大象传媒

Living space

Once we had left Port HHZ, the bridge was cleared of everyone but the two skippers and the watch: the officer on duty and the two lookouts, one to either side. The boat swung to starboard for a northerly heading, but wide enough to keep clear of the skerries off the little settlement of Scourie. Down in the control room telephone contact was kept with Jack Smart, the passage skipper, in X8; the line was crackly, and sometimes temperamental, but on the whole its users managed to make themselves understood both ways.

Meanwhile the operational crew had to find somewhere to keep out of the way. For the Scots ERA, this was less of a problem than for the three officers. Jock Murray found a place at the ERA鈥檚 mess-table. But Buck and Jack and I had to make ourselves as small as possible in the tiny wardroom of H.M.Submarine Seanymph. This was a rectangular space immediately forward of the control room, within the same bulkhead, and separated from it only by a thin partition. On one side the wardroom was open, giving access to the gangway along which all the Petty Officers and AB鈥檚 had to pass to go from their quarters to the control room and beyond. There was thus no question of any real privacy for the officers, even though a green curtain could be drawn across the side giving on to the gangway.

Much of the wardroom鈥檚 compact rectangular space was taken up with five bunks: an upper and a lower on two sides of the wardroom; against the bulkhead there was only one, for the captain, higher than the rest, with an inbuilt chest of drawers underneath containing official documents for the boat. Wedged in between these bunks was the wardroom table, with two narrow padded benches athwart, that is, across from side to side of the space available. Sitting on the bench on the skipper's side, and facing aft, you could lean your back against the chest of drawers; on the other side, facing forward, you had no support, while at the narrow end of the table, opposite the gangway, you had to sit on the inboard edge of the lower bunk - provided it wasn鈥檛 occupied -and lean forward.

This restricted space, I realised, was to be home for the three of us from X8, as well as for the five officers of Seanymph. Heading them was the skipper, Jack Oakley, all of twenty-eight years old, and balding, seeming more or less middle-aged to the rest of us, apart from the Engineer Officer, who had risen through the ranks, and might be abut forty, an old man therefore, with quiet voice and gentle. The first lieutenant was a Canadian called Forbes; his fair hair was cut very short, his blue eyes seemed still dreamy with the forests of Northern Ontario. He wore the two wavy-navy rings of the RCNVR and had won the nickname Fircone. Next came a tall sub-lieutenant called Wilson, with a sour manner; he claimed to have been forced into submarines against his will, and this seemed to rankle incessantly with him. He seemed to do everything under protest, even navigation: he was the 'pilot'.

Finally there was a very young Sub-Lieutenant, perhaps just turned twenty, the fourth officer able to take command on the bridge, or when submerged in the control room: these were Jack Oakley (who took watches when he chose), Forbes, Wilson and Mallows. On the other side of the bulkhead, just forward of the captain's bunk, lay the galley, a narrow passage crossing three quarters of the vessel鈥檚 beam, equipped with cupboards and a stove on either side: here the chef had to prepare, cook and serve up food for well over forty men, counting in the crew of X8. Like any other chef, this one was temperamental, and drove out of his galley anyone trying to set foot in there to have a sniff of what was brewing; we simply had to bear our hunger till he announced grub was up. When that might be remained a secret until the moment arrived. That first evening on board was no exception: the roast meat and fried potatoes could be smelt, temptingly, for long before we were finally summoned to table. To my relief the sea behaved itself that evening; I was able to eat heartily.

On board submarines in World War Two, the main meal of the day was generally eaten at night, sometimes quite late. This was because no cooking could be attempted while submerged; and since for the greater part of a patrol the boat would be submerged during the day, cooking began after nightfall. In consequence the submarine鈥檚 crew was at its liveliest in the earlier hours of the night; that was when it was no longer necessary to keep activity down to a minimum in order to save oxygen. So the period from nightfall to midnight, or thereabouts, was when people came to life and swopped yarns or jokes, when you could light up: almost everyone did smoke, in those years in the Navy. Not to do so was regarded as both unsociable and mean, and in any case tobacco was very cheap, being duty-free. A packet of twenty cigarettes cost sixpence in the old coinage, corresponding to 2 pence in later terms; and every sailor also had the right to a regular issue of tobacco in the leaf, which he could then prepare for his own use. This was called 'pusser's', because it was issued from the Purser鈥檚 office. Officers did not get this issue, nor the daily tot of rum available to everyone over 20 on the lower deck.

But then came the problem of where and when we were going to sleep: there were five bunks for five officers - and now three more of us had been added. Only one officer would be away on watch at any one time; the only other absences would occur if one of Seanymph鈥檚 officers had work to do, such as the pilot at the navigation desk, or the Engineer Officer checking the engines or motors or other machinery. Priority on use of the bunks had clearly to be given to the Seanymph officers, so the three of us from X8 simply took turns to get our heads down in any vacant bunk, whichever it might be - but never the captain's. I remember spending long hours with an acheing back sitting at the wardroom table, sometimes with my head on my arms, trying to doze; we had to take what sleep we could when we could. Much of the trip was thus spent in a somnolent haze. But when we livened up, we would try to solve one of the crosswords in a book someone had brought on board. Those crosswords, and the tantalizing nature of some of the clues, are among my clearest memories of the whole time spent on Seanymph.

Broken tow

Seanymph and X8 had been the fourth pair to depart from HHZ. We all bore up past Cape Wrath, and proceeded in a NNE direction, several hundred miles to the west of the Norwegian coast. Our compass courses were identical, but our track through the sea ran in parallels with some forty miles between them. The weather remained relatively benign, which was just as well, since the reports coming through the unreliable telephone wire from X8, at any rate, showed that it was difficult to maintain depth when being towed. The X-craft showed a persistent tendency to porpoise: to dive deep and then gradually turn bow up again, and return to shallow, or even break surface. The intention was that the midget should remain submerged by day, so that if a Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane or long range bomber should spot the big sub from a distance, the midget in tow would not be seen; also there would only be one vessel to get below the surface in the seconds available.

The porpoising put a very great strain on the tow rope. Ours was manilla, and parted during the night of the third or fourth day. On the big sub we didn't know what had happened until the 4.00 a.m. phone contact was attempted and failed completely, unlike on previous occasions when words could be interrupted by cracklings. An examination of the record of revolutions or fuel consumption or both enabled the skipper and Buck to calculate just when the tow had parted: the drag of the X-craft was no longer felt. We returned on a reciprocal course, very uneasy as to what might have happened, but hoping that with the dawn we would be able to pick out the X-craft from the lone figure standing on its casing, beside the schnorkel. Nothing was to be seen. We searched for several hours along reciprocal tracks, up and down in the area where the tow must have parted, without avail.

Later in the day we received a signal from the admiralty that X8 had been seen by another big sub, and was proceeding in company with her: a rendezvous was made and we met up, but by then X8 had disappeared again.. It was night and a course bearing had been misheard. It wasn鈥檛 till we carried out further searching that we finally located X8 again, and took her in tow using the spare manilla, stored for just such an eventuality.

Just how dangerous a procedure towing was showed itself with X9. The manilla tow parted there too, but when the fact was discovered and the big sub went beck on a reciprocal track, all that cold be seen on the surface - it was daylight at the time - was an oil slick running roughly in the direction of the course bearing it had been on. That was all: at the time, hope wasn't entirely given. up, for the skipper, Paddy Kieran, might have tried to make harbour, even in Norway (the nearest land) to give himself up after the date of the attack. He could have opened the seacocks on X9 to send her down deep in some fjord. But events proved that the craft must have gone down under at the time the tow parted, no doubt when the bow was pointing down, and the weight of the heavy iron towing bar in the bows had proved impossible to counter. So the craft simply went on diving, until the pressure of water buckled her hull.

Dinghy in the dark

A day or so later we received information that the weather was due to worsen. The decision was made to transfer the action crew to the X8 by rubber dinghy while this could still be done without undue risk. Perhaps a further consideration was that by now Jack Smart must be exhausted; but I know that Buck was anxious to make sure that any further parting of the two would leave him aboard X8, with the operational crew in place. Then he would be able to steer the midget towards the Norwegian coast, and get into action against the L眉tzow.

So we waited till nightfall, and then began the change-over. Quite a swell was running, a long one, coming in slow from the Atlantic, but the surface of the water was only lightly stirred. Buck and Jack went first, slipping away into the dark with a torch to signal to the-X craft. After a while the Petty Officer and Leading Seaman from the passage crew came down into the control room, looking haggard and drawn. I wondered whether I would be able to stand the strain of the remaining days in the X craft during its approach to the coast and then be fit enough for the challenge of working at the kinds of netting that would enclose our target.

Now it was the turn for me and the ERA to make our way across. With a few belongings we clambered out on the curved tanks on the sub's side, timing our approach to board the dinghy as it bobbed about on the surface; we wanted to avoid the swell washing up around our knees. We stepped awkwardly in, and were pushed off; the sub was keen to get this operation over as quickly as possible. As we rose and sank over the swell, the big sub vanished in the dark, and all we had was the light rope being paid out as we floated away astern, hopefully in the direction of the X craft. I had the torch, and shone it into the water, to see if we could see the manilla on either side. It was nowhere to be seen. So I shone the beam directly downwards: the manilla was below us, and rising. If it came up underneath us, we could be tipped into the water.

There was no paddle; it had been lost on one of the previous journeys. Feverishly I used my hand, shouting to the Scotsman to do likewise; the manilla rose from the water, dripping; I pushed away from it with my hand, to give us more distance. Then it sank slowly again. Shortly after there was a hail from the X-craft, and within seconds we were scrambling on to the casing, and holding the dinghy steady for Jack Smart to take his place and be hauled back.

The interior of X8 felt and smelt like a place lived in with difficulty; above all it was cold and clammy. So I wasn't sorry when Buck told me to go forward into the battery compartment and lie down on the boards. First I stowed the items we had brought over as best I could amongst all the other gear that had been .equipment crammed in; all my diving gear was there as well. As I lay down, Buck closed the hatch to the wet-and-dry, for safety's sake perhaps, or possibly simply because it was the practice to isolate the control room from the forward parts of the vessel. In any case, I was on my own on the battery floorboards, with not quite enough headroom above me to sit up, and nothing to do. I formed a pillow out of some spare clothing, and put on my kapok jacket; that, with the thick wadded trousers and leather seaboots kept me warm. All I had to do was wait until we were getting nearer to the target area, and give a hand now and then if Buck asked, for in- stance to take a spell at the wheel.

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