Dunkirk, Pearl Harbour, D-day
Alfred Humphreys, born 1921, was a chief petty officer by the time he left the Royal Navy in 1959. He joined up in 1937. His early war service included sailing with Atlantic convoys.
“We went from Portsmouth to Dunkirk, in HMS Hebe, a minesweeper. Well, to Dover first. Dover then Dunkirk. We were originally sweeping the English Channel - magnetic mines - and we were badly damaged and had to go into Poplar docks, London, for a refit. When we went across to Dunkirk, we were damaged by shells and shrapnel. We were a fairly small boat, about 250 tons. We could get right up to the beach, for we only had eight-foot draught.
“When we got there, the men were swimming in the water and underneath the water. We took 450 back the first time. The second time, we had about the same, really. Another ship took Lord Gort back to Dunkirk to organise things, because we couldn’t. We were a target for the German planes. We shot down one.
“We had cargo nets. They [the soldiers] had to climb up onto the ship. We had to leave a lot in the water. It was a terrible sight. Heartbreaking. It makes me want to cry to talk about it. It’s a thing I try to forget, put behind me.
“We were so badly damaged, two tugs came down from London and towed us there. Thirteen or fourteen shell holes, one on the water-line. We had collision mats. We put them over the side and they clung. It let some water in, but not a lot.”
Leave was granted following Dunkirk: “I think each watch had six weeks’ leave during the refit. I came back to Portsmouth, drafted off the ship then. I was in barracks at HMS Victory, had six weeks’ leave and joined the Hunt class destroyer, HMS Lauderdale, and went out to the Far East. We went over to Sydney and I volunteered for the Australian navy.
“We were just going into Sydney when the Japanese done Pearl Harbour. It was a shock. I went off HMS Devonshire. We were taking supplies out to the troops, just coming into port when we heard about Pearl Harbour.”
Mr Derek Brightman, born 1925, of Cambridge, was second-in-command of an LCT on D-Day. He says he was trained at HMS Collingwood, Portsmouth, and volunteered for Combined Operations: “This meant my being trained as an officer on landing craft. I was posted to New Dock, Southampton, and joined LCT 809 and we were able to take nine tanks on board. We had two officers and eight to ten ratings. We practised for months on various beaches in the area, taking off tanks.”
The ever-present landing craft bridged the gap between the Army and the Navy’s expertise.
“We left New Dock, Southampton, on 4 June. You remember that D-Day was scheduled for 5th June but was postponed 24 hours? And we went to pick up our tanks. The banks were lined with people shouting and cheering. It was obvious they knew something was happening. We went to the Beaulieu River and took on our tanks and men of the, I think, 88th Battalion, Royal Engineers. They were all frightfully seasick and, you know, the first twelve hours of being seasick you think you are going to die! We set off into a rather violent sky, with massive lines of landing craft. We saw our battleships - HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson, I think - which had 16-inch guns, which are very large, and this was very comforting.
LCT854 (see p. 89)
“In a grey dawn, we arrived at the British Gold Beach. We had LCTs. Six went into the beach and unloaded their tanks. We went in the second six and unfortunately as we got near the beach we were hit by the mines of beach defences, and the door was blown up, onto my foot on board. It hurt. It hurt like hell.”
He explained that the first six of his flotilla’s LCTs had escaped snagging the beach defences because the tide was a little higher for them but had gone down slightly by the time he and the rest of his flotilla reached them in their other six craft.
“The thing I most remember about going onto the beach was the noise - particularly rockets from converted Tank Landing Craft [known as LCT(R)s] which they fired over our heads. We had not seen nor heard them before and did not recognise the noise.
“We were sinking fast and abandoned ship. It was so traumatic. I was only 19 at the time. I remembered being in the water, but that was the last thing I remembered for three weeks. The next thing I remember was being in a Survivors’ Camp at Lowestoft. I recall tiny little bits - little flashes of the Great Storm. I learned later that the tanks were recovered, when the tide went down, by our soldiers, so we did get our tanks there.
“We were lucky because out of our twelve ships, we lost only two. Our beach was not at all like the American one shown on the film Saving Private Ryan but the noise and confusion was the same. It was very realistic, the film, in that respect. I remember the excitement and the first six tanks coming back. And there we were!
“Earlier, at New Docks, we were living on the landing craft. There was a little ward room and mess and the crew lived on the mess deck. It was a Mark 4 LCT. They are quite roomy. There was a PO engineer and a cox. It was powered by two, about 500-horsepower, diesel engines. Our LCT course was to learn how to con it - basic navigation, berthing, turning. At Troon.
“On D-Day, on our new door we had Mulock ramps, orange, for the tanks to drop easily onto the beach. It was one of these which hit my foot. We were the 28th LCT Flotilla, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Neiberg (or Neiburg). The Beaulieu River was where one loaded one’s tanks.
“I hate water. I joined the RNVR because it was the only part of the navy where you didn’t have to learn to swim! I was a midshipman on D-Day because you couldn’t be an officer until you were 20, although I was second-in-command of LST 809.”
One aspect we tend to forget when discussing the war is just how young some of the participants were. Brian James, born 1926, was only 18 in the year of D-Day. In 1942 Brian James was a Sea Cadet at a sea school run by a Captain Watts on the River Hamble.
“We could see the sky lit at Southampton when they were bombed at night. We used to count the MGBs going out of the Hamble at night, when I was a cadet, and count them coming back in the morning.
“I went to a salvage company because Captain Sands of the Merchant Navy wanted us to man salvage ships. On D-Day plus about 14, I did salvage work ‘over there’. Risden Beasley was the firm I worked for. I was on the Carmonita. We carried explosives to the Juno beach-head. I was a deckhand. I did training, so I was the gunner.
“Towards the end of my stay at the sea school, we had sub-lieutenants who were to pilot landing craft. We used to take them out learning navigation.
“We had four yachts, before my time, went to Dunkirk. The Mandolin is one. It had the marks of bullets in the side.”
(Interview courtesy of the Algerines, a veterans’ organisation for those who worked on minesweepers.)
Training in 1943
In 1943, Mr E Stott of Heywood, Lancashire, watched instructional films in an old cinema with a tin roof which the sailors called the “flea pit”, now the St Mary’s Street Post Office on Hayling Island. They did some marching and fell out at a local pub. After further training at Calshot, he remained with the training flotilla as an instructor and was on a landing craft which sailed past the Isle of Wight to lay cable. He was told it was secret but later found it was in readiness to provide power for the Mulberry Harbour. They returned to Hayling,