As soon as his meeting at Whitehall Place was over, Gus Agar took a cab and then raced back to HMS Osea on the first available train from Liverpool Street. He had phoned ahead for a car to meet him at Maldon station. Soon he was being driven across the low causeway which connected the 600-acre island with the mainland twice a day at low tide. In the distance to the east he could see oyster boats amongst the shoals dredging for the day’s catch, and further away on the island the slipway along which the CMBs had to be hauled before being stored in rows on either side of a long ditch known as the traverser pit. The car left the causeway and was soon driving swiftly along a deeply rutted track through the lines of temporary huts and tents that comprised the base. Flocks of ducks and chickens scattered ahead of the car. Osea Island had been commandeered by the Navy as a CMB base in 1917, but it was still a working farm and the sailors supplemented their rations by raising animals of their own, including pigs. In fact, the entire base was quite a menagerie. Agar’s driver made straight for the old manor house, which was the only substantial building on the island. It was also where HMS Osea’s commanding officer, Captain Wilfred French, had his office.
Captain French, known throughout the Royal Navy as ‘Froggy’, was the only other officer at Osea who would know about the operation. He and Agar were good friends and in many ways French had become like a father to Gus. It had been French who had originally recruited Agar to the CMB Service. The base at Osea had desperately needed an expert in mines and torpedoes but, with the prospects for promotion being better in the regular offices of the Navy, no one seemed to want the job. French had promised Gus that if he joined the CMB Service he would be given command of the first of a new type of CMB, a seventy-foot beauty that would carry four torpedoes. But before the boat could be built the war had ended and the order was delayed. Even so, French had kept Gus at the base. CMBs were sent on duty around the world – to Archangel in December 1918, to Riga in spring 1919, to the Rhine – but each time Agar had been passed over because he was required for training duties at Osea. As a result he became known throughout the Flotilla as ‘the torpedo conscript’. Captain French had always promised that one day he would make things right with Gus and now that chance had come with his recommendation of Gus to Cumming for this secret mission. Gus was keen to get his commander’s advice about how to tackle this seemingly intractable problem. As soon as Gus arrived, French dismissed his secretary and Gus told him the whole story.
Together the two men pored over maps of the area, trying to work out a plan of operations. The Gulf of Finland is almost 250 miles long but only thirty miles wide, narrowing gradually as it approaches the mouth of the River Neva where St Petersburg (Petrograd) is situated. Right in the middle of the last few miles of the approach to the city is the Russian island of Kotlin. It is five miles long and about a mile wide. Every inch of the surrounding water was swept by the powerful guns of the eight fortresses which lined its shore, the largest of all being the one at the south-eastern end and one of the most formidable in the world – Kronstadt. The defences of Kronstadt were supplemented by a chain of sea fortresses, nine to the north, six to the south, which formed a seemingly impenetrable barrier for any who might be tempted to slip past. Then there was the question of the minefields and the breakwater. In theory, a CMB could skim over a minefield – if the mines were set at the usual depth of six feet. But the breakwater was another matter. According to Cumming, the breakwater was three feet below the waterline. At full speed a CMB drew two feet, nine inches, leaving a clearance of just three inches. If Cumming was just slightly wrong the first that Gus would know about it would be when the bottom was ripped out of his boat. Of course, there was a route through the breakwaters to the south of Kotlin Island by going through the main shipping channel. But that would be so closely guarded that there was no chance of slipping through undetected. It would be little better than suicide. To the two British officers evaluating the task before them it must have seemed that the jagged coasts of Finland to the north and Estonia to the south were like the jaws of some gigantic monster waiting to slam shut on anyone who approached Petrograd by sea. The problem was not just how to get in and find the mysterious ST-25, it was also how to get out alive.
Gus and French both agreed that the first thing the team would need would be a secure base from which to operate. Cumming was sending Gus to Helsinki (which at the time was known as Helsingfors) where he had several secret agents who would do their best to assist Agar. But the distance between Helsinki and Petrograd was beyond the operational range of a CMB. If they were to drop the agents behind the Russian border they would need to be much closer. That meant some isolated inlet where they could hide the CMBs by day, but neither coast looked promising. To the north the coast of Finland was dotted with innumerable small coves which might be suitable. But Finland was strictly neutral. Finnish forces under General Mannerheim had only recently succeeded in expelling Bolshevik forces and achieving an uneasy truce. The Finns would be unlikely to support a secret mission which might undermine that hard-won peace. To the south was the coast of Estonia, but fighting between White and Bolshevik forces was raging back and forth across that country and it was impossible to know if a particular area would be safe by the time the CMBs reached the Gulf. Even if the team found a suitable base there would be problems of accommodation and supply. They would need hundreds of gallons of fuel and ammunition, together with workshop facilities to repair the temperamental engines. The problems just seemed to keep mounting up the more they considered the project. The worst thing was that there just wasn’t enough detailed intelligence on what was happening there.
In the end Gus and Captain French decided on a two-stage plan: Gus would examine the Bolshevik defences upon arrival in Finland and see if he could get any accurate information about the depth of the breakwaters. In the meantime, the most Gus could offer Cumming would be to run agents from Finland across the Gulf to the coast of Estonia and drop them as near as possible to the front lines.
With a plan of campaign agreed the next problem was to select the members of the team. French advised Agar to take two 40-foot boats. Each 40-foot CMB required three crew members: a commander, a mechanic and a junior officer to act as a second in command and man the Lewis guns. This meant that they would need five more men. Since this was his first command, Captain French advised that Gus should only pick younger men. This was in line with what Cumming had requested and in any case older, more experienced hands might be more difficult for a young man like Agar to command.
Agar’s first choice was his second in command of the boat. Sub Lieutenant John White Hampsheir was normally assigned to CMB 75. He and Gus were firm friends. This last fact was important: far from home and with a small team Gus would need someone he could trust. At five foot nine inches tall, Hampsheir was slight of build, blond and blue-eyed. He was a painfully shy man, but he was good at his job and Gus hoped that he would flourish in a small team.
The position of mechanic was in many ways even more important. The high-performance engines of the CMBs were notoriously temperamental. They were basically aeroplane engines, but conditions in a CMB were far worse than those in any aircraft. These delicate mechanisms were frequently doused with gallons of sea water and then pounded repeatedly by forces of several tons as the CMBs bounced across the waves. The engines and therefore the boats’ very survival depended on the skill of the mechanics. They had to remain below decks in the forward engine compartments in cramped conditions, never seeing what was happening outside, drenched in sea water from the bilges, thrown around as the boats smashed their way across the waves and working in almost complete darkness because they were allowed only the light of one tiny electric bulb per boat. CMB motor mechanics were considered the very best in the Royal Navy. Now Gus had the pick of those on the base. He had no doubt. There was one engineer at Osea who was better than any other: Chief Motor Mechanic Hugh Beeley. Although only twenty-four, he seemed much older. Trained at the elite Rolls-Royce engineering works he was known on the Flotilla as ‘faithful Beeley’ because of his unflappable calm and his ability to get the best out of any machine. Be it Fiat, Sunbeam or Thornycroft, there wasn’t a CMB engine that he couldn’t fix.
Captain French had a very clear idea who should command the second CMB. Gus later recalled French’s suggestion word for word: ‘Young Sindall should do you well for the other one: nice chap; no brains; but very willing and adaptable.’ Twenty-year-old Sub Lieutenant Edgar Sindall was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. His nickname in the CMB Flotilla was ‘Sinbad’ because of his buccaneering attitude. He didn’t much care what made a boat go, he just wanted it to go fast. But if his attitude was light-hearted, the one thing he didn’t lack was nerve. As French had implied and Gus well knew, Sindall was as keen as mustard to get into the action. French suggested that they leave the choice of ‘snotty’ (midshipman) and mechanic to Sindall, provided he followed the rule that they should be young and without any close family ties.
For his second in command, Sindall chose nineteen-year-old Midshipman Richard Marshall. He was a close friend and the best shot with a Lewis gun on the Flotilla. He was usually assigned to CMB5, another of the 40-foot boats, so he would be familiar with their operation.
For a mechanic Sindall chose his friend Albert Piper. Barely nineteen his character was very much like that of his new captain. Gus described him as ‘… rather a happy-go-lucky sort and much younger than Beeley, but first-class at his job. Keen and eager to go anywhere and do anything.’ He normally worked on one of the 55-foot craft, CMB46, but despite his youth he had already proved himself to be a first-class mechanic and like Beeley had qualified for his Chief Motor Mechanic rating.
Knowing the importance of keeping the engines in top condition, Gus begged for one other mechanic. He would not travel on any of the missions but would remain in Helsinki with the spare stores and could be called on as a reserve if necessary. Despite the acute shortage of trained mechanics at Osea, Captain French agreed and they selected 20-year-old Richard Pegler.
With selection of the team complete, it was now well into the evening and Gus and French left selection of the boats to the following day. When Gus went to bed that night his mind was still reeling at the pace of the day’s events and he lay awake for hours wondering what would happen on the mission ahead. Above all he thought about the mysterious ST-25:
‘Speculation about this man became an obsession. Who was he? What was he like? Was he still alive? Would I be in time to get to him? I must hurry – hurry the devil!’
*
The next day Gus and Captain French had to decide which of the 40-foot CMBs to take. The 55-foot boats would have been sturdier and carried more armament, but they were less manoeuvrable and their greater size would make them easier for Russian sentries to spot. On the way to the boats they collected Hugh Beeley to ask for his opinions on which engines had been recently overhauled and would be most reliable. He still had not been told that he was part of the team.
It was early morning and the mist still clung to the fringes of the island. The base was comparatively quiet at this hour apart from some hammering in one of the workshops and the distant lowing of the cows in the surrounding fields. There was space for 52 CMBs in the storage area, 26 on either side of the concrete traverser pit which contained the equipment for transporting them from the end of the slipway.
Much had been expected of these unusual weapons of war when they had first been designed, but in many ways their full potential had never been explored. Perhaps now they would justify the cost and effort of their creation. It was almost a miracle that they had ever been designed at all.
In the summer of 1915 three young naval lieutenants named Hampden, Bremner and Anson approached the boatbuilder Sir John Thornycroft with an idea. They were all serving with the Harwich naval force on convoy-protection duties. The conflict in the Channel had become a stalemate. The German navy lurked in their well-defended harbours and only occasionally made forays into the North Sea. On the rare occasions when the Kaiserliche Marine did appear the warships of the Royal Navy were usually too slow to reach the area before the German ships had returned to harbour. What was needed was a new kind of vessel, fast enough to reach the Germans when the alarm was sounded and somehow capable of evading their harbour defences to strike at them across the vast minefields which defended their coasts. The three young officers, desperate to see action, thought they had come up with a design which would do the job.
Fortunately Sir John Thornycroft was a brilliant engineer and inventor in the manner of Barnes Wallis (the man who was to design the Dambusters’ bouncing bomb in the Second World War). Sir John had been designing motor boats for various navies around the world as well as for the private market since 1864 when he’d been just nineteen. By coincidence, he was already thinking on very similar lines to his visitors. Motor torpedo boats had been in existence for many years, but as time had passed and the operational demands on them had grown they had become larger and heavier until many of them were more like small destroyers. Like the visiting lieutenants, Sir John thought that torpedo boats should return to being smaller and faster. In fact, he had only recently submitted designs for a new kind of boat to the Admiralty.
This design was the result of over ten years of development work. Two things had revolutionised high-speed motor boats during that time. The first was the development of the internal combustion engine. This device, which in 1890 had only been able to push motor cars along at a few miles an hour, had now become powerful enough to launch aircraft and boatbuilders had quickly used them in speedboats where high revolutions by the propeller were needed for high speed. The other breakthrough was in the design of the hull. Sir John had pioneered the design of a hydroplane hull where, as the speed of the boat increased, the boat actually began to fly above the surface of the water rather than forcing its way through the waves like a conventional vessel. The loss in drag meant a tremendous boost in speed. It was a similar basis to the design which allowed Donald Campbell to break the world water-speed record in 1964. When conditions were suitable it also led to a smoother ride without a great deal of the bouncing around which was encountered in other vessels.
Thinking that the Admiralty had ignored his papers, Sir John was now keen to interview his unexpected visitors as men on the front line who would tell him exactly what the Navy needed. He was right. As young men eager to see action they wanted a boat which was fast – breathtakingly fast. The seagoing equivalent of a fighter aircraft. In order to make it difficult to hit it should also be small, no more than thirty feet from bow to stern. Next, the boat would have to pack a really big punch, at least one and preferably two eighteen-inch torpedoes. Finally, the boat must somehow have fuel tanks large enough to allow it to cruise, find its target, attack and return to base.
Sir John must almost have wished that he hadn’t asked. To a boat designer the competing requirements of these young naval officers seemed irreconcilable. Speed was not the problem: Sir John had been working on a series of boats known as skimmers for the past ten years and his son Tom had raced them successfully on the international circuit. In 1910, one of the Thornycroft Miranda boats achieved a speed of 35 knots. Her hydroplane hull and specialised engine made her by far the fastest thing on the water. But carrying torpedoes, even one eighteen-inch torpedo, would soon put a stop to that. Each one weighed over three-quarters of a ton. It would be like attaching a caravan to a Formula One racing car.
And then there was the problem of launching the torpedo. In conventional motor torpedo boats the torpedo was lowered over the side of the ship on davits and launched while the boat was travelling at very low speed. But that system would be no use in this new kind of vessel because she would be a sitting duck as soon as she slowed down to fire. Torpedo tubes using compressed-air rams were used to launch torpedoes from warships, but these would be far too cumbersome for a high-speed motor boat.
Sir John and his design team wrestled with the problem all through the winter of 1915. They had produced an earlier design where the torpedo was launched over the front of the boat by an explosive ramming system using a cordite charge, but that had proved too dangerous as the boat tended to catch up with the torpedo and hit it in the rear as it entered the water – and then they both blew up. Another option was to fire the torpedo by means of a ram over the stern of the boat. But this meant that the boat would have to be sailing away from her target as she fired. Early torpedoes were tricky things to aim at the best of times and it would be damn near impossible to hit anything while heading the wrong way. This method would also entail getting far too close to the target before turning to aim as the attacking craft was sailing away. The CMB would probably be blown out of the water before it had a chance to fire.
Finally, Sir John hit upon the solution. It wasn’t pretty, but theoretically it should work: the torpedo would be launched over the stern of the boat by a ram, but with the torpedo facing forwards so that it was travelling in the same direction as the skimmer. On the face of it, this seemed like a crazy idea. There were certainly three big problems. The first was that the hydraulic ram had to hit the nose of the torpedo (which contained the explosives) hard enough to shove it off the CMB but without causing it to blow up. The second was that the skimmer would have to be travelling very fast for the torpedo to launch, otherwise the streamlining of the torpedo would mean that it would go into a ‘death dive’ straight to the bottom of the ocean. In shallow waters this meant that it would blow up, probably taking the CMB with it. The exact speed would have to be determined through experiment. The final and for any skimmer crew the most pressing problem was that once the torpedo was launched the skipper would have a split second to swerve out of the way before the torpedo’s motors engaged and sent it racing forwards much faster than the CMB could travel. Hesitate for a second and the skimmer would simply blow itself up.
There was also the question of range. As every car driver knows, high-performance engines guzzle fuel and a skimmer would require a very great deal of fuel indeed – and yet the skimmer had to be small and light. In order to get tanks big enough to give the skimmer a decent range, say 150 miles, everything else would have to be stripped out of the boat. And to keep weight down to the absolute minimum, the construction would have to be of plywood. There could be no weight allowance for armour so the fuel tanks would have no defence against bullets or shrapnel – even a near miss by a high-explosive shell might well cause the whole machine to split at the seams. It is hardly surprising that the boats came to be referred to as ‘eggshells’ by their crews.
Sir John summoned Hampden, Bremner and Anson to a meeting to announce the results of his research. But as he explained the design it was their turn to wish they had never asked. They had the fast boat they wanted, but only a fool would take to the water in it and only a maniac would try to launch a torpedo from one. Sir John was not even certain that his calculations were correct. The only way to be sure was to actually build the design and test it. For that he needed approval from the Admiralty. Nervously – knowing that they were likely to be the guinea pigs who were going to test this monstrosity – the three lieutenants agreed that they would support the project.
The Admiralty accepted the design and in January 1916 placed an initial order for twelve boats – provided that the first three prototypes passed trials successfully. The boats were built at the Thornycroft yard at Platt’s Eyot (pronounced ‘eight’) on the River Thames, whilst the special V-12 engines were developed by Sir John’s son Tom at their works in Basingstoke. Three months later, in April 1916, the first boats were complete and a unit from the Royal Navy established itself in great secrecy in some disused sheds belonging to the South-Eastern Railway at Queensborough in the Thames estuary near Sheerness. The crews slept in the sheds with the boats which were launched from a slipway outside. Their job would be to show that the principles Sir John had worked out on the drawing board would work in reality. But there was more than one problem: not only was the team testing a completely new warship, firing a torpedo backwards at their own sterns, but now, because of the sensitivity of this new design, the Admiralty insisted that they were only allowed to take the skimmers out to sea at night!
Maintaining secrecy soon became a bit of a problem. When the throttles were full out and the hulls lifted clear of the water, the engine roar was tremendous. The early CMBs must have been quite a sight for anyone catching a glimpse of them as well: if the petrol mixture was wrong the engine would belch great jets of smoke and flame from its exhaust, which must have looked spectacular at night as they shot past. But, despite all the problems for the young crews, as the stern of the CMB settled down, the nose rose and two great wings of water were thrown up on either side of the cockpit, there was no more exhilarating feeling than the sheer sense of speed they achieved. They were travelling in the fastest boats on the water and they had a licence to test them to the limit.
It was dangerous work. Travelling at high speed at night was always tricky and visibility over the long bows of the CMBs soon turned out to be a problem. Although they were working with torpedoes without warheads, it was still scary launching a three-quarter-ton torpedo over the stern of the boat and risking it hitting you in the backside if you didn’t get out of the way fast enough. The mechanics had their work cut out as well. Despite the careful work of the boatbuilders, under the strains of very high speeds and the battering as the boat bounced from wave to wave the seams tended to leak and the water and the vibration played merry hell with the high-performance engines. Half the work was just in keeping the engines dry. The mechanics soon found that the bilges could be drained when travelling at high speed by simply removing a bung from the hull. When the CMB was ‘flying’ this drain hole was clear of the waves and the excess water was forced out. But this method did have its drawbacks – as one captain found out when his CMB mysteriously sank after he returned from one trial run. After that mechanics had the importance of replacing the bung drilled into them …
Eventually, after nights of trial and (t)error, the determined crews finally got Sir John Thornycroft’s crazy system to work. They found that the CMB had to be travelling at 30 knots or better for the torpedo to be launched successfully. This was fast enough so that the torpedo did not go into a death dive and fast enough so that the CMB could get out of the way, but not so fast that the crew were unable to aim.
The Admiralty were impressed with the results of the trials and confirmed the order. The skimmer was officially designated as the Coastal Motor Boat, abbreviated as CMB. As soon as the results of the tests were known, Sir John began work on a fifty-five-foot version which would have two engines and carry two torpedoes. It was ready for service by April 1917. A seventy-foot mine-laying version eventually appeared in 1919. In total, the Admiralty was to order more than one hundred CMBs.
This was more work than Thornycroft’s boatyard could cope with. Other British boatbuilders had to be drafted in to help and soon the list of yards working on CMBs read like a Who’s Who of the classic age of British boatbuilding: Hampton Launch Works, Salter Brothers, Tom Bunn & Co., Frank Maynard, J. W. Brook and Co., Will and Packham, Camper and Nicholsons and many others. Most are long gone now, but in 1917 they were the finest yards in Britain. Each CMB was built by hand and because they came from different yards they each had slightly different handling qualities. A new commander would have to get to know the characteristics of his particular boat just as a rider has to learn the temperament of a new horse.
But although the hulls could be provided there was a further problem. The CMBs required high-performance petrol engines of around 250 horsepower. The war was still raging in Europe and capacity in British engineering works was stretched to the limit producing engines for aircraft. There was no chance of switching production for a small run of marine engines. The Admiralty had no choice but to order that aircraft engines be installed and soon the skimmer flotilla was sporting a variety of Thornycroft, Green, Sunbeam and even Italian Fiat engines. This meant that the performance of each boat varied even more. Every individual coastal motor boat truly was unique.
Gus asked Hugh Beeley which two of the remaining CMBs he would recommend. The first choice was easy. CMB4 was one of the oldest and most reliable of the skimmers in the Flotilla. Beeley had spent days of work getting the engine just right and as Gus later wrote: ‘he was as proud of it as a favourite hunter and gave it as much care.’ She already had a considerable war record and had taken part in one of the CMB’s first successful actions against enemy warships. On 8 April 1917, CMB4 under the command of Lieutenant W. N. T. Beckett was leading a hunting pack comprising CMBs 5, 6 and 9. They skimmed over the minefield just north of Zeebrugge harbour and were stalking the entrance at low speed to reduce the engine noise which might give them away. In the distance Beckett spotted four German destroyers off the Weilingen Channel. The CMBs increased speed and quickly moved in to attack. Beckett missed with CMB4’s torpedo, but the rest of the pack were more accurate and two torpedoes struck the German destroyer G88 below the waterline. She sank within minutes. The CMBs raced away into the safety of the darkness, using their ability to skim over the Germans’ own minefield to escape pursuit. Beeley promised Gus that CMB4 would not let him down.
As for the other vessel, after pacing up and down the line several times they finally decided on CMB7, known in the Flotilla as ‘the boat they couldn’t sink’. Seamen, even those of the Royal Navy, are by tradition a superstitious bunch and if there was ever a boat which was lucky it was CMB7. She was almost as old as CMB4, but had seen far more combat. The events which earned her reputation had occurred over four days just a year earlier: On the evening of 30 April 1918, CMB7 and CMB13, based in Dunkirk, had been lying in ambush outside Ostend harbour. German destroyers were a menace to British shipping in the Channel, but as long as these raiders were in Ostend they were safe. The plan that night was to flush them out into the open waters of the English Channel. First, the RAF would bomb the harbour. The German destroyers would almost certainly seek the safety of the open sea. There the CMBs would be waiting to finish them off.
CMB7 was then under the command of Lieutenant Commander Eric Welman. It was often hard for the CMBs to pick out their targets because they were so low to the waterline. They had already been waiting for an hour and a half when Welman caught sight of a ship heading for the open sea, silhouetted for just a moment against the explosions in the harbour. He signalled to CMB13 and the two boats moved slowly across the choppy waters, running parallel to the course of the German ship, one on either side, hidden in the darkness as they moved out into the Channel. The problem for the CMBs was that the German guns had greater range and they had to get close enough to launch their attack without being seen. It was not the first time that they had tried this tactic and they edged closer, knowing that the destroyer’s crew would be watching for them. But if the plan worked they would have the destroyer in a crossfire.
Suddenly they were seen. The destroyer opened fire and increased speed to try and get away from them. Both CMBs held their positions about half a mile out, too far away for them to launch their torpedoes but far enough to make them a difficult target. Welman could see that the destroyer was heading for the shallow waters of the coast. Sooner or later she would have to turn or risk grounding. The two CMB crews just had to stay alive long enough to take the shot.
Sure enough, the destroyer eventually put her helm hard over and the range between Welman and the destroyer closed rapidly. Welman opened up CMB7’s throttle and raced towards his quarry with shellfire bursting all around him. As soon as the range closed to 400 yards Welman gave the signal and his midshipman fired the torpedo. Welman immediately swerved to one side and, glancing over the side, he saw the bubbling stream as the missile coursed past them. They raced away into the enveloping darkness and as the crew watched over their shoulders there was a flash and roar which announced that their torpedo had found its mark.
However, on 2 May, two days after the successful attack, the CMB base at Dunkirk was alerted that another German destroyer had nosed out into the Channel. Four CMBs – CMBs 2, 10, 13 and 7 – raced as a pack to intercept the destroyer’s last known course. But on arriving at the position they found that there was not one, but a formation of four German destroyers. Because of their limited forward vision the CMBs had wandered right into the middle of them. Whether or not this was a deliberate trap laid by the Germans was never known, but the CMB pack was in any case in deep trouble. As the German ships opened fire the CMBs scattered in different directions. The German vessels, signals flashing between them, quickly decided to concentrate their fire on one – as luck would have it, it was CMB7.
Welman twisted and drove CMB7 through the waves, coaxing every knot of speed out of her as the shellfire came closer. The destroyers were fast, in the choppy sea almost as fast as a CMB, and they were soon close enough to open up with machine guns. With the high vulnerability of the CMBs because of their thin plywood skin and massive fuel tanks, it seemed impossible that CMB7 should survive such concentrated fire. Yet still she flew on, bouncing and zigzagging frantically, threatening at any moment to throw her crew overboard.
The other CMBs did not abandon her; seeing her plight their helmsmen returned to the attack. CMB10’s engines began to fail and she was forced to abandon the run, but the other two pressed on and very nearly paid dearly for their bravery. The skipper of CMB2 was wounded as she was strafed and the crew were forced to flee to safety. CMB13 was hit and her steering gear was damaged, which meant that she began steering in ever-increasing circles – circles which would take her right through the centre of the German formation. As CMB13’s crew fought to repair the damage, they continued to fight back against the destroyers as they passed through the formation. They launched their torpedo even though there was almost no chance of aiming. The torpedo duly missed, but it did force two of the German vessels to take evasive action. Finally, after passing through the formation twice and yet miraculously surviving, CMB13 was far enough out to sea to cut her engines, lie low and escape further attention from the destroyers which were still in hot pursuit of CMB7.
But CMB13 had done enough. As the sea calmed, CMB7 gradually outpaced the destroyers and one by one they gave up the chase. When they were finally able to stop, Welman and his crew had a chance to examine their boat. CMB7 had taken hits to her carburettor, her induction pipe (three times) the water-jacket of her engine and even her steering compass. Yet despite all this damage, when the loss of even a few knots might have proved fatal, CMB7’s engine had not missed a stroke.
So, twelve months later, Hugh Beeley recommended CMB7 as the reserve boat for the mission – whatever it was. It was then that Gus told Beeley not to worry because he would be going on the mission as well. Gus explained that he could not tell him where they were going or why, but he wanted both boats overhauled and ready to sail within two days. Mindful of Cumming’s cover story for getting them to Finland, he also ordered Beeley to paint the boats in brilliant white rather than their usual camouflage grey. As Gus and Captain French strode back to the manor house, Hugh Beeley stared after them as though they were barking mad.
Meanwhile Agar had two more meetings with Mansfield Cumming. At the first, on Friday, 9 May, he presented the plan that he and Captain French had developed in the past forty-eight hours. It did not amount to much. There were simply too many unknowns. Until Agar arrived and saw the area and in particular what kind of threat the forts presented he could not say exactly what the route he would take would be. However, if all else failed they would at least run a courier service over to the coast of Estonia and the couriers would have to take their chances from there.
Gus gave Cumming a list of the crews and details of the boats he was taking. Cumming checked once more that the crew members were young and unmarried – men who were expendable. Gus also outlined the fuel, food and ammunition requirements. Cumming promised that they would be met by his agents in Helsinki. He provided Gus with their names. There seemed to be little more to be said. Cumming told Gus to liaise with Commander Goff and Dorothy Henslowe over the transport arrangements. But there was one point that they had both overlooked. It was only as they were leaving the meeting that Cumming remembered that Gus would surely need money. Since the Navy had provided everything for him during his career, Gus had not thought of this either. Cumming asked how much would be needed. Gus was completely taken aback. He had no idea. After some thought he said:
‘Um, about a thousand guineas, I think.’
Cumming immediately called his secretary on the intercom and told her to have the MI6 paymaster Percy Sykes bring in a cheque for 1,000 guineas made out to ‘bearer’. Gus didn’t know what to say. He had never had more than a few pounds in his pocket. As someone who had been a penniless junior naval officer himself, Cumming apparently sensed Agar’s discomfort and said:
‘I don’t want you to keep detailed accounts – you will have other things to think about – but we shall require, later on, a rough statement showing how you have spent it. You will all, of course, receive your service pay, but not from the Admiralty.’
And with that he left the preparation in Gus’s hands. There was a great deal to do. Although it had broken Beeley’s heart the CMBs’ normal camouflage grey had been covered with a coat of shining white paint. Now he and the other mechanics at Osea had to construct canvas covers to protect the CMBs from the elements as they were shipped to Finland. The machine guns and torpedo-firing gear had to be stripped out of both boats and then repacked in crates labelled as engine spares. Passage had to be booked on steamers leaving for Finland as soon as possible. MI6 found ships that they thought were suitable. Agents working at the MI6 station at Helsinki tried to source petrol and oil but, because of the turbulent situation in the Baltic, this proved to be extremely difficult.
Despite the urgency of the situation there was a host of bureaucratic delays and it seemed as if the team would never be able to leave. For instance, none of the team had a passport. These were issued by the Foreign Office on Thursday, 15 May. With a lack of attention to operational security the passports were numbered sequentially – Hampsheir’s was 283727, Sindall’s 283728, Agar’s 283729 and so forth. A detail that might raise awkward questions with a sharp-eyed immigration official. There was also a great deal of discussion between government ministries about how the men should be described under the heading ‘Profession’. There was a lot of unhappiness about the idea of them being shown as commercial travellers. In the end the Admiralty won out and they were recorded as officers of the Royal Navy. Next there was the question of visas. Finland was a newly independent state and the Foreign Office was keen to observe all the proprieties. So despite the need for secrecy applications were made at the Finnish embassy for visas. Naturally it could not be explained to the Finns why there was a need for these to be issued as quickly as possible. Still, the Foreign Office did their best and the visas were issued the following Monday, 19 May.
Even clothing was a problem. Despite what their papers said, the team had to look like civilians. But having spent almost all his life in the Navy, Gus did not even own a suit. He was sent to Covent Garden where he bought a rather cheap brown two-piece suit from Moss Bros. He was afraid to spend his operational money on anything more expensive.
Finally, on the evening of Wednesday, 21 May, the team were ready to move. They would travel in two groups: Sindall, Piper and Pegler would be on the slow cargo ship with the boats. Gus, John Hampsheir, Richard Marshall and Hugh Beeley would travel on a slightly faster ship which MI6 had found for them. That night the Royal Navy tug HMS Security arrived secretly at Osea and cables were attached to CMBs 4 and 7 which were as ready as Beeley and his team could make them. The journey took all night because the boats could not be towed too fast in case they were swamped, but as dawn broke the next morning Security arrived at West India Commercial Docks in the heart of London and the CMBs were secured alongside the Swedish cargo ship SS Pallux. That evening Gus took the crews to dinner and then to the theatre where they watched the now forgotten comedy ‘Yes, Uncle!’ It was to be their last night in England for quite a while. Possibly for ever.
The following day the boats and the stores were finally hoisted aboard the Pallux. Sindall together with the mechanics Piper and Pegler were left with their charges. While the other members of the team did some last-minute shopping, Gus went to a final meeting with Cumming at Whitehall Place. To celebrate their departure, Cumming took Gus on a hair-raising drive through London in his Rolls-Royce to dine at one of his clubs. During the meal Cumming did not talk about the operation at all and when the meal was over he simply patted Gus on the back, said: ‘Well, my boy, good luck to you’ and left. Gus walked to the Army and Navy Club, collected his few civilian belongings and then took a taxi to Euston station. There he met Hampsheir, Marshall and Beeley. They were due to take the 5 p.m. service to Hull – and were a little put out that MI6 had only booked them third-class tickets! But there was also a surprise visitor waiting for them: Dorothy Henslowe. She had brought some magazines ‘for the journey’, but it is clear that this was something more than attention to detail. These were young men who probably would not be coming back and she clearly felt a sense of responsibility towards them which Cumming did not. She stood on the platform as the train pulled out of the station. Gus hung out of the window and watched her until she was out of sight.
The train arrived at Hull at 10.30 p.m. It had been an awkward journey. No sooner had they boarded the train than Gus had been spotted by an old naval friend named Hunt who was also travelling to Hull to take command of a new ship. Gus was forced to engage him in conversation while spinning some story about where he was going. The others lay low and pretended not to know him. When the train arrived in Hull the local Senior Naval Transport Officer (SNTO) had sent a rating and a car. He conducted them to the nearby Railway Hotel where the SNTO had booked rooms for them.
At 9.30 a.m. the next morning Gus and his colleagues changed into their ill-fitting civilian clothes, had a meeting with the SNTO at which they handed over the cases containing their naval uniforms and from there were directed to the offices of Ambrose Good, shipping agent. It was here that their cover story began to unravel.
Good was puzzled by the exorbitant rate which his guests had agreed to pay. £15 would have been a high price for passage to Finland, but because of the need to get the team out there as quickly as possible, MI6 had agreed a fee of £45 per man. In Good’s opinion this was ridiculous and quite frankly suspicious. He was convinced he could get a lower price and Gus agreed to let him try. Good telephoned the Fennia’s agent and soon had the price reduced to a more reasonable £20. But then there was another problem: the Fennia was not rated to carry passengers. To get around naval regulations the four men would have to be signed on as deckhands. They were taken to the shipping office to sign on and then went to the Aliens Office where their passports were stamped for exit. It was at this point that the naval men heard to their horror that the Fennia was a dry ship (she was Finnish-registered and Finland had introduced prohibition at the same time she became independent). Hampsheir was sent hastily into town to secure as much alcohol as he could find. He returned with a rather odd collection: four dozen bottles of stout and a dozen bottles of port. It would have to do.
Finally they arrived in their ill-fitting Covent Garden suits at the Fennia. Her captain (‘a good sort, fat,’ noted Gus) and some of the crew welcomed them aboard. The four Englishmen were clearly a matter of some curiosity. When Gus asked the captain about this, he admitted that this was the first time he had ever carried passengers as seamen. In his diary that evening Gus wrote despairingly that the captain gave him ‘many eyewinks’ at this point. Being a spy was going to be more trouble than he had thought: their cover story was already under suspicion and they had not even left England yet.
By 1.30 p.m. the Fennia was underway. Mealtimes on the ship were: breakfast at 9 a.m., dinner at 1 p.m. and supper at 6 p.m. Gus was horrified to find that there was no afternoon tea. As the Fennia moved slowly out of port, he noted in his diary that he was going to ask for afternoon tea to be served promptly at 4 p.m. each day and a late supper before bed as well. ‘Expect to have a row about it,’ he wrote cautiously. But in 1919 there were some standards which an Englishman simply could not let slip.
Gus wondered how ST-25 was faring.