War-Time Collisions At Sea

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30430, 2 May 1964, Page 5

War-Time Collisions At Sea

[Specially Written for “The Press’’ by R. E HARDING.] JAURING a war, collisions at sea are an ever - present risk. After the Audacious was sunk by a submarine off the west coast of Scotland, near the beginning of the First World War, noone tarried, even in a fog.

The Glorious was speeding through a thick and murky night, and in the morning she found an unexplained and hitherto unnoticed funnel on her fo’c’sle; some trawler had been in her way and she had not even felt the shock. A sister-ship, the Furious, was cut in two by one of our destroyers battle-cruisers have no armour and was joined up again as the first

aircraft carrier we ever had. My own first ship, the superdreadnought, Conqueror, was at least twice in collisions, and once when I was in her. Just before the Armistice, the second division of the Second Battle Squadron, the Orion, the Thunderer, the Monarch and the Conqueror, left Rosyth and went to Scapa Flow. There, after alarms and excursions caused by a desperate but abortive attempt by a German submarine, manned entirely by officers, to enter the flow, rumours of the Armistice reached us an exact week before they became fact. Almost at once, we sailed for Rosyth again. Lights On This well-trodden way is interrupted not far from the Firth of Forth by an elbowlike turn to round the Bass Rock, a tiny, lonely island off the coast of Aberdeen.

As the war was so nearly ended, orders were given to switch on navigation lights while the turn was being made. In war-time, the only light shown by ships at that time was a pale blue stern light for the purpose of keeping station. At a given moment the lights of the four battleships and their attendant destroyers startled the sleeping birds on the lonely rock, and the slight alteration of course was made.

On such occasions the captain is always on the bridge and automatically takes command. The navigating commander is there too, All, therefore, should be well.

Late Turn . But on this occasion, something went wrong. Two destroyers which had been in line ahead of each other on the Conqueror’s starboard quarter, were late in turning. All other navigating lights had been switched off, and the squadron was on its new course. But the two destroyers still had their lights burning and were on the old. This meant they were

bearing down on the Conqueror from a point and a half abaft the starboard beam, and, by the time the bridge noticed them, it was too late. Commander Humphreys, the navigator, was the first to see them, and he is reported to have said: “There’s a destroyer: it’s too late now.” The one he saw missed our bows by four feet and disappeared in a welter of wake into the night. Her consort was not so lucky. Grandstand View I was in the starboard gun control position and had a grandstand view. Suddenly a red light and • a green appeared almost exactly abeam, dead level and rising. The red rose.above the green aS the destroyer tried to turn to pass astern of us. It was too late. She struck just astern of where I was, and, for a few moments, the night was as bright as day. Her bows seemed to come right inboard, and I had visions of a terrible gash in our sides—months in dock! Weeks of leave! But she struck our 12in arm-our-plating. A .few feet further aft and she would have cut us in two. All that really came inboard was her fo’c’sle

deck. Her bows below that crumpled up like paper. Then the Conqueror swept on; the destroyer, dead in its tracks, fell. astern taking everything off our quarterdeck on the starboard side, railings, davits, sea-boat, hawsers, bollards, companion hatches. It was a clean sweep. Apart from that, our only damage was a broken scuttle, in the cells, where the ship’s old lag, one 0. D. Fagin, was, as usual, languishing. The door of the cells must be kept open at sea, and a rudelyawakened Fagin shot out and up the ladder as the sea came in. The destroyer made Rosyth stern-first, under her own steam, with no casualties and her sister ship in attendance.