I Sank The Bismarck Read online

  I learned later that Frobisher was scheduled at that time to be taken out of her training role with a view to her being mothballed. If I had known that, perhaps I would have been less surprised and confused when, after I had climbed up the gangway on to the ship, the duty officer immediately issued me with a travel warrant back home. I returned to the mainland once again on a small boat, only to find I was too late for a train back to London. The harbour office sent me to a naval dormitory in a large building that housed the Sailors' Rest – known as 'Aggie Weston', after the woman who founded them – and there I bedded down for the night.

  I felt upset, rejected and close to despair in that strange bed, in a building full of sailors who ignored me. I had been uneasy as I approached that forbidding ship, and now the journey from London had proved to be a complete waste of time. Very little had gone right with my life since I left school at sixteen; I felt that I had no idea what to do with myself; and, worse, it seemed that nobody else had any use for me either. The truth was, of course, that the Naval Air Service was in a complete state of flux. The handover from Royal Air Force to Admiralty control was still going on, and how and where the training of naval pilots was going to take place had not yet been properly decided. It was one thing to advertise for people, it was another to set up a proper organization. The impact of this on me was to make me very downhearted.

  Next morning I arrived back in London. I had foolishly given up my job in Harrods believing that I would be doing my naval training for the next three months, so I was now unemployed. I was determined not to go home, as my father would have said, 'I told you so.' I just could not face the defeat and humiliation. So I was forced to sign on the dole and look for a job. It was a very depressing experience and I was at an extremely low ebb. I was eking out my savings, living in the YMCA, walking the streets, visiting some of the sights like St Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament, but I was like a piece of wood floating in the Thames, a piece of flotsam drifting here and there. I had come a long way since my carefree days with my little terrier Wiggy running along beside me, and none of it was for the good.

  While I was in a state of limbo in London, the newspapers and news programmes on the wireless were describing events with an ominous tone. The Spanish Civil War had ended in victory for General Franco, and there had been a very tense period in 1938 when Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland, Czechoslovak territory in which a large number of German-speaking people lived, should be ceded to Germany. There was a feeling that another war might start over this and a general military mobilization got under way as the crisis built up. Air-raid shelters and trenches started to be dug – I remember noticing the piles of fresh earth as shelters were built in Hyde Park. Gas masks were given out to the civilian population, and hundreds of lorries carrying winches and towing trailers full of gas canisters were parked around the city. These were mobile installations to launch barrage balloons – small, hydrogen-filled balloons that rose into the air tethered by steel cables, the idea being that they would prevent enemy bombers from flying low over cities and factories. They floated high over the city, like hundreds of huge, strange fish, the sunshine glinting off their silver surfaces. People expected war to start quite quickly.

  Then in September 1938 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to discuss the situation with Hitler, returning with a deal that looked as though it might be a peaceful solution. It gave Hitler everything he wanted, including the Sudetenland, and Winston Churchill was bitterly opposed to it. However shameful Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler might have been, most ordinary people were relieved that another war had been averted. The dreadful slaughter of the First World War was still very much on people's minds; it had been over for only twenty years and millions of people had been affected by it. There probably wasn't a family in the country that had not lost someone in the trenches, and it was still seen as a great and unnecessary tragedy. Most towns and villages had erected a monument to those who had died in what we called the Great War; I remember the big ceremony in Kelso when I was younger for the unveiling of the town's memorial to the local men who had never come back from France. Nowadays there is a ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, and in towns and villages around the country, on the Sunday nearest to Armistice Day, but in the 1930s there were local ceremonies of remembrance on 11 November itself, whatever day of the week it fell, and the two-minute silence at eleven o'clock was very strictly adhered to. Buses and cars stopped and people stood still in the streets. At the time you were aware that this silence was being observed all over the country. It was a very emotional moment. So the threat of another war filled people with dread.

  The relief of the Munich Agreement didn't last long. In March 1939 Hitler took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. By then we had had time to become accustomed to the threat of war, and I think people thought now it was bound to happen. The question was, when?

  Meanwhile, I was tramping the streets of London, signing on and looking, unsuccessfully, for a job, when I received yet another letter from the Admiralty, this time telling me that I would be sent for training, probably at Drem in Scotland, which was an RAF flying training school at the time. When I read it, I made up my mind that I would now go home to Scotland, face my father and wait for further instructions about training. My return in August didn't go too badly – my letter from the Admiralty was proof that at least my life had some direction.

  It was in Kelso on 1 September that I heard on the news that the Germans had invaded Poland, and I knew that war was inevitable. My father and mother and I were gathered round the wireless set on the 3rd, which was a Sunday, to hear the Prime Minister announce that once again we were at war with Germany. It was a profound moment, where every person listening knows that their life will be utterly transformed, for ever, and there will be great changes in the world and that the future has suddenly become completely unknown. I knew that I would be part of the war, and that the question of what to do with my life was probably no longer in my hands. My parents must have felt a great deal of unease, but they kept it to themselves. My father in particular, with his experience of Gallipoli, must have had his own thoughts, but he had never discussed them before and didn't do so now.

  It was clear that I would probably be starting my training in the navy much sooner than expected, and indeed almost the next day I received another letter from the Admiralty. In contradiction to the last one, it contained orders and a travel warrant for me to take the train south to Gosport, west of Portsmouth harbour, and to appear at St Vincent barracks, which was the Royal Navy boys' training establishment. Once more I said goodbye to my parents and old schoolfriends to catch the train to Edinburgh and then south. I felt that I had been kicked from pillar to post in the past months, but was sure that now all that was behind me.

  3

  Up, Up and Away

  Unlike on my previous visit to Portsmouth, my destination was not a warship. HMS St Vincent was what was known in the navy as a 'stone frigate', a shore-based establishment of bricks and mortar. In fact, St Vincent was a collection of four-storey red-brick buildings facing a large asphalt parade ground. It was not very inviting. After finding my way there via the Gosport Ferry, I stood outside the entrance for quite a while, wondering what I had let myself in for. Things were a bit different from my last visit to the training ship HMS Frobisher. We were at war, and I was in the navy for the duration. I knew that once I entered the base through the arches there would be no going back. It seems strange, but after all the trials and tribulations of being accepted into the navy, I now could not bring myself to take the final step, so I delayed and delayed. Then another chap approached and stood next to me. He too was carrying a small suitcase. 'Are you going in?' he said in a Welsh accent, looking at me. I confirmed that I was. His name was Glan Evans and he came from Swansea. He too was filled with doubts and we both stood, silently, for another moment. At last, almost in unison, a Scot and a Welshman crossed the portal into St Vincent. From that
moment we shared a great fellow feeling, and he remained the best friend a man could ever have. He was also a terrific scrum half.

  Our fears were groundless. St Vincent was a boy sailors' training establishment, but when war was declared the young lads, who were about fourteen or fifteen years of age, were evacuated to the Isle of Man, out of range, it was hoped, of German bombers. Such was the fear of bombing that in the two months leading up to the outbreak of war, a programme of evacuating young children from the big cities had been put in motion, and eventually around two and a half million were taken from their families and sent to stay with strangers in the countryside. I imagine it did save some lives, although it was a very unpopular policy. But we had all heard about Guernica and what the German bombers had done to that town, and we expected that the same type of destruction would be visited on all our major cities by the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

  So St Vincent was now set aside for training officers of the Fleet Air Arm. I think we were the first batch. The whole process of training was in a state of chaos, caused not only by the start of hostilities but by the fact that up until May 1939 the pilots and aircrew of naval aircraft had been trained by the Royal Air Force. Now it was suddenly the navy's job.

  We were housed in G block, about forty of us, and they were a great bunch of lads. A wonderful officer by the name of Lt Commander Arthur Tillard introduced us to naval training. He was the first officer we saw with the naval wings on his sleeve. We were extremely lucky to have someone like that in charge. He was killed in a Walrus aircraft flying out of Arbroath later on in the war, and it was a very sad loss. Glan and I soon met up with a few other cadets who were slightly less English than most of our fellow recruits – they were South African: Buster May, Eric Margetts and Robert Lawson. For some reason it was us that Lt Commander Tillard would round up if there was anything needing doing – he seemed to realize that we worked well together and would get things done. After a few weeks we called ourselves the 'Black Hand Gang', a silly name from a popular comic, but it stuck and other people started to refer to us by it and continued to do so throughout the war.

  As members of the Fleet Air Arm we would be officers in the Royal Navy, as well as pilots and flying crew. We would be expected when necessary to carry out the duties of officers on board a ship, so we had to learn to be sailors first. We were taught naval traditions and the rules of seamanship by timeserved petty officers, old salts who had spent a lifetime in the navy and knew everything there was to know about life on board ship, and the very particular types of etiquette and behaviour that allowed officers and men in closely confined quarters to get along and organize themselves efficiently. These petty officers were the perfect teachers, confident, able to deal with anything that life threw at them, and by and large tolerant of our initial mistakes. We were taught the basic principles of every aspect of war at sea, from navigation, small-boat handling, gunnery, signals and fleet manoeuvres.

  Instructors would visit from the other naval establishments dotted around Portsmouth and Gosport. Our gunnery instructor, Chief Petty Officer Wilmot, was based in the gunnery school at Whale Island. He was an amazing fellow. Signals, not only the traditional flags used by the navy but also Morse code for wireless telegraphy and signal lamps, were taught by Chief Petty Officer Oliver. They stand out in my memory as being excellent teachers and extremely amusing, who both enjoyed their tot of rum. It was hard work, but we learned quickly. There were plenty of sports as well, with a shooting team, rugby and swimming. We enjoyed ourselves, but it was serious all the same. The war had started and, while the expected bombing of civilians hadn't occurred, there were already casualties at sea.

  One of the navy's aircraft carriers, HMS Courageous, was hit on 17 September by two torpedoes fired from a German U-boat. She had been patrolling in the channel approaches, south-west of Ireland, using her aircraft to search for submarines. The U-boat spotted her first. Courageous sank quickly, taking over five hundred sailors to their deaths, along with two squadrons of aircraft. We didn't dwell on these things, but it certainly served to remind us that we too might one day be on an aircraft carrier in the sights of an enemy submarine. In addition to Courageous's sinking, a U-boat penetrated the fleet's main anchorage at Scapa Flow in October and a battleship, Royal Oak, was torpedoed and sunk, again with a great loss of life – over eight hundred men. This incident was particularly galling as Scapa Flow was meant to be a very secure base for the Home Fleet, but of course they had grown complacent during peacetime. The anti-submarine defences were strengthened, but it was a case of bolting the stable door. There were also daily losses of cargo ships to U-boat attack, and British ships were falling victim to German raiders, warships called pocket battleships that were very fast and could travel great distances without refuelling. Three of these were active in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, preying on ships travelling outside the convoy system that had quickly been set up. So we young lads of eighteen and nineteen were studying away to join a service that was already seeing serious action, and not necessarily coming out on top.

  We were trying to complete a condensed course in just three months and the original group of forty or so chaps in St Vincent was whittled down by around a third as a result of tests and examinations. After two and a half months the navy assumed that we had learned all we needed to know, or at least all we were capable of absorbing, and we were sent off on the next and most important part of our training – our initial flying instruction.

  Half of those remaining on the course went to Elmdon in the Midlands while the other half went to Belfast. The odd part of this selection was that the men who, like me, were keen rugby players were all sent to Belfast. After about two weeks my friend Glan 'Taff' Evans and I organized a moderately good fifteen and played many of the local teams, with me hooking and my new Welsh pal as scrum-half. We had some wonderful matches, but one in particular sticks out in my mind. Taff was penalized three times in a row for the way he put the ball in. Frustrated, he picked it up and took it to the referee, saying, 'What bloody rules are you playing – Cardiff or Swansea?' He wasn't penalized again during the game.

  We had a great time and the locals were extremely hospitable. We were billeted in private houses near to Sydenham airfield, which is now Belfast City airport. Living off the base and able to come and go after our day's training was a great improvement on St Vincent, and I made the most of it.

  I met a girl, a petite blonde, and we arranged one night to meet outside the Plaza ballroom in the middle of Belfast. I had unfortunately not told her that the navy had decided we should wear civilian clothes when on leave in Belfast. My mother had sent my best kilt and sporran, so I wore these for my date. I arrived at the Plaza and saw my girlfriend on the other side of the road, so I waved and shouted. When she saw me she ran off as hard as she could in the other direction. It must have been my good luck after that to meet up with another young girl.

  We had been invited to a Christmas dance sponsored by the Gallagher's tobacco factory at the Plaza, and after a few dances I was singled out by a very peroxide blonde who was a brilliant dancer. She asked me if I could 'jitterbug', a popular dance at the time, but something that I had never done. After half an hour in a nearby room she had showed me all the moves. So, accompanied by enormous amusement from my friends, we entered a dance competition. We managed to make it to the last four and then came second, so we ended with the prize of a well-stocked Christmas hamper. Then I met a lady called Ruby and we started going out together. She was great company and very attractive.

  But learning to fly was the reason I had joined the navy and I would have been happy to be here, Ruby or no Ruby, despite the fact that the airfield itself was not particularly attractive. It was part of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff, whose massive mobile crane was visible from all over Belfast. Most of the base had been built on land reclaimed from Belfast Lough and it had a surface of hard-packed cinders. In winter a cold, bitter wind blew off the water, cuttin
g through anything that I was wearing. I was being taught to fly in an aircraft called the Miles Magister, which was a single-engined monoplane with two open cockpits, one for the pupil, the other for the instructor. To start the engines we had to turn them over, swinging the propellers by hand to circulate the lubrication oil and forcing the petrol mixture into the cylinders, and this could be very difficult on a cold morning with everything covered in thick white frost.

  There was quite a lot of classroom instruction, as well as practice take-offs and landings with the instructor. The Magister was a modern aeroplane, having been designed in 1937 as a purpose-built trainer for the RAF, so it was a very good plane to learn on, fun to fly and with none of the vices common to more high-performance planes that could take the inexperienced pilot by surprise. I learned a lot of my basic acrobatic skills in it.

  I made good progress and thoroughly enjoyed flying. There was something absolutely unique about the sense of freedom that I experienced, the thrill of soaring high above the ground. On the practice flights one could see right over Belfast to the hills beyond. Looking down, I could see the shipyard, now full of warships under construction, one of them a big aircraft carrier that I was later to serve on, although at the time I had no idea what it was. Flying is exhilarating, and I have never lost that sense of joy I felt as the plane became airborne, kept aloft by nothing more than the rush of air over the wings. Other feelings could quickly take over, however, when I was flying off a carrier on an operation. But that was to come later; for now I couldn't wish for anything better.