Dasher was the last of the four Archer Class to leave the Hoboken Shipyard in USA. She was commissioned on 2 July 1942 and she sailed for Greenock almost immediately. When Dasher arrived in the Clyde, all was not well. Her Chief Engineer tells the following story:
“Directly after we arrived in the UK from Hoboken, we went into dock. The Clydesider’s output (Messrs Scott-Lithgow) was a mere fraction of their American counterparts. The ship was therefore late for Operation ‘Torch’ and we had to sail for that operation at very short notice. Not only did we sail late, but we lost our original Captain and had a dashing destroyer type in his place. The Chief and Senior Engineer Officers on board were of course Naval officers, but the rest were not. The remainder of the engineer officers were ex-Merchant Navy engineers and lacked even the basic knowledge of a half-trained Engine Room Artificer, Fifth Class. These men were known as T124X men. They were civilians dressed in Naval uniform for the duration of the war. They were, however, paid the same rate and allowances as in the Merchant Navy. This was no less than three times that of their equivalent rank in the Royal Navy.”
“The notice for the next operation, although very short, was not short enough and a surprising number of the T124X crew managed to miss the ship when she sailed. These men would then report back to their civilian depot at Liverpool, would be given ‘scale’ Naval punishment and would go to the bottom of the seagoing roster once more — where they wanted to be. Had this process continued we would, indeed, have eventually achieved a loyal remaining complement on board Dasher. However, it was not allowed to work for long, for the ‘leave jumpers’ were detailed for the Pioneer Corps. This had a salutary effect and few ever missed the ship afterwards.”
“However, when we sailed for ‘Torch’, this weeding-out process was still in its very early stages in Dasher and we were far from a happy and efficient ship.”
My 19 year-old steward in Biter, who made my bed and cleaned my cabin drew more pay than a Lieutenant, RN. Had it not been that we all found our living conditions infinitely better than anything that we had ever experienced before in the Navy, we might have had some serious complaints. As it was, the crew in Biter could not have done enough for us ‘visitors’, as 800 Squadron was, and we hardly gave the pay difference a thought. We were far too busy to have any time to worry about pay.
Nevertheless the junior engineers were no match for the ‘Sun-Doxford’ diesel engines which drove these ships. These 8000 horse power opposed-piston engines had eight cylinders, several feet in diameter. If for some reason they had to be started — they were seldom if ever stopped — there would sometimes be an explosion of some kind. This would blow some vital bits of the engine up through the exhaust pipe, such as a valve stem or two and would bring the engine to a grinding halt. The engine then had to be dismantled, the loose bits and pieces removed and the whole thing bolted together again, minus the offending connecting rod and pistons. the engine would then have to run — seriously out of balance — on six cylinders instead of eight until the next start up time, when it would probably have another explosion. Explosions occurred several times in Archer and, of course, in Dasher. The latter spent the whole of Operation ‘Torch’ with one of her engines firing on an odd number of cylinders and with the whole ship jumping up and down at 100 times a minute in time with the crankshaft. Her maximum speed was thus 13 knots, too slow for safe deck operation. Nothing else worked properly in Dasher either. The radar, the Ops room, the r/t, the water supply, the compressed air supply, the petrol supply (it was contaminated with water half the time) and even her aircraft.
The ships had hangar space for about eight non-folding aircraft such as the Sea Hurricane. Six more were carried permanently on deck, lashed to the wooden flight deck with ten or more spring-loaded lashings, tightened by rigging screws. Three Swordfish were also carried for A/S duties.
There were six arrester wires instead of Eagle’s four. There were also two other new items. The wind brakes and the barriers. The latter were two hydraulically-raised-and-lowered wire mesh nets, strung across the deck at just above Hurricane spinner height. They aimed at collecting the aircraft that had missed the wires before they could crash into the deck park forward. Unlike the British equivalent, the American barriers were not designed to give way gently in a civilised and interesting manner. There were therefore several cases of Hurricanes which had impaled themselves semi-permanently amongst the wires in the American-type barrier and which could not easily be removed by the cranes or ‘bumper cars’ then in existence. In one case, a Hurricane refused to move forward. One of its wooden (‘Jablo’) prop blades had dug itself into the wooden deck and could not be broken off. To prevent a demarkation dispute, the ship’s ‘Chippy’ was told to report with his tools on the flight deck. With dedication to his trade, he took a tenon saw from his polished tool box, sawed off the prop blade, and, disregarding all about him, preceded to plane off the rough edge of the prop blade still stuck in the deck, finally finishing off with sandpaper and grey paint.
In Biter, the six arrester wires were each 35 feet apart. They therefore covered about 170 feet of deck. The total take-off run of the deck was 450 feet, some 200 feet less than Eagle. With only 17 knots of wind over the deck (on days with no natural wind) this allowed only a period of two seconds for the landing Hurricane to get amongst the wires. During these two seconds the pilot had to get his aircraft within a few inches of the deck to be sure that his hook would catch a wire. If he did not catch a wire, the aircraft would of course carry on into the barrier, hitting it with an impact velocity of about 50 miles an hour and a deceleration of about 20 ‘g’. Even with a ten knot natural windspeed added, the pilot would only have three seconds to hook on, but, if he still failed to do so, he would at least hit the barrier with far less energy.
In 1940 the Hurricane was believed by the ‘test pilots’ to be “too tricky by far” to be decklanded on board a carrier, even on the vast 800 foot decks of the Illustrious Class. Now, this same feat was being performed regularly by wartime-trained pilots with only 200 hours in their log books, and on decks half the length and with windspeeds 50 per cent slower.
The Sea Hurricane’s main decklanding advantage was its good view over the nose, an exceptional asset for any Naval single-engined fighter. It also had a crisp response to small control movements during the approach to land and good stall warning characteristics. However, it was not given folding wings like the Seafire, so that it took up too much room in the aircraft carriers’ hangars and was unpopular with the gunners if stowed on deck.
Furthermore there were very few left for the FAA after Russia had been given 20 per cent of production during 1943-44, and they were in very short supply.
It is with this poor aircraft supply situation in mind that we should now judge 804’s performance in Dasher at Oran. Jacky Sewell, the CO, was subsequently called to a Board of Enquiry to explain his squadron’s failure.
He did not know the entire reason why Dasher and his squadron had failed. He only knew about his part in it. In the event, he managed to convince the Board that he would have been justified had he refused to fly at all.
The basic cause of the failure was the fact that Their Lordships had not allowed sufficient time following the ship’s first Atlantic crossing after her commissioning on 2 July 1942. The change of Captain and the untrained and disloyal members of her crew further delayed her finishing date. At the time that we in Biter had already done a fortnight’s flying on board (only just enough for ourselves to get used to the new aircraft and new ship), Dasher’s two Hurricane squadrons had not yet embarked, they had only half their aircraft, there were no spares, no log books, the guns were unharmonised and only three out of the 14 aircraft were flyable.
It might have been considered by Their Lordships that the best part of three months was long enough to get the aircraft organised, just as Biter and Avenger had had. However, because Dasher was last in the queue she had suffered the most from the inadequacies of Scott-Lithgow. Several additional factors had slowed down the arrival of the Sea Hurricane Mark II into service, in addition to Beaverbrook’s apparent wish to give Russia and the Far East and the desert priority over the Fleet Air Arm. The RAF had recently been blamed for taking too much of the Country’s production potential for its Bomber Command build up. It had retaliated against the Navy — the Fleet Air Arm — by accusing it of precisely the same selfish behaviour, causing Churchill to say: “There can be no question of taking machines which will be used in action by the RAF (Hurricane IIs) in order to build up inordinate reserves for the Admiralty”. (Churchill’s Memo, dated 22 August, 1942.)
The Admiralty then pointed out to Churchill that Takoradi, the West African staging post, had 140 Hurricane IIs doing nothing there, apparently waiting for ferry pilots to fly them to the Middle East. So it went on. Both the Navy and the RAF had to keep vast numbers of aircraft in their 10,000 mile pipelines, from factory to front, but as the RAF ruled the aircraft allocation organisation, they won.
Thus it was that Jacky’s Hurricane IIs arrived late and the entire ship, Dasher, late as she was herself, could do nothing useful at Oran as a result. Three-quarters of 804’s Sea Hurricanes on the dawn operation in ‘Torch’ were doing their first flights, straight out of packing cases lifted aboard by cranes in the UK. Their Lordships should not have sought to blame Jacky. They should have blamed themselves, the go-slow Clydesiders, the T124X system, the inadequate machinery in the Archer Class, the RAF procurement system, and the political demands of Russia.