I Sank The Bismarck (8 page)

During my time at Abbotsinch I was able to meet up with
some of the friends I had made since entering St Vincent so
many months before. My friend Buster May from Durban
was one. During our stay we produced a concert party that
gave two performances at the local Empire theatre in Paisley.
It was a fantastic success, so much so that we were allowed to
travel for free on the local corporation trams and we were
treated in every bar we went to – and we went into many, I
can tell you!

The wartime forces were a great melting pot; people from
the strangest occupations and places, all over the Empire,
were thrust into uniform and told to get on with it. It produced
the most amazing juxtapositions. One of the junior
ratings who looked after our billet, and who was obviously a
wartime recruit, asked for a grand piano to play in the
concert. On the night he appeared in immaculate white tie
and tails and performed a solo act which was just unbelievable.
After a couple of classics he asked the audience for
requests and they would not let him leave the stage. He was
so popular that his original slot of fifteen minutes stretched to
forty-five, after which the MC had to go out and tell the
audience to let him finish. It was a remarkable performance,
and did a great deal to boost the popularity of the navy.

When my South African friend was due to leave, we
decided we would have a weekend on the town, so on
Saturday night we went off to Glasgow for a meal at a
popular restaurant called Rogano's. We decided after the meal
to look for some local female talent and were told that the
best place was the Locarno dance hall. This was a very
respectable establishment, where the doormen inspected you
to make sure that you were smartly dressed before letting
you in, and where no alcohol was served. Eventually we
teamed up with two nice-looking, well-dressed girls for some
enjoyable but fairly chaste dancing. Towards the end of the
evening they told us that they were going home together, so
we were forced to say goodbye. The girl that I had been
dancing with asked if we would like to come along to a tea
party at her parents' house the next day. We accepted. The
following day, to my annoyance, Buster, feeling perhaps
slightly more predatory, decided that as he was leaving on
Monday a tame afternoon in a suburban house was not for
him. I, however, felt under some obligation to go. Knocking
at the front door, I found about twelve people of both sexes
gathered in the parlour, chatting over sandwiches and cups of
tea. I was asked by my hostess to join a Ludo game where a
young lady needed cheering up. She had, I was told, recently
lost her boyfriend, who had been a pilot in the RAF.

As soon as we were introduced I realized that she was
someone special. Her name was
Marjorie Cochrane and she
lived in a small town south-west of Glasgow. There was something
about her that I had not met in any other woman.
Eventually, when we were on our own, I was able to get her
to talk about her boyfriend and she said that he had been
killed in a plane down south in Eastleigh about three months
ago. I didn't know of any accident at Eastleigh other than the
one I had tried to stop. We talked further, and it became clear
that her boyfriend was the pilot at the controls of the Hudson.
I explained that I had tried to prevent him from taking off. All
she knew was that his passengers had been some very important
people from the Air Ministry in London. It was a
remarkable coincidence. I was so struck by her that before the
evening was out I told her that I was determined to marry her.
I think she thought I was mad, but I am pleased to say that we
were married in June 1944 and remained so for almost sixty
years. It was the best decision that I ever made in my whole
life.

I learned a lot at Abbotsinch.
Dive-bombing in the
Swordfish was very different from doing it in a Skua. This
manoeuvre was enough to show what a reliable aircraft the
Swordfish was. At the beginning you do a banking turn and
head the nose of the plane down in a dive. The plane starts to
accelerate, and the wind starts shrieking as it rushes through
the struts and wires. At this stage it's quite possible for the airspeed
indicator to show 200 knots: you are falling fast, the
needle of the altimeter going from 8,000 feet to 7,000 feet like
the second hand of a clock, but you are still able to keep
perfect control of the aircraft. Plummeting down, it is
possible to wait until the frightening height of just 200 feet
is reached before pulling back on the stick and levelling out.
During our training I avoided diving to such a low height, but
I did it later and can vouch that it can be done.

There were complicated patrol patterns to learn, depending
on whether we were meant to be locating a surface vessel,
hunting a submarine that had been detected by a merchant
ship or mounting an anti-submarine patrol along the line of
advance of a convoy or fleet of warships. Finally, of course,
there was the torpedo practice, where we launched a dummy
torpedo at our target ship. She was an elderly destroyer but
still capable of the rapid manoeuvres that any self-respecting
warship would carry out to avoid a torpedo in the water. Of
course, she was not carrying guns that were directing their fire
at the crew of the attacking aircraft. But the key was learning
to judge the speed of the ship by the size of the bow wave, and
then to calculate the required deflection for a torpedo that
would be launched from a distance of 1,000 or so yards and
would travel at a speed of 29 knots to its (one hoped unsuspecting)
target. It sounded simple, but the truth was that
so far in the war torpedo attacks on moving warships had
never been successful, despite several attempts.

One such attack had taken place while I was still at
Eastleigh with 759 Squadron. The French government's
surrender in June 1940 meant that the French fleet in the
Mediterranean might be absorbed by the German navy,
boosting its strength overnight and threatening our fleet,
which was based in Alexandria in Egypt. The main base for
the French warships was Toulon on the French mainland,
but they also had ships with our fleet in Alexandria, as
well as a big base in Oran in Algeria. It was these ships
that the Admiralty felt they should do something about.

The
operation against the French ships in Oran was to
prove important, because it was the start of a battle that I was
eventually to join and it formed a big part of my war service.
The incident was given great publicity – it was all over the
newspapers – but what I later discovered had taken place
caused several people I served with, including the commanding
officer of a squadron I joined, 818, to make some crucial
decisions about the attack on
Bismarck.
Apart from that, it's
important to realize that while I was deciding about what
aircraft I would fly in the Fleet Air Arm and embarking on
various training courses, others were putting into practice
what I was being taught and were finding that there was a big
difference between peacetime exercises and what was possible
when the shells were exploding, with your aircraft as a target.

In July 1940 HMS
Ark Royal,
our most famous aircraft
carrier, was sent down to the Mediterranean base in Gibraltar
to be part of a small unit called
Force H. This was a very
powerful force when it was first created. As well as the
Ark
there was
HMS
Hood,
probably the most famous warship in
the Royal Navy, a battlecruiser, though most of us thought of
her as a battleship. The only real difference was that she was
slightly less armoured than a battleship and so was a bit faster,
but she had extremely large guns and was, we thought, quite
formidable. There were also the real battleships HMS
Valiant
and
Resolution,
each with big, 15in-calibre guns, accompanied
by several cruisers and nineteen destroyers. This may
appear to be a big fleet, but it wasn't that large compared to
either the Italian or French navies.

Force H had been assembled with the immediate aim of
making sure that the French fleet in Oran didn't become a
threat to us by remaining in the Med and coming under
German control. We were going to 'escort them off the
premises', so to speak.

The force was commanded by Rear Admiral James 'Slim'
Somerville, who was based on
Hood.
I was later to serve
under him on more than one carrier and the general opinion
of him was that he was an absolutely first-class commanding
officer, who was not only
respected but liked. His orders from
the Government were to tell the
French to steam their ships to
a British port and throw in their lot with us against Germany,
or alternatively to sail to a French port in the West Indies, or,
finally, to scuttle them. If they chose not to do any of these
things, then we would sink them.

The French naval base was really in two separate locations.
The harbour at the city of Oran was home to submarines and
small patrol boats, while further west along the coast was
Mers-el-Kébir, where the larger cruisers and battleships were
moored. The two that we wanted out of the way in particular
were, I gathered,
Strasbourg
and
Dunkerque,
which were
recently built and fast.

The captain of the
Ark,
Cedric 'Hooky'
Holland, another
officer I liked, and who had a great sense of humour, had at
one time been an attaché in the embassy in Paris and was
selected to go to discuss terms with the French admiral on one
of his battleships in Mers-el-Kébir harbour. The French were
given a deadline by which either they must agree to comply or
we would open fire. From the British point of view, there was
very little to discuss. It was important that, if we were to move
against the French fleet, the action should be decisive and
must not allow the French warships to put to sea and escape,
or fight back. The planning was quite meticulous, carefully
timed from the expiry of the ultimatum. Our battleships
would launch a massive barrage against the French ships in
the harbour, and Swordfish from the
Ark
would launch
torpedoes and bombs against them as well.

Early on the morning of 3 July the first two Swordfish took
off to start their patrol to the west of Force H. When the light
improved they would begin standard anti-submarine searches.
Almost immediately after this another six Swordfish took to
the air to search the sea up to 150 miles to the north-east and
as far north as the Spanish coast. (I became quite friendly with
a telegraphist air gunner who took part in these patrols,
George Dawson of 810 Squadron, one of those on the
Ark.
)
A fighter patrol of three Skuas was then put into the air, and
a reconnaissance Swordfish took off to carry out a patrol over
Mers-el-Kébir and Oran harbours, keeping watch over the
activities of the French fleet. It was also ordered to give any
assistance, especially in the way of transmitting signals, to HMS
Foxhound,
the destroyer that had taken Captain Holland to
meet with the French admirals.
Foxhound
was patrolling slowly
outside the breakwater at Mers-el-Kébir, while Captain Holland
had gone into the harbour on a small boat.

By now the negotiations were dragging on and the
squadrons started to make preparations for an attack on
the harbours. The plan called for six Swordfish to mine the
entrance of Mers-el-Kébir to stop any of the French ships
escaping.
Dropping mines was something that I went on to
practise at Abbotsinch. They were shaped much like a
torpedo, without the motor and the propeller at the back, and
were mounted in the same position on the aircraft's fuselage.
Once the mines were released they would hit the water, sink
to the bottom and then become armed. They would be set off
by a fuse triggered by the magnetic field of a ship passing over
them. They contained 1,000lb of explosive, so were very
potent, although their value was not just in the damage that
they could cause to one ship: particularly in a situation like
Oran, the knowledge that mines had been laid would also
deter ships from passing through the harbour entrance. So
dropping just one mine in the right place could bottle up a
whole fleet until the mine was cleared. That, at any rate, was
what we hoped and were told in our training!

While the mine-laying aircraft were ranged at the end of the
flight deck, the reconnaissance Swordfish, which had been
constantly circling over the French ships, reported back that
there was now a lot of activity amongst the moored vessels.
Tugs had appeared and were laying tow ropes to some of the
battleships, and it looked to the observers as though they were
raising steam. Their estimate was that the ships would be
ready for sea in half an hour.

At a few minutes after 1300, at orders from
Somerville, the
six Swordfish took off on the mission to drop the mines on
the harbour of Mers-el-Kébir. They circled while a flight of six
Skuas joined them to give them some defence against attack
from French fighters. There was no opposition from any aircraft
or from the ground; they seemed to have taken the
French completely by surprise. An hour later, fresh orders
came through from Admiral Somerville in
Hood
to mine the
harbour at Oran as well. Two Swordfish were loaded up to do
this, in the hopes of bottling up the submarines and destroyers
moored there.

As the minutes ticked away, no one on the
Ark
was clear
about what was happening. As a matter of fact, there was
growing confusion at quite a senior level about the state of the
negotiations. Captain Holland was talking to the French
Admiral Gensoul, trying to find a face-saving formula that
would allow the French to surrender their ships and avoid
bloodshed. Admiral Somerville was under pressure from the
Admiralty to settle the issue quickly and stop the French from
wriggling off the hook. The time for launching the attack
passed, and 'landing on' – as we called landing back on the
carrier – was suspended.