Secret Weapons of World War II, page 11
Dejected at this anti-climax, Cooke and Horsley prepared to test the second projector, amidships on the port side. This increased their unpopularity, a huge balk of timber being hurled right across the deck and through one of the lifeboats! But it was not until they tried the third and last projector that they struck really serious trouble. When Cooke pressed the firing switch the rocket remained inert on the rails. A hang-fire was what they had dreaded all along, and, as nothing was known about rendering the fuse safe once the complicated mechanism had become alive, the next step baffled them. At any moment the shell might explode, causing casualties and damage to every one and everything in the vicinity.
While they stood over the Harvey, wondering what the first move was, a cheerful voice boomed, “Can I give you an ‘and, sir?” and an immense Chief Gunner’s Mate appeared.
“We’ve got a hang-fire,” said Cooke.
“You don’t want to go worrying abaht that, sir,” said the C.G.M. with massive assurance. “I’m a bit of an expert on ‘ang-fires. ‘Ad two of them in the Nelson. If she ‘asn’t gone off thirty minutes from now we’ll pitch ‘er over the side.”
The round was eventually ditched without further mishap, but by this time the Captain had had more than enough of the Harvey Projector and its luckless operators. Ordering a boat to be lowered, he roared, “Put those two officers ashore,” and with that Cooke and Horsley, unceremoniously dumped on the nearest beach, were left to find their way back to Belfast. It certainly had been an interesting day!
The spring of 1941 brought a sharp increase in shipping losses. Enemy aircraft alone sank more than half a million tons — mostly in coastal waters — and the Harvey did not have to wait long for its baptism in action. Menhinick had fitted the Projector into an ocean boarding vessel, H.M.S. Patia, and on the evening of Sunday, April 27, he sailed in her on her maiden voyage in naval service.
When she left South Shields Patia headed north, and by dusk she was approaching the Fame Islands. There had been no warning of enemy air activity, and Menhinick was in the wardroom when he heard a sudden stampede on the deck above and, almost simultaneously, a loud roar of engines and the whistle of bombs. In the gathering darkness no one saw the Heinkel as it came in at wave-top height, and Patia shuddered as one bomb scored a near-miss on the port bow.
Patia’s gunners were waiting for it when the second attack came, but the aircraft, flying well below mast-head height, offered a difficult target. Until it was almost on the ship they could not depress their weapons sufficiently to engage the plane. The barrage from the ship appeared to disconcert the bomb-aimer, however, and Menhinick, manning his Harvey on the starboard side, saw two more bombs fall harmlessly.
The Heinkel then went away in a wide circle and came back, much more slowly, from dead astern, raking the decks with machine and cannon-gun fire, and causing heavy casualties. Among them were several of Menhinick’s seamen gunners, and their places for the fourth and final attack were taken by cooks and stewards.
Circling again, the Heinkel made its run in from the port quarter, and dropped a stick of three bombs very close together. One fell right under Patia’s stern; one hit amidships; and the third was a near-miss level with the bridge on the starboard side. The Heinkel’s machine-gun fire had already smashed the sights from the Harvey, but when the plane was only a hundred yards or so away Menhinick got a direct hit on its tail with one of his rocket shells. The bomber yawed violently, a bright flash of light blazed out from under the fuselage, and the plane came down on the water off Patia’s starboard bow.
By now, however, the ship herself was a shambles, and sinking fast. Weak from loss of blood — he had been shot in the neck — Menhinick crawled to a Carley Float, which was launched a shade too late, and was sucked down the funnel as the ship dived. The float bobbed free, but as it rose it struck the searchlight platform and the half-drowned men clinging to it were dragged under again. Miraculously enough, they were all still gripping it when the float finally surfaced, and they paddled away from the centre of the debris.
Not far from them they saw the vast shape of the Heinkel, lying on the water. The Germans were busy launching a rubber dinghy, and, noticing this, an elderly pensioner, Chief Petty Officer Prior, dropped off the float and swam towards them. The only weapon he had was a large pocket-knife, but when he reached them he brandished this fiercely, threatening to rip the rubber dinghy to shreds unless they let him climb in. He then ordered the wet and frightened Germans to throw their revolvers overboard, and informed them in lurid and unmistakable English that they were his prisoners!
In the bitter cold and darkness of the North Sea the hours that followed were a nightmare. On one Carley Float Patia’s captain and first-lieutenant died of exposure. Of the 18 men clinging to Menhinick’s float 12 froze to death, and when the French trawler Chassiron picked them up after six hours in the icy water another seaman died before they reached port. In all, 119 men of Patia’s complement lost their lives. The Harvey had accounted for its first enemy aircraft, but the bitter cost of this lone action in the North Sea was yet another reminder of the ‘price of Admiralty.’
8
CABLES IN THE SKY
SINCE the departure of Admiral Somerville the Wheezers and Dodgers had been working virtually on their own, without any powerful advocate to help them in their battles. Considering their lowly status, they had already achieved a surprising amount, but Goodeve was well aware that they had roused opposition in certain quarters.
Hardly had the team been formed before moves were afoot to restrict its activities, and between the new, unorthodox, and rapidly expanding research section on the one hand and various permanent bodies connected with gunnery, naval construction, and the electrical side of the Navy on the other there was continual friction.
This was not altogether surprising. The machine, rather than any individual, was to blame.
As in any other large organization, the smooth running of the Admiralty depended on detailed delegation of responsibility, but whereas in a big commercial undertaking the efficiency of each self-contained unit is kept at a high pitch by the competition from rival firms there is not the same vital corrective factor in the life of a Service ministry. Indeed, one obvious safeguard which could easily be applied is actually suppressed by the insistence of the Treasury that there shall be no overlapping of responsibilities. Each department has its carefully circumscribed and jealously guarded sphere of influence. In that realm it is supreme.
The drawbacks of this system are plain. In commerce competition rapidly exposes the incorrect decision; a Service ministry, on the other hand, has not the same ready criteria by which decisions can be evaluated.
In such a carefully compartmented world the apparent freedom of the Wheezers and Dodgers to trespass on the preserves of all and sundry cut right across tradition. The very existence of the new research section was a potential irritant; if one of the permanent departments condemned an idea and it was subsequently taken up successfully by Goodeve’s team amour-propre was offended. Quite unwittingly some of the hustling young Reserve officers made matters worse by their initial ignorance of ‘Admiralty procedure.’ Haste was rarely appreciated if it entailed any short-circuiting of established routine, but in their anxiety to get on with the job in hand some of the newcomers barged straight ahead on what seemed to them the most logical course. All too often they ran full tilt into difficulties which longer experience of the working of the machine would have enabled them to avoid.
The chief source of friction lay with the Admiralty departments dwelling in inconvenient isolation at Bath. Partly for geographical reasons they often found themselves left right out of the picture until they were presented with a fait accompli in the shape of a new weapon or device suggested by the Wheezers and Dodgers at some hurriedly convened meeting in London where none of the Bath departments had been represented. The latter would then either have to accept it or instantly put forward alternative plans of their own. Not unnaturally they often felt that acceptance of a suggestion as it stood might well condemn them for not having thought of it earlier themselves. In other instances they might genuinely disagree with the proposed weapon or device from a technical point of view. If, however, they rejected the proposal altogether, and set to work to design a weapon of their own, much valuable time and money were liable to be needlessly wasted.
Early in 1941 several attempts were made to get the Inspectorate of Anti-aircraft Weapons and Devices abolished altogether, but Wright, the Director of Scientific Research, whose opinion naturally carried much weight, refused to support these moves. He realized that the need for getting things done at high speed almost inevitably meant offending some people.
Admiral Fraser, too, had good reason to know what Goodeve was achieving. It was suggested to him that the new organization should be disbanded and its officers distributed among other existing departments, but he stoutly resisted this plan. He valued Goodeve’s team as a separate entity, but he saw they needed greater authority. He therefore proposed to the First Sea Lord that the Wheezers and Dodgers — hitherto, in football parlance, little more than a side on the fringe of the Third Division in the Admiralty League trying daily to compete with the big guns of the departments in Division I — should themselves be raised to the status of a full-blown Admiralty department. After several attempts to find a suitable tide for a party whose interests covered the whole field of naval warfare some one suggested D.M.W.D., and they became the Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, with Captain G.O.C. Davies, R.N., a Gunnery specialist, as Director.
This was the happiest of choices. “Jock” Davies, a natural leader with an engaging personality and a flair for getting the best out of every one, had much sea experience behind him — he had fought at Jutland as a midshipman, and had been commander of the Nelson — and he knew the Admiralty organization backwards. He came to the new department from a short spell at the Ordnance Board, where he had been concerned with some of Lindemann’s rocket experiments, and he had taken a keen interest in Goodeve’s work on the anti-aircraft problems of the Merchant Navy.
Admiral Fraser knew this, and realized that Davies was just the man to smooth over many of the difficulties which had arisen in the Wheezers and Dodgers’ dealings with other Admiralty departments. When he took over his new duties in March 1941 Goodeve was formally appointed Deputy Director, and D.M.W.D. settled down, happy in the knowledge that they could now go ahead with their status fully recognized.
A few days later the Prime Minister’s concern over casualties to merchant ships led him to issue a special directive. “The Admiralty will have the first claim on all the short-range A.A. guns and other weapons they can mount upon suitable merchant ships plying in the danger area,” he ruled. In addition to the rocket weapons already undergoing trials, D.M.W.D. had for some time been working to adapt for sea service an ingenious Royal Air Force device called the Parachute and Cable — or P.A.C. — and soon their efforts brought forth success.
The name of Schermuly had been familiar to seamen for more than half a century. Old William Schermuly had invented the lifesaving rocket apparatus adopted by navies and merchant fleets throughout the world, and when the war came the firm’s long experience of explosives was put to full use by the Services. To their factory, hidden in a Surrey wood, came demands for all manner of devices, and one urgent need — explained to the three Schermuly sons now directing the destinies of this unusual family business — was for a form of airfield defence against low-flying aircraft.
The brothers quickly designed a powerful rocket which could carry a steel cable up to a height of 500 feet; on the end of the cable was a parachute.
By this means an aerodrome ringed with PA.C.’s could provide its own emergency ‘balloon barrage’ at the touch of a switch, and enemy pilots soon found that low-level raids brought a new hazard. At the height of the Battle of Britain one Dornier blew up over Kenley after its port wing had been torn clean off by a P.A.C.
In the Admiralty it was soon realized that the device might be a valuable deterrent at sea. Aircraft attacking a ship at masthead height could drop their bombs with deadly accuracy, but if they were forced to bomb from a greater height the results might be very different. Although the P.A.C. had never been tried out at sea, it seemed doubtful whether a pilot would be keen to hold on his course if he knew that at any moment he might become entangled with a mass of wire and the dragging deadweight of an open parachute. So it proved, but first D.M.W.D. had to tackle several interesting problems.
Two parachutes were used, one at each end of the cable, and in early trials on a Devon moor it was found that the bottom parachute often failed to open at the critical moment. This difficulty was overcome by the insertion of a special explosive link. The rocket had to be made completely waterproof, and some means had to be found of preventing the wire from kinking. A kink in the wire sometimes led to the cable breaking under sudden stress, but patient research showed that this could be cured if the shape of the canisters in which the wire lay coiled was altered.
It was a fascinating apparatus. To make the parachutes D.M.W.D. enlisted the aid of the soft-furnishing department of a well-known Oxford Street store, and, using linen and nylon cord, the firm produced a tremendously strong canopy. One of the parachutes pulled the wing right off an old Wellington which was lent to D.M.W.D. for trials, and later on a German aircraft which had the misfortune to pick up several P.A.C.’s at once was literally dragged to a standstill in mid-air.
At first Richardson took charge of the naval experiments, but after a while he handed over the work to James Close, a tall, genial young R.N.V.R. lieutenant with a Cambridge engineering degree. Close wore spectacles, but in spite of his indifferent eyesight he had somehow managed to wangle his way into the Navy as engineer of an ancient armed yacht which eventually fell to pieces off the coast of Scotland. Development of the P.A.C. was his first task when he joined the department. His duties often took him to the Schermuly factory, and there he learnt something of the art of filling (or ‘stemming’) the rockets. This highly skilled job was carried out by men working in separate cubicles with shields of armour plate between the rocket and the stemmer. Peering through a thick glass slit above the armour, they would pour in the black powder, cupful by cupful, and tamp it down with small boxwood mallets. Occasionally there were moments of high drama. A rocket would catch fire, and the stemmers would dart from their armour-plated cubicles like greyhounds from a trap!
When the first P.A.C.’s were fitted to merchant ships there was the inevitable tussle before the Admiralty could persuade anyone to give them a proper trial in action. Perhaps it was not surprising that in the sudden moment of attack first thoughts went to manning whatever guns the ship had; the mysterious rocket apparatus was only remembered when it was too late.
By the spring of 1941, however, encouraging reports began to come in. The mate of one small ship in convoy, the Fireglow, was standing near the windward P.A.C. when a heavy air attack developed. Seeing one German bomber diving at the Fireglow from dead ahead, he pulled the lanyard, and up soared the cable. A large section of the plane’s wing was dragged off by the wire, and the aircraft came down in the sea.
Skipper Soames, of the Milford Queen, had another successful encounter, with a Dormer 17. His guns had hit the bomber on its approach run, and when the P.A.C. was fired it wrapped itself firmly round the Dormer’s wing. Losing height rapidly, the aircraft disappeared into the haze, and a few seconds later the Milford Queen’s crew heard a loud explosion. Skipper Soames was certain that his P.A.C. had destroyed the attacker.
The success of the device depended largely on the operator’s judgment. It was no use waiting until the aircraft was right over the ship. When the S.S. Stanlake was attacked by a Heinkel her captain was able to estimate its distance very accurately in the bright moonlight, and, putting his helm hard over, he fired a P.A.C. when the plane was still several hundred yards off.
By the time the parachute opened the Heinkel was right on to the cable. “I had seen our bullets hitting the forepart of the bomber with little effect,” he said, when he was interrogated later, “but after I fired my P.A.C. the Heinkel sheered violently, and I thought he was going to carry my bridge away. For a moment the pilot seemed to regain control, but when he was about 900 yards from us, and hidden in the darkness, we heard his engines suddenly stop dead.”
Soon significant evidence began to filter from the German side. An enemy bomber pilot on leave was overheard by one of our agents discussing the hazards he had to face. “It’s no joke, I can tell you,” he complained. “The English are shooting up these spirals from their ships, and you’re lucky to get home at all with a thing like that wound round your airscrew.” The captured crew of a Junkers 88 were interrogated. They had been carrying out regular shipping reconnaissance flights, and from one of these, off the East Coast, they struggled back to their base with a huge gash in one wing, between the engine nacelle and the fuselage. “We could not understand it. It looked as if it had been caused by a wire attached to a rocket,” said their captain.
Greatly encouraged, the department went to work on larger and more lethal versions of the Parachute and Cable. One, ominously entitled the “Fast Aerial Mine,” had an explosive charge attached to the wire, and Dove, experimenting with an early model of this formidable contraption on Haldon Moor, in Devon, had a memorable misadventure. The parachute failed to open, and the mine, which was filled with a special coloured liquid, fell through the roof of a cottage, smothering the whole interior with a vivid pink dye.
Close also had some eventful experiences with an apparatus called “Type J,” which had a bigger parachute, a larger rocket than the standard P.A.C., and a 5-ton cable which the rocket could haul up to 600 feet. The trials of this device were carried out in a desolate area on the Somerset coast, but there was farmland near by. Type J fired with a brilliant flash, accompanied by a noise like vast sheets of calico being ripped apart, and this invariably stampeded horses and cattle for miles around. On one occasion it so startled two horses pulling a reaper that they broke into a full gallop with the cumbersome machine and charged a bank bordering the field. In due course the Director of Naval Accounts received a stiff bill for broken cutter blades, and this agricultural item was duly charged to scientific research!
