Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea

by E. E. Barringer

  It would be no exaggeration to say that every one of the patrols flown during the next couple of days called for airmanship of the highest standard. If there had been the slightest error in an observer’s navigation or in his use of his ASVX, that would have been the end of that crew. If there had been the slightest misjudgement or slowness of reaction on the part of a pilot as he took-off or landed, that too would have been fatal. As it was, the Swordfish flew fourteen patrols in forty-eight hours, providing more or less continuous air cover for the convoy during a vital part of its route where no land-based aircraft could guard it. The wonder is not that there were some accidents but that there were not more. Inevitably it was the less experienced aircrew who came to grief.

  Sid Cowsill didn’t so much hit the barrier as land on top of it. “Barrier landing,” records the Fair Flying Log, “aircraft a total write off.”

  Dave Whittick arrived in an even more spectacular manner. Coming in to land at the end of a three-hour patrol, he made a good approach and was given the signal to cut; but at the last second the deck swung up to meet him. He hit it hard, missed the arrester-wires, ballooned high into the air, and suddenly found himself half-stalled some thirty feet above the flight-deck and heading straight for the top of the barrier. Seeing that if he didn’t do something, he and his observer would almost certainly be killed, he rammed open his throttle, leapfrogged over the barrier, and just managed to pick up sufficient flying speed to stay airborne. Coming in a second time, he made a perfect landing. “Jumped barrier and went round again!!!” records the Fair Flying Log, the number of exclamation marks in this most prosaic of journals reflecting a mixture of disapproval, disbelief and reluctant admiration. It will be remembered that our former CO, the unfortunate T.T. Miller, tried to do much the same thing. His hook caught the top of the barrier and he wrote off his Swordfish and a Sea Hurricane and ended up under cabin arrest. Dave was lucky, because those who watched his landing are all agreed that his hook missed the barrier by inches rather than feet.

  One other Kamikaze-type patrol is worth recording. On the evening of 3 November a German reconnaissance aircraft found and started to shadow the convoy. It shadowed us hour after hour, round and round. Every now and then, reminding us of what was going on, we could hear above the roar of the wind and the pound of the sea the not-quite-synchronized beat of its engines. It was far too dark and too stormy even to think of flying off our Wildcats, but Bob Selley and Dave Newbery volunteered to masquerade as a night-fighter in their Swordfish and try to drive it away. Their only armament was an ancient sub-machine-gun, which Dave Newbery managed (with some difficulty) to cram into his already overcrowded cockpit. Then they took-off and were vectored by Alan Kerry towards the shadower. And the German aircraft fled! Maybe it picked up Alan Kerry’s transmissions and thought that a bona fide fighter was about to attack it; maybe it spotted the vague shape of the approaching Swordfish and mistook it for a Wildcat. At any rate and for whatever reason, the blip disappeared from our screen and didn’t trouble us again. With considerable relief, Bob and Dave flew back to the carrier and landed safely after what was surely one of the more bizarre “fighter patrols” of the war. As Dave Newbery remarked as he returned his sub-machine-gun to Stores, “It’s lucky for us all cats are grey in the dark!”

  The bad weather meanwhile showed no sign of abating. Indeed if anything it got worse, and the speed of the convoy had to be reduced. Even so, many of the merchantmen, in ballast, were flinging their screws clean out of water as they nosedived into the swell.

  Aboard the unwieldy carriers conditions were chaotic. One of Nairana’s rolls was measured at 540; in other words she tipped from port to starboard through an arc of over 100°. This, according to the book, should have made her turn turtle. Conditions in the hangar were beyond belief, with the maintenance crew having to secure every aircraft and every item of equipment with treble lashings. In the wardroom too we had our problems. Our gallant gunnery officer was unable to enjoy his daily tipple until he had lashed himself to a stanchion!

  For three consecutive days we were duty carrier. Then, on 6 November, Vindex at last got her lift working and was able to help us. Next day aircraft of Coastal Command, operating from the Shetlands, were circling the convoy. And the day after that we sighted the northernmost islands of the Orkneys.

  As we entered Scapa Flow it was still blowing a full gale and snowing as though it would never stop. The elements, it seemed, were reluctant to admit we had escaped them.

  While protecting this homewardbound convoy we had flown thirty-three anti-submarine patrols and searches: not, you might rightly say, a lot of flying. Yet most of the patrols had been at night, all had been in difficult conditions, and we had lost only one aircraft and none of our aircrew.

  The three carriers didn’t tarry in Scapa but stood south at full speed for the Clyde: full speed because we reckoned that leave was in the offing. We must have been an impressive sight as, screened by our destroyer escort, we swept in perfect formation past the Mull of Kintyre. Nairana, however, had difficulty maintaining the requisite fifteen knots. Our Chief Engineer had to order “continuous maximum revolutions”, and this produced a curious rhythmic surge in the engines and a curious up-and-down movement – known as “the honeymoon motion” – in the ship.

  As we approached our berths at Greenock, Vindex must have been thankful that RA61 was over. However, she was to suffer one final indignity. In front of the watchful eyes of the welcoming Vice Admiral, she fouled the boom. We reckoned it was the Almighty’s passing shot at Dalrymple-Hamilton for not having flown his flag in Nairana!

  34. A Swordfish armed with ‘Oscar’ crashes. Note that the outline of the secret acoustic torpedo has been scratched out by the censor.

  35. Joe Supple nearly goes over the side.

  36. Bill Armitage nearly goes over the side in his Sea Hurricane.

  37. Pete Blanco and his Wildcat end up in the barrier.

  38. Swordfish taking off on a dawn patrol…

  39. …and landing.

  40. A Swordfish, its wings folded, is ‘struck down’ aboard HMS Battler into the hangar below the flight deck.

  41. A Swordfish revs up in preparation for take-off.

  42. Officers of HMS Vindex clear the flight deck of snow.

  43. Clearing the snow from HMS Campania’s flight deck.

  44. HMS Nairana in heavy seas on the way to Russia.

  45. Mist rising from the sea around merchant ships on a Russian convoy.

  46. Nairana’s ship’s bell, now hanging in the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton.

  47. Seamen clear the flight deck on an escort carrier at Kola Bay, illustrating the conditions which hampered flying in Arctic operations.

  48. In 1949 HMS Nairana was converted to the MV Port Victor.

  49. Forty years on! Lansdown Grove Hotel, Bath, 9 May, 1989.

  L. to R.: John Lloyd, Norman Sargent, John Roberts, Barry Barringer, Sam Mearns, Jack Teesdale, Al Burgham, Willie Armstrong, Bob Selley, Ken Atkinson, Jock Bevan, John Cridland, Eric McEwan, George Arber, John Eames, Teddy Elliott, David Newbery, Val Jones, Charles Gough, Donald Payne. Hank Housser also attended but missed the photograph.

  That night we had a distinguished visitor. Almost as soon as we had dropped anchor, Lumley Lyster came aboard to congratulate us. We were, he told us, “the first convoy to get to Russia and back without losing a single merchantman”. (Lyster, in fact, was not strictly right about this. A couple of small and very early convoys were never attacked at all. A stickler for accuracy would therefore say that Lyster ought to have told us we were the first convoy that was attacked and got through without loss.) Anyhow, his praise meant a lot to us. As did nine days’ leave.

  On returning to Nairana, we were told to fly to Machrihanish for the inevitable working up.

  Our Wildcat pilots were glad to get into the air – during JW and RA61 they hadn’t once got off the deck (although they had spent a total of nearly fifty hours strapped into their
cockpits or in the Ready Room) – and they now gave priority to practising dawn and dusk landings. For rumour had it that we might soon be providing air cover for another convoy to Russia, and it was obvious that in midwinter in the Arctic there would be little daylight-flying for the Wildcats. For the Swordfish there were dummy-night-deck-landings for the pilots, and swinging compasses for the observers; and we now carried out these routine assignments with more than usual care; for it was obvious that deck-landings and compasses were matters of life or death.

  Soon we were en route a second time to Scapa Flow. While waiting here for our convoy to assemble there were changes in personnel among both the squadron’s and the ship’s officers. We lost two stalwarts, George Sadler and Dave Newbery; both were given shore appointments. And we lost Commander Healey, an able and understanding man, who had managed to be both efficient and popular. His successor, Commander F.J. Cartwright (known as “Fat Jack”) may have been efficient but he was certainly not popular, for he tried to impose a formal Dartmouth-type régime in the wardroom. To give just one example: he decreed that meals – as in a peacetime battleship – should be served punctiliously at set (and very restricted) times. When he was told that aircrew might be flying at these set times, he replied that was too bad; if they couldn’t be in the wardroom on time they could go without. And when he was told that aircrew not only had to fly but often had to spend long hours in the Ready Room (which they were not permitted to leave) waiting to take-off at a moment’s notice, he replied that also was too bad and they would still have to go without. (How very different from the way the RAF treated their aircrew.) We could tolerate this in harbour or when we were working up, but not on operations, when our pilots and observers needed all the sleep and all the decent food they could get. A confrontation was certain as thunder after lightning. It was the quiet, equable and well-balanced Al Burgham who at last said what all of us had been longing to say.

  “You’d better remember,” he told “Fat Jack”, “the ship is here for pilots to fly off, not for you to try out your Dartmouth rules and regulations.”

  In view of the criticism that was later levelled at our captain, it ought to be said that it was Cartwright not Surtees who favoured these restrictions. At the end of the convoy, in his “report of proceedings” to Vice Admiral Aircraft Carriers, Surtees wrote:

  “I am not satisfied with the present arrangements for meals for aircrews, due in part to internal organization, lack of suitable accommodation and approved complement of cooks and stewards. This is being gone into, and a separate report will be rendered.”

  In the small hours of 30 November we left the Fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow and rendezvoused with Convoy JW62. This was another fair-sized convoy: thirty-one merchantmen, with the Commodore flying his flag in Fort Boise. Again the escort was powerful: one cruiser, three sloops, four corvettes, eleven frigates, fourteen destroyers, and the aircraft carriers Nairana and Campania, the latter flying the flag of Rear Admiral McGrigor. Tracker had been left behind, since both she and her Avengers had proved ill-suited to winter flying in the Arctic, while Vindex and her shell-shocked squadron were being very sensibly rested. The fact that once again there were more warships than merchantmen is evidence of the importance attached to these Russian convoys and of the difficulty that was anticipated in getting them through.

  A report on JW62 reads:

  “Although Tirpitz had been eliminated, removing the necessity of maintaining the Home Fleet at strength and using it to support the Russian convoy route, the enemy had replaced one threat with another by moving to North Norway a substantial force of Ju 88 torpedo-bombers. The U-boat threat, as always, remained great in this theatre. In spite of his formidable strength, however, the enemy was not able to make any impression on JW62 which arrived unscathed in Kola Inlet.”

  835 Squadron, however, were by no means unscathed. And it was on this convoy that the friction between Val Jones and Surtees came to a head.

  Our first convoy to Russia had followed a direct route which had taken us close to the Norwegian shore. This time we followed a far more westerly and northerly route, skirting Bjornaya or Bear Island (so called because the Dutch who discovered it in 1596 found there “a great white bear, which we came at with muskets, halberds and hatchets and killed after a two-hour fight”). This detour added three hundred miles and a couple of days to our voyage, but we hoped it would make things difficult for the Ju 88s, whose arrival at Bardufoss and Banak had not escaped the notice of Norwegian resistance agents.

  During the first couple of days we didn’t do a great deal of flying, no more than four patrols; for it was now official policy, we were told, to conserve aircrew in the early stages of the convoy so that they would be in good shape to cope with the more difficult later stages when we were likely to be beset by U-boats, Junkers, pack-ice and sea mist, the warships’ Asdic would be ineffective, and our aircraft would be the merchantmen’s most effective, and indeed their only, defence. However, on our second day out from Scapa, in the early hours of the morning, two enemy aircraft appeared on our Radar screen. There was not much cloud and a certain amount of moonlight; our Wildcats had been practising dawn and dusk take-off and landing and, although it wouldn’t be dawn for several hours, it was decided to scramble the two pilots who were standing-by – Bill Armitage and Norman Sargent – to see if they could make an interception. There was a strong wind and Nairana was pitching heavily; nonetheless Bill and Norman managed to get airborne and were vectored towards the German aircraft. Now it could have been that the Germans were short of fuel and that is why they turned for home; it could be that they saw the Wildcats coming; or it could be that they picked up Nairana’s homing signals. Whatever the reason, they suddenly headed back for Norway. Bill and Norman never managed to get within a mile of them. They did, however, manage to stay airborne for another couple of hours, until dawn brought a hint of light, and that made landing a bit (but not much) easier. They got down safely.

  However, it was clear that the convoy had been discovered, that its course and its strength were known and that there was likely to be trouble ahead.

  Nairana and Campania between them kept up a succession of patrols over the next few days. Then the weather worsened. And to make things even more difficult our Swordfish (hitherto so reliable) began to suffer a spate of engine, radio and ASV failures. This was not because of any shortcomings among our maintenance personnel; it was because of the testing conditions in which the aircraft had to be maintained, ranged on the flight-deck and flown. A glance at the Fair Flying Log reveals that, within the span of twenty-four hours, we could, all too easily, have lost a quarter of our aircrew.

  Of the ten Swordfish to fly that day one suffered a complete and unnerving R/T failure which severed contact between plane and carrier, one was recalled because of worsening weather, and three suffered the sort of engine-trouble which might all too easily have resulted in the plane having to ditch some way from the convoy, in which case the aircrew would have been unlikely to survive.

  The strain of having to face this sort of danger day after day was cumulative and our senior medical officer, Lt-Cdr Waterman, was not unaware of the fact that the health of the squadron aircrew, both physically and mentally, was now beginning to deteriorate. It seems likely that three factors exacerbated this deterioration: the weather, our failure to sink a U-boat, and the unreasonable demands of Captain Surtees.

  We escorted three convoys to Russia that winter in relatively quick succession and the weather on each of them seemed to get progressively worse. Week after week we had to live with huge seas, gale-force winds, numbing cold, and some nineteen hours each day of absolute darkness; even when it was light there was never a glimmer of sun. After a while it became depressing, and we depressed.

  If we had sunk a U-boat that would have gone a long way towards making it all worthwhile. Just about every other squadron in the Fleet Air Arm seemed to have sunk one, and goodness knows how many times we had picked a contact up
on our ASVX, homed on it and sometimes sighted it and attacked it. Yet we could claim no definite kill. We began to think of ourselves as Jonahs.

  An understanding captain would have got us to snap out of it. But whatever virtues Surtees may have possessed, understanding the needs of his aircrew was not among them. With his obsession to keep the squadron flying at all times and in all circumstances, he made life even harder for us than it need have been. What happened on the night of 9 December was typical. Conditions were appalling: wind 60 knots gusting 100, heavy squalls of snow, and a layer of stratus (and icing) at 500 feet. No U-boat could have been anywhere near the surface and survived, and Campania had very sensibly cancelled flying. But not Surtees. He ordered a Swordfish to patrol ten miles ahead of the convoy. It was of course Val Jones and his long-suffering pilot, Bob Selley, who “volunteered” for what at best was a highly hazardous assignment. Taking-off from a wildly-pitching carrier in total dark and a 60 knot snowstorm isn’t easy, but Bob managed it. He then did his best to reach his designated patrol-area ahead of the convoy. The trouble was that the convoy was heading almost directly into wind, and after about ten minutes Bob got a plaintive request from his observer:

  “Can you put your foot down? On the accelerator?”

  Bob checked his throttle-setting which was almost at maximum revs, and his airspeed which was also very nearly at maximum. “I’m doing my best. Why?”