Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (16 page)

The Yangtze Incident

By the time the
Queen Mary
’s hull was laid down in 1931 there were already legends aplenty in the Clyde’s past. Great passenger liners for Cunard like RMS
Aquitania,
or her sister ship RMS
Lusitania,
torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1915; capital warships like HMS
Australia,
HMS
Barham,
HMS
Inflexible,
HMS
Tiger
and HMS
Hood,
greatest of all the pre-war battlecruisers and brightest symbol of Great Britain’s invincibility. RMS
Elizabeth,
sister ship of the
Queen Mary,
would come next, and HMS
Indefatigable,
an early aircraft carrier, and HMS
Vanguard,
the last battleship built anywhere in the world. When the end of World War II silenced the call for warships, life was sustained by a balancing rise in merchant shipping.

All of these leviathans came out of just one yard—John Brown’s—and yet there were dozens more working round the clock just to meet demand. In 1967 RMS
Queen Elizabeth II (QE2)
was the last hurrah for passenger-liner building on Clydebank before John Brown’s became part of the government-sponsored Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. UCS went into liquidation in 1971 and the following year RMS
Alisa
became the last ship ever to be built on those historic slipways. It brought to an end 101 years of shipbuilding on the site.

All of this—from the
Queen Mary
to the
Alisa—
happened well within a lifetime. Generations of Scots grew up hearing about the Clyde shipyards. They always sounded like a constant, something proud and permanent and vital to the body of the nation—like an arm or a leg.

But of course they were anything but permanent. The Clyde is a dead river now and the only ship plying up and down with any regularity is an ocean-going paddle steamer called the
Waverley.
She takes tourists on day trips to Largs
and Rothsay, past the skeletons of derelict shipyards that once employed tens of thousands of men.

More than places of work, the Clyde shipyards were part of the identity of Scotland and of Great Britain. We would never have survived World Wars I and II without the warships and merchant ships that we built to keep ourselves alive.

Out of another Clyde shipyard came a ship that became an unforgettable legend of heroism and manliness. She was a
Black Swan
class sloop, built by the Alexander Stephens and Sons yard at Govan and launched on May 7, 1943. When World War II was over she was reclassified as a frigate.

By April 1949 she was on China’s Yangtze River near Shanghai. Her name was HMS
Amethyst.

There had been civil war in China since the 1920s. But by 1949 Mao Tse-tung’s communists had the upper hand and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists were bowing to the inevitable. At the British Embassy in the city of Nanking, as elsewhere, staff and other British and Commonwealth nationals were on standby to evacuate the territory. Standing guard nearby was the destroyer HMS
Consort
, a reassuring presence. By the middle of April she was running low on fuel and orders had been sent to the HMS
Amethyst
, anchored downstream at Shanghai, to steam up to Nanking and relieve her.

Since the 1858 Treaty of Tiensin, the British Royal Navy had enjoyed the freedom to navigate any and all Chinese waters. British warships had been a familiar sight for nearly a century, but Mao Tse-tung’s communists saw things differently. While the nationalists had quietly honored the treaty, Mao was of the opinion that since he hadn’t signed it, he was absolved of any need to respect its terms. More to the point, he was hostile to the possibility of British imperialist warships being at liberty, in his hard-won territory, to prop up the ailing nationalist forces.

The timing for the
Amethyst
could not have been worse. The
communists were already in control of the river’s north bank and were now looking hungrily toward the south. A temporary truce between the two sides had maintained a peace of sorts but it was due to expire on April 20. Although the communists expected to cross the river unopposed, they were prepared to do it the hard way on April 21 if the nationalists got in their way.

And so the
Amethyst
was entering treacherous waters when she slipped her moorings at Nanking early on the morning of April 19 and headed upriver at a sedate 11 knots. To this day it’s unclear whether the British Navy was still within its rights—but Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner could have been forgiven for thinking his ship was unlikely to face any real threat.

After a first day’s journey of around 100 miles they dropped anchor at Kiang Yin. The Yangtze River was notoriously difficult and dangerous to navigate in darkness, and the rest of the trip would be tackled the following day. There was no real sense of urgency, far less of danger.

By just after five o’clock on the morning of April 20 the
Amethyst
was under way once more. For around three and a half hours she steamed peacefully toward her destination—when all at once a burst of heavy machine-gun fire from somewhere on the north bank reminded Skinner and his crew that they had entered a war zone. The rattling burst was followed in short order by 10 or a dozen artillery shells from a shore battery, all of which flew well wide of the ship. The sailors were not alarmed. They assumed the firing—surely too wayward to be aimed at them—must have been part of routine bombardment of the nationalist positions on the south bank by the communists in the north.

Skinner had earlier had his men paint two large canvases with Union Jack flags, and just to be on the safe side he now ordered both to be slung over the side of the ship. Around an hour later, just about 9:30 a.m., the situation changed dramatically and
permanently. The
Amethyst
was approaching the village of San Chiang-ying when a communist shell passed over her bow, much too close for comfort. This wasn’t communist against nationalist—this was communist against the Royal Navy.

Skinner ordered action stations, and in a bid to distance themselves from this much more accurate shore battery, the ship’s engineers battled to wring full power out of the turbines. It was not to be. Before they could clear the field of fire a shell tore into the
Amethyst’
s wheelhouse and exploded. Leading Seaman Leslie Francis was at the wheel and somehow managed to stay on his feet, trying to stay on course. A second shell hit the bridge, killing or injuring every man. Skinner had suffered multiple wounds and was barely conscious, but managed to give the order to return fire. First Lieutenant Geoffrey Weston, bleeding heavily from a chest wound, tried to relay the order but found that the explosions had cut communications between the bridge and the rest of the ship. As more shells found their target the
Amethyst
ran aground on a mud bank off Rose Island. It was just 9:35 a.m.—barely five minutes after the first explosion. Further hits took out the generator, the port engine room and the sick bay. In desperation, Weston made it to the ship’s radio and sent a terse message to anyone listening:

Under heavy fire. Am aground in approx position 31.10 degrees North 119.50 degrees East. Large number of casualties.

 

Dead and dying seamen lay all around, and now the
Amethyst
was a near-helpless sitting duck, within point-blank range of her un declared enemy. To make matters worse, the position in which she’d run aground meant she couldn’t retaliate with the two great guns on her foredeck. Only the stern turret remained in operation, and the gunners managed to get 30 shells away toward uncertain targets before a direct hit by the enemy destroyed one of the two remaining guns. Hoping that by holding fire he could persuade the
communists to do likewise, Weston ordered the stern turret to fall silent. Unimpressed and unmoved, the enemy kept pounding shells through the
Amethyst’
s armor-plating.

Fearing the worst, Weston ordered some of the uninjured men to crawl into sniping positions, armed with rifles and Bren light machine guns, ready to repel boarders. Seeing men on the move on deck, the communists turned to heavy machine guns to rake the
Amethyst
from stern to bow. There was carnage aboard now. What had been a peaceful river-trip just minutes before was now a hell of dead and injured men strewn throughout the ship. The decks were awash with blood.

With Skinner mortally wounded and drifting in and out of consciousness, Weston had to assume command. Like the rest of the crew he knew the best chance of survival lay elsewhere—as far from the ship as possible in fact. He ordered most of the able men over the side into the water. The south bank and the nationalist forces offered the only hope of salvation, and it was either swim for it or die here aboard the stricken ship. Non-swimmers and wounded men scrambled into the only lifeboat still serviceable and began rowing south.

There was yet more hell to go through—machine-gun fire and heavy artillery were turned on to the men in the water and more were cut down before they could make much headway. In all, 59 sailors and four Chinese kitchen boys made it on to the south bank, where they were given medical treatment in a nationalist army hospital before being transported in trucks back to Shanghai.

It was an isolated and desperate band of brothers left aboard the
Amethyst
. Weston had slivers of shrapnel in his liver and lungs and was later dosed up on a combination of morphine and Benzedrine to simultaneously dull his pain and keep him awake. The communist shore batteries had fallen silent but any movement aboard ship still attracted the attention of the machine-gunners.

So far there were 17 dead and 25 seriously wounded and the situation was hardly expected to improve any time soon. Only around 80 men were still fit for active duty but they were trapped like fish in a barrel. The
Amethyst
herself was holed above and below the waterline, more like a Swiss cheese than a ship of war. Men scrambled to plug holes with hammocks and mattresses and anything else that came to hand, but she was in a pitiful condition.

Hopes were pinned on the arrival of the
Consort
, now well aware of their plight and steaming toward them. Out of sight of the enemy machine guns, men prepared a tow-line at the stern of the ship so the destroyer would have at least some slim chance of coming in close and pulling them clear of the mud bank that held them. It was the roar of communist guns that told them she was making her approach. Up on deck they caught their first glimpse of their would-be savior. Flying three Union Jacks and seven white flags, she was steaming toward them at a mighty 29 knots—the fastest speed that had ever been achieved on the Yangtze River. Her funnel was belching plumes of black smoke and all her guns were blazing fire toward the communist shore batteries.

Aboard the
Amethyst
men cheered as their ally knocked out one shore battery after another, but she was also coming under terrible fire herself. Her Commander, Robertson, wanted to make a rescue attempt—and sent an urgent transmission to that effect. Weston feared such an action would only cause the loss of a second ship and replied she was putting herself in too much danger. Initially undeterred,
Consort
made a first pass of the
Amethyst
and then wheeled around hard, still punching shell after shell toward the communist positions.

She was taking too many hits, though—that much was now clear even to the stubborn Robertson—and with 10 of his men dead and three seriously wounded he wheeled around once more and
headed downstream out of range. The trapped men could only watch as she steamed out of sight.

Desperate attempts to free the
Amethyst
from the mud banks of Rose Island were finally successful and she was able to limp a couple of miles upstream, out of range of the communist batteries that had so tormented them, where she dropped anchor at a place called Fu Te Wei.

All the while, Weston and his men had fought to free their ship, a further rescue attempt was under way. The transmissions from the
Amethyst
had been picked up in Shanghai and Vice-Admiral Madden was quickly on the move. Shortly after daybreak on April 21 two Royal Navy ships set a course for
Amethyst
’s last known position. They were the cruiser the
London
and the
Amethyst’
s sister-ship, the
Black Swan.