lou Wilmot, “Albert” Arber and their telegraphist-air-gunner, George Ferguson, took off in daylight, it was dark by the time they got back. Their Swordfish missed the arrester-wires, smashed into the island and fell broken-backed into the sea. Wilmot and Ferguson were drowned. Arber survived, but his lungs were so affected by fumes from the flares and smoke-floats triggered off in the sinking plane that he spent the rest of the voyage in Nairana’s sick bay and never flew with the Squadron again.

  Next morning we paraded on the flight deck. Wilmot and Ferguson weren’t the first of our aircrew to die, but they were the first to be buried at sea. It was a moving ceremony: the vastness of the sky, the moan of the wind and the sound of waves breaking against our keel as our friends were committed to the deep. And I shall never forget the moment of silence. For, as the bodies slid over the side, every ship in the convoy stopped its engines. There were perhaps twenty seconds of absolute silence, absolute stillness. Then engines picked up, propellers again churned up the water, and the convoy and the Battle of the Atlantic went on.

  Years later Johnny Cridland added a postscript to this. It seems that he and Wilmot had been particularly close friends, and o
nly a few hours before the accident Wilmot had admitted to Johnny that he had doubts about his ability to land in the dark in bad weather. Johnny had suggested that his friend should have a talk with me, to see if I would excuse him from flying that night, but Lou Wilmot had said this wouldn’t be fair, because it would mean that someone else in the Squadron would have to face the danger of extra night flying. His selflessness cost him and George Ferguson their lives.

  On 6 March the convoy arrived in Gibraltar after a passage not as lacking in incident as the Admiralty report might lead one to suppose. For many of us this was our second call at Gibraltar, and we lost no time in revisiting old haunts and old acquaintances – the Hotel Cristina amid the orange trees of Algeciras, the voluptuous Juanita and her all female band. Some of us joined the bull-fighting aficionados at La Linea. Most of us bought silk stockings and perfume (which were of course unobtainable at home). And all of us enjoyed the bright lights which, after dark, gave the Rock an aura of gaiety and excitement – a welcome change from the austerity of blacked-out Britain.

  It was good while it lasted. However, after only forty-eight hours we were back at sea, guarding the homeward-bound convoy MK529, which consisted of twenty merchantmen, many of them troopships. Among the escorts was the veteran battleship Warspite. She had been damaged during the allied landings at Salerno and now left behind her a telltale trail of oil, which McEwan and Hall found extremely helpful one evening when they were lost; they simply followed the oilslick back to the convoy.

  “The passage home,” records the Admiralty file on Nairana, ‘was uneventful, and on 15 March the carrier parted with the convoy and arrived at the Tail O’ the Bank.” And there is indeed not much else to say about Convoy MK529, except for the all-important fact that it enjoyed a safe passage, with no U-boat getting near enough to make an attack. This was largely because the convoy followed a route unusually close to the shore and for much of the time was guarded by land-based aircraft of Coastal Command. All the same, between 9 and 15 March the squadron flew more than twenty-five A/S patrols, a fair number of them at night. There were known to be U-boats in the Bay, and it seems reasonable to suppose that our efforts kept their heads down. Not spectacular work, but I dare say that the thousands of men in the troopships were glad to hear the throb of Pegasus engines as, for hour after hour, our Swordfish circled the convoy.

  We wouldn’t have minded a spot of leave, but no sooner had we dropped anchor in the Clyde than we were put on forty-eight hours readiness to sail and a couple of days later we were back in the Atlantic, providing air cover for the slow southbound convoy OS72/KMS46. Once again our destination was Gibraltar.

  You could say that this was another “uneventful” passage, for, although there were U-boats and enemy aircraft in the vicinity, none got close enough to launch an attack. Because the convoy was unusually slow and took a full ten days to cover the 1800-odd miles to Gibraltar, we had a good deal of flying to do. The squadron carried out fifty-two anti-submarine patrols and searches, which involved more than 150 hours flying. The Hurricanes carried out fifteen patrols and interceptions, involving some twenty hours flying. Many of the Swordfish patrols were made at night and in bad weather, while, on two of the Hurricane interceptions, conditions for flying were difficult in the extreme. It says much for our pilots’ skill and concentration that there were only three accidents, none of them serious – two Swordfish and one Sea Hurricane ending up in the barrier.

  The convoy arrived safely at the Rock on 5 April and it was during the ensuing spell of shore leave that a longstanding and niggling antipathy came to a head. It would be silly to make too much of this, but the relationship between some of the Squadron and some of Nairana’s T124X officers and stewards was not always as good as it might have been. In the early days of the war a number of Merchant Navy officers, in particular engineering, electrical and supply officers, chose to serve in warships rather than merchant vessels; they were therefore given what was known as a T124X contract and Royal Naval Reserve rankings. In the Merchant Navy these men had been used to certain standards of pay, certain privileges and certain codes of conduct, and these they expected to maintain – as they were perfectly entitled to – aboard the Nairana. To give an example: if a T124X officer carried out a duty watch at night, he expected to be allowed to spend the next morning asleep in his bunk – a practice unheard of in the Royal Navy. Another bone of contention was pay. Some of the T124X stewards were earning considerably more than the squadron’s pilots and observers, which, when one considers the relative importance of their duties, seems not as it should have been. (When Tony Costello offered his steward £2 a week to do his laundry, he was considerably put out when the steward replied that he would pay Tony £3 a week to do his!)

  Matters came to a head over the running of the wardroom bar. This was in the hands of Surgeon-Commander Dodds, a much-respected and well-liked doctor, but not the best of administrators. As a result of his somewhat lax control, our T124X stewards were able to siphon off large quantities of liquor to their companions below deck. Commander Healey, who was the man ultimately responsible for discipline aboard the Nairana, transferred the running of the bar into the capable hands of Jack Teesdale, who at once went to the heart of the problem. He relieved the bar stewards of their keys to the liquor store and initiated a régime whereby supplies had to be brought to the wardroom daily, under supervision, entered into a stock book and signed for. The result was an efficient, well-run bar.

  However, the cutting off of their illegal supplies didn’t please the T124X people. There were attempts to steal the keys, attempts to fake a burglary, and many heated arguments. In one of the latter, Bill Armitage, with typical Kiwi forthrightness, flattened an aggressive T124X Sub Lt(E) with a crunching short left. Those who saw the blow swear it travelled less than six inches, but the news of it travelled a good deal further, and from then on squadron aircrew were treated with wary respect!

  However, you might say that the ex-Merchant Navy officers had the last laugh. During one of our many visits to Gibraltar some of the fighter pilots and some of the engineer officers went wining and dining one evening at the Bristol Hotel. On their way back to the ship they spotted a party going on at the exclusive Gibraltar Yacht Club. This they proceeded to gatecrash. They then blotted their copybooks by chatting up the more attractive ladies and telling their RN escorts that they ought to learn to fly. In the eyes of the Commodore of the Yacht Club such behaviour put them beyond the pale, and a formal complaint was made to Captain Taylor. Next morning all officers were summoned to Nairana’s wardroom and our captain asked those who had been at the Yacht Club to stand up. Our delinquent fighter pilots got reluctantly to their feet and were given harbour duties, watch on watch off, for the rest of our stay in Gibraltar – “not,” as Norman Sargent put it, “an experience to be recommended!” The delinquent T124X officers, who marched to the beat of a different drum, remained seated and escaped punishment.

  Much to the relief of Sargent and his colleagues our stay in Gibraltar was a brief one. On 10 April we joined the slow, homeward-bound convoy SL154/MKS43.

  The evening before we sailed an intriguing notice appeared in the wardroom, confirming rumours that a German U-boat had been sunk off the Rock and that we were taking its crew back to the United Kingdom for internment.

  “As you may be aware,” Commander Healey wrote, “we have some German prisoners on board. It is unlikely that you will come into contact with them, but if you do please treat them as you yourself would wish to be treated if you were a prisoner of war.”

  In fact we did have contact with them, because, towards the end of the voyage, they were invited to a concert in the hangar and, with the help of George Gordon (who spoke fluent German), they joined in the singing. Later, when we had dropped anchor in the Clyde and the Germans were on their way to internment, they all stood up in the launch that was taking them ashore and waved us goodbye.

  The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the most terrible e
ver fought. Allied seamen were burned to death in patches of blazing oil and frozen to death in ice-cold waters; they died of starvation clinging to rafts and were trapped alive in sinking ships. German submariners, caught in the beam of our Asdic, were hunted to death with depth-charges; they were suffocated by carbon monoxide poisoning and blown, degutted, to the surface. Yet, as far as we were concerned, it was a battle fought without hatred and without rancour. Of course we would have sent a U-boat to the bottom if we had had the chance. But more than one member of the Squadron has since admitted to me privately that he was thankful to get through the war “without blood on my hands”. For of all the deaths that man in his inhumanity has invented for man, few are as terrible as the death facing a submariner.

  Convoy SL154/MKS43 was another so-called “uneventful” one, although, since we again provided almost continuous air cover, a more descriptive adjective from the squadron’s point of view would be “demanding”.

  The Hurricane pilots may have flown less than a dozen sorties, but they spent goodness knows how many hours strapped into their planes which were ranged on the flight-deck at instant readiness for take-off. Two interceptions were attempted. On the first, the enemy plane disappeared into cloud and was never seen again. On the second, the aircraft they intercepted turned out to be an American “Flying Fortress” being ferried to the United Kingdom. When Al Burgham and Charles Richardson appeared out of the murk in their Sea Hurricanes and took up station on either wing tip, the US aircrew obviously thought their last moment had come; they started flashing the code letters of the day at our fighters so fast that neither Al nor Charles could read them! As Al remarked, “It was good, for once, to scare somebody other than myself!”

  The Swordfish aircrew flew fifty-eight patrols, many of them at night and in bad weather. All went well until we were approaching the British Isles in particularly unpleasant conditions – gale force winds and a heavy swell coming in on our beam. We then had one mini and one major disaster. Teddy Elliott bounced over all the arrester-wires and went into the barrier; fortunately the wind was so strong his aircraft had virtually come to rest before he hit it. On the same day, taking off in the dark, Eric McEwan was halfway down the flight deck when Nairana corkscrewed violently. The Swordfish was flung sideways and its wing tip smashed into the island. The plane slid over the side and started to sink.