H.M.S. London: Warships of the Royal Navy by Iain Ballantyne

Author:Iain Ballantyne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783400294
Publisher: Pen and Sword

A Fool's Errand

Keeping up a bone-jarring twenty-five knots the ‘…destroyers and cruisers continued a nightmare dash at high speed through fog and a sea scattered with icebergs.’16 The ships kept a fairly tight formation and there was some risk of collision at high speed.

…the look out astern on Keppel, suddenly hearing many more voices than usual, lowered the binoculars with which he had been trying to peer into the mist just in time to see a blacker wall than the fog closing in on the destroyer. Very quickly it proved to be the port side of a much larger vessel and only a matter of feet away. The great ship drew away with the same speed as she had approached, the air then filling with the discordant music of sirens. Only by a fraction had London escaped sending Keppel to the bottom.17

But as each mile slid by under the keels of their warships, with no sign of the German battle fleet, the British and American sailors grew increasingly uneasy. Surgeon Lieutenant Ransome Wallis gazed at the faces of the people around him in HMS London as they became ashamed and depressed.

…gradual disillusionment set in – a feeling so strong that it swamped the natural feeling of relief at being let off the hook. We carried on to the west at a fairly high speed; in the eyes of the merchant ships we were running away and we did not like it.

As the cruisers and destroyers sped on, the communicators in London read with mounting horror the signals from PQ17 merchant ships as they were ripped apart by aircraft and U-boats. Commander Broome offered to go back but Rear Admiral Hamilton reminded him that his ships were low on oil and had lost their fuel ship somewhere in the scattered convoy.

In his secret journal Ken Tamon noted both the mood of the men and the faintly ludicrous attempts to buck them up with air attack exercises:

Ship's company morale at rock bottom. Commander Edden exercises ship's company in defence and damage control, impersonating bombs with ‘CRUMPA!’ over the tannoy.

Gordon Bruty felt equally overwhelmed:

We realized that we were a damp squib… looking for a phantom enemy fleet. Down in the engine room we didn't know they had been told to scatter or that they were being slaughtered, being sunk left, right and centre… but we did know that we had left them to it.

Captain Servaes picked up on how bad the men were feeling when he took a meal break during the endless night of 4-5 July.

I always lived on my bridge during these operations, and that night as I was having my evening meal on the bridge my old chief steward came up to me, and as he cleared away my plate and cutlery he whispered to me, ‘It's a pity, Sir, that we had to abandon that convoy…’. I knew then that the story was round the whole ship, and that something would have to be done to bolster the crew's morale.

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