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

‘Our first Russian convoy was PQ15, which sailed from Iceland on 24 April 1942, and our job on this was to screen the tanker – I can’t remember the name – and we went and lay in a position called “Y”, so if there was a Fleet action and the destroyers needed fuel they would come there and fuel from the tanker, or the ones going to Russia would come and the ones coming back from Russia also. So we made a rectangle which was labelled “AUNTY”, and we just steamed round this to keep the tanker moving all the time, as it would be very easy for the Germans just to send a U-boat to pick her off. The whole Home Fleet came by – the battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers – a most tremendous sight. We had a system of identification where you had to signal certain letters. The battleship Duke of York signalled the wrong letter and later on in Scapa I was sent for by the Commander-in-Chief. The Captain of this huge ship, which seemed absolutely colossal to me, with its great big guns and enormous quarter-deck, said, “Oh we had a bit of a mix-up over the recognition, didn’t we?”

Roger Hill, Commanding Officer of HMS Ledbury, on his bridge.

I said, “That’s all right, sir, I knew you would know I wasn’t going to open fire,” and I thought he was going to choke, going to have apoplexy.

Then we went on another one, PQ 16, and then we came to 17, when for the first time we were in the close escort of the convoy. By this time (we know now) the enemy main code had been broken and the Admiralty would intercept the German signal when they ordered the Tirpitz to sail, if she was going to attack the convoy. She was lying in the fjords in the north of Norway and we never got this signal. However, Admiral Dudley Pound, who was the Head of the Navy, he got this fixed idea that the Tirpitz was coming out to attack us.

We had a mother and a father of an air attack; about 50 or 60 torpedo-bombers came scarcely over the top of the sea right over the top of the convoy. We shot one down, which was great, and I thought that they had made a brave attack, lots of ships firing at them, so I picked up the chaps we had shot down, despite the pom-pom’s crew saying, “Come on, sir, one short burst, one short burst.”

I said, “You can’t do that – you’d be had up for war crimes.”

Anyway, we picked them up and they were quite nice chaps and after this I know we were all very cheerful – only one ship had been torpedoed – and suddenly the Yeoman of Signals said to me, “My God, sir, the signalman in the Commodore’s ship has made a balls.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “They’ve got the signal up to scatter!”

So I said, “Oh Christ,” and it wasn’t the signalman. They had got the signal from the Admiralty: “You are about to be attacked by a vastly superior surface force – your duty is to avoid destruction and pick up survivors.” I’ve never known the Navy to have had such a bloody awful signal as that, and then this order to scatter was made.

We all formed up behind the Kepple with Captain [D.] Jackie Broom ready to do a torpedo attack. I hadn’t any torpedoes, so my idea was to ram something, and everybody was just looking for the Tirpitz to come over the horizon, which was the effect of the Admiralty signal. Then nothing happened and all the merchant ships went off in different directions, and they said, “Cruisers are to retire at high speed to the west.” We had two English cruisers and two American cruisers, the London, Norfolk, Wichita and Tuscaloosa, and the Admiral, Admiral Hamilton, signalled us by lamp to join him and form a screen. We asked whether we could go back and we were refused, and then we went into thick fog and he made to me [signalled] “Try to keep up but don’t rupture yourself.” I remember because we only went 23 knots or 26 knots, whichever it was, which was the speed they were going, and I thought should I just slow down quietly and go back, but then, you see, from the moment you join the Navy you are taught obedience and it is very, very difficult to disobey. I did after that, but not then. And so we went on, and we came up out of the fog and eventually got back to Scapa.

There were 23 ships sunk in that PQ 17, 190 seamen killed, 400-500 aircraft were lost, about 300 tanks and 100,000 tons of war material. That’s what resulted from that Admiralty signal. It was really terrible – even now I have never got over it, because for the Navy to leave the Merchant Navy like that was simply terrible. And the Tirpitz was not within 300 or 400 miles of the convoy. She came out eventually, but not that day, the next day I think, or the following day. She was sighted by a submarine which made a signal, the Germans intercepted that signal and called her straight back to harbour. All these poor merchant ships – one merchant ship signalled, “I can see seven submarines approaching me on the surface,” and there was continual air attack. It was simply awful. Anyway, that was PQ 17.’

The ‘County’ Class cruiser HMS Norfolk took part in many of these convoys. Arthur Denby, a Signalman on board that ship, recalls that:

‘The first convoy I was in, there were four cruisers, there was Norfolk, Cumberland, London and I can’t remember the next one – it might have been Suffolk. We steamed around the convoy firing off everything that we could find at all these aircraft, and we got quite a few of them, but they made most of the attacks on the merchant ships. There was an oil tanker with a sort of catapult from which they fired off this Hurricane, and that certainly settled a few of the Germans, but the Hurricane could only land in the sea and the pilot had to be picked up quickly because you didn’t get very long to live in that kind of water there.

PQ 17, that was a real fiasco if ever there was. I don’t know where they got the information from, but they said there was either Tirpitz or one of these big ships coming out and we left all the convoy, the whole lot – the escorts and the cruisers and everything left at speed and the U-boats and the aircraft had a field day with all the merchant ships.’

Also in the Norfolk was Midshipman Richard Begg. It was his first ship and events were noted in his journal at the time:

‘Then we went on my first operation and it was the well-known and rather infamous Russian convoy labelled PQ 17. We went up to Iceland with three other 8-inch cruisers. They were HMS London, which was Admiral Hamilton’s flagship, ourselves and the American cruisers Tuscaloosa and Wichita. We had three destroyers as an anti-submarine screen. We fuelled at Seydisfiord in Iceland and next day went to sea as the cruiser-covering force to provide protection to the convoy against enemy surface ships. We didn’t travel with the convoy, we sort of hovered on the edges. At times we could see the convoy and at other times we were a bit too far away to see it.

Arthur Godfrey Denby

About the second or third day out we were joined by a German reconnaissance plane, a Blohm und Voss, which kept us company for most of the time. They would come out and they would circle round the Squadron, and then about four hours later their relief would come out from Norway and so they kept up their reconnaissance on us and the Germans knew exactly where we were all the time, and this applied to the convoy as well because, in those days, we didn’t have aircraft carriers accompanying the convoy and so we had no air cover. Of course, the Germans were very close in Norway, not far away. We couldn’t do much about these planes except to try and lodge the odd 8-inch shell in their vicinity on occasions, and there was the occasional exchange of signals; one, for which I cannot now vouch, was to the effect, “Squadron to Blohm und Voss – you are making us giddy, could you please fly in the opposite direction?” which brought an acknowledgement from the plane which obligingly turned and went in the opposite direction!

Richard Campbell Begg on the quarter-deck of HMS Norfolk at sea.

In the meantime, the German bombing and torpedo attacks had been going on against the convoy and, on about the fourth day, we were fairly close up to the convoy and we could see an air attack in progress; one plane was brought down and three ships hit, one exploded, an ammunition ship. Then, late in the afternoon, there was a hive of activity about the ship and the rumour went out that Tirpitz, the German battleship, had been reported just over the horizon and we were about to engage her and other ships of the German Fleet. Flags were flying from the masthead as we turned away at high speed, forming single line ahead whilst the destroyers from the convoy formed up in line on our starboard quarter. While this was going on, the merchant ships were to be seen breaking away from the convoy and moving off in all directions. It was an awesome moment.

Left and above HMS Norfolk refuelling destroyers on convoy PQ 17. (Begg)

It was only later that we heard that the Admiralty had signalled that German heavy units were at sea and attack was considered imminent. The ships in the convoy were to scatter and find their own way into Russian ports whilst the Cruiser Force was to retire to the west at high speed. Anyway, it soon spread about the ship that we were withdrawing and leaving the ships of the convoy. It was a dreadful moment really; this was a thing the Royal Navy was not accustomed to do. So over the next few days we continued steaming at speed towards the west. Incidentally, our Walrus aircraft seaplane had been up in the air at the time all this activity was going on, and our Captain requested permission from the Admiral to stop to pick up the aircraft because, of course, she had to land on the sea and we would cruise alongside it and pick it up with our crane, but permission was refused. So we had to leave our poor old Walrus aircraft up in the air as we went off. Incidentally, the pilot kept in the air as long as he could and then landed behind one of the merchant ships and got a tow into Murmansk, very fortunate because he chose a ship that got in.

During the days following our leaving the convoy, we kept receiving wireless messages from individual ships of the convoy, “Am being bombed, torpedoed, etc”, and requesting assistance, and, of course, there was no assistance available. Out of the 34 ships that sailed from Iceland, only 11 made it – 23 ships were sunk. This was my first operation, not easily forgotten.

Catapulting the Walrus aircraft from HMS Norfolk.

So over the next few months we spent our time either in Hvalfjord in Iceland or at Scapa Flow or carrying out gunnery exercises and so forth until the next convoy, PQ 18, which had been delayed because of the disaster occurring with PQ 17, was ready to sail. So it wasn’t until September that we went off again as part of the cruiser escort, but this time we also covered ships which were landing supplies for the Norwegian meteorological group, which was stationed in Spitzbergen and had, the previous week or so, been bombarded by the battleship Tirpitz, which had inflicted a lot of damage. PQ 18 was considered to be a fairly successful convoy, losing only 13 out of the 40 ships which set out, and these were lost by both submarine and torpedo-bomber attack. We hovered around the vicinity of Bear Island and picked up the returning convoy, the remnants of PQ 17 now labelled QP 14. It was this convoy where the ‘Tribal’ Class destroyer HMS Somali was torpedoed and later sank with the loss of 45 men.

Then there are those recollections which have little to do with enemy action. The weather and seas in the wintry north was one of them. I remember watching the great battleship, King George V, struggling to gain the summit of a roller as broad as the ship was long, and then crashing down into the trough beyond. Then that Russian convoy when, in the destroyer HMS Orwell, we were close escort to a motley collection of small naval craft, mainly ex-Italian, being donated to and manned by the Russian Navy, and how we were hove to for days with mountainous seas and, with the spume and winter darkness, not able to see or communicate with any of them. They all survived. Then those mad dashes from aft to the open bridge of Orwell, trying to avoid seas breaking over the deck en route. The cold, with the inner bulkheads coated with ice and one’s breath freezing on to one’s balaclava, and the decks, guns and stanchions all iced up. The awful occasion when we lost Ordinary Seaman Kelly overboard from Orwell while we were exercising in the tempestuous Pentland Firth, and the hours of fruitless search that followed.

On the other hand, there were those occasions when, at sea in the far wintry north, we were graced with the magnificence of the aurora borealis with its sheets of blue light moving across the sky and reflecting into the oily sea below, giving the impression of the ship being suspended in space. Then those lovely vistas of snow-covered mountains in Spitzbergen and Iceland, the almost holiday atmosphere when we left the frozen north for a spell to escort the massive troop convoys to the Torch landings in North Africa, escorting Mr Churchill to and from Canada, the camaraderie and good humour of the ships’ companies – all helped to compensate for the discomforts. And all this for 5 shillings a day – board and lodge included!’

With the approach of winter and the almost perpetual night in the Arctic, it was decided to sail merchant ships independently at intervals and without escort to Russia.

Reginald Urwin experienced that Arctic route in a lone freighter and was fortunate to survive and tell the tale:

‘I was 16 at the time and did the usual induction courses and so forth at a training establishment at Tyne Dock, where we learnt how to use Bofors, Oerlikons and machine-guns. I did a fairly uneventful trip across the Atlantic and was then on a collier in the Channel and had a scare or two with E-boats and things, and then it was back to the Tyne where we heard about PQ 17, and we’d also heard about PQ 18, convoys that went to Russia, from some of the survivors who got back, and that was interesting. About the middle of September 1942, I think it was, I was sent to a ship at Tyne Dock and she was loading at the time. She was loading tanks and dismantled planes and engine parts, medical stores and general equipment, everything to do with warfare, and the last thing that they did before we left was that they welded brackets on the afterdeck, three a side, and these were gun mounts for Vickers machine-guns, and that didn’t look very good. We had a Bofors onboard, we had four sets of twin Oerlikons, everything abaft of the bridge. This was the Empire Gilbert, and we had an ancient 4-inch on the stern, which the gunners weren’t very happy with because, I think, the date on it was something like 1916 or something, but it worked, it went OK.

Ralph (Reginald) Urwin

Then we sailed north. We thought, well, we’re going up to pick up a convoy, and we went off up to Iceland. Arrived in Reykjavik and we sat around there waiting for other ships to arrive; some were coming from America and other places and I think there were, in total, 13 vessels. Anyway, just prior to our departure there was a conference ashore and all the skippers were called to this conference, and when our skipper came back he got us all in the messroom and explained to us what was about to happen; it seemed that the idea was that the ships were to sail from Reykjavik at staggered times and try and get to Russia on their own, without escort or anything.

So we went out, we set off from there about the latter part of October and it was pretty rugged; the only ships we saw actually on the way were Icelandic fishing boats, and they were immune because the Germans didn’t bother them. I think it was about three days out from there that we were torpedoed – this was 2 November 1942. The idea had been, of course, to get to the most northern part and get straight on to the main route to Murmansk, but this didn’t happen – as I say, we got torpedoed.

My station was the port-side Oerlikon, and when we were hit I finished up at the foot of the starboard lifeboat davit and I didn’t know very much about how I got there or anything, but the explosion must have been quite severe because it must have thrown me right over the top, over the bridge. I got to my feet and tried to cut the lifeboat free, but the ship was going so fast that I was awash before I could do anything and the ship just went down – it completely disappeared within a very, very short space of time. It couldn’t have been any more than 3 minutes, well 2 minutes, and there was nothing to be seen. I don’t know how long I’d been out at the foot of the davit, of course, but it was just so sudden and then, after it was all over, it was a most weird, weird feeling, because suddenly about me there was nothing there, and you were just on your own with people all around just sort of hollering out at each other and trying to make contact.

It didn’t seem very long after that that I spotted this shape and it was the submarine that had sunk us, coming towards us, and we were screaming out for help and doing what we thought, you know, was the best thing, and they steamed up alongside us and I felt myself being dragged over the side on to the submarine, and after that I just didn’t remember very much more. I can remember going to the conning tower, but I just collapsed and the next thing I knew was that I was being sort of revived. I think it was the Medical Officer and the Mate or the Chief Officer who were working on me, and I’d been stripped and they were rubbing cognac and everything into me in order to get the blood flowing again. I afterwards found out that there had been two other people picked up and they were from the Mercantile Regiment, and these guys were responsible for the Bofors, the anti-aircraft guns aft, but I didn’t know these people because they had been put on board just before we sailed.

Other than that, we finished the patrol on the submarine. We were fairly well treated; I think the Navy looks after the Navy, the Army looks after the Army, and so on. Well, we weren’t treated too bad. We were fed the same sort of food as they were fed and we had pretty well within reason what you could expect; we had free rein of the submarine. If there was any action or anything like that we were told in no uncertain terms what to do and where to go and we just had to stay put at that. There was a couple of flurries but I didn’t find out too much about them, but there was some hectic activity there on two or three occasions actually. We finished the patrol on the submarine and we went then to Narvik. We were about two weeks on the submarine.

While I was in the submarine there was the usual questions; they asked about what cargo, what tonnage, where we were from and other activity. At that time I think the Air Force was fairly busy in Reykjavik; they were particularly anxious to know if there was any air activity in Iceland at the time. They weren’t too sure whether we had aircraft there or not and of course we couldn’t tell them anything because we didn’t know. We told them that we didn’t know. We had seen aircraft but they didn’t get too much information. They knew that we were carrying arms because of the explosions on the ship and all that sort of thing, but that was a dead give-away.

When we got to Narvik they put us into a holding camp, which was very close to a big Russian camp they had there; they had a lot of Russians there, and these fellows they treated like subhumans there. It was really, really bad, and of course it was a different calibre of German too that we got in with there. When we got to this holding place they actually strip-searched us and we thought that was rather funny, because we’d only come off a German submarine straight to the camp, and why they had done this I don’t know, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of trust between the services anyway. They took all our clothes away and deloused us, had our clothes done and they all came back pressed and cleaned, ironed, brought by two Russians, and we were told by the Germans that we were to make full use of the Russians and use them as our servants, because they were to prepare our meals, which was fish, consisting of nothing but fish and potatoes. They were to do anything – get the firewood in, do the washing and do anything that we required of them, which we didn’t do anyway of course. We did our own thing but, to all intents and purposes, these Russians were just earmarked to do precisely what we wanted them to do.

It wasn’t long before the rest of the Russians found out that we were there, and we could see these Russians, when we took our exercise we could see these Russians who were being made to pull sledges loaded with firewood and all this sort of thing, and they were very brutally treated, and it didn’t augur very well for us. I thought, well, if this is captivity under the Germans I wonder how it will go when we get to wherever we’re going in Germany. We were there, I think, about eight or ten days, and then one of the Germans came in, and in effect said pack up all your gear, you’re now going to Germany.

We were then taken down by truck to this little ship, about 2,000 tons, called the Danferspray Bremen, and she was an iron-ore carrier and she was going down to, well she was to drop us off at Wilhelmshaven. We dodged all the way down the Norwegian coast; we went to Stavanger and Kristiansand, which was just before we made a rush across the Skagerrak to get to Kiel, and the thing was only capable of about 7 knots. Of course, our first thoughts then were that if this thing ever got hit. . . When we got on board this Danferspray Bremen we were put into cabins and we were locked in these cabins all the time we were on board this thing, and the crew would bring us food to the cabin and that was it; we weren’t allowed out at all, not until we were leaving Kristiansand. Then the Captain, with another man in uniform, came down and he had a gun and he told us that this was going to be a bit of a dicey run: “Your cabin doors will be left open, here are life-jackets – should anything happen, then it will probably be every man for himself. If you get in the way or if you interfere with the running of the ship you will be shot.”

So we set off then across the Skagerrak and we made about 7 knots all the way, and we thought probably it would be a bit tough if we were going to be knocked down by one of our guys, say one of our MTBs or one of the RAF or something like that – that would have been just too stiff to take, but we got through luckily. Then we were taken ashore and put into a holding camp in Wilhelmshaven, and they held us there for a few days and they interrogated us and they wanted to know a lot of things. We didn’t know very much about what was going on, and we were being quite honest about that; there were a few things that we knew about, of course, but shush, they got no information from us. We were cajoled and treated to English cigarettes if we told stories and so on, but didn’t tell them anything much.

They gave us two meals a day there; we got one at 6 o’clock in the morning, another at 6 o’clock in the evening, which consisted of a couple of potatoes, a bowl of watery soup and a cup of coffee if you wanted it. There was black bread and jam or either margarine or butter or whatever it was. It didn’t taste nice anyway, but I thought, well, if these guys are eating this sort of stuff they must be in a pretty bad way, so that made me feel perhaps a little bit better because we were feeding much better in England. I mean these were the troops and we were civilians at that time and living on a damn sight better stuff than they were.

It wasn’t long after that that I think they might have given us up as a bad job; they made preparations for us to leave and go to where we were to finish out the war in a regular prison camp. In between Bremen and Hamburg there was one big compound; virtually it had been split into two and one side consisted of the Navy, of which I think it held something like about 800 ratings, and the other side the Merchant Service, with about 3,400 people.’

To continue the saga of the Russian convoys, it must be recorded that in September 1943 the battleship Tirpitz was disabled when attacked by British midget submarines, then, in December of that year, when the battlecruiser Scharnhorst ventured to sea on Christmas Day to attack a convoy, she was sunk with heavy loss of life by ships of the Home Fleet.

Signalman Arthur Godfrey Denby in HMS Norfolk remembers the occasion well:

‘We were covering this convoy when we got this information that this Scharnhorst was coming out with three destroyers. This was on Christmas Day 1943. It would probably be about 9 o’clock next morning when we spotted Scharnhorst; it was quite near because it was very dark at that time of year, you know you get 24 hours of darkness at Christmas-time in those latitudes. At that time I was up on the bridge at action stations and, about 9.30 it would have been, we fired on Scharnhorst and I think one of the shells did hit it, but I’m not sure because it was so difficult to see, but they turned away. [One shell hit the foretop, wrecking her forward radar, and another landed on the fo’c’sle.]

Well, the next time, we’d changed action stations. I’d gone back into the after action station where everything is fitted up so that if anything happens at one end, the ship can be conned from the other, and Commander Lichfield Spiers was in the after control. X and Y turrets were just behind us. At that time Norfolk, Sheffield and Belfast were in line and, as we were steaming along, Scharnhorst came up the port side and we fired again, but they fired too and, at that time, we were turning to starboard so the shell came through the X turret – went straight through the X turret – out through the upper deck, out through the side into the sea. The other one came in through into the office flat and blew the whole lot to pieces except for the wireless telegraphy office, which was properly armoured, and then went up through the torpedo deck; I think three of the fellows there were killed. We never saw anybody left in the office flat at all – they’d just been blown to pieces.

The battleship Duke of York was coming up with the destroyers and they attacked Scharnhorst, but the destroyers didn’t get much joy because the Scharnhorst’s secondary armament was a bit too fierce for them. Anyway, by that time Duke of York came up and we had to fire star shells up to illuminate or to backlight the Scharnhorst, and then when Duke of York opened fire, at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it was just like a flock of white lights going up into the sky, the fire from her 14-inch guns. You could see these things going higher and higher and then they’d just drop nice and gently down and eventually they put paid to Scharnhorst.

Now that the German heavy ships were no longer a problem, and with improved air support due to the use of escort carriers, the route to Russia became much safer, and enormous amounts of military and other supplies were sent by that route.