CHANNEL CONVOY

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 151, 23 December 1940, Page 5

CHANNEL CONVOY

THE SEA ROAD IN WAR

GERMANS DRIVEN AWAY

SUCCESSFUL VOYAGE

The gale, after threatening to tear away our barrage balloons, blew itself .out in the night, and a strange array of his Majesty's grey ships nosed across the harbour boom to their rendezvous ■with the merchantmen whom they were to take in convoy through, the Straits, says a writer in "The Times." Tftis was one of the Channel convoys; just a collection of lumbering old tramps which, under the quizzical eye .of the Royal Navy, are day after day loading and unloading along the British coast, cocking a snook at Hitler and all his works be it ever so fierce at "Hell's Corner." In these last weeks they have come to stand as fully for the freedom of the seas as the proudest squadron of ships of the line. One liked 'to imagine that Potato Jones was there among these sturdy, terse skippers, whose knowledge of English waters gives them high places in the fellowship '* of the sea. But it has been my experience to be aboard the commanding escort vessel, and Airing a memorable twenty-four hours witness something of the unwinking vigilance, the painstaking concern for detail, that the Navy exercises over its flock—to say nothing of the protection of its guns. We were to have cause to be thankful for them before , the sun w"ent down. . KEEPING CLOSE UP. I had been shown a plan of the convoy in harbour, and here over a stretch of choppy water it came to life with far more simplicity than might have been looked for from that intricate document, with its precise allotment of stations. No greater care could have been taken had it been a naval review. For the first essential was j that the convoy should keep close up. Little may be written about the several types of escort vessels employed, among them a number of balloon ships—one boat flew a kite-r-which imparted an even greater sense of security from the dive-bomber than the landlubbers of their kind. Naval vessels certainly | outnumber the tramps; and lest it be wondered whether land routes might not afford equal facilities and fewer hazards it should be remembered that it would take seven or eight trains to transport the load of one cargo boat. And, moreover, this is still the English Channel. . Off we went in a strong following wind that bore the balloons along back j to front and blew the funnel smoke the wrong way, an oddity for which the Navy apparently has no colloquial term. Action stations were immediately assumed and remained so throughout the voyage; the busiest man on the bridge for a long time was the yeoman of signals, rapping out messages on the- flashlamps, passing down others to the wireless cabin, as the convoy steamed from single into double line with the widening of the free passage. Its speed^was the speed of the slowest merchantman; andthat was no great rate of knots. TENSE WATCHFULNESS. For the warships it must have been rather like putting thoroughbreds between the shafts of hansom cabs but there was no fretting, just a tense watchfulness for a sign of the enemy. Here on the bridge were -Mr. Churchill's real Jim Crows, the lookouts whose binoculars perpetually, hours out, we went into action. The] alarm bell rang below, and before I was half-way up the ladder to the bridge the gun turrets fore and aft were blazing away with a staggering blast at a lone Dormer that circled in the clouds high above our heads. It was no sooner begun than over. "Bombs falling!" came the order, and we crouched low on the bridge, feeling, for my part, embarrassingly naked; but, with the exception of one fairly near shot, the German made such a bad job of it that, before. an admittedly fierce reception, he might ' have imagined from our smoke that we were going the other way. StiU, he made off, we feared to tell his friends-might it not to. be Jo boas to them?— though he was not out of earshot before one of the layers of the director, the eyes as it were of the ship, was back at his novel. A SPITFIRE PATROL. Another anxious moment was turned into glee when a-flight of overtaking aircraft was identified as a patrol ofSpitfires—and they were not far away when the next attack came. "Diver, flashed a sister ship whose guns were in acfion before. Much lower this time •we saw a vicious, black Junkers swoop out of the clouds seemingly between two barrage balloons. Now our multiple pom-pom joined in the racket; the enemy dropped his bombs, hopelessly wide again, arid, apparently pinked, went into a steep dive with two of the lurking Spitfires on his tail. We lost him in the clouds, but judging from the eloquent waddle of a returning fighter he probably did not get back to tell the story. There was one more sudden burst in the flaming sunset, over like the others in a few seconds; and the comment of the gunnery control officer this time was regret at having missed the 6 o'clock news. To the ship's company all this was uneventful; they had gone through sterner moments with the convoy that was shelled from the French coast. "I sat here below and counted every five minutes on the clock as the shells arrived," the young doctor told me. The captain called it shadow-fighting against things that could not be easily seen —aircraft, submarines, E-boats, j shells—and he longed to meet something his own size. Now and again he would step down from his platform with some apt comment or a story of his days as a submarine commander as we stole slowly through the night. THROUGH THE STRAITS. The cliffs at Beachy Head stood out like a distant range of white mountains in the moonlight; there was the fine tracery of the seachlights, the lurid spurt of gun flashes, the drone of aircraft overhead speeding, maybe, to wanton crime in London. The whole night was vibrantly alive, and as we came on through the Straits of Doyer we were near Hitler's barges, which will cross this challenging strip of water at their peril. Lights flickered on the French coast —usually there are fires —and one realised with a shock more bitter than in Paris or Bordeaux the fate that has fallen on that mysterious land. "It would be worth a guinea a minute in a pleasure launch," the captain said. There was to be no more excitement. The E-boats kept off in the night and dawn found the convoy well on the way for home, with several warships gliding across our bows on the horizon, which pleased the commodore of the convoy so well that he made undue haste. I was taken over this happy ship, so like all the others, proud- of its roomy bridge and pleased with the distinction that the officers' quarters were amidships instead of aft. The officers themselves, nicely balanced be- i tween members of the regular Service and the R.N.V.R.—with vigorous beards in the case pf the younger men j

to distinguish them—made light of the whole adventure. ■It was just another job of work accomplished, in which the old tramps and all the other ships had played their part; and when it got chilly on the bridge there was always the doctor down below to talk about Java and conger eels and motorbikes. One fell >■ to wondering what Kipling or Conrad would have written about them all.