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ARCTIC CONVOYS — Part 2

Donald Harman

Convoy Duties

We guarded the convoy by ringing the convoy on all sides. They would go in the centre and we would go on the outskirts. A bird class Sloop shall we say, three of them would be more likely to be right at the head of the convoy in case there were any U-Boats advancing from the front to surprise us. Also more or less in the middle of the convoy usually there was an aircraft carrier and a Cruiser so that was the convoy escort, not always the same but mostly the same and usually the Aircraft Carriers had been made in America, cheaply, and were useful for taking off and destroying a U-Boat on the surface but of course the weather was so ghastly that it was almost impossible for these aircraft to get back so you had a tremendous admiration for the pilots of these aircraft. The Cruisers were less dangerous in a way because they weren’t battered around quite so much but nevertheless everyone played a part and we used to zigzag. Zigzagging is the art of not going in a straight line to any given point and to that extent, hopefully throwing enemy U-Boats and aircraft off the course.

We were not very often allowed to signal to the other craft because of the danger of it being seen, sop Radio Telegraphy was the way we communicated. We had radar as well so we were able to pinpoint all the ships in the vicinity with the 270 or the 290 radar and that was a means of communication.

One of the major problems was if a merchant man broke down or slowed down and fell out of the convoy. More often than not we would possible deploy a small ship anything from a Destroyer to a small sloop, anything to keep it company until we thought it was safe to get it to port or back to base, but occasionally we would send an engineer on board to see if we could rectify the problem, in order to keep it in the convoy.

Keeping together as a convoy was absolutely vital, because the one convoy that was split up — P.Q17 suffered a terrible disaster in 1942. We were well aware of it and the Admiralty were felt to be responsible for stupidity and bad decisions. It was understandable in a sense because occasionally we heard wind of big German Cruisers and Destroyers getting out of port to tackle the convoy rather than the U-Boats and Aircraft and this didn’t happen very often but there were three or four times when they were threatened or they were lucky to break out and I think it was this fear that caused the Admiralty to make the bad decision.

The problem of course was that the Germans had occupied Norway and they had good bases from which they could operate, aircraft, and submarines so that when we were on the winter trek, which was very close to Norway we were very vulnerable. On our trips mostly when we had the return journey from the north of Russia back to Scapa Flow, we would take a little time off on the way back to see if we could get any radar contacts and occasionally we used to make them and I think we used to frighten them off — U-Boats and so on we frightened them off, but we never actually sank any and on one occasion we were about to sink a U-Boat on the surface to discover it was a British Submarine. This didn’t happen infrequently in the Navy but nevertheless we fortunately withheld the guns and fire or the torpedoes.

The arctic winter lasts for many months and it was often that we went into Russia in the dark and come back in the dark, and it was a bit frightening and a rather unusual life that we spent so many hours in the dark. We had so little time to think about light and darkness and so on because the weather was so disastrous that we were battered around on duty to such an extent that when we were off duty we immediately got our head down and if possible fell asleep, because this was the only thing that kept us going so to be honest the day passed in that way.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Donald Harman and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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