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Home fires burning

All I can claim to have done during the conflict is to keep the home fires burning, which was a bit tricky to do as half the time there was no coal with which to do it.

The first winter was very cold and the only place to get warm was ‘at the pictures’ so we spent as many an evening there ,as we could afford.

We did not see anything of my brothers for months on end, and we did not know where they were ,as all letters were censored of anything which might give a clue as to their location. One day we returned from the pictures to find brother Harry home and he said he had lit the fire, as he had only got in a few minutes ahead of us.

"Oh crumbs!", said Mum. "The fire was only laid for the sake of appearances, we haven’t got any coal to keep it going.".

It was a Saturday evening and she knew our coalman was likely to be at his usual watering hole at that time so she repaired to ‘The Lord Panmuir’ and enquired for ‘ Arthur.’ who appeared forthwith.

He said he didn’t have any coal at all, but he was not going to have the Navy cold when they did get home, so he would go and have a sweep round his cousin’s yard to see what he could find. He appeared about half an hour later with half a sack on his back, which he had carried quite a distance, so we were very grateful to him.

We always wrote to them both every Wednesday. Although we did not get any letters back from them for ages and then there would be several at a time. Thus it was quite difficult to keep up something a bit entertaining without any feedback.

When they got all these letters in a batch, many of the men in the mess did not get any thing at all, so as letters from a little sister were pretty innocuous, little did I know ,that they were passed all the way round the mess . until once George mentioned that they were all awaiting more chronicles of wartime England.

As the war progressed the system of Airgraphs was developed. They were just single sheet forms obtained at the Post Office and returned to , them where they were all transferred to a little reel of film which could be printed at the destination . Much easier to tansport but it meant that the greetings were pretty basic but quite as much as most people were prepared to cudgell their brains to produce.

The first winter of the war the Coventry was stationed in Sullum Voe in the Shetlands. That was the only place at that time being attacked by air craft.

HMS Coventry was an anti aircraft cruiser and both my brothers were gun layers. They stayed there defending them until shore batteries were established to do the job.

The next action they saw was Norway at Narvik.
I can’t remember the dates, but the Coventry was leading the flotilla out of a fjord, very carefully as they did not have accurate up to date charts of these treacherous waters, when the captain of HMS Effingham signaled that they had a Norweigan aboard who could guide them out so he would take over the lead.

They were guided straight on to rocks and Effingham was lost. The story circulating amongsst the ratings was that the skipper shot him on the spot as he was obviously a Quizling, but we never heard if this was true or not. Such trifles as this did not surface until well after the war, when books started to be written on many aspects of the conflict.

My brother George Sims met an old shipmate on London Bridge Station quite by chance and they got together and formed an Old Hands Association for the Coventry and George collated all the information about every ship of that name from earliest times and then recorded every action they could remember of their Coventry which is now at the bottom of the Med.

She was on escort duty and badly damaged and was slowing up the convoy so much that she was a danger to them, so it was decided to abandon ship and open up everything so she would sink. To everyones surprise the next morning she was still afloat, and someone had to go back and torpedo the old girl, a sad end to a good ship. I think there have been at least two ‘Coventries’ since then, one went down in the Faulklands, complete with a copy of George’s book in the library.

My brothers were transferred to other ships long before this , as a torpedo hit her and took the bows off completely, nevertheless, she limped back to port and had to go to India for a refit so all the experienced gunners were transferred to other ships as things were so very tough in the Med.

Sinking of HMS Auckland off Tobruk 24.6.1941

Brother George (Sims) was at this event. Recently my son found a lot about this action on the internet complete with a picture of the sinking and I find it a bit difficult to fit some of the things in, to what Georte related to me at the time. Unfortuneately George died in 1982 so I cannot ask him. He never said anything about the composition of the force engaged. There was not much about it in London papers.

One evening the lady who lived next door called me and showed me her evening news. There was a tiny bit of two or three lines which said HMS Auckland had been sunk and next of kin had been informed. "That's George's ship isn't it?", she said.

"We havn't been informed… Don't tell Mum" I said and waited in fear and trembling.
Next morning the letter came that he was in hospital in Alexandria and his injuries were not life threatening.

Friends who had seen a Bristol (I think) newspaper reported headline stuff
about an attack by 50 Stukas and 30 Messerschmits on the one ship. Counting them would have been a problem I suppose, but it was a lot.

When we saw George some months later I can only relate the tale as I heard it from him as nearly as I can remember:-

The bridge was hit by the first wave of bombs. There was no steering and no directions coming, so all we could do, as sitting ducks, was keep up independent firing until the decks were practically awash.
He was the gunlayer so pretty busy. but he turned round to enquire if it was about time they thought of packing up and found the rest of the guncrew had formed that opinion too and were scarpering. He was wondering what was the best course of action and noted that their depth charges were still on the back and thought it not advisable to be in the water when they went up, but it was at that moment that they DID.

He must have landed back on deck on his face and shoulder for in the hospital they treated broken shoulder and the nose was left all crooked…. When he came to, he was in an open boat being machine gunned and the uninjured men got into the water every time another straffing was coming, but he could not move very well and there was another injured man so they had to take their chances.

This kept up until dark and the Parramatta came in and picked them up. The other injured man was dead by this time. George never knew who had taken the trouble to check that he was only out cold and not dead and get him into a boat, but was grateful to this anonymous shipmate.

Gleanings from the internet are as follows:

At 1736 hours on 24 June 1941, close to Tobruk, Auckland (so named because she was slated for New Zealand Navy), Parramatta and the Pass of Balmaha were set upon by 48 German stukas in three formations. Two formations attacked Auckland and one on the other ships.

Auckland was immediately hit, her stern blown off, probably by a bomb, setting off her depth charges (according to George they were still intact in the last stage) and she was set on fire aft and listing seriously to port. She was stopped and preparing to abandon ship. The other two ships were not touched .

Another attack started at 1829 hours and while this was going on a huge internal explosion in the Auckland occurred. probably in the boiler room, shaking the ship and throwing her upwards. Her back broke with an opening down her starboard side and she quickly sank. Her captain, Commander M.S.Thomas, was thrown off the bridge and landed 50 yards away in the sea, 35 of her crew were lost, 50 wounded, and the rest from a complement of 200 survived.

The sloop HMS Auckland and HMAS Parramatta escorted the small coastal oiler, the "Pass of Balmaha" to besieged Tobruk .

On making the final run into harbour in late afternoon,the convoy was attacked by German JU88 (Stuka divebombers) and Italian S579s.

During the attack the Auckland was sunk and the amateur photograph of the sinking taken from Parramatta, is one of the most dramatic taken during the Mediterranean war.

H.M.S. Medway Submarine depot ship lost 30th June 1942 a Picture of her can be found on Page 337 warships of World War 2 (Lenton & Colledge)

My brother Harry Sims was on her in June 1942.

Things were going very badly in the Desert War and the Germans were getting close to Alexandria so it was decided to evacuate all the Women and children from there on the Medway which set off with a destroyer escort.
Despite this she was torpedoed and sinking.

There were only boats for the women and children so Harry decided it was best to swim to one of the escort vessels. As this was in my youth, when I discovered it was a distance of about a mile, I said "However did you manage that as you have only got a certificate for once round the bath, same as me?". To which Harry replied "Ah, but at the time I discovered I could have done twice the distance."

In those days, without the necessary LCC swimming certificate to get you into the Deep End I would have thought it madness to make the attempt, but luckily Harry thought differently.

Also luckily he jumped in wearing his working boilersuit and canvas shoes and white round rig cap and he was also sporting a luxurious "set" (i.e. a beard)

When he arrived at the escort vessel he still had his hat on and with the large beard the wags who were helping them aboard called out " See you brought your own buffers with you matey!".

There was nowhere much for all the survivors to go so they were stuck in camps in the desert and men who jumped in wearing absolute minimum were rather badly burnt before clothes could be got for them, and it was some time before that could be organised.

For some time they were set to guard the Italian Prisoners, and they were not much better off than the chaps behind the wire.

The loss of the Medway was such a blow that it was not announced until after the war, but somehow the stuggle continued.

Harry went on to train as a deep sea diver, and was in Burma getting up ships that had been sunk by the Japs to block harbour entrances,so they had to be cleared to get supplies to our troops. It was dangerous work and he was awarded a BEM for that.

After the war he joined the RNR and when the Affray was lost he was called back to the navy to help in the search for her. That was the first time that underwater television cameras were used, and they found her teetering on the brink of Hurd Deep so that was a very difficult job as one false move and she would have slid down and been lost forever.

They were already working at the absolute maximum depth for men to survive. Harry was able to withstand more pressure than most people. When he first started to learn the business, during the war he was at Siebe Gormans for a couple of months, taking part in Professor Haldane’s experiments with different mixtures of gas for the best results for use for the Frogmen.

All this was absolute top secret at the time and had to be kept very quiet. The guinea pigs had to be under 25 years and not kept on it for long.

Nowadays I see films of men in Wet suits diving to, what seems to me, to be impossible depths. I thought it was about 300 ft. that the pressure of the water made movement very difficult indeed, but perhaps I misremember, but anyway the helmets and heavy boots seem to be history now.

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