Four carriers, seven cruisers, 24 destroyers, 14 fast merchant ships the size of liners, tugs, minesweepers, two battleships, four Admirals, 86 fighter aircraft — 60 of them Sea Hurricanes — and with 16 A/S Swordfish and Albacores, reentered the Straits through fog on the night of 9 August 1942. Five days earlier some of this huge fleet had left the Clyde, ostensibly for West Africa. Indomitable (R/A Boyd) and four cruisers had then joined from the Indian Ocean. Victorious (Captain Bovell) had just returned from covering PQ17 — the ‘scattered’ convoy — and had driven Tirpitz back into harbour without her firing a shot. But none of these ships had worked together in the radar direction of fighter aircraft and none had operated a quarter that number. They had therefore been ordered to meet 300 miles west of the Rock to operate their aircraft and to learn the elaborate plan which Vice-Admiral Sir Neville Syfret in Nelson, had worked out for them. In spite of having the good fortune to pass the Straits in fog, the enemy soon learned of their re-entry into the Mediterranean, because the fleet was overflown by a French civil airliner. Victorious, lacking Mediterranean experience but possessing the best radar, was Fighter Direction Ship. She scrambled her fighters to intercept it. This annoyed the French pilot. He announced over the radio that he was being attacked whilst overflying a huge force of aircraft carriers. The French in North Africa informed the Germans and the German commander put his long-formed plans for air and sea attack into operation. We were sorry in Eagle that Tricky would not be directing us over the radio.
Rupert Brabner briefed us. He said the air opposition had increased even more since ‘Harpoon’ to some 400 Axis aircraft. We could expect raids of 60 at a time instead of the usual 30. The Germans were now using He 111s armed with two trackless torpedoes each. We could expect them to be in company with twin-engined Me 110-4s armed with eight cannon. The Italian Fleet had already left La Spezia, Taranto and Augusta and it looked as if Admiral Burroughs, who had just returned from the Arctic convoy, would have to fight a night action against them in the Narrows. His flagship Nigeria and Cairo were the two ADR/AA cruisers and would be directing the RAF Beaufighters and Spitfires from Malta to provide the convoy with air cover when we and the rest of the carriers turned back at the narrows.
“Furybox” (Furious), said Brabner, “is flying off 40 more RAF Spits to Malta. They were worried about her short flight deck — 100 feet shorter than Eagle — so they have had all their props changed to ones with finer pitch.”
Brabner told us that Indomitable had 24 Hurricanes, in 800 and 880 Squadrons, and that Argus had 12 more in 807 Squadron. Victorious could only take six as a deck park, as her lifts were not large enough to take them down into the hangar. He told us who the COs were. Names like ‘Buster’ Hallett (884), Rodney Carver (885), Bill Bruen (800), Butch Judd (880), Frazer-Harris (807), Captain Alan Marsh RM (804) and so on. It seemed that much of the fighter Fleet Air Arm was there.
During the first sunny morning of the journey westwards, the Fleet practised AA fire. Nelson and Rodney fired their main armament, newly fitted with high-angle mountings on the 16 inch guns. The half-ton shells made a colossal bang when they went off at about 10,000 feet, but how on earth the turret could be traversed quickly enough if a raid came over at that height none of us could work out. Perhaps they were intending to put up a barrage, hoping that the Stukas would fly through it. Whatever the plan was, we made a mental note to give the Fleet a wide berth whenever possible.
Rupert Brabner’s interesting briefing was interrupted on several occasions by the ship’s siren. This denoted emergency turns to avoid torpedoes. We went on deck as we could not bear to miss anything. We saw several of the screen of 24 destroyers dropping depth charges — as we had before on the ‘Club Runs’ — but we had never seen them dropped so far west before. Perhaps the Swordfish had found something on the surface.
The air battle that evening and the next day, and the night action in the ‘narrows’ which followed have often been described elsewhere, but several incidents in it relate particularly to this narrative and are worth including. On the late evening of the day Eagle was torpedoed and three or four hundred of us were speeding back to Gibraltar in Malcolm, we could see from her deck a mass of AA fire and tracer rising in the eastern sky. The mighty battle started just as we left. However, we knew that 801 Squadron was represented, because four of her Hurricanes had been airborne at the time our ship was sunk and they had landed on Victorious.
Towards the end of the first night’s air battle, six Hurricanes of 880 from Indomitable led by Dicky Cork their Senior Pilot, and a couple from Victorious’ 885 Squadron from Buster Hallett’s Squadron, were airborne. The Fleet was under attack, they were short of fuel and it was impossible to find which was their own carrier in the darkness. They were being fired on whenever they came near and it seemed as if they would have to ditch. Indomitable’s Captain, Tommy Troubridge, was, however, giving his fighters all the help he could to find his ship in the darkness, ignoring signals from Nelson that he must tell them to ditch. He took his great ship out of line, steaming her into wind on his own with his masthead and deck landing lights full on. He again ignored Syfret’s order to douse his lights and to “rejoin immediately”, just as Nelson would have done. He said later. “What is the good of a carrier without her fighters?”
Quite apart from Troubridge’s brave action — later backed up by his Admiral Sir Dennis Boyd also on board Indomitable — the incident had been equally unpleasant for the Hurricanes. They were consistently fired upon by each ship in turn as they tried to regain Indomitable. In desperation, Tommy Troubridge put on a searchlight and shone it at the clouds above his ship. Even then, when the Hurricanes came right past the ship with their hooks down and nav-lights full on to join the landing circuit, they were still fired on by their own carrier’s pompoms, 300 yards away.
Next day the air battles started again. The remaining 60 fighters made 200 sorties, four times the flying intensity per pilot of a peak day in the Battle of Britain. It could not have been sustained. But only one of the 14 merchant ships was hit, leaving the others and the 45-ship escort to continue.
Then, on this second evening, after the air battle seemed to have subsided, and just before the Fleet divided, the Germans made yet another determined attack on Indomitable. She was hit by two bombs in the soft part of her flight deck by the lifts and she had to retire westwards early. Her fighters, then airborne, had to crowd into Victorious. As Vic had no room, she had to pitch them over the side. Later Indomitable was hit again, with a near miss by her wardroom. Because wardrooms were always used for briefing and debriefing aircrew in RN carriers during action stations, the carnage was awful.
Meanwhile Admiral Burroughs continued through the early part of the night towards Malta. From the experience in ‘Harpoon’, Burroughs had realised he needed to double-up on his cruisers fitted with ADR to ensure that at least one would be available for directing the RAF fighters. The remainder of the cruisers and nine destroyers, tugs, minesweepers and other vessels were also considered essential for the last lap, to fight off the Italians during the dark night that followed and to clear the mine fields near Valetta and tow damaged ships to the docksides. Burroughs’ air cover was to be provided by parts of eight Malta-based fighter squadrons, half Spitfire Vbs and the other half Beaufighters. Provided that the 24 Beaufighters arrived smack on time, Admiral Burroughs considered that he would have a well balanced force to meet anything he might find in the Narrows that night or next morning, whether they were enemy U-boats, MTBs, surface fleet or air.
However, during the confusion of a second MTB raid against Burroughs that night, an Italian submarine fired four torpedoes, almost at random, in the direction of the tightly packed convoy. It managed to sink his Flagship, Cairo, and disable Nigeria. So Burroughs quickly lost his entire ADR capability, for no other ships were fitted with ‘stop-me-and-buy-one’ radar or r/t.
Having lost his Flagship and thus communication with his Fleet, Burroughs was unable to control its subsequent movements. The 20 or 30 German and Italian MTBs (Motor Torpedo Boats) raced about inside the remains of the destroyer screen, firing torpedoes in all directions. Several of the merchant ships fired at each other. The MTBs sank four merchant ships in the first 45 minutes of the action and later torpedoed the cruiser Manchester. She was scuttled and her 700 crew were barbarously imprisoned by the French in the desert until North Africa was liberated in 1943. A second Italian submarine disabled the cruiser Kenya, the submarine’s skipper saying in his report that he could hardly miss as she was silhouetted against the burning merchantman.
Next morning with no ADR and no Flagship, and with the convoy spread over 2000 square miles of Mediterranean without a leader, the Beaufighters and Spitfires were set an impossible task to intercept enemy raids in the poor visibility. Many of the RAF fighter pilots returned to Malta without sighting a single ship or enemy aircraft. From 400 sorties the RAF claimed 13 enemy destroyed. The Fleet Air Arm’s claim (which the Admiralty did not bother to announce) was 39 enemy destroyed from 250 sorties. Even if both claims were to be halved — which they should be — the effectiveness of operating fighters with and without ADR can easily be judged. With ADR and when operating from carriers with the Fleet, the fighters were five times as effective per sortie and ten times as effective per flying hour. This was exactly the figure established in the Biggin Hill experiment before the war. (See Appendix 2 — Naval Air Power.)
Back at Gibraltar, we watched the entrance of the harbour for the returning ships. We were seated round a table at the Yacht Club, sipping John Collins. I had just returned from the GPO post office where I had sent a telegram to my immobile Wren and to my father saying “Woe is us for we are sunk. What a corpuscular nuisance”. I looked up and saw Indomitable slowly entering harbour and turning to starboard to come alongside the southern mole. She had her glistening Royal Marine Band sounding forth on the sunlit flight deck.
“Christ!” said Bully. “The band’s on top of her lift and that’s 20 feet off the flight deck. And look at those scars on her side.”
We walked round to the mole and went aboard. There I found Paddy Brownlee and we went round the ship together. Butch Judd, Mike Hankey and six other Hurricane pilots were missing from air operations. Three Albacore aircrew had also been killed by the near miss in her wardroom and 70 more injured. The dockyard men had begun to pick off human remains stuck to the underside of the shattered lift.
“What’s that awful smell, Paddy?” I asked.
“That’s ‘Junior’ Young’s rhino horns and hooves. The bomb spread them around the lift well,” replied Paddy.
Apparently ‘Junior’ Young, Sub-Lieutenant John Young, DSC, RNVR, 800 Squadron, had shot a black rhino while at Mombasa. This was nothing unusual in those days, of course, but he had done it one morning on his own, using a soft-nosed bullet. He shot it as it had charged at him, bringing it down ten feet short of where he was standing. He was lucky to have hit it in the mouth, the only place that a soft Army rifle bullet could have pierced the skull.
“How was Butch killed?”
“He went in too close to a Ju 88 in a straight-in stern attack. Funny thing was, he had lectured us not to do the same thing the day before.”
I met Dicky Cork and also Bill Bruen, now the COs of 880 and 800. They both seemed entirely unconcerned at the chaos all around them, the shattered wardroom and the smell of entrails everywhere.
Indomitable went back to the repair yards of Norfolk, Virginia. We, from Eagle, went aboard Argus for our voyage home. I sat in the ancient leather armchairs in Argus’s wardroom and read the paper. All it said was that the Fleet had fought its way through with the convoy, and the RAF had shot down 13 enemy aircraft. Churchill later upbraided Admiral Pound the First Sea Lord: “Where is the mention of the Fleet Air Arm’s 39 victories?” he demanded. “This would put a very different complexion on the air fighting.”
Back in the Clyde we all went on three weeks leave. After a trip to London’s Grosvenor Hotel — where I managed to get a new Naval uniform free that had belonged to another sunken sailor who had not returned — I spent the remaining two weeks with my immobile Wren at her mother’s house in Queen Camel. It was heaven.
Searching through some letters the other day, I came across this written by Granny to my father: “Thank you dear for your letter which came this morning. I was so very pleased to hear about Michael; as his ship has been sunk, he will I expect have a good rest and it will be fine it he goes to America; the time he has gone through must be a very great strain on him, but he is young and keen; he always has been a dear, good boy; I do hope he will be spared to be a great help and blessing to others.” Wasn’t that sweet of her.
It was true that I was glad of the rest that Eagle had given me. There was no scheme at that time in the Fleet Air Arm to limit operational flying as in the RAF. Fleet Air Arm aircrew just went on until they were killed or until they were no more use because of ‘twitch’, sometimes call ‘lack of moral fibre’. The average appointment to a ship was two and a half years in peacetime and in war. This also applied to Royal Naval aircrew. So that, working on this basis, I should not qualify for a rest until I had done another two years in a first line fighter squadron. As the average life of a first line pilot or observer or TAG was about five months of operations, the chance of anyone surviving in the Fleet Air Arm was entirely due to luck, or his ship being sunk, or his ‘lack of moral fibre’. When I saw Bill Bruen on board Indomitable in Gibraltar, he already had a DSC and a DSO. When I asked Paddy what he had got these for, he replied that they were for the Norway raid and Petsamo and “a whole lot of other ops”. He had spent all the war in 800 or 803 Squadrons and he was about the only one left.
So I was lucky to have this three week break. I used it well. As the letter that my Granny had written shows, I seemed to have needed a secure home and a family more than most young people of my age, doubtless because of my upbringing. Therefore, it seemed inevitable that I should want to get married. I was determined to marry my immobile Wren. I asked for her hand one night on the sitting room sofa. She surprisingly agreed and so did her mother next morning.
We got married because we both felt that life hung on a thread and the thread might part before we had tasted life’s goodness. Life was for living while it was still possible. Our thoughts went no deeper. Our eyes saw no further. The long future was a hazy vision, nothing discernible. We lived only for the present.
So we were married in the church at Queen Camel. Her family and her friends looked on amazed and indeed happy for us both. We spent a three day honeymoon in a small hotel in the middle of Dartmoor; after which I reported to Bill Bruen, my new Squadron Commander — 800 Squadron — at Lee-on-Solent.