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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

CHAPTER 4

       North Africa to the eve of El Alamein

       I taly entered the war on 10 June 1940, and on 13 September its troops advanced from Libya into Egypt, establishing fortified positions around Sidi Barrani. The British, under General Wavell, outnumbered by the Italians, attacked the Italian positions on 7 December, and by 8 February 1941 they were on the borders of Tripolitania, having soundly defeated the Italians and taken many prisoners. Then, as a result of operations in Greece and Crete, a greatly reduced British force was left to guard Cyrenaica and Egypt. Rommel, now in North Africa with his Afrika Corps, went on the offensive in late March, and by 11 April the British were back in Egypt, leaving a force in Tobruk, which came under siege. Rommel’s subsequent attacks to take Tobruk and British attempts to relieve the town were inconclusive and resulted in heavy losses to both sides.

       Finally, towards the end of December, after a month of bitter fighting, Tobruk was relieved and the Germans were back on the western border of Cyrenaica. On 21 January 1942 Rommel went on the offensive, and by 30 June was in Egypt some hundred miles west of Alexandria. After heavy fighting he was forced on to the defensive south-west of El Alamein, while the Eighth Army, now under General Montgomery, prepared itself for what was to prove the decisive offensive in October, which will be the subject of a later chapter.

      Rex Thompson was one of the New Zealanders who arrived in the Middle East at an early stage when the Italians were without German support:

      ‘Early in 1940, as a driver in the NZ Army Service Corps, 2nd Expeditionary Force, I left New Zealand on the Sobiesky, a Polish ship which was very modern, and in it got to Egypt. I went to Maadi camp, had more training there and, being a driver, I had a job at one stage testing tyres on the trucks in the desert sand and reporting on their performance, etc. Early on I was attached to the 4th Indian Division, and that was quite an experience. They were tremendously adept at camouflage in the desert. Twenty minutes after camping for the night you’d never know there was a vehicle or a person on the desert.

       Rex Montgomery Crowther Thompson

      As a Division, we moved to Mersa Matruh and I was attached to the Regimental Transport Office there. We used to take the troops up from the train to the border; they’d been on leave or were going on leave. And that’s where we struck our first taste of bombing by the Italians. They used to come over at 4 o’clock every afternoon when the train arrived. And we had slit trenches along the road by the station and we made the mistake of getting into them very early to start with, and all the natives would pile in after us. They’d wait till we got in and pile in on top of us so we had to reverse that. And it was quite an event to be waiting and watch the bombs leave the planes. And from then on we were providing transport over the various parts of the desert, and we soon found out the safest place with the Italian bombing – they were doing over a petrol dump or an ammunition dump – was to get on the СКАЧАТЬ