“Eventually, we came to a stop. We left Portsmouth to go on the Walcheren Operation, got outside the harbour and were sent back. I suppose due to being damaged on D-Day, our craft was a bit weak amidships and wouldn’t be a lot of use. After the operation, we heard of the casualties there. We thought that was a bit of luck for us as the LCTs took a battering and we might not have got away with it a second time. Just after that we took our craft to Southampton and paid off. We got different drafts and didn’t meet up again for at least 40 years, well six of us anyway.”
The Walcheren Operation was a major amphibious landing on the former islands of Walcheren (now a peninsula) at the mouth of the Scheldt, Southern Netherlands, and their continued occupation by the Germans meant that the Allies could not use the port of Antwerp. It was a bloody and expensive battle.
Sub Lieutenant Peter Douglas Bird, born in 1923, was in the 1st Flotilla LBV (Landing Barge Vehicle):
“I was at first sent to the Isle of Wight (HMS Medina) then went to Whitehall as a Staff Officer for Exercise Jansen. We were unloading coasters across beaches. A dozen barges swamped and sank in the sea. That was the kind of thing we wanted to find out. After that, back to London, and I said I wanted to go to sea. HMS Medina was at Puckpool, between Ryde and Bembridge.”
“You arrived in Langstone Harbour, October 1943?”
“Yes at Langstone Harbour from HMS Manatee the base at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Well, if I may go back, perhaps: when these personnel craft arrived, they were really Thames lighters which had been converted and they put in the twin Chrysler marine engines and of course Jim [Jim Jarman, author of Those Wallowing Beauties] can give a lot more detail than I have given here. And we more or less were drafted to HMS Medina which was at Puckpool House in Ryde on the Isle of Wight and of course the Thames lighters, which had been converted, were gathered in Wooton Creek. I remember my earliest days, having been appointed to HMS Medina, I was taking these barges out and learning how to handle them and … “
“Were they difficult to handle?”
“Oh, yes. Top speed was 6 knots. Of course they were flat bottomed, designed for river work. So having them on a choppy sea … But we learned to manage them all right. Another factor is that when they were converting them, they put a ramp in the stern of the vessel, and two engines and a rudder and things like that so that when we went into a beach we had to turn round, drop an anchor and go in astern. A kedge anchor, yes. Well of course if you’ve got a wind coming in at an angle it called for a considerable amount of seamanship to beach her and to hold her, until the tide dropped sufficiently. Well we went in on the top of the tide usually, or better still, you could be neaped if you didn’t watch out; that is to say that the subsequent high tide is as high as the one you went in on, so it is best to beach about an hour after high water. But we went in on the beach, let the vessel dry out and army lorries, technically, would come and unload us, and take the cargo off to the depots. We started as LBV, which is Landing Barge Vehicle, with the idea that I think we could get in about two three ton lorries fully laden.”
“You see, Lord Louis Mountbatten realised that the demand for a second front and pressures from Stalin were so great in 1940, 1941 to relieve the pressure on the Russian front (we did not have any - or very, very few - purpose-built landing craft, in those days), so Lord Louis commandeered, I think in the first phase, about 600 Thames lighters and initially was prepared to have them towed over with tugs, loaded, to invade with three barges at a time …” (Peter Bird agrees that would have been “very dangerous”.)
“But you know, needs must when the devil drives. And when America came in the war, we obviously got a considerable number of Chrysler marine engines, and it then became a priority to convert these dumb lighters into powered craft, who could manoeuvre and go around at their own speed.
“Well the next stage, of course was to gather them together at HMS Medina. As they were converted they were sailed around from the Thames and formed, roughly, into flotillas - 12 craft.”
“And your flotilla was called?”
“Well then, there was no flotilla, we were just a hotchpotch. At that particular juncture, if you want my story, I was ordered to go up to Whitehall, on the staff of Captain Landing Barges - Captain LB - who was a Captain Harrison-Wallace. And this was for planning for a very large exercise called Exercise Jansen and this took place at Tenby. We commandeered hotels, we set up a naval headquarters in the harbour at Tenby and then three flotillas were sailed round from the Isle of Wight, round Lands End up to Tenby to take part in this big exercise. Coasters were brought
up and anchored a mile off the beach and our craft had to unload them, with, obviously, dummy ammunition, stores, food, and land us on the beach and supply an army which technically then invaded as far as Birmingham.”
“It was a lot of supplies!”
“Yes, 36 barges, working away. Of course it was a learning exercise and there were gales! I mean, if the tides are in the middle of the night, then of course, we went on the tides. But there were things like gales, on one beach six craft, I think, were swamped, and on another beach I think I’m right in saying five craft were swamped and had to be recovered.”
“And were the people all right?”
“Yes, Jim Jarman recounts in his book. But we got a bit wet on one or two occasions, had to swim ashore, that sort of thing. But lost quite a bit of gear, I suppose. You see it was a learning exercise and to my mind it was a very valuable exercise because it was virtually a full scale exercise before D-Day. It was in July and August 1943. It was a rehearsal, so far as we were concerned, as to how much stores … The significance of this, to me, happened after D-Day, because our flotillas were putting a thousand tons a day over the beach, of ammunition, food, stores and things for the army. Everybody in the world has heard of the Mulberry, but due to gales and things like that, the Mulberry wasn’t operational for six weeks until well into July.”
“That was the one that was working?”
“Yes, one was wrecked completely. Now, during that first six weeks or more, we were putting ashore a thousand tons a day. Nobody’s ever heard of LBVs. You see, in 1943, when the Americans came in the war, and Lease-Lend became … [obsolete] we then got large numbers of purpose-built landing craft, which were specialised, doing different jobs.”
“Were they designed by people here or by the Americans or ..?”
“Oh, both, I think. I couldn’t vouch for exactly who designed them. A lot of them were built in America. The LCTs were.”
“Some early landing craft, somebody was telling me, were designed by local Marines and lost on the Norwegian expedition.”
“Well, the Marines ran the LCMs. They were a type of craft which was Landing Craft Mechanised. I don’t know why they called it mechanised, but they manned LCMs. We… when the purpose-built tank landing craft and things came in large numbers, LCTs, then of course Admiralty decided that we were better fitted for unloading stores. So the vehicle part was cancelled, so we didn’t carry any vehicles. They were always known as LBVs and so they stuck to that title. But by the time we headed up - well, from Exercise Jansen onwards - they realised that we had a much better potential in unloading ship to shore. So that’s how we came to revert, as it were, to carrying stores.
“So that was basically what LBVs were all about. HMS Medina continued in being and I think people were drafted there initially and did some training there. You see from my deck-log that HMS Manatee was where we finished up, after the voyage back from Tenby and then we were definitely formed into definitive flotillas: First Flotilla, 2nd, 3rd, 4th. And I notice in the log that we went back to HMS Manatee for training. On 30th January 1944, and from 1st to 9th of February, the whole flotilla was under training instruction: exercises, medical