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X-CRAFT DIVER : INTRODUCTION

My main service in the Royal Navy for the two years 1943 and 1944 was with chariots: two- man craft with oxygen-breathing divers mounted aboard. It was for this form of service that I was principally trained. The fact that I served with X-craft for three months in the third quarter of 1943 was due to a realisation that X-craft — midget submarines — could not operate efficiently without a fully-trained diver. The slight amount of diving practice to which until then X-craft crews had been exposed did not give them the confidence to exit from these craft as divers underwater and carry out necessary tasks unseen in an enemy-held fjord.

Operation Source — the attack planned on units of the German fleet in a fjord in the north of Norway: the Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Lützow — had already been delayed by six months. Emergency action was called for, and so fully trained charioteers were asked to volunteer for inclusion in X-craft crews for Operation Source, thus bringing each operational crew up to four men. Six X-craft were already in the latter stages of preparation for the action when six of us appeared on HMS Bonaventure in Loch Cairnbawn in the far north-west of Scotland.

The account given below of that whole experience — taking part in Source — is as I recall it.
No-one has a perfect memory of all detail, but I have striven to tell the events as truthfully as I can; conversations are not verbatim, however; yet they present the kind of thing that was said at certain points in time. Only four of the six X-craft that set out actually made it into the fjords. One was lost on passage, and the one to which I was assigned — X8 — developed such faults that she had to be scuttled some fifty miles from the Norwegian coast.

Thus I am amongst the least experienced of X-craft divers, for after Operation Source I trained to become a submariner on big boats, and then returned to chariots. Other X-craft divers served much longer in these tiny cramped craft, and carried out a wide variety of activities underwater from X-craft, wearing the diving suits with which we were equipped. One of them, Leading Seaman Magennis, won the VC for bravery in an attack on a Japanese heavy unit off Singapore. Other divers cut the submarine cables in the East, forcing the High Command in Tokyo to use other means of communication — which the Americans could read — and this led to the decision to use the atom bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki.

One feature of this account of three months of service attached to X-craft is to show how in wartime the pressure to act could result in inadequate preparation and training. Corners had to be cut, and the risk taken: we divers were not given anything like the necessary induction into the tasks we were to perform. One was to cut the X-craft through netting around the German ships: but there was no information as to what kind of netting this was: neither the thickness of the wire, nor the shape of the mesh, nor the depths at which they were hung. Each of us had no more than one practice run at cutting an X-craft through British netting in Scotland.

But this was just one of the risks that we had to take: the operation against the German ships could not be delayed any longer. So we set out, with much unknown — such as the behaviour of the X-craft under tow. They were found to porpoise up and down, almost out of control; that must have been what happened to X9, which disappeared, half way to Norway, leaving no more than a telltale oil streak to show where she had plunged to the bottom.

Roland Hindmarsh
April 2005

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