Why has this book been written more than sixty years after the events narrated? It is the story of a very unusual reserve officer in the Royal Navy who, between joining Coastal Forces to command his first boat in December 1940 and being killed in action in April 1943, came to dominate the evolution of motor gunboats into an effective fighting force, thus making a significant contribution to maintaining control of the Channel and the North Sea.
Its importance lies in recalling how, after the fall of France in June 1940, Britain had to struggle to maintain control of her coastal waters due to her failure to plan for fighting an enemy close enough to home to threaten her ability to move merchant shipping around our coasts. The German Navy had prepared for that moment by developing weapons suitable for that purpose, principally magnetic mines and the Schnellboote or German fast patrol boat, known to the British as the E-boat.
The Navy, beset on all sides, finding itself fighting Germany and Italy, and by December 1941 Japan as well, stretched to breaking point to convoy supplies of food and war material across the Atlantic, had serious problems in providing enough warships to transport vital supplies of coal and other essential materials down the east coast from Scotland and the Tyne to London and through the Channel. It had never planned that it would need to do so other than through defending itself against U-boats that had wreaked so much havoc towards the end of the First World War. The Navy had planned for the threat of the mining of its coastal waterways by German aircraft and U-boats, but had made no plans for fighting a swarm of E-boats, based in the Dutch, Belgian and French ports only a few hours away from the British coastal routes which they could mine and where they could attack convoys with torpedoes.
To meet this threat the Royal Navy commissioned a handful of small, lightly armed motor gunboats, designed originally as MTBs for the French, Dutch and other navies, but requisitioned and quickly converted to fight E-boats. It then built new MGBs from designs which currently existed, fast enough to find and fight the E-boat, yet small and cheap enough to be risked close to enemy air bases from which German aircraft could sink any warship found in daylight hours in the Narrow Seas. From its entirely inadequate force of destroyers, ships could only be earmarked for the protection of coastal convoys in small numbers, and they were thus an imperfect defence against E-boats, fighting always in darkness and moving so swiftly that they presented the most difficult of targets for a destroyer’s guns in the days before radar controlled gunnery.
The man who became the dominant tactical thinker in motor gunboats, who was the first to challenge the E-boats successfully, and who ultimately led the way to the development of the far better armed and more robust second generation MGBs, was my father, Robert Hichens. Before the war a Cornish country solicitor, dinghy sailor and amateur motor racing enthusiast, by the time he was killed in April 1943 he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order and bar, the Distinguished Service Cross and two bars and had been three times Mentioned in Dispatches. Posthumously, but unsuccessfully, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross.
Max Hastings, in his book Warrior, explains why the dedication and effectiveness of a small number of soldiers, sailors and airmen makes a crucial difference to the success or failure of armies, navies and air forces employing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of men who do broadly what is asked of them but no more. The handful of those who see it differently, whose sense of duty takes them regularly into exceptional danger, are the leavening that can alter the fighting efficiency of the great mass to a remarkable degree. Robert Hichens was one such and I believe his story is worth telling.
Anyone who reads the history of Coastal Forces will see the names of half a dozen officers with a comparable fighting record, highly decorated, whose lives would make interesting reading to those who wish to discern why some men excel in the stress and danger of war at sea; but history has a way of casting its light on one individual amongst many. There is no doubt that Robert Hichens’ name is the name best remembered from Coastal Forces’ struggle in the Channel and North Sea against the German Navy between 1940 and 1945.
A fellow Cornishman, himself a decorated naval reservist, Lord St Levan of St Michael’s Mount, said to me recently ‘Your father has become the patron saint of the RNVR.’ There was an irony in his tone, perhaps a gentle rebuke to me in case I made too much of my father’s achievements. Yet he acknowledged the fundamental truth that it is Robert Hichens’ name that has emerged from the process of creating history as the archetypal Coastal Forces commanding officer. His name appears in every historical work about Coastal Forces in the Second World War. His portrait, painted posthumously by his friend and contemporary Coastal Forces commanding officer Peter Scott, hangs in the Naval Club above the RNVR Roll of Honour. The handsomely bound Roll of Honour beneath the portrait contains the names of over 6,000 officers and men who lost their lives while serving in the RNVR in the Second World War. The story of ‘Hitch’, as he became universally known in the Navy of his time, is their story and I believe that they would be content that it should be written as representative of their joint achievement.