I Sank The Bismarck (29 page)

There were no official repercussions from our attack on the
beachmaster, although we never tried it again. The exercises
continued throughout the time I was in Machrihanish and I
was to learn later that they were preparations for landings at
Diego Suarez in Madagascar. The art of amphibious landings
was in its infancy. All the landing craft, with their ramps or
with big bows that opened to unload troops or tanks, were
quite new inventions and were still being developed.

In September I was taken out of 818 Squadron yet again and
drafted on to that old floating shoebox,
Argus
– although this
time I got on board without having to resort to a fast motorboat
as the carrier steamed out to sea. I was one of two
Swordfish crews escorting a convoy bound for Gibraltar.
When I got aboard I was astonished to find that there were
also Wrens on the carrier. They were all of petty officer rank.
This must have been the first time that Wrens had been
allowed on board a warship at sea and they had the best
accommodation, because all the officers in
Argus,
including
the captain, had given over their cabins to them. They
were the finest bunch of young ladies that you could imagine
and as the voyage progressed they naturally became even
more attractive. I struck up conversation with them as soon as
I could and discovered that they were special cipher clerks on
their way to work in the signals and radio listening stations
on Gibraltar. They had been rushed aboard
Argus
because
they were replacements for an original detachment of Wrens
who had been killed when their passenger boat was torpedoed
in the Bay of Biscay. The fate of their predecessors cannot
have been a very comforting thought to them, but they
seemed to cope with it admirably and they were marvellous
company on the two-week voyage. If I hadn't had to go out
on patrol in the Swordfish, the whole cruise would have been
just marvellous.

There was no let-up in the hunt for enemy submarines. I
tried to point out to one of the Wrens, to whom I had taken
a particular liking, that I was in the front line in defending
them from harm and I had no doubt that, if I had been around
then, their former colleagues would have arrived safe and
sound in Gibraltar. As it was, I was risking life and limb every
time I took off.

Unfortunately, this line turned out to have more truth to it
than I cared for. One day during the voyage we had had an
uneventful patrol quartering the sea for 10 miles in front of
the convoy, keeping our eyes peeled for the track of a
periscope in the water, the most obvious sign of a U-boat
shadowing the convoy, or for any other disturbance that
might reveal a submerged wake or a fuel leak. However, as
usual we had seen nothing.

As we approached the carrier to land on, my observer
received a signal asking us to drop our
depth-charges astern
of the convoy. They gave no reason, but we assumed that an
asdic operator on one of the escort vessels had picked up some
echoes that suggested a U-boat might be following us. We had
no indication of where the target might be, but I turned round
and made a wide circuit to do as I had been instructed.

I flew across the combined wakes of the carrier and the
merchantmen about 1 mile astern of the convoy, flying at
about 50 feet above the sea, with the intention of dropping
my two depth-charges in a line. It might not sink a U-boat,
but the explosions might persuade the captain to stay submerged
for a while longer, where his speed was reduced, or
further slow him down by making him take some evasive
manoeuvres.

I pressed the button and no sooner had the depth-charges
released from the racks under the wings than there was an
almighty explosion and I was physically pummelled by a
massive blast, the Swordfish being flung into the air from 50
feet to a height of 300 feet. A wave of very hot air engulfed us
and the smell of burned explosives filled my nostrils. For some
strange reason, the depth-charges had exploded on the surface
of the sea, rather than at what should have been their pre-set
depth in the water. The equivalent of 500lb of TNT had
exploded directly underneath us with an enormous force.

The Swordfish was wallowing around and I immediately
struggled to get it under control. To my alarm, I saw that the
bottom main planes had been torn open by the blast, revealing
the ribs and stringers over which the canvas was stretched.
There was no floor left in the cockpit and I could see down
past my flying boots to the sea below.

I had lost communication with my crew so had no idea
what condition they were in. There was a good chance that
they had received more of the blast than I had, but I was preoccupied
with the effort to keep the Swordfish in the air. With
the control column pushed as far forward as possible I could
just manage to keep her level, but it took an enormous force
to hold the stick forward and I had to use my feet as well as
my hands. I shouted down the Gosport tube that connected
me with the rear cockpit to anyone who might be listening to
fire a red emergency flare. I do not know whether anyone did
or not. I managed to steer a course to
Argus,
adjusting the
height to a degree by using the throttle. As we headed for
the flight deck I saw the deck landing officer vainly waving his
bats, but I was in no position to respond. We were sinking
fast: I thought I had misjudged my height and I was going to
crash straight into the open quarterdeck beneath the flight
deck at the stern. I saw some ratings start to run from their
gun stations as they realized I was heading directly for them,
but I managed to lift my Swordfish nose up with a blip of
maximum power on the throttle. This was not a time to worry
about elegance – we were yawing from side to side, and as
soon as I saw that the round down was underneath us I cut
the engine and we smashed down on to the metal plates of the
flight deck in the heaviest landing I have ever made.

To my relief, my observer and TAG were unharmed,
although probably pretty shaken up and confused by now.
They were able to drop straight out of the bottom of the
fuselage on to the flight deck, for they had been hanging on in
their harnesses with their feet and legs exposed to the slipstream.
The bottom part of the fuselage had been completely
blasted away. Later that evening my rigger and fitter asked me
to meet them in the hangar. I was told to look up under my
rudder bar at the bottom of the petrol tank and there, sticking
into the tank, was a large piece of shrapnel from the
depth-charge casing. I was told that I was very lucky because
the metal would have been red hot from the explosion. The
rigger turned to me and said, 'Well, at least you know that a
self-sealing petrol tank does work!'

There was, however, some consolation to this almost fatal
disaster. The Wren, who had become somewhat blasé about
my line-spinning of the dangers I faced every day, had
witnessed the whole incident. That evening she went out of
her way to be extremely comforting. I was very sad to see her
go when we got to Gibraltar.

We escorted the next convoy back from Gibraltar to the
Clyde with more anti-submarine patrols, then I was back once
more with 818 Squadron, to be told that we were changing
over to a new aircraft called the
Albacore. This was a
modernized version of the Swordfish and had an enclosed
cockpit, but it did not have the handling ability of the old
Stringbag. The engine, a Taurus radial, was not as reliable as
the Pegasus and I don't think you would find a Swordfish
pilot who preferred it.

In November
1941 came the news that
Ark Royal
had been
sunk coming back from another Malta supply mission. She
was torpedoed just outside Gibraltar. I was extremely sad to
hear this news. It was a minor miracle that all bar one man
had been rescued, but I felt the loss personally. My experience
of the Fleet Air Arm so far was that the
Ark
was a remarkable
ship, not just because she was more modern than any other
carrier I had served on, and more comfortable, but because I
thought she was superbly well run. Someone remarked to me
that on the
Ark
food was ready when you wanted it, not when
the galley said it was. This seems a petty thing to say, but if
you were a mechanic or armourer, struggling through the
night to get sufficient planes ready to range on the flight deck
by first light, it made a big difference if you knew that food
would be available no matter how late you finished your
work. The
Ark
had been my home for nine months, and it was
on her that I felt I had won my spurs and found a maturity
and pride that up to then my life had been lacking. I looked
back to the time when we had turned round in a gale to
launch our attack on
Bismarck,
superb manoeuvres as bombs
and torpedoes narrowly missed us, the riggers and fitters who
never gave me a duff aircraft, and I didn't think I would ever
again serve on a ship that had the same easy pride in her
abilities. Subsequently, talking to other former crewmembers,
I knew that I wasn't the only one to think this.

In January 1942 we were, I think, the only front-line Fleet Air
Arm squadron in Britain. At the end of the month we received
a signal in the duty office at Machrihanish to mobilize and
head to Hatston in the Orkneys. The German battleship
Tirpitz,
the sister ship of
Bismarck,
had been moored in the
German port of Kiel and reconnaissance indicated that she
was no longer there. The possibility that she was trying to
break out into the Atlantic like
Bismarck
was alarming. After
Pearl Harbor, we were now fighting a war in the Pacific
against the
Japanese and the surface fleet was even more
stretched.
Prince of Wales,
one of our most modern battleships,
which had been part of the initial engagement with
Bismarck,
had been sunk by Japanese bombers along with the
battlecruiser
Repulse,
the sister ship of
Renown,
our old
companion in Force H.

We flew up the Great Glen, the big glacial valley that cuts
through the Highlands and carries Loch Ness, heading northeast.
We encountered snow all the way up, then the weather
followed us towards Wick. We eventually landed
at Hatston
that night. The squadron arrived in one piece, despite the
poor conditions, but half the aircraft could get no hangar
space. The Met office had issued a gale warning and it seemed
every aircraft for miles around had landed for shelter. Eight of
us ended up in perimeter bays, where we covered and tied
down our aircraft as best we could.

The gale hit Orkney that night while we were still eating in
the wardroom. The temperature plummeted as the wind
whistled round the buildings. We could not get to our bunks
in a Nissen hut, as the snow was blowing horizontal and there
was a white-out. Anyone going outside would barely be able
to stand up and would inevitably get lost, with fatal consequences.
So we stayed that night in the wardroom, keeping
the fire going and sleeping in our uniforms on the leather-covered
chairs and settees.

Next morning the blizzard had abated, but the snowfall had
been very heavy. We had to dig ourselves out of the snowdrifts
that had heaped up against the doors and then trudge through
2 feet of snow down to our aircraft. We got an enormous
shock, because the bays where we had left our Albacores the
night before were completely empty. These aircraft, weighing
over 3 tons each, had been picked up by the gale-force winds
and blown for hundreds of yards, some of them as far as the
waters of the bay next to the aerodrome. None of them was
flyable without major repairs. There was nothing left for us to
do except wait for replacement planes.

We were stuck there for over two weeks, kicking our heels,
and while I was there I heard not about
Tirpitz,
which had
moved north to anchor again at Trondheim in Norway, but
about the awful tragedy surrounding the escape of the two
German battlecruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau.
I had
searched for these two raiders over thousands of square miles
of Atlantic Ocean, until an aircraft from
Ark Royal
had
finally found them, but it was too late – there was not enough
daylight left to mount an
attack. So they had escaped us and
had made it safely to the French harbour at Brest. A month or
so later they were joined by
Prinz Eugen,
the heavy cruiser
that had accompanied
Bismarck.

There these three ships had remained, with
Prinz Eugen
in
dry dock undergoing lengthy repairs. Late in 1941 photo
reconnaissance carried out by the RAF showed that
Prinz
Eugen
was now afloat, and that the two battlecruisers had
also left the dockside and were moored in the harbour. A
build-up of smaller warships, including destroyers and motor
torpedo boats, had been observed at Brest. Germany had to
do something with these ships – the question was what?
Would they make another foray into the Atlantic, to be joined
by
Tirpitz,
and hope to pursue the mission that
Bismarck
set
out to do? Or would they make an effort to return to port in
Germany? The Admiralty had even considered the possibility,
now that the
Ark
had been sunk, that these heavy units of the
German navy might make a run through the Straits of
Gibraltar into the Med to operate out of Genoa.

British intelligence took the view that a return to a German
port was most likely, but that still left open the route they
would take. Over the month of January the ports all along the
coast of France and Holland were the scene of increased
movements by motor torpedo boats and minesweepers, and it
looked as though the Germans would try to get their three big
warships back home via the English Channel. This was not as
absurd as it might seem, because this route would give the
German navy the best air cover they could hope for during
the day, and it was assumed that they would attempt passage
through the Straits of Dover at night. All that remained to
discover about their intentions was the date that these ships
were going to put to sea. The main striking force against
them, if they attempted to pass up the Channel, was going to
be some twin-engined Bristol Beaufort torpedo bombers
operated by the RAF, but the Fleet Air Arm's 825
Squadron of
Swordfish aircraft was sent to Manston airfield in Kent to
take part in the attack. Under Lt Commander Esmonde, 825
had of course flown off
Victorious
to attack
Bismarck
and
had then subsequently replaced 820 Squadron on
Ark Royal.
We had had a fine old party when they joined us in Gibraltar,
and I vaguely remember winning a wrestling contest with one
of their pilots,
Percy Gick, later that night. When the
Ark
was
sunk most of the squadron on board were temporarily disbanded,
so 825 had only just been re-formed. With just six
Swordfish, it was placed on standby, ready to intercept the
German warships. The RAF constantly carried out reconnaissance
patrols of the approaches to Brest harbour, so it
seemed that we were ready to deal with any breakout by
Scharnhorst,
Gneisenau
and
Prinz Eugen.