The Day We Went to War (40 page)

A return to trench warfare? Scottish troops reinforcing a trench in France, November 1939.

‘
You have been chosen to go into action as the vanguard of the British Army
. . .
The enemy awaits your arrival with expectancy. The opportunity is yours to maintain and enhance the glorious traditions inscribed on your colours.’ Men of the Gloucestershire Regiment use their Bren gun carriers to rescue a French wine merchant’s delivery van from a ditch.

C
HAPTER
8

The War at Sea

Only at sea did the Allies, and especially Britain’s Royal Navy, actually seem to be getting to real grips with the enemy. The sinking of the SS
Athenia
by
U-30
, with the loss of 112 lives, including twenty-eight Americans and Canadians, was only the first in a series of sinkings by U-boats during the war’s first months. But under Churchill’s bellicose leadership, the Royal Navy was hitting back. Just as in 1914, so again in 1939, Churchill was reluctant just to sit back and let naval matters take their course. First priority was to try and intercept the crack 51,000-ton North German-Lloyd liner
Bremen
, which was on its way back from America.

Evert Post, a Dutch member of the liner’s crew, told the Amsterdam newspaper
Het Volk
: ‘After we left New York on 30th August we went at top speed. During the night we carried no lights, and no one was allowed even to light cigarettes on deck. In daytime all hands were in the lifeboats with pots of paint and long brushes, painting the hull a greyish colour. No radio reports were sent out.

‘On 3rd September Captain Ahrens called everybody into the saloon and told us war had broken out. “I swear solemnly,” he said, “that the English won’t get me alive, nor my ship. I prefer to sink her.” The crew answered with “Hochs” and gave the Nazi salute. Next day the captain again called us together again and said, “Between England and Iceland where we are now, British warships are watching every ten miles. We are in a lion’s den.”

‘Every day lifeboat drill was held. The forepart of the ship was evacuated, in case we ran into a mine. Everywhere on deck were set barrels of petrol, to be set on fire if a British warship came near. Everyone wore his best clothes, as we would not have been able to take any baggage into the boats with us. No one slept or undressed.’

Eventually, on 6 September, the
Bremen
reached the Soviet port of Murmansk after a voyage of 4,750 miles. And in Berlin, a rumour was soon going the rounds that Hitler had offered the
Bremen
to the Russians in exchange for 100 submarines.

Churchill, intensely annoyed at missing the
Bremen
, then ordered the establishment of battle groups to seek out and sink the underseas enemy. On 14 September, one such group, led by aircraft carrier HMS
Ark Royal
, was attacked by the
U-39
. The U-boat fired its torpedoes at the carrier, but all missed.
Ark Royal
’s destroyer escorts then launched an immediate counter-attack on the submarine and sank her – the first U-boat to be sunk in the Second World War. Three days later, the Germans got their revenge when
U-29
sank the aircraft carrier HMS
Courageous
, while on patrol off the Bristol Channel. Sixteen-year-old Boy Seaman John Desmond Wells from Seaton, Devon, was reading in his hammock when the torpedo struck. The explosion momentarily stunned him:

‘After groping about I managed to get to the upper deck. Many men were running about but there was no panic. I slid down a
blister [a form of protection on the ship’s side], to within six feet of the water and stayed there for ten minutes. Other men did the same. It was apparent that the ship was sinking, her bows being nearly under water. I jumped clear and swam in the direction of a destroyer which was standing about a mile off. There were also two other destroyers and two merchant vessels.’

While in the water awaiting rescue, John and the other men sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

Naval writer eighteen-year-old Tom Hughes from St Anne’s, Lancashire, was in the water for nearly three hours before being rescued:

‘As for myself, I just swam and swam. Those three hours in the water seemed much longer. I must pay tribute to the handling of the destroyer that saved us. She was so navigated that the swell created by her progress helped us to swim towards her.

‘As I got fairly near her a fellow swam alongside me and said, “Help me.” I gripped him by the hair and when a man off the destroyer caught me to pull me aboard I was still hanging on. That chap’s long absence from the barber’s saved his life.’

The carrier’s escort destroyers immediately set about trying to locate and sink the U-boat, which ironically enough had been about to return to Wilhelmshaven because of fuel shortage, when she sighted the
Courageous
. Her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Otto Schuhart, having fired off his last three torpedoes, thought, ‘The noise of the depth charges was enormous, it was the worst we heard, but we kept our heads because we were sure to have had a great success. The next day we heard by English radio that we had sunk the carrier
Courageous
and we were very proud of our success . . . but we were well trained for this task and we had only done our duty.’

Forty-nine-year-old Captain William T. Makeig-Jones went down with his ship, together with over 500 members of the crew. Civil servant and poet Humbert Wolfe penned a tribute to them:

FOR THE LOST OF HMS COURAGEOUS

You have given all.

Fate has no more to ask.

But we, for whom you died, Do here renew

Our sacred promise to complete the task

For the love of England – and because of you.

A month later on 14 October, an even more spectacular success was achieved by Germany’s U-boat arm. Kapitänleutnant Gunther Prien in the
U-47
sank the battleship HMS
Royal Oak
at anchor at the Scapa Flow naval base.

Eighteen-year-old Vincent Marchant of Doncaster was asleep in his hammock when the
Royal Oak
was hit at 12.58am:

‘I ran to the upper deck to see what happened. There was a second explosion twenty minutes later, followed by a third and then a fourth. By that time the ship was tilting. She was sinking rapidly. Remembering what had happened on the
Courageous
and the lesson that taught us, I stripped myself of all my clothing and, tying my safety belt around my waist dived into the water. Searchlights were playing over the surface and I could see hundreds of heads bobbing around.

‘Great volumes of oil started to belch up to the surface. My eyes started to smart and the faces of all the men swimming in the water turned a greasy black. I was caught by a searchlight for several minutes and saw two of my pals swimming alongside me. Later, however, they had cramp and disappeared . . . I swam and swam for I don’t know how long, but I must have gone about a mile and a half when I felt a rock under me. I scarcely remember what happened after that. It was like a nightmare.’

14 October was the birthday of Paymaster-Lieutenant Harrison from Glasgow:

‘I was in the mess at two minutes to one when I heard a minor explosion. I was just about to open a parcel from my wife – a birthday present – but I replaced the string and went up on deck. Three minutes after I left the mess there was a violent explosion. I was pitched forward. Then there came another explosion. I joined a queue and was making to go overboard on the portside when there came a fourth explosion. I managed to get to a canvas lifeboat, but after I clung to it for a while another poor fellow arrived almost exhausted. I hoisted him into my grip on the boat and swam away. A piece of wreckage came along and I used it for a swimming support. Later I bumped into a log, and with wood support under both arms I swam to a drifter and was taken aboard. It was lucky birthday for me.’

Lieutenants Fritz-Julius Lemp of the
U-30
and Otto Schuhart of the
U-29
exchange greetings at the Wilhelmshaven U-boat base. Lemp was responsible for sinking SS
Athenia
on 3 September, and Schuhart had sunk HMS
Courageous
on 17 September 1939.

A dramatic photograph of HMS
Courageous
sinking after being torpedoed by
U-29,
off the south-west coast of Ireland. On hearing the news Churchill said, ‘We can’t expect to carry on a war like this without that sort of thing happening from time to time. I have seen lots of it before.’

The loss of the
Royal Oak
at Scapa Flow came as a great shock to a nation which since Nelson’s time had taken the Royal Navy’s supremacy, indeed invincibility, for granted.

Florence Speed’s reaction was typical, ‘As I left the station the posters said “Royal Oak sunk”. My heart sank.’ Up and down the country, Mass Observation diarists and observers recorded a welter of emotions on the battleship’s loss:

‘Terrible news about the ‘Royal Oak’. My mind flies to Bob, in the Navy. Hope like Hell nothing happens to him.’

‘. . . terrible, when you come to think of it. That’s when you begin to realize what a war means. Nearly a thousand dead . . .’

‘. . . three captured U-boats are nothing, compared to the loss of a boat like that.’

‘First there was that aircraft carrier, and now this: we don’t seem to be having a very easy time of it.’

‘. . . a shame. All those men dying for nothing, like that. We might as well make peace and be done with it.’

‘. . . so I said, and I say it again now, once they admit one defeat, you don’t know how many defeats they’re hiding from us. Them papers only say what they’re told.’