The voyage

Sevenoaks to Suez

On 21^st June 1941 Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union. During the last week of July 1941, the personnel of the 67^th Medium Regiment R.A., who had been camped under canvas in Montreal Park, Sevenoaks, marched to Sevenoaks railway station to begin a journey to an as yet unknown destination.

These two events seem totally unconnected. Yet I suspect that it wasn't until Hitler committed his armies to the invasion of the Soviet Union, thus removing the immediate threat of a Nazi invasion of Britain, that the government considered that it was safe to send a convoy of ships carrying thousands of troops plus arms and equipment away from the defence of the United Kingom to our hard-pressed forces in the Middle and Far East.

I had said my farewells a week or so earlier at the end of my embarkation leave. I was glad that Heather Gilbert, my girl friend, wasn't among the little group of tearful women and girls who saw us off. We travelled westwards through that long, cold, uncomfortable and – for most of us – sleepless night, arriving at our destination, the dock-side at Avonmouth, early in the morning.

There our troopship, 'Rangitiki' awaited us. I learned later that she was a New Zealand Shipping Company vessel that, before the war, had brought frozen 'New Zealand lamb' to England, returning to New Zealand with passengers. Built in 1929 she was a vessel of 1,700 tons.

We poured on board and were shown our 'mess-deck', where we would sling our hammocks to sleep at night and have our meals during the day for the duration of the voyage. We were not the only troops on board. I know that there was also a battalion of the Welch Regiment and there may have been others.

As night was falling the 'Rangitiki's' engines started up and we crept silently out of the harbour, down the Bristol Channel and into the open sea. The morning found us steaming northwards up the Irish Sea within sight of the Welsh coast. There was a notice asking for volunteers to man the Breda machine guns that were mounted on the ship's bridge to fire at attacking aircraft. Volunteers would serve a four hours on, eight hours off, watch throughout the voyage and would sleep in the fo'c'sle with the crew. I instantly volunteered, not out of heroism (I sincerely hoped that there wouldn't be any air attacks!) but because I had spent another thoroughly uncomfortable, claustrophobic and sleepless night in that hammock. I was pretty certain that in the fo'c'sle we wouldn't be expected to sleep in one.

We weren't – and we didn't have any air attacks either. The four hours on and eight hours off continuous watch was a bit demanding but the view from the bridge and the feeling that we were, in a sense, part of the crew, made it well worth while.

Our immediate destination was the Firth of Clyde where we met up with the rest of our convoy. Did we arrive the day after we left Avonmouth? I don't remember. I do recall that we were there on August Bank Holiday Monday (in those days it was the first, not the last, Monday in August) and that our entire convoy escorted by two Royal Navy destroyers, steamed out of the Clyde a day or two later.

First we sailed north-west, almost as far as Iceland I was told, to evade – or perhaps simply to confuse – any patrolling U-boats. The sea became increasingly choppy and the weather colder and colder. Then, on a signal from the convoy commodore, we swung round and steamed at full speed south-southeast towards the equator.

The weather grew warmer and the sea calmer. Many of us changed into the tropical uniforms that we had brought with us. Once, I think that it was just after we had passed the Azores, there was a submarine alert. We had all been allocated a place with one of the rafts lashed down on the upper deck. If our ship was torpedoed and sunk we had to grab hold of the rope lashed round the raft, which would help us keep afloat until we were rescued – or, of course, not rescued!

We stood ready at the Breda in case a submarine surfaced. The convoy began to zigzag to make each ship a more difficult target. The destroyers circled round us. Suddenly their courses converged and they released depth changes. They were some distance from the Rangitiki but we saw vast columns of water rise in the air and felt, rather than heard, the underwater explosions like gigantic hammer-blows on the submerged hull of our ship. Shortly after that we received the 'all clear'.

Activities were devised on board to keep us occupied. Every day there were physical exercises in which, much to our disgust, we volunteer machine gunners had to take part when they took place 'off our watch'. There was an inter-battery quiz. I was, typically, the only contestant to know that 'Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note as his corpse to the ramparts we carried', were the opening words of a poem about the burial of Sir John More after the Battle of Corunna in the Peninsular War. Equally typically (to the disgust of the Suffolk countrymen in 231^st Battery) I didn't know that the young of the hare was called a 'leveret'. But for that demonstration of my ignorance we'd have probably won!

It became still hotter. We volunteer machine-gunners were permitted to go to the ship's galley and take a glass of ice-cold water. 'Sip is slowly', we were warned, 'or you'll regret it'. I, of course, knew better than that. I gulped it down – and quickly did regret it. I was seized by agonising stomach cramps that took hours – or so it seemed – to subside.

We spent a few days under leaden skies and intermittent torrential rain anchored off Freetown, Sierra Leone. During brief rain-free periods native canoes drew up along side our ship, the occupants diving for pennies that we threw into the turbid water. Diving like seals and swimming like fish, they never failed to retrieve the pennies!

A day or two out of Freetown, off an area of the West African coast where there was believed to be an enemy U-boat base, we spent the most alarming few hours of the entire voyage. There was a problem in the engine room. The engines fell silent, the constant vibration to which we had become accustomed ceased. The Rangitiki lost way and stopped. The rest of the convoy sailed past us and and continued on their way, while we remained motionless, like the vessel of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 'As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean'.

Meanwhile, we could hear (and we were convinced that any U-boat commander within twenty miles could hear!) thunderous banging from the bowels of the ship as engineers frantically strove to get the engines going again. Nightfall – it was a cloudless night with a full moon and a million bright stars! Any U-boat commander whose attention had been attracted by the engineers' hammering could hardly miss the Rangitiki starkly silhouetted on an ocean as still as a millpond! As the hours dragged on, our nerves were stretched to breaking point, our ears alert for any unusual sound and our eyes constantly scanning the surface of the ocean for anything that could, just possibly, be a hostile periscope.

At last, at long last – there was a familiar and welcome vibration beneath our feet. A white wake appeared behind the ship's stern. The engines were working again. We were on our way.

What a relief it was, from our vantage point high on the ship's bridge, to see the convoy and those two protective naval destroyers in the distance, and slowly to catch up with them and take our place again in their midst.

There were no further incidents. After we had crossed the equator we watched shoals of flying fish leap out of the water and dive back into it again and, on two occasions, we saw great whales surfacing and 'blowing'. Table Mountain came into sight. The seas were turbulent as we rounded the Cape, huge waves tossing our 1,700 ton vessel (and all the other vessels in the convoy!) about like match boxes. During those few hours I came as near to sea-sickness as I did throughout the voyage.

Soon though, we were round the Cape and sheltered from the ferocious westerly winds. Putting in at Durban in Natal was, as far as we were concerned, the most momentous event of the whole voyage. We were fortunate in that the 'Rangitiki' was one of the vessels of the convoy that pulled in and was moored beside a quay. Others anchored off-shore. A lorry, loaded with oranges (which we hadn't seen since the outbreak of war!) drove up to the side of the ship. The oranges were unloaded and distributed among us. There were few duties on board and we machine gunners were exempted from all of these. Everyone not on duty went gratefully ashore on each day of our brief stay.

We had left an England beset by air attack, with a thorough blackout, shortages of everything, and strict rationing of food, clothing and other essentials of life. Durban was a city of peace, light and plenty. It was how we imagined Britain would be 'once the Nazis were defeated'! It is true that the city had its darker side. Everywhere there were notices, in English and in Afrikaans, proclaiming that this, that or the other facility was 'for whites only'. I can't honestly claim that this disturbed us very much – though I think that it would have if we had had any non-whites among our number.

Ferret Hawes and myself in Durban. Ferret is still in his battledress uniform. I have changed into tropical kit which I felt looked smarter. The rickshaw man never actually pulled that rickshaw. He just stood there and had his picture taken. I imagine that hundreds of British and Colonial troops who passed through Durban must have duplicates of this picture!

Local people welcomed us and made us feel at home. I went ashore with 'Ferret' Hawes, a fisherman from

Orford who was a fellow member of the No 4 gun team of 231^st Battery's 'B' Troop, and on board ship was a fellow machine gunner. We explored Durban together and one afternoon a large car with a black chauffeur drew up alongside us and we were offered the hospitality of a very 'top drawer' English lady whose husband, a lieutenant-colonel, was serving in Burma. She was living in Durban 'for the duration'.

She told her chauffeur to drive us out to 'the Valley of a Thousand Hills', a spectacular vista not far from Durban. We were then driven back to the lady's palatial home where she clapped her hands and her servants (black of course!) produced a lavish, and extremely enjoyable meal for us accompanied by a South African white wine. I can only hope that our table manners weren't too far short of those to which she was accustomed!

Until we steamed out of Durban into the Indian Ocean we had no idea of our eventual destination, apart from the fact that, since we had been issued with tropical kit, it was likely to be somewhere 'in the tropics'. Once the convoy was again on the high seas, it became obvious that our destination was the 'Middle East', almost certainly Egypt and Libya. The convoy split into two, our half proceeding northwards up the East African coast, the other half departing eastward towards India, Burma and Singapore.

An incident that made a strong impression on me occurred at about this time. There had been a death on board and there was to be a burial at sea. It was not a member of the 67^th but it was a service man, presumably from the Welch Regiment. He was to have a military funeral. Everybody who wasn't on duty was assembled. We all tried to look our smartest. We sang an appropriate hymn, but our voices were carried away by the wind, The chaplain said a prayer and the appropriate words of committal. A trumpeter sounded the Last Post and the flag-draped coffin was consigned to the ocean. How tiny the coffin seemed compared with the size of the ship and the immensity of the ocean! I was quite suddenly struck with a sense of the insignificance of mankind faced with the majestic power of the natural world and how petty our daily concerns seemed when we were faced with the great mysteries of life and death.

There was now considered to be no possibility of attack from enemy aircraft but it appeared that there was a possible threat from floating mines. The ship was fitted with what I can only describe as 'a mine deflector'. A steel cable that, just below waterline was stretched round the prow of the ship and fanned out away from the ship's hull. The hope was presumably that any mine that was encountered would be deflected away from the ship by this means. We machine gunners were taken off the bridge and the Breda guns and given the new duty of standing in the bows keeping a sharp look-out for floating mines, U-boat periscopes, or any other suspicious objects. As before we did a four-hour watch and eight hours off duty.

We put in at Port Sudan, a hot, dusty port where, to our disgust, the officers were allowed ashore but we were not. Passing from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Suez we saw Arab fishing dhows for the first time. With the barren Egyptian desert on our left and the slopes of Mount Sinai to the right (no, we hadn't been at sea quite long enough to think in terms of 'starboard' and 'port') we realized that we were nearing our destination.

It was Port Tewfik, an out-station of Suez. The Suez Canal area had experienced one or two German or Italian air raids so we manned our Breda guns again while the Rangitiki was unloaded and the troops disembarked.

As a result we machine gunners formed part of a rear-guard and it was several days after everybody else had departed that we walked down the gang-plank with our kit and piled into the back of a lorry to be taken to the 67^th's new tented base – somewhere in the Egyptian desert.

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Postscript

There are, in fact, two post-scripts to this account of my voyage in the Rangitiki. The first relates to the occasion, it must have been in the early '60s, when Heather and I camped with our two sons at Debden Green on London's north-eastern outskirts and took them to 'see the sights of London'.

Among these was the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the Greenwich Maritime Museum and the'Cutty Sark'. We returned via the Woolwich Free Ferry and as we drove through theNorth Woolwich docks we saw a large steamer moored there. Yes, it was the Rangitiki, which had obviously, like me, survived the war and had lived to sail another day.

Much later, this must have been in the '90s, I was contributing a regular 'chat and comment' article to a local newspaper and mentioned my voyage on the Rangitiki from Avonmouth to Tewfik in 1941. This evoked a letter from a reader, who lived less than half a mile from my home, who had been the ship's boy on that same voyage. I went to see him and we had a long chat.

It was his first voyage just as it had been mine but, of course, he had been a member of the crew. He had later joined the Royal Navy. He remembered well both the funeral at sea and the time when we had been broken down off the West African coast. The crew, he remembered, had been every bit as apprehensive as we had! The funeral too, had given him the same deep feeling of depression that it had me.