by John Moffat
When the plane turned upside down, both George and Cross were thrown out, but Cross was either dead or too badly injured to open his parachute. George managed to grasp his ripcord and his chute opened; he floated down into the water of the harbour while 15in shells from Barham exploded all round the port. He managed to swim ashore, where he was arrested and taken prisoner. In the police cells where he was initially locked up he met the crews of the two other Swordfish in his sub-flight who had also been shot down. The lead Swordfish, flown by Lieutenant Jackson, had managed to drop its bombs, but then a bullet had ignited their liferaft's flares and set the main wing on fire. The third Swordfish had also been hit, then pounced on by a French fighter, and the pilot, the young Sub-Lieutenant England whose plane had been hit in the attack on Dunkerque at Mers-el-Kébir, had been killed. So too had the TAG, Sub-Lieutenant Moore. The observer, who was wounded, had, like George Dawson, managed to swim to shore where he was also captured.
Five Swordfish from the Ark were lost that day. The operation was clearly a disaster, and the Ark, with the rest of the British ships, returned to the UK, where the Ark docked in Liverpool for a refit. The lesson was clear: Swordfish could be very vulnerable, despite their great manoeuvrability and robustness, and attacks on shore-based installations could prove extremely risky. Whether I would ever be involved in any, I would just have to wait and see.
Having completed my training in torpedo-dropping and dive-bombing at Abbotsinch, I was sent to Naval Air Station Arbroath, where we practised carrier landings on the tarmac runways. Here again the slow speed of the Swordfish is an advantage, although landing on land is completely different from landing on a carrier. A Swordfish stalls (stops being able to fly) at a speed of 50 knots, but at sea the carrier after all is moving forward at perhaps 30 knots, so the relative speed of the aircraft as it flies over the stern is just 20 knots. There is also the effect of any wind, which will aid in reducing the landing speed of the aircraft to perhaps 15 knots. That, at any rate, is the theory.
But for all my praise of the Swordfish, it was while flying one out of Arbroath that I had my first crash, and I was lucky that it was not fatal. I was flying with my friend Sub-Lieutenant Ed Dunkley on a navigation exercise and we were looking forward to making some observations of wild deer as we travelled west along the South Grampians. Flying at a relatively low altitude over the rugged hills just due north of Kirriemuir, the engine began to run erratically. I started to adjust the mixture, but the engine hiccupped, sputtered and cut out. I went through the procedures in the cockpit to restart it – check all the switches are on, pump the fuel primer to get more fuel into the carburettor – but nothing I tried would revive it. Naturally it's noisy in the open cockpit of a Swordfish, with a big nine-cylindered, 700 h.p. radial engine hammering away in front of you, but now all I could hear was the sound of the air rushing through the struts and over the wings. We were in trouble.
I obtained the best angle of glide to keep our speed up for as long as I could. I shouted to my passenger that I would try to get down, but this was rather a forlorn hope among the steep mountains over which we were now gliding. I remembered having seen a large house to the south and hoped that it might be set in some open ground, or a paddock. I turned and we glided over to it, but I could see there was no grass or any sort of open country. We had lost height and were rapidly running out of anywhere to go.
Then I noticed on my right a narrow firebreak between the trees. This was our only chance. I turned, losing even more height, and headed straight for the gap. As we got closer the trees came up to meet us and the firebreak, which was fenced with a gated entrance, seemed impossibly tight. It's hard to say what I felt. One part of the brain is full of fear about the possibility of pain and injury, while the other part takes over and tries to stay in control, in the vain belief that somehow the inevitable might be avoided. That, I suppose, is what the training is all about. A Swordfish might look fragile, but it weighs over 2 tons without any payload, so we hit very hard. The wings smashed against the trunks of the trees with a loud crash and I was knocked unconscious. The next I remember was a female voice shouting at me and shaking my shoulders.
When I managed to regain focus I could hardly believe what I saw. There was a lovely young lady standing over me in the cockpit with her skirts raised, enquiring if I was hurt. It left nothing to the imagination. I undid my harness and she pulled me over the side on to the grass, which was quite close as we had lost our undercarriage. Then I remembered my friend Dunkley. The girl and I got him out and saw that he was bleeding from a head wound and very frail. With assistance from some other men who had arrived, we took him to the house and bandaged him up. I then asked to phone Arbroath, but our crash had pulled down the telephone lines, so someone was dispatched to go a considerable distance by bicycle to the nearest phone at Kirriemuir. Meanwhile, the butler of the beautiful apparition I had seen on regaining consciousness appeared with an extra-large decanter of whisky.
Dunkley was laid out on the settee, with his head bandaged, but I, fully recovered, had a very good evening in the company of the young girl, with a good meal and plenty of dance music from a wind-up gramophone. I particularly remember listening to 'In the Mood' by Glenn Miller. Very appropriate!
All's well that ends well, but it was a chastening experience. Mercifully, the engine of the Swordfish was normally extremely reliable, and engine failures like the one I had experienced were definitely out of the ordinary, but it certainly brought home to me that I was going to be spending a lot of my service life flying over large areas of ocean in a single-engined aircraft. There was an investigation into the crash, of course, and I was told later that the engine had failed due to sabotage. I received a letter from the squadron's commanding officer, who told me that they had discovered sugar in the fuel tank and that similar accidents had happened to two other Swordfish, neither of which had been fatal. Who did this, or for what reason, I never discovered but, as someone pointed out, there was a host of motives. The saboteur could have been an IRA sympathizer, an admirer of Hitler, or perhaps a Communist, because at the time Hitler's nonaggression pact with Stalin was still in force. Anyway, I was glad that the incident happened right at the end of my time at Arbroath, because it is obviously very disturbing to know that people are deliberately trying to make you crash.
During my stay in Arbroath I bought a second-hand car, a Morris Isis, and I used it regularly for Saturday-night trips to the dances at the Seaforth Hotel in Arbroath. Because there was no late-night public transport, the car was always full of Wrens; often it was so overloaded that the mudguards would be scraping on the tyres.
As my period of training was finally over – it was now December 1940 – I knew that I would be posted somewhere, and that I was most likely to be sent to serve on one of the aircraft carriers. In the RNVR we had, I think, originally been intended as useful bodies who would relieve full-time aircrew and properly trained Naval Reserve officers so that they would be able to serve in the front line. Casualties had been high in the Fleet Air Arm, however. The navy had been fighting since the very first day of the war, the Fleet Air Arm had seen a lot of action in Norway, and Swordfish squadrons had been extremely active in the Channel on mine-laying missions. In the few months leading up to Dunkirk, more than fifty Swordfish crewmembers had been killed or gone missing on operations, and then of course the fatalities caused by the sinking of Courageous and Glorious were considerable. Swordfish were even used over the beaches of Dunkirk; eight of them were shot down in a period of five days at the height of the evacuation. It was obvious that some of us would be filling their shoes.
We were given a week's leave before our postings came through and I wanted to go home, to see my parents and take my car to be looked after by them while I was away. There were one or two problems I had to solve before I gave the car to my father. It was dark blue and someone had written in white paint on the back 'Honky Tonk the virgin's hearse'. This would go down badly with my parents and th
e other upstanding folk in Kelso. I found it extremely difficult to paint it out before driving the little Morris down to the Borders.
My journey was not without incident. Three of my friends from the Naval Air Station came along with me. One of them, whom I remember very well, was a South African, Guy 'Brok' Brokensha, who had flown Skuas on Ark Royal. He had taken part in the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, and flown as part of a protective escort for the Swordfish who had torpedoed Strasbourg. He had become engaged in several dogfights with French fighters, during one of which he was turning to open fire when all his forword-firing machine guns jammed, as too did that of the observer in the rear cockpit. He manoeuvred his way out of it, though, and later helped shoot down a couple of attackers and was put forward for an award. In the same way that I had formed up with the 'Black Hand Gang' at St Vincent, I naturally seemed to get on well with anybody, like Brok, who was from the colonies. Brok was senior enough to be an instructor at Arbroath, but this didn't get in the way of our friendship.
The three wanted me to give them a lift down to Edinburgh, dropping them off in Princes Street on my way home. Brok was courting an attractive girl from Wick, whom he later married. I was happy to oblige, but I asked them if they would fill the tank with petrol. Before we left I also took the precaution of filling the spare jerrycan that was carried on the running board. In a breach of regulations, I used aviation fuel from the base. This was dyed pink, in the same way that agricultural diesel is today, to prevent unauthorized use and to make it harder to divert to the black market, which was quite rampant because of rationing.
We had a nice drive to Edinburgh and I went with them to a hotel off Princes Street. When I left them to continue my journey to Kelso, however, I discovered that my rascally friends had welched on their deal and put hardly any petrol in the main tank. I got as far as the post office at Waterloo Place when the engine spluttered and died. Cursing my friends, I gave thanks that I wasn't in a Swordfish, when I noticed that a policeman on traffic duty had seen me come to a stop and was walking methodically in my direction. He was very sympathetic, keen to help a young flyer in uniform get on his way to see his parents before going abroad. 'Don't worry, sir,' he said. 'I'll soon sort this out.' Then without warning he grabbed the spare can and started to fill up the tank. I sat there quaking, my fingers tightly crossed, hoping that he wouldn't notice that the petrol he was pouring into the tank was strictly for military use and should never have left the base. If he did notice, he said nothing, and with a wave and shouted thanks I motored off for my few days' leave in Kelso.
I had one bad time there. While flying out of Arbroath I would occasionally make a detour to Kelso and fly over the main square. On one of these trips I had seen my father and decided to 'beat up' the Horse Market, heading directly at him in the square. I can remember him looking at me in horror, his hands high in the air! When I got home he certainly told me all about it and how he managed to stop the police reporting me!
When I returned to Arbroath after the leave I received notice of my first posting to a front-line squadron. I was amazed at my luck, for I was being sent to what we all thought of as the crack carrier in the fleet, Ark Royal. She was very well known and, as I have already made clear, always seemed to be in the thick of any action. I was clearly going to have to meet some very high standards. The Ark, however, was in the Mediterranean and first I was going to have to travel to Greenock and embark on HMS Argus for the trip down to Gibraltar. As soon as I received the orders I phoned home and asked my parents to see that my trunk was sent immediately to the railway station at Paisley where I would collect it.
*
If Ark Royal was one of the most modern carriers in the world, then Argus was one of the oldest. Her keel had been laid down in Beardmore's shipyard in Glasgow in 1914 and she was originally intended to be a passenger liner for an Italian steamship company. Instead, the navy commandeered her and modified her into an aircraft carrier and she entered service in 1918. She was an odd-looking ship, with a big, flat flight deck laid over her hull. I heard her referred to unkindly as a floating shoebox. There was neither the funnel nor the bridge structure you would expect to see in most carriers. The funnel gases were directed so that they came out under the flight deck at the stern, and there was a small retractable bridge that rose and fell on the edge of the flight deck according to whether flying was taking place or not. She was lying in the Clyde in midstream when I first saw her, and I was taken out to join her from the pier by one of her boats.
I had travelled through Paisley on the train from Arbroath, but my trunk had not arrived. Each day I went back to the station for it, but never managed to locate it. After an agitated phone call to my mother, I was assured that the trunk had been forwarded promptly. On the third day I was told that we were due to sail on the morning tide to join up with a convoy. I panicked. My trunk had still not arrived. The station office had been trying to find it for two days now, with no success. That afternoon I rushed to the station again, to be told that my trunk had finally been located in Glasgow Central and had just arrived on the local train. Relieved, I spent a small fortune on a taxi to help me carry it as far as Greenock pier. Dashing to the signals office at the end of the pier, I asked the petty officer on duty to signal Argus for a boat to collect me and my trunk. I was horrified to get a signal by return saying that all boats had been hoisted and stowed and the ship was due to get under way. I was in a serious sweat now: this was my first posting on board a vessel and I could imagine the repercussions if I failed to make it on board. It was a serious disciplinary offence, but there was also the shame, and damage to my reputation, as well as my own pride. Then I noticed a fellow in a motorboat and asked for help. After some wrangling about the price of petrol, a fiver was waved – a good week's wages in those days – the trunk was loaded on board and we set off in pursuit of the carrier.
As we got closer I could see a commander on the quarterdeck and I shouted to him to help me. In retrospect, what he must have thought, seeing a young RNVR sub-lieutenant in a speedboat, bouncing about in the wake of his ship and yelling at a senior officer for a hand as though he were a railway porter, beggars belief. He merely replied, with a voice that carried remarkably well, 'Come along the starboard side.'
There was an opening in the side of the hull, just above the waterline, that I assume had been originally intended for passengers' luggage when the ship was designed as a liner. I urged the boatman to go flat out and, as we passed the quarterdeck and drew level, a seaman opened the baggage port. The huge ship above me was gathering speed and my boat started to bounce about in the wake and the increasing chop of the estuary. The boatman and I heaved the trunk on board, then I stepped on to the gunwale of the speedboat and, sensing the boat rising up on a crest of a wave, threw myself into the hatchway, where a couple of seamen caught me and dragged me safely aboard.
One of them straightened my uniform and adjusted my cap as though I were a small boy, while the other saluted and said, 'Captain's compliments, sir, and he will see you in the wardroom.' I was on an aircraft carrier at last, but it was quite clear I had not made a very good impression.
6
Active Service
The journey to Gibraltar on board Argus was anything but pleasant. The weather was poor all the way, with strong winds, seas and the occasional rain squall. Also, there was a shortage of accommodation for junior officers. At one time Argus had been considered inadequate for front-line service, and would probably have been scrapped had not the war started. Even then, initially she had been set aside for aircrew training, but the loss of Courageous and Glorious meant that she had been pressed into service. For several months she had been used in the Atlantic for anti-submarine patrols, and as a carrier to ferry aircraft to the Mediterranean. This is what she was doing while I was on board her. On this particular voyage she was carrying eighteen Swordfish, which were going to be assembled in Gibraltar to be flown on to Malta. Normally, I was told, Hurricane fighters were carried o
n the flight deck, and when Argus was in the Mediterranean they would fly off to provide air defences for Malta, the island located just east of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean. Malta was being pounded heavily by air raids from the Italian and German air forces, and there was quite a high casualty rate amongst the Royal Air Force.
We had the Hurricane pilots and maintenance staff on board, so I, a very junior reserve sub-lieutenant, was given a hammock, which I had to sling in the afterdeck. I gathered from some of the Fleet Air Arm chaps on board that Argus was very much a navy ship – in other words, the complement of Swordfish and their crews was seen as a bit of a nuisance. Fortunately, I was not going to stay on board.
It may seem odd, but I had been in the Fleet Air Arm for a year now and this was the first time that I had been on an aircraft carrier, or been to sea. All my flying had been from land-based airstrips and I had lived in barracks or civilian billets. This was my first introduction to sailing and a carrier, and it was not a very good first impression. I never got used to sleeping in a hammock, and for the first few days I found it hard to get around the ship. I was not used to negotiating ladders and companionways while the ship was being knocked about by rough seas. The food was not very good, and cockroaches were everywhere. I found my sea legs, of course, but the food did not improve.