14Chapman

The War of the Motor Gun Boats: One Man’s War at Sea with the Coastal Forces 1939-1945

by A. J. Chapman

163 pages with black and white photographs, index

Pen & Sword Maritime, Barnsley, 2013 £19.99

ISBN: 1783462248

These are the engagingly written memoirs of a lower deck Telegraphist. He wrote them for his family in 1979 and rewrote them in the 1980s. By 1990 he had joined the Coastal Forces Veterans Association and made contact with old shipmates, which allowed him to fill out lacunae in his memories. Although dated 1990 they are only now seeing the light of day. He writes fluently and with a nicely self-deprecating wit which make this an enthralling but easy read.

He was born in 1924, the son of a Southampton shopkeeper who had been gassed in the trenches in World War 1 and belonged to a large family which lived in Southampton’s docklands. The early part of the book gives an interesting and unsentimental account of his pre-war upbringing, of evacuation to the country, of his return, leaving school at 15 without even a School Certificate, getting a job as a junior clerk and combining that with joining the ARP. There is a good account of the German raid which engulfed Southampton in November 1940. In 1941, aged 17, he volunteered so that he could choose which service to join.

He gives a good engaging account of his training at Royal Arthur in Skegness. More training followed in Aberdeen and at Prestwick. He chose the submarine service but to his surprise finished up in Coastal Forces since his father refused to sign a consent form to allow him to serve in submarines – a fact he only learned many years later. He then went to Portland for some sea time in small coastal launches. It was now September 1943 when he joined ML522. She spent her time bumping up and down the Channel as a rescue vessel. He has tales of his awful seasickness and going on duty with a bucket, of runs ashore and of the many ways to spend hard-lying money This section which covers over a year of training is fascinating in showing a long departed world where Skegness could seem exotic, where ice skating was the highlight of the week and where teenage hormones began to burst into existence.

He then received his first truly operational posting to Great Yarmouth where he joined MGB 607 and again writes fluently but honestly and unsentimentally about life on the lower deck of Harry Tate’s Navy. And he writes of his first night at sea on operations when MGB 607 sailed with MGB603 and took part in an epic running battle with German E-boats while protecting an East Coast convoy. The two boats sank three German E-boats but MGB 607 sustained so much damage that the first signal he had to send was “am sinking”. He captures the sense of claustrophobia in the wireless room, of noise and clamour, of the silence of the aftermath with half the crew of twenty dead or wounded, of the cries of drowning German sailors they could not help, and of the sheer bloodiness of seeing comrades killed in front of him. But perhaps the most telling sequence is his description of the aftermath. Towed back and cheered ashore, the RN treated the survivors appallingly. With cold leftovers for food, with no kit provided for days beyond the blood-soaked items they arrived in and left to clean a badly damaged boat of grime and gore, it was days before they went on survivors leave. This callous and indifferent treatment by Base staff seems to have left even more of a mark than the action itself. He had spent the action in the wireless cabin where he could see nothing but hear everything. However he does a splendid job of reconstructing the action, helped by other veterans whose assistance he acknowledges freely.

Chapman next transferred to MGB 605, still employed on protecting coastal convoys but the E-boats did not reappear. In February 1944 he passed the formal examination for his rate and was posted to the Eastern Mediterranean. Now aged nineteen he was a veteran who could think of 21 year olds as old and whose officers were the same age as himself. He stood by ML 838 which was assembled on the Nile from a prefabricated kit and then had a wonderful year in Lebanon, Cyprus and the Dodecanese. There are tales of lively gun actions, of secret missions, of landing Greek commandos of the Sacred Band who would bring back Italian prisoners but never Germans, of landing food supplies for impoverished Greek islanders. And lurking behind this are some curious and unexplained incidents which may have been related to Dr Kurt Waldheim (later President of Austria) and his role in the death of British prisoners. But behind it all is a sense of fun, of brushes with authority, of young men bursting with health and vigour letting off steam on runs ashore and simply growing from boys into men. He gives a great sense of the way in which a good boats crew worked together in a confined space – and of how quickly that could turn to near mutiny when a new and callow CO tries to apply the rules to what was in effect a commune. Indeed the space was so confined that he had literally no space to sling his hammock and had to sleep on the floor of the wireless room, unable fully to stretch out.

At the beginning of May 1945, ML 838 was at anchor in Simi Harbour. On VE Day, it carried some senior officers to Kos to accept the German surrender. By July the Flotilla moved to Malta to refit for the Far East. VJ Day intervened and

However by this time it was the end of March 1945 and VE Day soon brought at least an easement of the appalling over-work that had been a feature of Chapman's war - sleeping as best he could on the deck of his wireless office. There was still work to do, but then 838 was to be refitted for the Eastern War. VJ Day supervened and soon after that Chapman, by now a Leading Telegraphist, was drafted home to be a watch leader in a UK shore station near Winchester where he stayed until demobbed in June 1946.

He gives a strong sense of the combination of informality and comradeship which existed in these small ships and how on occasion they could rub up awkwardly against larger and more formal elements of the RN. He also gives a strong sense of how ill-informed the lower deck were about the reasons for their exploits, most notably in the Aegean in 1944-45. He writes with humility, counting himself lucky to have missed service on the Murmansk Run or the Malta convoys. But most of all he gives a sense of a life lived joyfully.