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Round The World with The RNVR (1940-1946) Ch.2

After three months, we were recalled to the UK to take on the job of escorting fast tankers to the West Indies, 16 knots all the way. This was in '43. But the very first one was another disaster, because we lost five ships in one night when west bound off the Canary Islands. It was a terrible night of fire and explosions, and once again the U-boats got it all their own way. One big tanker survived with a hole in it's side so big that a boat could be rowed into it, and we were detached to escort her to the American Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in Western Cuba, while the convoy steamed on to Curacao. The tanker could still do 8 knots in spite of the hole, and we had a wonderful cruise through the Sargasso Sea, with clumps of weed stretching to the horizon for a day or two on end - and with a fry of flying fish on the decks every morning. We did a fantastic trip up a river near Guantanamo. Just about the whole wardroom piled into the motor boat, and off we went, every man armed with a rifle, and with a crate of beer being towed along behind to keep it cool. We overlooked the fact that the water temperature was in the 80's, and most of the beer fizzed into the river when we opened the bottles. Why the rifles? Well, we were on an alligator hunt! We never saw one. Took pot shots at some distant pelicans, like schoolboys on an outing, and returned empty-handed but extremely cheerful.

Wilhelmstadt is in a lagoon in Curacao, very colourful and with a marvellous swimming beach. But soon we were on our way to Aruba to pick up the homeward convoy. And I think that was my last voyage in EXE. I left her in the Clyde in the late summer of '43. (Come to think of it, I must have done some more Atlantic convoys in her to take me through to the time I left in about August. Don't remember now.) Anyway my next appointment was to another frigate, AVON, built in Bristol and now 'working up' at Tobermory. She was almost identical to EXE, except that she had no minesweeping gear and no huge winch on the quarter deck, but she had a Hedgehog on the fo'c'sle. I had been hurriedly appointed, I discovered, because two executive officers had blotted their copybooks and been dismissed by Monkey Stevenson, and I was one of the 'experienced' replacements. There were some very agreeable chaps aboard, with an RNR Lt. Commander in command, and a VR No.1. We had a marvellous skylark the night before we left. A crowd of us had dinner ashore in the Western Isles Hotel, and who should also be there later on but Monkey Stevenson and his son, who was a Lt. Colonel in a cavalry regiment, tanks, I suppose. We got him drunk, and one of our chaps crept under the table and unscrewed his spurs. We kept one spur, and the other one was 'won' from us by an officer from our chummy ship, TAY. Our first trip was to Gibraltar, and first thing on arrival we got a dockyard matey to weld the spur to the wing of the bridge. We heard later that there were awful repercussions at Tobermory. Shore leave for officers was forbidden for a time, and the hotel was out of bounds to everyone, perhaps for the rest of the war!

Round about November '43, I think we did only one convoy trip before being sent east through the Med. We had a couple of interesting weeks in Alexandria, then it was south through the Suez to Aden, where we were based for three months, convoying in the Bay of Bengal. The Japs were still active there, because we once had to make a 24-hour dash to pick up more than 100 survivors from a tinfished Norwegian freighter which had been carrying some New Zealanders home. I still have the boat's compass from one of her lifeboats. Presently we moved to Bombay, and were entering the harbour there one day when there was the most God-awful explosion ashore. We were about 4 miles from it, and yet when the blast hit us everyone threw himself flat. It was the famous Bombay ammunition ship explosion, which devastated a dock, sank 11 freighters, and killed 3,000 people, including the whole of the Bombay fire brigade which had been attending the ship fire. Naturally it didn't make the news at the time, but a book has been written about it since. Thousands of native boats, all loaded with cotton and moored in trots were set on fire by incendiary explosives, and as they burned through their moorings they came drifting down river on the tide, sinking as they came. It was an amazing sight, especially as night fell and the unending stream of burning cotton drifted past us. Our stokers had a helluva time in the next two days trying to clear out condenser inlets of blackened cotton. But then we left on a very pleasant cruise across the Equator to Kilindini (Mombasa), though it wasn't so nice there in sticky monsoon weather. I can't remember why we went to Cochin in south-east India, but we did, and then eventually to Colombo where we were based for about a year, operating north towards Calcutta and east to Burma. I think I was in Colombo when we got word of the D-Day invasion of France. We did a big refit in Colombo and idled an awful lot of the time away. Went on leave twice to a tea plantation and once to the Diyatalawah Rest Camp in the hills. All of these leaves were idyllic, and I always had the ship's doctor with me. He made very strict rules about avoiding catching dysentery, and the whole ship's company avoided that successfully -excepting only for the doctor himself! I don't know why he was unlucky, because he was always very careful, but he took it badly, and when it returned twice more, that was blighty and he was sent home.

Early in '45 we were ordered to leave the East Indies Fleet and join the British Pacific Fleet, and in company with half a dozen other escorts, we sailed for Australia. First post of call was Darwin, and we stayed a day or two before departing on what was probably my most picturesque cruise of the war, through the Coral Sea and up the coast of Papua to Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, where the Yanks had established a huge base. They threw a reception for us, and there must have been about 5,000 officers at it, squatting under the palm trees at the end of a lagoon, consuming whisky and enormous ham and chicken sandwiches. Our little group had the pleasure of drinking a U.S. Admiral under the table and shipping him, semi-conscious, off in our boat and back to his ship - or at least to some ship! From there we proceeded to Leyte Gulf, in the Philippines, and saw plenty of British ships there bearing the scars of battle damage, notably the aircraft carriers. I knew a flight deck officer aboard the INDOMITABLE, and went aboard to have a close look. At least two suicide planes had crashed on her deck at that time, but she had an armoured deck and so fared much better than some of the Yankee carriers did.

We became one of the escorts of the Fleet Train, a new concept in which 20 to 30 big storeships and oilers formed into a convoy which steamed towards Japan and remained at sea for months on end, for as long as their stores lasted, I suppose, or until they were relieved by fresh storeships. The fighting ships made forays towards Japan, then fell back on the convoy to replenish their supplies, being saved the long haul to the Philippines. I suppose it was a Yankee notion of efficiency maximised, but it meant long and wearing months at sea for everyone. We steamed two or three hundred miles north at a time, then turned and reversed the course every second day, varying it just enough to avoid being seen twice in the same place. We did this for three whole months on end, never getting within about a thousand miles of land in all that time! We were somewhere south of Japan when VE Day came, and I remember celebrating with the skipper on the midnight watch, the only time I ever had a drink at sea except as a rum-swilling rating.

It was a long time after that that we were relieved and sent to Brisbane for a refit. (Come to think of it, I believe we went there from Darwin, months previously, for on our return from Japanese waters we had plenty of contacts.) We were in Brisbane on VJ Day, and that was a long, riotous day. We had engine troubles and were months in Brisbane. I had two spells of leave, one with a family in Toowomba, and another on a ranch in Mitchell, which is in desolate sheep country 700 miles west of Brisbane. A ghost land of ring-barked trees, all dead, and bare, red soil. God knows what the sheep lived on -- and yet the rancher had 10,000 of them, each one at that time worth ten bob for carcass and ten bob for fleece. In our terms that was a fortune. His nearest neighbour was 40 miles away, and the rail head 80 miles away.

Presently I wangled a month's training course in Sydney and flew off there to find a billet in the Officers' Club at King's Cross. Had lots of free time, so explored Sydney pretty thoroughly, though it was the Australian winter and I couldn't make the most of the beaches. Back in Brisbane, our No. 1 got his half stripe and was appointed to another ship, and I took over as No. 1. We were now to be sent home (November '45) so we sailed for Sydney and spent a week or two there picking up some officers due for demob and leaving some of our youngsters behind. Then it was out through the Heads and south for the Australian Bight, with no blackout and all steaming lights switched on and a full peacetime routine. We made Freemantle in a week, and I had radioed ahead for a dental appointment. It was a lucky chance for the Toothy's surgery was in Perth, and I spent all day in that beautiful city. Then north to Colombo, Aden and the Canal, where we created a record by being the only ship ever to be so badly blown off course that we actually turned around in the Canal and had to return to Suez! The French pilot seemed to lose control completely. We thought we'd be home for Christmas, but after stops at Port Said and Gibraltar it was the 27th. till we sailed into Devonport, more than 2 years after leaving the UK.

I was due for demob, but the Admiralty had lost my papers. I went to London to stir things up and found I was supposed to have volunteered to take command of a big landing craft due to be returned to the USA and to have agreed to spend six months on this kind of work! It took nearly three months to get things sorted out, during which I travelled no less than seven times between Devonport and Dundee. I was a free man at last on 8 March 1946, wearing the only Trilby I've ever owned.

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