I Sank The Bismarck (10 page)

It was an open secret when I joined 818 Squadron that
pilots on the
Ark
were doubtful about the efficiency of the
new
Duplex triggers, but Admiralty instructions were clear:
they were to be fitted and used unless there was no alternative.
The torpedoes carried by the Swordfish were the
Mark
IX and were referred to as 18in torpedoes, which was the
diameter of the warhead and body. These were smaller than
those launched by our submarines, the
Mark VIII, which had
a 21in diameter, at 40 knots were faster and had a far greater
range of 7,000 yards. More important, the warheads were
very different. The airborne 18in carried a warhead of 250lb
of explosive, compared to 750lb in the bigger Mark VIII.
Some modern warships had thick enough armour, or specially
constructed bulges in their hulls designed to limit the effect of
a hit by a torpedo, and our small warhead would not
necessarily cause enough damage to sink one of these ships.
At best, as I was to be told during my training at Abbotsinch,
all we could hope to do was damage a ship sufficiently to slow
it down, or get enough hits in at the same time to cripple it.
An unreliable warhead was merely adding to our problems.

I shouldn't give the impression that flying a Swordfish against
enemy fighters or anti-aircraft guns was a piece of cake. It was
remarkable that the planes that tried to hit
Strasbourg
or
attacked
Dunkerque
were able to make it back to the safety
of the
Ark
's flight deck in one piece. It took a very cool head
and some fantastic flying skill to avoid two modern fighters in
the way that Sub-Lieutenant Pearson had done over Mers-el-Kébir.
The outcome wasn't always guaranteed: if you got into
a fight you could easily end up dead. George Dawson of 810
Squadron told me about the horrible mess that he got into
when the
Ark
was sent down to
Dakar, in French West Africa.
This happened in the middle of September 1940, when I was
just starting my training at Abbotsinch.

General de Gaulle, who led the Free French in Britain,
believed, for whatever reason, that the troops in the French
colony might come over to his side if he presented himself and
made a personal appeal to their loyalty to France. The plan
was that he would go down there in a small force of British
warships and
Ark Royal,
with around 6,000 Royal Marines
and Free French troops, to make a public proclamation and
negotiate with the French governor. As with Oran, the
negotiations would be backed up with the threat of taking the
port by force if they came to nought.
Dakar was an important
port on the west coast of Africa, and if German submarines
started operating out of it they would cause a lot of damage
to our convoys sailing round the Cape of Good Hope to India
or the Red Sea. Another reason why it was worth taking
Dakar, so it was rumoured, was because a lot of gold from the
central banks of Poland and Belgium had been shipped there
for safekeeping when Germany first invaded France. There
were stories that up to £60 million in gold bullion was stashed
away there.

So
Ark Royal
sailed down to West Africa with two battleships,
HMS
Barham
and
Resolution,
with an escort of five
cruisers and ten destroyers. They arrived in Freetown, in
Sierra Leone, on 16 September, and then a few days later
sailed for Dakar. Whatever the attitude of the Vichy forces to
General de Gaulle might have been, it was unlikely that they
would welcome a visit from the Royal Navy after our actions
in Oran. Their fleet in Dakar had been reinforced by a
modern battleship,
Richelieu,
which had sailed from Brest
dockyard to avoid being captured by the Germans, and two
other cruisers that slipped past Gibraltar from Mers-el-Kébir.
The first attempt at persuading the French forces in Dakar
to leave Vichy and join De Gaulle didn't go well.
Ark Royal
had embarked two French aircraft at Gibraltar and when they
took off and landed at Dakar airfield, their pilots and
passengers, all Free French officers, were straightaway
arrested and jailed. Then two ships' boats that attempted
to enter the harbour with De Gaulle's representatives were
fired upon and several of their passengers wounded. This
marked the start of a general French offensive. They knew of
course what had happened at Mers-el-Kébir, and it is
hardly surprising that they decided to get their retaliation in
first.

Their shore batteries opened fire on the British warships,
and
Richelieu,
with her huge 15in-calibre guns, also started
blasting away. The battle lasted intermittently over two days,
with
Barham
suffering a hit by one of
Richelieu
's shells, and
Resolution
being torpedoed by a French submarine. The
French lost two submarines and a destroyer.

In the middle of this battle,
General de Gaulle decided that
he would attempt a landing along the coast and deliver an
ultimatum to the Vichy forces. It was a hopeless effort in the
circumstances. The landings were hampered by fog and two
French cruisers managed to leave the harbour, raising the
possibility that the
Free French troops would be cut off and
their reinforcements from the troop ships sunk by the cruisers
that were now steaming along the coast. The Vichy forces also
managed to send troops to the landing area at Rufisque, and
they started to fire on the Free French soldiers. De Gaulle
realized that the situation was lost and he would gain nothing
from large numbers of French casualties, so the landings were
abandoned and the Free French troops already on the shore
were taken off.

Ark Royal
had flown off some Swordfish to provide aerial
spotting for
Barham
and
Resolution
during their attempt to
shell the shore batteries and Dakar harbour, with the
immobile
Richelieu
at anchor, but they met some organized
resistance. French fighters were already on alert and maintaining
combat air patrols over the coast. When the landings were
abandoned, the two French cruisers turned and tried to return
to port. Seeing an opportunity to weaken the Vichy forces,
and under orders from the Admiralty, eight Swordfish from
810 and 820
Squadrons were ranged up to carry out a
torpedo attack on the cruisers. They met some very fierce
anti-aircraft fire, and five of the Swordfish failed to make it
back. The observers that managed to return to the
Ark
reported that they believed they had managed to get two hits,
but in the mayhem of the crossfire and their violent getaway
they could not be sure.

All this was happening while I was engaged in my training
at Abbotsinch, carefully guiding my Swordfish over the
waters of the Clyde, waiting for the cameras mounted on
the wing of my aircraft and on the target ship to tell me if I
had carried out a successful drop or not. Perhaps if I had had
an idea of what was happening in the harbour at Dakar at
that very time I might have been more apprehensive about my
decision to transfer to Swordfish. I would certainly have been
less complacent about my good results from the training
course.

Back on
Ark Royal
in West Africa, the final operation was
to be a dive-bombing attack on the French shore batteries,
and George Dawson was the TAG on one of the Swordfish.
Armed with 250lb bombs, they had originally been briefed to
dive-bomb the 9.2in gun batteries located on the island of
Gorée, lying to the east of Dakar, which effectively covered
the entrance to the port. George was strapped in ready for
take-off when a last-minute change of orders was handed to
their observer: the Swordfish were now directed to bomb
Richelieu.
George, in the last plane of the flight of six, had not
been told of the change of target and was alarmed when he
realized that they were flying past the island and heading into
the harbour. A French fighter followed them in and started
firing. The Swordfish was hit, bullets thudding into the cockpit
and the metal-covered forward part of the fuselage.
George was uncertain whether it was from the fighter or
whether it was anti-aircraft fire from the French ships at
anchor, but it seems unlikely that the French guns on the
ground would risk hitting their own plane. He was slightly
wounded by some shell fragments in the arm, but kept his eye
on the fighter, waiting for the opportunity to get in a burst of
fire from his Lewis machine gun. He had warned his pilot
immediately, but the Swordfish had not taken any evasive
action. George then noticed that they were leaving a trail of
smoke. He turned round to check where it was coming from
and saw a horrific sight. His observer,
Sub-Lieutenant Cross,
was still seated, his eyes glazed and blood pouring from his
mouth. Looking further forward and up to the cockpit, he
could see the pilot, Sub-Lieutenant Wheeler, with his head
flopping on his shoulder as if he were asleep, his yellow Mae
West lifejacket covered in crimson blood. The Swordfish was
flying crazily, doing violent zooms and dives, and the pilot's
head rolled with the plane's gyrations. Then his arm came out
of the cockpit and George saw that it was almost severed
below the elbow, hanging on by just a piece of skin.

When the plane turned upside down, both George and
Cross were thrown out, but Cross was either dead or too
badly injured to open his parachute. George managed
to grasp his ripcord and his chute opened; he floated down
into the water of the harbour while 15in shells from
Barham
exploded all round the port. He managed to swim ashore,
where he was arrested and taken prisoner. In the police cells
where he was initially locked up he met the crews of the two
other Swordfish in his sub-flight who had also been shot
down. The lead Swordfish, flown by
Lieutenant Jackson, had
managed to drop its bombs, but then a bullet had ignited their
liferaft's flares and set the main wing on fire. The third
Swordfish had also been hit, then pounced on by a French
fighter, and the pilot, the young
Sub-Lieutenant England
whose plane had been hit in the attack on
Dunkerque
at
Mers-el-Kébir, had been killed. So too had the TAG, Sub-Lieutenant
Moore. The observer, who was wounded, had, like
George Dawson, managed to swim to shore where he was
also captured.

Five Swordfish from the
Ark
were lost that day. The
operation was clearly a disaster, and the
Ark,
with the rest of
the British ships, returned to the UK, where the
Ark
docked in
Liverpool for a refit. The lesson was clear: Swordfish could be
very vulnerable, despite their great manoeuvrability and
robustness, and attacks on shore-based installations could
prove extremely risky. Whether I would ever be involved in
any, I would just have to wait and see.

Having completed my training in torpedo-dropping and dive-bombing
at Abbotsinch, I was sent to
Naval Air Station
Arbroath, where we practised carrier landings on the tarmac
runways. Here again the slow speed of the Swordfish is an
advantage, although landing on land is completely different
from landing on a carrier. A Swordfish stalls (stops being able
to fly) at a speed of 50 knots, but at sea the carrier after all is
moving forward at perhaps 30 knots, so the relative speed of
the aircraft as it flies over the stern is just 20 knots. There is
also the effect of any wind, which will aid in reducing the
landing speed of the aircraft to perhaps 15 knots. That, at any
rate, is the theory.

But for all my praise of the Swordfish, it was while flying
one out of Arbroath that I had my
first crash, and I was lucky
that it was not fatal. I was flying with my friend Sub-Lieutenant
Ed
Dunkley on a navigation exercise and we were
looking forward to making some observations of wild deer as
we travelled west along the South Grampians. Flying at a
relatively low altitude over the rugged hills just due north of
Kirriemuir, the engine began to run erratically. I started to
adjust the mixture, but the engine hiccupped, sputtered and
cut out. I went through the procedures in the cockpit to
restart it – check all the switches are on, pump the fuel primer
to get more fuel into the carburettor – but nothing I tried
would revive it. Naturally it's noisy in the open cockpit of a
Swordfish, with a big nine-cylindered, 700 h.p. radial engine
hammering away in front of you, but now all I could hear was
the sound of the air rushing through the struts and over the
wings. We were in trouble.

I obtained the best angle of glide to keep our speed up for
as long as I could. I shouted to my passenger that I would try
to get down, but this was rather a forlorn hope among the
steep mountains over which we were now gliding. I remembered
having seen a large house to the south and hoped that
it might be set in some open ground, or a paddock. I turned
and we glided over to it, but I could see there was no grass or
any sort of open country. We had lost height and were rapidly
running out of anywhere to go.

Then I noticed on my right a narrow firebreak between the
trees. This was our only chance. I turned, losing even more
height, and headed straight for the gap. As we got closer the
trees came up to meet us and the firebreak, which was fenced
with a gated entrance, seemed impossibly tight. It's hard to
say what I felt. One part of the brain is full of fear about the
possibility of pain and injury, while the other part takes over
and tries to stay in control, in the vain belief that somehow
the inevitable might be avoided. That, I suppose, is what the
training is all about. A Swordfish might look fragile, but it
weighs over 2 tons without any payload, so we hit very hard.
The wings smashed against the trunks of the trees with a loud
crash and I was knocked unconscious. The next I remember
was a female voice shouting at me and shaking my shoulders.

When I managed to regain focus I could hardly believe
what I saw. There was a lovely young lady standing over me
in the cockpit with her skirts raised, enquiring if I was hurt. It
left nothing to the imagination. I undid my harness and she
pulled me over the side on to the grass, which was quite close
as we had lost our undercarriage. Then I remembered my
friend Dunkley. The girl and I got him out and saw that he
was bleeding from a head wound and very frail. With assistance
from some other men who had arrived, we took him to
the house and bandaged him up. I then asked to phone
Arbroath, but our crash had pulled down the telephone lines,
so someone was dispatched to go a considerable distance by
bicycle to the nearest phone at Kirriemuir. Meanwhile, the
butler of the beautiful apparition I had seen on regaining consciousness
appeared with an extra-large decanter of whisky.

Dunkley was laid out on the settee, with his head bandaged,
but I, fully recovered, had a very good evening in the company
of the young girl, with a good meal and plenty of dance music
from a wind-up gramophone. I particularly remember listening
to 'In the Mood' by Glenn Miller. Very appropriate!