Patrol Ship Officer's Grim Story

Northern Advocate, 4 May 1940, Page 2

Patrol Ship Officer's Grim Story

Incidents in life at sea in a patrol and escort vessel of the Royal Navy on the west coast of Great Britain are vividly described in a letter from-a chief petty officer who served a threeyear commission on H.M.S. Achilles in New Zealand and who finished his service just before war broke out. Being on reserve he was calied to the colours again, and in the letter to Hastings relatives he relates incidents encountered by the ship on which he is serving. He says: . . . The boat I am on is on patrol duties and escort work on the west coast, and although we are not in as much danger as there is on the other coast, we still have plenty of thrills on the job. "We are able to got ashore a couple of evenings a week, but on several occasions I have been at the pictures and had just settled down to enjoy myself when on the screen has been flashed orders for us all to return on board immediately, and so our night s picture entertainment at least is ended. “Wherever we have been, people have made a great fuss of us and we have a marvellous time, especially in j where we are actually based. It is surprising the number of people who, since the war began, are just dying to knit something for ‘we poor sailor boys.’ I’ve had mittens, gloves, scarves and a thick woollen roll-collar jersey given to me, with promises of all sorts of things to come from different people. We do really need them all, though, and it is jolly decent of them to do it for us, I think. 30 and 40 Degrees of Frost. "The weather up here in the north is positively starvingly cold, registering as much as 30 and 40 degrees of frost. I had ten days’ leave a couple of weeks ago while our boat was being overhauled and another gun fitted on it. On my'return, I caught the mail-boat back. It was the and no doubt you heard about it being sunk. It was hit a week later by a mine.

“However, two days after this, we found there was a U-boat lurking around in cur area and for nearly four hours we stalked it around, using our submarine detecting gear until about 3.30 in the morning, when we eventually got her just where we wanted her, and then away we went with our depth charges, dropping over a dozen of them round about her. "After circling round for quite a while we saw her gradually breaking the surface. It was a pitch-black morning, but our searchlights picked her out. I was on the upper deck and it was a fascinating sight to see the black and grey conning tower sticking. out of the water. We were all wondering momentarily whether or not she was going to smack a torpedo into u's at close range, and then our guns opened fire on her. Then she lurched to the surface properly, and we could see it was all up with her. Her crew poured out on deck and lined up waiting for her to sink. "After a while we saw sparks and smoke coming from her conning tower hatch and knew that the sea water had got to her batteries and that they had blown up. Then slowly she sank down by the bows and her crew took to the water, which was about 42 degrees Fahrenheit. We did our best to pick them up, but there was a fast tide running and they soon drifted all over the place, which made it difficult for us to rescue them. Foot Blown Off. “One fellow passed about a hundred yards from the ship and shouted to us: ‘Save me! Save, me!’ in perfect English, so I yelled out to him to swim to the ship so that I could throw him a line, but he shouted back: ‘I can’t. My foot’s blown off.’ It was impossible for us to do anything and he drifted away into the darkness. “It was a grim sight to see them all in the water and knowing that they were practically freezing to death there and then. Eventually we got two boats away and picked up a bout a dozen cf them and brought them on hoard alive, but it was a long' time before we got the remainder. Finally, we saved about 17 of them and picked up a further 25 dead from exposure. “We found out from the prisoners that the sunken craft was the U-boat that had laid the mines that had'sunk the , the passenger boat I mentioned previously, so we had avenged the sinking. “But that is not all. You know the old saying we chaps have: ‘lf you don’t get them, they’ll get you.’ Well, this was brought home to us more than ever when the Germans told us that if we had been two minutes later in picking them up with our searchlights she’d have been able to put a ‘tin fish’ (torpedo) into ps and have blown us sky high! “It must have been our lucky day. “We are now having a couple of days in harbour doing a few necessary repairs, etc., after our hectic adventure, but we are going out again tomorrow morning to carry on, on patrol work, as usual. “Later: Did you hear about the Üboat torpedoing a tanker in the North Atlantic in February and the crew taking to the boats for a couple of days and then finding that one half of their ship was still floating? If you did you will remember that they then went back to her. Well, we’ve just come back from escorting her in after about a week at sea with her. We beached her and after preparations have been made they are going to put a new bow on her and off to sea she’ll go again.”