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Читать книгу: «The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice», страница 6

John Bourne, Peter Liddle, Ian Whitehead

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Notes on contributors

Commander Jeff Tall OBE RN, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, UK.

Commander Jeff Tall is the Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a post he has held since August 1994 when he retired from the Royal Navy. A submariner for twenty eight years, he has served all over the world and commanded four submarines: HMS Olympus, HMS Finwhale, HMS Churchill and, finally, the nuclear powered Polaris Missile submarine, HMS Repulse. He served as Admiral Sandy Woodward’s submarine staff officer during the Falklands Conflict in 1982. He was co-author, with the naval historian Paul Kemp, of HM Submarines in Camera, he wrote the historical element of the CD-Rom The RN Submarine Service - Past Present and Future, produced jointly with the Royal Naval School, which is available to the general public.

Chapter 4
The merchant seaman at war

Tony Lane

The development of submarine commerce warfare in the First World War and its extensive and systematic application in the Second World War ensured that in both wars merchant seamen were the only civilians to be killed in large numbers by military action: 14,679 in the First War, 28,000 in the Second. Where in each war the casualty rates suffered by merchant seamen were higher than those for Royal Navy seamen, in 1939–45 merchant seamen actually had a higher death rate than any of the armed forces. The wars produced a few epic encounters between lightly armed merchant ships and warships, and frequent examples of extraordinarily resourceful feats of survival in lifeboats and the nursing homeward of seriously damaged ships. Of the latter, there was the extraordinary case of the San Demetrio. Abandoned by her crew, then reboarded by those in a lifeboat unnoticed by a rescue ship, fires were extinguished and makeshift steering organised. With engines restarted, the San Demetrio limped home with her cargo of petrol – to be celebrated in a full-length feature film and a Government publication, The Saga of San Demetrio, by F. Tennyson Jesse (HMSO, 1942).

Seafarers could hardly have been unaware of their critical role in bringing in food and raw materials, or insensitive to the risks they ran; neither their exploits nor their crucial role in the supply chain seems in any way to have affected their everyday behaviour. They did not set aside their habitual independent-minded attitudes to shipboard discipline and become ‘respectable’ and orderly patriotic citizens. In both wars, merchant seamen unquestioningly adjusted to testing circumstances, but in their everyday actions they insisted on being themselves. They were intensely proud of their occupational culture, and at the heart of this fine mesh of norms and values was a profound belief in the legitimacy of resistance to breaches of customary rules of justice and fair play, and entitlement, when opportunity offered, to a ‘good run ashore’. These beliefs were not set aside in the exceptional conditions of war, and merchant seafarers could therefore seem to be both heroic and a disorderly rabble. They were neither. They were themselves.

Ships, crews and war

Only 20 years separated the end of one war and the beginning of the next. It was therefore a relatively simple matter for those administering the direction and the organisation of shipping in the Second World War to draw upon the experience of the First. The Ministry of Shipping, which did not appear until 1916 in the Great War, was operative in 1939 just six weeks after the outbreak of war, and had key senior officials who had held similar posts in 1918.¹ In 1939, as previously, this new ministry had overall control of the destinations and the cargoes carried, although day-to-day technical and personnel management of ships was left in the hands of the shipping companies. Military protection was of course the Admiralty’s responsibility, and here, as in commercial operations, the Royal Navy was in 1939 much better prepared. Where in 1914 the Admiralty had been obliged to use the Lloyd’s insurance market’s global network of agents to advise shipmasters on avoidance of normal routes and on ‘blackout’ precautions, in 1939 the master needed only to open ‘Envelope Z’. Previously lodged in his safe, it contained a single sheet giving the ship its secret call-sign and instructions on radio silence and blackout procedures. The Admiralty had also been providing training courses for merchant ships’ deck officers since 1937 on the likely demands of war, and more than two-thirds of officers had attended them by September 1939. Gunnery training for officers began in the summer of 1938, and for ratings from early in 1939.

In the First War merchant ships only began to be equipped with defensive armament (stern-mounted 4-inch or 12-pounder guns) from 1916, and the typical gun crew was led by a recalled, retired naval gunner and assisted by volunteers from among the crew. In 1939 guns that were often relics from the Great War were quickly brought out of store and fitted between voyages when port-time and labour availability allowed. By 1943 every ship was armed with at least one large gun at the stern and lighter anti-aircraft weapons, and gadgets such as anti-aircraft kites. The deliveries in increasing numbers of American-built Liberty ships with purpose-built gun platforms and modern quick-firing guns from early 1943 finally provided the ultimate in armed merchant ships. By this time merchant ships were also being provided with professional gunners. Early in the Second World War gunners, as in the First, were either a mixture of recalled naval professionals and volunteers or wholly recruited from among trained crew members. By 1944 there were 24,000 naval gunners aboard merchant ships and a further 14,000 army gunners who were members of the specially formed Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery and universally known as DEMS gunners.

Britain’s dependence on the ability freely to import great volumes of foodstuffs and raw materials was well enough known. And it was naturally better known in 1939 after the experience of 1914–18. Nevertheless, in 1939 the British merchant fleet’s carrying capacity was 8 per cent smaller than in 1914, while both the British population and its per capita consumption of commodities had increased. For example, between 1914 and 1939 it was estimated that Britain’s weekly consumption of sugar went up from 37,000 tons to 48,000 tons and grain from 27,000 tons to 38,000 tons, increases respectively of 22 and 29 per cent. The widened gap between the supply and demand for shipping services had been met by a growing dependence upon the shipping services of other nations, especially Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. Ships of neutral nations had of course been important carriers of British imports in 1914–18. In the Second War the ships and crews of the neutral nations, which had escaped capture when their countries were occupied, made even more significant contributions; Norwegian tankers were especially valuable. Although the British economy had become increasingly oil-dependent in the inter-war years, it was Norwegian rather than British shipowners who had become tanker specialists.

The extent to which an adequate flow of supplies was maintained was necessarily a military matter, and the fundamental question was how best to protect merchant ships from submarines. After 12 months of the war at sea in 1914–18, 68 per cent of merchant ship losses were accounted for by submarines. The equivalent figure for 1939–45 was 44 per cent. The worst years for merchant seamen were 1917 and 1942, when respectively 94 and 77 per cent of sinkings were due to submarines.

In the First War it took the Admiralty a long time before it gave in to pressure, and finally, in April 1917, began to organise convoys. This was quite a policy turnaround considering that in January 1917 the Admiralty had issued a pamphlet that, in response to its critics, recorded that: ‘…the system of several ships sailing together in a convoy is not recommended in any area where submarine attack is a possibility.’² Convoying, however, quickly proved successful by demonstrating that unescorted ships were much more likely to be sunk than those sailing in company and with escorts. In 1939 there was still some residual Admiralty resistance to convoys, but the main problem – as indeed it had been in 1917 – was a lack of suitable ships and a general shortage of sufficient ships of any kinds.

The first homeward-bound convoy sailed from Gibraltar in mid-May 1917 escorted by two special service ships (small, armed merchant ships manned by the Navy) and three lightly armed steam yachts. Convoy escorts were not markedly superior in the earlier phases of the Second War. The SC7 convoy that sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October 1940 was escorted by a sloop and an armed steam yacht. After two days the yacht returned to port, leaving the sloop as the sole escort until joined after nine days by a corvette and another sloop. Of the 30 ships that began the crossing, 21 were sunk by submarines, 15 of them in one six-hour period. The war was almost two years old before North Atlantic convoys were escorted for the whole crossing. The most heavily protected convoys were those bound for Murmansk and Malta. Losses were especially heavy in the Malta convoys, which, although made up of the fastest and most modern ships in the British merchant fleet, came under heavy attack from aircraft and surface ships. Similar onslaughts were experienced in the Arctic convoys. These engagements were arguably the most significant military events in the war at sea in Europe during the Second World War.³

It may have taken the Admiralty a long time to develop effective tactics for the protection of merchant ships, but it was very quick to decide that it would like to impose military discipline on merchant seamen. In 1915 the two leading figures in the largest of the seamen’s unions, Havelock Wilson and Edward Tupper of the National Association of Sailors and Firemen, were summoned to the Admiralty to be told by the Prime Minister of a proposal to conscript merchant seamen for national service. Apart from the fact that at this time conscription had not yet been introduced for the armed forces, the union leaders, who were well known as super-patriots, were outraged at the idea that, although still working for civilian employers, seafarers themselves would be subject to military law if conscripted. The Prime Minister and his colleagues met with adamant refusal from the two union leaders and no more was heard of the scheme. However, the idea resurfaced in 1941 when Lord Marchwood, together with a group of retired admirals, some serving naval officers and members of the consular corps, were proposing that merchant seamen become an auxiliary service of the Royal Navy. This time the proposal lacked any superior backing and was quickly strangled by an ad hoc alliance of trade union leaders and shipowners.⁴

In both wars the Royal Navy took over large numbers of fast passenger liners for use as armed merchant cruisers, and many of their crews, including officers, volunteered to go with them and were duly entered into the Royal Navy. In the Second War, 50 of these ships were taken by the Navy and 15 were sunk, mostly by submarine, two of them, the Jervis Bay and the Rawalpindi, in hopelessly one-sided engagements with German battlecruisers. In the First World War 17 armed merchant cruisers were lost, also in the main to submarines. Other and similar merchant ships were taken up for Government service as hospital ships. Their crews stayed with them but retained their civilian status.

It was a matter for some understandable grievance that merchant seamen who stayed by ships transferred into the Royal Navy would be paid on service rates that were considerably lower than those paid to merchant seamen. In the Second World War the problem was pragmatically dealt with by paying these men a special rate. Generally, and as for other industrial workers, rates of pay for seafarers significantly increased in both wars. Able seamen who were earning £5 per month had doubled their wages by 1918. These gains did not survive the inter-war depression. In September 1939 the able seaman’s wage, at £9 6s 0d, had only recently got close to the 1918 level. By 1945 wages had once again doubled, although seafarer’s working hours were much longer than those in any other industry. In 1939 the basic working week before overtime was 64 hours, which was 20 hours longer than in the building industry and 17 hours longer than in engineering. Even when the basic week was reduced in 1943 to 56 hours, it was 10 hours longer than the all-industry average. The biggest wartime grievance, however, had little to do with either wage levels or working hours. What angered seamen was that their wages were stopped from the moment their ships were sunk. In the First War they had to wait until mid-1917, and until mid-1941 in the Second, before survivors were paid until their return to the UK.

In terms of more than just danger, the years 1917 and 1941 were significant ones for merchant seamen. For more than two decades before 1914 shipowners had fought a militant and highly organised campaign against the seafarer trade unions. By far the largest of the unions, the National Association of Sailors and Firemen, had a modest ambition – the creation of national collective bargaining machinery. In 1917, and at the height of the German submarine onslaught, the Government pressured the shipowners into creating the National Maritime Board, and also produced some significant symbolic gestures. A silver badge was struck for war-disabled seamen, a roll of honour to publicise brave deeds was to be issued regularly, and an Act of Parliament provided for the voluntary adoption of a standard uniform, identical in style to that of the Royal Navy and differing only in badge and insignia of rank. In 1941 the provisions of the Essential Work Order as applied to merchant seamen certainly tied them to their industry, but in return provided paid continuous employment, paid leave, paid study leave for approved courses, and proper compensation for lost effects in the event of shipwreck. In this war there was little additional need for symbolic gestures.

In 1928 the Prince of Wales had acquired the additional title of ‘Master of the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets’, and this then passed subsequently to the Monarch. Resentments in the First War at merchant seamen’s ineligibility for medals and honours were laid to rest as the CBE, OBE, MBE, DSC, DSM, BEM and Mentioned in Dispatches all became available. In January 1940 Royal Assent was given to the production and distribution of a Merchant Navy buttonhole badge to be worn voluntarily. Merchant seamen, however, still commonly believed that they went unnoticed and unappreciated. Rarely practised but significantly often spoken of, the MN badge could be worn upside down as NW, to indicate ‘Not Wanted’.

There were roughly a quarter of a million seafarers employed aboard British merchant ships in 1914 and almost 200,000 in 1939. In both years at least one-third of these were foreigners – mainly Europeans, but also Indian, Chinese, West African, West Indian, East African and Arab. Ships regularly employed in the trade to the Indian sub-continent were typically manned by British officers and Indian petty officers and ratings, and complements were high. In 1940 the Clan Forbes, for example, had a total crew of 108, of whom 87 were Indian. At the same time the Biafra, a ship trading to West Africa, had a total crew of 54, of whom 27 were from Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Manning levels per ship, whatever the nationality composition of the crew, changed little between the two wars, although average ship size increased considerably. The crews engaged in UK ports for coal-burning tramps averaged at about 42 men in both wars. Ships in the cargo liner trades, and with ratings recruited in India and China, rarely had crews of less than 80. Cargo liners with all-European crews comprised between 50 and 60. The fact of war made very little difference to crew size. In the First War the average foreign-going merchant ship doubled its complement of radio officers (from one to two) and in the Second three radio officers were carried but no other additional personnel were shipped, if members of the armed forces signed on as gunners are excluded.

Images and identities

In the Great War the mass media was in its infancy, unable to pick up and put into deep national circulation stories of the doings of merchant seamen. In the early decades of the 20th century far more people read local and regional newspapers than national ones, photo-journalism as a distinctive genre was under-developed, and the same went for cinema (even though the soundless newsreel could present actualité); books were relatively expensive and talking radio was still a few years in the future. In 1939 all these means of communication had reached high levels of technical development and, furthermore, were within the economic reach of the great mass of the population. But it was as much the politics of the Second War as the technical and economic development of the media that made merchant seafarers such an obvious and prominent focus for the attention of newspapers, radio and cinema. Where the First War was a patriotic war fought in defence of great power status, the Second was quickly announced as a ‘people’s war’, to be fought in defence of democracy. The one war required examples of patriotic heroism and helpless victims of enemy brutality, the other needed patriotic heroic instances as before, but especially needed ordinary people being good citizens. Merchant seafarers were well cast for this role and no doubt for that reason received an enormous amount of publicity.

The weekly photo-news magazine, Picture Post, famous anyway for its celebration of the ‘common people’, regularly carried articles on merchant seamen. The following sequence appeared in 1940:

‘ONE OF THE MEN HITLER CAN’T FRIGHTEN

Harry Townsend of the Dunbar Castle

Harry Townsend, 60 years old, is just one of over 150,000 men in the British mercantile marine. He had a berth as a cook in the Union Castle Line’s Dunbar Castle. On a Tuesday, the Dunbar Castle strikes a mine off the south-east coast, and sinks in 10 minutes. With other survivors, Harry Townsend is picked up by a lifeboat. He reaches London wrapped in a blanket, a pipe stuck in his mouth. That was Tuesday. By Saturday, Harry Townsend has found another ship. He is at sea again.’⁵

‘WHAT IT MEANS TODAY TO BE A MERCHANT SEAMAN

Lifeboats pull away from the sinking Clan Stuart

All day and all night ships are putting into the ports of Britain. They bring us food. They bring us metal. They bring us the needs of war and the comforts of life. They bring us them in spite of mines and submarines. They bring us them at the cost of heavy risk to our merchant seamen – the men of Cardiff, Glasgow, Tyneside, London; the men of Bombay, Singapore, and the little ports of the Near East.’⁶

‘AND STILL THE CONVOYS COME…

The strain on merchant seamen’s nerves is terrific, as the ships proceed at snail’s pace over the ocean and nobody knows from minute to minute when disaster may come from under the sea, on the sea or in the air. The merchant seaman is given an inconspicuous little badge, about half the size of an air-raid warden’s. He is paid (if he is an AB – a skilled man) £9 12s 6d a month, plus £3 danger money. For this he risks his life every minute of his day and night, awake and asleep… doing what is in the last analysis, the most important job of all – the job of keeping the nation fed, and its trade flowing.’⁷

Picture Post’s only competitor, Illustrated, was no less concerned with celebrating the merchant seaman. A seven-page photo-article on the rescue of the crew of a sunken ship by a Royal Navy destroyer contained these captions:

‘Rescued! The face of the Lascar survivor betrays his ordeal. His feet are frozen.’⁸

‘James Fitzpatrick, junior wireless operator of the torpedoed freighter, is only nineteen years old. “I’m ready to sail again at any time,” says James.’⁹

‘Chief Steward Dumbill after being torpedoed four times, believes firmly in his lucky star. He was in his cabin rolling a cigarette when the torpedo struck the freighter. “I ran on deck to help with the boats then returned for my shipmates,” says Dumbill, affectionately nursing his canaries.’¹⁰

The cinema and the popular daily press were no less attentive. There were seven documentaries, three full-length feature and at least 29 newsreel items. The Daily Mirror deliberately set out to champion the merchant seaman, as might be expected from the archetypal left-populist newspaper, but the patriotically populist Daily Express carried a similar number of stories. These two newspapers were certainly idiomatically different in their approach, but they were nevertheless staunch friends of the seaman. The same was true of the BBC, which broadcast at least 19 talks given by serving merchant seamen recounting experiences. The BBC also broadcast a number of charitable appeals on behalf of seafarers. Its greatest achievement was the programme Shipmates Ashore, which in its first six months went out as The Blue Peter. Devised as a light entertainment for merchant seamen of all ranks rather than about them, it had established a home audience of six million listeners by 1943. It went out at peak period on Saturdays, was one of the very few BBC programmes to be repeated on all its short-wave services, and was the only programme solely dedicated to an occupational group unless one were to include the musical offering of Workers’ Playtime.

The press, film and radio output was supplemented by a number of novels and non-fiction books – at least 30 titles of each category. As we have seen, means of mass communication were of a different order in 1914–18, and there is therefore quite simply no comparison between the publicity attached to merchant seamen in the two wars. There were a number of 1914–18 wartime books that were wholly concerned with merchant seamen – but almost certainly less than ten titles. The idiom of the non-fictional books of this war, if just slightly more luxuriant than those of the Second War, was rhetorically interchangeable. The reader could have heard:

‘Concerning the seafarer the slightest suspicion of degeneracy was never entertained. He toiled on in fair weather and foul, in every clime, in every season, all day and every day. He had neither the opportunity nor the desire to follow the path of the landlubber. Atlas-like, he supported Britain on his broad shoulders despite increasing hazards. The might of the navy is due to a very appreciable extent to the might of the Merchant Service, and it is the latter which is the real binding link of the Empire. Never before in our history have we so much appreciated the men who “go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters”. The present conflict has accentuated our irredeemable debt of gratitude to them.’¹¹

‘Here then are the great arteries supplying Great Britain with survival power in the shape of food and raw materials; and over them every day and every night, in the piercing cold of winter and the blazing heat of summer, through fog and snow and ice and rain, with mortal danger hovering above and lurking below, go the brave obscure men of the Merchant Navy on whom now our hopes and our lives depend.’¹²

Just how far these images and implicit identities were heard, read and seen among seafarers themselves was finally what mattered. That the public at large and especially seafarers’ families knew that seafarers were valued was of course important. But by being mostly absent for at least nine months in very twelve, it was unlikely that seafarers would themselves have had much opportunity to see themselves as others saw them. If, therefore, the imagery produced and distributed in the public domain was to percolate into the seafarer’s own consciousness, it had to be passed on primarily by intermediaries who in most cases would have been family members.

In the First War at least, this two-step flow of communication was inevitably an imperfect process. The economic costs and the skills needed to consume the printed media must have meant that at best only a substantial minority of seafarers’ families could have been aware of what was being said about their fathers, grandfathers, husbands, brothers or sons. And of those who did receive and pass on to their seafarer relatives the images in circulation, by far the great majority must have been officers’ families. The two-thirds of crews of cargo-carrying ships who were ratings must surely only have seen themselves as they saw each other. Their image was their self-image. In the earlier war it is safe to say that most seafarers’ experience of their conduct in war was little touched or influenced by the perceptions of the wider world.

The situation in 1939–45 was undoubtedly different. The economic costs of media consumption had fallen, the growth in scale and variety of the media had been enormous in order to feed the information demands of a developing democratic state and levels of literacy that were continually improving. On the other hand, the rhythms of the seafarers’ life as dictated by the conditions of employment, passage times, trade routes and port stays changed very little in the inter-war years. In short, the pattern of sea life in 1939 was much the same as in 1918. This was an infinitely more closed occupational community than those of farmworkers, miners and quarrymen. Paid leave was still wholly unavailable to ratings and petty officers in 1939, and not much known among officers either. Being a seafarer meant being aboard ship for not less than 80 per cent of the year provided jobs were available, and that meant almost literally being out of touch with families and having only a sketchy awareness of world events. The enhanced pervasiveness of media messages in the Second World War, the introduction of paid leave and continuous employment, and the development of welfare services can only have brought seafarers ‘closer to home’ than was possible in the earlier war. But as we shall see, to be a seafarer was to live a life apart. All those carefully wrought images, as well as all the thoughtful and considerate good intentions, could not have weightily touched the Second World War seafarer. Although writing almost a century earlier, the Victorian poet Arthur Clough had found a universal measure:

‘Where lies the land to which the ship would go!

Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.

And where the land she travels from? Away,

Far, far behind, is all that they can say.’¹³