Overview of life overhead

AS BEFITS the centennial year of naval aviation, there has been a flurry of Fleet Air Arm-related books.
The latest to cross the desks of the Navy News team is the officially-endorsed history by Christopher Shores, 100 Years of British Naval Aviation (Haynes, £35 ISBN 978-1-84425-661-7).
The author is a former RAF man with four decades’ experience of writing about the history of aviation and has been a guide at the FAA Museum for the past ten years.
So he knows his stuff – and demonstrates it in an excellently- illustrated book which provides as good a cross-section of the deeds of naval fliers as you’ll find in a single volume.
The forerunner of the Fleet Air Arm, the Royal Naval Air Service, is often overlooked, or its life concertinaed, in general histories.
Nearly one fifth of Shores’ book is devoted to the first decade of naval flight – and it’s worth remembering the achievements of the RNAS (which is usually eclipsed by the Royal Flying Corps).
By the time it was swallowed up by the new RAF in April 1918, there were 100 RNAS aviators with the distinction ‘ace’, none more so than Canadian Raymond Collishaw, credited with more than 60 kills.
Two decades later the RN possessed the largest carrier force of any of the world’s navies (larger than either the USA or Japan), but Shores argues that 20 years of RAF control over naval aviation had stripped the RN of its core of fliers and aircraft which were obsolete or obsolescent, so its accomplishments in the first couple of years of WW2 are all the more impressive.
Indeed, the author devotes much time to the Mediterranean – Taranto, Matapan, Pedestal – but away from these ‘trademark battles’, the FAA was in harm’s way every day, such as May 8 1941 and the struggle for a convoy, Operation Tiger.
Nearly 300 tanks, plus 180 other vehicles and more than 50 Hurricanes were dispatched from Gibraltar to Alexandria to support the campaign in North Africa.
Two carriers, Formidable and Ark Royal, would provide air cover with Fairey Fulmars – a sluggish fighter which was just about a match for the Heinkel 111s it would face during three days of battle.
Tiger got through, but mauled – more than 230 tanks and 43 Hurricanes reached their destination – and at a price. Among those condemned to death in the Mediterranean skies was one of the leading FAA aces, S/Lt Philip Sparke, killed when he tried to close in on a Heinkel. Their wings touched, and German and Briton plunged into the sea.
Tiger is one of a myriad of operations, most lost to history, conducted by the Fleet Air Arm daily between 1939 and 1945. With the turn of each page of this book, the reader is reminded that naval aviators were in the thick of the fight – wherever that fight was.
This is a wonderfully-illustrated book – there are many photographs, among them a good number readers perhaps will not have seen before – and an excellent general introduction to the first century of naval flight.
If there’s a disappointment, it’s that the book rather breezes through the modern era of the Fleet Air Arm (the last 20 years are dealt with in under 12 pages).
The £35 price tag is a little steep, although shopping around on the web, you should be able to find a copy for a little over £20.

How the Navy gave birth to the bomber

IN THE opening months of the Great War, many things vexed the Admiralty.

The U-boat menace. The mines menace. The Zeppelin menace.

It didn’t know entirely how to deal with any of them: it largely abandoned the North Sea for the sanctuary of Scapa Flow and northern Ireland in the face of the U-boat especially.

But with the Zeppelin, Whitehall took the fight to the enemy.

Unable to destroy the German airships while airborne, the fledgling Royal Naval Air Service sought to destroy them on the ground.

It is these efforts which are the focus of former Royal Marine Ian Gardiner’s The Flatpack Bombers: The Royal Navy and the Zeppelin Menace (Pen & Sword, £19.99 ISBN 978-1-84884-071-3); the title comes from the fact that the aircraft were frequently shipped in boxes and assembled at airfields.

Gardiner focuses on three landmark episodes involving naval aviators in 1914: strikes at German airship sheds in Düsseldorf, Cuxhaven and Friedrichshafen.

The attacks on the hangars at Düsseldorf in September and October 1914 have been called the first strategic bombing raids.
The title more accurately applies to the Royal Naval Air Service’s lunge at the birthplace of the Zeppelin, the factory producing them at Friedrichshafen.

The bombers, four Avro 504s, were shipped in crates (marked in Cyrillic to fool any German agents) to Belfort in south-east France.

From there it was a 250-mile round trip over southern Germany to the Zeppelin works.

On November 21 1914, the bombers left, skirting the Black Forest, then following the waters of Lake Constance, possibly – and illegally – flying over neutral Switzerland at times, before striking at the factory amid a hail of anti-aircraft fire (long before it earned the nickname flak).

Agents’ reports and Allied newspaper accounts suggested that the 11 bombs dropped that day had wrecked one Zeppelin, blown up a hydrogen works and provoked tremendous panic in the small lake-side town. Only the latter was true.

As with most things in the early days of the Great War, the raids launched by naval aviators were a harbinger of things to come rather than ‘things now’. (The only truly tangible success was the destruction of LZ25 in its shed at Düsseldorf.)
“One can well imagine,” wrote Sqn Cdr Cecil Malone after the raid on Cuxhaven, “what might have been done had our seaplanes carried torpedoes.”

Within a year, naval aircraft would carry torpedoes into battle and within a generation they would cripple an entire fleet.
This is an excellent book, thoroughly researched (the author has taken the time to delve into German as well as British records) and captures the spirit of the age perfectly, without falling for contemporary propaganda canards.
Most of the efforts of these first aces were in vain, but they blazed a trail for all offensive action in the skies over land and sea.

Quite a legacy.

End of the Intrepid era

A CENTURY ago, bosses at Harland and Wolff told their official photographer to record the birth of the Titanic, cataloguing every milestone in the creation of the world’s greatest liner.

One hundred years later, George Heron has done the same in reverse. Not with Titanic (obviously – Ed), but with his former ship HMS Intrepid.

George, aka the Grumpy Old Matelot, spent nine years on the assault ship as a radio operator. She was his first ship, “the place where I grew up and learned about life”.

And as such she holds a very dear place in his heart, as evidenced in HMS Intrepid: Her Final Journey (privately published, £20), a photographic record of the ship’s break-up.

George and comrades in the Intrepid Association had tried to persuade the powers that be to save the ship as a museum piece – a final shot at the limelight in a career often eclipsed by her sister Fearless.

The plea fell on deaf ears, but undeterred he set about recording the final months of a ship which served the nation for more than 30 years.

The Falklands veteran was towed to Merseyside last autumn, where, in the words of Whitehall, “graceful recycled retirement” awaited her (of which only one word was accurate, and it wasn’t ‘graceful’ or ‘retirement’...).

Instead, George watched as “Intrepid slowly began to disappear while an increasing mound of debris began to build up in the dock bottom”.

His camera captured the diggers chopping away at the ship’s innards, steel cutters slicing up compartments, until the ship was no longer recognisable.

So this should be a sad book. The end of great ship and all that.

And to some degree it is.

But interspersed with images of the dying Intrepid are photographs of the living Intrepid, the ship’s company in war and peace, enjoying mess deck life, SODS operas, at sea with her sister Fearless, plus a fair smattering of memories from her sailors.

All, it seemed, loved their time aboard. “I had many happy times aboard Intrepid,” says Std Andy Goodman. “Each time I think back to those days a smile creeps over my face and I chuckle to myself.”

K for catastrophe

On the last evening of January 1918 Vice Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas, flying his flag in the 15in-gun-armed ‘large light cruiser’ Courageous, led to sea a ‘light cruiser force’ from the Firth of Forth to join with the main body of Admiral Beatty’s Grand Fleet for a major exercise in the North Sea.
This was no normal cruiser force but an innovative mix of battlecruisers, fast battleships and steam-powered fast fleet submarines, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.
Each submarine flotilla was led by an experienced submariner carried in a fast surface ship in an attempt to provide better command and control than was possible from the submarines themselves.
The 13th Flotilla was led by the specialist flotilla leader Ithuriel (half as big again as a contemporary destroyer) and the 12th by the ‘scout’ (ie small cruiser) Fearless. In between the flotillas was the 2nd Battle-Cruiser Squadron with the four oldest battle cruisers (their demotion to ‘light cruisers’ being significant). The three available Queen Elizabeths of the 5th Battle Squadron brought up the rear.
As so often with innovation, not all outcomes had been foreseen and the result was disaster. It was the usual World War 1 problem – the very advanced hardware was commanded and controlled by grossly inadequate ‘software’.
As the force deployed in darkness a small but significant difficulty might lead to events getting out of control. There was no radar or voice radio for instant situational awareness and command response, only coded wireless telegraphy that took many minutes to get through.
Things did go seriously wrong on this terrible night. First of all, the middle of the five submarines of the leading flotilla, K14, suffered a mysterious and short-lived steering failure and was hit by K22. The latter was something of a jinxed boat as she had sunk on her contractors trials to be raised and commissioned with a new number.
She was certainly partially lucky on this night as she was not fatally damaged and, in a second collision, suffered only a glancing blow from the battle cruiser Inflexible, as she passed on her way. K22 could well have been sunk.
Leading the 13th Flotilla, Cdr  Leir, a submariner known for both the high professional skills and scruffy personal habits of the submarine ‘trade’, now made a fatal but understandable decision that converted a mishap into a disaster.
He turned Ithuriel and his remaining submarines round to give assistance to the two boats in distress. As he crossed the path of the other submarine flotilla its leader Fearless sliced into K17 and sank her with the loss of 47 of her ships’ company. In the confusion two submarines of the 12th Flotilla, K6 and K4 collided, the latter being cut in half by the former, the wreckage being touched by K7 on the way down. Fifty-five men were lost from K4 and 104 men died in all.
The events were soon dubbed, ironically, ‘The Battle of May Island’. Cdr Leir was court martialled but, fairly, was exonerated from any negligence. Indeed, many of the officers involved rose to high rank in the service.
The whole affair could be put down to experience and the price one sometimes has to pay for the development of new tactical combinations.
It has, however usually been seen as another nail in the coffin of the reputation of the fast steam submarines of the ‘K’ class.
This is certainly the line taken by
N S Nash in his new book on the affair,
K Boat Catastrophe: Eight Ships and Five Collisions (Pen and Sword, £19.99 ISBN 978 1 84415 984 0).
He has had access, albeit apparently at second hand, to the Leir court martial records and his account does shed some light on what went on.
The rest of the book however leaves much to be desired. Including index, it only runs to 145 pages (plus a few blanks at the end).
Forty-two of these are, however taken up by an amazingly-badly-informed ‘Setting the Scene’ chapter which plays the old, discredited tune of the Royal Navy’s supposedly defective record of technological innovation.  
It is hard to take anything the book says at face value after this disastrous start. The author, apparently a soldier and a writer on military matters who lives overlooking the scene of the sad affair, has taken the advice of naval officers on some things but he has had little contact with naval historians either in person or in print.
The bibliography amounts to less than one page and would be thin for an undergraduate essay. Putting Wikipedia as a major source says more for the author’s honesty than it does for his scholarship.
I was tempted to feel rather sorry for the perpetrator of this hapless work until I came to the final appendix on the K-class boats.
It is full of factual and analytical errors but then crowns these by dismissing a fascinating defence of the K-class submarines and their role written in 1919 in the Naval Review by an officer clearly cognisant of the boats’ potential.
Having read it, I was able to understand why, as Norman Friedman had told me, the Americans had been very impressed by these fast and seaworthy submersibles.
The article also confirmed that many submariners disliked the K-class not only because of the real problems that were the price of their virtues.
They also disliked the whole idea of serving with the Fleet because of their natural cultural antipathy to “being ‘one of a crowd’ instead of having a little action alone and consequently reaping all the credit.”
The author dismisses this excellent, thoughtful and important piece of first hand analysis as “naïve” and its appearance in Naval Review as “breathtaking”. On what grounds he makes these extreme assertions is far from clear.
It is hard to see in his profile any reason why Nash should have the temerity to disagree with the professional views of someone who was clearly intimately aware, first hand and at the time, of the K-boats and their potential.
In many ways the book is summed up by its mis-spelling of ‘court marshal’ on the dust jacket. 

A second chance to live

ONLY the dead have seen the end of war.

The words of Plato remain as apposite for warriors today as they did two and a half millennia ago.

The pages of Navy News over the past couple of years have been peppered with the obituaries of Royal Marines killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan.

Rarely, however, have we featured the other casualties of war: the wounded, those maimed by mines and improvised explosives.

Mark Ormrod is a rare exception. He has appeared in the pages of Navy News. And most national newspapers. And on the telly.

Not by choice, the Royal Marine found himself thrust into the spotlight – thanks in part to a visit to Headley Court by Princes William and Harry last spring, a visit which received considerable media coverage.

Since then he’s attended a Bond film premiere, featured on the X-Factor, met pop stars, and raised a lot of money for charity.

The reason for his reluctant celebrity status? A Taleban bomb on Christmas Eve 2007 which deprived him of both legs and his right arm.

Much of his memoir Man Down (Transworld, £16.99 ISBN 978-0-593-06355-2) is devoted to that fateful day and the long road to recovery.

But it also offers a fairly rare insight into Bootneck life right at the very coalface.

So far, we’ve had a smattering of accounts of the Royal Marines’ actions in Helmand, but none from the down-and-dirty endlike this. And first-person books from the green beret ranks in Afghanistan are as rare as a snowflake in hell.

But aside from some visceral descriptions of combat, Man Down provides a good account of life as a trainee at CTCRM in Lympstone.

Mark Ormrod was studying for a career in business, until he watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. “Arnie gets to lead an elite squad through a jungle spunking the world’s supply of ammo while being chased by an invisible alien. Could happen.”

That prompted him to join the Army... until his dad persuaded him the Corps was the only force an Ormrod was going to serve in.

That was reinforced by the recruiter in Plymouth who showed him that life in the Royal Marines really was like a Schwarzenegger film. “It looked like one long adventure holiday.”

Oddly enough, it wasn’t...

Mark’s memoirs are not a great literary work. There’s a lot of choice Anglo-Saxon (but not gratuitously). There’s a lot of Bootneck speak (and a handy guide for non-Royals).

And above all there’s a lot of honesty, not least some dark emotions as the Royal began to grasp the enormity of his injuries.

He concedes thoughts of suicide after his first attempts to climb on to a sofa – a simple act for the able-bodied but one which left the disabled Royal feeling “as if I’d just been 12 rounds with Mike Tyson”.

Here was a man, one of just 16 on an initial course of 60 at Lympstone to earn the green beret, now “reduced to crawling across a floor on my arse inch-by-inch and having the fight of my life just to get on to a sofa”.

What is clear is that spirited though Mark Ormrod is, his daughter Kezia and especially his fiancée (now wife) Becky were instrumental to his physical and, above all, mental rehabilitation.

So too were the experts at Headley Court who provided the Royal with his artificial limbs (the ‘bionic legs’ – officially C-Legs – are £20K apiece; you plug them into the mains overnight “to juice up the batteries”) and helped him to walk again.

As did fellow amputees and other severely-injured Servicemen, not least squaddie Sam Cooper, left partially-paralysed and with impaired speech after being shot in the head by the Taleban.

In Born on the Fourth of July fashion, the pair would tear around the recreation room in their wheelchairs.

“I might only be able to say one word beginning with ‘f’ but I’ve got one more hand and two more feet than you,” the soldier would taunt Ormrod.

“You’ll never beat me sunshine.”

Perhaps not, but he would walk again – as demonstrated to the world one day last spring when the men of 40 Commando received their campaign medals.

The moment was captured by a Royal Navy photographer. It’s as defining an image of the conflict against the Taleban as the ‘fix bayonets’ photograph on the cover of Man Down.

It captures the tenacity not just of Ormrod but the entire corps.

What it doesn’t capture is the applause rippling around Norton Manor or the fact that the then Second Sea Lord, Vice Admiral Sir Adrian Johns, called the young Royal “a legend”.

And it doesn’t tell you that Mark Ormrod spent the 40-minute ceremony doing his utmost not to fall over, or that he “felt like a fucking idiot” being praised as a legend by an admiral. “All these other hundreds of marines had managed to come home without stepping on an IED.”

But the thinned ranks of 40 Commando that day reminded the green beret that he was one of the lucky ones; good friends, such as Cpl Damian Mulvihill, had been killed by Taleban bombs.

“We’d been given a second chance and had lives to live thanks to the courage, skill and hard work of so many people,” says Mark.

“We certainly knew how lucky we were – especially when we remembered the three men from 40 Commando who would never be coming home.”

Picture: LA(Phot) Steve Johncock, FRPU West

Casualty of War(ships)

OF THE already lengthy list of essential reference works charting the long, proud history of the Royal Navy, now add the first volumes of a monumental work listing casualties from 1914 to the present day.

Don Kindell’s Royal Naval Roll of Honour (Naval-History.net, downloadable PDF from £13.50, paperback from £26.49) intends to list, for the first time, every sailor or Royal Marine who died while in the Senior Service – in action, in accidents, as a result of illness.

The author is a former US Navy sailor and police officer with a passion for the RN over four decades.

He’s researched the details of 120,000 individuals whose records have been scattered around the archives – Kew, Whitehall, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the Naval Historical Branch among others.

The latter in particular has been heavily involved in what its head, Capt Christopher Page, calls an “astonishing corpus of work”.

And how right he is. Royal Navy Roll of Honour isn’t a book you read as such, but it is one serious naval, social and family historians will no doubt turn to time and again.

The first two volumes (of a projected six to eight) deal with casualties of WW1 (by name) and the Inter-War period (by name, by ship and by date).

We’ve only caught sight of the ‘Between the Wars’ volume, but it gives an excellent idea of the quality of the research and the incredible usefulness of Mr Kindell’s labour of love.

Indeed, it’s a solemn reminder of the price of Admiralty, even in peacetime.

On November 12 1918 – the day after the guns fell silent – more than two dozen sailors died, almost all of them victims of the ‘Spanish flu’ decimating the peoples of the world.

In fact, there was barely a day between the Armistice in the autumn of 1918 and September 3 1939 when hostilities resumed, that a sailor or Royal Marine did not die (as motor car usage increased in the 30s, road accidents began to take their toll – a recurring cause of deaths in the military to this day, sadly).

As well as being cheaper, we’d recommend the downloadable PDF version simply because it’s fully searchable and therefore much quicker to use.

Raiders: the lost art

IN THE Royal Navy’s two titanic struggles with the German Fleet, the U-boat was generally regarded as the gravest threat to the survival of the Empire’s mother country.
Enemy submarines were not the only scourge of trade on the high seas, however.
Individual German ships ranged the seven seas hoping to pick off Allied shipping and stir up panic.
These commerce or surface raiders could be warships – the Emden was the most prominent in WW1, while the Graf Spee remains the most famous of the WW2 German raiders.
But far more common were merchant raiders – merchantmen on the surface, but hidden behind trapdoors and other disguises were guns and torpedo tubes.
Few, if any, were more successful than the Wolf, whose exploits between 1916 and 1918 were celebrated by Berlin’s propaganda machine – and in a succession of books in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Since then, however, the ship has rather been forgotten (unlike the Emden, for example). Now authors Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen hope to elevate the raider back to her pre-eminent position in The Wolf (Bantam, £17.99
ISBN 978-0593-060705-9).
The duo have trawled the archives of the world, contacted the families of crew or prisoners of the Wolf and pored over newspaper cuttings and ship’s logs to recount a cracking tale of humanity in an otherwise inhuman war.
For in an age of total war, the surface raiders have somehow maintained an air of romanticism.
Submarines were underhand and damned un-English and all that, Q-ships were very dubious when it came to the laws of the ocean, yet the war the commerce raiders waged was largely seen as an honourable one.
Commerce raiders did not necessarily sink their prey without warning, invariably looked after their prisoners as humanely as possible, and were almost always captained by men of honour.
Karl August Nerger, Wolf’s captain was one such man. Nerger was charged with wreaking havoc against the British Empire in the Southern Ocean, ‘contaminating’ the approaches to Colombo, Bombay, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore and Cape Town especially with mines before striking at merchant ships leaving Australia for Europe.
A nearly-new steamer, Wachtfels, was converted into an auxiliary cruiser, complete with a radio transmitter to send signals 5,000 miles, 5.9in and 2in guns, torpedo tubes, a changeable funnel to conceal her identity, and a new name, Wolf.
In a 15-month voyage, Nerger and his crew dispatched more than three dozen ships – more than 100,000 tons in all.
More than a dozen ships were mined by the ‘eggs’ Wolf dropped in the oceans. One washed up as recently as last December in New Zealand.
This is a story of skill and bravery, of luck, of political machinations, of wartime propaganda by both sides, told with panache which brings the ship, her crew and especially her captain to life again after nine decades.
It rightly does justice to the Wolf whose captain was portrayed by the Allies as “a typical Hun” who possessed “no gentlemanly instincts”.
Empire historians also criticised Nerger (for temerity, although they did praise his humanity), they pooh-poohed the impact of the Wolf, and the commerce raiders especially.
Privately, however, the view of the Admiralty was very different. Raiders had disrupted maritime trade and kept Allied warships occupied. “It seems extraordinary that they were not used on a larger scale,” one official report noted in 1940.
By then, the Wolf was no more. Post-war, the ship traded on the routes she had once stalked before finally being paid off in 1931.
Her former captain was allowed no such graceful end. After taking up a management position with Siemens, he was courted by the Nazis as a war hero in the 30s – and certainly benefited from their anti-Semitic laws by buying a villa from a Jewish family for a song.
That was about as far as his dalliance with Nazism went, but in 1945 Nerger was thrown into Sachsenhausen – once a Nazi concentration camp, now a Soviet concentration camp – where a fellow prisoner beat him to death with an iron bar for refusing to surrender his shoes.
It was an end unbecoming a man described by a sailor he took prisoner aboard Wolf as “one of the greatest seamen this world has known”.