I Sank The Bismarck (5 page)

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.

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, cutting 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.

The time for my solo flight came quickly. My instructor,
Flight Sergeant Jack, thought I was ready and I remember a
sense of mixed pride and nervousness as he climbed out of his
cockpit and sent me off on my own for the
first time. I took
off to do two circuits of the aerodrome before making a final
approach and landing. As I flew around I was so happy to
have at last achieved my ambition that I could not contain my
joy and was singing the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at
the top of my voice. I still can't believe it, but I did – I had
such a great sense of achievement. I felt that I had accomplished
more in the few months since I started my training
than in the whole of my early life.

I also felt that deciding to join the navy had been the right
thing to do. The navy was getting some excellent publicity as
a result of some daring exploits. One of the German pocket
battleships,
Admiral Graf Spee,
had been tracked down and
there had been a major battle.
Graf Spee
had sailed for several
months around Africa, in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans,
and had sunk nine British merchant ships, one of the most
well known being
Doric Star,
run by the Blue Star Line. The
German warship was finally spotted in the South Atlantic by
three British cruisers,
Ajax,
Achilles
and
Exeter,
and they
opened fire. The British ships were hit, but kept up the chase
and
Graf Spee
sought sanctuary in the harbour at Montevideo
in Uruguay. She too had been hit and suffered damage. After
three days she was scuttled in the harbour and the crew
interned. The British ships were badly damaged and there
were severe casualties on board, but
Graf Spee
was better
armoured and had much more powerful guns than our
cruisers, so it was seen as a major victory, with the British
taking on a superior enemy and winning the day.

The aftermath was even more exciting. The captain of
Graf
Spee
had behaved very decently, usually allowing the crews of
the merchantmen that he intercepted to man the lifeboats
before he fired on their ships. Some of them, however, had
been taken prisoner and put on to
Graf Spee
's supply ship,
Altmark.
Some weeks after
Graf Spee
was scuttled,
Altmark
was spotted in Norwegian territorial waters, heading south to
a German port in the Baltic. The crew of
HMS
Cossack,
a
destroyer, tried to board
Altmark
but were stopped by a
Norwegian gunboat, which was attempting to enforce
Norwegian neutrality. The captain of
Cossack
knew there
were prisoners on board, despite what
Altmark
and the
Norwegian gunboat captain said, and he ordered his gun
crews to open fire if the Norwegians threatened his ship.
During this stand-off the captain of
Altmark
tried to ram
Cossack,
but instead his ship ran aground.
Cossack
sent over
a boarding party to find that there were three hundred British
sailors held prisoner in the hold. They were freed and brought
back to Britain. The papers were full of the story, naturally,
but the icing on the cake as far as we were concerned was the
report that, as they broke into the hold where the prisoners
had been kept for weeks, the boarding party shouted out, 'It's
OK, lads, the navy's here!'