For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

Чтение книги онлайн.

       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 It was a pity because we were, well, we were outdated, that’s the basic thing I suppose, and the Germans weren’t above using their brains.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

       The war at sea – North Sea, Channel and Arctic

       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 СКАЧАТЬ