“We’re barely,” Val told him, “keeping pace with the convoy!”
Bob pushed his throttle-lever right through the gate, the Swordfish’s airspeed increased to 95 knots, and the plane began very slowly to draw ahead of the advancing merchantmen. Suddenly the engine cut stone dead. One second the noise of the storm was muffled by the throb of the Pegasus XXX, next second there was only the storm.
Val transmitted a Mayday distress call. Bob jettisoned his depth-charges and flares. (This was standard procedure for an aircraft about to ditch; otherwise when the plane hit the water it was liable to be blown up by its own depth-charges and set on fire by its own flares.) Depth-charges could be jettisoned “safe”; flares could only be jettisoned live. And now, to Val and Bob’s horror as the bright white flares suspended by their parachutes were swirled away downward, they lit up the advancing convoy. For, although the Swordfish had been airborne for more than a quarter of an hour, it had made little headway against the wind. However, for the moment the convoy was the least of Bob’s worries. He made all the checks that were in the book – and several that weren’t – flicking his ignition switches, shifting his fuel cock, operating his primer. But to no avail. The Swordfish lost height. However, due perhaps to the force of the gale, the propeller was still windmilling, and suddenly and for no apparent reason, when they were down to 300 feet, the engine burst into life. They were now almost directly over the centre of the convoy and Bob made a beeline for Nairana, his one thought to land-on before his engine failed a second time. In spite of the darkness, the 60 knot wind, the snow, the fact that Nairana wasn’t exactly into wind, and a coughing engine, he managed, by a combination of luck and skill, against all the odds, to get down safely.
He and Val were at once summoned to the bridge. Here, instead of being congratulated by Surtees on a fine piece of flying, they were berated for having lit up the convoy. This was just one example of Surtees’ inability to understand what could reasonably be expected of his aircraft and his aircrew.
Other examples were to follow. Next day JW62 reached its destination safely and without loss. No sooner had we dropped anchor than we were told we would be staying in Vaenga (the port for Murmansk) for three or four days and then escorting another convoy back to the UK. On our first night in harbour our maintenance crews were looking forward to being able to service their Swordfish in peace and quiet. Captain Surtees, however, had other ideas. He ordered the hangar to be cleared of aircraft so that the ship’s company could enjoy the showing of a film. In spite of Val Jones’ protests our already deteriorating Swordfish were taken up to the flight-deck and parked there for more than five hours, exposed to the driving snow and sub-zero temperature of the Arctic night. This did them no good at all. To quote Val Jones:
“It was a crass decision. Anyone in his right mind would have realized that by hazarding his aircraft he was hazarding not only the lives of his aircrew but the safety of his ship; for the whole raison d’être of a carrier is to operate aircraft, and without its aircraft a carrier is like a tiger devoid of claws and teeth.”
So was Surtees in his right mind? Val Jones was not the only person to ask himself this. For improbable and theatrical as it sounds, during our brief stay in Vaenga Commander Cartwright and “Doc” Waterman got together and seriously discussed the possibility of declaring Nairana’s captain insane. If they had done this – as readers of The Caine Mutiny will recall – they would have been empowered to relieve him of his command.
What particularly concerned the doctor was the deterioration in the health of the aircrew, and this he attributed very largely to Surtees’ insistence on keeping them flying no matter what the circumstances. However, after considerable personal agonizing, “Doc” Waterman decided, I believe rightly, to let things be.
No sooner had he made his decision than Nairana weighed anchor, and, screened by the 6th Destroyer Flotilla, stood out to sea. It transpired that Surtees had volunteered to leave harbour forty-eight hours ahead of the convoy and disperse the U-boats which were known to be congregating at the mouth of Kola Inlet. Campania was not involved in this venture. So before the convoy even put to sea, our squadron had to face the prospect of two days of intensive flying single-handed. And what days they were!
During the next forty-eight hours our Swordfish flew twenty-five patrols and searches. Sometimes as many as four planes were in the air at the same time; hardly ever was there less than one. Sometimes as many as four aircrew were standing by in the Ready Room; never were there less than two. What made this programme particularly demanding was (a) the weather – high seas, intermittent snow, low cloud and sea mist; (b) the darkness – because it was midwinter and we were so far north of the Arctic Circle the sun never rose above the horizon; (c) the unreliability of our aircraft: of the twenty-five Swordfish to take-off two suffered electrical or radio failure and three suffered partial engine failure; (d) the fact that our senior naval officer knew so little about flying. To quote one of our pilots: “At the back of our minds was the fear that because Surtees had so little experience of operating aircraft he would land us in a situation where our lives would be put needlessly at risk.”
Of all our aircrew none had better reason to endorse this judgement than Brown and Eames. Their first patrol was aborted and they were recalled because of worsening weather. Next morning, at 0300 hours, they were off again, with orders to patrol some seventy miles ahead of the carrier; navigation and fuel, they were told, should be no problem because the carrier would be maintaining a steady westerly course towards them. At the end of their allotted two-and-a-half hours Brown and Eames returned to the place where the carrier ought to have been. It wasn’t there. On one side (invisible of course in the dark) lay the Norwegian shore at the approaches to North Cape; on the other side (equally invisible) lay a mass of pack-ice extending all the way to the Pole – not ideal terrain for a forced landing. Brown and Eames switched their IFF to “distress” and tried to gain height with the idea of picking up Nairana on their ASV. Gaining height, however, led to problems. Immediately above them was a layer of cumulus in which icing was heavy; after only a few minutes their Swordfish was so sheathed in ice that she became difficult to control. However, they picked up the image of the carrier and homed on it. They had been flying for nearly three-and-a-half hours and were getting low on fuel when at last they spotted the Nairana – heading not west but east. They requested permission to land – and were refused.
What happened next beggars belief. Brown and Eames circled the Nairana, their IFF at “distress” and their navigation lights flashing. Again and again they asked permission to land. When they were down to their last few gallons of fuel they started transmitting “Maydays”. Nobody took any notice of them. Eventually they ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea.
What had been happening meanwhile aboard the Nairana was this. When our Operations Officer, Dick Mallett, was planning how best to fly the patrols that Surtees wanted, he was told that for the next few hours the carrier would be heading due west: i.e. it would be steaming towards the aircraft which was patrolling ahead of it. However, after this aircraft (Brown and Eames’s) had been airborne for about an hour and a half, Nairana’s navigating officer thought that there might be shoal water ahead. He therefore ordered the carrier to reverse course. Nobody, however, bothered to tell Brown and Eames that instead of steaming directly towards them, their landing-strip was now steaming directly away from them. When, by a combination of luck and navigational expertise, they managed to locate Nairana and catch up with her, they ought to have been landed-on at once because they were short of fuel. Surtees, however, wanted to have aircraft continuously in the air. He therefore ordered the next two Swordfish that were due on patrol to take-off before Brown and Eames landed. This would have been OK (a) if Brown and Eames had had plenty of fuel and would have been happy circling the carrier, and (b) if the two Swordfish could have been flown off quickly. However, Brown and Eames did not have plenty of fuel and one of the S
wordfish due to be flown-off refused to start. The recalcitrant aircraft ought to have been moved out of the way – either by pushing it for’ard of the barrier or striking it below into the hangar. However, it remained in the middle of the flight-deck, blocking the landing area and surrounded by mechanics trying to start it. They were still trying to start it as Brown and Eames crashed into the sea.
Ron Brown did everything right. He managed to ditch so skilfully that he and his observer were able to get into the aircraft dinghy before the plane went down. And he ditched in exactly the right place: on the Nairana’s port quarter, where the rescue ship should have been waiting to pick them up. There was no rescue ship.
It was standard procedure (and Admiralty Instructions) that, whenever landing-on or taking-off was in progress from a carrier, a rescue ship should always be in position to rescue the aircrew in emergency. Surtees, however, was so obsessed with his quest for U-boats that he failed to take this obligatory safety measure. Even after the Swordfish had ditched, little apparent attempt was made to rescue the aircrew. About the only person aboard the Nairana to act positively was Bob Mathé who, with commendable presence of mind, flung his illuminated bats into the sea in an attempt to mark the spot where the plane had gone down.
It was as well for Brown and Eames that they were wearing their recently-issued rubber-immersion suits, otherwise they wouldn’t have survived for more than a few minutes. As it was, they crouched in their dinghy, firing off distress signals and watching Nairana grow smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the night.
John Eames relates what happened next: a saga not of hours but days.
“Our depth-charges hadn’t gone off, but our flares burned brightly. Into this somewhat apocalyptic scene came HMS Cassandra (Lt Leslie, OBE, RN) with roving searchlight. He very sportingly made his ship alarmingly visible as he stopped to pick us up. Our hands were so numb we couldn’t grasp the lifelines thrown to us, but Cassandra’s seamen jumped into the icy water to secure us and haul us to safety. We were a bit chilled but undamaged.
“It was too rough for us to be transferred back to Nairana, so next night we borrowed pyjamas and settled down for a comfortable kip.
“I woke not in my bunk, but in the corner of the cabin where I had been flung by the force of the explosion. U-365 had torpedoed Cassandra, cutting the destroyer in two. The bow section sank immediately, with heavy loss of life – all those in the for’ard messdeck. The after section remained afloat, and we began to try and limp back, sternfirst, towards Kola Inlet about 200 miles away. The frigate Bahamas took us in tow, but in the heavy seas the two ships were more often on parallel courses than in line ahead. After twenty-four hours we had been blown thirty miles farther from Kola than when the tow started.
“We had a lot of injured. Two died, and we buried them on the second day. The usual quiet ceremony, made more dramatic and somehow more poignant by the huge seas, stormy sky and twilight at noon.
“Eventually a Russian tug came to our rescue, and we got back to Kola I forget how many days later.
“After kicking our heels here for almost a week, we were given passage home in Bahamas, and arrived in Londonderry after a solo voyage uneventful except for one brief encounter with a mine.”
It is an indication of the spirit and camaraderie in the Squadron that both pilot and observer declined to take the survivors’ leave to which they were entitled, but reported back as soon as they could to Nairana.
Meanwhile aboard the carrier, Captain Surtees’ sortie was grinding to a halt; for at the end of forty-eight hours’ continuous flying virtually all the squadron’s Swordfish were unserviceable. Nairana therefore returned to the entrance to Kola Inlet to await the convoy now due any moment to emerge from behind the protective barrier of the Russian minefields.
It is perhaps only fair to point out that although no one in the squadron thought much of Surtees’ venture, and although he himself admitted in his official report that it “proved a great strain on all concerned,” it is possible that it did disrupt the U-boats. For, although once again we made no “kills”, our constantly patrolling planes kept the submarines submerged and on the defensive.
The homewardbound convoy (RA62) which on the morning of 11 December stood, west out of Kola Inlet was a medium-sized one – twenty-nine merchantmen with their Commodore in Fort Crèvecoeur – and it was to prove our most eventful to date.
Within an hour of clearing the minefields the corvette Banborough Castle attacked and sank U387 (Kapitän Buchler); there were no survivors.
Over the next couple of days Nairana and Campania did their best to provide air cover, turn and turn about. However, flying conditions were “at the very limit of possibility,” and the serviceability of our Swordfish was a constant headache. Nonetheless on the morning of 11 December we came our closest yet to success.
Joe Supple and Johnny Lloyd took-off at 1000 hours, in what passed for dawn. There was a lot of mist about and, with poor visibility and an indeterminate horizon, Joe had to fly most of the time on his instruments. They had been airborne about an hour when they picked up a contact at a range of nine miles. They homed in on it. Most contacts as a plane approached usually disappeared. This one remained on their screen and it occurred to John Lloyd that, if it was a U-boat, its kapitän probably reckoned the weather was too bad for aircraft to be flying. With the range down to less than a mile, the contact was still on their screen.
Suddenly they saw it – a surfaced U-boat at a range of no more than 500 yards – looming surprisingly large out of the mist. The U-boat must have seen them at the same moment as they saw it, for, as Joe dived in to the attack, it began to submerge. As ill luck would have it, their Swordfish was armed with rocket projectiles (which were best against a surfaced target) rather than depth-charges (best against a submerged one), and, although Joe obtained at least a couple of underwater hits, the submarine was damaged rather than sunk.
John Lloyd had just transmitted the news of their attack to Nairana when the Swordfish suffered a total radar, radio and electrical failure. He switched his IFF to “distress”, circled the spot where the U-boat had been attacked, and hoped that the carrier would guess what had happened.
Aboard Nairana a strike force of two Wildcats and two Swordfish was quickly flown off in the hope of detecting and finishing off the U-boat, but no trace of it could be found. The strike force did, however, find Supple and Lloyd, and the stranded Swordfish formed up on them and was guided back to the carrier. Landing-on was not easy because the plane had no wing lights, but between them Joe Supple and Bob Mathé got it safely on to the flight-deck. This U-boat was officially classed as “damaged”.
Next day the threat of German submarines receded, but the threat of German torpedo-bombers increased. For the convoy was now passing North Cape with its airfield at Banak, and would soon be turning south-west which would bring it close to the airfield at Bardufoss. And sure enough, late that night, we were picked up by a pair of German reconnaissance planes. They circled us hour after hour, well out of range of our ack-ack, reporting, we didn’t doubt, our composition, course and speed.
It looked as though, next morning, we would be in for a dawn attack. Action stations were piped at 0600 and, although it was pitch dark, four Wildcats were ranged hopefully on the flight-deck.
It was not, however, the expected torpedo-bombers which were first to materialize on the morning of 12 December, it was another shadower, a Blohm and Voss 138 reconnaissance plane. It appeared on our radar screen a little after 0800 and started to circle the convoy. At 0830, although it was still almost pitch dark, Bill Armitage and Norman Sargent were scrambled to try and make contact with it. They had a hard time taking-off, a hard time staying airborne, and an even harder time trying to catch the Blohm and Voss. Wildcats were not night fighters – “on no account,” reads an Admiralty Fleet Order “are Wildcats to be flown at night under operational conditions” – they had none of the sophisticated instruments which enabled Swordf
ish to “see in the dark”; they needed to be flown visually. In poor light they were difficult to control; in particular when flying at low level in and out of cloud with an ill-defined horizon, it was all too easy to end up in the sea. Another problem – assuming they did spot an enemy aircraft – was the difficulty of lining up their reflector gunsights, a problem aggravated by the fact that, in poor light, the flames from their uncovered engine exhaust ports affected the pilot’s vision. A final disadvantage for them in poor light was that it was almost impossible to operate in pairs. So no wonder, that morning, to quote Bill Armitage, “we chased the bugger all over the sky but couldn’t catch him!”
An hour later, at 0940, another pair of Wildcats was scrambled. George Gordon and Pete Blanco were the pilots, and they too were vectored towards the circling aircraft. By now the light was better, and they spotted it, spotted it in a patch of open sky and swooped down on it before it could escape into cloud. It was all over in seconds. George closed right in and, with an inspired burst of shooting, set fire to one of the Blohm and Voss’s engines. The great plane crashed in flames near the periphery of the convoy. There were no survivors. It was George Gordon’s 21st birthday.
That afternoon, as though in retribution, “blips” came swarming on to our radar screen. In one group, coming in from the north-east, it looked as though there were nine or ten aircraft; in another, coming in from the southeast, it looked as though there were about the same number. It seemed we were about to face a well-organized, co-ordinated attack. Nairana quickly landed-on her patrolling Swordfish and ranged her Wildcats.
Then came a problem. Should the Wildcats be flown-off? It was after 1330 hours, already dark, and getting quite rapidly darker. It was also one of those afternoons, with low cloud, sea-mist and poor visibility, when conditions were particularly hazardous for the Wildcats. Al Burgham and Dusty Miller were strapped into their cockpits, ranged and ready for take-off. But were conditions too bad for them to have any realistic chance of making an interception? Surtees, needless to say, wanted the aircraft flown-off. Val Jones thought it too risky. Nigel Ball came running across the flight-deck to ask the pilots what they thought. The cautious and experienced Al Burgham thought “no”; the eager and less-experienced Dusty Miller thought “yes”. Before their views could be relayed to the bridge, Surtees ordered “fly off”.
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 20