They Were Just Skulls. John Johnson-Allen

      [W]e went off to Russia. We took with us Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averill Harriman; they were going to Moscow to meet Stalin. When we went to Russia we had an admiral on board, Admiral Hamilton. That’s because we had the VIPs on board, although we didn’t see much of them. They joined the ship in Scapa Flow and we sailed from there to Archangel. The weather was a bit choppy, but when we got to the ice floes the spray started coming over and they had us on the decks with chipping hammers.

      In conditions where spray – and in some cases, when the bow went down into a wave, solid water – was coming over the side, ice formed very quickly on the decks, on the handrails and on all the fittings. This had to be cleared, as the additional weight would rapidly affect the ship’s stability to an extent that would make capsize a serious risk. In addition to the crew out on deck with chipping hammers removing the ice, all wearing every piece of cold-weather gear they had, including gloves –flesh freezes to ice very quickly – all steam-powered winches and capstans had to be kept turning to prevent the steam in the pipes freezing and bursting them.

      We weren’t attacked on the way up there, but we were on the way back. When we tied up alongside in Archangel they put guards on the gangway so that nobody could be allowed off. All we could see were several women with axes over their shoulders who were cutting down trees and that. There were a few buildings on the jetty. We were only there for a few days and we weren’t allowed off. We took a convoy back [part of the way].

      London then returned to Archangel to collect the diplomatic mission and return it to the United Kingdom. This time she did not go into the port, but instead anchored outside in gale force winds and a very rough sea. This caused problems, as the members of the mission were taken out to London on a Royal Naval minesweeper which was based in Archangel. The small size of the minesweeper, compared to London, caused the transfer of the mission to be fraught with risk; it was, however, completed without loss or injury. After returning the mission, London spent some months in the Arctic, including the Denmark Strait. The sea conditions there were notoriously bad, and the result of a period in those conditions was to cause damage to London’s hull which necessitated a further refit.

      It was one of the early convoys up there. We were attacked by German torpedo bombers; I don’t remember that there were any submarine attacks. We weren’t the sole escort; there were corvettes as well. We were lucky because we ran into fog, and so we got through without much incident. We didn’t have radar at that time, though; it was installed later. I think we were in the middle of the convoy. We streamed paravanes in case there were any mines about. On the way back, I was made an ordinary seaman because I was 18. I was still part of the 4-inch gun’s crew. We were firing at the torpedo bombers. Although we didn’t get any of those bombers, there was one incident later when we were up in the Arctic and we had a near miss with a bomber. We went up there once more, going up into the Arctic Ocean, but we didn’t go around into Russia but turned round and went back. The convoy after that was the PQ-17. We went back to Scapa Flow, and then they sent us to Newcastle for a refit. There was a problem because she was very unstable because of the extra armour that they had put on, and she rolled a lot. I’d applied to do a sonar course and I left her there.

      The refit in Newcastle was needed because the works that had been carried out just before Fred joined her in Chatham had added additional weight to her superstructure. During her pursuit of the Bismarck and her subsequent time in the Arctic Ocean in her role as a convoy escort, following her trip to Archangel with the Anglo-American Supply Mission, cracks had appeared on the upper deck and on her hull, and various rivets were leaking. This result of her rolling and pitching heavily in the violent seas that she had encountered made it seem that the effect of adding extra weight to her superstructure had not been properly calculated.

      When Fred reached 18 and was rated up to ordinary seaman from boy seaman, he was able to choose the specialisation he wanted to follow in the Navy. Sonar, as he refers to it, was usually called Asdic in the Royal Navy in the war years, and was the means of detecting submarines underwater. Fred was interested in the element of the training course that studied electricity, and as will be seen after he left the Navy, it proved a very good choice.