Blitz Kids, page 37
At the mine in Silesian that was both home and workplace for John Norman, the conditions did not improve as the war progressed. The prisoners continued to live in fear and suffered continual deprivation. Every mouthful of food was savoured and every moment of rest was enjoyed. Anything was better than the long hours spent underground. Life as a coal miner was dirty and dangerous, as he found to his cost. One day, he reached up to hang his lamp on an overhead wire, not realizing it was a live wire, part of the electrical system used to haul the coal wagons. With the electrical current surging through his body, the teenager was unable to let go. Thinking quickly, one of his fellow prisoners lashed out at his hand, releasing his grip. Free from the current, he was thrown several yards along the tunnel. He was carried from the mine and, with his hand burned, swollen and bruised, was unable to work for two weeks.
In the winter of 1944 the conditions for prisoners grew increasingly intolerable. At Milag Nord Leslie McDermott-Brown recorded his experiences in his diary. In January 1945 he wrote: ‘Cold and miserable, wood gang not functioning, making wood issues scarce. German food rations have been cut again and Red Cross parcels issued fortnightly.’ A few days later the American sailors were allowed to leave the camp and a number of the sick were repatriated, as Leslie noted: ‘This has an even more depressing effect on the camp.’17 The youngster grew sickened by the rumours – all of which seemed to promise a swift return home. With thick snow on the ground, the camp was a miserable place. It was not until the end of January that they received their Christmas parcels. Leslie noticed how few of the prisoners ventured outside. Instead, they stayed indoors huddled around the meagre fires in their stoves. Even when the fires were left unlit, due to fuel shortages, they still crowded around them. With the fields frozen and covered in snow, there was no work on the farms and thus no opportunity for the prisoners to trade with the local farmers.
By the middle of February the food shortages had got so great that the prisoners went without food in the evenings. Cigarettes were running short and power shortages meant there were no lights in the huts during the dull winter’s afternoons. Worst of all, there was no coal for heating and they were forced to burn damp wood in the stoves. At the start of March the only good news was that American Red Cross parcels had arrived and thus the parcel ration increased to one per man, per week. The effect of parcels was that prisoners started smiling again. As Leslie noted, when parcels arrived it became impossible to see across the room for smoke.
By early April the tension had increased and he wrote in his diary, ‘I wish to hell the troops were here … my nerves are in a terrible state.’ Each entry to his diary emphasized how desperate the prisoners at Milag Nord were becoming:
something I can’t explain at present predominates over the Lager. Everybody is just watching, waiting, listening but nothing happens. It seems like the calm before the storm I wonder? What lies ahead we would like to know … It’s torture waiting on them coming.
As the Allies advanced ever closer, Leslie was relieved to hear towns to the west being hit by artillery fire and towns to the east being bombed: ‘Hell, I wish they’d hurry up and get here.’18
Notes
1. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
2. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
3. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
4. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
5. Paul McMillan, ‘This soldier panicked and ran. The German soldier shot and killed him. I had never seen anybody die. I was just 14’, Evening Chronicle (20 June 2006).
6. McMillan, ‘This soldier panicked and ran’.
7. James Diffley, ‘Justice Looms at Last’, Evening Chronicle (7 March 2006).
8. Imperial War Museum archive: Captain F. W. Bailey (95/35/1).
9. The Prisoner of War. The Official Journal of the Prisoners of War Department of the Red Cross and St John War Organisation, 2: 16 (August 1943).
10. The Prisoner of War. The Official Journal of the Prisoners of War Department of the Red Cross and St John War Organisation, 2: 15 (July 1943).
11. Rob Kennedy, ‘The commandant hated us like we were poison. If anyone didn’t work, he punished them’, Evening Chronicle (12 January 2006).
12. ‘A tide of memories’, Journal (27 October 2005).
13. McMillan, ‘This soldier panicked and ran’.
14. Mel Mason, ‘My teenage years in a prisoner of war camp’, Northern Echo (1 March 1996).
15. The Prisoner of War. The Official Journal of the Prisoners of War Department of the Red Cross and St John War Organisation, 2: 25 (May 1944); 1: 12 (April 1943).
16. ‘I was 15 and thrown into the Jap factory of death’, Daily Record (14 August 1995).
17. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
18. Imperial War Museum archive: Leslie McDermott-Brown.
CHAPTER 16
A Boy’s Life on the Ocean Wave
‘I got in the water, but she was going down. The suction was pulling me back.’
Seventeen-year-old Albert Riddle, HMS Prince of Wales
Right from the outbreak of war, the youth of the Royal Navy were in the front line. From the Battle of the River Plate to the Dunkirk evacuation and from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, boys as young as sixteen played their part in the war at sea. The terrible losses on HMS Royal Oak were only the beginning of what was to be a violent and dangerous war for the boys of the Royal Navy. Every major maritime operation involved boys. When HMS Gloucester was sunk during the evacuation of Crete in 1941, 44 boy sailors were among the 700 casualties.
War meant that youngsters who had joined up for the peacetime Navy had to suddenly adapt to the pressures of combat. All felt this pressure, but few were honest in admitting the intolerable strain it created. One who did was William MacFarlane Crawford. Aged seventeen, he was among the crew HMS Hood when she sailed from Rosyth in March 1941. Since 1939 he had seen plenty of action, but a brief leave in Edinburgh had convinced him he did not want to return to sea. On the day they departed, he wrote to his mother: ‘It took me all my time not to cry as we came down the river … God knows how much I didn’t want to go back today, Mum.’ He even asked that she write to the Admiralty to see if a position on shore could be arranged for him: ‘I don’t suppose it will do any good, but it might … Don’t pay much attention to the letter, Mum, I’m just getting things off my chest, but everything is true. I’ll get over this rotten feeling through time, I guess. But it’s hit me hard this time.’
The following day he wrote another letter: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I feel sick, tired and in every way fed up.’ He even admitted he had considered going absent and not joining ship: ‘The first chance I get, Mum, I am leaving for good, as I honestly feel yesterday something died inside me, and now I don’t care much about anything … I feel I’ll go nuts if this carries on much longer.’ A third letter revealed the sense of homesickness he endured onboard: ‘I always feel like crying, Mum, and there is a permanent lump in my throat.’ Poignantly, he asked his mother to make sure his little brother did not try to volunteer for the Royal Navy. Three days later he wrote a final letter home: ‘We haven’t been away very long, but we have had some tense times since I left. And now that Germany has started sending her warships out, there looks as if there will be action for the fleet soon. Anyway, the sooner we get them the better.’1
Two months later HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck. There were only three survivors – William Crawford was not among them. It was the Royal Navy’s most infamous sinking of the entire war and cost the lives of numerous boys. Of the three survivors, Ted Briggs was a former ‘boy’ who had joined the Navy aged fifteen. When the Hood was sunk, he had just reached his eighteenth birthday. As he struggled to remove heavy clothing, a surge of water dragged him under. Resigned to death, he was suddenly hit by a pocket of escaping air that propelled him to the surface. As he emerged, Briggs looked up to see the bows of the Hood slipping beneath the water.
Another survivor of the disaster was William Dundas, a sixteen year old who had joined the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1937 at the age of thirteen. When the Hood was sunk he was serving as a midshipman and was stationed on the compass bridge. As the Hood slipped beneath the water, William kicked out a window to escape. As she went down, he too was somehow carried away by a blast of escaping air and blown to the surface, from where he was able to swim to safety.
Adrift amidst the floating wreckage, he managed to reach a small floating raft and dragged himself aboard. Soon he found two others had also boarded rafts. All three attempted to keep together as they watched the battle continue, seeing HMS Prince of Wales steaming past. Adrift in the icy waters of the Atlantic, William helped his fellow survivors, singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, keeping them awake in the freezing conditions. After two hours, and with the oil-soaked, frozen sailors all but giving up hope, and two of them suffering from hypothermia, the destroyer HMS Electra appeared and pulled them aboard.
In total 1,415 sailors had perished with the Hood. Of these, more than fifty were aged seventeen, whilst an additional seventeen boys were aged just sixteen. They were all boys who had volunteered for the Royal Navy and were still some time away from being eligible for conscription. The youngest victim was sixteen-year-old Thomas ‘Bernie’ Sammars, born in Hampshire in 1925. The Hood was his first, and last, ship.
With the Hood lost, it was the turn of other ships to join in the pursuit of the Bismarck. Next to engage the German warships was the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Prince of Wales. As she searched for the Bismarck, sixteen-year-old Albert Riddle had to fight against his seasickness. At least he was out in the open where the fresh air helped settle his queasy stomach. As both Albert and his officers knew, he was useless below decks, where every movement sent him reeling. So he had been posted to the air defence platform where, along with other boys, he scanned the horizon with binoculars, in search of enemy warships, submarines and aircraft.
The Prince of Wales had thrown itself into battle, opening fire on the Bismarck, yet now had become the target for both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. The end of the sea battle came in an instant. With astounding accuracy, a fifteen-inch shell struck her bridge, exploding as it passed out the far side. On the air defence platform, just above the bridge, young Albert Riddle was standing beside Lt Esmond Knight. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been greater: the sixteen-year-old boy who had gone straight into the Royal Navy, and the thirty-five-year-old actor, a star of stage and screen who had volunteered for the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war. The noise and heat of the shell was something Albert was never able to forget: ‘Esmond Knight was my officer, he was in charge of all the lookouts. He was standing just behind me. This shell went between us – just inches away – and blinded him.’ The shell exploded beneath them on the bridge.
Albert went quickly down to the bridge to see if he could help. He was confronted by a scene of absolute carnage: ‘Captain Leach was a wonderful man. He was the only one left standing. He and the gunnery officer were the only two who survived.’ The youngster looked at the rest of the men on the bridge: ‘They were blown to bloody smithereens. It was a terrible shock. It’s not a thing I’ve ever talked about. These people were absolutely blown to bits.’ They had not suffered the type of clean death so often portrayed in the films of the period: ‘The voice pipes, leading down to the engine room, were full of flesh and blood – bits of people’s bodies – there was blood all over the floor.’ Despite the carnage, the captain remained calm: ‘I can still see Leach now, he said, “Is there anybody who can stomach cleaning this up?” He was looking for volunteers. I was quite happy with it. It didn’t sicken me. I just got cracking. Some people couldn’t do it. I was always fine with that sort of thing.’ Looking back nearly seventy years later, Albert was able to explain why, despite his youth, he had been able to help clear up the shattered corpses: ‘I think it was coming from a farm, I was more used to the idea of blood and mess. I used to help sheep give birth, or help the horse when she was foaling.’ The shell had killed fourteen seamen, with two of the casualties just seventeen years old.
Having narrowly escaped injury, for Albert Riddle the war continued, but it did not get any better. In August 1941, the Prince of Wales took the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, to Newfoundland where he met with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. With Albert having celebrated his seventeenth birthday, they then escorted a convoy from Gibraltar to Malta. In October the orders came for the Prince of Wales and the Repulse to head to Singapore. The intention was that the presence of the ships would deter the Japanese from attacking Malaya and the East Indies. What had seemed sensible on paper soon turned into a disaster. As Albert Riddle recalled: ‘They told us the Prince of Wales was unsinkable. The Japanese soon put an end to that myth!’
On 10 December 1941, as the ship set out to intercept the Japanese fleet, it came under attack. It was a tremendous shock for the crew; they had done battle with two of Germany’s most powerful warships, but the attack by Japanese bombers was, as Albert Riddle recalled: ‘Intense. By Christ, you wouldn’t believe it. I saw torpedo tracks in the water and I could see the planes in the sky.’ Albert was lucky; as they went to action stations he took up his position in one of the 5.25-inch gun turrets. This meant he was at deck level, with the door leading into the turret directly from the deck. He watched others going below decks: ‘All the hatches and doors are closed and locked. That’s it, you are down there and you are not coming up. If the ship goes, you go with it.’ He knew exactly why he had been selected to man one of the upper turrets: since he was still so badly seasick, he needed to be somewhere with more air and where he might have a chance to see the horizon.
Whilst this was one of the mightiest ships in the Royal Navy, there was little the crew could do after the first torpedo struck:
I heard the explosion – it would have been even worse below, they would have known they were trapped down there. That’s a terrible thing. It was the only time I was bloody glad to be seasick. I can laugh about it now, but there was no laughing about it then.
What Albert did not know was that the torpedo had hit in the worst possible place: ‘They did the thing that buggered us completely, they hit us in the screws [the propellers].’ No longer able to steer, without light, without power to many of its turrets and without power for many of the pumps, the Prince of Wales was all but helpless. Though her anti-aircraft guns kept firing, they were in a hopeless situation.
With no idea of how bad the damage was, Albert kept working:
All I knew was the sound of the gun, and the recoil and the stench of the cordite. I couldn’t see what was happening outside. You hadn’t got time to think. I was in the turret with eight men, all handling the shells. We were trying to keep the lifts working. The ammo was being fed from the magazines, into the hoists. They came to us vertically, then into the breech. When the ship started to list, the shells were toppling over – that’s when it gets dangerous. The mechanics eventually went wrong, so we had to handle the shells.
As the bombers kept up the attack, and more torpedoes struck, the ship began to sink, listing to port: ‘We had finished firing by then, we couldn’t do anything at all, the electrics had gone.’ With the anti-aircraft guns useless, and the fate of the ship sealed, Albert listened as Captain Leach – an officer for whom he had great admiration – gave the order to abandon ship, then said a prayer: ‘Lord, I shall be very busy this day and may forget thee, but do not thou forget me.’ It didn’t offer Albert much comfort: ‘It frightened the life out of us. It sounded like we were already on the seabed.’
Realizing it was time to leave, Albert stepped out on to the deck. He got a sudden shock: ‘The water was coming over the guard rails. I thought, this isn’t going to last much longer.’ Strangely, he felt little fear: ‘All I had to do was to step off into the water.’ However, what concerned him was that he had always been instructed that he should leave a sinking ship on the opposite side to the one that was going down. The thinking was that the undertow would be worse on the side that went down first. However, to leave from the opposite side would mean heading up the deck.
By now the situation was getting desperate: ‘A bomb went through close to me, I could feel the heat from the bloody thing. I can’t believe I was so lucky.’ However, the blast caught him:
My clothes were all blown off me. I was as naked as a jaybird. All I was wearing were white overalls, I had nothing on underneath. It was so hot in the turret, so I just had the overalls and white gloves and the anti-flash helmet. After the blast, they were tattered, so couldn’t swim in them.
Casting off the remnants of his overalls, he prepared to enter the water. There was something else to do first: ‘I gave my lifebelt to a stoker who came up on deck, he’d been injured by steam. I wasn’t thinking I’d need it as much as him.’ It was whilst waiting to leave the ship that Albert encountered another boy: ‘It was one the twins, James and Robert Young. I wanted him to leave, but he wouldn’t go because his brother was injured. So he stayed and they were both lost.’
