Mike’s detailed account on the H.M.S. Patroller
In the decade before his death, John’s twin brother Mike wrote a memoir, tentatively titled “Without Trumpets or Drums.” This unpublished memoir has been very useful for this website, since John and Mike did most things together as children. This chapter tells the story of their 1944 eastbound crossing on H.M.S. Patroller.
4
Convoy
You can never tell when lightning’s going to strike.
In 1944, when I was fifteen, my grandmother suddenly told me one day that she had just received a letter from my mother who was then living in the north of England. She wrote that she had decided it was time for my twin brother and me to return to England. Although at that time the Germans were sporadically bombing England with V-1 and V-2 rockets, the deadly blitz now seemed to be over and she deemed it safe for us to return. My older brother, Peter, had returned the year before.
Both John and I were devastated. After five years of living in America, the thought of suddenly leaving our school (Editor’s note: This was probably the Fessenden School, in Newton, Mass.) and all our cousins and close friends was a real body blow. At the same time we realized that our grandmother was too old to continue indefinitely the care and feeding of two fairly boisterous teenagers, and I understood my mother’s need to have her children back again. And certainly we wanted to see our parents once more after a five-year separation.
Crossing the Atlantic in wartime was not something that was easily arranged. However, before the war a favorite uncle, Greenough Townsend, had been a senior executive of the United States Lines, America’s premier shipping company. Through some deft string pulling, he was able to arrange passage for my twin brother and me on H.M.S. Patroller, an American-built aircraft carrier which had been presented to the British government as part of the Lend Lease program. She was scheduled to sail from New York to Liverpool on August 15, 1944.
Accordingly, John and I packed all our belongings and took the train from Hyannis to New York on August 14 where we were met by another favorite uncle, Bill Taylor. I will never forget that evening in New York. Undoubtedly understanding our despondency at leaving our friends and what had been our home for the past five years, he decided that a massive diversion was needed.
On the death of our grandfather several years before, Uncle Bill had become the head of the W.A. Taylor Company, and because of this he was a well known figure in New York’s restaurants and nightspots. Our first stop was for dinner at the Versailles, one of the city’s flossiest nightclubs where, besides dancing, there was a floorshow which we watched from a ringside table. I remember that the show included a magician who put a dozen razor blades in his mouth followed by a length of black thread. After some theatrical chewing, he pulled the thread out of his mouth with all twelve razor blades dangling from it. An outstanding diversion.
Next we went to the 21 Club for an after-dinner beer. This famous establishment had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, and at Uncle Bill’s request Mr. Kreindler, one of the owners, took us downstairs to the brick-lined cellar. At the end of one passage there was an apparent dead end; nothing but a brick wall. Mr. Kreindler took a long, slender rod from a hook, inserted it in a tiny hole between two of the bricks, and the entire wall swung smoothly and noiselessly open. In the old days bootleg liquor had been stored there, concealed from the Feds. Since Repeal it has housed the Club’s fabled wine collection. The visit to the 21 Club was another great diversion.
We visited three more spots that evening before heading back to Uncle Greenough’s apartment where we spent the night. Both John and I had consumed five beers over the course of the evening; one at each stop. The accompanying buzz, perhaps, may have been the best diversion of all.
Early the next morning Uncle Bill accompanied us to a west side hotel where we joined twenty-two other children, all slated to return to their homes in England as our fellow passengers aboard H.M.S. Patroller. We thanked and said goodbye to Uncle Bill, took our seats in the bus that was waiting outside the hotel, and headed to a pier in Brooklyn where we climbed the gangway and boarded the towering aircraft carrier.
Patroller was not a giant aircraft carrier, but she seemed pretty large to me. While she was fully armed and carried a complete crew, she had no active aircraft on board. Instead she was serving as a cargo ship, ferrying a load of about 50 fighter planes to England. These were stored on the flight deck and one deck below in the capacious hangar. So that more planes could be ferried to England, their wings were folded back, and to protect them against the salt air they were all coated with a dark green plastic film.
Because there were no functional planes on board, there was no need for pilots either, so we young passengers occupied the pilot’s Ready Room, the area where the pilots normally gathered when they were not actually flying. For this voyage our rather Spartan accommodations in the room consisted of two dozen cots, two dozen metal chairs, and scores of hooks lining the walls. From a large hook by each cot a bulky life preserver was hanging. Quite naturally, all of us were a bit depressed, not just by our new quarters, but also by the strangeness of our new situation.
In their wisdom, the British navy had appointed a corporal of the Royal Marines to oversee the ship’s twenty-four young passengers. He was stationed almost all day long in the Ready Room as our “nanny,” and although today I cannot remember his name, all his mates called him Tubby. He had been born some thirty years before in London, within the sound of Bow Bells, which made him a true Cockney. He was a quintessential Marine sweat; overweight, dismissive of all authority, undeniably vulgar, and possessed of a huge and infectious laugh. Within hours we all worshipped him.
We learned from Tubby that Patroller was the flagship of the large convoy of more than eighty ships. Although the carrier’s cruising speed was relatively fast, in spite of the danger of German submarines lurking in the Atlantic, she would be forced to sail slowly enough so that the slowest of the heavily laden cargo ships could keep up. Thus the trip to Liverpool would take eleven days instead of the more normal prewar time of seven days. Tubby told us that the much slower speed would make our ship “A ruddy sitting duck for any Kraut submarine,” a gloomy comment that did nothing to dispel our depression.
At mid-morning, seamen cast off the lines that had lashed Patroller to the dock and, aided by two tugs, we slowly moved out into New York harbor where we saw the Statue of Liberty. There were already several dozen cargo ships and three destroyers there, and together we moved further out toward the Atlantic. We waited here for hours as the rest of the convoy formed up and took station around Patroller as directed by the warships. Later that night, when we were all fast asleep, the convoy moved out on the first step of the possibly hazardous ocean crossing.
As you might imagine, twenty-four children ranging in age from eight to fifteen at first found the aircraft carrier wildly exciting after the first strangeness had worn off. We were allowed almost the full run of the ship and the sailors were unfailingly friendly and helpful. But after we had inspected the planes, the flight deck, the guns, the galley, and the bridge (on a scheduled visit), boredom quickly set in.
The tedium was alleviated slightly on our first day out when, in response to a command from our captain, the entire convoy practiced synchronized zigzagging, an exercise designed to make a lurking submarine’s accuracy more difficult. From our vantage point on the flight deck, it was an enormously impressive sight as every ship simultaneously shifted direction from port to starboard and back again on the captain’s signal. The convoy performed this exercise every day at a different time and, although we didn’t see it, sometimes at night as well.
Even though it was August, the Atlantic was unpredictable. On our sixth day out the waves had grown increasingly higher as the wind became stronger, and at about four o’clock the ship was pitching and rolling so much that it was impossible to stay upright without holding on. Feeling a bit seasick, I decided to go on deck for some fresh air, and so I climbed up until I came out on the flight deck overlooking the ship’s bow.
It was an awesome sight. Stretching as far as I could see were giant white-crested waves, and even though the flight deck was forty feet above the sea, spray from a cresting wave would occasionally sweep across the deck. I clutched onto the chain which circled the bow area, but before long I was too cold and wet to stay there any longer.
Although we never had any sort of lifeboat drill, we were told that in an emergency we should all put on our life jackets and proceed to the hangar deck, positioning ourselves underneath the aircraft stored there. To make sure that the younger children followed these instructions, each of the older boys was assigned to look after one of them. My charge was an eight-year-old called Spencer.
Spencer was a frail and often fearful child. I had observed him softly weeping on the day we embarked, and several times after that I had seen him in tears because, I presumed, of the strangeness of his new surroundings. I was not thrilled to be his guardian, but apart from what we termed in those days his “soppiness,” he was not a bad little boy and he seemed pleased that I would be looking after him.
One afternoon, two days out from Liverpool, alarm horns sounded and the entire convoy was ordered to commence zigzagging. At once Tubby told us that a submarine had been detected by something called ASDIC, and as Patroller would obviously be the prime target, he told us to go down to the hangar deck as quickly as we could. I grabbed Spencer and we ran down the stairs to our assigned station.
As we cowered beneath a fighter plane on the hangar deck, the klaxons continued to blare and we could feel the ship violently changing directions as the captain maneuvered to avoid any possible torpedoes. It was all too much for the terrified Spencer, who started to wail. I tried to comfort him as much as any fifteen-year-old boy could, but obviously what he wanted was his mother. Sadly, she was many miles away in England. Trying to be a good substitute, I put an arm around him and told him I knew that he was going to be a brave little boy. This may have had some effect because after a few minutes he stopped sobbing and then turned and lay flat on his stomach. After which, probably exhausted by his sobbing, he mercifully fell asleep on the metal deck.
Relieved that he was no longer crying, I watched him quietly breathing. And then I noticed that he was lying on a large hatch which was painted yellow. Stenciled on it in bold red letters were the words, “DANGER. MAGAZINE #3.” I knew immediately that if a torpedo did hit H.M.S. Patroller, Spencer and I would be among the first to hear about it. I decided he didn’t need to know this. (Editor’s note: A ship’s “magazine” is where artillery shells and gunpowder are kept.)
Three days later we reached Liverpool. There John and I saw our mother waiting on the pier for us. As we disembarked, I had to admit to very mixed feelings. It was wonderful to see my mother again even though I was far away from the life I had known and loved for the past five years. But most of all, I was happy and vastly relieved that H.M.S. Patroller had docked safely. I was pretty sure that Spencer was, too.
— Michael Maxtone-Graham