Zambesi’s John Booth recalled how Gavin Hamilton, the destroyer’s first lieutenant, ‘in his anxiety to secure a line round one of the survivors, attached a rope to himself and jumped into the water… Within a very few moments, [he] was yelling to be hauled out, as the paralysing temperature… soaked into his bones.’81

  By the time darkness proper fell, the three destroyers had between them picked up around 66 of approximately 88 men, women and children who had been on board Henry Bacon – the survivors including all 19 of the Norwegian refugees who had been in the ship at the time of the sinking, and those referred to in Allison’s report as ‘the remaining four live men that could be seen’ in the water.82 At 6.20 p.m. Captain Allison, believing that all those alive had been rescued, issued the order to head back to the convoy, which was reached by all three destroyers at 1 a.m. on 24 February.83 Tellingly the missing included Captain Carini and 14 members of his crew, and seven armed guards, most of whom would probably have survived had they not willingly sacrificed their lives so that the civilians and the younger men on board the merchant vessel could be saved.

  Those in the convoy still had more gales to sail through, but the attack on Henry Bacon represented the last opposition put up against RA64 by the Germans. Some of the convoy’s merchant ships finally reached the various destinations allocated to them, which included Loch Ewe and the Clyde, on 28 and 29 February, while those ships remaining with the Commodore arrived at Belfast Lough on 1 March 1945.84 In the meantime most of the Henry Bacon survivors, including the 19 Norwegian refugees rescued by Opportune, had been dropped off in the Shetland Islands when the destroyer had docked there on 26 February before she rejoined the convoy.85

  43 Wolves at the Door

  Main Actions: 20 March and 29 April 1945

  Sinking of Lapwing and Goodall: JW65 and RA65, JW66 and RA66

  GMT + 1: JW65 and RA65

  GMT + 2: RA66

  By the spring of 1945, it could confidently be asserted that the northern route to the Soviet Union had been secured as much as it ever could be while the Germans still had a functioning U-boat arm. U-boats carried on congregating in the approaches to the Kola Inlet, and were to show that German opposition continued to have a sting in its tail.

  The potency of this sting was demonstrated when JW65 (22 merchant ships – 17 of them American, 4 British and 1 Norwegian – 3 tankers and 1 escort oiler, that is 26 ships in total) which had sailed from the Clyde, Scotland during the night of 11–12 March 1945, was forced to approach the Kola Inlet up the usual 40-mile channel from the east, without an ‘air umbrella’.1 Although the support laid on for Operation Scottish (the protection of JW65 and RA65) included a substantial, but not an extraordinarily large, protection force (9 destroyers, 8 corvettes, a sloop and an anti-aircraft cruiser) as well as aircraft flown off two escort carriers, in one of which the 10th Cruiser Squadron’s Vice Admiral Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton flew his flag), the British bombers and fighters were neutered during the early morning of 20 March 1945 when JW65 reached the approaches to the Kola Inlet. It was snowing heavily, causing the aircraft to remain grounded.2

  The escorts’ task was made all the more difficult because the Russian destroyers which were supposed to meet up with the convoy with a view to taking six of the JW65 merchant ships to the White Sea failed to make an appearance.3 That left the escorts with more ships to protect than was feasible given that so many U-boats had moved in on the 40-mile-long east to west route along which JW65 would have to pass during the last lap of its journey before turning south into the Kola Inlet.4 It was a case of an overstretched group of escorts having to guide their charges through a double cordon made up of no less than 13 U-boats.5

  The imbalance provided the opportunity at 9.15 a.m. that morning for U-995’s Oberleutnant Hans-Georg Hess, whose vessel lay concealed some 24 miles to the east of the Kildin Island North Light (Severni Kildinski light – Kildin Island being a short distance to the north-east of the Kola Inlet’s entrance), to order that a torpedo should be fired at the convoy (see Note 6 for location).6 It struck amidships on the port side of the American Liberty ship Horace Bushnell, the first freighter in the port column, and exploded in her engine room killing five men, but sparing the lives of the other 63 men in the ship.7

  Water gushed into both the engine room and No. 3 hold through the 35 by 25 foot hole in her hull, but after appearing to be going down rapidly by the stern, the ship steadied and she was eventually first towed and then beached.8

  But the removal of two of the six convoy escorts guarding the front of the convoy, as it continued on its westward path, to stand in for destroyers diverted to react to the threat posed by the U-boat which had targeted Horace Bushnell, together with the moving away of two more escorts to follow up another U-boat contact, left JW65 dangerously exposed.9

  Taking advantage of the resulting lacuna, when at around 11.10 a.m. that morning JW65 was a few miles to the north-west of the Kildin Island North Light, U-968’s Oberleutnant Otto Westphalen, whose torpedoings had created such mayhem during the lead up to RA64 (see Chapter 42), gave the order to fire one of his vessel’s torpedoes. The crew in the sloop Lapwing, the starboard escort at the front of the convoy, were to be the unfortunate sailors on the receiving end.10

  As had happened with Horace Bushnell, the torpedo hit her amidships. However on this occasion, the effects of the torpedo which slammed into Lapwing’s starboard side but which also holed her port side, were devastating. So violent was the explosion, that a sailor watching from the corvette Allington Castle, about a mile and a half away on Lapwing’s port beam, later reported: ‘As the torpedo hit, I heard a thud. I saw steam or smoke rising up as high as the ship’s mast. When the steam cleared away, I saw a hole in the port side in the centre of the ship.’11

  Lapwing’s Lieutenant Ian Leitch, who was at the time of the explosion in the sloop’s plotting room on the after end of the bridge, later recalled how it ‘threw us off our feet and wrecked the… plot’.

  Even worse, as he reported: ‘the door of the compartment jammed, and… it was some minutes before the attention of those on the bridge could be attracted… A. B. Birtwhistle kicked the panels of the door in from outside and let us out’.

  It was lucky he was released when he was. When he looked over the side of the ship, he saw that she was settling quickly. As he reported later: ‘Her back was broken, and there was a large hole torn in the upper deck, starboard side, abreast the funnel… I considered it unlikely that the ship would remain afloat for more than a few minutes…

  ‘I said… [to] Surgeon Lieutenant Wilson [who] was on the bridge: “Where is the Captain?” He replied: “He has been knocked out. I am just going to attend to him.” I then saw the Captain lying unconscious on the port side of the bridge under the chart table.’

  In his report Leitch then described how he reacted: ‘Some ratings on B gun deck were cutting free a flotanet from the starboard guard rails, but there appeared insufficient life-saving equipment for the large number of ratings, about one hundred, which had mustered on the forecastle. I shouted to them to cut everything adrift that would float off, such as the whaler’s gear, which was slung overhead on the Bofors gun platform support.’

  As he descended to the upper deck, he heard ominous sounds: ‘loud breaking up noises [that] could be heard from the region of the boiler room’. Evidently he was not alone in thinking that the time had come to abandon ship: ‘I saw that the ratings forward were starting to jump over the side as the ship was now settling rapidly, and listing heavily to starboard,’ he reported, continuing: ‘I assisted [the injured] Sub Lieutenant Baldwin through the guard rails into the water, and then followed myself. A few seconds later, the ship broke in half. The forward part capsized to starboard, and the after part floated vertically stern uppermost. As I swam clear to avoid being fouled by the mast and rigging, I saw the Captain holding on to the port side of the bridge as it turned over, and then drop clear into the water.’12

  All this was unfolding in plain sight of the men in the corvette Allington Castle, who were looking on at what for them was a terrifying series of events. What was to stop the U-boat making their ship its next victim? Long after the war, the corvette’s Bill Bridges, who at the time had been 19 years old, could still recall how the torpedoing of Lapwing prompted him to inflate his life jacket. ‘I could see men sliding down the deck – mostly from the stern part – as she broke in half,’ he told me when I caught up with him many years after the event.

  Because there are few accounts by participants, it is impossible to gauge how many of those whom Bridges saw falling made it to safety. One can only report the little that is known. ‘I found my inflatable lifebelt gave ample buoyancy,’ Lieutenant Leitch wrote in his report. ‘There was also a vast amount of floating wreckage such as planks, danbuoys, floats and cork life jackets to help support one, although oil fuel made it difficult to grasp them. I clung to a wooden plank, but later transferred to a flotanet attached to a fully manned Carley float, whose occupants were singing cheerfully, and appeared admirably confident of being rescued.’

  They certainly needed robust spirits, although the report by Allington Castle’s Lieutenant Commander Phillips Read states that the sea temperature was a life-saving 3° C, much warmer than the air temperature which was -1 °C.13

  ‘Snow then began to fall,’ Leitch’s report continues, ‘and… [some time later] I found myself drifting under Allington Castle’s starboard quarter, but cannot recollect anything after this until I found myself being stripped and cleaned on board her in the seaman’s bathroom.’14

  In a book published after the war, Ian Leitch stated that his report ‘more or less tells the sad story. From a ship’s company of 220, there were [just] 60 survivors.’ The latter included Lapwing’s captain Commander Edward Hulton.15

  The fallout from this second torpedoing, which led to more ships being diverted from convoy protection to rescue duties, further reduced the number of escorts with the bulk of JW65. Some escorts were still engaged in the task of rescuing men from Lapwing, when at 12.15 p.m. that same day, while the convoy’s ships were proceeding in two columns in order to ease their eventual entry into the inlet, the American Liberty ship Thomas Donaldson was also torpedoed by U-968.16 At the time, the convoy was around three miles north-west of the Kildin Island North Light.17

  The torpedo exploded after hitting Thomas Donaldson’s starboard side beside her engine room, killing all three men on duty there, who either died instantaneously, or they drowned when the compartment flooded. But apart from three other members of the crew who were badly injured as a result of the blast (so badly in one case that the wounded man subsequently died), the remaining men on board were not harmed, and were able to abandon ship. Once again an attempt was made to tow the ship, but it had to be aborted when the ship sank.18

  Losing a second fully laden ship so close to the planned destination seems at first sight to have highlighted the fragility of the Arctic convoy system when coming up against groups of U-boats whose crews knew the merchant ships’ route. However, those who feared that Germans in the Arctic were about to make a comeback would have to eat their words. The remaining JW65 vessels made it into the Kola Inlet safely, and everything that had gone wrong with JW65, went right with the returning convoy, RA65.

  The 10th Cruiser Squadron’s Vice Admiral Dalrymple-Hamilton was able to have the merchant ships and escorts constituting the Kola Inlet section of RA65 proceed out of the inlet during the night of 23–24 March 1945 without losing a single vessel. Because the U-boat commanders had no idea there was a newly mine-swept channel that went north-east from the inlet’s entrance rather than from west to east like the one used previously, the merchant ships and escorts alike were able to escape up it without being noticed let alone attacked. Their unimpeded progress was assisted by the merchant ships passing Toros Island, on the western side of the inlet’s exit (see Map 23), at midnight, a departure time that was unprecedented.

  The escape was also helped on its way by four destroyers being sent as decoys, shortly before the convoy emerged from the inlet, down what the Vice Admiral designated the ‘standard route’, which ran from the mouth of the inlet towards the east, where so much damage had been done by the U-boats on 20 March. These destroyers made their presence known by dropping depth charges and firing starshell, before retracing their steps and then catching up with the convoy proper.19

  The convoy’s escape was also made easier because the number of ships passing up the escape route was reduced thanks to the decision to rendezvous with the White Sea feeder convoy after the U-boats had been evaded. The ships in RA65 (3 tankers and 23 other merchant ships) went on to reach their various destinations without loss.20

  Although as far as the Allies were concerned that was a blessing, one wonders whether the success of the ruse that had been played so artfully during RA65, a ruse that could not be employed again with the same effect, created unrealistic expectations concerning future operations. Those who suffered as a result of the subsequent decision to sail another pair of Arctic convoys could rightly question whether a judicious cost-benefit analysis was done before the merchant ships and escorts set out. Had such an analysis been carried out without political expediency being included in the mix, it is more than likely that the convoys would have been halted by this time. The fact that they were no longer a necessity on purely military grounds was being openly discussed by Churchill with other members of his war cabinet by the end of March 1945.

  Admittedly the 26 protected ships within the east-going JW66, which sailed from the Clyde on the night of 16–17 April 1945, guarded by an equivalent escort to that used in the previous east-going convoy, also arrived at their various north Russian destinations without loss.21 The naval force for this, the first part of Operation Roundel (the protection of JW66 and RA66), consisted of 2 carriers, an anti-aircraft ship, 9 destroyers and 2 escort groups utilizing a sloop, 7 corvettes and 5 frigates. 16 submarine chasers manned by Russians also accompanied the convoy, and 6 Russian destroyers played their part at the end of the voyage, escorting the White Sea portion of the convoy after it split off from the ships bound for the Kola Inlet.22 But the 14 U-boats which had assembled outside the Kola Inlet prior to the departure of the west-going RA66 were to highlight the unavoidable dangers still lurking there.23

  These dangers do not appear to have been much affected by the strategems employed by the 10th Cruiser Squadron’s Rear Admiral Angus Cunninghame Graham, the Operation Roundel escort commander. Two days before the convoy departed, he deployed what he called a ‘feint’. This involved the Russians switching on the coastal navigation lights, wireless beacons being operated, and depth charges being dropped by small craft. He hoped that by doing this, he would simulate the sailing of the convoy two nights before it really sailed, and that this would ‘mislead and tire any U-boats present’.24

  Then during the afternoon and early evening of 29 April 1945, just hours before the convoy proper sailed, he had the eight warships of the 7th Escort Group and the five frigates of 19th Escort Group sweep the area through which RA66 would pass later that night. While the 19th Escort Group frigates were in a long line sweeping northward, a U-boat was detected at around 7 p.m. between Kildin Island and Syet Navalok (at the head of the western side of the entrance to the Kola Inlet) by an asdic operator in the frigate Loch Shin. After this U-boat was blasted to the surface by the pattern of Squid fired from Loch Shin, and hit by shells and bullets emanating from the guns in Loch Shin and in two other British warships, it hovered, vertical, with 30 feet of bow showing, before sinking back under the water stern first. Answers elicited from the 14 survivors it left behind told their rescuers the sunk vessel was U-307 (see Note 25 for location).25

  But what initially appeared to be a victory for the Allies turned out to be pyrrhic. ‘No sooner had the furore died down,’ wrote G. A. Roy, the 20-year-old gunner who operated the port side Oerlikon aft of the bridge in Goodall, the 19th Escort Group’s frigate tasked with sweeping northward at the left of the line, ‘[than]… I heard the yardarm pulleys working. I looked up and I saw the black flag flying. I remember thinking “Christ, another ping. They must be thick around here.”… Then… there was a terrific flash followed by flying debris. Something big slammed into my gun shield… knocking the magazine… off the gun… I was left hanging by the straps, spitting blood due to a rap on the head… My mate was lying beside the gun platform, his head missing… Looking at the funnel I could see the carnage… What had been the bridge [was high] on the funnel… Bodies and body parts [were] lying about the funnel deck.’26

  Like many in Goodall directly impacted by the blast, Roy had not even heard what his shipmate Freddie Peeters described as the ‘almighty explosion’ – which according to official reports compiled later occurred at around 7.35 p.m. (29 April).27 Such an eruption is par for the course when as in this case a torpedo hits a ship beside the magazine under its main armament. The torpedo struck Goodall beside the magazine for A and B guns. The sound of the resulting blast was for some literally deafening.

  Peeters, who like many of the survivors in Goodall was knocked onto the deck by the pressure waves and the violent shuddering of the ship as the torpedo exploded, only lived to tell his tale thanks to a stroke of good fortune. He had minutes earlier exited Goodall’s wheelhouse, and climbed down onto the top deck. His first observation on picking himself up and looking around, dazed, was: ‘half the ship was missing’.28 As Goodall’s first lieutenant, James Dallaway, would subsequently confirm: ‘There was nothing of the fo’c’sle left… The bridge had turned right over on top of the funnel and midship Oerlikon gun.’29

  The following extract from Dallaway’s official report explains how he came to take charge of the ship: ‘At [the]… time [when the torpedo hit], the Captain was on the bridge… After the explosion, no trace of… the Captain could be seen… I presume[d] that he was lost.’30