Sail of the centuries

Jonathan Dull is an American historian of the 18th Century who has already published studies of the French Navy in both the Seven Years’ War and the War Of American Independence, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

Both won him awards and good reviews, such as Professor Rodger calling the former “a tour de force in combined diplomatic, political and naval history.”

His new book – The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies 1650-1815 (Seaforth, £25 ISBN 978-1- 84832549-4) – is a study of the maritime dimension of the major wars from 1650 to 1815, based on the importance of battle fleets in these conflicts. Dull emphasises the key role played by fleets made up of the ‘ships of the line’ that form his title.

As in his previous volumes, he puts the maritime operations into their overall strategic and diplomatic context which means there is much fascinating material on the general history of the period. It is easy for amateurs to get lost in such background discussion but this author is too professional to fall into this trap and his account is admirably balanced.

It is balanced in another way too. As an American, the author is able to take an admirably neutral perspective in a period where most accounts come from the British point of view.

The author’s knowledge of the French side of the story gives the book a rather Gallic flavour but the British side is well known by the Anglophone audience whereas the French is not. Most readers will learn something from the book and see well-known events in new ways.

The book is short but generally well-written and is an engaging read. Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press it is fully-equipped with endnotes which both display the author’s mastery of the literature and give critical guidance for further reading.

The author points to the fundamental advantage that allowed Britain to prevail in the conflicts he reviews. Insular Britain was able to put more investment into its navy than continental France.

In the War of the Austrian Succession of 1744-48, Britain spent the equivalent of 71, 300,000 French livres per year on the navy, France less than half that figure, 32,170,000 livres.

In the Seven Years’ War the annual figures were even more in Britain’s favour, 111,160,000 livres against 36,670,000.
The British Admiralty and Navy Board were getting more than three times the annual provision of their French counterparts.

Only in the American War of Independence 1778-82, with no continental opponent and Britain forced to deploy larger ground forces, was France able to approach Britain’s expenditure, 138,435,000 livres against Britain’s 157,900,000.

No wonder Britain was able to afford more ships of the line than France as well as a higher proportion of more heavily-armed ships.

France had a much larger population than Britain and higher overall government income but, as Dull points out, much of the latter “was spent on pensions, public works and administration”.

The classes represented in the British parliament allowed themselves to be taxed to a remarkable degree. British 18th-Century taxpayers were paying twice to three times as much per head as their French counterparts.

The British government was also credit worthy and its investors willing to accept lower rates of interest. On such mundane but crucial foundations were the achievements of Anson, Hawke and Nelson built.

Dull sympathetically explains the difficulties the French had in manning their ships with effective crews, an absolutely fundamental factor when men were the mechanism of the ship, both in terms of propulsion and armament.

Even before the Revolution French fleets could be manned, with “novice sailors” prevented from training to efficiency by British blockaders. Thus was Conflans’ fleet “run ashore” by Hawke “steering to glory” in Quiberon Bay in the “wonderful year” of 1759.

The balance of training of the two fleets was the decisive factor.

What made it all the worse for the French, as Dull points out, was that it was already clear that invasion was not possible but Conflans’ sense of honour forced him to unnecessary action and defeat.

One reason for French difficulties in 1759 was the serious epidemic that had affected its fleet sent earlier successfully to relieve Louisbourg in North America. When it got back to France its contagions spread to the ports of Brest and Rochefort.

Nearly half the fleet’s personnel strength of 12,000 died. A similar fate had overtaken a French expedition to Cape Breton Island in 1746.

The superior standards of cleanliness in British ships were a major strategic advantage throughout this period.
Although the author  admits that Britain’s overall advantages were decisive, he puts forward the interesting argument that the more centralised French political systems did have some advantages, producing “tough and skilled” administrators who could turn situations round quite quickly when required.

An example of this was when Andre Jeanbon Saint-Andre managed to replace the grievous losses of 1793 and put 50 French ships of the line into service the following year.

Sadly, however, a lack of crew training was again endemic, not helped by the disastrous effect of the Revolution on the French officer corps and Saint-Andre’s own mistake of January 10 1794 in abolishing the corps of naval artillerymen.

Dull’s conclusion is that “on balance, the British Navy was strongest at the bottom with its incomparable sailors and shipboard officers, while the French was strongest at the top with its often excellent naval ministers.”

The author is clearly saddened by what he sees as the rather unnecessary conflicts of two countries he likes and respects. He points to the period of Anglo-French alliance after 1716 as almost a golden age and characterises the mid-18th Century as an era of “foolish wars.” He is critical – probably rightly – of the factors that caused Britain to attack Spain in 1739 and those which persuaded Louis XV to escalate the European conflict shortly afterwards.

Louis’ 1744 plans to invade England to install a Stuart king under the cover of only 15 ships of the line have all the realism of Hitler’s impractical invasion plans of almost two hundred years later, and the latter had more excuse.

The account is short and generally comprehensive but I would have liked a bit more in places, notably on the War of the Third Coalition after Trafalgar. The book’s title is also a bit misleading: perhaps the subtitle should have read ‘A Strategic History of the Maritime Wars 1650-1815.’ Nevertheless, these are only quibbles.

I can recommend this excellent book most heartily as a highly-accessible balancer to more conventional naval histories of the period.
 

What if we had fought on the beaches?

THERE is no greater ‘what if’ in Britain’s 20th century history than what was – or rather what was not – played out over the summer of 1940.

‘What if’ the Battle of Britain had been lost? ‘What if’ Hitler had invaded? It’s a debate historians continue to argue over to this day.

Rather less attention is paid to the last time Britain faced – and averted – the threat of invasion: 1803-05.

The prolific Brian Lavery looks at both in We Shall Fight on the Beaches (Conway, £20 ISBN 978-1844861019).

His focus is not the invasion plans – Napoleon’s unnamed project/Hitler’s Operation Sealion – but Britain’s plans to defeat them.

There’s a myriad similarities between the threats Britain faced in 1803-05 and 1940: a jumped-up dictator dominating Europe; a mighty continental army facing a very weak force defending Britain; the Royal Navy as the pre-eminent naval power; the ports of the Pas de Calais and Low Countries filling with barges to carry troops; the revolutionary use of airborne troops to cause unrest (balloons for Napoleon, paratroopers for Hitler).

The ties between the two unrealised invasions do not stop there.

A levee en masse was intended to bolster the relatively weak army: in the 1800s, a militia, in 1940 the Home Guard.

And on both occasions, a huge construction programme was undertaken to safeguard our sceptred isle.

The relics of the early 19th century – the Royal Military Canal in Kent and Martello towers – are rather more obvious than those from the 1940s.

Despite Churchill’s rallying cry about fighting on the beaches, the real battle for Britain in 1940 would have been waged inland: a series of ‘stop lines’ were carved through the landscape of southern England, comprising pillboxes and bunkers, anti-tank ditches, road and bridge demolitions, barbed wire entanglements. Most are still there, only overgrown.

And what of the Royal Navy? In 1803-05 and 1940 it possessed a moral and quantitative superiority over its foe, but how it grappled with the invasion threat was markedly different.

His Majesty’s ships successfully blockaded the French fleet in its ports in the 19th century. With the threat of air power 140 years later, that wasn’t an option.

Instead, the core of the Home Fleet – cruisers and destroyers, plus waves of motor torpedo boats – would have been committed (the battleships were too unwieldy, too much of a target for the Luftwaffe, to have been used except in extremis).

The toll of men and ships would have been grave – as evidenced by the heavy losses the RN suffered at Dunkirk.

The author draws upon copious published and unpublished sources to compare and contrast the 19th and 20th century threats in this excellent, thought-provoking account.

Perhaps the greatest bond between 1803-05 and 1940 is the moral component.

Napoleon may have dismissed Britain as a “nation of shopkeepers”, but French military commanders were rather more sceptical.

Gen Charles Dumouriez expected the British to rise “up in arms” and to fight “for all it held most dear and most sacred”.

It was no different in 1940. At the height of the Blitz, the great US radio commentator Ed Murrow observed: “If the people who rule Britain are made of the same stuff as the little people I have seen today, then the defence of Britain will be something which men speak of with awe and admiration as long as the English language survives.”

Of course, the British people were never tested.

Long before Nelson dealt a mortal blow to the French at Trafalgar, Napoleon had marched his newly-titled Grande Armée east to defeat the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz.

Hitler too turned east; even before the aerial campaign against the British Isles had been unleashed, he had decided to invade Russia.

It remains a matter of conjecture whether Sealion was ever anything more than a bluff to frighten Britain into capitulation.
But ‘what if’?

Lavery dismisses any prospect of success for Napoleon’s plan: it relied on good weather, beating the blockade and defeating the RN in battle – all, at best, unlikely prerequisites.

As for Sealion, staff officers and veterans of 1940 played it out in a war game at Sandhurst in the early 70s.

The Germans succeeded in putting elements of ten divisions ashore. The RN and RAF struck back.

The Kriegsmarine was all but wiped out, most of the invasion barges were sunk and after just two days, the German troops were effectively cut off.

75,000 were killed or captured and the myth of German invincibility was shattered.

Sink the Bismarck (again)

The dramatic circumstances surrounding the first and last cruise in 1941 of the German battleship Bismarck have been covered in many books over the years.

This new one is by two Swedish authors, Niklas Zetterling and Michael Tamelander. The former works at the Swedish National Defence College and is best known for his studies of the Eastern Front.

With his co-author he has published joint studies of the Normandy and Norwegian campaigns.

This book seems to be the authors’ first move into the ‘pure’ naval field, the first of a pair of works on the sister ships Bismarck and Tirpitz, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

There is not much really new in the Bismarck book – Bismarck: The Final Days of Germany’s Greatest Battleship (Casemate, £19.99 ISBN 978-1-935149-04-0) – but it is a good read and does the subject justice.

The British and especially the German sources, both secondary and primary, have been trawled once more to produce a comprehensive and interesting account that stands comparison with any.

The first-hand accounts of Mullenheim-Rechberg and Ted Briggs receive particular attention and, as the authors say, they developed a special acquaintanceship with both. When the book was written the German officer had already died; sadly he has now been followed by Ted.

What is most useful from the book’s unusual provenance is the neutral approach to a story that has previously been told from a British or German perspective.

This gives the book a particular new and refreshing flavour that makes it an especially  worthwhile addition to the Bismarck library.

There are, however, drawbacks. As the book, from a primarily American publishing house, is not translated into American spelling, it looks as if the Swedish authors wrote it in English.

Their script did, however, need some further editing to give it the proper language to make it seem as authoritative as I think the book really is.

The authors compounded their linguistic challenge by a self-confessed desire to keep seamanlike terminology to a minimum with the aim of attracting the widest range of readers.

This produces some doubtful results. The persistent use of ‘machine’ for engine gets a bit wearing as is the use of ‘corporal’ as a rank for seamen and ‘division’ for squadron of both ships and aircraft.

Gunnery control positions are not ‘turrets’ but director control towers.  The complexities of British air organisation also seem to defeat the authors both in terms of ranks and organisation. The uninitiated reader might think from his short biography that Eugene Esmonde was still in the Royal Air Force in 1941.

It may be a linguistic problem also when Bismarck and Prinz Eugen are described as being ‘at sea’ when they were photographed by ‘Lieutenant’ (Flight Lieutenant) Suckling near Bergen. They were in fact at anchor – as the reproduction of his famous picture in the book clearly shows.

The Swedish dimension does have its uses however. One of the first sightings of Bismarck’s sortie had been by the Swedish cruiser Gotland, news of which had been leaked to the British via the Norwegian Naval Attaché in Stockholm. The Swedish intelligence officer who did so has previously been identified as a Major Tornberg but he never existed. It was probably a Captain Ternberg who passed on the information to the Norwegians.

The authors usefully put the Bismarck sortie into the context of previous  voyages by German major units, especially Operation Berlin the cruise of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (correctly identified as ‘battleships’) in January to March 1941 under the command of Admiral Lütjens, who was to go down in Bismarck.

Lütjens’ skill as a raider commander is recognised, as are his difficulties of operating in an ocean commanded by his opponent. It is a shame that this intelligent and calculating officer was portrayed as such a bombastic Nazi oaf in the classic film Sink the Bismarck.

The authors’ discussion of the vexed subject of sinking of the Hood is interesting and fair. The Germans in Bismarck considered the ‘Mighty Hood’ to be their opponent of choice and could hardly believe it when she came into sight on the morning of that fateful May 24.

The authors accept that the actual nature of the fatal penetration of the ship will always be uncertain but in a footnote they give their theory that the shell penetrated Hood’s side, which, as my old sparring partner Bill Jurens has explained, is entirely plausible.

The authors do however agree with me that there was secondary explosion forward. They quote ‘Corporal’ (Able Seaman) Tilburn seeing a “tremendous flame between the bridge and B turret,” the origins no doubt of the Hood’s conning tower’s long journey from the wreck and Ted Briggs’ clear memories of a “sheet of flame”.

The authors also quote Coxswain French’s key observation from Prince of Wales of “flames shooting up from the water” along most of the ship’s starboard side and his seeing the ship break ahead of ‘A’ turret, both observations being reflected in the actual wreck that has lost most of its starboard plating as is indeed broken exactly where French saw it happen.  

Bismarck was herself damaged by Prince of Wales in this engagement and was forced to abandon her mission.

She shrugged off the attack of Esmonde’s Swordfish from Victorious, the miracle being that the carrier’s untrained air group carried out any attack at all.

The authors are refreshingly positive in their assessment of the features of the much derided biplane torpedo bomber – spotter-reconnaissance machine which, eventually, flying from Ark Royal, sealed Bismarck’s fate.

The fruits of the latest dive on Bismarck seem not to be reflected in the authors’ account of the fatal damage inflicted on Bismarck’s stern but they do succeed in their attempt to put over the atmosphere on board Bismarck during its last doomed night.

The story of the final action is accurately and fairly told. There is a very valid defence of Admiral Tovey’s natural desire to sink the ship by close range gunfire that should have worked if Bismarck had not had such a formidable protective system.

Certainly suggestions that somehow the British were taking revenge on Bismarck’s ships company for the loss of Hood ought to be consigned to the dustbin they deserve. Her flag was still flying; the bombardment had to go on.

Although they do admit it is rather sterile, the authors come down on the scuttling side of the debate on the final cause of Bismarck’s foundering.

Their point that, even if she had not been torpedoed by Dorsetshire, her scuttling measures would have taken her down is a valid one. I do, however, think they put too much stress on the lack of implosion damage on the wreck as evidence of scuttling as the primary cause; torpedo hits would surely have made the flooding of the wreck even more extensive. Again the latest diving evidence, which would have reinforced the authors’ view, is not cited.

I have to admit to having enjoyed this book. The little niggles did not put me off, indeed they endowed the work with a certain Scandinavian charm.  My only serious gripe is that the photographs are mostly common views and not very exciting.

Calling all Hans

“THE surrender of Germany came not with a bang but a whimper,” the great war correspondent Alan Moorehead observed in 1945.

But then Moorehead was in north-west Germany. He wasn’t on the Eastern Front – or on the high seas, where war was waged to the bitter end.

The very last ships to fall victim to U-boats were sunk on May 7 1945 – some 20 or so hours after Eisenhower had tersely signalled “The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 3:00 a.m., local time, May 7, 1945.”

Indeed, the U-bootwaffe may have lost the war at sea – comprehensively – two years before, but there were more than 60 German submarines at sea as May 1945 began.

Their demise is recounted by Lawrence Paterson, arguably the foremost authority on U-boats in the English-speaking world, in Black Flag: The Surrender of Germany’s U-boat Forces (Seaforth, £25  ISBN 978-184832-0376), a work based on published and unpublished material, plus the author’s interviews with the dwindling band of survivors.

The surrender of the German Navy a generation before was one of the defining moments in British – and German – maritime history.

The 1945 surrender was every bit as comprehensive, every bit as dramatic, even if it lacked that famous procession of dreadnoughts which marked Der Tag in 1918.

And if the U-boat continued the war to the bitter end, so too did the RN. On May 4 1945, the Fleet Air Arm unleashed the wonderfully-titled Operation Judgment to wipe out German naval forces in Harstad, northern Norway.

U711 and a number of supply/depot ships were sunk by Wildcats and Avengers, while the RAF joined in the U-boat cull the next day, sinking six submarines off Norway.

Other boats ended their days more peacefully. U977 famously surrendered in Argentina on August 17; most tamely surfaced and were escorted into Allied harbours, such as Loch Eriboll or Gibraltar.

Most were sunk, some were handed over to Allied navies as booty to be put into service, such as U995 used by the Norwegians, to undergo trials, such as the formidable Type XXI boats (just entering service as the war ended), some such as U234 were used as gunnery or torpedo targets.

Paterson peppers his excellent, detailed book with first-hand accounts from captors and captives.

He also describes how the German naval archives fell almost intact into British hands – more than 70 years of naval history which remains a treasure trove for historians; copies remain in the files of the Naval Historical Branch in Portsmouth to this day.

And just in case the chances of survival in a U-boat were too high (three out of four men died), there was the opportunity for German sailors to die as cannon fodder at the war’s end.

The 2nd Naval Infantry Division – mostly ex-submariners – was thrown into battle in north-west Germany in March 1945… the same month in which it was formed. Other sailors were committed to defend Berlin – against the wishes of the German Army commander, Gotthard Heinrici.

Karl Dönitz, head of the German Navy – and Hitler’s surprise successor – ignored the general’s (very just) protestations.
“I tell you the crews of warships are every bit as good as your Wehrmacht troops.”

The sailors fighting in northern Germany and Berlin weren’t the only land-locked Matrosen (matelots) at the war’s end.

The U-boat bases at La Pallice, Saint Nazaire and Lorient had been invested by the Allies since the fall of France (unlike Brest, which the Americans made a point of seizing). They served little purpose other than to tie down Allied troops and devour re-supply forces (the Luftwaffe suffered heavily trying to ferry mail, ammunition and medicine to these forlorn outposts).

The fortresses surrendered, like the rest of the German Armed Forces, in May 1945. U-boat ace Jürgen Oesten spent two years in captivity. “I think the Allies viewed us as Super Nazis as we had kept fighting a lost battle.”

They were not and nor were their boats. Most were sunk under Operation Deadlight at the war’s end – not an act of vengeance or malice, says Paterson, more an act of mercy. “The boats were neglected and barely seaworthy by the time of their destruction,” he points out.

Today there are just four WW2 U-boats left around the world, but the power of these grey wolves to captivate remains as strong as ever.
 

Overview of life overhead

AS BEFITS the centennial year of naval aviation, there has been a flurry of Fleet Air Arm-related books.
The latest to cross the desks of the Navy News team is the officially-endorsed history by Christopher Shores, 100 Years of British Naval Aviation (Haynes, £35 ISBN 978-1-84425-661-7).
The author is a former RAF man with four decades’ experience of writing about the history of aviation and has been a guide at the FAA Museum for the past ten years.
So he knows his stuff – and demonstrates it in an excellently- illustrated book which provides as good a cross-section of the deeds of naval fliers as you’ll find in a single volume.
The forerunner of the Fleet Air Arm, the Royal Naval Air Service, is often overlooked, or its life concertinaed, in general histories.
Nearly one fifth of Shores’ book is devoted to the first decade of naval flight – and it’s worth remembering the achievements of the RNAS (which is usually eclipsed by the Royal Flying Corps).
By the time it was swallowed up by the new RAF in April 1918, there were 100 RNAS aviators with the distinction ‘ace’, none more so than Canadian Raymond Collishaw, credited with more than 60 kills.
Two decades later the RN possessed the largest carrier force of any of the world’s navies (larger than either the USA or Japan), but Shores argues that 20 years of RAF control over naval aviation had stripped the RN of its core of fliers and aircraft which were obsolete or obsolescent, so its accomplishments in the first couple of years of WW2 are all the more impressive.
Indeed, the author devotes much time to the Mediterranean – Taranto, Matapan, Pedestal – but away from these ‘trademark battles’, the FAA was in harm’s way every day, such as May 8 1941 and the struggle for a convoy, Operation Tiger.
Nearly 300 tanks, plus 180 other vehicles and more than 50 Hurricanes were dispatched from Gibraltar to Alexandria to support the campaign in North Africa.
Two carriers, Formidable and Ark Royal, would provide air cover with Fairey Fulmars – a sluggish fighter which was just about a match for the Heinkel 111s it would face during three days of battle.
Tiger got through, but mauled – more than 230 tanks and 43 Hurricanes reached their destination – and at a price. Among those condemned to death in the Mediterranean skies was one of the leading FAA aces, S/Lt Philip Sparke, killed when he tried to close in on a Heinkel. Their wings touched, and German and Briton plunged into the sea.
Tiger is one of a myriad of operations, most lost to history, conducted by the Fleet Air Arm daily between 1939 and 1945. With the turn of each page of this book, the reader is reminded that naval aviators were in the thick of the fight – wherever that fight was.
This is a wonderfully-illustrated book – there are many photographs, among them a good number readers perhaps will not have seen before – and an excellent general introduction to the first century of naval flight.
If there’s a disappointment, it’s that the book rather breezes through the modern era of the Fleet Air Arm (the last 20 years are dealt with in under 12 pages).
The £35 price tag is a little steep, although shopping around on the web, you should be able to find a copy for a little over £20.

MONTH after month we fill these pages with tales of death, destruction, damage, disability and other horrors of war.

So how nice to lighten the mood for once with a breezy jaunt through the halcyon days of end of Empire, of tea parties and ceremonies.

There was a Cold War to be won, of course, plus one brief but very ‘hot’ one in the Falklands during the three-decade career spanned by Cdr Roger Paine.

But why read all about that when there are tales of irate cooks (before they were given today’s rather cumbersome moniker), bothersome pets, dignitaries in need of ice in their drinks, faux pas at dinner parties (the author was referred to constantly as “the officer who called Invergordon a dump” at one function... in Invergordon), and the like to read? And stories involving royalty and a loo are always worth repeating...

Call The Hands (Book Guild, £10.99 ISBN 978-1-84624-3189) is a miscellany of tales and anecdotes mainly from the quirkier side of Cdr Paine’s career.

Some of the events and occurrences he recounts have probably passed into history. But some are still valid today.

Like that of the cook who slaved in the galley to produce a cake for 200 guests at a visit to the Seychelles. It was a beautiful piece of baked craftmanship, lovingly topped with the islands’ flag. The wrong flag that is. (It changed four times in the 20th Century, which accounts for the blunder.)

With food colouring all but run out for the correct red, green, yellow, white and blue flag, the cook reverted to Plan B: ink.

Guests were none the wiser, nor the children of a local orphanage who were presented with the inky cake the following day.

For all the light-hearted anecdotes, however, the author is at pains to point out, that the RN takes its traditions seriously. It always pauses to pay tribute at 36˚11’N 6˚23W and 3˚33’N 104˚28’E – the sites, respectively, of the Battle of Trafalgar and the sinking of Force Z.

From Armada to Scapa Flow

Empire of the Seas (£20, Conway 978-184486-1095) is the book of the eponymous documentary which should be appearing on TV screens about now (there’s no accompanying T-shirt, thankfully...).

The programme is presented by Dan (son of Peter) Snow; the book features a few pictures of Dan (in suitably brooding/pensive mood), but the words are left to one of the authorities of the RN’s history, Brian Lavery.

He’s produced a clutch of first-rate books on many facets of the Senior Service.

Empire of the Seas is aimed at the more general market/reader.

Which is no bad thing because in this age of sea blindness its worth reminding the Britons that the ‘great’ which was their nation’s prefix for so long came courtesy of the Royal Navy.

Such panoramas can be a Nelson-centric, or focus on the Napoleonic Wars, but Lavery casts his net wider, beginning with the defeat of the Armada (as good a ‘birthday’ of the RN as you’ll find in Britain’s maritime history – and the first battle honour awarded).

In his overview of the centuries, the author picks stories possibly known by the general public (the execution of Admiral Byng, the revolutionary work of Capt Cook and Darwin) and the not-so-common (how the need to copper sheath hulls sparked an industrial boom in Cornwall and Anglesey, how the RN was streets ahead of British society in the early 19th Century as a meritocracy, how British ships helped bring an end to the slave trade, how technology gave Britain a decisive edge over the Chinese Fleet in the Opium Wars).

The years of Pax Victoriana are often seen as an age of sloth and complacency. They were years liberally interspersed with conflict, there was radical change (from sail to steam, from gun decks to turrets, iron to steel, the arrival of the torpedo, submarines, the turbine engine).

Yet it was also an age of deference, of rigid discipline, of increased centralisation (which reached its apothoesis/nadir with Jellicoe’s battle orders) and increasing mechanisation which gnawed at life of the lower decks, as Winston Churchill observed:
“The life of the bluejacket and stoker in our finest ships of war is one of pitiable discomfort.”

Such first-hand accounts pepper Empire of the Seas, bringing four centuries of naval history to life. The book’s also very nicely produced and lavishly illustrated – it’s the quirky stuff which stands out, like an advert selling ‘obsolete war vessels’ in Portsmouth Harbour in 1910, including the battleship Barfleur, or a diagram explaining how to exercise on a dreadnought.

(There’s a ‘but’ coming...).

But, what is surprising is that Empire of the Seas ends before the British Empire.

Lavery guillotines his account with the end of WW1; the Empire limped on for another 30 years, during which time the Royal Navy “would find new glory and affection”.

Then again, WW1 might be the right place to end this account, for it is where the demise of the RN and the rise of the Army as our principal fighting force – in the public’s eyes, that is – began.

The Senior Service helped win the war (decisively), but lost the PR battle – a salutary lesson as apposite now as it was then.

A 'raire breed

FIVE years ago, Britons voted on their favourite painting. They plumped (pretty conclusively) for Turner’s iconic, romantic view of the end of the days of sail.

And as a piece of art, The Fighting Temeraire (‘The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838’ to give it the full title) has rather overshadowed the subject herself.

Sam Willis intends to correct that with a biography of the eponymous warship.

This is the first book in a trilogy focusing on the days of sail – a biography of Admiral Benbow and an account of the ‘Glorious First of June’ will follow.

The Fighting Temeraire (Quercus, £25 ISBN 978-1-84724-998-2) is probably the obvious place to begin the triptych: the name resonates, not least because of that painting.

Sam Willis really does produce beautiful books.

His enormous pictorial histories of the days of sail and steam are among the finest – and largest – volumes ever to land (with a thunderous thud) on the Navy News doormat.

The Fighting Temeraire follows in the same vein, although the emphasis here is on words rather than imagery.

There have been seven ships to bear the name, but the author focuses on just the first two.

The first was a captured French 74-gunner, Téméraire (we quickly dispensed with those tricky accents...), the second entered immortality at Trafalgar, famously coming to the aid of Victory.

The ‘fighting’ sobriquet came courtesy of Turner. Temeraire was lavished with praise and recognition after the victory; she was held aloft as the ‘Pride of England and Terror of France’. Sailors, however, preferred to call her the ‘saucy Temeraire’ – for reasons, sadly, lost in the mists of time.

She was also the mutinous Temeraire: in late 1801 sailors refused to sail anywhere other than for home after peace was declared with France. A dozen men were hanged for their impudence. The stain was only erased at Trafalgar.

The ship served for a decade after that defining battle, in the Baltic and off the Iberian peninsula, before ending her days first as a floating prison, then as a ‘receiving ship’ for new sailors without drafts.

Temeraire’s retirement was long, but it did not diminish her fame. Her final journey to the breaker’s yard was reported by a myriad of newspapers and contemporary journals, her passing provoked lament and drew huge crowds to Rotherhithe, among them Joseph Turner.

It is as well he did venture down to the Thames to capture the passing of one era and the dawn of another, for little else of the fighting Temeraire survives: most of her timbers were sold to builders, furniture makers and shipyards. Perhaps, the author muses, they hold up the roof of a home in Rotherhithe or were turned into that ornament in a Greenwich antique shop.
He concludes: “The Temeraire may now be scattered but she lives on in our hearts and minds today as surely and as steadfastly as she once lived on the seas that surround us.”

How the Navy gave birth to the bomber

IN THE opening months of the Great War, many things vexed the Admiralty.

The U-boat menace. The mines menace. The Zeppelin menace.

It didn’t know entirely how to deal with any of them: it largely abandoned the North Sea for the sanctuary of Scapa Flow and northern Ireland in the face of the U-boat especially.

But with the Zeppelin, Whitehall took the fight to the enemy.

Unable to destroy the German airships while airborne, the fledgling Royal Naval Air Service sought to destroy them on the ground.

It is these efforts which are the focus of former Royal Marine Ian Gardiner’s The Flatpack Bombers: The Royal Navy and the Zeppelin Menace (Pen & Sword, £19.99 ISBN 978-1-84884-071-3); the title comes from the fact that the aircraft were frequently shipped in boxes and assembled at airfields.

Gardiner focuses on three landmark episodes involving naval aviators in 1914: strikes at German airship sheds in Düsseldorf, Cuxhaven and Friedrichshafen.

The attacks on the hangars at Düsseldorf in September and October 1914 have been called the first strategic bombing raids.
The title more accurately applies to the Royal Naval Air Service’s lunge at the birthplace of the Zeppelin, the factory producing them at Friedrichshafen.

The bombers, four Avro 504s, were shipped in crates (marked in Cyrillic to fool any German agents) to Belfort in south-east France.

From there it was a 250-mile round trip over southern Germany to the Zeppelin works.

On November 21 1914, the bombers left, skirting the Black Forest, then following the waters of Lake Constance, possibly – and illegally – flying over neutral Switzerland at times, before striking at the factory amid a hail of anti-aircraft fire (long before it earned the nickname flak).

Agents’ reports and Allied newspaper accounts suggested that the 11 bombs dropped that day had wrecked one Zeppelin, blown up a hydrogen works and provoked tremendous panic in the small lake-side town. Only the latter was true.

As with most things in the early days of the Great War, the raids launched by naval aviators were a harbinger of things to come rather than ‘things now’. (The only truly tangible success was the destruction of LZ25 in its shed at Düsseldorf.)
“One can well imagine,” wrote Sqn Cdr Cecil Malone after the raid on Cuxhaven, “what might have been done had our seaplanes carried torpedoes.”

Within a year, naval aircraft would carry torpedoes into battle and within a generation they would cripple an entire fleet.
This is an excellent book, thoroughly researched (the author has taken the time to delve into German as well as British records) and captures the spirit of the age perfectly, without falling for contemporary propaganda canards.
Most of the efforts of these first aces were in vain, but they blazed a trail for all offensive action in the skies over land and sea.

Quite a legacy.

Dutch ambition and English spin

BETWEEN Friday June 1 and Monday June 4 1666 the fleets of England and the Dutch United Provinces fought a major engagement in three locations in the middle of the southern North Sea to the east of the Thames Estuary.

The result was a Dutch victory, in large part because the English fleet had been divided at the start of the action, Prince Rupert, its co–‘General’, having been diverted to deal with the fleet of  France’s Louis XIV aligned, rather uncharacteristically, on the Dutch side and threatening an invasion of Ireland.

George Monk, Duke of Albermarle, who had restored Charles II to his throne, was tempted to take on the Dutch with a numerically inferior force, and was forced to retreat.

He re-engaged the following day but again had to make another retreat which went on through Sunday over the Galloper sandbank, which caused ships to go aground, notably the mighty 92-gun Royal Prince, flagship of the White Squadron that was captured along with its Admiral, Sir George Ayscue, the most senior RN officer ever to be so taken in action.

Prince Rupert’s group now appeared and on the fourth day there was the hardest fighting yet.

At the end of it the English were driven back into the Thames, Monk’s discomfiture increased by a painful and embarrassing ‘thigh’ wound following a hit that tore ‘part of his breeches away.’

The exchange ratio told the story.

The Dutch had lost only four ships, all to burning, which meant they lost more men killed than the English.

Total Dutch casualties were however about 2,850; English casualties totalled 4,250, over 20 per cent of those engaged, including 1,800 prisoners.

In addition to the Royal Prince that was burnt by the Dutch (the ship’s charred remains are still visible) the English lost ten ships, including six prizes taken back to the Netherlands, among them another flagship, the 66-gun Swiftsure.

Although the English government ‘spun’ a victory story the Dutch commanded the North Sea and were able to bring in their vital trade.

Attempts, however, to inflict a coup de grâce on the English failed and, back up to strength after feats both of repair and impressment, did rather better in the St James’s Day fight on July 25.
With equal numbers the more heavily-armed English ships prevailed,  although not decisively.

The Dutch were, however, demoralised and attacked at home, over 150 merchantmen being burnt in ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’ in the Vlie roads.

Then the English treasury ran out of money, a factor compounded by the Great Fire of London.
With both sides in no condition to continue, peace was negotiated in 1667 with England’s possession of Dutch North America confirmed; but the Dutch held on to their assets in West Africa and the East Indies.

The war, begun with high hopes of inflicting a major and profitable defeat on England’s Dutch rival had ended in a fiasco, made even worse by the Dutch strengthening their negotiating position by their attack on the unmanned English fleet in the Medway that destroyed or captured four of the five most powerful ships in the fleet.

It is all a rather sad and cloudy story from the Royal Navy’s point of view and has not therefore received the attention it deserves.

In 1980 Frank Fox established his position as a leading authority on both the ships and maritime art of the later Stuart period with his Great Ships.

After 16 years more work this meticulous author produced a handsome volume called A Distant Storm, a heavily-illustrated limited edition.

Fox’s text, however, was much more than a mere ‘coffee table’ account to provide backing for pictures – it was a detailed account of the battle and its background.

Given the paucity of the literature he also put the Four Days’ Battle into the wider context of the Second Dutch War with detailed chapters not only on ships, people and naval organisation on both sides but the events that preceded and came after the central engagement.

Rob Gardner and Seaforth are to be congratulated for reissuing this material in this new and revised form as a ‘proper’ book which allows the text to appear as the magnificent piece of naval historiography that it is.

At over 400 pages of relatively small print the volume appears rather formidable, but do not be misled. The author has a most engaging style and the book is a joy to read.

My wife remarked that she does not often hear me chuckling over a review book but on this occasion it was hard not to share the author’s enthusiasm for the subject or share the dry humour of some passages.

I especially liked his character sketches of the commanders (Albermarle, it seemed to me, had many of the characteristics of John Prescott) and his description of the wonderful underhanded deal with the King of Denmark that led to the fiasco at Bergen when the attempt was made to capitalise on the initial victory at Lowestoft and capture the Dutch East India  convoy.

There are fascinating little points too that reflect the author’s command of the period.
I was interested to see that the contemporary pronunciation of Albemarle was ‘Aumarle’.

Lt (later Admiral) John Narborough, who took over Victory from the fatally-wounded commanding officer, the popular Vice Admiral Sir Christopher Myngs, and who then made his name by handling the ship with much distinction in difficult circumstances, would have answered to ‘Norbrook’.

The author contrasts the comparatively lax discipline on board warships of this period with what came afterwards and one senses in the author’s approving tone a slightly old-fashioned attitude to the  traditionally over-emphasised rigours of life in the warships of a century or so later.

 It crossed my mind, however, that this apparent modernity had a down side as well.

The positive side of discipline, fighting efficiency and staying power was clearly at times at something of a discount in the still very immature Caroline Navy.

I cannot recommend this masterly book more highly.

Readers will learn a great deal from it because of its combination of detail, analytical rigour and accessibility.

It answers, as far as can be done on available evidence, all the previously open questions about this major engagement, not least on the vexed question of the reasons behind the division of the fleet.

But it is more than just a book on a single battle – it is probably the best single study of the Second Dutch War.

There are copious appendices and endnotes as well as good and informative illustrations and wonderful maps.

That of the Thames Estuary and Southern North Sea which is on the inside of the covers is a model of its kind – I am much better acquainted with the precise locations of the Swin, Kentish Knock and the Gunfleet than I was before!

Frank L Fox’s The Four Days’ Battle; The Greatest Sea Fight in the Age of Sail  (ISBN 978-1-84832044-4) is published by Seaforth of Barnsley and  is excellent value at £30.00.

The human face of the Falklands

VETERANS of the 1982 conflict in the South Atlantic often complain that their ship was the ‘forgotten’ ship of the war.

Others grabbed the glory, or the headlines, but their ship made the decisive contribution to victory.

It is a claim Captain David Hart-Dyke would never make on behalf of HMS Coventry, but it’s probably fair to say her role in the Falklands war has often been overlooked.

She wasn’t the first ship to be lost in the war; she would not be the last. She did not blow up spectacularly for the cameras like Antelope. She did not venture into Bomb Alley like Ardent. She did not survive an Exocet hit like Glamorgan.

She did, however, fight with supreme distinction and bravery – and made the supreme sacrifice, as her former commanding officer describes in the outstanding Four Weeks in May (Atlantic, £18.99 ISBN 978-1-84354-590-3).

The emotions, the nerves, the strain the Coventry men felt were identical to those felt by their predecessors 40 years before. The previous Coventry was subjected to repeated enemy air attack in the Mediterranean; like her successor, she fought with distinction but the odds were against her.

The sailors talked of home, of loved ones, they drifted oft silently into thought, tears rolling down their cheeks, they turned to God – irrespective of whether they were religious or not. And if the worst came, they prepared to die. “You know, sir, some of us are not going to get back to Portsmouth,” Hart-Dyke’s XO confided to him as the war dragged on.

This was the real war, too honest to be trumpeted in the jingoistic press or to be reported to loved ones in letters home. For his daughters Miranda and Alice, David Hart-Dyke sketched a cartoon of Coventry blasting an enemy patrol boat out of the water and an enemy aircraft out of the sky.

It was something at which the destroyer was particularly adept; on the final day of her life, May 25 1982, Coventry had dispatched three Argentine aircraft with Sea Darts.

Fate was against her as the day waned; HMS Broadsword’s Seawolf played up, Coventry’s own Sea Dart couldn’t get a lock on Argentine Skyhawk jets, whose pilots showed undeniable bravery as they raced in towards the destroyer.

Coventry’s crew responded with equal bravery; every machine-gun fired, the 4.5in main gun blasted away, the Oerlikons chattered (until one jammed); the sailors even tried to blind the Argentine pilots by shining the beam from the bridge wing signalling projector in their faces.

It was, sadly, to no avail. Three bombs tore into the side of the ship – and tore her heart out.

The operations room where David Hart-Dyke had been directing the battle ceased to exist as he knew it. His headset and microphone had vaporised, his anti-flash hood and gloves were in tatters. And yet he was one of the lucky ones.

“I looked to my left and saw a sheet of orange flame leap out of the hatch down into the computer room below and envelop a man as he attempted to climb up into the operations room,” recalls Coventry’s captain.

“He had nearly reached the top of the ladder and someone had stretched towards him and tried to catch his hand. It was too late: consumed by fire, he could go no further and fell back with a final, despairing cry for help.”

Seven men were burned alive in the computer room – or were killed by the blast of one of the bombs. A dozen of their comrades were also lost.

The author paints a vivid picture of Coventry’s final moments, drawing upon the accounts of numerous former comrades.

Survivors of the Barham, Prince of  Wales, Gloucester, Repulse and countless more vessels will identify strongly with the scenes in the destroyer in her death throes.

Training reaped dividends. There was no panic, no selfishness. Each man helped the next to escape the stricken Coventry. Some 250 of them survived.

His crew, Hart-Dyke wrote just a few days after the sinking, had been “nothing short of heroes”. Many of the heroes struggled to adjust to life after the Falklands.

It took Coventry’s captain perhaps 18 months to come around.

He regards himself as one of the lucky ones; he never suffered flashbacks or nightmares like some of his former shipmates.

And it was only back in the UK that the captain realised the scale of Coventry’s contribution to victory.

“I really had taken part in a momentous event in the country’s history,” he writes. “The conflict was not just something to be played down as having been merely in the line of duty.”

Fifteen years ago, reviewers praised Sandy Woodward for the frankness of his account of the campaign, and in particular the strain of command.

David Hart-Dyke gives you the ‘business end’ of that conflict, the story of the sailors in harm’s way. It is one of the most moving, honest and vivid memoirs of life – and war – at sea you will ever pick up.

Tales of the Stone age

IN THE streets of Plymouth there was singing and dancing.

Sailors and soldiers shook hands with each other – and with complete strangers. Sirens and hooters blasted constantly. People rolled up newspapers into trumpets and bellowed their delight

The bells of the city’s churches chimed, while Plymothians hung the Union Flag from any building – or object – they could find: trams, poles, windows.

The city’s pubs closed early. They didn’t want a repeat of the “wild and unrestrained behaviour” in Plymouth which had followed the relief of Mafeking.

The date is not May 8 1945. It is November 11 1918.

But this is how Britons celebrated the end of the Great War – and this is what William ‘Bill’ Stone experienced.
In the final years of his life, Bill Stone came to symbolise the sacrifices made by his generation alongside fellow WW1 veterans Henry Allingham and Harry Patch.

TV directors would show footage of men going ‘over the top’ while reporters would bang on about the ‘futility of war’, ‘slaughter’, ‘senseless sacrifice’.

But as the late senior rating reminds us in his excellent memoirs Hero of the Fleet (Mainstream, £17.99 ISBN 978-18459 65082), it wasn’t seen like that at the time.

It’s ironic that the Devonian would be singled out as one of the nation’s last Great War veterans: he never saw action in the 1914-18 (he was still undergoing training in Devonport, training which was protracted by illness).

And the media focus on Bill’s WW1 career unjustly ignores what followed: a quarter of a century’s distinguished service.
Indeed, Bill Stone’s life is an echo of the RN – and the nation – in the first half of the 20th Century.

He joined the fledgling Boy Scout movement. He was struck down by the flu pandemic in 1918. He witnessed the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet. He served as an engine driver during a rail strike. He was part of the transition of the inter-war Navy from one of big guns to a submarine hunting and escort force. He experienced the Empire in the halcyon days of peace when men did indeed join the RN to ‘see the world’.

To the very end of his life, Bill Stone was fêted by the HMS Hood Association (and sang unrepeatable ditties at their events…). He took part in what became known as the ‘Empire cruise’, a flag waver intended to rally Britain’s distant colonies and remind the world of the greatness of the RN.

His memoirs give a fascinating insight into what became known unofficially as the ‘world booze’: the heat of Sierra Leone and South Africa (in days when air conditioning meant sleeping on deck); the warnings of rampant venereal disease in Singapore; the 140 men who deserted in Australia in the hope of a better life; the Maoris and Fijians who welcomed the visiting sailors with festive dances.

There are some choice extracts from journalist Scott O’Connor’s tubthumping Empire Cruise which perfectly capture a middle-class Briton’s view of the inter-war world: of Sierra Leone – “if the hand of England were removed from this Colony it would be a disaster for its people”; of the Empire – “we alone of the great nations engaged in the war had begun to pay our debts and it was plain to all men that our word, long honoured, would continue to be our bond”; and of the British sailor – “every man on the ship becomes a sort of envoy from the Homeland”.

Like HMS Hood, Bill Stone would have to wait two decades for his first taste of active service. It came with a vengeance: Dunkirk.

He sailed three times with HMS Salamander to rescue troops – “the most terrible experience of my life”. It may have been described in the newspapers as some great triumph, but the experience for the ordinary sailor was rather less glorious or victorious.

“The bodies of the clothed and the naked were covered in oil, which coated large sections of the sea as the swell and tides either took them out or brought them back to shore.

“The dark nights were alive with the sight of tracer bullets and the sounds of gunfire.”

He was Mentioned in Dispatches for his service with HMS Newfoundland in the Med, particularly during the invasion of Sicily when the cruiser was torpedoed.

“It was a dramatic scene down below,” he writes, “but we stokers weren’t prone to panic. On many previous occasions I had been fighting imaginary fires and repairing make-believe destruction, sometimes in the dark.”

Newfoundland made Malta and eventually Boston in the USA for repairs.

Bill’s last service to his country came on the German island of Sylt making sure the Nazi resistance movement, Werewolf, didn’t flare up in 1945 (it didn’t).

To reach the remote island, he had to pass through Hamburg – pounded by Allied bombers in July and August 1943.

“I remembered how I had wept as I walked through the devastation of Plymouth and was somehow glad to see it was not only the British cities that had suffered,” he recalled.

“However, seeing the effects of the Allied blitz and the many starving, homeless people lining the street was another matter. It was terrible to see such destruction, no matter which side was the victim.”

Britain lost all three of its last WW1 veterans this year; Bill Stone passed away in January.

All three left memoirs and Bill’s are undoubtedly the most coherent and comprehensive, an important addition to our literature on the lives of the lower decks between the wars and during WW2.

Add to that the extra information and accounts included by the editors and you have a gem of a book which brings Bill and his era back to life.

He ends his tale with 90th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Great War which will leave many a reader with a tear in their eye.

 “Sometimes I can hardly believe that me, a farmer’s boy from Devon and now well over a hundred, should have been to so many important events and met such wonderful people,” he wrote just weeks before he died.

“I feel sure that someone has been taking care of me over all these years. I only have to think back to Dunkirk when, with ships sinking all around me, I said: ‘God help us’ – and He did.”

Another doyen of the Kriegsmarine is Jak Mallmann Showell who has updated his standard work on the subject for the 21st Century.

Hitler’s Navy: A Reference Guide to the Kriegsmarine 1935-1945 (Seaforth, £35 ISBN 978-1848320208) is a lavishly-illustrated oversize introduction to every facet of the subject: the ships, the organisation, the campaigns, the uniforms, the awards.

And as a reference guide do not, of course, expect anything too in-depth (although an excellent annotated bibliography points readers in the direction of a myriad of reading material, in English and German, if your appetite is whetted).

Aside from updating that bibliography, this revised guide features some stunning colour images of U-boats (presumably originally produced for the glossy wartime magazine Signal), and a very useful illustrated guide to ranks, uniforms and badges (of which, as in the RN, there was a plethora).

The WAFU over GAFA

FOR a supposedly unpopular war, Afghanistan is proving to be very popular at the bookstands.

We’ve had accounts from the guys on the ground – such as Mark Ormrod’s gritty Man Down. We’ve had an account from the fast jet jockeys – Adrian Orchard’s Joint Force Harrier. And we’ve had the measured eye of a historian – Ewen Southby-Tailyour’s
 3 Commando Brigade – taking a more detached view of operations.

Royal Marine Major Mark Hammond adds to that groaning bookshelf with Immediate Response, (Penguin, £17.99 ISBN 978-0718-154745), an account of life as a Chinook pilot over Afghanistan.

The book describes two tours of duty in Afghanistan (although the author focuses on the first in 2006).

Immediate Response is a quick read – it rattles along. There’s some choice language (particularly during am account of a night-time delivery of munitions to a far-flung outpost). There’s some scathing criticism of the BBC who reported that a Chinook had gone down with all crew – when it was actually a Nimrod (they’d blundered badly three years before when two helicopter collided on HMS Ark Royal and flashed up images of the wrong type of Sea King…).

Mark Hammond seethed. He had to ring his wife to tell her he wasn’t dead. The demand for ‘news’ outweighed common sense, respect for families, caution, the need to take a step back and wait for the dust to settle. “The news game had become a dirty business with 24-hour news channels generating a greed for information that too often came at the expense of truth,” the Royal fumed.

This is a brutally honest account of life on the ground and in the air in Afghanistan. Maj Mark Hammond shares his feelings of life and death. You understand his pain when a wounded soldier his Chinook has rescued dies on the ramp. He concedes that fliers are “up their own arses” – with good reason; they sit in the cockpit and “make big things happen.” And he realises that to many people bootneck banter might seem “a tad full-on”.

Hammond questions some of the tactics which meant several outlying bases were “just like the Alamo”. But he does not question the war itself.

“This war is about keeping Britain safe from terrorists – terrorists train in Afghanistan,” he stresses. “This conflict, which is being played out thousands of miles away from the UK, is taking the lives of our sons and daughters. All the papers were interested in were the lives of stupid, gormless chavs who have a high profile but contribute nothing.”

Good to see things have changed since 2006 then…

Immediate Response will introduce some new words to your vocabulary: Teletubbies (the Taleban). PONTIs (Persons of No Tactical Importance – most of whom seemed to inhabit Kandahar Air Base). GAFA (the Great Afghan Fuck All – the vast tracts of wasteland in Helmand). Lively (heavy incoming fire). Sparky (ditto). Apaches ‘schwack’ or ‘mallet’ enemy positions.

As for the foe, well the Taleban aren’t the cardboard cutout villains of Hollywoodland. “We had to take our hats off to the Taleban,” writes the Chinook pilot. “We had burnt them, we had bombed them, we had mortared them and we were shooting at them. The Taleban were not cowards – no matter what we threw at them they were prepared to have a go.”

Mark Hammond was awarded the DFC for his bravery and skill in picking up casualties under heavy Teletubbies fire in September 2006.

It’s something he plays down with typical RM understatement. It was, he told the Queen as she pinned the medal on his chest, a bit scary.

Also being honoured at the Palace that day was actor Hugh Laurie for services to drama. He was made an OBE. He received the full Royal Marine banter treatment…

“My wife is so happy that you are here,” he told the star of House MD. “She loves ER.”

* Five per cent of royalties from Immediate Response go to Help For Heroes.

End of the Intrepid era

A CENTURY ago, bosses at Harland and Wolff told their official photographer to record the birth of the Titanic, cataloguing every milestone in the creation of the world’s greatest liner.

One hundred years later, George Heron has done the same in reverse. Not with Titanic (obviously – Ed), but with his former ship HMS Intrepid.

George, aka the Grumpy Old Matelot, spent nine years on the assault ship as a radio operator. She was his first ship, “the place where I grew up and learned about life”.

And as such she holds a very dear place in his heart, as evidenced in HMS Intrepid: Her Final Journey (privately published, £20), a photographic record of the ship’s break-up.

George and comrades in the Intrepid Association had tried to persuade the powers that be to save the ship as a museum piece – a final shot at the limelight in a career often eclipsed by her sister Fearless.

The plea fell on deaf ears, but undeterred he set about recording the final months of a ship which served the nation for more than 30 years.

The Falklands veteran was towed to Merseyside last autumn, where, in the words of Whitehall, “graceful recycled retirement” awaited her (of which only one word was accurate, and it wasn’t ‘graceful’ or ‘retirement’...).

Instead, George watched as “Intrepid slowly began to disappear while an increasing mound of debris began to build up in the dock bottom”.

His camera captured the diggers chopping away at the ship’s innards, steel cutters slicing up compartments, until the ship was no longer recognisable.

So this should be a sad book. The end of great ship and all that.

And to some degree it is.

But interspersed with images of the dying Intrepid are photographs of the living Intrepid, the ship’s company in war and peace, enjoying mess deck life, SODS operas, at sea with her sister Fearless, plus a fair smattering of memories from her sailors.

All, it seemed, loved their time aboard. “I had many happy times aboard Intrepid,” says Std Andy Goodman. “Each time I think back to those days a smile creeps over my face and I chuckle to myself.”

K for catastrophe

On the last evening of January 1918 Vice Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas, flying his flag in the 15in-gun-armed ‘large light cruiser’ Courageous, led to sea a ‘light cruiser force’ from the Firth of Forth to join with the main body of Admiral Beatty’s Grand Fleet for a major exercise in the North Sea.
This was no normal cruiser force but an innovative mix of battlecruisers, fast battleships and steam-powered fast fleet submarines, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.
Each submarine flotilla was led by an experienced submariner carried in a fast surface ship in an attempt to provide better command and control than was possible from the submarines themselves.
The 13th Flotilla was led by the specialist flotilla leader Ithuriel (half as big again as a contemporary destroyer) and the 12th by the ‘scout’ (ie small cruiser) Fearless. In between the flotillas was the 2nd Battle-Cruiser Squadron with the four oldest battle cruisers (their demotion to ‘light cruisers’ being significant). The three available Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron brought up the rear.
As so often with innovation, not all outcomes had been foreseen and the result was disaster. It was the usual World War 1 problem – the very advanced hardware was commanded and controlled by grossly inadequate ‘software’.
As the force deployed in darkness a small but significant difficulty might lead to events getting out of control. There was no radar or voice radio for instant situational awareness and command response, only coded wireless telegraphy that took many minutes to get through.
Things did go seriously wrong on this terrible night. First of all, the middle of the five submarines of the leading flotilla, K14, suffered a mysterious and short-lived steering failure and was hit by K22. The latter was something of a jinxed boat as she had sunk on her contractors trials to be raised and commissioned with a new number.
She was certainly partially lucky on this night as she was not fatally damaged and, in a second collision, suffered only a glancing blow from the battle cruiser Inflexible, as she passed on her way. K22 could well have been sunk.
Leading the 13th Flotilla, Cdr  Leir, a submariner known for both the high professional skills and scruffy personal habits of the submarine ‘trade’, now made a fatal but understandable decision that converted a mishap into a disaster.
He turned Ithuriel and his remaining submarines round to give assistance to the two boats in distress. As he crossed the path of the other submarine flotilla its leader Fearless sliced into K17 and sank her with the loss of 47 of her ships’ company. In the confusion two submarines of the 12th Flotilla, K6 and K4 collided, the latter being cut in half by the former, the wreckage being touched by K7 on the way down. Fifty-five men were lost from K4 and 104 men died in all.
The events were soon dubbed, ironically, ‘The Battle of May Island’. Cdr Leir was court martialled but, fairly, was exonerated from any negligence. Indeed, many of the officers involved rose to high rank in the service.
The whole affair could be put down to experience and the price one sometimes has to pay for the development of new tactical combinations.
It has, however usually been seen as another nail in the coffin of the reputation of the fast steam submarines of the ‘K’ class.
This is certainly the line taken by
N S Nash in his new book on the affair,
K Boat Catastrophe: Eight Ships and Five Collisions (Pen and Sword, £19.99 ISBN 978 1 84415 984 0).
He has had access, albeit apparently at second hand, to the Leir court martial records and his account does shed some light on what went on.
The rest of the book however leaves much to be desired. Including index, it only runs to 145 pages (plus a few blanks at the end).
Forty-two of these are, however taken up by an amazingly-badly-informed ‘Setting the Scene’ chapter which plays the old, discredited tune of the Royal Navy’s supposedly defective record of technological innovation.  
It is hard to take anything the book says at face value after this disastrous start. The author, apparently a soldier and a writer on military matters who lives overlooking the scene of the sad affair, has taken the advice of naval officers on some things but he has had little contact with naval historians either in person or in print.
The bibliography amounts to less than one page and would be thin for an undergraduate essay. Putting Wikipedia as a major source says more for the author’s honesty than it does for his scholarship.
I was tempted to feel rather sorry for the perpetrator of this hapless work until I came to the final appendix on the K-class boats.
It is full of factual and analytical errors but then crowns these by dismissing a fascinating defence of the K-class submarines and their role written in 1919 in the Naval Review by an officer clearly cognisant of the boats’ potential.
Having read it, I was able to understand why, as Norman Friedman had told me, the Americans had been very impressed by these fast and seaworthy submersibles.
The article also confirmed that many submariners disliked the K-class not only because of the real problems that were the price of their virtues.
They also disliked the whole idea of serving with the Fleet because of their natural cultural antipathy to “being ‘one of a crowd’ instead of having a little action alone and consequently reaping all the credit.”
The author dismisses this excellent, thoughtful and important piece of first hand analysis as “naïve” and its appearance in Naval Review as “breathtaking”. On what grounds he makes these extreme assertions is far from clear.
It is hard to see in his profile any reason why Nash should have the temerity to disagree with the professional views of someone who was clearly intimately aware, first hand and at the time, of the K-boats and their potential.
In many ways the book is summed up by its mis-spelling of ‘court marshal’ on the dust jacket. 

A second chance to live

ONLY the dead have seen the end of war.

The words of Plato remain as apposite for warriors today as they did two and a half millennia ago.

The pages of Navy News over the past couple of years have been peppered with the obituaries of Royal Marines killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan.

Rarely, however, have we featured the other casualties of war: the wounded, those maimed by mines and improvised explosives.

Mark Ormrod is a rare exception. He has appeared in the pages of Navy News. And most national newspapers. And on the telly.

Not by choice, the Royal Marine found himself thrust into the spotlight – thanks in part to a visit to Headley Court by Princes William and Harry last spring, a visit which received considerable media coverage.

Since then he’s attended a Bond film premiere, featured on the X-Factor, met pop stars, and raised a lot of money for charity.

The reason for his reluctant celebrity status? A Taleban bomb on Christmas Eve 2007 which deprived him of both legs and his right arm.

Much of his memoir Man Down (Transworld, £16.99 ISBN 978-0-593-06355-2) is devoted to that fateful day and the long road to recovery.

But it also offers a fairly rare insight into Bootneck life right at the very coalface.

So far, we’ve had a smattering of accounts of the Royal Marines’ actions in Helmand, but none from the down-and-dirty end like this. And first-person books from the green beret ranks in Afghanistan are as rare as a snowflake in hell.

But aside from some visceral descriptions of combat, Man Down provides a good account of life as a trainee at CTCRM in Lympstone.

Mark Ormrod was studying for a career in business, until he watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. “Arnie gets to lead an elite squad through a jungle spunking the world’s supply of ammo while being chased by an invisible alien. Could happen.”

That prompted him to join the Army... until his dad persuaded him the Corps was the only force an Ormrod was going to serve in.

That was reinforced by the recruiter in Plymouth who showed him that life in the Royal Marines really was like a Schwarzenegger film. “It looked like one long adventure holiday.”

Oddly enough, it wasn’t...

Mark’s memoirs are not a great literary work. There’s a lot of choice Anglo-Saxon (but not gratuitously). There’s a lot of Bootneck speak (and a handy guide for non-Royals).

And above all there’s a lot of honesty, not least some dark emotions as the Royal began to grasp the enormity of his injuries.

He concedes thoughts of suicide after his first attempts to climb on to a sofa – a simple act for the able-bodied but one which left the disabled Royal feeling “as if I’d just been 12 rounds with Mike Tyson”.

Here was a man, one of just 16 on an initial course of 60 at Lympstone to earn the green beret, now “reduced to crawling across a floor on my arse inch-by-inch and having the fight of my life just to get on to a sofa”.

What is clear is that spirited though Mark Ormrod is, his daughter Kezia and especially his fiancée (now wife) Becky were instrumental to his physical and, above all, mental rehabilitation.

So too were the experts at Headley Court who provided the Royal with his artificial limbs (the ‘bionic legs’ – officially C-Legs – are £20K apiece; you plug them into the mains overnight “to juice up the batteries”) and helped him to walk again.

As did fellow amputees and other severely-injured Servicemen, not least squaddie Sam Cooper, left partially-paralysed and with impaired speech after being shot in the head by the Taleban.

In Born on the Fourth of July fashion, the pair would tear around the recreation room in their wheelchairs.

“I might only be able to say one word beginning with ‘f’ but I’ve got one more hand and two more feet than you,” the soldier would taunt Ormrod.

“You’ll never beat me sunshine.”

Perhaps not, but he would walk again – as demonstrated to the world one day last spring when the men of 40 Commando received their campaign medals.

The moment was captured by a Royal Navy photographer. It’s as defining an image of the conflict against the Taleban as the ‘fix bayonets’ photograph on the cover of Man Down.

It captures the tenacity not just of Ormrod but the entire corps.

What it doesn’t capture is the applause rippling around Norton Manor or the fact that the then Second Sea Lord, Vice Admiral Sir Adrian Johns, called the young Royal “a legend”.

And it doesn’t tell you that Mark Ormrod spent the 40-minute ceremony doing his utmost not to fall over, or that he “felt like a fucking idiot” being praised as a legend by an admiral. “All these other hundreds of marines had managed to come home without stepping on an IED.”

But the thinned ranks of 40 Commando that day reminded the green beret that he was one of the lucky ones; good friends, such as Cpl Damian Mulvihill, had been killed by Taleban bombs.

“We’d been given a second chance and had lives to live thanks to the courage, skill and hard work of so many people,” says Mark.

“We certainly knew how lucky we were – especially when we remembered the three men from 40 Commando who would never be coming home.”

Picture: LA(Phot) Steve Johncock, FRPU West

The lives of udders

An important dimension of the German submarine offensive against Allied shipping in World War 2 was the development of the ability to replenish boats so as to extend their time on station.

Given the diplomatic difficulties created by the use of Spanish ports and the effectivenesss of British countermeasures against conventional tankers at sea the answer seemed to be the use of submarines as replenishment platforms, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

A new Type XIV tanker submarine was brought into service at the end of 1941 just as the U-Boat war entered the Western Hemisphere with Hitler’s declaration of war on the USA opening up the mass of unprotected shipping in US waters.

Other boats were also used as ‘Milch Cows’ (Milk Cows), as the Germans called them, notably the large Type XB minelayers whose size precluded their use in the shallow waters where their mines were most effective.

An established expert on these supply submarines is Dr John F White, whose professional activities are those of a computer programmer in artificial intelligence, computer translation and finance, but who has had a long-standing interest (since the age of ten) in the German Navy and its activities.

Certainly his general command of the sources is as good as that of a professional naval historian and he has used this to expand and revise his previous U-Boat Tankers 1941-45 into the present work, The Milch Cows: The U-Boat Tankers 1941-45 (Pen & Sword, £19.99 ISBN 978-1-84884-008-9).

One connection between the author’s ‘day job’ and his subject is the use of mechanised computation in the code breaking that made the activities of the Milch Cows so dangerous.

Clearly, refuelling operations were almost impossible without some radio indiscretion, although the amazing German over-confidence in the security of their ciphers made the situation much worse.

This over-confidence was matched by the American tendency to throw caution about security to the winds and exploit every code-breaking breakthrough to hunt down submarines, regardless of the possibility of the Germans smelling a rat.

The result was carnage among the ‘Milch Cows’ and the submarines suckling from them. All ten Type XIVs were sunk and eight of the ten Type XBs.

In a sense the Milch Cows were rather peripheral to the main war against the U-boat on the main North Atlantic convoy routes which, as the author shows, had been won by the end of 1943.

Nevertheless, the U-tankers were very significant force multipliers. Between them the 18 Type XIVs and IXDs made about 50 completed cruises and by the author’s calculation were responsible for the U-boats’ sinking an extra 1,400,000 tons of shipping – about ten per cent of the total losses they inflicted over the whole war.

They also allowed U-boats to operate much further afield than they otherwise could have done, notably off Cape Town and into the Indian Ocean. They could not, however, defeat a mature convoy system.

Perhaps the main enemy of the Milch Cow was the American escort carrier group freely using special intelligence to make a ‘hunter-killer’ strategy work.

This was a prelude to the SOSUS-based anti-submarine warfare of the Cold War era using underwater listening posts.

The American dimension is indeed a crucial part of the Milch Cow story and the author might have developed a little more his discussion of the interesting US Navy ‘Tenth Fleet’, the specialist ASW organisation set up in May 1943 that had no ships but which directed the American anti-U-boat war through ‘suggestions’ and ‘recommendations’ .

As the author says this was under the overall command of the Chief of Naval Operations, the irascible Admiral King, but its effective operational commander was its Chief of Staff, Admiral Frances Low, who, sadly, does not get a mention.

The best book on this subject, Farago’s interesting and informative study Tenth Fleet, is also strangely not mentioned in the bibliography.

This is probably the most important gap in the book, given the impact of Tenth Fleet’s aggressive submarine killing policy on the fate of the Milch Cows.

Given the importance of code breaking to the story there are one or two little glitches. In his introduction the author refers to codes being broken by ‘the world’s first electronic computers’. Whether the electro-mechanical ‘bombes’ used against Enigma qualify for this title is debatable, as the author later makes clear.

The real electronic computer at Bletchley Park, ‘Colossus’, was used against different ciphers. The role of the capture of U110 and its relationship with the other cryptographical captures about the same time also needed more discussion, especially as the author is clearly aware of the work of the official historian, Harry Hinsley, who knew more about this rather vexed subject than anyone else, having played a key role in the process himself.

For those put off by Official Histories the more recent book by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: the Battle for the Code is easily available and accessible and is highly recommended as a balanced and well-informed account.

Clearly the author has spent a massive amount of time on his research over the years. A sign of this is his reference to that former mine of U-boat information Bob Coppuck, as if he were still at the Naval Historical Branch.

Bob was always most generous with his time to researchers and created that amazing evolving data base on U-boats and their fate that is one of the Branch’s greatest achievements (among many others) but he has not been there for some time.
Dr White’s command of the German sources is notable, including the archives at the U-boat Museum in Cuxhaven and the U-boat crews’ magazine Schaltung Küste that is a good source for survivors’ stories.

As usual with the publisher, there are no footnotes or endnotes which is rather a pity given the overall quality of the book which is clearly an authoritative and comprehensive study.

Readers will be fascinated not just by the mainstream replenishment work but by also by the book’s accounts of German submarine operations far afield, including the interface with the Japanese, liaison with whom was a significant U-boat activity.

Penang in Malaya and Tjikopo in the Dutch East Indies were important, if unlikely, U-boat bases.

This is a most worthwhile book and a most worthy addition to the literature on the U-boat war.

A pig-headed clash

THROUGH the ages Britain has gone to war for reasons just (liberation of the Falklands, curbing Nazi aggression), reasons not entirely just (the ‘scrap of paper’ to save Belgium in 1914 although the real motive was to limit German expansion) and reasons downright shabby (the Zulu war anyone?).

Perhaps the most ludicrous reason for two nations squaring up, however, was the death, nay murder, of a pig.

Hence the name of this silly little contretemps, The Pig War whose (very complicated) course is charted by former RN officer turned historian, E C Coleman (History Press, £14.99 ISBN 978-0-7524-52272).

The pig, of course, wasn’t the issue, but it was the casus belli.

For a number of years in the mid-19th Century, Britain and the United States had been squabbling over ownership of an island chain which dominated the waters between Vancouver Island and the North American mainland.

It was their commanding strategic position which led both nations to want the San Juan Islands. Both claimed them. A showdown was inevitable.

The first colonial settlers of San Juan came courtesy of the Hudson’s Bay Company – 1,300 sheep, a few pigs and a handful of farmers.

The Americans weren’t chuffed. They demanded recompense. The British said ‘no’, so the Americans set out to steal the sheep.

Now sheep without a sheepdog aren’t very co-operative. Having ‘liberated’ the animals from their pen, the Americans struggled to herd the creatures into their cutters for rowing back to the US mainland.

The British weren’t chuffed. They demanded nearly £3,000 – £175,000 in today’s money – in compensation (for the theft of 34 sheep, plus the cost of hiring 18 men for eight days to round up the 409 other animals let loose by the Americans).

The Americans didn’t pay up. They did, however, begin settling San Juan to stake a more permanent claim to the island.

Among the settlers was one Lyman Cutler, a farmer of staggering ineptitude. Cutler planted a crop of potatoes and became rather annoyed that one of the island’s (British) pigs kept helping himself to the veg.

Building a fence might have been a good idea but, no, Cutler shot the pig. Again the British demanded compensation ($100) and again the Americans said no.

It’s here that the dispute slips out of the hands of settlers and incompetent farmers and enters the realm of diplomats and generals.

The American settlers felt threatened. The Army was sent in to ‘protect’ them: a small garrison was established under one George E Pickett (he would later lead his division to destruction in the eponymous charge at Gettysburg).

The Empire responded by sending a few warships, their guns trained at Pickett’s flimsy camp.

And across the water in Victoria, English, Canadian and American sightseers bought tickets to watch the stand-off.

The Americans sent in more troops and guns. Britain put a Royal Marines detachment ashore. They established a fort at the opposite end of San Juan.

And so began a ‘cold war’ where the only people fighting were the diplomats and generals.

The two opposing sides on the island regularly entertained each other (the Brits were cordially invited to take part in July 4 celebrations), there were sporting contests (the 100-yard blindfold dash), there were picnics attended not just by the troops but by ladies who’d come across from Victoria.

The ‘pig war’ petered out in amity between the two sides on the island, while the respective governments sought a permanent solution.

It took them 13 years to resolve the dispute; a commission eventually ruled in the Americans’ favour.

In October 1872, the British garrison – “76 men of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, fine, healthy, sturdy-looking fellows” – withdrew, taking the flagpole with them. “You know,” one junior officer told the Americans “we could never have any other flag float from a staff that had borne the cross of St George.”

This is a most unusual tale, told in great detail by the author who has made excellent use of the (vast) source material.

Are there resonances today? Well, nations still fight over disputed territories (the Falklands being a prime example in Britain’s recent history).

But above all, the pig war is a reminder that war’s too serious a business to be left to the bigwigs, while the men on the ground viewed things far more sensibly – and amicably.

More than mere criminals

RESPECT to Ross Kemp.

You may (or may not) like him as an actor, but he’s carved out an admirable niche as a documentary maker.

Not in the Desmond Wilcox, John Pilger, Michael Apted cure-the-socio-economic-problems-of-the-world sense, more in the Chris Terrill prepare-to-get-your-hands-dirty sense.

He’s twice joined troops on the front line in Afghanistan, he’s been on the mean streets of various cities to look at gang culture, and earlier this year he was filmed looking at the pirate problem in Somalia.

A spin-off of that documentary is Pirates (Penguin, £16.99 ISBN 978-0-718-15443-1) which divides its time between land and sea.

The latter was spent with HMS Northumberland escorting shipping to Somalia over the winter – and running the pirate gauntlet in doing so.

Kemp was an ‘RN virgin’, so the guys in the senior rates mess made him feel at home: a picture of Sharon and Roly the dog from EastEnders pinned to the underside of the bunk above and a ‘gentlemen’s’ mag to ‘read’.

Don’t expect a literary masterpiece, but if you want something which spells out in very simple, honest terms what the RN does and why it does it, this is it.

In fact it’s about the best overview of the problem, written in layman’s terms that you’ll find.

Kemp explains a very complicated problem in uncomplicated terms – and that’s no bad thing if you’re trying to spread the anti-piracy, and pro-RN, message.

His time with Northumberland taught him that he “would have to look at what was happening not only out at sea, but also on land” and that the Gulf of Aden is not a small stretch of ocean.

“Ships were dotted around below us,” he says of a flight in Northumberland’s Merlin, “but even though there were many of them, they were insignificant compared to the vastness of the ocean.”

During the presenter’s time aboard, one ship, MV Saldanha, was seized by pirates; Northumberland was told not to engage the enemy in case the brigands vented their anger on the hostages. For the Merlin crew, their GPMG locked and loaded, it was “f**king frustrating”. It was perhaps the right decision. After two months, the Saldanha’s crew were released unharmed (a ransom of nearly $2m was paid).

What also comes through is that pirates aren’t some cardboard cut-out Hollywood villains. You may despise what they do, but in many cases they are desperate people acting desperately.

“Foreign ships have made a beeline for the Gulf, hoovering up the precious fish stocks – to the tune of $300m a year – to sell around the world, destroying the livelihood of these Somali fishermen,” Kemp points out; the average Somali lives on under $2 a day.

Unlike the people traffickers in the region who ‘help’ Somalis cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen (illegally). They earn a fortune and don’t care whether their ‘cargo’ reaches its destination or not.

Northumberland and Kemp came across a dhow crammed to the gills with ‘fishermen’. “These people could have been fishermen, but you’d have more luck tickling trout than trying your luck with that kind of tackle.”

The second half of Kemp’s book looks at the problem on land – and not just in Somalia, but also the Malacca Strait andNigeria where there’s a less-publicised pirate scourge.

In many cases, the pirate operation in Nigeria is run along Mafia-esque lines.

Yet here too issues on land are driving actions at sea. Nigeria makes $40bn a year from its oil reserves; a good $30bn of that ends up in the pockets of one per cent of the populace, while 90 million Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day.

And if the Somali pirates are seen as local celebrities, those in Nigeria are seen as superhuman. A policeman told Kemp adamantly that bullets would simply melt upon striking the skin of a pirate. “It does. I have seen it. They have juju.”

What strikes Kemp is that the pirates themselves are a fearless bunch – but not in the same way that a fundamentalist in Afghanistan are fearless.

“If pirates don’t fear a Type 23 frigate, then they don’t fear anything,” he points out. “A merchant vessel was taken from under our noses despite the impressive military presence.”

This is a really good read and gets to the rub of the issue better than any academic study or work by a celebrated maritime expert. And because of its author’s reputation, it should enjoy a wide audience far beyond those who normally pick up nautical tomes.

“Piracy is a seaborne menace that has its roots in poverty and political unrest on land,” he concludes. “And long as these continue, pirates will always take to the sea.”

The Grove Review

Heaven 17th Century

Richard Endsor is an excellent example of the amateur historian at his best.

A production engineer by profession, he has made 17th-Century ships and shipbuilding his passion and has spent a great deal of time in serious research that would do credit to a professional historian, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

He has fully exploited his contacts with the acknowledged experts on the period – Peter LeFevre, David Davies and Anne Coats – and has also benefitted from consultations with specialist experts on shipbuilding and artillery.

This is a classic example of how the wider naval historical community can enable its members to produce first class work.

Such is Endsor’s new study of the design, construction and career of the 70-gun third-rate ship of the line Lenox – The Restoration Warship: The Design, Construction and Career of a Third Rate of Charles II’s Navy (Conway, £50 ISBN 978 1 844860 88 3).

Lenox was named after Charles, Duke of Richmond and Len(n)ox, son of King Charles II and his mistress Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth.

There is something refreshing about Restoration honesty and openness about Royal extra marital family relationships that puts current tabloid puritanism to shame! Indeed Charles’ liaisons are to this day commemorated in the names of Type 23 Duke-class frigates.

Lenox was the first built of the King’s ambitious 1677 programme of thirty ships, voted by a recalled parliament after the impassioned pleadings of Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty and member for Castle Rising.

The cost was almost £600,000, raised by a special property tax, although, like modern programmes, this one turned out to be more expensive than expected. Most were third rates and Lenox was the first of all, being built at Deptford under the supervision of the master shipbuilder at the yard, John Shish.

She was built remarkably quickly, being launched on 12 April 1678 but went straight into ‘ordinary’ (that is reserve), moored at Chatham on the seventh or eight mooring down from Rochester bridge, as the author carefully notes.

She was ten years in this condition, not being very well preserved it would seem, until she was commissioned in 1689 to bolster the fleet against France, England having changed sides in the Franco-Dutch wars as a result of the invasion and revolution of the previous year. .

On commissioning she was armed with twenty two 32 pounder ‘demi-cannon’ supplemented by four 18-pounder long ‘culverins’ on her lower gun deck bolstered by 38 nine-pounder ‘demi-culverins’ on her upper decks and forecastle and six three pounders on the poop.

Lenox’s first action was the unfortunate Battle of Beachy Head when Admiral Torrington, the officer who had brought William III to England, was forced by Queen Mary II to engage a superior French fleet.

Later strategists would praise Torrington’s ability to keep his ‘fleet in being’ but, following the inevitable reverse, the Admiral was thrown into prison and court martialled.

Although acquitted he was never placed in command again; neither was Lenox’s captain Granville, whose support for his erstwhile commander was not politically wise.

After Beachy Head, Lenox operated off Ireland and then was part of the fleet that won the great victories of Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692 but which was less successful in defence of trade the following year.

In 1694, by now under the command of Captain Christopher Myngs, Lenox was part of Russell’s fleet in the Mediterranean. 1695 saw stormy convoy duty and 1696 a major repair.

It was back to convoying in 1697 before peace came in October. Then Lenox returned to the Nore and reserve before the ship was taken back to Deptford as a “worn-out wreck” to be completely rebuilt into what the author regards as a new ship (that would last for almost another half century).

Endsor covers this story in absolutely amazing detail.

The book is a veritable triumph of research into all aspects of naval life in the late 17th Century, with Lenox as the perfect hook on which to hang the analysis.

There is fascinating material on, timber supply, shipbuilding and shipbuilders, (including detailed analysis of ‘shipwright productivity’).

One interesting point the author makes is the extent shipwrights were pressed (ie conscripted) to build ships as well as seamen to man them in wartime.

Other chapters provide detailed coverage of sails and rigging, armament, recruitment and life on board.

In all Lenox’s seven-year period of service its crew served a total of 3,000 crew years aboard and only 115 died of all causes, few actually in action

Good food generally kept sickness away. No court martial records survive for Lenox although there are some for her contemporaries and the indications are that she was a happy and well run ship by any standard.

The author also fully understands the political background of the period when connection, religion and faction dominated appointment of officers. The day of the apolitical servant of the state was still a long way off.

The book shows that its publisher Conway, now taken over by Anova Press, has lost none of its ability to produce a very handsome book.

It is exceptionally well illustrated with impressive fold out plans of the ship, deck by deck, and diagrams of every aspect of her fittings. The colour plates are excellent and I rather liked the sepia tones used for the rest of the book which gave a suitably ‘period’ feel to it. The price asked is not an unreasonable one for such a beautiful volume.  

We have been lucky over the past 12 months or so to see the publication of two truly excellent books on a period of naval history that has, on the whole, received insufficient attention.

J D Davies’ Pepys’s Navy covered the slightly earlier period of 1649-89 while Endsor, despite his subtitle, continues the story after the Revolution with a nice connective overlap into the late Stuart period.

The approach is, of course, rather different – the telescope being looked through from either end as it were – but the result has been two highly-significant additions to naval historiography.

Casualty of War(ships)

OF THE already lengthy list of essential reference works charting the long, proud history of the Royal Navy, now add the first volumes of a monumental work listing casualties from 1914 to the present day.

Don Kindell’s Royal Naval Roll of Honour (Naval-History.net, downloadable PDF from £13.50, paperback from £26.49) intends to list, for the first time, every sailor or Royal Marine who died while in the Senior Service – in action, in accidents, as a result of illness.

The author is a former US Navy sailor and police officer with a passion for the RN over four decades.

He’s researched the details of 120,000 individuals whose records have been scattered around the archives – Kew, Whitehall, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the Naval Historical Branch among others.

The latter in particular has been heavily involved in what its head, Capt Christopher Page, calls an “astonishing corpus of work”.

And how right he is. Royal Navy Roll of Honour isn’t a book you read as such, but it is one serious naval, social and family historians will no doubt turn to time and again.

The first two volumes (of a projected six to eight) deal with casualties of WW1 (by name) and the Inter-War period (by name, by ship and by date).

We’ve only caught sight of the ‘Between the Wars’ volume, but it gives an excellent idea of the quality of the research and the incredible usefulness of Mr Kindell’s labour of love.

Indeed, it’s a solemn reminder of the price of Admiralty, even in peacetime.

On November 12 1918 – the day after the guns fell silent – more than two dozen sailors died, almost all of them victims of the ‘Spanish flu’ decimating the peoples of the world.

In fact, there was barely a day between the Armistice in the autumn of 1918 and September 3 1939 when hostilities resumed, that a sailor or Royal Marine did not die (as motor car usage increased in the 30s, road accidents began to take their toll – a recurring cause of deaths in the military to this day, sadly).

As well as being cheaper, we’d recommend the downloadable PDF version simply because it’s fully searchable and therefore much quicker to use.

Super marina nation

How many gears does an Italian tank have?

Five: four for reverse, one for going forward in case they were attacked in the rear.

What do you call 100,000 Italians raising their hands in the air? The army.

Breaking news from Afghanistan: the Italians have surrendered.

We could go on – but we won’t. Long is the shadow of WW2 that jokes about Italian military efficiency (or otherwise) live on.

Most relate to the performance of the Italian Army, the Regio Esercito, but not a few myths and slurs persist about its naval counterpart, the Regia Marina: that it came off worse in most actions it fought, that it turned for home at every opportunity.

The facts show us otherwise, as Vincent O’Hara attempts to demonstrate in his Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great Navies at War in the Mediterranean 1940-1945 (Conway, £20 ISBN 978-18448-61026).

O’Hara looks at all five major powers whose navies fought for control of the Middle Sea: Royal Navy, Kriegsmarine, Marine Nationale, US Navy and the Italian fleet.

The result is an excellent, detailed yet readable, history of a very brutal campaign.

How brutal? Well, there were 55 surface engagements – all but five of them involving the RN – in the Mediterranean theatre (including the Red Sea) according to O’Hara’s research. There were 57 in the Atlantic/Arctic, three dozen in the Pacific.

Using an excellent series of tables, accompanied by many maps, the author provides an excellent breakdown of each surface action, as well as easy-to-understand graphs which chart the rise and fall of Allied and Axis fortunes.

In the first six months of 1942, for example, 19 in every 20 ships carrying material to North Africa to support the German-Italian push on Cairo arrived safely. In the second half of the year, the figure was just 15 in every 20.

No wonder, then, that as 1943 opened, the head of the Regia Marina’s intelligence section Franco Maugeri wrote: “Our situation now seems clear and sharp to me: we have lost the war.”

The Italians bowed out of the war that September, but the struggle for the Mediterranean continued with the Kriegsmarine taking over some of the Italian fleet as well as what ever forces it could commandeer from in its conquered territories.

The Germans fought to the very end – but they waged a poor man’s war, lost almost every encounter – and more than 60 vessels in the process. Their sacrifice did, however, stall the Allied advice.

O’Hara’s command of sources is impressive, in particular his use of British and Italian archival material. Referring to the latter gives the Royal Navy’s then foe a belated voice.

Take the first Battle of Sirte in December 1941, a sign of RN moral and fighting superiority according to British sources... or for Italian sources “one of the three or four turning points of the war for Italy. The route to Libya, red with the blood of Italian sailors, could now be considered open again”.

The book is not without its shortcomings. Some readers may feel the author gives the Italian Navy too much credit, the RN too little. And what certainly does raise eyebrows Roger-Moore-fashion is the sidelining of submarine and aerial actions in favour of surface clashes.

The combined aerial and underwater campaign against Axis shipping to North Africa in 1943, for example, dealt the enemy a far heavier blow than any losses inflicted by surface forces, while the Taranto raid is dispatched in a handful of sentences; a surface action in the Otranto strait that same night receives two pages.

Shedding light on many of these ‘forgotten actions’ is not necessarily a bad thing – not least because it shows the efforts made by the warring factions in the Mediterranean on a daily basis – but it does lead to a rather blinkered view of the struggle for the Middle Sea.

That said, there is some excellent myth-busting here. Contemporary and post-war German commentators were scathing of the Italian Navy’s performance (far more so than their British counterparts). Eberhard Weichold, the Kriegsmarine’s liaison officer in Rome, thought the Italians “soft and weak”.

They were neither: 98 per cent of the troops and 90 per cent of the material escorted by the Regia Marina reached its destination.

It paid a heavy price for its efforts. Nearly two dozen Italian ships were sunk at the hands of RN surface vessels (just three destroyers were sunk in surface actions by the Italians). Its record in night fighting was woeful. The RN was better trained, better equipped, better informed and possessed a better doctrine.

Yet the Royal Navy was also – and many commentators will challenge this point – “workmanlike” at its worst and, above all, fought the wrong war, the author believes, when it should have focused on defeating the Germans in the European theatre.

If it was the ‘wrong war’, then at least it was an illustrious one. O’Hara acknowledges: “The Royal Navy’s deeds in the Mediterranean fill a proud chapter in that service’s glorious history.”

Working (MI)9 to 5

THERE are many stories of the clandestine war fought by the Royal Navy between 1939-45.

Tales of X-craft operations, ‘the man who never was’ and the Shetland Bus are pretty well known.

Not so perhaps the work of MI9 (the number of nebulous military intelligence organisations went all the way up to 19…) charged with supporting resistance movements in occupied Europe – and helping PoWs and important figures escape.

Former fisherman Ronald Stephens found himself working for this shadowy organisation aboard HMS Tarana, a trawler basedin Gib.

On the Rock, the ship’s company would wear naval whites in summer with HMS on their tallies, while the White Ensign fluttered on the grey-hulled Tarana.

But once out of harbour, the hull was hurriedly re-painted, the White Ensign lowered and the Portuguese flag raised – hence the name of this memoir HMS Tarana: Under Two Flags (Ten Bells, £9.75 ISBN 978-0-9531269-4-1) – while the ship’s company dressed as any good Portuguese fisherman would.

Tarana made numerous trips to the coast of southern France to collect ‘parcels’ – downed airmen, French politicians, Polish refugees, who were informed about the boat’s arrival via clandestine messages on BBC foreign-language broadcasts.

The most famous rescue Tarana conducted was Operation Bluebottle in the summer of 1942.

The phrase Les Marrons sont cuites (the chestnuts are cooked) was broadcast… and scores of parcels were collected from the beach near Perpignan. They were taken to Gibraltar in foul seas.

“The air was thick with the stench of sick and dirty bodies but with the weather so atrocious no hatches could be opened to let in a bit of fresh air,” Stephens recalls.

“The water was strictly for cooking and drinking only, so no one could have washed – even if he’d had a mind to.”

It’s a shame the author doesn’t go into slightly more detail about the nuts and bolts of these missions – it may well be modesty on his part, but the Tarana’s crew were brave men, as evidenced by France’s award of the Croix de Guerre to them.

But Stephens does give an excellent – and very lively – account of life in one of His Majesty’s Trawlers, life in Gibraltar in the eye of the storm such as the work of the burial ship HMS Laurel, and the liberation of Marseille.

Tarana was the first Allied ship into harbour in September 1944 (Allied engineers blew up part of a blockship so she could sail in) and ended the war in the Med performing general duties, ferrying prisoners and mail around.

She was finally brought back to England and returned to her original owners. “She had never deserted us or let us down,” says the author as the ship’s company left Tarana for the final time. “No throat was without a lump and few eyes were dry.”

* Navy News readers can buy the book for the discounted price of £7.50 (including postage) from the publishers at 21 Burrs Road, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, CO15 4LA, quoting the reference ‘RNN’.

The human face of the Falklands

Meanwhile, John Lippiett offers two sides of the war in his War & Peas (Pistol Post Publications, £12.99 via www.navybooks.com), the fighting front and the home front.

The story of those left behind has largely been ignored in accounts of the 1982 conflict (unlike, for example, World War 2 where books abound on life in the UK).

John Lippiett and his wife Jenny wrote to each other almost daily as the war in the South Atlantic raged.

John was a lieutenant commander and executive officer of HMS Ambuscade.

His wife Jenny, at home in West Sussex, was carrying the couple’s third child (nicknamed Alfonso in honour of our foe, but eventually named the rather more British Oliver).

The author arrived on Ambuscade in late April 1982 with his new ship preparing to leave Gibraltar.

From then until the frigate’s return to Devonport in mid-July, the correspondence between the Lippietts provides a snapshot of the everyday life in the task force and of task force families.

Many of the letters from home are about the mundane: the dog escaping, children earning top marks at school, shopping, paying bills, fixing the car, digging the garden (hence the peas in the book’s title).

And many of the letters from sea concern the routine of life aboard ship, sprinkled liberally with cartoons and diagrams (quite what Jenny Lippiett made of her husband’s description of a replenishment at sea we’ll never know...).

Some of the stories here are familiar: reaction to the loss of Coventry and Sheffield, the battle of Bomb Alley.

Others are not.

Among John Lippiett’s many tasks aboard the Type 21 frigate was censorship of his crew’s letters, a laborious duty he did not enjoy. Well, not always.

In May 1982 a video tape arrived in the post, one of the ‘creature comforts’ for the sailors when off duty.

The rest of the Fleet was already on VHS, but Ambuscade still had an old Betamax tape system, so the choice of films was limited. Imagine the crew’s delight, then, when Lady in Paris arrived in the post – a potentially ‘blue movie’.

It had to be passed by the censor, of course, and the ship’s chaplain.

It turned out not to be lots of rumpy pumpy in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, but a rather tedious short film of a model wearing various lingerie accompanied by an even more tedious voiceover.

Such a story didn’t appear in the letters home. Nor too the fears of Ambuscade simply breaking up.

The South Atlantic campaign took a terrible strain on man and machine. Cracks certainly appeared in the latter, as hairline fractures began to show in Ambuscade’s hull as the elements and high-speed dashes took their toll of the ship.

Victory did nothing to lessen Nature’s ire, but surprisingly, it did not noticeably lift the men’s spirits in Ambuscade.

“There were no fireworks or champagne,” John Lippiett recalls. “We were suspicious that it could all flare up again.”

Thankfully, of course, it did not. But what is interesting from these letters is how frustrated and depressed sailors were after the victory.

If war at sea is monotonous, ‘Groundhog Day’ if you like, then uneasy peace at sea is even more monotonous.

“Life is now boring – no action, no news, same position day in, day out,” John Lippiett wrote a week after the Argentine surrender.

“Oh to know when we are returning to where we belong. And oh that we don’t have to come rushing back here.”

Raiders: the lost art

IN THE Royal Navy’s two titanic struggles with the German Fleet, the U-boat was generally regarded as the gravest threat to the survival of the Empire’s mother country.
Enemy submarines were not the only scourge of trade on the high seas, however.
Individual German ships ranged the seven seas hoping to pick off Allied shipping and stir up panic.
These commerce or surface raiders could be warships – the Emden was the most prominent in WW1, while the Graf Spee remains the most famous of the WW2 German raiders.
But far more common were merchant raiders – merchantmen on the surface, but hidden behind trapdoors and other disguises were guns and torpedo tubes.
Few, if any, were more successful than the Wolf, whose exploits between 1916 and 1918 were celebrated by Berlin’s propaganda machine – and in a succession of books in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Since then, however, the ship has rather been forgotten (unlike the Emden, for example). Now authors Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen hope to elevate the raider back to her pre-eminent position in The Wolf (Bantam, £17.99
ISBN 978-0593-060705-9).
The duo have trawled the archives of the world, contacted the families of crew or prisoners of the Wolf and pored over newspaper cuttings and ship’s logs to recount a cracking tale of humanity in an otherwise inhuman war.
For in an age of total war, the surface raiders have somehow maintained an air of romanticism.
Submarines were underhand and damned un-English and all that, Q-ships were very dubious when it came to the laws of the ocean, yet the war the commerce raiders waged was largely seen as an honourable one.
Commerce raiders did not necessarily sink their prey without warning, invariably looked after their prisoners as humanely as possible, and were almost always captained by men of honour.
Karl August Nerger, Wolf’s captain was one such man. Nerger was charged with wreaking havoc against the British Empire in the Southern Ocean, ‘contaminating’ the approaches to Colombo, Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore and Cape Town especially with mines before striking at merchant ships leaving Australia for Europe.
A nearly-new steamer, Wachtfels, was converted into an auxiliary cruiser, complete with a radio transmitter to send signals 5,000 miles, 5.9in and 2in guns, torpedo tubes, a changeable funnel to conceal her identity, and a new name, Wolf.
In a 15-month voyage, Nerger and his crew dispatched more than three dozen ships – more than 100,000 tons in all.
More than a dozen ships were mined by the ‘eggs’ Wolf dropped in the oceans. One washed up as recently as last December in New Zealand.
This is a story of skill and bravery, of luck, of political machinations, of wartime propaganda by both sides, told with panache which brings the ship, her crew and especially her captain to life again after nine decades.
It rightly does justice to the Wolf whose captain was portrayed by the Allies as “a typical Hun” who possessed “no gentlemanly instincts”.
Empire historians also criticised Nerger (for temerity, although they did praise his humanity), they pooh-poohed the impact of the Wolf, and the commerce raiders especially.
Privately, however, the view of the Admiralty was very different. Raiders had disrupted maritime trade and kept Allied warships occupied. “It seems extraordinary that they were not used on a larger scale,” one official report noted in 1940.
By then, the Wolf was no more. Post-war, the ship traded on the routes she had once stalked before finally being paid off in 1931.
Her former captain was allowed no such graceful end. After taking up a management position with Siemens, he was courted by the Nazis as a war hero in the 30s – and certainly benefited from their anti-Semitic laws by buying a villa from a Jewish family for a song.
That was about as far as his dalliance with Nazism went, but in 1945 Nerger was thrown into Sachsenhausen – once a Nazi concentration camp, now a Soviet concentration camp – where a fellow prisoner beat him to death with an iron bar for refusing to surrender his shoes.
It was an end unbecoming a man described by a sailor he took prisoner aboard Wolf as “one of the greatest seamen this world has known”.