I Sank The Bismarck

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Beginning

  Chapter 2 Childhood Lost

  Chapter 3 Up, Up and Away

  Chapter 4 The Shooting Starts

  Chapter 5 Hard Lessons

  Chapter 6 Active Service

  Chapter 7 Gotcha

  Chapter 8 Buckling Up, Buckling Down

  Chapter 9 Dambusters

  Chapter 10 Hunting the Scharnhorst

  Chapter 11 The Thick of It

  Chapter 12 Against All Odds

  Chapter 13 The Attack

  Chapter 14 After the Bismarck

  Chapter 15 Another Carrier

  Conclusion A Lifetime Later

  Author's Note

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  Picture Section 1

  John Moffat was nineteen years old when he joined the Ark Royal and is the only surviving member of the group of fifteen pilots who sank the Bismarck. John continued to fly until very recently, and now lives in Scotland, but frequently gives talks at airshows and events around the UK.

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  I SANK THE BISMARCK

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  I SANK THE

  BISMARCK

  John Moffat

  with Mike Rossiter

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409082194

  Version 1.0

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  www.rbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain

  in 2009 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © John Moffat with Mike Rossiter 2009

  John Moffat and Mike Rossiter have asserted their rights under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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  John Moffat would like to dedicate this book to the memory of his lovely wife Marjorie, who shared his life for 58 years; their two daughters Pat and Jan, who encouraged him to write about his life; and his four grandchildren, Nicole, Amanda, Ian and Valerie.

  Mike Rossiter would like to thank the Headmaster of Kelso High School, and the former crew members of HMS Ark Royal for their help in researching this book. Also the assistance of his agent Luigi Bonomi, editor Simon Thorogood, and copy-editor Brenda Updegraff are gratefully acknowledged.

  Introduction

  I slid the canopy of my Grumman single-engined aeroplane shut and tightened my safety harness, then pushed the yoke forward so that I could turn to the passenger seat to see if Ian needed any help to strap himself in properly. He was a smart lad, but he was just nine years old. I wanted to make sure he was safe.

  'Are you OK, lad?' I asked him.

  'Yes, Grandad, I'm fine.'

  It was a lovely September evening in the year 2000. I was eighty-one years old and had brought up two daughters, but now I had a grandson, and I loved him. It was funny how life turned out. He had just started playing rugby at school and I had given him a few tips that his mother thought were more suited to the adult game than to a prep-school team, but he was coming on a treat.

  I looked through the windscreen: some slight cloud cover, with a south-westerly wind of about 5 knots. We were on a small grass airfield on the Isle of Bute, with a runway length of 1,300 feet. We were about 1,730lb in weight and should be able to take off in about 800 feet, giving us plenty of room.

  I made sure the handbrake was on, then pressed the starter motor. The Lycoming engine turned over, once, twice, three times, then it fired up. The twin-bladed propeller became a blur in front of the engine cowling and I waited for the temperature and the oil pressure to stabilize. Everything looked fine. I released the handbrake, eased a touch on the throttle, and the plane moved forward, trundling over the grass to the end of the strip.

  I was going to make what is called a performance take-off, which I think is the safest option. You hold the plane on the brakes until the engine is running at full power, then you release the brakes and take off in half the recommended distance. Grumman's handbook for the AA-5 suggests taking off with no flap – the sections at the rear of the wing that, if moved down, provide more lift – but you can get a higher rate of climb with 10 degrees of flap and so I selected this with the flap lever, then with the handbrake on again increased the revs to full power. The orange windsock hung loosely, barely extended in the light breeze. Everything was clear above and behind. I patted Ian on the knee and released the handbrake. We were lightly loaded, and the air-speed indicator quickly started rising.

  We had rolled for about half our take-off distance when the engine started misfiring. The r.p.m. needle was bouncing up and down, and there were more misfires. We were travelling more slowly than we needed to be at this stage of the take-off, but we still had some distance left on the runway. I could keep going and hope that the engine would give us enough power to take off, but then I could be faced with having to crash straight ahead if it cut while we were struggling for height. I quickly decided that I was not going to risk it.

  'Oh Christ, this would happen,' I thought. I cut the engine and tried to put on the brakes, but we were still moving at close to our lift-off speed. There was a hump in the grass strip at the end of the runway: we hit it, bounced up from it and rose into the air. Then we dropped again as the undercarriage hit the hedge.

  'Hang on!' I shouted and put out my arm to protect Ian. Then, as clods of earth and grass hit the windows, we banged and scraped along, and finally smashed into a deep ditch.

  The silence as we came to a halt was eerie. I was desperate to get Ian out in case we caught fire. The poor lad was sitting there, trying to gather himself together, and I undid his straps. The canopy still opened, thank God, so I slid it back and told him to get out and run to the edge of the field. Once he had gone, I slowly undid my own straps and climbed out. I couldn't move as fast as I would have liked, and I had been shaken about by the impact. Ian was looking at me anxiously, so I walked over to him and said as reassuringly as I could, 'Not to worry, son – we're fine.'

  I didn't feel fine. I was shaken up and I knew that actually we were lucky not to have been hurt. The plane, which I coowned, was damaged – how badly I didn't know at the time, and probably wouldn't until an engineer had had a good look at it. It might
be a write-off. I didn't yet know why the engine had failed. As far as I was aware, there was no water in either the tank or the lines. There were bound to be gentle hints that maybe a man of my age should hang up his flying helmet, and similar talk.

  All this was going through my mind – but, thank God, Ian was safe.

  A couple of men came running from the airstrip, one of them carrying a fire extinguisher, and told me that they had called the Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) rescue helicopter from the mainland and it should be here in a few minutes. It was too late to protest that we were really not hurt at all.

  Sure enough, ten minutes later a Sea King helicopter swooped over us, its turbines whining and its rotors clattering. This would be a flight that Ian hadn't bargained for, and I hoped it would be exciting enough to lessen the shock of our crash. The young winchman got out, looked us over, and said that he would take us to hospital for a check-up as a precaution. He lifted Ian in, then helped me up the steps into the cabin.

  We lifted off, the young man sitting opposite us in his polished black flying boots and green flight overalls, a whippersnapper probably still in his twenties. While he talked to the pilot over his intercom, he was also looking at me slightly quizzically. I imagined he was probably thinking, 'What's an old crock like this doing trying to fly?' but then he said, 'I think you and I have met before, sir.'

  I must say I couldn't place him, but ten minutes later he said, 'I know – we met when you were guest of honour at HMS Gannet for our Taranto Night dinner, sir.' HMS Gannet is the Fleet Air Arm air-sea rescue base at Prestwick airport. They, like other Fleet Air Arm bases, celebrate the attack on the Italian fleet moored in Taranto harbour on 11 November 1940, when twenty-one Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers flew in and sank several Italian warships, inflicting as much damage as they might have suffered in a major sea battle. By the year 2000 very few of the thirty or so who had flown on that historic mission were still alive. I had not taken part in the raid on Taranto, but I had flown Swordfish aircraft in the Second World War, against the Italians in the Mediterranean and the Germans in the Atlantic, and as someone who knew what it was like, I was often asked to attend these annual celebrations.

  'I certainly recognize you, sir,' the young man continued. 'You were one of those who hit the Bismarck.'

  My hesitation must have shown, because he went on, 'You must remember, sir – that was the night that we set light to the piano.'

  The wardroom had become rather raucous after the toasts and, typically, someone had sat down at the piano and started playing tunes from the Fleet Air Arm Song Book, and we had sung away to our hearts' content. Some of the men had poured rum into the top of the piano and set light to it, and, as it was wheeled outside burning vigorously, others were pushing the pianist along with it and he was still playing away. It took me back to the days when, as a young sublieutenant, I was roused from my bunk to hammer out some tunes on the wardroom piano – but pianos were not easy to replace at sea during a war, so we refrained from setting light to ours. I enjoyed myself so much that night at HMS Gannet that I offered to help them pay for a new piano, but they wouldn't hear of it. 'We never spend much on a wardroom piano,' I was assured.

  Our companion and I talked a bit about the dinner, then we landed at the hospital. The pilot and co-pilot also wanted to shake my hand and wish me luck, and then they were off.

  Feeling my grandson's hand in mine, I looked down at him. 'Grandad,' he said, 'why were you at their dinner, and why did they set light to the piano?'

  Where to start?

  1

  The Beginning

  Looking back over eighty or more years to when I was a young child, younger even than my grandson when we crashed on the Isle of Bute, I cannot help but think that I grew up in another world entirely, one that has now completely vanished. It was slower, much quieter, it seemed infinitely safer, and of course the sun was always shining. This seems unlikely, I know, but there you are!

  I spent my childhood in a part of the country known as the Scottish Borders – that bit of Scotland to the south of Edinburgh, close to Northumberland, along the northern border of England. My parents moved from town to town as my father's business dictated, with one brief stay among the 'Sassenachs' in County Durham.

  Although I seemed to get into all sorts of scrapes, I enjoyed life; I remember the fun and excitement of various incidents rather than the tears that followed. At all events, two of the most important influences in my life were triggered by things that I first saw and experienced as a child growing up in southern Scotland.

  I was born in a small village called Swinton, but my parents moved fairly soon, when I was still just a baby, to Earlston, where my father opened the town's first garage. It was here that I spent the extremely happy, by and large carefree, first years of my life.

  My father, Peter, had served in the First World War, joining up in 1914 to qualify as an air engineer for the Royal Naval Air Service and then serving in No. 2 Wing RNAS under Commander Charles Sampson, who in 1912 had become the first man to fly a plane off a ship. My father saw part of the war in Belgium, then was posted to the seaplane carrier Ark Royal, which sailed for Gallipoli, the site of the bloody attempt to land forces in the Dardanelles. I gather that my father not only served on Ark Royal, but was part of a detachment that went ashore to build an airfield at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. He left the service in 1917 and married my mother Mary a year later. It might seem obvious that, with my father's background, I would also join the navy, but this was not the case. My father, like most men at the time, rarely if ever talked about his wartime experiences, and I found out only a little about them much later in my life. No, I was left to make my own way, and my own mistakes.

  Earlston, like many towns in the Borders, was built round a large open square. Here each year they held the 'Hirings', to which farmworkers from the surrounding countryside would come hoping to find new employment for the next twelve months. It was a giant annual labour exchange and needless to say it could be a desperate time for people. There was little in the way of a welfare state for those who were too old or too ill to work. Rural areas saw a great deal of poverty in those times.

  The square in Earlston was also the site of a yearly summer fair, and then it would be filled with all sorts of sideshows and entertainers, fire-eaters, jugglers and boxing booths. The arrival of the fair always caused great excitement. Steam-driven traction engines would haul wagons into the square, then would be set up to drive roundabouts and steam organs.

  Entertainment was by and large a communal affair. One local custom I loved to watch was a wedding. The groom would have purchased a rugby ball from the local saddler, and after the ceremony the newly married couple would go to the saddler's and the groom would kick the ball as hard and as high as he could into the town. This was a signal for all the men to rush after it and try to grab it, with the idea that one of them would secure it and hang on to it. There was no prize for this – gaining the ball was an end in itself. The struggle for possession would often go on until dark; it was taken very seriously. Naturally the whole town enjoyed it, so a wedding was a major event.

  When I was about four years old my parents gave me a pet, a terrier that I named Wiggy. I wandered far and wide with Wiggy, securing him with a length of rope for a lead. Roaming away from home must have given my parents several anxious moments, but looking back I can only marvel at the freedom I had and the adventurous habits I developed. My favourite walk was to go to see the grounds of a large house called Cowdenknowes. I was always welcome at the gardener's cottage on the estate, where there was always something to eat – a piece of cake fresh from the oven or an apple out of the orchard.

  I also used to wander off to the railway station to watch the steam trains come and go. The porter there was also called Moffat, although we had no family connection of which I was aware. After I had been making regular visits for a while, the train drivers and firemen on the local route all got to know me. Naturally, as
a young boy I found the steam engines absolutely enthralling, belching steam and smoke, shrieking and clanking as they pulled to a halt and then heaving away gathering speed. It didn't take long before the crews were willing to let me on the footplate, and then it became a regular occurrence for me to travel on the engine to St Boswells, a town about 4 miles away down the line. It was enormously exciting, with the heat from the firebox, the gleaming brass levers and dials, the smell of hot oil and smoke, and me in the company of the overalled men in charge of this monster. When we got to St Boswells I would hop off and the driver would ensure that I was safely ensconced on another engine making the return journey. When I got back my parents would chastise me for running off without a by your leave, but what little boy would be able to resist such an amazing opportunity? I certainly couldn't.

  I became extremely adventurous, and absolutely fearless, feeling that I could go anywhere I chose without coming to any harm. One day I got it into my head to visit a good friend of my grandfather, a man called Mr Deans who was the landlord of a pub, the Black Bull, in the town of Lauder, which was about 6 miles north of Earlston. I hopped on to a local bus and hid beneath a seat, but someone must have seen me and told my parents. My father clearly thought this was the last straw. He telephoned the local constable in Lauder and this fine fellow was waiting for me when the bus pulled in. I can still see him, with his blue cape, his helmet and his fierce waxed moustache, like a typical sergeant major. Towering over me, he grabbed me by the ear and none too gently marched me off to the police station, up the iron steps to the front door. There I was led to the cells and put in the first one on the left. They were in the centre of the village, and they are still there now, to remind me whenever I pass by. Naturally I was not very happy and I am sure that my distress took the edge off my father's anger when he arrived to take me home. Mr Deans at the Black Bull was incensed at the constable's treatment of me and before he was calmed down by my father he threatened to take his shotgun to the man. This was a very unpleasant experience all round, but I cannot say that it made me curb my wanderlust.