大象传媒

The X3 was built in an old tin shed. It was the most appalling craft, with only a six- inch freeboard, and very different from the X-craft we actually operated in later on. Donald Cameron took over X3 and I was his number one.

We trained volunteers, which was fine until 4 November 1942, when I took two people to train in the afternoon and we sank in 120 feet of water. One of the bad things about X3 was the location of the batteries - right aft. We sank, stern-first, at an angle of about 70 degrees, and the water in the bilges entered the batteries and created chlorine, which is lethal. We decided we had to equalise the pressure inside and outside in order to escape. There鈥檚 only one way to do that and that was to flood the craft. One of the people I was training became a bit excited, and the more excited he became the more he breathed oxygen. We had four Davis escape sets, and he finished his set and I managed to get the other set onto him. Then the other trainee managed to get the hatch open and I pushed the first man through, but it was a close-run thing.

Within twelve hours, a boom defence vessel came along and lifted X3, but I wasn鈥檛 the most popular man because she was the prototype, and I鈥檇 been forced to sink her. She was taken to Faslane and put on low-loader train - X3 was crated up by shipwrights in an enormous long wooden box - and I was detailed to escort her down to Portsmouth for repair. Four sailors joined me as guards. It took us eleven days to get from Faslane to Portsmouth, and we stopped at a siding in Glasgow, where I put two sailors on guard with their fixed bayonets. A small Glaswegian boy of about eight came up to look at us and said, 鈥淲hat have you got there, mister? A wee submarine?鈥� So much for security.

Then Vickers-Armstrong won the contract for building six new X-craft, which were to be very different from X3. (They still have a reputation for building submarines, and now build nuclear submarines.) X5 to 10 were all built by Vickers. On Christmas Day, 1942, they launched three submarines, a T-boat and an S-boat and an X-craft.

The X-craft was a new weapon, and everyone wanted to add their own gadget to the design, and as soon as they put in a gadget, we often wanted to chuck it out. But the most effective gadget was a coil in our keel, which was wired up to the ship鈥檚 head. You set it, whether you were going north, east, south or west, and it neutralised our magnetic effect so that we weren鈥檛 under threat from magnetic loops. Subsequently we discovered we鈥檇 gone over six magnetic loops without being picked up. We鈥檙e a good nation for producing boffins!

These craft had a compartment in the middle called the WD, which stood for 鈥榃et and Dry鈥�. We had to climb into this compartment, shut both hatches fore and aft and, to equalise the pressure, we had to open valves to let it flood. We鈥檇 dress in our diving suits in the WD to do our chores. The one thing I really hated was sitting on the loo in this little WD, as it was flooding. I had a sense of claustrophobia. And that鈥檚 why, later on, they introduced divers to the crew, who were used to the conditions.

Operation Source was a glorious c**k-up from start to finish because eventually we had to travel twelve hundred miles, and none of the craft had been at sea for more than about five continuous days. We were being towed for ten days, by which time things had gone wrong and we鈥檇 lost two of the X-craft because of tow ropes. The Americans were offered them, but they said they were too dangerous. Even so, the X-craft was definitely an incredible weapon and hopefully Operation Source proved its worth. The Tirpitz, our target, was the most magnificent ship I鈥檇 ever seen. It seemed an awful pity to blow her up, but there we are.

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