大象传媒

(extract from unpublished autobiography of L.D.W Rees written in 1970's)

I had a very great shock on first going aboard the Penn. Our main armament was eight torpedoes and four 4 鈥済uns. The guns were very familiar to me. I had last seen them on the upper deck of the Battleship Barham in 1930 where they had been in use as anti-aircraft guns. So here we had a brand new destroyer fitted with the most modern fire control equipment and guns that had been made by Vickers in 1914. The guns intended for us had been sent to Soviet Russia on Government instructions, so we had to be content with the old ones. I was in full agreement with assisting the Russians but thought this was a ridiculous position. If the Government wanted to send guns to Russia why not send them the old ones? They had more than a fifty 鈥攆ifty chance of being sunk on the way to Murmansk anyhow.
It was part of my responsibility to see that the fire control system worked and that the guns fired when they were asked to. When the guns were on the Barham鈥檚 upper deck they were in the centre of the ship and well above the water line, consequently they very seldom got covered with salt water and their old fashioned firing circuits remained efficient. Now the guns were on a destroyer it meant that even in normal weather 鈥淎鈥� and 鈥淏鈥� guns were constantly being drenched in salt water. Part of the firing circuit was an old type of magnetic lock housed in a brass box near the interceptor, and if water got into the box the firing circuit was earthed and useless.
鈥淎鈥� gun was a gentleman and its magnetic lock stayed watertight and never gave me any trouble. 鈥淏鈥� gun was a swine and try as I might I never did quite succeed in keeping water out of that box. The number of times during the next twelve months that I fired 鈥淏鈥� gun by sticking a screwdriver between two contacts when the fire buzzer sounded, was nobody鈥檚 business.

We left the Tyne for Scapa Flow for a 鈥榳orking-up鈥� period of four weeks in which we tried to simulate anything and everything that was likely to happen in the future. Our ship鈥檚 company was very green indeed as most of them had never been to sea before. There were only twenty or so regulars out of a company of about 160. Slowly but surely we knitted together so that after a month, although without any battle experience, we were ready and willing to have a go.
To gain experience and at the same time do a useful job, new destroyers were stationed at night in the North Sea on a course that our returning bombers would take on their way home. This gave the crew of aircraft that 鈥榙itched鈥� a chance to be picked up.
Coming to the end of the working鈥攗p period the ship鈥檚 company had a stroke of luck. We were going alongside the destroyer parent ship Tyne early one morning when an engine signal was misinterpreted and we collided. The Tyne was undamaged but our bows were smashed in. This meant repairs and repairs meant leave. I was doubly lucky for we went back to the river Tyne to be patched up with the result that I was at home in Newcastle with my wife Flo every night for the following six weeks.
A week before completion of our repairs and subsequent sailing to join the Fleet, I carried out an insulation test on all fire control circuits and found them satisfactory, all the meggar readings being perfectly acceptable.(The meggar was an instrument for measuring resistence) All low power cables were painted blue for about six inches at regular intervals along their run throughout the ship. Other electric cables were similarly marked but in different colours making it possible to identify the type of circuit inside any cable. Fire control being my responsibility I used to glance instinctively at my cables in whatever part of the ship I happened to be. Three days before we were due to sail I was in the Ordnance Workshop and during my instinctive glance at the fire control cables running through to 鈥淴鈥� gun, I was horrified to see the head of a large nail protruding from a multicore cable. We had a saboteur on board!
I immediately reported the finding of the nail and the Intelligence Services were alerted. My records of the complete insulation tests carried out three days before proved conclusively that any act of sabotage must have occurred in the previous three days. The first problem was to find out if any other acts of sabotage had been carried out on the fire control system. I carried out another complete insulation test which straightaway disclosed that other acts of sabotage had indeed taken place. The meggar was showing zero readings from a large number of fuse panels. By using an ingenious method of balancing the resistance of the cables to the point of the sabotage it was possible to pinpoint an area where the damage was most likely to be. In this way, before the day was out I located three other nails and a screw that had been hammered through the lead cased cables and into the multicores inside.
Once the damaged parts of cable had been found the job of repairing them was turned over to the dockyard electricians. They were an excellent bunch of men and worked right through two nights and a day to finish the job. I was able to report an all clear insulation record the day before we were due to go to sea so our saboteur had failed in his abvious attempt to prevent us from sailing on schedule.
I had been strongly interrogated by the Intelligence people because, quite rightly, I had to be eliminated from any suspicion. I lived in Newcastle after all and had every reason to want to stay at home. They were very smart people indeed and arrested our saboteur within 48 hours of arriving onboard. I regret to say that he was one of our ship鈥檚 company and a member of the Torpedo Party. I was told some time later that at his court martial he received a sentence of fourteen years penal servitude.
The night before we sailed Flo told me that she thought she was pregnant and if all went well the happy event would be near the end of October which was a tremendous fillip to my morale.
Penn joined the Fleet and we took part in normal convoy work, mostly in the North Atlantic, until the end of May 1942.

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