The War of the Motor Gun Boats

One Man's Personal War at Sea with the Coastal Forces, 1943–1945

A. J. Chapman

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Select
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473830080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Tony Chapman was born in Southampton in 1924. Aged 16 he watched with horror as the historic High Street of Southampton burnt to the ground in a firestorm caused by a heavy German bombing raid on the night of 30 November 1940. He vowed to join up and fight back. Tony joined the Navy.Within hours of being posted to his first Motor Gun Boat, Telegraphist Tony Chapman was involved in an epic Coastal Forces engagement when his flotilla took on a force of thirty E-boats. Although their unit of two MGBs sank three E-Boats, it was at a high cost. Half of Tony's shipmates were killed or injured.This was the start of an eventful and dramatic wartime service with these little warships. Tony's flotilla operated in the Mediterranean and Aegean where the Motor Gun Boats played a key role in this important but often neglected theatre.rnDaily life on these small ships is vividly described. The flotilla had a busy time showing the flag in the Levant and on combined operations in the Aegean with the Greek Sacred Regiment of Commandos. The culmination of their efforts was when Tony's boat, ML838, took the surrender of the Island of Kos in 1945.rnrnWritten from the perspective of one of the other ranks, War of the Motor Gun Boats fills an important gap in the literature of the Second World War.As featured in the North Devon Journal and Exmoor Magazine.

Chapter One

Shadows of Wars and Depressions

The first few months of the war have been described as the phoney war. While the description is apt, I have always felt that the years 1933–1939 could, with greater force, be referred to as the phoney peace.

Only those who lived through such days can really understand the traumatic impact on people’s minds of the scarred memories of the First World War and after 1933 the prospects of a seemingly inevitable, impending second one. All around us there were the shattered wrecks and shadows of men who had diced with death in the trenches of Flanders and left bits of themselves over there in the mud. Surgery and medicine were less advanced in those wartime days and in any case it sometimes took a long time to get the wounded back to base hospitals where overworked surgeons could do their bloody work. Some of the sights were indeed pitiful yet we did not see the worst. I grew up in the inter-war years in the city (then the town) of Southampton and a few miles away was the famous Netley Hospital which incarcerated the cases that were too bad to be let loose on the outside world. Hidden away they may have been, but there was no shortage of lurid descriptions circulating in the neighbourhood to remind us of man’s inhumanity to man.

However, my young and impressionable mind had ample evidence much closer to home than Netley. I did not know my father before the war (having been born in 1924) when he was a very good footballer and wrestler and a man, I learned from older members of the family, of wit and humour. I only knew him in after years when he had become accustomed to a life of pain and discomfort. He was caught in a poisonous cloud of mustard gas at Loos. In spite of spending months in hospital and a convalescent home, he spent the rest of his life plagued with internal disorders. Still, he did come back. A brief glance at the countless war memorials in town and village throughout the land reveals the names of the legions who did not.

It is hardly surprising that he and many of his contemporaries were so profoundly affected. I can recall him saying on a number of occasions he would shoot every one of his five sons rather than let them go to war. Often, since, I have wondered just how he must have felt during the long, long days of “our war” when he waited at home for news from his four sons on active service, two in the Army, one in the RAF and later myself in the Royal Navy. Happily, we were allowed to go rather than be shot at home and in spite of an aggregate total of twenty years actually on active service between us, we all came home. How very different from his war where some families were left without a male member alive at the end of it.

In the “thirties” two events every year, one domestic and happy, the other civic and sombre, brought home to me the fact that the memories of the Great War were still very much alive. We were a large family and very self-contained so as a general rule we had few visitors, but every summer a family of four always came to see us for a day. They were Birmingham folk and the father, Bill, had been a young soldier in the war and found life in the trenches frightening and unbearable. My father, over thirty at the time, had taken care of him to such an extent he came through it safely and was so grateful that he kept in touch right up until my father died and made this annual one-day pilgrimage to Southampton to see him. I must confess that the full significance came rather later, my earliest recollections being of sweets and goodies all round when our benefactors called.

The other annual occasion was Armistice Day. When most of my childhood memories have faded, I will remember vividly the two minutes’ silence at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I think it meant a great deal more than it does now in spite of all the pseudo-pomp and ballyhoo of the British Legion Service of Remembrance at the Albert Hall. It was very simple. At 11.00 a.m. precisely, a gun fired and for two minutes everything and everyone stopped. Traffic, including the tramcars, ground to a halt. People just stood and remembered. In school, lessons ceased and the whole class stood. At two minutes past eleven, the gun fired again and life resumed. I can truthfully say I never remember a single instance of anyone failing to observe the ritual and although being in a sense organised, there was about it an air of poignant spontaneity.

I think our fathers might well have accepted their lot more readily and happily if they had come home to what Lloyd George referred to as “A land fit for heroes to live in”. Having won the war to end wars they certainly merited a land flowing with milk and honey but the reality was sadly so different. Economic depression on a scale only dreamt of nowadays and an increasing fear of war dominated the 1930’s. It is difficult to imagine what those mutilated war veterans who stood in shop doorways trying to sell boxes of matches or, without being able to afford the capital outlay, with a hat on the pavement begging for pennies, must have thought about it all. Or the able-bodied stevedores crowded into the gathering pens just inside Southampton old docks waiting to be counted out like sheep for a few hours’ work. They were the lucky ones. For many it was a case of waiting an hour or two and then being told there was no work and drifting off home or to the nearest street corner to while away the time.

Added to all this was the increasing certainty from 1936 onwards that another war was on the way. People talked of bombs and gas with the same horror as nowadays the unilateral disarmers talk about nuclear weapons. The next war would indeed be the one to end wars simply because there would be no-one left to fight another. To those who had lived through the First World War, the prospect was horrifying yet oddly enough I think there was a fatalistic acceptance that it had to happen. Perhaps it took their minds off the depressions.

It was in many respects, a hard but exciting age to grow up in. Living, as I did, in Southampton dockland added an element of toughness. My father had spent much of his life at sea and after reaching his zenith as Chief Baker on the R.M.S.P. Arlanza retired, largely due to ill-health from his war injuries, and took up shop-keeping. He could never quite sever all connections with the sea so he bought a general shop and combined it with a sub-post office as near to the old docks as he could get.

He picked a good spot to drop anchor. We lived to an accompaniment of foghorns, the deep booms of great ocean liners manoeuvring in Southampton Water and the nightly thumping and banging of dredgers keeping the channels clear. Lest the nautical background was not noisy enough, the shop was sited immediately at a tram terminus. Anyone who has not lived beside a tram terminus can only imagine the cacophony and be grateful to have missed the experience.

We were something of an outpost of empire at home. Compared with people all around us we were well-off (at least by pre-war standards) and although that was fine while we were indoors, it made for considerable problems when we ventured abroad. Our reception by the local populace could be described as warm but not in the generally accepted meaning of the expression. This was particularly the case if we chanced upon a number of our contemporaries in a group when battle was the likely outcome. Who could blame them? At the local junior school I rubbed shoulders with boys who were ill-clothed, ill-shod and underfed, in many cases from mean little terrace slums. Yet in the end we arrived at an acceptable modus vivendi and lived in peace if not harmony.

Our noisy surroundings were blessed with technological advantages. Just down the road was the Floating Bridge, a slave ferry which plied its way across the River Itchen confined by strong chains either side and on the opposite bank, at Woolston, was the Vickers Supermarine works where Mitchell was beavering away at his prototype Spitfires. This was the age of the Schneider Trophy and frequently we were privileged to see the contenders flying over the Southampton Water. In fact we were privy to much of the aircraft development of the inter-war years. A regular air service to the Channel Islands began at this time using a very up-to-date plane called an Ensign. More exciting were the boat-planes which took off and landed in the sheltered waters and, even more so, what was known as the pick-a-back plane. This was a large plane (Mercury) which carried a smaller craft (Maia) on its back and launched it in flight.

Ashore, cinematography techniques were developing fast and the penny cowboy films in the fleapits were giving way to more grandiose occasions where the films broke down less often and the cinema organist used to rise up and down on his seat to entertain us during the intervals. At home, if our hearing was good, we could actually identify the words or music obscured by the crackling which issued from the crystal wireless sets.

The fruits of progress were present in more mundane and less discernible ways but nevertheless there. Apart from the ice factory just round the corner from my home where large consignments were loaded on ships as well as various commercial undertakings ashore, the science was applied to a skating rink. My father allowed the Southampton Ice Rink Company to post an advertising board outside the shop for which he received two complimentary tickets a week – both of which I appropriated, one for myself and the other for the latest girlfriend.

I sometimes wonder how it was possible to cram so much into a young life. Skating two evenings a week and playing football or cricket at every and any available opportunity does seem extravagant yet it was only possible after all the daily chores were done. Once at Grammar School, there was homework every evening and double measure at weekends and the single dose was bad enough taking up to two hours at a time. On Saturday mornings it was a case of delivering groceries to the customers (as well as homework) before doing anything else. Sunday was the time for a thorough clean and scrub of the shop. Starting at 7.00 a.m. my father and I would be hard at it until gone 10.00 a.m. after which the day was my own.

In those days it was quite normal to rise at 6 o’clock in the mornings and we were not afflicted with the time-consuming banalities of television so we perhaps had much more time to do things. Certainly, we seemed to have a sense of purpose and perspective which is so often missing in the post-war age of aimless affluence. In this respect I believe I was much more fortunate in many ways than young people today. The shadows cast by the First World War throwing, like so many great events, its shadow before it, provided a powerful stimulus to a young man. And while on its own it could have been overpowering and daunting there was always the great counterbalance in the shape of the burgeoning advances in technology which created a realistic perspective. In spite of the unstable political situation, there was much to work and strive for. The results of idleness and lack of effort were poverty of mind and body but the rewards for enterprise could be seen in the good life. No doubt the same is substantially true today but the edges have become blurred and the issues do not appear quite so black and white as they were in the harder thirties.

The clouds of war became inexorably darker and closer but, in spite of the inevitable, daily life carried on more or less as usual. As Hitler proceeded to annexe his eastern neighbours one by one I continued to grind away at French and Latin grammar under the piercing, eagle eye of Mademoiselle Beauregard who I freely confess struck more awesome terror into my heart than Hitler’s predatory activities ever did. As Chamberlain excitedly waved his famous piece of paper after Munich I was duly receiving six of the best on the posterior having narrowly missed the headmaster with a gym-shoe as he entered the changing room at a somewhat inconvenient moment. And I suppose it could have gone on for years like it but suddenly it all changed in the late summer of ‘39.

School had barely started for the new academic year when there was a great deal of scurrying in the corridors as people came and went obviously engaged in matters other than educational activities. Rumours were rife but it soon became clear that plans were being made to evacuate the whole of the staff and pupils to a safer place. We were to go to Andover in Hampshire and move in on the Weyhill Grammar School. Such was the organisation and the speed of implementation that we were already there and in our billets by the time Neville Chamberlain made his famous broadcast on that Sunday morning, 3rd September, 1939. We were at war. Not that it felt like it in the back of beyond.

At the time it was the aspects of life in rural England which were fascinating to me. Beyond the very occasional day trip to the New Forest, I had lived my whole life in the town and the countryside was a wholly new dimension. With a classmate I was billeted with a family called Hayes at the delightful little hamlet of Enham. The settlement had been developed after the first war to provide housing and work for partially disabled servicemen. My own guardian had served in Mesopotamia where he was wounded but still able to work in the estate timber yard. After the war further development took place and it is now known as Enham Alamein, the new influx presumably being ex-desert rats of the eighth army.

The autumn of 1939 was beautiful in the idyllic surroundings once I became accustomed to the “quietness”. The morning chorus of birds was quite unlike the noise of trams and dredgers. Rambling in the woods and fields was a very different pursuit from striding along down-town streets. I learned to set snares for rabbits but not very successfully because I never managed to catch one yet the fun was just in being there. Although I was beginning to feel an increasing desire to go to sea, the few months at Enham instilled within me a sense of wonder and love of the countryside, almost without my realising it at the time, which has remained ever since.

Apart from the rural charm Enham also gave me my first direct experience of the dubious joys of an outside, bucket toilet together with the techniques of dealing with the contents thereof. One of the great blessings of post-war rural England has been the widespread introduction of modern amenities within the home which I must say greatly enhance the quality of the bucolic life. I see no objection to enjoying the best of all possible worlds.

Unfortunately, there was a big drawback. In spite of the delightful environment I was becoming restless. My young sister had also been evacuated in September to Bournemouth but after a month she had returned home and refused absolutely to go back. So my parents and all three sisters were now in Southampton and two older brothers who were in the Territorial Army before the war were now in ack-ack batteries at Marchwood on Southampton Water. This seemed to leave just me in a rural funk hole and my manly pride was badly hurt as a consequence. Quite irrational of course particularly as an air of absolute peace reigned over the town, but a young man’s sense of pride is not always amenable to reason.

So, having stuck it out through the very cold winter of 1939/40 I decided, against parental strictures, to leave the safety of Enham and return to the “battle-zone” where I properly belonged. It meant abandoning my education until after the war and raised the question of what to do in the immediate future. At 15½ it was too soon to join up although that is what I really wanted to do and one of the curious fears at the time was the thought of the war being over before I could join it. I need not have worried! Although we had grown up in a society which had been shattered by one war my generation never saw anything illogical or wrong about embarking on another. Once the chips were down all the lessons of the past seemed to be forgotten and we accepted the challenge without question.

The only problem seemed to be, what war? Because nothing very apparent happened. The Courageous was sunk in the Western Approaches very early on but otherwise shipping entered and left Southampton on its lawful occasion. New uniforms appeared on the streets. The ARP (Air Raid Precautions) Wardens took up their positions in little concrete ARP posts which sprung up all over the town. In the ill-vented, gloomy interiors the new army slept in shifts, played with various forms, and made and consumed vast volumes of tea with toast and margarine. Such wanton squandering of public money did not pass unnoticed. There was indeed much comment and gossip about what “goings on” took place behind those thick concrete battlements. It was not right that men and women should be allowed to enjoy such protected privilege!

As further support for the civil defences the fire brigade was augmented by the AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service). As part of their contribution to the war effort large steel tanks, labelled with SWS (Static Water Supply) were installed in strategic places. The AFS crews drilled endlessly in preparation for the massive fires which seemed destined never to happen.

More familiar uniforms were also in evidence in increasing numbers. Reinforcement drafts for the BEF would occasionally be seen singing and swinging down through the town towards the docks for embarkation to France, very much as Henry V’s troops must have done on their way to Agincourt. These 20th century soldiers radiated confidence and enthusiasm for all to see – in those days foot soldiers still travelled à pied rather than in convoys of trucks. The ancient port of Southampton has witnessed many such stirring occasions but little did we realise that it would be the last war in which the military accoutrements of Empire would depart these shores.

A few days before war was declared the local T.A. men were called to the colours and reservists, generally, were joining their units. The terriers were responsible for manning the ack-ack batteries set up to defend the ports of Portsmouth and Southampton from the expected air attacks. However, on the evidence of the time it seemed they fired more shots at goal than at aircraft and downed rather more pints of beer than aircraft. Reports from France suggested that the BEF in its cushy billets along the Franco-Belgian border was keeping remarkably fit while enjoying a splendid rapport with the many eligible young ladies. Language barriers apparently presented pas de problème to warriors such as these.

At home publicans and tradesmen alike were enjoying the new found prosperity after the long, lean years. Job creation was a booming industry and minor bureaucrats multiplied in the way of mosquitoes in a warm swamp. But it all increased the available money supply and such a deafening roar of tinkling tills had not been heard for many a long day.

It was all a little reminiscent of Nero playing his party piece. Above all this exciting new activity hung the vague, haunting shadow of the war – but what war? Could the war be fought and won without anyone getting hurt or did the teasing twilight have to give way to darkness? As matters stood the whole world was witnessing the anti-climax to eclipse them all. Hindsight is of course a remarkably clear sort of vision and looking back it is extraordinary that Britain and France could so easily be lulled into so false a sense of complacency. It was only necessary to cast a cursory glance at the methods by which the Wehrmacht battered Poland into total submission in a matter of days by skilled use of stukas and panzers to understand what was likely to be in store for us. We did have our not too-secret weapons of course. There was much rendering of “Run Rabbit Run” and “We’ll Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line” with a view to intimidating our enemies while simultaneously boosting our own morale. Whistling in the dark had acquired a deeper more sinister meaning.

In spite of the bewildering complexities of life in late 1939 and early 1940 it was quite clear to me that something had to be done by way of earning a living. Mundane and irksome it may be but essential it certainly was. My one and only ambition was to go to sea and, to my father’s horror, I wished to do so with the Royal Navy. To him it was inconceivable, if not downright seditious, to prefer the white ensign to the red duster. Fortunately he had time enough to get used to the idea and in the meanwhile the immediate problem of a livelihood was tackled and resolved with great speed. On the day after returning home from school an advertisement appeared in the “Echo”, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Introduction
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Shadows of Wars and Depressions
• Chapter 2: Farewell Illusions
• Chapter 3: In Training
• Chapter 4: English Channel and North Sea
• Chapter 5: Aftermath
• Chapter 6: Introduction to Warmer Waters
• Chapter 7: The Wine Dark Sea
• Chapter 8: It’s All Over!
• Appendix