by John Moffat
I felt that I was riding a carthorse instead of a steeplechaser at first, but the more I flew it, the more I began to appreciate its qualities. It was nicknamed the 'Stringbag'. Several reasons are given for this, the most obvious being that at first glance it looks as though it is held together by string. This is deceptive. The main struts were made out of stainless steel, the rigging was very strong steel cable, and the frames were made of steel and duralumin, an aluminium alloy produced for aircraft production. No, I believe the Stringbag got its name because, like the old lady's shopping bag, it expanded to accommodate whatever was demanded of it. It carried bombs, depth-charges, torpedoes, smoke flares, and they even mounted sixteen rockets under the wings in the later stages of the war. There are stories of some squadrons moving rapidly from airstrip to airstrip in the desert in North Africa, securing motorbikes underneath the fuselage of their Swordfish and then carrying them to a new location. It was a tough plane and could take an awful lot of damage, as many aircrew were to discover and be grateful for. Its low speed was also an asset, it seemed, as our instructors told stories of Swordfish in the Norwegian campaign being attacked by Messerschmitt 109s. The British pilots employed the tactic of making 180-degree turns at sea level towards the attacking plane. The Swordfish had a much smaller turning circle than any fast fighter, and moreover it had such an advantageous lift ratio that you could reduce its speed to just 70 knots in the turn and it would continue on a perfect line. Most planes need more power to complete a turn, but not the Swordfish. The hapless Messerschmitt pilot would not know why his target had suddenly disappeared from view as he sped past.
During my time at Abbotsinch I was able to meet up with some of the friends I had made since entering St Vincent so many months before. My friend Buster May from Durban was one. During our stay we produced a concert party that gave two performances at the local Empire theatre in Paisley. It was a fantastic success, so much so that we were allowed to travel for free on the local corporation trams and we were treated in every bar we went to – and we went into many, I can tell you!
The wartime forces were a great melting pot; people from the strangest occupations and places, all over the Empire, were thrust into uniform and told to get on with it. It produced the most amazing juxtapositions. One of the junior ratings who looked after our billet, and who was obviously a wartime recruit, asked for a grand piano to play in the concert. On the night he appeared in immaculate white tie and tails and performed a solo act which was just unbelievable. After a couple of classics he asked the audience for requests and they would not let him leave the stage. He was so popular that his original slot of fifteen minutes stretched to forty-five, after which the MC had to go out and tell the audience to let him finish. It was a remarkable performance, and did a great deal to boost the popularity of the navy.
When my South African friend was due to leave, we decided we would have a weekend on the town, so on Saturday night we went off to Glasgow for a meal at a popular restaurant called Rogano's. We decided after the meal to look for some local female talent and were told that the best place was the Locarno dance hall. This was a very respectable establishment, where the doormen inspected you to make sure that you were smartly dressed before letting you in, and where no alcohol was served. Eventually we teamed up with two nice-looking, well-dressed girls for some enjoyable but fairly chaste dancing. Towards the end of the evening they told us that they were going home together, so we were forced to say goodbye. The girl that I had been dancing with asked if we would like to come along to a tea party at her parents' house the next day. We accepted. The following day, to my annoyance, Buster, feeling perhaps slightly more predatory, decided that as he was leaving on Monday a tame afternoon in a suburban house was not for him. I, however, felt under some obligation to go. Knocking at the front door, I found about twelve people of both sexes gathered in the parlour, chatting over sandwiches and cups of tea. I was asked by my hostess to join a Ludo game where a young lady needed cheering up. She had, I was told, recently lost her boyfriend, who had been a pilot in the RAF.
As soon as we were introduced I realized that she was someone special. Her name was Marjorie Cochrane and she lived in a small town south-west of Glasgow. There was something about her that I had not met in any other woman. Eventually, when we were on our own, I was able to get her to talk about her boyfriend and she said that he had been killed in a plane down south in Eastleigh about three months ago. I didn't know of any accident at Eastleigh other than the one I had tried to stop. We talked further, and it became clear that her boyfriend was the pilot at the controls of the Hudson. I explained that I had tried to prevent him from taking off. All she knew was that his passengers had been some very important people from the Air Ministry in London. It was a remarkable coincidence. I was so struck by her that before the evening was out I told her that I was determined to marry her. I think she thought I was mad, but I am pleased to say that we were married in June 1944 and remained so for almost sixty years. It was the best decision that I ever made in my whole life.
I learned a lot at Abbotsinch. Dive-bombing in the Swordfish was very different from doing it in a Skua. This manoeuvre was enough to show what a reliable aircraft the Swordfish was. At the beginning you do a banking turn and head the nose of the plane down in a dive. The plane starts to accelerate, and the wind starts shrieking as it rushes through the struts and wires. At this stage it's quite possible for the airspeed indicator to show 200 knots: you are falling fast, the needle of the altimeter going from 8,000 feet to 7,000 feet like the second hand of a clock, but you are still able to keep perfect control of the aircraft. Plummeting down, it is possible to wait until the frightening height of just 200 feet is reached before pulling back on the stick and levelling out. During our training I avoided diving to such a low height, but I did it later and can vouch that it can be done.
There were complicated patrol patterns to learn, depending on whether we were meant to be locating a surface vessel, hunting a submarine that had been detected by a merchant ship or mounting an anti-submarine patrol along the line of advance of a convoy or fleet of warships. Finally, of course, there was the torpedo practice, where we launched a dummy torpedo at our target ship. She was an elderly destroyer but still capable of the rapid manoeuvres that any self-respecting warship would carry out to avoid a torpedo in the water. Of course, she was not carrying guns that were directing their fire at the crew of the attacking aircraft. But the key was learning to judge the speed of the ship by the size of the bow wave, and then to calculate the required deflection for a torpedo that would be launched from a distance of 1,000 or so yards and would travel at a speed of 29 knots to its (one hoped unsuspecting) target. It sounded simple, but the truth was that so far in the war torpedo attacks on moving warships had never been successful, despite several attempts.
One such attack had taken place while I was still at Eastleigh with 759 Squadron. The French government's surrender in June 1940 meant that the French fleet in the Mediterranean might be absorbed by the German navy, boosting its strength overnight and threatening our fleet, which was based in Alexandria in Egypt. The main base for the French warships was Toulon on the French mainland, but they also had ships with our fleet in Alexandria, as well as a big base in Oran in Algeria. It was these ships that the Admiralty felt they should do something about.
The operation against the French ships in Oran was to prove important, because it was the start of a battle that I was eventually to join and it formed a big part of my war service. The incident was given great publicity – it was all over the newspapers – but what I later discovered had taken place caused several people I served with, including the commanding officer of a squadron I joined, 818, to make some crucial decisions about the attack on Bismarck. Apart from that, it's important to realize that while I was deciding about what aircraft I would fly in the Fleet Air Arm and embarking on various training courses, others were putting into practice what I was being taught and were finding that t
here was a big difference between peacetime exercises and what was possible when the shells were exploding, with your aircraft as a target.
In July 1940 HMS Ark Royal, our most famous aircraft carrier, was sent down to the Mediterranean base in Gibraltar to be part of a small unit called Force H. This was a very powerful force when it was first created. As well as the Ark there was HMS Hood, probably the most famous warship in the Royal Navy, a battlecruiser, though most of us thought of her as a battleship. The only real difference was that she was slightly less armoured than a battleship and so was a bit faster, but she had extremely large guns and was, we thought, quite formidable. There were also the real battleships HMS Valiant and Resolution, each with big, 15in-calibre guns, accompanied by several cruisers and nineteen destroyers. This may appear to be a big fleet, but it wasn't that large compared to either the Italian or French navies.
Force H had been assembled with the immediate aim of making sure that the French fleet in Oran didn't become a threat to us by remaining in the Med and coming under German control. We were going to 'escort them off the premises', so to speak.
The force was commanded by Rear Admiral James 'Slim' Somerville, who was based on Hood. I was later to serve under him on more than one carrier and the general opinion of him was that he was an absolutely first-class commanding officer, who was not only respected but liked. His orders from the Government were to tell the French to steam their ships to a British port and throw in their lot with us against Germany, or alternatively to sail to a French port in the West Indies, or, finally, to scuttle them. If they chose not to do any of these things, then we would sink them.
The French naval base was really in two separate locations. The harbour at the city of Oran was home to submarines and small patrol boats, while further west along the coast was Mers-el-Kébir, where the larger cruisers and battleships were moored. The two that we wanted out of the way in particular were, I gathered, Strasbourg and Dunkerque, which were recently built and fast.
The captain of the Ark, Cedric 'Hooky' Holland, another officer I liked, and who had a great sense of humour, had at one time been an attaché in the embassy in Paris and was selected to go to discuss terms with the French admiral on one of his battleships in Mers-el-Kébir harbour. The French were given a deadline by which either they must agree to comply or we would open fire. From the British point of view, there was very little to discuss. It was important that, if we were to move against the French fleet, the action should be decisive and must not allow the French warships to put to sea and escape, or fight back. The planning was quite meticulous, carefully timed from the expiry of the ultimatum. Our battleships would launch a massive barrage against the French ships in the harbour, and Swordfish from the Ark would launch torpedoes and bombs against them as well.
Early on the morning of 3 July the first two Swordfish took off to start their patrol to the west of Force H. When the light improved they would begin standard anti-submarine searches. Almost immediately after this another six Swordfish took to the air to search the sea up to 150 miles to the north-east and as far north as the Spanish coast. (I became quite friendly with a telegraphist air gunner who took part in these patrols, George Dawson of 810 Squadron, one of those on the Ark.) A fighter patrol of three Skuas was then put into the air, and a reconnaissance Swordfish took off to carry out a patrol over Mers-el-Kébir and Oran harbours, keeping watch over the activities of the French fleet. It was also ordered to give any assistance, especially in the way of transmitting signals, to HMS Foxhound, the destroyer that had taken Captain Holland to meet with the French admirals. Foxhound was patrolling slowly outside the breakwater at Mers-el-Kébir, while Captain Holland had gone into the harbour on a small boat.
By now the negotiations were dragging on and the squadrons started to make preparations for an attack on the harbours. The plan called for six Swordfish to mine the entrance of Mers-el-Kébir to stop any of the French ships escaping. Dropping mines was something that I went on to practise at Abbotsinch. They were shaped much like a torpedo, without the motor and the propeller at the back, and were mounted in the same position on the aircraft's fuselage. Once the mines were released they would hit the water, sink to the bottom and then become armed. They would be set off by a fuse triggered by the magnetic field of a ship passing over them. They contained 1,000lb of explosive, so were very potent, although their value was not just in the damage that they could cause to one ship: particularly in a situation like Oran, the knowledge that mines had been laid would also deter ships from passing through the harbour entrance. So dropping just one mine in the right place could bottle up a whole fleet until the mine was cleared. That, at any rate, was what we hoped and were told in our training!
While the mine-laying aircraft were ranged at the end of the flight deck, the reconnaissance Swordfish, which had been constantly circling over the French ships, reported back that there was now a lot of activity amongst the moored vessels. Tugs had appeared and were laying tow ropes to some of the battleships, and it looked to the observers as though they were raising steam. Their estimate was that the ships would be ready for sea in half an hour.
At a few minutes after 1300, at orders from Somerville, the six Swordfish took off on the mission to drop the mines on the harbour of Mers-el-Kébir. They circled while a flight of six Skuas joined them to give them some defence against attack from French fighters. There was no opposition from any aircraft or from the ground; they seemed to have taken the French completely by surprise. An hour later, fresh orders came through from Admiral Somerville in Hood to mine the harbour at Oran as well. Two Swordfish were loaded up to do this, in the hopes of bottling up the submarines and destroyers moored there.
As the minutes ticked away, no one on the Ark was clear about what was happening. As a matter of fact, there was growing confusion at quite a senior level about the state of the negotiations. Captain Holland was talking to the French Admiral Gensoul, trying to find a face-saving formula that would allow the French to surrender their ships and avoid bloodshed. Admiral Somerville was under pressure from the Admiralty to settle the issue quickly and stop the French from wriggling off the hook. The time for launching the attack passed, and 'landing on' – as we called landing back on the carrier – was suspended.
Then, without any warning, the British battleships opened fire. Somerville had told Holland to break off negotiations and head out to the open sea. George Dawson in 810 Squadron, who had been on a reconnaissance patrol, searching the coast of Spain, told me that all during his patrol he had been listening to broadcasts from the French Radio Lyons. Their news bulletins had been repeating the British demands, so it was clear to him that they had been quickly passed to the French authorities and were by now common knowledge. He was not at all sympathetic to the French admirals and couldn't understand how they had allowed themselves to get into the position they were in.
He was now one of those Swordfish crews anxiously waiting to land on when he was startled by the huge crash of Hood's heavy guns going off, blasting out clouds of black smoke tinged with white flashes. He could see the impact of the shells in the harbour at Mers-el-Kébir, and after a few minutes of this barrage there was a massive explosion from the harbour, and the smoke and debris from what was clearly a substantial target poured high into the air, reaching an altitude of, he thought, 1,000 feet or more.
The giant blast was caused by a battleship, Bretagne, blowing up. A shell must have hit a magazine to cause such devastating damage. Then almost immediately a destroyer also disintegrated as it too blew up. The harbour was by now covered in smoke from the explosions of the French ships and our shells, with the result that the observers in the spotting Swordfish found it hard to see anything. One of them thought he could see ships preparing for sea, despite the fact that the harbour entrance had not been cleared of the mines laid earlier in the day. Some other ships had also been seriously damaged. Dunkerque, which had received some hits, was being driven on to the beach to save her from sinking,
and so too was Provence, another battleship of the same class as Bretagne.
Two flights of three Swordfish had now taken off, with racks under their wings carrying four 250lb bombs and eight 20lb anti-personnel bombs, to dive-bomb the remaining French warships in the harbour. With this striking force already in the air, one of the Swordfish spotter planes confirmed what they had suspected ten minutes earlier: Strasbourg had raised steam and was powering through the carnage in the harbour, determined to make its escape. A signal was sent to Somerville in Hood, while the crew of the Swordfish watched the harbour boom open and the raked bows of one of the fastest ships in the French fleet passed over five 1,000lb mines totally unscathed and headed for the open sea. She was escorted by eleven destroyers that had also managed to escape any damage from British shells or from the mines. The Swordfish signalled to the Ark that Strasbourg was coming into gun range, and the Ark immediately changed course and went at full speed away from her. But escape was uppermost on the French officers' minds and they headed east as fast as they could go.