For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II

Early days in Digby in wartime, our main commitment was convoy patrols. We used to fly out, and the operations room guided us out to a convoy moving either northwards or southwards on the North Sea off Norfolk and Suffolk. We would patrol seawards of them; they usually had an escort of a couple of destroyers or armed ships of some sort. We patrolled for probably an hour, three of us in a loose formation, and then we’d be relieved by another section, as they were called, and we’d go back and refuel and wait for our next turn. We were told by the Navy we mustn’t come within, I think it was, 1,000 metres otherwise they would open fire and, yes indeed, they did from time to time. During clear air we didn’t see any hostile aircraft. In poorer weather, with a lot of comparatively low cloud, yes, you would see that there was something going on, because the Navy opened up; we might get a sight of a hostile aircraft, but it would immediately disappear into cloud.’

Although Roy McGowan doesn’t mention it in his tape, the Squadron was sent to Norway in late May 1940 and lost many of its men and planes when, during the evacuation shortly afterwards, the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk.

‘Anyhow, later – I guess by mid-June – things started hotting up. We were very much outnumbered in those days. The Operations Room controller would scramble us and climb us to 15,000 feet or something like that. Initially in sections of three, and then a flight of six aircraft and eventually, because of the numbers of enemy aircraft, whole squadrons and later the whole wing. It took time to form up but of course you had to get some numerical strength.

I made many interceptions; I fired my guns on pretty well every time we took off. I didn’t get any confirmed victories, but we were very involved. We would see aircraft smoking, we would see pieces coming off. The pattern was that we in the Hurricanes would attack the bombers whilst the Spitfires, with their ability to climb faster and higher, they would go higher and get involved with the escorting Luftwaffe fighters.

We were still operating from Digby in Lincolnshire and the Air OC of 12 Group, Leigh-Mallory, Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, conceived this “big wing” theory. The problem was getting it formed up in some kind of order before we went south to make an engagement. It wasn’t anything like as manoeuvrable as a smaller operation of 12 aircraft. We would go down and most days often go down to an 11 Group airfield in the immediate London area, land there and refuel, and do operations from there, and then we’d return to Digby in Lincolnshire.

However, in September some time we were posted to a little airfield called Stapleford Tawney, which was a satellite of North Weald, which was one of the well-known Sector Fighter Stations. Stapleford Tawney had this sloping grass airfield and I recall Hillman Airways, a pre-war small Civil Airline, they used to operate London-Paris out of Stapleford. With our Hurricanes it was a little bit of a problem; irrespective of wind direction you certainly couldn’t land downhill, so often you had to make cross-wind landings and monoplane fighters weren’t too happy with a strong cross-wind landing. However, we coped.

On one occasion, I guess it was the Sunday before 15 September, which was also a Sunday, I got shot up quite badly. I was losing glycol, the engine temperature was going up pretty rapidly, we were down somewhere in the Kent area, I had to get down quickly before the engine packed up, and I landed at Biggin Hill. Looking down at Biggin I saw all kinds of bomb holes; I selected a line between bomb holes, landed safely and I quickly taxied in, because by then the glycol was well over the permitted temperature, and switched off. Nobody came out to meet me, no attendants whatsoever near the tarmac. However, an airman ran out and said, “Quick, get down, we’re being attacked!” So we got into a slit trench and, sure enough, Biggin on that day, Sunday, was being very, very heavily bombed. Their transport, I recall, their Transport Section, had a direct hit; quite a number of ground crews and airmen and WAAFs were injured and killed.

I then found I had an unserviceable aeroplane and I had no way of getting a ride by a vehicle, by a transport vehicle or anything else, and certainly not by an aeroplane, to get back to my own station, Stapleford Tawney, north of London. I was south of London. The end result was I hitch-hiked; I hitch-hiked up to the southern end of London, I took a tube across London. I called my own unit from the most northerly point and they came and picked me up. That was the way of life in those days. I guess I should mention that in this journey back to Stapleford I carried my own parachute on my back, not open of course, and so was ready to get into the air again.

Moving along, that following week we were very hard worked; we were doing three or sometimes four patrols a day or flights a day, up to two hours in length, often making an interception and having an engagement.

For me, 15 September was a day I certainly will never forget. I think I was on my third flight of that day. Around midday we joined up with another squadron, probably two squadrons, of 24 aircraft climbing up into an enormous raid which was coming over. We made an interception. The pattern was with these that when you came across these bombers with the Hurricanes you could get in perhaps two good attacks, by which time the bomber formation would break up, your own comrades would break up and you’d find yourself in a sky full of single-engined aircraft of both nationalities, German and British, and you’d have to try and make some reforming if you had any ammunition left. During that act, on that day, I suddenly was shot at and in no time my aeroplane was on fire, burning merrily, and I got out very smartly. I recall that I was probably about 12,000 feet and I had in mind, right, I won’t open my chute immediately – there was some scattered cloud – I’ll wait until I get just about to the bottom of the cloud layer, which might be 5-6,000 feet, so I wouldn’t be a target, I wouldn’t be shot at, and this is what I did.

I opened my parachute around 5-6,000 feet. I looked around at myself – my trouser legs were in tatters from having been burned, I didn’t have shoes any longer. Contrary to all advice – like most other pilots, because we were searching and you can’t search with a pair of goggles on – I had not had my goggles over my eyes. I realised I had some burning in my face; the oxygen mask, of course, is round your nose, and as soon as the aircraft caught fire that oxygen burned up, so I was quite damaged with burns and so on. I saw I was coming down to land in the sea. I landed in the sea perhaps a mile, perhaps a little less, from the mouth, the southern mouth, of the Thames estuary, and I had a Mae West on and I just sat in the water and saw a small craft coming towards me, a power craft, and they pulled me aboard and they saw I wasn’t in good shape. I, too, saw I wasn’t in good shape. They got me ashore, they put me into a vehicle and took me to a First Aid Post in the Isle of Sheppey, north of Rochester, and called Rochester Hospital. They said, well, do nothing with this man, bring him here immediately. So in a private car I was taken to Rochester Hospital.

In Rochester Hospital I was immediately put in the theatre and given a full anaesthetic and had my burns worked on. The following day I learned that – I didn’t ever see him – but I learned that a Luftwaffe pilot was also a customer at Rochester Hospital. I was extremely well looked after at Rochester Hospital. I was treated with something called gentian violet, which was a dark dye, and that was put all over my face and my hands and my legs. I had a few shrapnel injuries upon my legs.

Eventually, after several weeks, I guess, a civilian surgeon was going around South East England looking at RAF casualties and evaluating them. He decided that I should go up to RAF Halton, which was the hospital near Aylesbury. I and two or three other fellows were transported up there by ambulance. I recall we drove through the centre of London, saw all the damage that was being regularly inflicted, stopped at a local pub and had a glass of beer brought out to us in the ambulance and off we went again to Aylesbury and into the Halton Hospital.

From there, the New Zealand burns specialist, Archie Mclndoe, decided that I should go to his hospital in East Grinstead for skin grafts. So I guess it was in November 1940 I went down to East Grinstead where a whole mass of mainly RAF people suffering burns, some away back to the early days of the war in France, were all being attended by Archie, as we all called him, and he did wonderful work. He recognised not only the necessity for surgical work, but also rehabilitation. He got on to all the families in the East Grinstead area – the solicitor belt as it was called – and said to them, look, you’ve got to make these fellows, who are badly disfigured, more conscious of everyday life and invite them to your homes, and so on. So he had great success in that aspect of his work as well.

I only had grafts on eyes – top and bottom eyelids were replaced. The pattern was, you had an op and then you went off from there to a Convalescent Hospital down in Torquay, the Palace Hotel, which had been taken over. Then you’d come back for your next op, so it was a long and slow business, but we were well looked after.

After several medical boards I was cleared for home service only and with limited non-operational flying. I was posted as a Flight Lieutenant to the post of Air-ground Control Officer running the watch office, now known as “flying operations”, and this was at Martlesham Heath. They were interesting times. I had control of a dummy town, which was supposed to be Ipswich, and lights came on at night and made it look for all the world like an operating city, and it attracted some German bombs. Also a dummy airfield – we would switch on the flare path at night and aircraft movements showing on the ground, all disguised of course and artificial, but that too attracted bombs from time to time.’

A final vignette of the 1940 air war over Britain comes from Alan Burdekin, who had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in March 1939 as a wireless operator/air-gunner:

‘We did get some flying; apart from the training in the town centre, we had camera-gun exercises flying. We were flying Fairey Battles and Audax mainly, open cockpits of course, strings and wires, biplanes, all very little different from the aircraft they finished up the Great War with. A monkey wire to stop you falling out and your scarf flying in the breeze, all real Biggies stuff, and for a young man interested in flying all very exciting. So then, of course, we were into the “Phoney War”. We did war training, we did hangar guard, duties at the aerodrome and that sort of thing. I think it was 1 October 1939 I was posted away to join 266 Squadron at Sutton Bridge.

They had Fairey Battles, the odd one or two, that was all. Got no flying there until I went off to Penrhos in Wales for a gunnery course, where we were flying again almost last-war aircraft, the Westland Wallace for instance, which was a fair sort of antique, even then. However, I passed my Gunnery Course and back to Sutton Bridge, where the Squadron had then re-equipped with Spitfires, so there wasn’t a job for me, and I transferred to 264. We went to Martlesham Heath and trained with our new Defiants, which had a good turret, a four-gun Boulton Paul turret – it really was magnificent.

Then I was detached on to a Parachute and Cable outfit; there was just one pilot, myself, a sergeant fitter and a couple of erks [ground crew]. The idea of this Parachute and Cable was that we would lower the bomb-bay of our Handley-Page Harrow, again strings and wires, biplane and canvas, and, when the enemy approached, we would steam across their bows but higher up, if we could get that far, and drop this load of 1,000 feet of piano wire with a parachute on one end and a bomb on the other. The enemy would obligingly fly into this, which would either wrap round the prop or soar back over the wing with the resistance of the parachute and either wreck the engine or blow the wing off. Well, it was a nice idea!

Then, on 10 May 1940 the Squadron was told to be at Knutsford that same afternoon and ready to go into battle, so I went across the road and saw my Flight Commander and said, “What do I do, sir?” and he said, “Well, you’re working on this experimental job – you’d better stay there. I’ll speak to the CO.”

Alan George Burdekin

Well, they went in a rush to Knutsford, went into battle that same afternoon, and the Flight Commander was shot down so he never did speak to the CO and it wasn’t until the thick of that particular battle was over that somebody thought to ask where I was, and I was sent for to join them at Knutsford and found a very depleted lot of aircrew. There were 23 when they left Martlesham and there were seven when I walked into the crew room.

So then they decided virtually to disband the Squadron; they’d had a fair sort of beating because the Germans, once they found out that we couldn’t fire downwards, they used to come up from underneath and that was it because the aircraft was underpowered. So I then did a conversion course on to Blenheims and went to join 600 City of London Squadron at Manston, and this was Battle of Britain time of course. Looking back on it, it was a very, very interesting time. We were night fighting. The Blenheims were undermanned as far as armour goes, of course. We didn’t have a great deal of fire power. The aircraft was too slow and we chased around London – we were supposed to be defending London – we chased around being vectored by all the ground control, and they would say, “There’s enemy aircraft ahead of you,” and so forth. We never did catch one – at least, I never did – and our biggest danger was the anti-aircraft; they’d open up a quarter of a mile behind the enemy and under our nose, which wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Then they’d cone you with the searchlights and that’s an awful feeling when you’re coned – you feel just like, well, as I imagine a moth on the end of a pin feels, you really feel pegged there.

I think our Squadron did get the odd one, but we did lose quite a number. They seemed to hang around – the enemy that is – they’d hang around and when we scrambled, somebody would come down and before you were really airborne you’d be shot down. I know one finished up in Dover Harbour or finished up round Ramsgate. It was a pity because we were, well, we were outdated, that’s the basic thing I suppose, and the Germans weren’t above using their brains. I was going to the Mess one night, going down the main road towards the Sergeants’ Mess, and I heard these aircraft on the circuit and just looked up and saw them, six aircraft with their wheels down, and said, oh, she’s right, as everybody else did, and suddenly up with their wheels and opened up with everything they’d got, and they were 109s. The next thing there was a mixed cannon shell and machine-gun fire coming right up the road behind me and I didn’t wait very long. Barney and I dived behind the nearest hut, which, of course, were concrete block at Manston, and all in 10 minutes they dropped 110 bombs, apart from shooting everything up. There must have been others there because 109s didn’t carry bombs, but they gave us a fair plastering and finally we had to leave Manston – it was wrecked.’

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_96578876-8fc9-599c-b8a6-279c958017b7)

The war at sea – North Sea, Channel and Arctic (#ulink_96578876-8fc9-599c-b8a6-279c958017b7)

The Blitzkrieg in the Low Countries and France was preceded by dire events in Denmark, Norway and the North Sea. The British Home Fleet had sailed from Scapa Flow on 7 April 1940 to cover mine-laying operations off Narvik in Norway and in response to the reported sailing of German naval units from their bases. The Allies were preparing to land troops in Norway but Hitler got in first, and, on 9 April, occupied the major ports in Norway as far north as Narvik and the whole of Denmark. Then, in the North Sea, the first naval battle involving capital ships in the Second World War took place.

John Musters was a Sub Lieutenant RN when he was appointed to HMS Renown as Captain’s Secretary:

‘The Renown was a battlecruiser of considerable antiquity; she was finished in 1916, the sister ship of the Repulse. In 1939, when I joined her, she was just finishing a three-year reconstruction, a total modernisation, new engines and boilers, new superstructure, new gunnery control, new armoured main deck. In fact, they really hollowed out the ship and started again. We carried out sea trials in July 1939. There was a bit of urgency about completing the ship then, because it looked as though we were going to have a war fairly soon, and we finally commissioned for service in the end of August. We arrived at Scapa Flow on 4 September and then started working up in basic gunnery.

On 6 April 1940 Renown was sent out with her own destroyers and also as the cover of a force of four other destroyers fitted for mine-laying. The plan was to go and lay mines in Vestfjorden in Northern Norway, as a rather conservative measure, to interrupt the German iron-ore traffic which brought the iron-ore down from Narvik and which had been brought across from Sweden. This traffic would come down the west coast of Norway, down to Germany using neutral waters for this traffic, which was just legitimate, if somewhat borderline. Anyway, this operation had been overtaken, although we did not know it at the time, by the German plan to just go into Norway and take it over, and it practically coincided.

John Vivian Auchmuty Musters

On 8 April our destroyers went into Vestfjorden, laid their mines, while we and our destroyer screen hovered off somewhere near the Lofoten Islands outside. Meanwhile the German invasion of Norway was going full swing and the ten big German destroyers, which took the German troops into Narvik at the head of Vestfjorden, passed our mine-laying destroyers, which had laid their mines and were on the way out. Neither side saw the other because of a snowstorm. There’d have been a considerable slaughter if they had sighted each other, and we would undoubtedly have come off worst.

Before that, on our way north, one of our destroyers, Glowworm, had lost a man overboard and she turned back with the permission of our Admiral, Admiral Whitworth in Renown, in order to try to find him. I don’t think they had a hope of finding him alive in that very cold and very rough sea, but they did what they could and searched for him, and then they turned north again to rejoin Renown’s group, from which they were, by now, probably a couple of hundred miles astern. Glowworm fell in, at that point, with two German destroyers which were part of the German invasion group, which included the heavy cruiser Hipper, waiting to go into Trondheim, when the moment arrived for all the Germans to go into Norway at different places at the same time. Glowworm fought a gun battle with the German destroyers, which fell back on Hipper. Glowworm was overwhelmed and sunk by Hipper, after having rammed her and done a bit of damage. It didn’t stop Hipper going into Trondheim and landing her 1,700-odd troops there.

Well, meanwhile we were up north with our own five screening destroyers plus the mine-laying destroyers, which had rejoined us. The weather now was quite appalling, a north-westerly gale and a very heavy sea indeed. Very early in the morning of 9 April we were patrolling somewhere south-west of the Lofoten Islands and news was coming through of German activities all the way up the Norwegian coast, and we’d been at action stations since the previous afternoon, which took us to about half past three in the morning of the 9th. By that time one of our anti-torpedo bulges on the port side for’ard had been damaged by very heavy weather, having quite an effect on our potential for full speed.

My job in the gunnery control team was range-spotting officer, which meant making the corrections to range up or down. I was stationed in the Gunnery Transmitting Station, a sort of calculation station. We had six 15-inch guns in three pairs, two pairs for’ard and one pair aft and, since the ship had been reconstructed, we had a gun range of about 32,000 yards, which was quite good for an old ship. The loading interval of a 15-inch gun is about 40 seconds, it takes anything up to 60 seconds for the shells to arrive at the other end. This meant a long pause before any alteration to bearing and range, based on observation of the splash made by the preceding salvo, could be made, and, in the meantime, the enemy could have altered course or speed. So what we did was fire one gun in each turret simultaneously, as the “A” salvo, and then, 10 seconds later, having made some arbitrary corrections to line or range, we’d fire the other three, which would be termed the “B” salvo. That gave you a better idea of how you were getting on than if you just had one great clump of shells landing at longer intervals.

Well anyway, we are now in the very early morning on 9 April somewhere south-west of the Lofoten Islands, steaming rather slowly north-east, keeping our speed down because the destroyers were astern and they couldn’t really go very fast in that sort of sea. At about 3.50 in the morning, people on Renown’s bridge sighted one and then two warships to the eastward, quite a long way away in a clear patch between snow squalls. The eastern horizon was just then beginning to get light as dawn was breaking. At first it was thought that it might have been Repulse, our fellow battlecruiser on this operation, plus somebody else with her. We did not know quite where Repulse was, but we did know that she was at sea somewhere off the Norwegian coast. Anyway, we increased speed and turned to a parallel course while we tried to identify these vessels, and then a little later we made a positive identification that the leading ship was the German fast battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and we thought that the ship next astern, the second ship, was probably a ‘Hipper’ Class cruiser. All the German naval ships looked extraordinarily alike. Accordingly, we turned on to a parallel course, which was about north, and we were all at action stations already. What we did then was to bring the main armament to the ready, checking receivers, testing firing circuits, usual drill before a shoot, and then the order came through to load the main armament with 15-inch armour-piercing shells on full charges.

My memory of time is a little uncertain, but some 20 minutes after we sighted the ships we decided to engage. The Captain, Captain Simeon, at this point turned Renown slightly away from the enemy, in order to bring their return fire further aft on a relative bearing, because we only had 6 inches of side armour and that wouldn’t stop an 11-inch armour-piercing shell, certainly not a German one. I should say here that we could not place the enemy’s range by our optical range-finders because they were so full of salt water from heavy spray, so nothing could be seen through them. We had no radar. So the Gunnery Officer, who was up in the main director, estimated the range at 18,000 yards, which was not a bad guess at all; in fact, it was only 1,000 yards out. One of our first two salvos was reported spotted short and that was passed down to me and I then took over the range spotting. So for third and fourth salvos, the next pair, I ordered an up 400 ladder, up 400 for the first salvo, our number three, and then up another 400 for the next one, and then we waited for those to arrive. In retrospect, it is quite clear that, on such scanty information about the enemy’s range, 400-yard steps was a bit too conservative. It would have been prudent to have gone up in two steps of 800. Well, we waited for those second pair of the up ladder to fall, and they were both short and this had me slightly worried. Anyway, I ordered another up 400 ladder, hoping to hell that this would cross the target and do the trick, because it is necessary to cross the target, to bracket the target, and the smaller the bracket the better, and then you can start filling in the gap. Well, at this point we got our first salvo away, which was number five of the shoot, and I was waiting to see the gunnery lamps come on for the second salvo, and that never happened for quite a while. Apparently they had quite some trouble in the turrets; the violent motion of the ship due to the heavy seas resulted in water coming down the spouts of the for’ard turrets. So I waited and then the first salvo fell, and to my relief it fell over, so then I was able to take off the last up 400 correction and come down 600 in order to push the middle of the bracket we had now achieved, so we got that one away and we waited for that one to arrive, and that, to everyone’s astonishment, hit the leading ship, which happened to be the Gneisenau, not the Scharnhorst, and that was Admiral Lutjen’s flagship. That was seen to produce an orange glow in her for’ard superstructure, which was a hit straight in their sort of tower mast which those ships had, just abaft the bridge. On top of that was their Main Armament Control Tower Director.

After that Gneisenau’s shooting was considered to have gone a bit ragged and uneven and erratic. Then we fired about half a dozen more salvos and we got two more hits on Gneisenau. One hit its for’ard turret and put that out of action, another hit arrived somewhere amidships – people up top saw a flash and clouds of smoke.

After this Gneisenau turned away to the north-eastward and her next astern, which we thought was Hipper, actually Scharnhorst, which was the other half of that dangerous pair, came across her stern and we shifted fire on to Scharnhorst. We never got a chance to sort of settle down for a shoot at her before she turned away, following Gneisenau away to the north-north-east. They went off at very high speed. We turned to follow and from time to time they were obscured by more snow squalls, but occasionally we had a good sight of them. We were only able to fire our two for’ard turrets at this stage, because we were more or less end on to the enemy and two gun salvos don’t get you very far if you don’t get a hit. Gradually they drew away and, after about 20 minutes of pursuit, obviously we weren’t going to catch up with these people. Because of the damage due to bad weather, we could only make 26 knots and, for firing, we had to come down to about 23, because when we went into that sea an awful lot of water came down the spouts of the 15-inch guns, making loading quite difficult. So after about 20 minutes of ineffectual shooting by us and plenty of ineffective shooting by them, they finally disappeared into a snow squall. So after that we finally gave up the pursuit, came back, found our destroyers and in due course made our way back to Scapa.

We discovered afterwards that we’d been hit a couple of times; one shot went through the foremast and broke all the radio aerials, stopping our enemy reports in the middle. The Admiralty were reading them with a great deal of interest, saw our signals break off and feared the worst. We also got another one through the hull aft; it came in abaft of the main armoured belt and it came in under the quarter-deck, through the midshipmen’s berth and then went down through the unarmoured bit of the main deck there, through a baggage store at F deck and out through the other side, below the water line, without exploding. If it had burst inside the ship it would have done considerably more damage. As it was, we didn’t discover that until after the action, when the damage control parties opened up the watertight doors to see what was what, and when they got down there they were met with a wall of water, so they shut it fairly quickly. That was the end of the Norwegian campaign as far as we were concerned.’

After this the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took refuge in Brest in March 1941, having spent two months in the Atlantic where they had destroyed over 80,000 tons of Allied shipping. They had been blockaded there for nearly a year when Hitler decided to bring them, together with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, back to Germany through the English Channel. On the night of 11 February 1942 they slipped out of Brest and, because of a series of circumstances unfortunate for the British, succeeded in reaching their bases in Germany by the morning of the 13th. However, both battlecruisers had been damaged by mines, which put the Scharnhorst out of action for six months and the Gneisenau for the remainder of the war. Their Channel dash had been threatened, but not seriously impeded from the air.

Pilot Officer John Checketts, RNZAF, who went to Britain in September 1941 and was posted to a Hurricane Training Unit at Sutton Bridge, has memories of the brave but largely futile attacks made from the air:

‘Halfway through the course we were hastened to finish the training and we did so in a matter of three weeks. We were posted at the completion of the training to various squadrons throughout England. My posting was to Royal Air Force Squadron 485, which was manned by New Zealanders operating from Kenley, south of London.

An interesting battle during this first period on operations was the escape in February 1942 of the German ships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen from Brest through the English Channel to their home ports in Germany. The weather was extremely bad with snow, hail, rain, wind and fog. The Germans successfully evaded detection until they were seen by Group Captain Victor Beamish. They escaped detection until that time by virtue of a series of misadventures by the British intercepting people. The submarine which was to keep a guard on the Port of Brest had to go out to recharge its batteries in the evening, and the radar stations were successfully jammed by the Germans until quite late on the morning of the operation. Victor Beamish obeyed the rules and did not speak to warn the British organisations, but flew home and landed first, which let the Germans get up almost to Boulogne before any attempt was made to do anything about it.

John Milne Checketts

The British coastal guns had so far fired on the vessels without success, and I cannot remember the exact times, but it was round midday. The cloud base was 300 feet, the Navy sent up six Swordfish armed with torpedoes out to attack these vessels, and they were all shot down by the Germans without success. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

We were sent out into the area where these vessels were and made contact with them off Ostend, but we could do very little against them. We destroyed some German aircraft and attacked E-boats – successfully, I might say – and were applauded for our action. However, it was of little consequence as far as the vessels themselves were concerned. I was impressed with their size and their speed; they were immense ships and the British were caught wrong-footed and had little that they could put against the ships. There were mess-ups with torpedoes and torpedo-carrying aircraft, and bomber aircraft had little chance to bomb from such low level. The only success against them were actions by aircraft which had laid mines ahead of the ships. Scharnhorst was mined and lay idle for nearly half an hour, but was not intercepted. The British destroyers were severely handled by the Germans and the torpedo-bombers were not effective; it was a convincing victory for the German Navy and a sad day for Britain.’

Following upon the German offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Arctic became the main route for the despatch of supplies to Russia, Britain’s new ally. The first convoy sailed in September 1941. By May 1942, with almost perpetual daylight and the rapid build-up of German naval and air strength in northern Norway, the convoy route had become very hazardous indeed. Not least was the risk from major units of the German Navy, including the battleship Tirpitz, attacking the convoys at a time when British capital ships could not be exposed to the overwhelming German air superiority in the region.

Lieutenant Commander Roger Hill, RN, in command of the ‘Hunt’ Class destroyer HMS Ledbury, was involved in some of the Russian convoys: