uneasy, as they were stopped in the water picking up survivors – an easy target for a torpedo. The survivors taken on board were found to be mainly German naval personnel with some merchant seamen. The next day the London found the German supply ship Egerland, which was flying the Panamanian flag as a disguise. She was scuttled. Her crew abandoned ship and were also taken on board London, which now had the crews of Esso Hamburg and Egerland on board. Their accommodation was in the seaplane hangar on the upper deck. This was now completely full, to the point of overcrowding, so she sailed to Freetown to put them ashore, where they were put into prisoner of war camps. She then sailed back into the South Atlantic to carry on the search for German supply ships. Two others had been located and sunk, one by HMS Sheffield and another by aircraft from HMS Eagle. On 21 June London found the Babitonga, which was disguised as a Dutch ship with the false name of Japara.
They sent us off into the South Atlantic, where we found three of Bismarck’s supply ships. They were the Esso Hamburg, the Egerland and the Babitonga, which we found on 21 June. All three ships had Panamanian registration. We thought it was wonderful how we pinpointed the ships – later on, we found it was through the Enigma system: the ships were in touch with Germany, and we found out where they were. The German crews had all taken to the boats, so we had over 300 prisoners on board. We took the Walrus seaplanes out of their hangars and put the prisoners in. They were on board for several weeks, and while they were on board there was an outbreak of food poisoning and they all went down with it. They thought we were trying to get rid of them, but some of our people caught it as well – it was some bad meat I think. We dropped the prisoners at Freetown. The army took them and presumably put them in a camp.
[After that] I was on the boarding party for the Babitonga. We rowed across to her in a cutter. We were armed with cutlasses. The petty officer and the officer had a pistol each. The officer found that they had opened their seacocks and she was settling gradually. When we were in Sierra Leone all the boys were taken across to a place to go swimming – the trouble was, there were plenty of sharks about so we had to keep our eyes open. While we were there on London we painted ship in Freetown. We were on stages, two of us painting the side, and I looked down and there were sharks’ fins floating around beneath us. We were painting down and getting closer to the water level. When we got down to the bottom there was a boat there to pick us up. Then we went back on board and they shifted the stage and started again. We were doing it all day, and most of the seamen were all at it. We were painting a dazzle pattern. Our feet got fairly close to the water. We were doing that for a couple of days.
We shot down a Vichy French aircraft while we were there, which had come from Dakar. It was observing us, I suppose. A lucky shot brought it down.
From the warm waters of the South Atlantic London was dispatched to the seas off Iceland, in the mistaken belief that another surface raider was about to enter the Atlantic. After that, she was part of the escort protecting a convoy of troop ships bound for North Africa. She then returned to Iceland.
Iceland was of major strategic importance to the Allies, as it extended the air cover that could be maintained to help protect convoys against U-boat attack, and provide surveillance over sea areas including the Denmark Strait. But in the early days of the war there were few suitable aircraft available for this task. Apart from the Sunderland flying boats, which had a range of over 2,000 miles, none of the other suitable and available aircraft had a range that was enough to provide significant cover. This situation was only alleviated when America entered the war, and the Sunderlands were joined by long-range American Liberator aircraft, which also had a range of over 2,000 miles.
The use of Iceland as a base for aircraft did not become possible until Britain sent a Royal Naval task force to Reykjavik on 10 May 1940 to take control of the country. The Icelanders had not been warned in advance, and naturally were not happy about the matter; however, the need for the Allies to secure Iceland and deny it to Germany was of more importance to the British War Cabinet than the outraged feelings of the Icelanders. In May 1941 President Roosevelt offered to replace the British troops in Iceland with an American force. Following discussions with the Icelandic government, the American force landed an advance party on 8 July, which was followed eventually by a force of 40,000 men. The Americans did not endear themselves to the Icelanders at first: as Jonathan Dimbleby quotes in The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, ‘United States troops on sentry duty had a tendency to be “too quick on the trigger” …within the first few weeks two Icelandic civilians had been shot and killed, one of them a 12-year-old boy.
London sailed from Greenock and arrived at Hvalfjordur on 2 August.
After that we were at the occupation of Iceland. We went to Hvalfjordur, near Reykjavik. We were escorting troopships, as part of a convoy. There were sloops protecting against submarines. While we were in the fjord the U.S. Navy came in, including the battleship USS Texas, and they invited all the ships’ boys across for ice cream, so we all went over and had a look round. It was a First World War battleship, but it was still very spruce. They all had bunks – I never saw any hammocks. They took us round different parts of the ship, then some of them came aboard us later. It was a bit more drab than that ship – I think we could get pop, but not ice cream! I never remember having ice cream on board. That was in the summer, but after that we went off to Russia.
The London’s trip to Russia came against the backdrop of the worsening situation in the Russian fight against Germany, which had invaded Russia on 22 June 1941, inflicting huge losses on its aircraft and men on the very first day. The situation continued to deteriorate rapidly as the Germans advanced. In response to demands from Stalin, America and Britain had accepted that aid to Russia was necessary: from 22 June, the day of the invasion, as Richard Woodman notes in Arctic Convoys, Churchill had complained that
the Soviet Union’s first impulse and lasting policy was to demand all possible succour from Great Britain and her Empire … They did not hesitate to appeal in urgent and strident terms to harassed and struggling Britain to send them the munitions of which her armies were so short.
Churchill and Roosevelt held a meeting on board HMS Prince of Wales (the battleship which was later to be sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Malaya), in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941. The result of that meeting was a telegram to Stalin, to reassure him that the United States and Great Britain were cooperating to provide him with the supplies that he was demanding – demanding in unfriendly terms; in Lord Beaverbrook’s words, ‘surly, snarling and grasping’. So as to coordinate supplies and formulate a joint policy with the Russians, a conference was set up in Moscow. From the Allied side, an Anglo-American Supply Mission was sent, led by Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averell Harriman, accompanied by British and American military staff and civil servants.
They boarded London at Scapa Flow and sailed for Archangel on 22 September. Fortunately for the members of the mission, it was a calm trip and devoid of German attack. London had sailed without escorts, so the fact that the Germans did not find her was very fortunate. She arrived at Archangel on 27 September. The delegation was then escorted to Moscow. On the following day, London sailed from Archangel as part of the escort for a small convoy carrying timber to the United Kingdom. The fog and low cloud that surrounded the convoy prevented German aircraft, which were heard overhead, from attacking; as it was a designated slow convoy, with a top speed of 6 knots, that was very fortunate. On 2 October London handed over her responsibilities for the convoy, and returned to Archangel to collect the members of the mission after the completion of the conference. This time they anchored outside the harbour, and the members of the mission were ferried
