大象传媒

Raffle tickets are irksome things. No matter what their colour, they are usually unlooked for purchases, intended to buttress the income of remote organisations scarcely known to us. If not later destroyed on the occasion of their purchase, they lurk in the corner of some pocket to re-emerge into the light of day, a forlorn reminder of a lost cause. Except, for some, that is. Sometimes, as I look at their three digit numbers, they prompt memories of major landing craft and their crews long since swallowed up by time. There is 148, a Landing Craft Gun medium, the best sea-boat I was ever in, or 292, an Infantry landing craft sailed back to America, or 979 a battered Tank landing craft of the 22nd flotilla, 0r 532, or 789, or 465 or several others. They have been cast aside, and scrapped, like the raffle tickets which bring them to mind, from time to time.

I joined the Royal Navy, in October 1943, my call-up having been deferred so that I might sit the London Matriculation examination. The importance of this lay in the weight it attached to my educational claims, and in the chronology of the war, for I was commissioned in June 1944, a few days before D-Day. Otherwise, had I been viewed as an ordinary recruit, I would have later served as a D.E.M.S. gunner aboard a merchant ship, quite a hazardous occupation to follow, though the 鈥楿鈥�.boat war, by this time, was being won. But, on joining H.M.S. Glendower, whether on the strength of the matriculation qualification, or on the evidence from the battery of psychological tests to which we were subjected, I was selected as a C.W. candidate. Thence forward I was trained as a prospective officer, and subjected to an incessant winnowing process, until I was commissioned, in early June 1944. There was then an assumption, taking the Dieppe raid as a precedent, that there would be many casualties amongst landing craft personnel, so that many people on my course found themselves directed into Combined Operations as replacements, but in the event, were not rushed into the hazards of the war.

It must be sixteen years ago that my wife, Margaret and I decided to take a cruise on the Rhine and the Moselle. It proved to be an interesting and enjoyable experience. All the delights and beauties offered by the brochure duly appeared: there were the half-timbered, clean little towns, the Gothic castles perched high above the river, and the serried lines of vines clothing hillsides of improbable steepness. But there were times when, as passengers we had nothing to do but look about us, and my attention was taken up with observation of the way the vessel was handled as she approached our next destination. It soon became clear that the captain of the ship was autonomous, in a far more comprehensive way than I was accustomed to. He gave no orders, but conned the ship from where he stood, perhaps moving to the wings of the bridge for better observation, but managing everything via a little tablet in his hand, which he stabbed with a forefinger, to alter engine speed or change course. It seemed distinctly off-side, when I discovered that the vessel had side-thrusters. In my view, though it was soothing for the passengers, this took all the sport out of the situation. Other disillusionments have followed. More recently, we sailed, at night, from Portsmouth to visit the D-Day beaches. All the starboard side of the fairway was a glow of brilliant green light, and the port side was an equally garish red. It did not seem decent. All the intricacy of fixing the position of the ship by night, using triangulation, had vanished. No more bearings, no more variation, no more deviation, no need to consult the ship鈥檚 compass card, it was all plain sailing. I was, perhaps foolishly, hoping to revisit the skills of proceeding in unbroken darkness, by reading the variable light flashes from buoys, some occulting, some coloured, which formerly marked the course to Normandy.

Obsolescence must always be a factor in war. The 鈥楥鈥� and 鈥楧鈥� class cruisers of the Royal Navy were certainly long past their best when war broke out in 1939. Faith, Hope and Charity, the Gladiator aircraft flown in the defence of Malta had it, as did the Swordfish aircraft flown against the Bismarck Even H.M.S. Hood, for long the icon of British naval supremacy, carried it into her last fatal contest with that powerful German adversary. It is a tribute to the professionalism of the men manning these aircraft and ships that they achieved what they did. In one respect, all the second World-War ships were alike, for they all ran on human dialogue. Orders came down the copper voice-pipe from the bridge, and were repeated by the quartermaster manning the wheel
Bridge: Starboard fifteen
Quartermaster : Starboard fifteen, sir. Fifteen degrees of starboard wheel on
Bridge: Amidships
Quartermaster : Wheel鈥檚 amidships. Course 270
Bridge :Steer 270.

Day and night , there were little exchanges of this kind, and these constituted the fabric of life at sea. Only extreme examples began to illustrate that it was to become an inadequate means of proceeding. The lifebuoy sentry, aboard H.M.S. Diomede, for example, was stationed right aft on the quarter deck. If he wished to report an aircraft sighting to the bridge, he had to wind up an antique telephone, and launch into this dialogue:
Lifebuoy sentry: Lifebuoy sentry, forebridge
Midshipman of the watch: Forebridge,lifebuoy sentry
Lifebuoy sentry: Aircraft bearing green 135, angle of sight 10

This information would then be repeated by the recipient, to ensure its accuracy, during which time the aircraft and its torpedo were approaching at 300m.p.h, so that, by the time that the process was complete, the aircraft was wheeling away over the masthead. The electronic pinging of an escort鈥檚 A.S.D.I.C. was the harbinger of the new norm of communication which warfare would require, and it would sweep away, not merely the dialogue, but the steering wheel and the engine room telegraphs into the bargain. No exocet was yet on hand, but already there were racks of rockets mounted on tank landing craft which could devastate large stretches of beach. Nevertheless, obsolescence seemed to set in very quickly amongst major landing craft. The thirteenth flotilla of L.C.T. were all new craft, mk.3*, with the exception of L.C.T 465. They were completed in the Spring of 1945. They were intended to take part in the recapture of Singapore, but never sailed beyond Falmouth before the Americans dropped the Bomb. For some weeks, several of them pottered about the Devon coast, delivering prefabs, and then six of them were sold to the Dutch, to help fill in the dykes breached during the German invasion, they themselves being sunk in the gaps. The remaining six paid off in Appledore, and were presumably scrapped. It is almost as though D-Day , which called landing craft into existence, marked the end of their useful life Once the armies, landed on the beaches, had captured deepwater ports, the life of landing craft became too expensive to maintain. Odd vessels survived to be employed in the Arabian Gulf, but the future seemed to lie with L.S.T and larger vessels

The C.W. course, unlike that held at Lochailort, was not intended to prepare officers solely for Combined Operations. Thus from H.M.S. King Alfred one might go on to serve in many types of naval vessel, from the largest to the smallest. Thus we were all trained in seamanship, ship-handling, navigation, signals, gunnery, power-of command, anchors and cables, ship and aircraft-recognition, pilotage and much more. It was a very varied and intensive diet for young men, who, six months earlier, would have been ignorant in all these fields. It was also a measure of the country鈥檚 desperate need, that the command of naval vessels could be put into the hands of such people. In large ships, it was unlikely to occur, but not so in minor vessels. Irony and factual accuracy are beautifully combined in the classification 鈥楳en dressed as seamen.鈥�

What was true of the men was equally true of the ships. At the time of Dunkirk, there was no such thing as a major landing craft. By June, 1944, there were hundreds of landing craft, large and small. Well established naval officers, at that time, were unused to the idea of running ships ashore, other than in an emergency. To run vessels ashore repeatedly would have seemed like an invitation to commit professional suicide. With conventional ocean-going vessels, such it probably would have been, and so the new landing craft had to have some radically different characteristics from ocean-going vessels. Firstly, they were flat-bottomed, to enable them to slide up a beach, and to remain upright if they 鈥榙ried-out鈥� there. Hence, from the song, 鈥楾his is my story鈥�,( a parody of the well-known hymn tune )
This is my story, this is my song,
I鈥檝e been in this navy, too bloody long,
Roll on the Nelson,Rodney, Renown,
These flat-bottomed bastards are getting me down鈥�
( The last line is to be spat out in embittered suffering)

Secondly, they had to be of shallow draught, so that troops did not have to swim for the shore. This, in turn, meant that the landing craft鈥檚 grip on the water was superficial. This could be a comfort, in that they were unlikely to be torpedoed, the conventional torpedo running some nine feet below the surface. The bad news was that landing craft were very responsive to wind and tidal currents, so that ship-handling was always interesting, if not positively exciting Troon harbour, for instance, had a tidal stream running across the harbour entrance, and a stone,light-bearing bollard within the harbour鈥檚 mouth. A speedy approach was therefore needful, but if the angle of approach was wrong, or insufficient allowance had been made for the wind, the landing craft would enter the harbour in-off the stone bollard , and if way was not taken off her pretty smartly, she might proceed to inflict damage on newly -built frigates fitting out against an adjacent harbour wall.( A tank landing craft, her great steel door poised at a deadly angle, would be a prime vessel for this task.) There was indeed an apocryphal story that a frigate had been launched by a tank landing craft under these circumstances.

Increasingly, as the war progressed, the Germans became anxious to identify where any sea-borne attack upon them might be mounted. Would it be the Pas de Calais, or Normandy, or perhaps even Norway, or even the South of France ? They were in the classic stance of a central military power opposed by sea-power, as described by A.T. Mahan. The whole coast of Europe was vulnerable and, accordingly, needed to be defended. The raid on Dieppe, in 1942, gave some indication of intent, but the capture of tank landing craft in that adventure gave the Germans some logistics to work on. They would then calculate that a tank landing craft had a range of about three thousand miles before it required refuelling. Some potential allied targets might then suggest themselves, given known Allied bases. Such speculations were aided by Allied intelligence units.

The three thousand mile range of the tank landing craft depended on two five-hundred horsepower engines, which gave a maximum speed of ten knots. They were presided over by a petty-officer motor mechanic, two stokers and a wireman. This team were responsible for everything mechanical and electrical on board, including the capstan and the door winches. At sea, their place of work was located just forward of a bulkhead separating the messdeck from the engine-room There the sea-sick mechanic could sit between his two noisy engines, being sick into a bucket between his knees, whilst he awaited any change in orders from the bridge

However, given that the Allies were going to land on open beaches, not all beaches were equally suitable. There were quick-sands, beaches in which runnels featured, largely rock covered beaches, or beaches which sloped at inhospitable angles. There were British beaches enough which shared these and other unfortunate characteristics., some of which tank landing craft discovered for themselves. I have seen a Rear-Admiral leave a tank landing craft via a ladder, from her fo鈥檆鈥檚le to the beach, when the vessel steadfastly refused to shift. There was the apocryphal story of the infantry subaltern, drawing his revolver and commanding his men, 鈥淔ollow me!鈥� but all that they could see of him was his cap, marking the spot where he had vanished into a beach runnel, a little inshore from the door. Or the tank landing craft, fitted with ramp-extensions, to save tanks from the embarrassment of stalling as they hit the beach. She lowered her door , and a ramp extension was pierced by an angle-iron obstruction, so that the craft was thereby hooked like a fish She could not escape. Her C.O., feeling vulnerable and exposed, ignited a smoke-float to hide his vessel. The Germans, thinking the damned Englanders were up to fresh devilment, threw everything they could in his direction. All the upper deck was peppered with shrapnel, and an 88mm. shell entered the engine room, on the port side, shot across in front of the petrified wireman, and vanished out of the starboard side of the vessel. He, terrified, tried to burst out on to the open deck, and was only restrained when four or five of his shipmates tackled him.( Incidentally, the tank landing craft was the only vessel in the Second World War which had need of the antique drill, 鈥� Repel boarders !鈥� Were she high and dry on an enemy beach, apart from the oerlikons on the wings of the bridge, the crew of a tank landing craft had one Lanchester, two revolvers, and a range of brooms and squeegees to keep the Wermacht at bay.) Nothing looked more forlorn than the tank landing craft, burning on the beach at Dieppe, her lowered door exposing all her vitals to enemy fire

In 1918, at the close of the War to End All Wars, when men鈥檚 minds were looking towards a better future, the Education Act of that year proposed an extension to elementary education through Day Continuation schools. H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, in justifying his proposal, said these words: When you get Conscription, when you get a state of affairs under which the poor are asked to pour out their blood and to be mulcted in the high cost of living for large international policies, then every just mind begins to realise that the boundaries of citizenship are not to be determined by wealth, and that same logic which leads us to desire an extension of the franchise points also to an extension of education.鈥� In short, the industrial workers were entitled to be considered primarily as citizens, rather than the hands of this or that master. So, after arguing for education as an absolute good, rather than something instrumental to something else, the economy, for example, he said these prophetic words : W e cannot flatter ourselves with the comfortable notion, I wish we could, that after this War the fierce rivalry of Germany will disappear and hostile feelings altogether die down. That in itself constitutes a reason for giving the youth of our country the best preparation which ingenuity can suggest鈥� This might have been common ground in Parliament, but, if this was an educational aim in the twenties and thirties, no one spelled it out to those being educated in the new Secondary Schools, not even when the Hindenberg loomed out of the mist over our P.E. lesson. Nevertheless, Roy Wenham died off Stavanger, when the destroyer, H.M.S. Afridi was lost, Frank Shaw was killed in the Rhine crossing, and Harry Lowndes badly injured when the frigate, H.M.S. Halstead was torpedoed off the Normandy beaches. To-day, half the population can scarcely be bothered to vote. The War to End All Wars has been succeeded by at least two others, one of very doubtful standing, and, if the politicians get their way, we shall abandon insular Britishness for a cool European outlook. The whirligig of time, and political spin may yet prove too much for a once proud, sea-going people

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.