Then there are those recollections which have little to do with enemy action. The weather and seas in the wintry north was one of them. I remember watching the great battleship, King George V, struggling to gain the summit of a roller as broad as the ship was long, and then crashing down into the trough beyond. Then that Russian convoy when, in the destroyer HMS Orwell, we were close escort to a motley collection of small naval craft, mainly ex-Italian, being donated to and manned by the Russian Navy, and how we were hove to for days with mountainous seas and, with the spume and winter darkness, not able to see or communicate with any of them. They all survived. Then those mad dashes from aft to the open bridge of Orwell, trying to avoid seas breaking over the deck en route. The cold, with the inner bulkheads coated with ice and one’s breath freezing on to one’s balaclava, and the decks, guns and stanchions all iced up. The awful occasion when we lost Ordinary Seaman Kelly overboard from Orwell while we were exercising in the tempestuous Pentland Firth, and the hours of fruitless search that followed.
On the other hand, there were those occasions when, at sea in the far wintry north, we were graced with the magnificence of the aurora borealis with its sheets of blue light moving across the sky and reflecting into the oily sea below, giving the impression of the ship being suspended in space. Then those lovely vistas of snow-covered mountains in Spitzbergen and Iceland, the almost holiday atmosphere when we left the frozen north for a spell to escort the massive troop convoys to the Torch landings in North Africa, escorting Mr Churchill to and from Canada, the camaraderie and good humour of the ships’ companies – all helped to compensate for the discomforts. And all this for 5 shillings a day – board and lodge included!’
With the approach of winter and the almost perpetual night in the Arctic, it was decided to sail merchant ships independently at intervals and without escort to Russia.
Reginald Urwin experienced that Arctic route in a lone freighter and was fortunate to survive and tell the tale:
‘I was 16 at the time and did the usual induction courses and so forth at a training establishment at Tyne Dock, where we learnt how to use Bofors, Oerlikons and machine-guns. I did a fairly uneventful trip across the Atlantic and was then on a collier in the Channel and had a scare or two with E-boats and things, and then it was back to the Tyne where we heard about PQ 17, and we’d also heard about PQ 18, convoys that went to Russia, from some of the survivors who got back, and that was interesting. About the middle of September 1942, I think it was, I was sent to a ship at Tyne Dock and she was loading at the time. She was loading tanks and dismantled planes and engine parts, medical stores and general equipment, everything to do with warfare, and the last thing that they did before we left was that they welded brackets on the afterdeck, three a side, and these were gun mounts for Vickers machine-guns, and that didn’t look very good. We had a Bofors onboard, we had four sets of twin Oerlikons, everything abaft of the bridge. This was the Empire Gilbert, and we had an ancient 4-inch on the stern, which the gunners weren’t very happy with because, I think, the date on it was something like 1916 or something, but it worked, it went OK.
Ralph (Reginald) Urwin
Then we sailed north. We thought, well, we’re going up to pick up a convoy, and we went off up to Iceland. Arrived in Reykjavik and we sat around there waiting for other ships to arrive; some were coming from America and other places and I think there were, in total, 13 vessels. Anyway, just prior to our departure there was a conference ashore and all the skippers were called to this conference, and when our skipper came back he got us all in the messroom and explained to us what was about to happen; it seemed that the idea was that the ships were to sail from Reykjavik at staggered times and try and get to Russia on their own, without escort or anything.
So we went out, we set off from there about the latter part of October and it was pretty rugged; the only ships we saw actually on the way were Icelandic fishing boats, and they were immune because the Germans didn’t bother them. I think it was about three days out from there that we were torpedoed – this was 2 November 1942. The idea had been, of course, to get to the most northern part and get straight on to the main route to Murmansk, but this didn’t happen – as I say, we got torpedoed.
My station was the port-side Oerlikon, and when we were hit I finished up at the foot of the starboard lifeboat davit and I didn’t know very much about how I got there or anything, but the explosion must have been quite severe because it must have thrown me right over the top, over the bridge. I got to my feet and tried to cut the lifeboat free, but the ship was going so fast that I was awash before I could do anything and the ship just went down – it completely disappeared within a very, very short space of time. It couldn’t have been any more than 3 minutes, well 2 minutes, and there was nothing to be seen. I don’t know how long I’d been out at the foot of the davit, of course, but it was just so sudden and then, after it was all over, it was a most weird, weird feeling, because suddenly about me there was nothing there, and you were just on your own with people all around just sort of hollering out at each other and trying to make contact.
It didn’t seem very long after that that I spotted this shape and it was the submarine that had sunk us, coming towards us, and we were screaming out for help and doing what we thought, you know, was the best thing, and they steamed up alongside us and I felt myself being dragged over the side on to the submarine, and after that I just didn’t remember very much more. I can remember going to the conning tower, but I just collapsed and the next thing I knew was that I was being sort of revived. I think it was the Medical Officer and the Mate or the Chief Officer who were working on me, and I’d been stripped and they were rubbing cognac and everything into me in order to get the blood flowing again. I afterwards found out that there had been two other people picked up and they were from the Mercantile Regiment, and these guys were responsible for the Bofors, the anti-aircraft guns aft, but I didn’t know these people because they had been put on board just before we sailed.
Other than that, we finished the patrol on the submarine. We were fairly well treated; I think the Navy looks after the Navy, the Army looks after the Army, and so on. Well, we weren’t treated too bad. We were fed the same sort of food as they were fed and we had pretty well within reason what you could expect; we had free rein of the submarine. If there was any action or anything like that we were told in no uncertain terms what to do and where to go and we just had to stay put at that. There was a couple of flurries but I didn’t find out too much about them, but there was some hectic activity there on two or three occasions actually. We finished the patrol on the submarine and we went then to Narvik. We were about two weeks on the submarine.
While I was in the submarine there was the usual questions; they asked about what cargo, what tonnage, where we were from and other activity. At that time I think the Air Force was fairly busy in Reykjavik; they were particularly anxious to know if there was any air activity in Iceland at the time. They weren’t too sure whether we had aircraft there or not and of course we couldn’t tell them anything because we didn’t know. We told them that we didn’t know. We had seen aircraft but they didn’t get too much information. They knew that we were carrying arms because of the explosions on the ship and all that sort of thing, but that was a dead give-away.
When we got to Narvik they put us into a holding camp, which was very close to a big Russian camp they had there; they had a lot of Russians there, and these fellows they treated like subhumans there. It was really, really bad, and of course it was a different calibre of German too that we got in with there. When we got to this holding place they actually strip-searched us and we thought that was rather funny, because we’d only come off a German submarine straight to the camp, and why they had done this I don’t know, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of trust between the services anyway. They took all our clothes away and deloused us, had our clothes done and they all came back pressed and