I Sank The Bismarck (11 page)

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
int
ended 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 the 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.

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 on 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.

Landing on the mole at
Gibraltar was another shock, as I
tried to adjust my balance to dry land having just acclimatized
to the constant pitching of a ship at sea. This was a minor distraction,
however, as I looked at the ship that I was now about
to join.
Ark Royal
looked magnificent. She was huge, towering
above me, and compared to
Argus
looked extremely
modern and elegant. Her sheer sides rose up to the flight deck,
and there was a swooping grace to her bows and an enormous
flared flight deck at her stern. She had recently returned from
her brief
refit in Liverpool after the Dakar operation, and her
paint still looked relatively fresh. I felt a sudden burst of
happiness that I was going to serve aboard her.
Ark Royal
was
really a very famous ship by now: there had been magazine
articles and newsreels about her since her launch in 1937, and
if you thought of aircraft carriers you thought of
Ark Royal.
She had already come through so much that it was hard to
imagine anything happening to her.

I boarded her and was met by a young rating who took me
to my
squadron's office, which was beneath the flight deck on
the port side. I thought if I had had a job finding my way
about
Argus,
then the
Ark
was going to be twice as bad. She
seemed to be more than double the size, with two hangar
decks, and was much longer. There were three Swordfish
squadrons, one Skua squadron and one Fulmar squadron on
board when I joined her, so there were over fifty
aircraft. My
new home was going to be 818 Squadron and I met the
commanding officer,
Lt Commander Trevenon 'Tim' Coode,
who seemed a decent chap. He was friendly and said that I
had a good report from my training squadron at Abbotsinch.
Then he said, 'It doesn't say how many deck landings you
have done.'

'None, sir!'

He looked completely perplexed and started to say something,
then thought better of it. I could see the squadron
writer, a chap called
Percy North, and the rating who had
brought me to the office looking at each other as if to say, 'My
God, another one.' I was aware of the absurdity of the
situation. If there is one unique aspect of naval aviation, it is
that pilots take off from and land on the flight decks of aircraft
carriers at sea. Here I was, on the most famous aircraft
carrier in the world, in the middle of a war in the
Mediterranean, and I had never taken off from a flight deck,
let alone landed on one.

Lt Commander Coode put my papers down on his desk and
said, 'We'll have to do something about that, but go along to
your cabin. We'll join up in the wardroom later and you can
meet the rest of the squadron.'

I was taken to my quarters. However much of a disappointment
I had been to my CO, he hadn't made a meal of it, for
which I was grateful, and my cabin was far superior to the
hammock I had had in
Argus.
Here I had a bunk, with
properly laundered sheets, and the cabin had its own wash
basin with hot water.

Later I went to the wardroom and met my
fellow pilots.
They seemed to be mostly regular navy officers, with a
sprinkling of Reservists like me. There were one or two
veterans, people like
Lieutenant Alan Owensmith, a good
pilot, who had been shot down over Norway and had taken
part in the mining of Oran; and Lieutenant 'Feather' Godfrey-
Faussett, who had attacked
Strasbourg
and made a brilliant
attack on the beached
Dunkerque
at Oran. I was to discover
that his name was automatically on the flying list for any
operation. There were also some real characters. An observer
in 820 Squadron,
Lieutenant Val Norfolk, was naturally
known as 'Duke', and would knock back pints of a cocktail
called a Horse's Neck, made of cognac and ginger ale.
Another was known as
'Maxie' Mayes, a real dandy who
refused to wear a Mae West lifejacket because it spoiled the
line of his uniform, which he had, of course, had specially
made. These characters were always ready to start a sing-song
in the bar. Others were quiet, almost shy, like
'Tan' Tivey, who
was one of the quieter RN types, and the CO of 820
Squadron, James Stewart-Moore, who was an observer, not a
pilot.

Interestingly, in the Fleet Air Arm it was rank, not function,
that decided who was in charge of an aircraft or a squadron.
Apparently most of the new recruits to the Swordfish
squadrons on the
Ark
had joined while she was having her
refit at Liverpool and, although all of them had completed
several deck landings, they were fairly inexperienced. There
was a
hierarchy of sorts; for example, certain areas near the
bar were reserved for more senior officers, whereas sublieutenants
like me were expected to occupy an area down the
other end. There was an inevitable distinction between the
regular navy officers and the Reservists and hostilities-only
types. They wondered what to make of us, but even so the
wardroom was a relaxed and friendly place and I was made
to feel welcome. It seemed that the
Ark
was a genuinely happy
ship.

My CO was as good as his word. Next day the
Ark
slipped
out of Gibraltar to escort
Argus
to where her fighters would
take off for Malta, and Lt Commander Coode told me that
the commander air had given him permission to take me up
on a
familiarization flight. He sat in the cockpit while I
perched in the observer's seat. With the
Ark
heading into the
wind, our take-off was rapid and we flew in a circuit round
the carrier, then made our approach. I paid close attention,
looking over Lt Commander Coode's shoulder. There was a
bit of turbulence from the funnel gases and the wash of the big
bridge structure on the starboard side, but nothing severe. It
was a question of adopting a three-point tail-down attitude
and approaching at about 60 knots, then, as you passed over
the round down at the end of the flight deck, you would
close the throttle and the plane should drop, allowing the tail
hook to catch one of the arrestor wires, and you would thump
on to the deck. The trick, of course, was not to misjudge the
speed of the ship and either overshoot or undershoot the point
where you had to cut the power. We landed, then Lt
Commander Coode undid his harness and turned round: 'Get
into the cockpit. This is my plane, so don't bend it.' Then he
left me to get on with it.

I knew that he was paying close attention, and that there
were a lot of spectators on the 'goofers' gallery' that ran level
with the flight commander's station on the island – the
structure at the side of the flight deck with the bridge and
funnel. Their cameras were at the ready, waiting for me to
make a total hash of it. There was a 'batman', as the deck
landing officer was known, by the side of the flight deck on
the port side who was an experienced pilot and whose job it
was to indicate to approaching planes whether they were too
high or too low, or wandering off the centre line. I followed
his signals, got it right and made a very competent landing.

Walking off the deck to the squadron office I met the
batman, the very tall Lt
Commander Pat Stringer, and I said,
'That was a very good landing we made today, sir!'

He looked down his nose at me, a tyro Reservist, and
snorted. That put me in my place.

The reason I had been drafted out to 818 was that there had
been a few accidents in the past month. I was introduced to
the rest of my crew: the observer, 'Dusty'
Miller, and the
telegraphist and air gunner, or TAG, Leading Airman Albert
Hayman. Miller looked presentable enough, but Hayman
seemed to be a tough-looking brute. He had a broken nose
and a cauliflower ear, and I thought, 'What have they given
me?' I could think of nothing to say except, 'So are you good
at your job?', which was a pretty cheeky thing to say, considering
I was a raw sub-lieutenant without a single
operational flight to my name.

Quick as a flash, Hayman retorted, 'Are you any good at
yours?' They could hardly have failed to hear that I had just
made my first deck landing. He went on, 'I've been shot down
twice over Norway, and I don't intend to let it happen again.'

He was a dead shot, and both of them were stalwarts. I
clicked with Miller; we were never close friends in the wardroom,
but we had a rapport in the cockpit that worked.
Hayman was a junior rating, so we never met socially, but I
trusted him. I saw how good he was one day in Gibraltar.
There was an old racecourse in the north, close to the border
with Spain, which we had turned into a runway; the modern
runway is still there. Known as North Front, this was where
some maintenance work would be carried out and we would
fly off sometimes from here for anti-submarine patrols in the
Straits if the
Ark
was in the harbour. The army also used
the runway as a firing range. We had just picked up a
Swordfish and Hayman wanted to align the sights of his
Lewis machine gun. I asked the sergeant in charge if we could
use one of his targets, taxied down to the end and had just
turned the aircraft to give Hayman a clear field of fire when,
without any warning, a burst of fire ripped apart the target.
'OK, boss, we can go now,' he said and so I opened the
throttle. We had never even come to rest. He was a first-class
operator.

As well as the
Ark,
the battleship HMS
Renown
was based
in Gibraltar. This was now the flagship of Force H, still
commanded by Rear Admiral James
Somerville, the
Hood
having returned to the home fleet. His nephew was an
observer in the Fulmar squadron on board the
Ark.
There was
usually a cruiser,
HMS
Sheffield,
and two or three destroyers
accompanying us. We worked most closely with
Sheffield.
The
Ark
did not have radar installed, relying on
Sheffield
's
radar for locating enemy aircraft.
Commander Henry Traill,
the commander air in the
Ark,
a fresh-faced officer whom I
later found friendly and approachable, and the radar operators
in
Sheffield
had worked like this for several months, first
of all off Norway and now carrying out the same procedure
in the Med. The radar operators would plot the range and
bearing of suspected enemy aircraft on a board identical to
one maintained by the commander air in the
Ark.
It also
marked the positions of the
Ark
and
Sheffield,
and the
positions of any aircraft from the
Ark
that were in the air.
Information about enemy aircraft would be radioed to the
commander air's office and he would inform
Sheffield
when
aircraft were launched or recovered, so a continuous plot of
the situation in the air was maintained on both ships. All the
information between them was exchanged via radio using
Morse code, so it required a high level of collaboration. I
think
Ark Royal
had been the first carrier to work out this
way of directing aircraft by radio – remarkable when you
think that she didn't even have her own radar!

We left port a few days later to fly off the Swordfish that
had been brought down by
Argus.
These had observers with
them and so, like all Fleet Air Arm crews, would not find it
that difficult to navigate for several hundred miles to their
destination.

When RAF Hurricanes were involved, however, the pilots
had a difficult task ahead of them. Their anticipated long
flight over the sea was not something that fighter pilots particularly
relished. It isn't easy to navigate on a long journey
using dead reckoning whilst also flying a plane; it needs
special training, and there is always the anxiety of relying on
a single engine, with absolutely no chance of making an
emergency landing. Once they had taken off from
Argus,
that
was it – they couldn't land back on. The plan usually was
that we would sail just far enough into the Med to launch the
Hurricanes, hoping to avoid being spotted by Italian reconnaissance
planes. As soon as the Italians knew that aircraft
were being ferried to Malta, the Italian air force would lie in
wait for them and catch them as they approached the island.
The Hurricanes were easy meat at that stage in their journey.
They were unarmed to save weight, and they would anyway
be at the very limit of their fuel, with no extra resources to
engage in a dogfight. The launch point was finely calculated,
depending partly on how strong the winds were and in which
direction they were blowing, because this would influence
how far they could fly on their fuel load.