大象传媒

The Voyage of the S.S Settler
By Colchester Library
People in story: Richardson, Hugh J
Location of story: Mediterranean

After the sinking of the S.S Nalon I travelled back to Liverpool in November 1940 to join the S.S Settler and I hoped she would be a luckier ship for me than the ill fated S.S Nalon. The settler was a cargo freighter of 16, 000 tones and her normal peacetime voyagers were to the West Indies which accounted for the numerous bottles of Jamaican Rum in the cabin settee lockers a bonus indeed!
I thought she was rather an ugly ship because of the well decks for and after, but she had obviously been chosen for the voyage to Suez to carry deck cargo of tank landing craft chained to the decks in the well decks. The master of the Settler was Captain R. F. Henchel, German by birth but his family had moved to England when Hitler was coming to power in Germany. Captain Henchel had a master's ticket in the days of the sailing ships but had come back from retirement to join the war against Hitler. I admired him for that, but I had more reason to admire him later in the voyage in the Mediterranean when his cool courage and superb seamanship in action saved his ship and all aboard.
He was a very austere man who did not mix with his officers but his wonderful control of himself and his ship in action was truly superb.
We joined the convoy at Oben and we sailed at night as usual to take full advantage of darkness. There were no alarms in the first part of the voyage and we were soon off the coast of Portugal. Portugal was neutral during the war and her ships were ablaze with light in order that the U-boats would not make any mistake. It was Christmas Eve and we were very annoyed when a Portuguese cargo ship looking like a giant Christmas tree sailed up between the darkened ships in our convoy silhouetting us for the enemy. On Christmas morning I had just come off watch when there was suddenly loud gunfire at the rear of the convoy. The enemy heavy cruiser Hipper had stopped the convoy during the night and opened fire. As dawn broke one of the escort destroyers came past at full speed with a great bow wave on her way to join action with the Hipper. A clear case of David and Goliath as she was going to be terribly out-gunned by a heavy cruiser. We received an urgent signal from the commodore "Convoy to scatter" and we set off single ship into the South Atlantic. We were extremely lucky that we were in the leading line of the convoy as all the action was taking place at the rear of the convoy.
The S.S Settler had an unusual feature in her engine room with an exhaust steam turbine which gave her an extra 3 knots when it was jacked into the main engines. It was only used in emergency as it used extra fuel but it did mean on this occasion that we could escape from the scene of the action more quickly.
We followed a wide course into the South Atlantic to be safer and it seemed an age before we reached Cape Town and dropped anchor in Table Bay. We had been extremely lucky to escape from the attack on the convoy. It might have been the most disastrous Christmas present from the enemy.
As we had taken so long to reach Cape Town, we remained at anchor in the bay until we had taken some fresh stores onboard and then we sailed on round the Cape to Durban for a day and a night before sailing on to Suez. The Suez Canal had been closed on several occasions by enemy aircraft laying mines but it was reopened shortly after we arrived. A Royal Navy minesweeper preceded us into the canal, we had reached halfway along the canal when suddenly there was a very loud explosion just ahead, we stopped and waited for news. The news was terrible. We were horrified to learn that the Royal Navy minesweeper, in spite of all the sophisticated mine detection equipment she had aboard, had been blown apart by a mine. The enemy had laid a new type of mine that the minesweeper had failed to detect. The canal was closed so we had to stay there for a day and a night while a major sweep ahead of us was carried out. I found out just how hot the desert could be and how cold at night. To be in the land-lot sea of the Mediterranean was a drastic change from the wide oceans of the Atlantic where the menace of the U-boats was still very real but it was possible for ships to escape the hunting U-boats or an enemy warship as the Settler had done on this present voyage. The war at sea in Med was very different to the war at sea in the Atlantic. Instead of the menace of the U-boats, the real menace was the proximity of the enemy airfields in Sicily and Southern Italy. This made it easy for enemy aircraft to attack her ships in the much smaller area of the Med. While Hitler was achieving his conquest of Europe he left the conduct of the war in the Med to his axis partner Il Duce Mussolini who pictured himself as the modern Caesar. When Mussolini declared war on Great Britain and America he was stupid enough to boast that he would capture Malta in a matter of weeks. When France capitulated and the treacherous French Vichy government started to collaborate with Germany Hitler decided that he was ready to intervene with the war in the Med. He had become increasingly irritated by the failure of Mussolini to match his bombastic words with successful action. Hitler was particularly contemptuous of the high level bombing strategy of the Italian air force or, to give them their flowery name, the Regia Aeronautic. The Italian pilots were very reluctant to face the barrage over Malta or the guns of the Royal Navy. The Luftwaffa had proved in Europe that the successful modern strategy was to use dive-bombers and low-level bombers. The Stuka 77 dive-bombers and the shallow-dive Junkers 88 were the successful aircraft that spearheaded the attack. The Stuka 77 in particular was a fearsome weapon. The screaming siren sound of a Stuka's dive, it's guns flashing, and the knowledge of the howling death it carried underneath its wings was something that those underneath would never forget. Hitler sent a large squadron of Stukas and Junkers with 30 Heinkle bombers together with a squad of Messerschmit fighters to be based in Sicily. This large force of attack aircraft was to swing the balance of power in the Med in favour of the enemy and was a huge menace to Malta, the Royal Navy and all our ships.
The Settler had been waiting in Alexandria for further orders and they were quite a surprise when they came. The Settler had been chosen to act as a makeshift troop ship to transport 2 contingents of New Zealanders and Australian troops to Greece. We took the Australians on the first trip; the soldiers in the empty cargo holds and their equipment of Bren guns and carriers, jeeps and motorcycles in the well-decks. We sailed in a hurry and when we left we still had two Egyptian harbor pilots on board. The captain told me to signal the nearest destroyer and ask for instructions. In typical navy style the answer came back "catch another 2 and they can make up a bridge four!" We discharged the Australians in Piraeus, the port of Athens and came back to Alexandria. We repeated the exercise with the New Zealanders and it was a clear case of too little, too late for not long afterwards Greece had fallen and the Allied troops had to be evacuated. After our return to Alexandria from Greece I learned with some apprehension that the next voyage for the Settler was a convoy to Malta. The Royal Navy with their liking for understatement had coined the euphemistic phrase to describe the Malta convoys as "going on the Malta run" a masterpiece of understatement to describe the never-to-be forgotten convoys on which the garrison of the island depended on for it's survival. The siege on Malta is one of the epics of World War II. It must rank with the Battle of Britain, the Guy Gibson attack on the Mohne Dam and the Siege of Stalingrad as true epics of the war. It is the story of the very brave people of the George Cross Island holding out despite starvation, disease and the ceaseless air raids by the German and Italian bombers that made Malta, always the key to the control of the Mediterranean, the most bombed place on earth.
The Malta convoys were notorious for the intensity of the enemy action to prevent them reaching the island so many men had died on the voyages to Malta or had failed to succeed in getting back safely to Alexandria. I must admit my heart sank when I saw the cargo we were taking on board for our voyage. It consisted entirely of explosives, shells for the anti- aircraft guns, bombs for the Wellington bombers and depth charges. The Settler was about to become a large floating bomb. This convoy was most unusual; it consisted of only four ships, two tankers of aviation spirit, another freighter and the Settler. In his memoirs "Admiral Cunningham C in C Mediterranean" describes this very convoy in some detail and how he was determined that these ships with their precious cargos would reach the island safely. This was even more vital as the previous convoy had been turned back to Alexandria because too many of the merchant ships had been sunk to make it worth proceeding. In any case the convoy was less than halfway there and most of the escorting destroyers had almost run out of anti-aircraft ammunition. The violence of the action during that convoy had been in the sinister area south of Crete known as "bomb alley". Our convoy sailed at dusk and after I finished my midnight to 6 am watch in the radio room I went on the bridge for duty on the Aldes signal lamp. Dawn was just breaking and I could hardly believe my eyes. Our 4 ships in the convoy were in the middle of Admiral Cunningham's task force. It was truly impressive sight! The battleship Warspite, Admiral Cunningham's flagship, the aircraft carrier Indomitable with fighter planes ready for action on her flight deck, 2 cruisers and 6 destroyers. I noticed there was a drastic change in the weather conditions, instead of the usual sunshine there was a lot of low cloud and the visibility was very poor. In his memoirs Admiral Cunningham refers to this and gives the explanation. He reported that the weather was thick with low cloud down almost to the mastheads and this was due to the Sirocco wind. Starting in the desert as a dry dusty southerly wind varying in direction from southeast to southwest and known as the "Khamson". The wind picks up moisture as it crosses the sea, the hot desert air cools from contact from the sea's surface, the resultant humidity rises sharply and the Sirocco wind is warm and hazy and full of moisture-laden cloud. It is this that causes the buildings and gutters on the island to stream with water causing even the mildest to swear while they sweat. Since the war the besieged islanders had grown to bless the normally cursed wind for the respite it gave from the air attack. It was during such a period that our convoy would be approaching the island. Traditionally known as Calypso's Isle from the secret hidden island of the goddess in Homer's Odyssey from Malta low-lying on the face of the sea would now be completely obscured by cloud.
As the Settler was the slowest of the 4 merchant ships the overall speed of the convoy would depend on the top speed that the Settler could achieve. As I have explained this would be 13 knots using the exhaust steam turbine and extra fuel. While I was on watch I took a signal from Warspite
that left no doubt about Admiral Cunningham's wishes. This signal read "I don't care if you end up burning the furniture from the saloon I want your maximum speed of 13 knots!" There is no doubt that the safe passage of our convoy, the 2 tankers carrying 24,000 tons of fuel and our Settler with it's cargo of ammunition for the guns and all the other explosives would sustain order and ensure the Island's sufficiency for the long summer that lay ahead. The successful passage of our convoy through to Malta must largely be ascribed to state of the weather at the time, for without it there can be little doubt that the Mediterranean fleet which had with them for fighter cover the aircraft carrier Indomitable and the combined fire power of the taskforce was awesome. The convoy would certainly had been spotted and heavily attacked, indeed a great many enemy aircraft were reported on the fleet's radar clearly searching for the convoy. By the grace of God the cloud cover continued to hide our ships and the convoy sailed on towards Malta. Although we were hoping that the dangerous part of our voyage would soon be over Admiral Cunningham learned while still at sea that the Island was encircled by more than the Sirocco cloud, it was completely "mined-in". During their night raids the Regia Aeronotica had been sowing mines in all the approaches. (This story continues in "The Voyage of the S.S Settler Part II)

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