The World at War (34 page)

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ROBERT SHERWOOD

Commanding HMS
Tay,
took over escort of Convoy ONS-5

The crew of the
Gharinda
were all rescued without getting their feet wet. Her captain, a man called Rodney Stone, was sitting in the stern of his boat and I looked down from the wing of the bridge and I could see him sitting there with the biggest gun I've ever seen between his knees. I remember saying something to him about it – I trust it wasn't loaded – but he got it on board and he still has it as far as I know.

CAPTAIN STONE

I did the quickest run around the ship I've ever done in my life to make sure that nobody else was on board and then I went down the ladder to the lifeboat – I suppose I was about three or four feet above water level. I'd got all my boats in a line, which made it fairly easy for Captain Sherwood on
HMS
Tay,
who didn't have to go from one boat to another, all dotted around the place. That was something we were taught – if you get sunk get all your boats together and keep together, because if an aeroplane looks for you it's much easier to find a bunch of boats than one solitary boat. I had one of my rifles, which I was very proud of, with me and didn't want to lose it. The only reason I had it was because I'd been cleaning it and I grabbed it as I went down those few steps. Sherwood did ask me if the damn thing was loaded and I said no it wasn't. I was picked up very unceremoniously by the scruff of the neck and thrown on the deck – the same as the rest of my crew and my officers – and I went forward and made myself known to Captain Sherwood. My only casualty was the Third Officer who went over the side into the drink – he sat on the gunwale after I'd told him not to. We pulled him out almost instantly and he couldn't speak, he was so bloody cold. So he was picked up, thrown on deck and taken straight down to the lay's engine room, otherwise he'd probably have frozen to death. I don't know the temperature of the sea water but I think it was below freezing at the time, because we'd just come out of the ice floes.

LIEUTENANT RAYMOND HART

Commanding HMS
Vidette,
Convoy ONS-5

I'd just been out some two thousand yards to a particular contact and given it a pattern of depth-charges
[U-514,
damaged]. Sweeping back to my station I was just reducing speed to eight or ten knots when I got a very firm Asdic contact about eight hundred yards from the nearest ship in the convoy. My immediate reaction was to increase speed and give it a five-charge pattern straightaway to keep the chap's head down – it would put him off his stroke if he was going to fire torpedoes – but I was short of depth-charges at that stage. Conditions were perfect, the night was relatively calm, a bit of fog, but perfect for a deliberate attack, so I decided to do a deliberate attack with our forward-throwing weapon, the Hedgehog, which as you probably know threw twenty-four bombs ahead of the ship and the bombs only exploded if they made contact with a submerged object. We had to fire by voice pipe because the bad weather which we had encountered before had upset the electrical communications. I gave the order to fire when I thought we'd approached the right spot and some literally few seconds after the bombs hit the water we all saw two vivid flashes as the two bombs hit the U-boat [
U-630]. If I remember rightly one of them was on the port side and one of them just on the starboard side of my bow. This was quite an exhilarating moment and I think I remember striking the First Lieutenant on the chest and the next thing we heard was from the Asdic operator and the Asdic officer that there were noises of a submarine breaking up. Well, we'd seen a tremendous kerfuffle in the water and the bow of the ship was virtually lifted out of the water as we went over the spot where we'd hit the U-boat.

LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER SHERWOOD

Somewhere in the region of ten o'clock the attacks started and they became fast and furious. It was not an attack as we had known it in the past – escorts were reporting submarines coming in, ships being torpedoed – and this was of course absolute hell; it was the first time it had ever happened, certainly least to me. Shortly afterwards there were reports that submarines had been hit and presumably sunk. Must have been pretty late in the night when I asked
Vidette
to come back in, which she did, and on the way she ran into a submarine and that was another one gone. Of course this was very distressing to me because all I was doing was sitting there putting marks on a chart as the actions took place and not getting any action myself. But I suppose thereby lies the tale that the more exercise you do between ships of a group produces better answers.

SQUADRON LEADER OULTON

As soon as he appreciated the situation the Australian immediately went into the attack, and because he was going to have a very rough time with the heavy deck armament of the U-boat I flew slightly ahead of him and gave him cover with my machine guns. He went in and dropped his depth-charges perfectly, they exploded and then there was a tremendous orange and blue explosion and when that subsided there was nothing but wreckage, the U-boat had gone and a lot of survivors in the water. So I flew round and dropped out Mae Wests [life jackets] and dinghies in the hope of getting some of the survivors. I knew there was a British escort group about a hundred miles away and then my wireless operator intercepted what was clearly traffic between Brest and Junkers 88 fighters coming out to the area, so I thought we'd better go home.

LIEUTENANT LOOKS

I thought we would have a good chance for the next night because we picked up quite a lot of signals from other submarines getting contact to this convoy and so we thought that this convoy would be absolutely dead during the night. Then suddenly dense fog came up, we could only see fifty metres, not more, so it was nearly impossible to find the convoy again. I submerged for one period to listen with my hydrophone but we couldn't find the ships again, and staying on the surface during the dark time, now in dense fog of course, it was very dangerous. I was nearly rammed by one of the British escorts, it passed just five or ten metres behind the stern using his searchlight but they couldn't see anything, as we couldn't see more than just the shadow of the destroyer passing our path and then disappearing in the dense fog. I submerged because it was not so nice to be in such close contact with a destroyer and this escort vessel turned around and depth-charged me for about one or one-and-a-half hours without result. And then I thought it was useless to try to find the convoy because underwater the submarines at that time were merely sitting ducks. We were very slow using our electric motors underwater and so we had no chance to find the convoy again, and as I was running out of fuel I decided to go back to the base the next day.

COMMANDER GRETTON

Well, of course, I was delighted by the battle for ONS-5. One felt that the long training we had – we had slogged at training and really practised our manoeuvres and various dodges – had paid off and we were beginning to get on top. As a result after a very hectic week in St John's, Newfoundland, there was a lot of alcohol consumption and much writing of official reports, then we sailed for the next convoy,
SC-130 [11–26 May], on top of the wave and despite the fact that we had a very heavy battle with about twenty U-boats: we sank three of them and we didn't lose a single ship. Dönitz in his book says that after SC-130 and another HX convoy which was coming across about the same time as us, he felt it was no good going on and withdrew from the North Atlantic.

SQUADRON LEADER OULTON

The RAF as a whole had nothing like enough aeroplanes and it must have been very difficult to apportion the resources. And I think that on the whole they didn't do too badly in sharing it out fairly. Surely, if there had been more aircraft, more Liberators allocated from America, then we could have improved the situation much earlier and saved the lives of a lot of seamen. But I don't think it would have brought the war to an end very much earlier. D-Day would not have been much earlier whether or not the Battle of the Atlantic had been won six months earlier or not.

ADMIRAL DÖNITZ

Another heavy disadvantage was the breaking down of submarine warfare, which happened in May 1943, which until this time had prevented the sea powers from having enough ships to carry out landing operation on the Western European continent. In consequence of the defeat of the submarine the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy on July 1944 was now a success and now we knew clearly that we had no more chance to win the war. But what could we do?

LIEUTENANT CREMER

The beginning of the end is the year 1943 when Captain Walker had trained the escort crews. After each attack you get depth-charges at least twelve or fourteen hours, and then it's a terrible stress not only for the sailors but also for the commander. Water comes into the boats, there's no electricity, there is no more hydraulic, there's only the possibility to handle the controls by hand and there's no possibility to give messages to the stern or to the bow except by voice. These twelve hours, everybody of course, after every attack, has to do a lot to repair, and this gives a little help not to think. But during the time when the destroyer is coming the propeller revolutions are changing in the frequency so you could know when perhaps two or three seconds later comes the depth-charges. This is a very bad moment for the crew and they are looking at their commander, how are his nerves and at his face, and it was also for him not too easy. It is very nice now, twenty-five years later, to talk about it but during that time it was always the death before the eyes. From thirty-six thousand sailors we have lost thirty-two thousand, so you can imagine it was a terrible sacrifice.

CHAPTER 14
BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC 1942–43

The Imperial Japanese Navy's (IJN) Commander-in-Chief Isoroku Yamamoto had hoped, at best, to 'run amok' for a year before US industrial power began to overwhelm Japan. However, the IJN was first checked in the Coral Sea on 4–8 May 1942, simultaneously with the surrender of the last outpost of the US–Filipino Army in the Philippines. General Douglas MacArthur, the Commander-in-Chief had been ordered to leave in March and set up a new South-West Pacific Command based in Australia. Australian forces under his command inflicted the first Allied defeat on the Japanese Army at Milne Bay, on the eastern tip of New Guinea, in early September. Before that, however, the Americans had broken the Japanese naval codes and on 4–7 June the IJN's all-conquering carrier force was destroyed off Midway Island in an ambush set up by US Fleet Commander Chester Nimitz. On 7 August the first of seventy-eight amphibious landings by US forces during the Pacific War was made to seize an airfield on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea and immediately came under intense attack by land and sea. The Americans held on and the campaign became a prolonged battle of attrition, in which the IJN lost many irreplaceable ships and aircraft before finally evacuating the island in February 1943. Their hope had been to interdict communications between the United States and Australia from the air base on Guadalacanal and another on Betio, the main island of Tarawa atoll in the Gilbert Islands. In May 1943 the Americans encountered unexpectedly vicious resistance when recovering Attu, one of two Aleutian Islands lost to the Japanese in June
1942, and in August mounted a massive operation to retake Kiska, only to find the Japanese gone. In 20–24 November 1943 tiny Betio became the most crowded place on earth when the Americans assaulted it with 35,000 men against a Japanese garrison of 3,000 Marines and 2,000 pioneers. Many valuable lessons were learned, but many more remained to be learned.

MICHIKO NAKAMOTO

Hiroshima schoolgirl

I thought, always I had thought America was a very, very big country and Japan is very small and what's going to happen, that was my first thought. Well, naturally Japan was winning and every day we had over the radio all the victories and the whole nation was very excited and the thought I had at that time when I heard the
news about the war was immediately all the victories over the radio all day long so we are quite excited and it was almost like a festival. I didn't even doubt about the news when they were always talking about the victories and then the sad news began to be heard over the radio and we were very sad but of course we had to believe what we were hearing. I can't remember correctly by order about the battle of Midway, battle of the Solomons and all South Pacific areas. Japan was beginning to pay much sacrifice although it was always said we sank many ships, we attacked so many aeroplanes, but at the same time we lost our soldiers, we lost our ships; so I don't recall precisely news of the battle of Midway but I remember it was very sad news and always when news began with very sad Japanese music, very immediately we knew it was bad news.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe

There were people who wanted to go to the Pacific first: all the Pacific states [of the USA] were more interested in the Pacific war; some military opinion was that we should fight this war first. Roosevelt did everything he could to bring public opinion to his view [that Germany should be beaten first]. Those who were involved in the war demanded more, the Pacific was almost an endless demand; war production was very limited in the beginning. It wasn't until considerably later that we had adequate for both fronts, so one side or the other had to sacrifice and also we had to balance off the requirements of our allies, Britain and the Soviet Union. I think Roosevelt handled public opinion extremely skilfully.

TOSHIKAZU KASE

Principal Secretary to the Foreign Minister

Most people were surprised by the extent of the victories achieved by the Navy and Army in the initial phase of the war. There was a torchlight parade night after night, but I was basically sceptical because having lived years under German Blitz in London, having witnessed at close quarters the war in Europe, I knew that victory amounts to little when the war is likely to be dragged on.