SEAFARERS AND THEIR SHIPS DURING WORLD WAR II

SEAFARERS AND THEIR SHIPS DURING WORLD WAR II Former RMT shipping secretary Tony Santamera recounts experiences of some of the many thousands of seafarers, including his father, who made such a huge contribution towards the defeat of fascism during World War Two The liner Aquatania at anchor Pictures courtesy of the National Maritime Museum RMTnews :: july/august 2006 :: www.rmt.org.uk 24 Whilst writing this article, I was conscious that many thousand of our members both in the merchant navy and armed forces were involved in many arenas during the Second World War. Over 28,000 seafarers on British merchant ships were killed and 4,800 ships were lost due to enemy action and we should be eternally grateful to all of them for the sacrifice they made to keep Britain supplied throughout the war. JOE ARCHER Now 85 years young, Joe Archer was a cook on the “Basset Hound” which was docked in Milford Haven in 1939. Aged 18, Joe and his shipmate Charlie Chin, a Liverpool-born Chinese professional boxer, decided to go ashore for a few drinks. They forgot to bring their identity papers with them but they managed to blag their way out of the oil terminal and proceeded to the nearest pub. They sat down to a well- earned pint but their stay was short lived because the local cops burst in and arrested them as spies. They were held for several hours before their identities had been established and they were released into the custody of their captain, alas to late to re-join their pints. Joe also recalls joining the Cunard-managed “SS Western Land” a Dutch ship in Liverpool in 1940 carrying French Foreign legion troops for the invasion of Dakar in French West Africa. The ship also picked up West African troops to take them to Mombassa in East Africa and on to Suez canal to pick up Italian POW’s to ship them to Bombay to be incarcerated into POW’s camps. Next port of call was Cape Town to take Australian troops back to Suez to fight the German nazi war machine in the desert. These trips were repeated for several months, Suez to Bombay with Italian POW’s and on to Cape Town or Durban with Australian troops bound for Eygpt and desert war. On one of these trips some of the crew had a sit-down strike about the quality of the food. The captain sent for a Royal Navy destroyer for back up and a navy officer was dispatched to “Western Land” with an armed escort. The threat to take out the leaders of the dispute seemed to work, however, the incident was repeated on the following trip and a navy boarding party took six of the ringleaders to their ship and the crew were never to see them again. The rest of the crew were put ashore in Bombay and fifty or so so-called ‘undesirables’ were put up in the Seaman’s mission. Every day a messenger from the shipping office came to us with jobs on a piecemeal basis. Married men got first choice and Joe and about 10 others were last to be picked up for a ship the “City of Paris” which was docked in Karachi. “It took us two days to get there by road, we were put up in an army camp for the night and just before the ship was to sail, we were escorted to the ship and boarded as third class passengers for the trip home via Cape Town and Trinidad and picked up by a convoy bound for Liverpool in Halifax Canada,” Joe recalls. “Nobody ever heard anymore of the strike leaders or indeed the undesirable tag,” he says. This strange episode became even stranger as the Cunard company kept all the crew on full pay whist in Karachi and also on the voyage home in the City of Paris. “When our crew travelled home as passengers if we had been undesirables we would have been put off pay. So our members where exonerated by the companies actions,” he says. DON NEW At the age of 16 years of age Don New joined the Commandante Dorice. A captured French ship, she was loading war materials in Southampton to take to Suez. The night before we sailed, Southampton was heavily bombed she sailed to Cardiff to pick up coal then on to Milford Heaven to form a convoy of 30 ships. 14 ships were lost on the way to Freetown due to enemy action before the convoy then split up to go their own destinations. The Commandante Dorice sailed down to Walvis Bay for food stores, then on to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London, all in South Africa. “In East London, I met my brother who I hadn’t seen him for three years and he was in the Royal Navy,” Don recalls. continued overleaf... www.rmt.org.uk :: july/august 2006 :: RMTnews 25 The ship went on to Cape Town then to Biarra in East Africa, which was a Portuguese colony and was not involved in the war. “My mate and I had to go to the dentist who was German, I got my teeth extracted but my mate ran away,” he says. The ship went on to another Potuguese enclave Lourenço Marques, now Maputo the capital city of Mozambique, where Don and three other seamen were invited to dinner with the British Consul. Don continued his voyage around South African ports and on the way back to Freetown a U-boat torpedo crossed the bow but luckily the ship made it to her destination and joined the convoy for Liverpool. Don then joined a Norwegian ship the Norvark in 1942. She docked at Philippeville in Algeria then onto Casablanca stopping over night Gibraltar in order to shelter from U-boats. The Royal Navy was dropped depth charges before Norvark then went back to Casablanca to load phosphate bound for Ipswich. “I received news that my mother was dying, so I asked to be paid off and went home, she died ten days later,” he says. Don’s next ship was the Moreton Bay, sailing to New York in 1943, she picked up 3000 US troops and joined a convoy. On the voyage to England several of ships were torpedoed. He left the Moreton Bay and joined the Mauretania and sailed to Boston to join the Aquatania to disembarked 10,000 US soldiers. “We sailed to Goureck, Scotland with no escort and then went back to Hailfax, Canada for 10,000 troops to bring back to Goureck,” Don says. He signed off the Aquatania in 1944 and joined the Queen Mary as a first class steward. The ship carried 10,000 troops in winter and 15,000 in the summer. The troops only had two meals a day and a chef suggested selling egg and bacon sandwiches and they sold about 30 or 40 a day. Don went to the ship Carnarvon Castle for one trip before joining the Atlantis to take 700 war brides to Perth and Melbourne. TONY SANTAMERA SNR My father appears in Tony Lane’s book The Merchant Seaman’s War. Tony interviewed my Dad in 1989 and he has given me his kind permission to reproduce this passage. Ratings, especially firemen, were, of course, aware of the contempt in which many officers hold them and could be quick to respond. Tony Santamera snr and two other firemen were going back aboard the Fort Bourben late one night in New York, the mate and chief engineer were standing on the top of the gangway. “They made audible comments about us being the sort of people that got the British a bad name and so we got stuck in and there was trouble we ended up in the nick. “We got tried that night – this particular beak in the states would try you any time of the night. “The skipper was away with friends and there was only the mate there in court and he’d been involved in the trouble the judge said he did not want to impede the war effort and so he fined us twenty-five dollars plus costs each. “We had money in the ship but the mate wouldn’t pay the fines so we had to go in the nick for 17 days,” Tony recalled. Tony Santamera, with his patriotic credentials in good order, was resentful as he had been sunk on the King Robert in the North Atlantic in January 1941 and sunk a second time in April 1942 when the Harpasa ran into shellfire from a Japanese warship in the Bay of Bengal. Tony Lane’s book gives an insight into the sinking of the King Robert, my Dad in interview recalled: “There was five of us on the starboard side, one was a galley boy from Birkenhead, he went CONVOY: Many seafarers lost their lives during the wartime convoys which kept essential supplies coming to Britain SS Western Land carried troops to Africa RMTnews :: july/august 2006 :: www.rmt.org.uk 26 continued from page 23 down the Jacobs Ladder, the boat had drifted away so it took them a while to tow it back to the side of the ship side so that he could get in. “But he got petrified and he wouldn’t go up or down so the second mate had to go down and give him a belt, him and the second mate more or less fell into the boat,” he recalled. FERRY BOATS The ferry Colonel J.A Moss was one of eleven such vessels leased by the British Ministry of War and Transport to replace the cross channel and short sea passenger vessels lost during hostilities. The vessels were used as troop transports on the Irish Sea cross between Scottish and Northern ports to Belfast and other ports. Some were intended to be put into service in other auxiliary duties, in home waters and the Mediterranean. The management of all the vessels was placed in the hands of Coast Lines Limited, Liverpool (now swallowed up by shipping giant P&O). The CJA Moss proceeded to Halifax Nova Scotia but on the way there she had to pull into Boston, USA with damage bulkheads after a battering at sea and the voyage was abandoned. Of the other 10 ferries, two more were taken out because of structural problems, and sadly three, the New York the Yorktown and the Boston were sunk by enemy action on September 25/26 1942. Out of a total of 188 crew and gunners of the stricken ships, 142 paid the supreme sacrifice and only 46 survived. The remaining five ferries, the President Warfield the Naushon the New Bedford the the Northland and the Southland came through the convoys safely and carried out there assigned voyages for the remainder of the war. They were handed back to their original owners at the end of the war. PASSENGER LINERS These huge ships made a massive contribution to the war effort, carrying US and Canadian troops to the war in Europe. The huge Cunard passenger liner “Aquatania” sailed to Honolulu to pick up the US armed forces personnel and their families who had survived Pearl Harbour attack by the Japanese air force. The evacuees were first taken to San Pedro in California where some of them disembarked. The ship then passed through the Panama Canal for the voyage to New York when the rest of the evacuees were landed. At the time the Aquatania was the largest ship ever to pass through the Panama Canal and the ships sides almost scraping both of the sides of the canal. The ship was also the only passenger liner to take a full part in both World Wars. The liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary carried upwards of 15,000 troops each and they were very fast, too fast for the U boats, and they didn’t always need to be escorted in convoys. Winston Churchill said that the ‘two Queens’ probably shortened the war by a year. There was, however, one major tragic incident involving the Queen Mary on a trip from New York in 1942. She picked up an escort the light cruiser HMS Curacoa with four destroyers. When she reached the waters around Scotland, the Curacoa was four knots slower and could not match the precautionary zig- zags of the ‘Mary’. The cruiser had tried to keep ahead, but in clear visibility the ‘Mary’ struck her amid ships and the Curacoa sank in five minutes with the loss of 329 out of its 450 crew. The Queen Mary’s Captain Commodore Sir Gordon Illingworth decided that, with 10,598 troops aboard, he could not risk stopping to help. The incident was kept secret at the time but a judgment on January 21 1947, five years after the tragic collision, held the Curacao entirely to blame. However, a later judgment apportioned one-third of the blame to the lookouts of the Queen Mary. A number of graves of the men of the Curacoa can be found at Lower Breakish in Skye, Arisaig and Morar. Queen Mary and other liners shortened the war by transporting tens of thousands of Allied troops www.rmt.org.uk :: july/august 2006 :: RMTnews 27