大象传媒

On Sunday 27th we left the convoy at 74O North 24O East. At noon we sunk a large U-Boat by three depth-charge attacks. When under attack, a U-Boat might put a few cushions and other jetsam into an empty torpedo-tube and fire it out, to rise to the surface and give us the impression that our attack had been successful, but we were aware of all their tricks. I was officially on the Afternoon and Last Dog, but since we were at Action-Stations all the Forenoon I was on the bridge all day, and was well-nigh frozen. Yeoman Hughes said afterwards that I was the only man he had ever seen to be asleep standing up. We were sailing south at 16 knots, and soon we were appreciably warmer, at only 16O below Zero.
A submarine's best method of attack is to take up a position ahead of the target, fine on its port or starboard bow, so to defeat this tactic a ship or a convoy follows a complicated zigzag course. We had a book full of these, all different, setting out the exact times and distances between changes of course, and the exact angle of each turn to be made, and giving the resultant extra time that would be taken to sail from the starting-point of each zigzag to its conclusion. The submarine -commander finds it impossible to calculate what and when the next change will be, and, having taken up his position, may suddenly find his target either veering sharply away from him or bearing suddenly down upon him. On the 27th we were on Zigzag number 10. The higher the speed, the harder it is for a submarine to attack. Since the speed of the convoy is the speed of the slowest ship, some convoys can barely manage 7 or 8 knots. At 16 we felt tolerably safe, except from Gneisnau.
On the 28th it became steadily rougher, and to add to our discomfort the ice from the deck-head was thawing and dripping into everything. Our course all night was 256O, altered to 225O at 0600, and to 207O at 2000, our noon position being 70O30' North, 06O08' East. Leap-Year Day, the 29th, we celebrated in a 100 m.p.h. blizzard, and up on the bridge we were drenched by sleet, snow, hail, rain, and sea-water, our position at 0800 being 67O North, 00O08' West.
Our plates had suffered from the battering we had taken, and three of our four starboard fuel-tanks were full but unusable through contamination by sea-water, and the port tanks were almost empty, severely upsetting our trim. Still in the 100 m.p.h. blizzard, we were listing up to 60O with each starboard roll. Taking my usual starboard-side route to reach the bridge for the Middle Watch, my feet slipped as I was climbing the vertical ladder and I found myself hanging by my arms clear over the sea. I scrambled gingerly down and went around to the port side, where I found the ladder at an unusually helpful angle.
We had only 16 tons of available fuel left whilst still 45 miles from Skaale Fjord. When we arrived in pitch darkness on March 1st, Yeoman Hughes was hanging on to the two handles of a 30" searchlight, struggling to keep it trained on the entrance, but visibility was too poor to find the official gap in the anti-submarine boom, so we made our own gap, crashing through just as the engines gave out, and shuddering to a halt at 0615, about one cable short of the anchored oiler. If the searchlight lamp had failed, or if the fuel had given out five minutes sooner, the ship would have been wrecked upon the rocks, and all hands, including this pair, lost.
With no steam there was no lighting, no heating, no hot food nor drink - a veritable H.M.S. Hypothermia. In spite of some warm work bailing out the 25 gallons of water from Ten Mess, Thursday March 2nd was the coldest day I had ever endured, and the night was worse. However, I was able at last to go aft and replace our tattered Ensign, which I had been too busy to attend to before. As a result of its valiant flapping in the wind, three-quarters of its length had gone, and the remaining quarter, pierced by a bullet, at the time of writing hangs in my garage.
It was not until noon on the following day that Strule could man艙uvre alongside to give us enough fuel to steam that 200 yards to the oiler. Although the fuel was crude oil, black, near-solid, and smelling like rotten eggs, and the filling-hatch was down in the floor of our messdeck, on that day we were mightily glad to see it. However, in coming alongside, Strule's great overhanging bows smashed into our whaler resting in its davits, reducing it to matchwood.
Next afternoon the divers reported a mass of tangled steel-wire mesh wrapped around both screws, and at 1800 we sailed with Strule, using the port engine only, throbbing and shaking all the way to Londonderry, arriving early on March 6th. I went on leave next day, but my shipmates who remained aboard saw 17 tons of steel-wire mesh cut from around our screws and taken away in several lorries, and the King bought us a nice new whaler. I presume he also bought Skaale Fjord a nice new boom.
In 1985 I received the Russian Commemorative Medal from their Embassy in London. It was not intended to be worn, but ten years later, the Cold War having relaxed, the Queen gave us permission to wear it. When it was first in the news, part of my story was published in the Bexhill Observer, and as a result I had a call from a fellow-signalman then living in Bexhill with whom I had often communicated officially by ten-inch signal-lamp, and chatted with unofficially from the back of the bridge with a pair of flags, but whose voice I had never before heard. He had been aboard Strule, and remembered crashing into us. and another surprise was to find that he had been a survivor from Hurricane, which we had sunk on Christmas Day.

(A copy of this chapter was deposited amongst the archives of the Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, in

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