with the aid of conscription, as there was still a large number of men unemployed in 1939. This took the Navy to 310,000 men – but the early events of the naval war had generated the need for many more ships than had been anticipated. Some of these had been taken over from the French, and 50 old four-funnel destroyers had been acquired from the United States Navy. In addition, a number of cargo passenger liners from the Merchant Navy had been converted into armed merchant cruisers. So a further 40,000 men were needed to help man the extra ships.
The numbers of men that needed to be trained, therefore, escalated at a huge rate. The existing bases for the training of boys, HMS St Vincent at Portsmouth, HMS Caledonia at Rosyth and HMS Ganges, all became training bases for conscripted men, known as Hostilities Only (H.O.) ratings, and this was why the training for the boy entrants was moved to the Isle of Man.
The Navy required all boy entrants to be literate, and 9 of the 26 weeks of training were given over to normal education. At St George the teachers were former civilian schoolmasters who had been called up to serve. The standard of education there was considered to be better than was the case at Ganges. Some of the instructors for the practical subjects were retired petty officers who had returned to the Navy. Although they were out of touch with the modern Navy of the day, their knowledge was adequate for basic training for boys. Their methods of instruction varied from the authoritarian to the academic, with more of a tendency to the former.
In April 1940 I went to HMS St George on the Isle of Man. We took a bus to Ipswich and then the train all the way across to Liverpool. Then we caught the ferry to the Isle of Man, escorted by two destroyers. There must have been 300 or 400 of us who went across in that draft.
When we got the Isle of Man they split us up; some went to an old camp in Douglas but we were sent up to Onchan, a bit out of Douglas. It was a hotel called St George. There was another camp for signalmen, up at Peel. It was a lot pleasanter there. There were four to a room – at Ganges there were two or three dozen in a room. The training was more or less the same as at Ganges: seamanship and gunnery. They had an old 4-inch, a very old gun, to train on. We did more sailing; we used to go down to Douglas to the boats. We sailed straight out into the Irish Sea. Some people were seasick, although I was never seasick – and wasn’t seasick in all my time at sea. They would let us go out if it was a bit choppy, but not if it was really rough. The instructors were the same ones who came with us, including Chief Petty Officer McIntyre, and he brought his wife as well. He was a bit more amiable with his wife there. She used to come and watch whatever activity we were on; she would be in the background. I was there until October 1940.
Training was now over for Fred. He was ready to join his first ship. After his leave at home in Gillingham with his family, he went the few miles to Chatham Royal Naval Barracks. By the end of 1940 Chatham was being heavily bombed, and on 3 December the dockyard was the target, the sky over Chatham glowing red from the fires. On the 14th a land mine fell on Ordnance Street, Chatham, causing huge damage. The dockyard was always a major target; during the war it had over 1,300 air raid alerts, and 92 bombs fell on the dockyard alone. Despite this, the number of ships refitted there was about the same as the number of air raid alerts.
Fred’s draft to join HMS London came amongst all this.
After that, I had about 10 days’ leave and then reported to Chatham, where they sent us up to Borstal, the young offenders’ institution in Rochester. It was a big establishment, and they divided the place so there were prisoners one side, and we were on the other. We slept in the cells; the only difference was that the doors were open. I suppose we had the same food as the prisoners. I was there until about December, when I was drafted to HMS London.
‘We were armed with cutlasses’
HMS London was a heavy cruiser of the same class as Devonshire, Sussex and Norfolk, and very close in design to Berwick, Cumberland, Kent and Sussex. They had all been designed by Sir William Berry, and had all been launched between 1926 and 1928. London had been built in Portsmouth Dockyard and launched on 14 September 1927. Over the years she had been the subject of much alteration: when Fred joined her in December 1940, she had been in refit since March 1939. Major modifications had been made to her original design: amongst other changes she had a new bridge built, new aircraft hangars and an aircraft catapult, and new engines. The changes increased her displacement by over 1,000 tons. Although these were major improvements, it became apparent that her hull could not cope with the additional strains put upon it as a result of wartime service; further changes were made in 1942, when Fred left her, as the earlier alterations had caused stress damage. She was heavily armed with eight 8-inch main guns, eight 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, various smaller guns and eight torpedo tubes. When new, her top speed was over 32 knots.
Three of her sister ships made names for themselves in the early part of the war: Cumberland was part of Rear Admiral Sir Henry Harwood’s South Atlantic Squadron that took on the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, although she was away from the squadron when the action took place but returned in time to join the blockade off the River Plate. Norfolk and Suffolk were in the Denmark Strait in the action to find and sink the Bismarck, and were the first to locate her and then shadow her, enabling the successful action to take place, ending in her destruction.
On 3 September, only hours after war had been declared, a signal went out to the fleet: ‘Winston is back’. The Navy was delighted, as Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, returning to the post he had held from 1911 to 1915. He had been a very dynamic first lord, to the extent that he had been criticised for being too hands-on and involving himself too much in what would now be called micro-management, and also for having some grand, but unsound, ideas. The latter culminated in the disastrous attempt to force the Dardanelles in order to attack Istanbul.
The German navy in 1939 was not ready for war. It was still small, with only five battleships – three of which were pocket battleships – plus five cruisers, some destroyers and fifty-six U-boats, not all of which were suitable for service in the Atlantic. By contrast, the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet alone had five battleships, two battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, and sixteen cruisers, destroyers and submarines. Also stationed in British home waters were a further two battleships, four cruisers and over sixty destroyers. There were yet more British ships in the North and South Atlantic commands. Although this sounds a huge numerical superiority, many of the ships were old, veterans of the First World War, and not fast enough to catch the recently built German ships. And although the British also had aircraft carriers, the aircraft that flew from them were obsolete, and the Fleet Air Arm remained starved of modern aircraft throughout the first years of the war.
The war at sea had started on 3 September – the very day war was declared – when the cargo/passenger liner Athenia was sunk in the North Atlantic, just west of Ireland, with the loss of over 100 lives. She had been hit by two torpedoes from U-30, commanded by Fritz Julius Lempe. Exactly two weeks later the aircraft carrier Courageous was sunk by U-29 in the Bristol Channel, with a loss of over 500 of her crew. A month later, the U-47, commanded by Gunter Prien, managed to find its way into the Home Fleet base at Scapa Flow and sink the battleship Royal Oak. Over 800 were killed. The U-boat made a successful escape. The third major naval loss in the autumn of 1939 was that of the Rawalpindi, an armed merchant cruiser, which encountered the two German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau whilst on patrol in the Denmark Strait. The lightly armed Rawalpindi stood no chance, with her elderly 6-inch guns pitted against the 11-inch guns of the Scharnhorst. Only 38 of the Rawalpindi’s complement survived.
Much to the Admiralty’s relief, the tables turned somewhat in December, in the South Atlantic. HMS Achilles, HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter, under the command of Commodore (later Rear Admiral Sir) Henry Harwood, were trying to locate the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. She had been attacking merchant ships in the South Atlantic, with some success. Harwood considered that the numbers of British