大象传媒

This story has been contributed to the People's War by the 大象传媒 Learning Centre on behalf of Dennis Wood with his permission.

My granddaughter Phoebe wanted a story about the war for a school project so this is what I wrote for her.

The war began on lst September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. I had my fifteenth birthday two weeks before the war began. I had no brothers or sisters. I was a grammar school pupil.
My mother was in a hospital at the time. She had had an operation two years earlier for a goitre in the neck. They removed the Thyroid gland (nowadays it is recognised as dangerous to remove the complete gland because the thyroid provides essential elements needed to preserve sanity).

Because of her mental condition she was expected to be in hospital for a very long time. My father had long periods away from home, he was a railway driver. He decided that I should leave school and help with the cooking and maintenance of the home. I was also to find a job to help with the family income which was depleted because of my mother's illness and the drain on the money available. There was no national health scheme and one had to fund one's own medical bills.

For six months in 1939/40 I worked in a factory making material for aircraft production, followed by six months in another factory making transmissions for tanks, lorries etc. I then moved to a job on the railway, in the depot where my dad was based. I took over the office job of one of the staff who had been called up into the army.

During the first years of the war if any spare time was available, voluntary work was the normal thing to do, covering such jobs as fire watching (spotting incendiary bombs and smothering them to prevent them taking hold) and home guard operations (Dad's Army). I was a fire watcher.

In Birmingham where my work was, there were some heavy air raids, and one neighbouring factory was burnt to the ground. The railway bridge carrying the trains past the depot was hit by a bomb, and a train fell into the street below, causing weeks of delay on a main line from Birmingham to the north. Lots of damage was done to houses in the area.

One foggy lunch time, I was with two other juniors walking along the railway for a break from work, when out of the mist a German Heineken bomber came flying just above the railway track within yards of us. We had the fright of our lives, but he disappeared into the fog without taking any action.

My 18th birthday came in 1942 and shortly afterwards I joined the Royal Navy. I trained as a radio operator and learned German radio operating practices.

I was posted to a destroyer escort (frigate) in 1943, and the ship, HMS Moorsom, joined an escort group based in Pollock Dock in Belfast. Three of the radio operators on the Moorsom were trained in German procedures, and our job was to listen on U boat radio frequencies to hear submarines reporting back to base when they had spotted Allied convoys, or reporting weather conditions to Berlin for German high command strategic planning. When a U boat made a signal we had to get a direction bearing on him, enabling an attack to be made on the U boat to either sink him or keep him down under the sea so that he could not make further reports on the convoy to disclose a change of direction or other actions taken to protect the convoy.

Bletchley Park had broken the German Naval Enigma code, and although I did not know then (or for many years afterwards) the source of the information, we received messages from the Admiralty telling us that there were several U boats in specific areas of the North Atlantic.

We spent many trips on 鈥渟upport group鈥� duties, which were the consequence of the breaking of the Enigma code, our job being to present a threat to the U boats, so that they remained submerged at critical times, and did not spot the convoys heading for Britain.

If a convoy was attacked we were available to reinforce the convoy escorts.

During the two weeks before the D day landing in Normandy, frigates were detached from North Atlantic convoys and sailed into Moelfre Bay in Anglesey (North Wales) building up a large force.

Three days before the landings, in the early morning, about 100 ships sailed for the English Channel. (A wonderful sight to see 100 sleek frigates sailing into the rising sun in line astern).

We arrived in the English Channel to take up our position as the the outer screen for the landings in France, our job being to prevent U boats and E boats getting to the landing craft carrying the troops to the beaches.

Three days after the first landings, the German U boats made a big attempt to penetrate the outer screen. The submarines were equipped with acoustic torpedoes, which were able to follow the sound of a frigates propellers without the U boat using its periscope and disclosing its position. Usually an acoustic torpedo would blow the stern off the frigate but our ship was very fortunate that the torpedo when it hit our propeller did not explode. We were able to limp away on one propeller, unsure exactly what had happened, and managed to reach Falmouth on one propeller. A diver went down and inspected the stern of the ship and confirmed that we had been hit by an acoustic torpedo which had failed to explode.

The ship limped up the Irish Sea at very slow speed and three days later reached Glasgow in Scotland, where we had 6 weeks in dry dock in Govern shipyard. During that period, I was sent to Eastbourne Naval Signal School to learn the latest German innovations in Radio communications.

Eastbourne was in the direct path of the doodle bugs, the V1 weapon which Germany had just started to launch against London, and every day and night doodle bugs were flying overhead aimed at the capital. The allies had perfected a new weapon, called the close proximity fuse, which detonated a shell when a small radar device in the shell indicated that it was close to an aircraft.

All the antiaircraft guns which could be mustered were brought to Sussex, to attempt to shoot the doodle bugs down before they reached London. The result was very noisy time for Sussex and there was some danger, in so far as some shells which did not go close to an aircraft, fell to earth where they could explode with the shock of hitting the ground.

This drawback was quickly realised, and a fail safe device introduced into the shell to make it explode in the air and not on the ground.

Six weeks passed, and I rejoined my ship in Glasgow which sailed to join a new group based in Greenock. Our first assignment was to join the escort ships around the Normandy landing area.

Cherbourg had just been liberated, and we were one of the first ships to sail into the harbour. The port was a shambles with wrecked ships and buildings everywhere. We had to be very careful, (the Germans had mined the harbour), and proceeded in with our motor boat leading us in very slowly.
During the following few weeks we provided escort to supply ships sailing from England to Cherbourg. In early December we had two weeks in harbour, carrying out maintenance work, and sailed to rejoin our escort group in the English Channel which was due to relieve another escort group (EGG leader HMS Affleck) which was going to Portsmouth harbour to allow the crews to have a Christmas break, and some of the crew members to have leave.

We joined this escort group on Christmas Eve, only to find that EGG had had a very good sonar contact on a U boat just south of the Isle of Wight, and the Senior Officer in charge of this group decided he was not going to hand over his 鈥渇ind鈥� to someone else. He was senior to our Group leader, so he took overall charge of both groups (twelve ships altogether).

Christmas Eve and Christmas day were spent sweeping the sea with our sonar devices, and dropping lots of depth charges. The American navy sent out ten motor torpedo boats from Cherbourg. The sea was now too crowded with ships for the sonars to be able to distinguish a U boat.

On Boxing day I was on the upper deck, having just drawn the rum ration for the communication mess deck, when there was a terrific explosion on the next ship on our port side. HMS Capel was hidden by a big cloud of smoke. She had been hit by a torpedo.

Action stations were sounded, and I hastened to my action station which was a small cubicle, inside the chartroom, where I had a radio direction set. Under North Atlantic conditions I would listen out for U boat transmissions and if I heard one quickly find the direction the signal came from.

However, no U boat was going to surface in the crowded English Channel to make a radio signal, it would have been suicide to do so. I had a speaker in my cubicle, which relayed the transmissions between captains of ships, and could follow the actions being taken to find and hopefully sink the U boat.

At half past four in the afternoon, the skipper of HMS Affleck came on the radio screaming 鈥淚鈥檓 hit, I鈥漨 hit鈥�. He had been torpedoed by an acoustic torpedo. Instead of staying at sea over Christmas, he would have been wiser to have gone to Portsmouth for his crews to have Christmas leave, and left the English Channel less crowded and put us in far better position to find the U boat.

Four months later the war in Europe was over. We were in Plymouth at the time, and immediately the three radio operators trained in German radio practices were drafted to Signal School at Glenholt near Plymouth, to learn about Japanese radio practices, and learn the Japanese morse code.

The Japanese written system, required a lot more characters than the western system. By adding symbols called 鈥渂ars鈥�, 鈥渘igeries鈥�, and 鈥渉amnigeries鈥� to the morse alphabet, they were able to multiply 26 by 4 making a lot more characters available. I still remember the longest morse character ever, called Z bar hamnigery. (Z __.. Bar_ hamnigery..__.). It was not necessary to be able to understand Japanese or even to know the shape of the Japanese character. We wrote down the shorthand notation and the linguistic people who would read the intercept would translate into the appropriate Japanese character. (Z bar hamnigery shorthand was Z_*)

However, our learning of the Japanese morse code, was not required as the Japanese surrendered before we could be sent to the Far East.

That was the end of the war, and I was demobbed from the Navy in 1946.

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