Then, providentially, the sea mist started to clear. By mid-afternoon our Swordfish were back in the air and the U-boats had lost their opportunity.
In the next twelve hours we flew thirteen patrols, some lasting more than three hours. This meant that there were always at least two aircraft circling the convoy. Conditions for flying were difficult. At first, the remains of the sea mist restricted visibility; then, as twilight gave way to total darkness, the wind increased and the waves steepened. By midnight it was blowing a full gale and Nairana was pitching and corkscrewing like a roller-coaster. Out of the thirteen aircraft to take-off four came or nearly came to grief. Supple and Lloyd had to return with their engine overheating and losing power. Rogers and Eames had to return with their ASV unserviceable. Paine and Roberts landed heavily, writing off their undercarriage, and, as their Swordfish slithered across the flight-deck, very nearly writing off the batsman as well.
Ron Brown and Jock Bevan had the narrowest escape of all. It was coming up to midnight as they were given the green Aldis light to take-off. Nairana was corkscrewing violently. And just as Ron fired his RATOG the carrier reared upwards and sideways, flinging the Swordfish not only into the air but straight towards the island. The plane hit the starboard oerlikon guns, did a spectacular half-roll, plunged near-vertical into the sea and sank like a stone. Aboard the carrier everyone who had seen what happened held his breath. For if Ron had activated his depth-charges that would have been the end not only of him and his observer but quite possibly of the Nairana as well. Half a ton of high explosive detonating on our waterline would have done us no good at all. The seconds ticked by. There was no explosion. And suddenly, and against all the odds, our lookouts saw that Ron Brown and Jock Bevan had surfaced and were clambering into their dinghy, which had broken free as the Swordfish sank. They were swirled away into the night. One wouldn’t have rated their chances of survival too highly. But after about fifteen minutes they were picked up by HMS Onslaught, commanded by Captain Pleydell-Bouverie, RN, who risked his ship and the lives of his ship’s company to comb the sea for them with his searchlight. He was only just in time, for in those few minutes, in spite of their rubber-immersion-suits, Ron and Jock were frozen almost literally solid and in the last stages of hypothermia. To quote an official report, “Their limbs wouldn’t bend and the clothes had to be cut away from their frozen bodies.” Few aircrew survive a single ducking in the Arctic. Ron Brown survived two. And a torpedoing!
Two more patrols were flown that night: by the CO and John Rogers. Then conditions deteriorated still further and, by dawn on the 18th, the convoy was pitching into a full-scale Arctic hurricane. There was no question now of our fighting U-boats or Junkers, conditions were far too bad for them to survive in. Our adversary was the storm.
It is hard to find words that are adequate to describe the ferocity of the blizzard that now engulfed us. One of our pilots said it was “like being attacked by a wild animal”. Equally telling is the matter-of-fact report in “ Convoys to Russia”:
“The weather that followed deserves the description of ‘the great gale’. Other convoys suffered serious weather damage, but none so bad as this. The convoy was greatly scattered, numerous ships suffering severe weather damage. Several merchant ships were reduced to steering with block and tackle on the rudder-head and, on return to Britain, twelve warships had to be docked with weather damage.”
Another report worth quoting is Mike Arrowsmith’s met forecast:
“An intense depression centred over Spitzbergen continues to move rapidly east. Strong W’ly gale will continue today with low cloud and intermittent snow; wind increasing and backing this evening.
Grade ‘C’ Forecast until 2000/19
WIND: W’ly, averaging 70–80 knots but gusting
considerably over
WEATHER: Cloudy with intermittent snow
CLOUD: 9/10–10/10 at 600 feet; patches at sea level
VISIBILITY: 2/3 miles
SEA: Very rough; swell very heavy w’ly.”
This forecast was pinned to the wardroom notice board, and beneath it some wag had written “Fly off ALL the Swordfish!”
The night brought no respite. Indeed conditions worsened. The maximum that our anemometer was able to record was eighty knots. In the small hours of the morning its needle reached this level and not once in the next twenty hours did it drop below it. And Arrowsmith reckons that many gusts were over 120 mph. The convoy slowed down: first to six knots, then to four. But even at this reduced speed, many of the merchantmen were continually shipping it green and in danger of foundering. McGrigor realized he could easily lose more ships to the storm than to the attacks of U-boats and Junkers. Early on 19 February he sent a signal to Surtees.
“Nairana from CS One. Am turning into wind and heaving to. Signal your intentions.”
Godley was on the bridge with Surtees when the signal was handed to him. “Strawberry,” he wrote, “didn’t turn. Just a ghost of a smile. ‘Reply as follows,’ he said: ‘CS One from Nairana. Am staying with the convoy’.”
So RA64 split into two fragmented groups. Campania, with about half the merchantmen and escorts, hove-to into the wind. Nairana, with the other half, held course to the south at four knots. Several factors made a lot of the merchant captains reluctant to heave-to. Some didn’t want to use up precious fuel without making headway towards their destination; some found that their vessels were easier to handle when they were under way and all wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the north Norwegian airfields. For everyone realized that, the moment the weather cleared, the Junkers would be searching for us. It was this that made Surtees determined to stay with the convoy. For past experience had proved that, once a convoy was scattered and bereft of air cover, its individual merchantmen were easy prey for the German bombers. Our captain had no intention of deserting his charges. No matter what the risk or what the cost, he was determined that his aircraft would defend the convoy.
But there were times that night when it looked as though there might not be any aircraft left to protect the merchantmen. For in Nairana’s hangar, a little after midnight, a huge tractor weighing over a ton broke free of its lashings and, with every pitch and roll of the carrier, began to wreak havoc among the parked aircraft. It was, for the Squadron maintenance personnel, a nightmare scenario. Each aircraft had been trebly lashed down, and each lashing had been tied not just to one ring-bolt but to two. Every chock, drip-tray and oil drum had been doubly secured. Our electrically-powered tractor had of course been secured too, but with the ship rolling through 100 degrees, and one moment pitching bows-under and next moment dipping stern-under, a steel cable that had been fastened around the tractor began to work loose. Suddenly, under the strain of a particularly vicious roll, it parted. The tractor burst free of its lashings and went careering across the hangar, smashing into aircraft after aircraft. Squadron ratings risked their lives to fling themselves on to it and try to hold it down. But there were too few of them and the tractor was too heavy. Again and again it hurtled across the deck, crashing into the parked aircraft. The tannoy blared for reinforcements. John Godley appeared and helped to organize the teams trying to “net” the tractor. Nigel Ball appeared, lost his footing on the oil-coated deck, shot across the hangar on his backside and disappeared through a companionway. The situation was critical, with the tractor at last enmeshed like a huge bluebottle in a spider’s web of ropes but not yet under control, when a joke did more to raise morale than a whole spate of orders and exhortations. About a dozen of the squadron maintenance personnel hadn’t joined Nairana; they had been left behind at Burscough, a dull and unprepossessing airfield, where they had languished on reduced pay, reduced rum and reduced chances of promotion. They had moaned and moaned and moaned. And now, as a group of ratings scattered for their lives as the tractor bore down on them, one of them shouted, “Pity those poor buggers at Burscough!”
There was no doubt from that moment but that t
he runaway tractor would be brought under control. In the small hours of the morning Godley was able to report to Surtees that it had been secured. Three Swordfish, he told him, were a total loss and three had been badly damaged. But seven Swordfish and all the Wildcats were flyable.
Surtees, wedged into a corner of the bridge which he never seemed to leave, was concerned with one thing only. “The convoy,” he told Godley, “is badly scattered. The moment the weather clears the enemy will be after us. We must be prepared to fly off any time. If need be at dawn.”
Godley passed on the message to Chief Air Artificer Banham, and Banham and his maintenance crews worked flat out through the night, in about the most taxing conditions it would be possible to imagine, to repair the damage and bring order out of chaos. By dawn the hangar was back to normal and thirteen aircraft were ready to be flown off. It was the Wildcats that were needed.
During the night of the 19th/20th the weather moderated a little. As the eye of the storm went swirling away to the north-east the wind decreased from ninety knots to sixty knots, while the solid curtain of cloud broke up and its base lifted. But the seas remained mountainous – huge fifty-foot rollers, a mile from crest to crest, surging in endless succession over the western skyline. The convoy did its best to reassemble. Some ships, however, had been blown far out of position. By dawn four stragglers still hadn’t returned to the fold and a German reconnaissance aircraft had found us and was shadowing us. We knew it wouldn’t be long before the Junkers were back.
It seemed hardly possible that morning for our Wildcats to get airborne, and not possible at all – assuming they did get airborne – for them to have the slightest hope of landing back. However, it says much for the improved relations among Nairana’s top brass that there was now a meeting between Surtees, Nigel Ball, John Godley and Al Burgham and it was agreed that Al should decide if and when the Wildcats should be scrambled. Al was an experienced pilot, not given to taking risks, but he knew how much was at stake, knew that it would be no exaggeration to say the fate of many of the merchantmen rested on his fighters. At 0800 the order came through on the tannoy: “Range 4 Wildcats”.
The ranging of four Wildcats would normally have taken less than ten minutes. That morning it took over an hour. The flight-deck handling parties were doubled. Even so, there were not enough men to hold the planes steady against the pitch and roll of the ship and the tug of the wind. The Wildcats glissaded this way and that over the ice-rimmed flight-deck, dragging with them whole rugger scrums of men as they clung to wings and heaved on securing wires. But at last the planes were manhandled into position and secured aft of the lift. Their engines were started. And four pilots – Armitage, Sargent, Gordon and Blanco – clambered into the cockpits.
At a little after ten o’clock “bogeys” appeared on the radar screen and the order was given to scramble.
Nairana laboured round into wind. An Aldis lamp flashed green from the bridge. The leading Wildcat revved up its engine. Chocks were whipped from under its wheels, gloved hands let go of its wings. For a second the plane slithered wildly; then, as it gathered speed, its tail rose and it was flung off the flight-deck through the spray of a fifty-foot wave. For a moment it hung half-stalling over the carrier’s bow; then, picking up flying speed, it climbed into the comparative safety of the sky. Bill Armitage was airborne. His three colleagues also got off safely, in take-offs probably as hazardous as any ever made in the history of naval aviation. They formed up and were vectored towards the Junkers.
The Junkers weren’t expecting them. German plans had been based on the assumption that the weather would be too bad for carrier-borne planes to be airborne and the sudden appearance of our fighters threw them into confusion. One group had planned a low-level torpedo attack, while the other group had planned to fly across the convoy’s line of advance and drop mines. Both plans were now frustrated by our four Wildcats, who broke the formations up, harrying the German planes this way and that and forcing them to jettison their torpedoes and mines. The Junkers shied away. They had had a nightmare search for the convoy; they were at the very limit of their endurance (in more senses than one) and they had been mauled too savagely before by our Wildcats to have the stomach to try conclusions with them again. They dropped their torpedoes and mines at long range, more in hope than expectation, and made for the safety of the clouds. Most got away. But three, braver or less lucky than their companions, fell to the ack-ack of the warships. And two were shot down by our fighters, one by Gordon and Blanco, and one by Armitage and Sargent. (Luftwaffe records reveal that twenty-six Junkers took-off that morning to attack the convoy, but only nineteen returned. So it could be that our fighters so damaged two other planes that they failed to survive the flight home.)
It would not be wrong to say that our four Wildcats, that morning, saved the convoy. For, if the German planes had had to face ack-ack only, their attacks would undoubtedly have been more determined and more successful. But as our pilots came back and started to circle the carrier at 1,000 feet it looked as though they might well have to pay for their victory with their lives. For with our flight-deck corkscrewing this way and that, and rising and falling by anything up to fifty feet, one would have thought nothing short of a miracle would get them down safely. There was no miracle, just a combination of inspired batting and skilful flying; repeated four times.
Bob Mathé admitted afterwards that although he would have hoped to land Swordfish in such conditions, he never thought that the Wildcats would make it, for the monoplanes with their narrow undercarriage, high landing speed and shallow angle of approach were far more difficult to land than the accommodating biplanes. The first pilot, Bill Armitage, had to be waved-off twice. Waving-off was a nerve-racking experience, with the plane poised near-stalling above the round-down and the pilot longing to cut his throttle but having instead at the last moment to ram it full open and claw desperately for airspeed; but better an anxious wave-off than a disastrous touch down. The third time Bill approached Nairana’s stern obligingly swung up at the crucial moment, and the first Wildcat plummeted down, heavily but safely. The second plane had a lucky escape. Norman Sargent was given the signal to cut, but, at the last second, the flight-deck swung up sharply. Norman hit it hard, leapfrogged all six arrester-wires and was brought up short only inches from the barrier by the gale-force wind. Then the gale which had saved him very nearly proved his undoing. For the Wildcat, unhooked, was picked up almost bodily by the seventy-knot wind and bowled backwards across the ice-covered deck. To quote Norman:
“Rebounding from the barrier, I slithered across the deck on my wingtip. First, I was almost blown over the starboard side, then I was almost blown over the round-down. Much to their credit, a lot of the flight-deck-handling party tried to grab me as I slithered past them; but they hadn’t a hope of stopping five tons of fast-moving Wildcat. I rammed open my throttle, managed to stop the glissade, and came to rest no more than a dozen feet from the round-down. From here I was hauled to safety.”
Somehow, and against all the odds, the last two pilots – Gordon and Blanco – managed to get down in one piece.
These were not the last operational sorties carried out by the squadron – both Swordfish and Wildcats flew patrols during the final few days of RA64 and also during our last and once again aborted shipping strike – but they were the last really meaningful sorties. All that happened afterwards was something of an anticlimax.
There were no more attacks that afternoon, which was just as well because, almost as soon as the Wildcats landed, we were hit by another and almost equally violent storm and for the second time the convoy became scattered. Three extremely hazardous A/S patrols were flown in high winds and huge seas on 21 February, but conditions were too bad for the U-boats to operate and no contacts were made.
A couple of days later, as we were nearing the Faeroes, we flew our last sortie in defence of RA64. It was a sad occasion. Several stragglers had not yet managed to catch up with the convoy. Among
them was the Henry Bacon, an American “Liberty Ship” which had aboard thirty-five members of the Norwegian Resistance who had been evacuated from Soroy Island to avoid German reprisals. On the afternoon of 23 February a formation of Junkers were searching for the main convoy, but found instead the solitary and defenceless merchantman. The Henry Bacon managed to get off a radio message and two of our Wildcats (flown by Armitage and Sargent) were flown off to go to her aid. However, by the time they found her her decks were awash and the Junkers were on their way back to Norway. Armitage and Sargent circled the sinking ship, watching the survivors take to their boats. The USN Armed Guard who were manning the Henry Bacon upheld the finest traditions of the sea; they gave up their places in the lifeboats to their passengers. All the Norwegians were saved, but twenty-six of the Armed Guard went down with their ship. There was nothing Armitage and Sargent could do except take an accurate fix on the lifeboats, circle them and fly low over them to make sure the survivors realized they were not being abandoned, then make their way back to Nairana.
The Henry Bacon was the only merchantman we ever lost. All told, we escorted twenty-one convoys consisting of something like 1,000 merchant vessels. To have lost only one ship, and she a straggler, was a record we could be proud of. Nonetheless it saddened us to think that on the very last day of our very last convoy lives had been lost.
During the final stages of our passage home air cover was provided by Coastal Command from their bases in Iceland and the Shetlands. The squadron was stood down and given a well deserved rest, until on 28 February we were flown ashore to Hatston – to find we were headline news.
The usual wartime restrictions had been lifted and the press had a field day.
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Page 24