Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea

by E. E. Barringer

  Nigel was given first aid and turned out to be quite badly but not seriously wounded. Al’s damaged aircraft was dragged for’ard of the barrier. Then it was Charles Richardson’s turn. To everyone’s very considerable relief, he made a perfect approach and touch-down, one of the first night deck-landings ever made in a Hurricane.

  When I found time to visit the island, I had a good look at the hole made by the cannon-shell. And there was no doubt about it. If I had been in my usual position, where I had been standing only a few minutes earlier, it would have gone straight through me – at heart level.

  “You’re like a cat with nine lives,” Nigel said when I went to see him in the Sick Bay.

  That gave me something to think about. Because, when I started to add together all the “near-misses” I had had since joining Eagle way back in 1940, I realized I had now used up eight out of my allotted feline quota. And before I dossed down that evening, Captain Taylor gave me something else to think about.

  “I want you,” he said, “to take over as Commander Flying.”

  Next day, 26 May, turned out to be even more eventful. It was the day we shot down our first aircraft – though at a terrible price.

  Soon after sunrise the shadowers were back. It says much for Burgham’s and Richardson’s resilience that, in spite of the drama of the night before, at 0730 they were strapped into their Hurricanes ranged on the flight deck, waiting to take off. There was not much cloud that morning and the German aircraft came in low, hoping to avoid our Radar. Low, but not low enough, because Nairana’s Fighter Direction team picked him up, and Burgham and Richardson were scrambled to intercept. After only a few minutes there was an excited “Tally Ho!”

  “A four-engined Ju 290,” writes Al Burgham, “was approaching at sea level on the starboard beam of the convoy. This was the sort of interception that Charles and I had practised and dreamed of. We climbed above him and took up position on either side, so that as soon as he committed himself to turn, one or the other of us would be in the ideal position to attack. As soon as he saw us, he went down even closer to the sea and turned to starboard. This gave Charles the opportunity to make a diving attack. The Junkers tried to take evasive action by turning towards him, which put me in the ideal position. As I closed in, I could see that Charles was almost on his tail. No one will ever know what happened next. It could be that Charles was caught in the German plane’s slipstream; it could be that he was hit by fire from its rear-turret 29 mm cannon. Whatever the reason his Hurricane’s wingtip touched the sea and the plane flicked over and exploded in a sheet of flame and a cloud of spray, I pressed home my own attack, hitting the Junkers repeatedly at close range. It crashed into the sea and exploded. I went back to look for Charles. I saw what might have been his Mae West, but there was no sign of life. All that remained of the Junkers was an oil slick and a few floating pieces of débris. It all happened unbelievably quickly.”

  Three Swordfish were flown off to search for survivors. They found the wreckage of two planes and one body. After a while the Swordfish were joined by the destroyer Highlander, which recovered the body; it was that of Charles Richardson. There was no trace of the German airmen, and after about an hour the search was called off.

  In the afternoon, there were more shadowers, and another interception. By now there was a great deal of cloud about and a little before 1600 hours two aircraft were detected coming in from the east at 5,000 feet. Sam Mearns and Frank Wallis, who were strapped into their Hurricanes at instant readiness, were flown off and vectored towards the approaching planes.

  Alan Kerry remembers this as the perfect interception. Our Hurricanes were manoeuvred into the ideal position: about a thousand feet above the enemy aircraft – which were identified as a pair of Ju 290s – and up sun. Mearns and Wallis then carried out a diving attack on the leading Junkers, which saw them coming, opened fire with tracer and tried to get down to sea level. (The idea of this was that at sea level it couldn’t be attacked from below.) However, it had neither the manoeuvrability nor the defensive armament to escape. Opening fire at a range of 250 yards with high explosive incendiaries, our Hurricanes brought a lethal weight of fire to bear on the German plane which was quickly shot down, though the pilot, with no little skill, managed to ditch his shattered aircraft before it exploded. Mearns and Wallis then turned their attention to the second Junkers. It, however, very prudently first sought refuge in the clouds, then made for home.

  Returning to the first aircraft, Mearns and Wallis saw that some of the German airmen had survived the crash and were struggling to get into their dinghy. They must have thought their last moment had come when Sam came diving down on them. However, he had no intention of shooting them up; all he wanted was proof of his “kill” on his wing camera. Our two Hurricanes then headed back for the Nairana.

  As they disappeared into the path of the sinking sun, one imagines that the German airmen can’t have fancied their chances of survival. However, as I’ve said, as far as the Squadron were concerned the Battle of the Atlantic was fought without rancour and a Swordfish, with Joe Supple as pilot and Johnny Lloyd as observer, was flown off to locate the survivors and keep them company. Joe and Johnny found them, a tiny speck in a vast sea, and stayed circling them, waving encouragement, until they were picked up by one of the escorting corvettes.

  Next morning Highlander took station close on our starboard beam. Once again the squadron lined up on the flight-deck. Once again there was a moment of absolute silence while every ship in convoy, its flag at half-mast, stopped its engines as the body of Charles Richardson slid into the grey waters of the Atlantic.

  The Commodore sent us a message of sympathy. He had, he told us, arranged for a collection to be made aboard each of his ships. The response was quite overwhelming, and the very considerable sum of money that was raised was passed first to Captain Taylor, then to Charles Richardson’s family. It was used to fund a bed in his memory in the hospital close to his home town.

  Life for the rest of us went on. We had a job to do. And we did it. And that was that. But I don’t think I was the only one to do some calculations that summer. In the last four months we had lost seven pilots, observers and telegraphist air gunners, and come within a hair’s breadth of losing a great many more. We were a small squadron and if we kept up this sort of mortality rate you didn’t need to be Einstein to work out that by the end of the year there wouldn’t be many of us left.

  A few days later we were joined by another carrier, HMS Emperor, and fighter patrols and interceptions were shared with her. Our Swordfish, however, continued to provide air cover against the U-boats unaided, first for Convoy SL158/MKS49, then briefly for a southbound convoy and finally for the 15th Escort Group. On 30 May Bob Selley made the Squadron’s thousandth deck-landing on the Nairana, and a couple of days after that we were back in the Clyde.

  Nairana had been at sea for twenty eventful days. Our fighters had flown forty-five sorties and destroyed two enemy planes. Our Swordfish had flown eighty-two sorties, and although no U-boats had been destroyed, several had been attacked and once again our patrols had been so effective that not a single ship in any of the convoys or escort groups that we were guarding had been attacked.

  The safe passage of these vulnerable and near-defenceless ships made the risks that we had taken and the sacrifices that we had made worthwhile.

  We wouldn’t have minded a few weeks’ leave. We were given forty-eight hours. Then, after a brief stay in the Clyde during which we took aboard new aircraft and new aircrew, we were back again in the Atlantic, our destination, for the third time, Gibraltar.

  The passage of Convoy KMF32 was remarkable only for the weather. It was midsummer. Yet for the whole of our six-day voyage the wind was an almost perpetual gale, rain fell without respite out of a lead grey sky and great rollers came surging endlessly in on our beam. Our Swordfish flew only a dozen patrols. Our Hurricanes never got off the deck. And this was because the U-boats and Junkers obviously fou
nd conditions as impossible as we did. For during the whole of our passage not a blip was seen on our Radar screen, nor a ping heard from our Asdic.

  Our return passage, escorting the troop convoy MKF32 to the United Kingdom, was almost equally uneventful, although two of our recently joined Hurricane pilots, Ken Atkinson and Dusty Miller, had a somewhat novel experience. Al Burgham decided that his “new boys” could do with as much deck-landing practice as they could get, yet he was reluctant to risk practising on our unusually narrow flight-deck. It so happened that sailing with the convoy was HMS Ravager, an aircraft carrier which had just taken a squadron of Spitfires to Malta and was now returning empty to the United Kingdom. Our flight-deck was 60 feet wide, Ravager’s was 100. Ken and Dusty were therefore flown in a Swordfish to Ravager; Al Burgham took over a Hurricane and, under his fatherly eye, the two young pilots successfully completed a number of deck-landings. There can’t be many pilots who can claim to have done a deck-landing training course in the middle of an Atlantic convoy!

  The only other thing worth recording is our running feud with our new Commander Flying. The unfortunate “One Gun” Ball had departed on sick leave with his arm in a sling. His successor, Lt-Cdr Hugh Davenport, RN, was a little man with a rather big opinion of himself. He turned out to be a real martinet, and was forever rebuking the more high-spirited members of the squadron for “conduct unbecoming”. Our fighter pilots, for example, when they returned from patrol, had on previous convoys brought pleasure to all and harm to none by flying low between the columns of ships and waving to the servicemen (and servicewomen!) lining the rails of the troop ships. This practice was prohibited by the aptly named “Little” Hugh. Nor did the misdemeanours of our Swordfish pilots escape his critical eye. Bob Selley, about the most experienced pilot in the squadron, was taken to task like a naughty schoolboy because he too flew low over the ships in convoy while carrying “Oscar”. “Little” Hugh severely reprimanded him for revealing this supposedly secret weapon to the troops. It was typical of Davenport that, whereas all squadron officers and most ships’ officers wore the comfortable and practical battledress, he was invariably dressed in a formal reefer jacket, with the traditional 1½” of white shirtcuff below the jacket sleeves. How delighted we were, at the start of our next operation, to welcome back Nigel Ball!

  About the only moment of excitement during our passage home occurred as the convoy was nearing the British Isles. It was a beautiful night with a full moon and a quiet sea, and the fifty-odd ships in their parallel columns were keeping station with guardsmanlike precision. Sam Hollings was our officer of the watch and was surveying the peaceful scene from Nairana’s bridge when the moment came for all ships to make a 10° turn to port. (Convoys in wartime nearly always zigzagged; this was to make it difficult for the U-boats to predict their course.) At the given moment every vessel made the turn correctly, every vessel, that is, except the Dominion Monarch, which was on our port beam. She turned not 10° to port, but 10° to starboard. This put her on collision course with the carrier. Sam ordered Nairana to swing away, but once helm has been applied in one direction, it is quite a while before a ship is able to alter course on to another direction. For a moment it looked odds on on a collision, but in the end the two vessels, their propellers churning frantically, passed within a dozen yards of one another, throwing Sam’s stomach and the centre of the convoy into great confusion. The signal sent by our Commodore to the Dominion Monarch doesn’t bear repeating!

  On 3 July we were back in the Clyde, having successfully completed what was to prove my last tour of operations with the squadron. We reckoned we were overdue for leave, but it was not to be. On 4 July we received a signal to report to RNAS Burscough. Here, we were told, the Squadron would convert to Swordfish Mk IIIs, which were equipped with the latest 3cm ASVX air-to-ground Radar.

  Burscough was a not unpleasant but somewhat undistinguished airfield west of Bolton. Here we settled into our inevitable Nissen hut cabins and became acquainted with our “new” aircraft.

  We found that our poor old Swordfish had been transformed into what had become little more than a vehicle for carrying the new and highly sophisticated ASVX. Externally, this equipment was housed in a bulky transmitter/receiver scanner which was slung under the belly of the fuselage; this gave the aircraft a decidedly pregnant look and reduced its performance. Internally, the equipment was so complex that it took up the whole of what had once been the observer’s cockpit; this meant that the observer now had to move into the telegraphist-air-gunner’s cockpit, while the unfortunate TAGs (since there was no room for them) became redundant. From the pilots’ point of view, although the Swordfish Mk III remained reliable, robust, forgiving and easy to fly, the sheer weight of the equipment now loaded into it and the extent to which this equipment cluttered up its aerodynamic profile, meant that the plane became ponderous. Its top speed – never its best feature! – decreased; its stalling speed was increased; and it needed a longer take-off run – indeed it was so overweight that it often required RATOG (rocket accelerated take-off gear) to lift it clear of the flight-deck. From the observers’ point of view, the new sets were a great improvement technically. They could pick up the U-boats at a greater range; the U-boats had difficulty detecting their emissions; and their screens gave a clearer and more easily understood picture. However, there were drawbacks. The equipment was temperamental and needed careful maintenance by specially trained radar mechanics. And it was bulky. As one observer put it:

  “We now found ourselves crammed into the much smaller and more exposed air-gunner’s cockpit. Here we had to face for’ard to watch the ASVX screen; while every now and then we needed to perform contortions to reach backwards to tune the radio, read the compasses or work out our DR plot.”

  From the point of view of our telegraphist-air-gunners the Swordfish Mk III was a disaster. It did them out of a job. Willie Armstrong and his colleagues now found themselves surplus to requirements and were obliged to leave the Squadron. This was sad. And since fewer and fewer Fleet Air Arm planes now needed air-gunners, many of these brave, skilled and air-minded men had to be assigned to other and less worthwhile duties. Although this may have been the inevitable price of progress, one can’t say that the TAGs got a particularly good deal out of the Navy.

  All in all, although the Squadron accepted the need for change and recognized the value of our improved ASVX, our feelings were summed up as we sang The Pregnant Swordfish, to the tuile of “She was Poor but she was Honest”.

  “Oh, I used to think my Swordfish

  Was as slow as she was tame,

  But I’m sorry to inform you

  She has lost her maiden name.

  For she’s going to have a baby;

  You can see that by her shape.

  You can tell from her performance

  She’s been sub-jected to rape!

  See that bloody great protusion?

  You can spot it from afar.

  If you ask me what’s inside it –

  It’s a bastard like its ma!

  Once my thoroughbred old Swordfish

  Was my pride and my delight;

  But now that she is preggers

  I’ll go fly some other kite.”

  For the Squadron our time at Burscough was, above all else, a time of change. Not only did we acquire new aircraft, we acquired new aircrew and a new commanding officer, while Nairana acquired a new captain.

  Our fighter strength remained the same – six Hurricanes and eight pilots – but our TBR strength was now increased to twelve Swordfish and fourteen pilots and observers. As well as meeting this increase in number we had to find replacements for our aircrew who had been killed and for those “old timers” who now left the Squadron to take up appointments ashore. Among the latter was Jack Teesdale. I was not too happy, at this time of reconstruction in the Squadron, to face the prospect of losing not only a personal friend but the most efficient Stores Officer; so (with Jack’s approval) I asked if his app
ointment could be deferred. Our request, however, was turned down. And it was this, among other things, that now made me consider my own position.

  I was glad to have Nigel Ball to talk things over with. On 2 August he arrived unexpectedly at Burscough. His arm, he told me, was no longer a problem and he had been reappointed as Nairana’s Commander Flying. I explained to him that I was a bit concerned at the whittling away of our more experienced personnel, and we had a long discussion about the Squadron aircrew. It came up in the course of conversation that I had been serving continuously in front-line squadrons for the last four years – as well as my two and a half years with 835, I had previously spent a year and a half with 813 on the Eagle. He was amazed. As I have already explained, the Navy, unlike the RAF, had no set tour of duty at the end of which aircrew were automatically rested; however, eighteen months was usually reckoned to be a fair stint. I had been in front-line squadrons almost three times as long as was usual, and Nigel put it to me that I would be well advised to request a shore appointment. I told him I’d sleep on it.

  It was a hard decision to make. I had enjoyed being CO of 835 Squadron. I had enjoyed the challenge, the responsibility and the Camaraderie; and I think it would be fair to say that I had helped to build up an efficient and successful operational team. However, from the personal point of view there were compelling reasons for my now saying enough was enough. Of the eight original members of the squadron who had come together at Eastleigh in January, 1942, I was the only one left. During the past few weeks at Burscough I had been so preoccupied with administration that I had had to skip a lot of the ASVX course; it would, I told myself, be a recipe for disaster if the CO and Senior Observer of a TBR squadron wasn’t au fait with his equipment. There was also the point that I was beginning to feel the strain. Of the nine lives proverbially allocated to cats, I had used up all but one, surviving eight times in situations where death had seemed not only possible but probable. And in recent months to the strain of flying had been added the strain of command. Finally, there was the Pacific War to consider; I could well be needed for service there. I told myself that for the time being I had done my bit, and that to go on might jeopardize not only my own life but that of others. So I let Nigel know that it might be best if I was given a shore appointment.