Library Reference Number: 088
Life on Coastal Command 1939-45
The following extracts are from a book written by Saltire Branch member Ian Currie. "White Crows" was published in 1996 and details are given at the end of the following two extracts. In both cases, the writer was a navigator serving with No. 502 squadron, RAF Coastal Command, flying Armstrong Whitley aircraft.
At the beginning of August (1941) we carried out a convoy escort which brought home to us the enormous losses the U-boats were inflicting on the Merchant Navy. Nearly always the convoys we escorted were on the North Atlantic route between the UK and North America. On this occasion, however, we were briefed to pick up a convoy of 21 ships coming from India by way of the Cape and the South Atlantic. At first light we came upon a convoy in the approximate estimated position, but it contained only 7 ships. An eighth was found sinking some miles astern with a corvette standing by to take off the crew. We had arrived just too late to prevent the attack. The rest of the convoy had been picked off on the long journey from India.
"At 12.25 we were at the limit of our patrol and set course for home. We were flying in cloud at 1800 feet. I needed to find the wind velocity and for that had to see the sea surface so I asked the skipper to break cloud. As we came out of the clouds, dead ahead was a U-Boat, crash diving. The skipper simply had to keep going down. He dropped his stick of depth charges at right angles to the U-Boat's track and straddled it by the conning tower which was just visible as we swept over. We circled for some time and slowly the bow of the boat rose out of the water. She seemed to be trying to struggle to the surface but was going round in circles, her steering gear obviously damaged. We still had two armour-piercing bombs in the bomb-bay so we dropped these as well. - - -
- - We flew around for another ten minutes while the bow of the U-Boat slowly slid below the surface again but had to resume our course for home, sending messages to base indicating the time and position of the attack. I had obtained some good pictures of the enemy as we made our run in and we knew that the backward-facing camera which started taking pictures as soon as the tit was pressed would show where the depth charges had exploded. - - -
- - At that period a flight of Lancasters of 61 Squadron Bomber Command had been lent to Coastal Command to reinforce the offensive in the Bay and some of them had been participating in that day's sweep. We discovered when we landed that the Lanc on the sweep next to ours had strayed on to our patch and had come upon the crippled U-Boat which had struggled to the surface but was unable to move. Our depth charges, which exploded at a depth of 50 feet must have exploded aft beneath the engines. It was a sitting duck and the Lanc dropped its load of depth charges and finished it off. As she sank, some forty or so members of the crew were seen to escape through the conning tower. U751 had gone to the bottom.
Speaking to some of the crew of the Lancaster afterwards, I found it ironic that several confessed to feeling rather queasy on seeing the Germans swimming in the water, their chance of rescue virtually nil. They had been accustomed to pounding the cities of the Rhur night after night but this was the first occasion that they had been aware of the consequences of their acts in human terms.
I must confess that my own feeling and that of the rest of the crew was one of elation. - - - We had undoubtedly saved the lives of hundreds of British and Allied seamen for each U-Boat took a heavy toll of our shipping. In June of 1942, 144 ships, 700,000 tons altogether were sunk, in July 96 ships, 476,000 tons, and in August 108 ships, 544,000 tons. It was little wonder that Admiral Donitz, Fuhrer der U-Boote, and later Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of Naval Forces, could boast in an interview with a Swedish journalist that `the aeroplane can no more eliminate the U-Boat than a crow can fight a mole.' In fact July 1942 was the beginning of a remarkable change of fortune for Coastal Command aircraft which sank 15 U-Boats in the second half of 1942. 1943 was to be the decisive year when 219 were destroyed, Coastal Command bagging 84 of them."
A few months before the above episode we had survived `ditching' in the Atlantic Ocean, and a month after our U-Boat kill we survived a crash-landing on Hayle Beach in St.lves Bay due to struggling back from a sweep to the Spanish coast on one engine. However, those are stories for another occasion.
Note: The above brief extracts are from "The White Crows" by Ian S. Currie (1996) pub: Minerva Press. UK £7-99. Available from www.amazon.co.uk