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HMS Bonaventure

The operation for which the X-craft were being prepared was now deemed of such urgency that Alecto was to take us divers immediately up north to the secret loch where the X-craft were based. That, we presumed, would enable us to practise cutting the midgets through the nets, and getting to know our way around on these compact vessels so as to make ourselves more generally useful. We looked forward also to getting to know the other three members of the crew of the X-craft to which we were to be assigned.

Fortunately the storm had blown itself out, and we had a less disturbed trip north, even though Alecto continued to respond to the faintest swell. Two nights and a day of steaming brought us into the bight of Eddrachillis bay - though then I didn't know its name - and approaching Port HHZ. I could see that this was another kind of landscape we were nearing, quite unrelated to the smooth green slopes at the head of Loch Corrie, or the high rounded shoulders of hills edging the wider waters of Loch Linnhe. Here in the far north-west the headlands were gnarled with rock, ancient and menacing; they promised complex, treacherous shapes underwater. Inland, the patches of grass looked yellow and sparse; outcrops of grey stone speckled the landscape. This was a bleak coast worn down by wind and weather, and savaged by the power of the great Atlantic swell, whose massive lift we could feel below us even on this calm summer's morning, raising and lowering the slim grace of Alecto as if she weighed no more than a cockle-shell.

We made for the most inhospitable corner of the bay, up in its north-east corner. Not until we were within a couple of hundred yards of a craggy, riven hillside did Alecto swing rapidly to starboard and set her bows into a loch entrance that quite suddenly revealed itself. As we rounded the point to the south of us, the extent of this gully into the land became apparent; for two miles, three perhaps, the loch extended inland. On its southern shore, tucked away near a cliff, a vessel lay at anchor, as well as moored to the shore, her bows pointing seaward: HMS Bonaventure. The name seemed to harbinger well.

This depot ship was much larger than Tites: that we could see at once. Her freeboard looked about twice as high, and the cranes at the well-decks were much more stoutly built. Tites was black, having kept her more ancient merchant ship colours from before the war; this depot ship was a light grey, quite in keeping with many other units of the fleet. By now we were abreast of the larger vessel. As Alecto swung through a half circle, and moved closer to the big depot ship, we could see several X-craft moored to the boom protruding to starboard.

The six of us who had volunteered for service as divers on X-craft transferred to Bonaventure almost at once. The change in atmosphere from Tites was immediately palpable. In place of homely warmth, with much easy boyish buffoonery in the wardroom, Bonaventure was severe and purposeful, bustling with activity and tense with deadlines to be met, virtually from hour to hour. The working-up schedule for the operation was already tight, yet constant revisions had to be made as one or other mechanical fault would show and have to be put right, or some supply material fail to arrive on time, necessitating yet another change of plan.

To begin with, we divers were at a loose end. This was partly because provision had not originally been made for practice at cutting through nets; we were therefore yet another item to be fitted somehow into the busy schedule. But it was also to give the operational commanders of the X-craft the opportunity of taking our measure individually, and thus of making their choices as to which diver each was prepared to have in his crew. In the confined space of a midget submarine, it was important to have men ready and able to cooperate with each other. The diver would be the new man, added at the eleventh hour to a crew of three who had already got used to working together. So the commanding officers were eyeing us and appraising us from time to time, probably a lot more closely and critically than we imagined.

Geordie and I had come on board the Bonaventure in a truculent frame of mind. We were primarily charioteers, but as divers had skills that the X-craft couldn't do without. We may even have thought
it was we who were making the operation possible: such a conclusion would have in any case been in keeping with my mood on the first day. At lunch, and perhaps at dinner too, the charioteers took to sitting in a group of six, noticeably separate from the X-craft people; there was a distinct feeling of us and them.

I remember throwing off remarks loudly to Geordie on the second day, as he sat beside me, about those X-craft types, and making myself obnoxious. I think I felt disturbed by the change from being the centre of attention on Tites to simply one of a much larger team, and a somewhat unwelcome late arrival at that. Certainly I remember no warmth towards us from the X-craft crews, when we arrived. So if they were going to be stand-offish, we could be hostile in return. This led to a sharp exchange I had in the wardroom at lunch with an RN lieutenant who took exception to the style of my remarks, and snubbed me in public. I learned afterwards that this was one of the X-craft commanders, Lieutenant Godfrey Place. I hadn't experienced this kind of nastiness since my training at King Alfred, and I found it particularly unwelcome in the context of an imminent hazardous operation.

But we still didn't know what it was we were going to do, what the operation actually entailed specifically, not with any precision. Of course the senior staff knew, and we believed the X-craft commanders had also been let into the secret, but even they would not admit to anything. The view was taken that the strictest security was to be maintained. And as people were still moving in and out of the base, and even going into Inverness and beyond on duty, no information was given other than that an operation was due in September, and that nets were expected; what kind of nets was not made clear, however, to our discomfiture. For if they were anti-torpedo nets, we would not be able to cut the midget through them; these were normally made of rings of wire a few inches in diameter, looped together like chain-mail. This doubt about our utility to the operation remained with us during the working-up period and presumably was in the minds of the other crew members as well.

I was certain that Godfrey Place wouldn’t want to have me as his diver; nor would I have wished to be enclosed in the confined space of an X-craft with him. It took me some time to find out who were the operational skippers for the trip, because each X-craft had a passage crew as well as an action crew. That meant twelve commanding officers, as well as a dozen second lieutenants, drawn from a wide variety of sources, including several from Australia and South Africa. The action CO who attracted me most strongly was a British RNVR lieutenant called Henty-Creer; he had a twinkle in his eye and wore his cap at a jaunty angle that seemed to me to fit the character of a hazardous undertaking. More and more I felt drawn to him, and hoped that he would pick me.

Australians

We had to wait, however. The commanding officers, both passage and action, were busily engaged in getting their craft ready, and tasks kept appearing that required the X-craft to be hoisted inboard, at a time when there were only limited berths on deck for this to be carried out. So I felt they were jostling for priority in the queue, and had little desire to bother about choosing their divers; that could wait till later. As the days, indeed weeks, went by without our having the opportunity of practising on the nets, I became more and more uneasy.

There was one officer amongst the X-craft crews whom I recognised, however: Jack Marsden, an Australian who had been with me in the same training division at King Alfred. In fact I remembered him from earlier, in those infamous barrack buildings at Portsmouth, for it was he who had talked about his homeland to a group of sailors, extolling its opportunities, and saying that after the war men like us were needed in Australia needed to swell its population. So I must have made contact with Jack, and perhaps shared a beer at the bar, and he may have gone to his CO, another Australian called Buck McFarlane, and talked to him about me. But I think it was several weeks after our arrival before Buck came up to me, again in the bar, and asked me straight out if I'd like to be their diver. I was already inclined to favour Australians in general; Buck had a keen and sunny eye; so I accepted at once.
'You know Jack, don't you?' Buck asked.
'Yes, from KA.'
'But you'll not have met the ERA yet, Jock Murray. He's down in X8 now, doing a bit of maintenance. Like to come down? That way you can meet him and have a look at the craft as well.' 'Right.' I was keen to have a proper look inside an X-craft. So far I had had little more than a glimpse. Now I would be seeing the X-craft of which I formed one of the crew.

We clambered along the boom and down a jacob's ladder to the craft. Again I noticed how she yielded to our weights as we stepped aboard. Buck led the way down, leaving the main hatch open. As I crouched down in the wet-and-dry I heard hammering from aft. Buck was standing in the centre of the control room, with his head up in the periscope dome. He ducked down to see me.
'Well, here she is. Squat down there by the wet-and-dry and I'll take you through the controls. You know the levers for the main hatch and flooding already.'
'And the equaliser valve. But what is there forward of the wet-and-dry?'
'We'll take that last. Now here's the helm.' Buck slipped into the seat and worked the wheel. I twisted my head round and saw the compass.
'Does it work off a giro?'
'Too right it does. Magnetic would go haywire near any other ship.'
'Yeah ...We had that trouble on chariots.' I was already using the past tense. For on jeeps, the compass had frequently swung wildly during the last fifty yards of an underwater approach.
I looked aft. ‘She seems full of pipes and cables and levers ... What have I got to avoid touching?'
Buck thought for a moment. 'Not a lot. really. The flooding lever in the wet-and-dry - but you know about that. The wheels to turn the charges out - but they're locked anyway.'
'Which are they?'
Buck stepped aft and crouched down again. He was a small man, and could move easily in the confined space. I felt enormous and clumsy. 'Here they are.' He touched two large wheels that looked like old-fashioned lorry steering wheels, one on either side of the hull. 'But there's nothing mounted there.'
'Nothing mounted where?' I had no idea what he was talking about.
Buck turned to look at me, almost as mystified as I was. 'On the saddle tanks. of course ... Jeez - haven't they told you?'
'Told me what?'
'The explosives ... They're carried on the saddle-tanks. one each side.'
'You mean like torpedo warheads?'
Buck laughed. 'They really haven't told you a thing. have they? Well. that's good for security. But as you're the diver. you've got to know. You'll be getting us through the nets...' He turned to me with a pre-occupied look. 'That's what we hope, at least.'
So Buck shared my uncertainty about getting through the nets: I felt relieved.
'No,’ he continued, ‘the explosives are shaped to fit round the tanks. like thick scoops. They make the craft a bit fatter. but echo the general lines.'
'And these wheels are to wind them out?’
'Right. And let them drop to the sea-bed.'
'They don't have to be fastened to the ship's belly with magnets then?'
Buck looked taken aback. 'No, no ... Is that what you do with your warheads?'
‘S³Ü°ù±ð!’
‘No, no. The explosive in the side-charges is made of amatol, and that's so powerful it can lift thousands of tons of water, and anything that's floating up above. The seabed makes all the thrust go upwards, where the water pressure is least.'

A grimy face poked out from a hatchway aft.
'That job's done. Surr.' It was at once clear that Jock Murray came from Glasgow.
'Good on you, Jock. Meet Sub-Lieutenant Hindmarsh. He's our diver.'
'Welcome aboord, Surr.' The face grinned for a brief moment. then resumed its lugubrious expression. In the Navy, engineroom artificers were traditionally expected to be dour and doleful, convinced that the commander and officers of the watch had no regard for the health of the ship's engines, for which each ERA cared with jealous maternal pride. The face disappeared aft again, into what I assumed must be the engineroom; there must be even less space to move around than in the control room, I surmised - rightly, as it turned out.

Buck took a pace aft, and stood up to his full height, his head almost touching the periscope dome. 'Good to have a stretch,' he smiled. His teeth were a dazzling white; with his fair hair, tanned complexion and golden-brown beard, he looked a picture-book mariner.
I moved to try to stand beside him, but only succeeded in straightening my legs. My trunk remained bowed in a caricature of simian posture. 'Too short for me, Sir.' I had caught the sirring from Jock Murray, and regretted having used the formality.
Buck looked slightly embarrassed too. He looked down at the deck, then up into my eyes. 'There's no room for quarterdeck bullshit here,' he announced. 'I'm the skipper, and I give the orders. But it's Jack and Buck between us, and I call the ERA Jock, though he calls me Sir. That feels right to me. But it wouldn't be right for you. So it's Buck and - what do they call you?'
'Lefty is what I get mostly.'
Buck didn't look convinced. 'Odd name, that. Still, if it's yours...'
'How does the periscope work?'
Buck switched on and a thin tube hissed up close to my shoulder.
'Take a look, this way.' He pressed his eyes on the soft rubber housing for a moment, and I copied him, holding the handpieces and swivelling the slim metal shaft this way and that, and trying to focus on the far shore of the loch. The image was small, lacking in detail.
‘It’s the attack periscope. The navigating one is further aft, and sticks out permanently above the casing. But the real works are back here,' Buck asserted, with a note of pride.
'The engines - the motors?' I tried to correct myself.
'Well, yes, both are there of course, just like on the big jobs... But I meant the controls - speed underwater, and depth. Jack sits here while I have the con; Jock Murray's at the helm ... Can you steer a course, hold the helm against the sea?'
'I'd like to try,' I smiled. 'At any rate I can read the compass.'
'Good-O, we might need that. Give Jock a spell, so he could see to the engines while we're on the surface.'
I was studying the dials and levers. 'Feet or fathoms?'
'Feet!' Buck exploded. 'We can't go much below two hundred feet in these craft, Maybe two hundred and fifty at a pinch.' I peeped into the engineroom. Jock was still there, with a spanner and an oily rag.
We left him to it and went up to the wardroom for tea.

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