Chapter Sixteen

Aftermath

After Hitch’s death, the Eighth Flotilla was sent west to Dartmouth again. It was inevitably much changed. Not only Hitch but David James and Derek Sidebottom had gone, Boffin Campbell asked for a new posting and the changes that had taken place in the autumn of 1942, including the loss of George Duncan and Tom Ladner, going on long leave to Canada, meant that the Flotilla was essentially led by a new group of men. John Mathias initially took over the position of Senior Officer but was shortly superseded by Lieutenant F.N. Stephenson, RN. Mathias was back in command as Senior Officer by January 1944. Francis Head, Hitch’s sometime first lieutenant, became CO of MGB 75 and then 77. Sadly he did not survive the war, being killed in a motorcycle accident. David James returned to England a year later, having escaped twice from prisoner-of-war camp, once in full naval uniform as Lieutenant Ivan Bugerov of the Royal Bulgarian Navy, but he did not rejoin the Eighth Flotilla.

In late September 1943 the boats of the Eighth MGB Flotilla were re-designated as MTBs and became the First MTB Flotilla. All the boats took MTB numbers starting with a four. Despite being designated MTBs it would appear that only two received their eighteen-inch torpedo tubes, 414 and 415. Those who had not already made their own shoulder trained twin Oerlikon mountings received an official one at long last, reducing their dependence on powered gun training with all its vulnerabilities in action.

The Flotilla had further actions ahead of it. Based in Dartmouth, it operated around the Channel Islands again and had a number of successful encounters with the enemy. Very sadly, in late July 1944 off Cap d’Antifer, it was involved in a fierce battle with a larger force of E-boats. MTBs 430 and 412 were lost, with eleven officers and men missing, in exchange for one E-boat. John Mathias, the Senior Officer, was himself badly wounded.

The First MTB Flotilla soldiered on to the end of the war in Europe. 414, once MGB 77, was at Felixstowe when a token unit of E-boats were met in the North Sea and escorted into harbour on Sunday, 13 May 1945. S.205 and S.204 were carrying Admiral Brauning who brought charts of the German minefields to be handed over to C-in-C Nore.

Within three weeks of VE Day, the Eighth Flotilla had been disbanded and the boats paid off preparatory to sale out of the service. There is a particularly fine photograph of MTB 414, flying her paying off pennant, against a background of Channel chalk cliffs, taken on the 21 May 1945 when she was en route from Felixstowe to Poole where the boats were laid up. A range of fates awaited them. Most ultimately ended up as house-boats on the mud of various south-coast and east-coast creeks. One at least survived that indignity and is still at sea today. MGB 81 was rescued from its houseboat grave and put back into its original condition by Robin and Phil Clabburn, father and son. It was relaunched in 2004 and can still do forty-four knots, albeit at a high cost per mile. She went over to Caen on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, in which operation she had participated, carrying her last Commanding Officer, Cameron Gough, seated in a comfortable chair on the fore deck. There can be few old warriors who return to the scene of their youthful glory in the self same boat, plane or military fighting vehicle sixty years after the event. Today she lies at Buckler’s Hard and faces an uncertain future in the absence of any maritime museum willing to lay her up.

The Navy has no Coastal Forces boats any longer. A decision was taken in 1956 to pay off the First and Second Fast Patrol Boat Squadrons. The Navy was faced with the requirement to reduce its cost to one compatible with the requirements of the Cold War and to be able to fight a limited war, but no longer a global war. Given the consequential reduction in the number of ships the Navy faced, sacrificing the residual coastal forces flotillas seemed less damaging than cost-cutting alternatives. The last class of MTBs, the Brave class, went out of commission in 1970. Fast Patrol Boats within NATO became the domain of the growing West German Navy who took over responsibility for the Baltic, with boats evolved from war time E-boat designs.

Many other navies disagreed with the Royal Navy’s judgement in this matter. The Israeli Navy, for instance, have a number of heavily armed Fast Attack Craft, as do a number of its potential enemies. It is possible to pack a very considerable punch in a very small and expendable hull. But every navy has its own priorities and the Royal Navy has opted to concentrate on submarine and antisubmarine warfare and the capacity to deliver aircraft and invasion forces to distant parts of the world. The threat of an enemy-held coast of Europe is no longer a scenario under active consideration. But then nor was it in the 1930s.

The fate of MGB 64 is also worth recording as it was Hitch’s own boat. In August 1943 she had been on patrol and was caught out in extremely bad weather under the command of a temporary CO. She was, by then, an old boat, still suffering from failures of the pendulastic couplings to the prop drive. The Sixth Flotilla was no longer used for offensive operations but it patrolled the Z line; the imaginary line beyond the British convoy routes where coastal forces, particularly the older MGBs, undertook defensive E-boat patrols.

On a night when unforecast bad weather blew up, 64 began to make water and, when her stern was practically submerged, it was decided to take the crew off, with 58 coming alongside to do that. A witness remembers the coxswain jumping across to 58 still clasping a rum jar firmly to his chest in the best tradition of all good coxswains. MGB 58 stood by expecting 64 to sink but she did not and more valuable stores were retrieved. In the end they had to leave her wallowing, but a reconnaissance aircraft sent out to look for her could find no trace a few hours later. She must have foundered.

There was a fair amount of press coverage and comment on Hitch’s death. It came out in dribs and drabs, with Peter Scott’s broadcast at the end of April 1943 receiving particularly wide coverage. There was a short obituary in The Times on the 14 April, and comment in a wide range of popular papers. A much wider coverage appeared in the Sunday Express in September 1943 when they serialized his, as yet, unpublished book We Fought Them in Gunboats. It came out in successive editions and encapsulated what he had to say rather well, though leaving out most of the criticism of the Admiralty’s policy of under-arming MGBs, at the censor’s insistence. When the book itself was published in February 1944 there was further acclaim, with a particularly good article written in the Illustrated London News. We Fought Them in Gunboats was reprinted free of censorship in 1956 but made little impact. Occasional press articles appeared on anniversaries. The Guinness Book of Records in 1966 noted that Hitch had been the most highly decorated RNVR officer. His RN equivalent pipped him on points with a DSO and two bars and a DSC and bar, but won in two world wars.

After my father’s funeral my mother returned to Cornwall, initially to stay with my grandmother who, at that stage of the war, was living in a house in Perranarworthal. Enys had been commandeered for use as the Dutch Naval College which had been evacuated from The Hague in 1940. Shortly afterwards we moved back into the house in Falmouth that my father had bought at the beginning of the war to provide my mother with a bolthole from Treworval, recognizing that with petrol rationing she was uncomfortably cut off in the depths of the country, and perhaps also detecting my mother’s distaste for the rural squalor that surrounded the farm. We lived in Falmouth until the end of the war when we were able to repossess Bodrennick from the family who had leased it for the duration. In the summer of 1946 we thankfully returned there to live and my brother and I grew up there. My mother never moved again.

My brother and I were sent to school at Stowe. For some reason my mother had never taken to Marlborough and there was an obscure row over being asked to contribute to the cost of the Second World War memorial to old Marlburians. However it came about, it was to Stowe that we went. From there we both went on to Magdalen, my brother to get a first in chemistry and I a mere second in law, but where we both had a wonderful time. Most of Magdalen’s sons would regard their years there as the best they had and would not have exchanged it for any other college at Oxford.

Between school and Oxford we both joined the Royal Navy for our National Service. My brother was in destroyers and an aircraft carrier. I went to the Mediterranean Fleet, learnt to become a shallow water diver, and spent nine extremely happy months in an anti submarine frigate, HMS Ursa, some of the time doing anti-gun running patrol around Cyprus. Both of us acquired a lasting affection for the Senior Service. After Oxford my brother and I both joined large natural resource companies, in his case Shell and in mine Rio Tinto, a mining giant. We have spent our lives in these and similar companies. My brother retired some years ago to live at Bodrennick again, my mother having died in 1990.

My mother lived at Bodrennick happily enough, watching us grow up, gently settling in to county life surrounded by friends she had known since her youth. However she maintained her links with the Navy and particularly Coastal Forces. In 1947 she was asked to unveil a portrait of my father painted by Peter Scott and presented to the RNVR Club at 38 Hill Street, London, W.1, paid for by a subscription raised amongst Hitch’s brother officers. The fund was organized by David James. The portrait still hangs there and is a fine likeness of my father on the bridge of his little warship. I have a good copy of it in my home in Dorset.

In September 1954 she was also asked to unveil the memorial to Coastal Forces at HMS Hornet in Gosport. It was a grand occasion with a line of Fast Patrol Boats moored behind the memorial, a Royal Marine band playing, a great crowd of ex-Coastal Forces’ officers and men, and senior officers of the post-war Navy. I can remember a message arriving for me in HMS Theseus, where I had just commenced naval training, asking me to attend but which I begged off on the grounds that I didn’t want to be considered singular by my new mess mates, and in any case would look mildly ridiculous in a round cap and bell bottoms at the easily embarrassed age of eighteen on such an occasion. In retrospect I am sorry that I didn’t attend. My mother kept up with many of her late husband’s naval friends, especially David James, Peter Dickens, Boffin Campbell and Bussy Carr.

My brother married and had a family of three and in turn now has four grandchildren. I have also been very happily married for over forty years and our one daughter has given us three fine grandchildren who will in time, I hope, want to know something of their gallant great grandfather.

Inevitably I was brought up to revere my father’s memory. The strongest condemnation of my many shortcomings was to be told that my father would not have approved of my conduct, which apparently had a particularly sobering affect in my early years. Later, perhaps naturally, a modest sense of rebellion set in. I was inclined to argue either that I had to make my own judgements in these matters or alternatively that he would indeed have approved of any conduct showing a mutinous spirit.

In the Navy of the mid-fifties his name was well remembered. I certainly found from time to time that my own extremely modest attainments were compared unfavourably with his reputation and it made life, if anything, slightly more difficult in the Service. However it did occasionally open important doors, not least the gates of Magdalen whose dons might otherwise have looked askance at my none too scholarly progress through Stowe. I can remember moments throughout my life when I either came across individuals who had known him or had heard of him and thus showed a friendly interest in me which they might not otherwise have taken.

I read his diary of the years 1939 to 1941 when I was in my thirties during a fortnight’s naval reserve training in Mounts Bay near my old home in Cornwall. It caused me to go back and reread We Fought Them in Gunboats. Nevertheless it was more a background memory than a guiding light as far as my own world and career were concerned. Occasional meetings with men like Peter Dickens and Bussy Carr were convivial but did not lead to a much better understanding of what they had all been facing in the early 1940s in the Narrow Seas.

This filial neglect ended abruptly in the early 1990s when Admiral Bill Pillar, Chairman of the RNVR Officers Association and what was, by then, called The Naval Club at 38 Hill Street, asked me to join a fund-raising committee for a new charity called Wave Heritage. It had been formed to help preserve 38 Hill Street as an historic building and as a memorial to the RNVR. Admiral Pillar had started his naval career in the RNVR and knew all about Hitch. The project gradually developed, from one designed purely to preserve 38 Hill Street, into gathering all the information necessary to produce a complete Roll of Honour of all those killed in the RNVR in the Second World War. The dead were dominantly officers because those who had joined the Navy after the outbreak of war on the lower deck were classified as Hostilities Only ratings and did not join the RNVR unless they were commissioned, so that the only lower deck members of the RNVR were ratings who joined before the war and never became officers; a relatively small group. In the end we collected over 6,000 names of those killed, a number which astonished all of us, no matter how well versed we were in the naval history of the Second World War. The book was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh and is on display today beneath Hitch’s portrait in The Naval Club.

In the course of fund raising, the chairmanship of which I took over on the untimely death of the original incumbent, I had cause to write to a large number of surviving ex-RNVR officers, and some of them naturally wrote back, generally with much appreciated financial contributions, but adding that they had known Hitch during the war and perhaps recalling some episode which had involved him. I both corresponded with and met a surprising number of ex-Coastal Forces veterans, and indeed some ex-Wrens who had known my father. Perhaps the most gratifying discovery was that retired Chief Petty Officer George Curtis, DSM, lived in Weymouth, half an hour from my Dorset home, and still treasured a battle damaged clear view screen from the wheelhouse of MGB 64. We are now good friends.

As a result of these contacts I was asked to address the annual meeting of the Coastal Forces Veterans’ Association in 2002, with Hitch as the theme. This meant a good deal of work to put together something worth saying, so that his diaries and his book were reread. My notes for the speech were the best summary I could make of what Hitch had achieved during the war. That, in turn, led directly to the feeling that his was a story worth retelling and here it is.

At the very least I hope this book will cause him to be remembered by his great grandchildren with some of the admiration and affection felt by his two sons. He didn’t only tell Peter Dickens that he didn’t expect to survive the war. He also told his wife but added: ‘but I shall live on in my sons’. I hope in some way that he has.