Sent in by email from John Bull, Gosport

John Bull reveals his father’s part as an AB in World War II -- from his book The night they blitzed the Ritz - Memoirs of a Bomb Alley kid.

‘Stand by to sink the flagship’ skipper told my Dad.

My father, Able-seaman James Bull, was due to finish his ‘12’ in 1939. The plan was to emigrate to South Africa and run a fruit farm with his partner Bill. World War II put an end to that…off he went to sea and it was a long, long time before I saw him again.

“Hey John, come and see who’s here -- it’s your Dad home from sea…” my Gran shouted one day.

All I could see in the doorway was a grubby-looking pongo in a creased up uniform.

My Dad? Had the woman gone mad? Whoever this bloke was he was definitely not my tiddley-sailor dad, the smartest bell-bottomed matelot in the fleet. Missing since 1939...half my life in fact.

And what welcome did my old man, get? The brass band, the smiling wives or girl friends, the king handing out medals?

 A harassed mother-in-law, turban round her head, flour-coated hands. His lovely wife working at the munitions yard…and this lumpy boy, what ...nine …ten? A lippy street urchin, badly in need of some discipline.

The next time I saw him he was in full square-rig with wide bell-bottomed trousers , a torso-hugging jumper topped off by a silk neckerchief, rolled just so, and a real old salt’s collar,  the colour washed out pale blue as an autumn sky.

On his sleeve, three deep, red stripes, his long-service badges. His round cap was decorated with a ribbon with a fancy bow (done I believe with a razor) and his black shoes shone like dancing pumps.

But his war at sea remained a mystery.

I remember Mum explaining: “He just doesn’t want to talk about it. His brothers, Bill and George, they were in the Great War, in the trenches, and those old soldiers had their own unwritten code -- ‘never talk about it to anyone who wasn’t there.’

“They’ll tell you all sorts of stories about their adventures in France, and they’ll tell blokes in the pub, tales of the ‘mamselles’ they kissed, but the trenches, no. They will sing those wonderful ditties they made up to music hall favourites and hymn tunes -- but the mud, the blood and the whiz-bangs, forget it. That’s sacred ground, see. And it’s the same with your Dad. So don’t ask, son.”

In fact he would happily relate some strange thing that happened to him, often ruefully, or some story with a funny ending, what the matelots called ‘spinning a dit.’

That’s how I came to piece together some of the fighting he saw while serving in the destroyer HMS Kimberley. We were at a museum in Southampton with my children one time when we came upon a model of the ship in a glass case. Not surprisingly since she was built there at Thorneycroft’s yard.

Dad points out various features... “You see that little corner there, in front of the starboard tubes ? That was a favourite place of mine to get my head down,” he told us. “Well, that was where I was with my oppo Dan, oh, let’s see, that would have been in the summer of 1941... we were part of a force sent to soften up the Vichy (German controlled French forces) up in Syria or Lebanon. Ready for us to invade Iraq.”

By now, quite a little crowd has gathered round us, taking an interest in this living history lesson.

“Juno, one of our destroyers had taken several hits from enemy ships or shore batteries and we were ordered to take her under tow…to take her to our nearest port for repairs. Of course, it took time to fix the tow, and in the meantime we had to just lie there -- sitting ducks under the enemy guns ashore.
 
“It seemed to go on for ever. Me and Dan were lying on the deck, just there,” he pointed to his cubby hole on the model.. “wearing our Mae Wests and trying to keep our heads down.

“I remember saying to Dan, “Y’know the shore’s not that far off mate. All we got to do is roll over the side and swim for it.’”

“Dan thought about this for a while, as the noise of firing seemed to get louder, with our own guns occasionally joining in.

Then he said: “Yeah, I’m with you, mate. Which side do you fancy…we’ve got hungry sharks that side, and mad fuzzy-wuzzies ashore over there, just waiting to cut our throats. You choose.”

It was only now and again like this that I got a glimpse of his life as a fighting sailor -- in some yarn of his that briefly pierced the fog of war.

“Not many matelots have been ordered to stand by to sink the flagship of the fleet,” he casually mentioned one day.

It happened in the Battle of Narvik when the Germans over-ran Norway in April 1940. A force led by HMS Penelope and including the destroyers Kimberley and Eskimo were steaming up a fiord to join the attack on a group of German warships and transports.

“Penelope was regarded as a bit of a jinx ship,” Dad said, “you know how superstitious sailors are. Well she lived up to her reputation that day all right…halfway up the fiord, the bitch ran aground and ripped a slice out of her bottom.

“Captain Yates thought he’d have to scuttle her to keep her out of German hands and ordered the crew to put on their Mae Wests and be ready to go over the side. Our destroyers were standing by to pick them up fast -- don’t forget we were practically in the Arctic.

“Kimberley was ordered to fire a torpedo into her as soon as the last man left …and since I was duty torpedo man, it would be my finger on the trigger. Imagine that -- I could see that for the rest of my life I ‘d be known as the matelot that sank his flagship! Scary.”

Thanks to the skill of the engineer Commander Best they managed to get one engine going and Penelope was able to limp to safety with the crew.

Just as well. The man who later became my father-in-law Walter Ness, a Highland Scot from Oban, served as a yeoman of signals in Penelope.  Mind you, I think the humour of Dad’s yarn kind of passed him by.

I was chatting to Dad once about a story I was reading where the hero, a sea officer in Nelson’s time, struck lucky in the matter of prize money, retired ashore and set up his carriage in a country mansion in Hampshire. I said something like, “Those were the days eh, Dad?”

“I had some prize money once,”  he said, “don’t you remember? The admiralty sent me  a cheque for a hundred quid?  Well, that was my share of the loot from an Italian freighter we captured in the Med.”

I didn’t remember. So he told me the story of how they put a shot across the bows of an Italian freighter that promptly surrendered.  “She was carrying hundreds of Fiat cars for the Italian troops in North Africa,” he said. “They must have fetched a pretty penny for me to get a hundred quid. Mind I didn’t get the money until years later, long after the war ended.

“Your uncles -- dead jealous, o’course -- said they reckoned all matelots were no better than pirates. But I notice they had no big objection to downing a  few pints to celebrate my bit o’ luck.”

One drama of  HMS Kimberley has only just come to light . In April 1941 as the Germans over-ran the Allied forces in Greece the mayor of a small village and his 13-year-old son helped a group of five New Zealand soldiers to escape in a small boat. They were headed for Crete when they were picked up by Kimberley…

Some 63 years later the boy -- now the famous civil rights lawyer George Bizos -- was awarded the highest honour of the International Bar Association at their annual meeting in Auckland. He took the opportunity to try to find relatives of the soldiers he and his father had helped in the war.

So it was that George, who after his rescue became a South African and went on to defend Nelson Mandela during Apartheid, met the families of those Kiwi soldiers in a tearful reunion in Auckland in 2004.

George showed them photos taken by one of the crew, of the rescue at sea, the rail of the destroyer lined with sailors -- one of whom has to be my father.

He was ahead of his time in his anti-colonial beliefs (formed by his years on China station, up the Yangtse) and he would have delighted to know the rescued kid had been so prominent in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

I mentioned the fog of war. Sometimes, of course, this fog was intentional, the Admiralty being keen to keep quiet about ship losses and movements that could  be of use to the enemy. In trying to trace my father’s career I discovered that though ship’s logs of the 1940s are now open in the National Archive, the movements of humble lower deck ratings like my father are not always clear. My father died at the age of 80 in 1985 so I can’t ask him.

Dad left HMS Kimberley later in 1941 and after a spell ashore in Alexandria he was drafted to the cruiser HMS Naiad in December -- about the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and brought the United States into the war.

Meanwhile things were getting tougher for the Royal Navy defending Malta and our supply lines in the Med, and the Eighth Army fighting Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa. The RAF fought hard, but they were desperately short of planes -- and Rommel controlled the Libyan airfields.

HMS Naiad and her escort force of destroyers under Philip Vian (later Admiral of the Fleet Sir Philip Vian) took a supply convoy to Malta. Early in the evening of March 11, 1942 Naiad was ambushed by a U-boat (U565) and sunk by a single torpedo with the loss of 82 sailors.

Three destroyers picked up the 585 survivors,  including I assume my father, within half an hour.

Sir Philip, in his book Action This Day, graphically describes leaving Naiad with his signal officer Peter Hankey. They had to slither down the side of the doomed ship as she listed at an angle of 60 degrees.

He was suffering from a large carbuncle on his bum and tells Hankey he’s dreading the slide over the barnacles encrusting the half of the hull normally under water. Hankey tries to cheer him up by saying the cold seawater will probably do it good.

Vian became celebrated as the navy’s foremost seagoing officer of World War II. Vian he was --Vain he obviously was not.

Dad turned up on our doorstep soon after this …not exactly dripping wet but having lost his kit and wearing a borrowed pongo’s uniform.

HMS Kimberley rescues 13-year-old George Bizos, his father and the NZ soldiers in the Med in 1941, watched by the crew and other survivors of the Greek campaign lining the rails