大象传媒

After nearly two years in the Mediterranean Fleet as a Midshipman, I was appointed to training courses in Portsmouth for promotion to Sub Lieutenant. The courses covered Navigation, Torpedo and Anti-Submarine, Signals, Submarine and Gunnery and should have lasted over a year but, in August 1939, with the threat of war looming, the courses were stopped, the reserve fleet was mobilised and we were sent to sea as Acting Sub Lieutenants.

On 22 August 1939, I was appointed to HMS Antelope as Navigating Officer under the command of Lieutenant Commander R T (Dick) White and we were at Portland when we received the message: 'Special telegram TOTAL GERMANY', which meant we were at war with Germany. I have to admit that those of us who had just completed all our basic training as naval officers would have been very disappointed had war not been declared.

Channel convoys

We took the first channel convoy from Dover into the Atlantic. Unlike the disciplined formations of later convoys with proper intercommunication facilities, the first convoys were just a rabble of ships steering in the same direction with us, while we, with our high speed, careered about protecting them, like a sheepdog with its flock. We rigged up a batch of messdeck loudspeakers and amplifiers in order to talk to the ships!

On one of the first Channel convoys, we dropped so many depth charges on targets detected by our Asdic equipment, which might have been U-Boats but which were actually wrecks on the seabed, we had to proceed to Portsmouth to restock. Off Beachy Head, we ran into thick fog, which persisted all the way.

I was on my metal as the Navigator to find our way into Spithead. Looking back, I am amazed that the Captain was prepared to rely on his 20-year-old Acting Sub Lieutenant to give the courses required to get there. One had to calculate the effect of the speed and direction of the tides on our own course and speed. Anyway, I was dead lucky for a little while after giving the course to turn into Spithead - the Nab Tower rose out of the fog some 200 yards fine on our starboard bow!

Atlantic convoys

There then followed many months of appalling boredom as we escorted convoy after convoy mostly from the Clyde halfway across the Atlantic to pick up incoming convoys from the USA and escort them to the Clyde.

The Atlantic is over 3,000 miles across. Half way is over 1,500 nautical miles. Many convoys went at six knots and so it took about ten days to get them half way across the Atlantic and another ten days to bring the UK-bound one home. Apart from boredom, there was exhaustion. The Navy had expanded so fast as war threatened that there were only a bare minimum of qualified officers in each ship and, for several months, we had to keep watch four hours on, four hours off. After 20 days at sea, it became exceedingly difficult to keep awake on watch!

U-Boat attack and a DSC

At first, we almost longed for the excitement of a U-Boat attack to relieve the boredom, but after seeing a few merchant ships sunk and many lives lost, the U-Boat soon became the dreaded, hated enemy. If we picked up an Asdic echo on a suspected U-Boat, it was my job to plot the U-Boat's course and speed. I had to estimate where it might be should contact be lost, then devise a search pattern to find it again.

On 9 February 1940, we picked up such an echo, which was confirmed as a likely U-Boat, and we attacked with depth charges. There then followed a cat and mouse skirmish that lasted several hours, during which we actually picked up a second target. We attacked repeatedly. The U-Boats cleverly took avoiding action and we lost contact. With an appropriate search pattern, we later re-established contact and continued attacking.

Eventually, one U-Boat was forced to the surface by further depth charges. As she broke surface, there was a huge cheer from the upper deck of Antelope to be quickly stifled as the U-Boat manned her gun and started firing at us. We swiftly replied and her crew abandoned ship and the U-Boat sank. We picked up most of the crew and made the officers honorary members of the wardroom mess. I lent one some clothing but I received little thanks. They thought we were mad. As the war became total and cruel, we treated future prisoners very differently!

Later we learnt that the second U-Boat, which we thought we had sunk, had escaped. We also learnt that the one we did sink was the U-41 and that it had torpedoed a tanker of 8090 tons and a steamer of 9,374 tons in convoy OA84.

For my part in this battle of wits, I (among others) was awarded the DSC but the awards also recognised the huge strain we were under during those early war days. The Captain was awarded the DSO.

A final note on navigation aids

In these days of satellite navigation and other radio navigation aids - which enable one to fix the position of one's ship to within a few hundred yards without sight of land or stars - it is worth recalling that we had no such aids at the beginning of the war. We did not even have radar. In fact, apart from occasional help from a rather inaccurate medium frequency direction finder and an echo sounder, one relied entirely on fixes from compass bearings of objects ashore such as lighthouses, church spires etc.

When out of sight of land, one relied solely on one's sextant, taking star sights (ie: the altitude of identified stars or planets or the sun) and linking these with the time from one's chronometer. I suspect that we had far more satisfaction from balancing in the corner of the bridge and taking star sights with a sextant as the ship rolled and pitched and working out our position than the modern navigator, who just reads off his position from a few dials on his satellite navigation receiver!

Admittedly, it may be far more accurate and there would be no question of missing a rendezvous with an incoming convoy in the middle of the Atlantic, which I did once because of foul weather and no sight of stars or sun for several days.

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