CHAPTER TWO
A certain knowledge that he and his ship were to take part in the making of history was what most impressed Lieutenant Peter Dickens, as he sailed HMS Blencathra, a Hunt class destroyer, from her normal patrol station on the east coast of England towards Milford Haven. He had not been told why he must report there, but clearly something big was in the wind. This was one of the most extraordinary facts about Operation Overlord - everybody, both allies and enemy, knew that it was imminent, yet the details remained one of the best kept secrets of the war.
As she ploughed through the English Channel, Blencathra passed a tug towing what Dickens later described as ‘a vast and half-submerged cotton reel’. Unable to control his inquisitiveness, Dickens signalled the tug’s captain, asking what it was. ‘A machine for putting a head on watery wartime beer!’ came the splendidly misleading reply, with which Dickens had to be content as he made his way onwards towards his destination. Only later, after the invasion, did he learn about PLUTO - Pipe Line Under The Ocean.
Two parcels awaited him at Milford Haven. The smaller contained the detailed orders for Operation Neptune, the naval assault. Dickens handled these reverently. The larger contained the amendments, and since security ordained that only the Captain should see them he settled down for a lengthy session with scissors, paste and waste-paper basket. As he worked through the orders, he began to understand the true magnitude of the operation. The complete confidence in victory; the amazing detail; all truly staggered him. The little Blencathra would be just one ship among almost 7,000, yet, as he read on, it was made perfectly clear what he was required to do and how his small part would fit into the whole complex jigsaw.
HMS Blencathra, a Hunt class destroyer commanded by Peter Dickens on D-Day.
‘The sea was filled with shipping of all shapes and sizes’ - headiong for the coast of France.
The waste-paper basket soon filled, and when Dickens was momentarily in the ‘heads’ his ever solicitous steward, Able Seaman Gallop, ditched the entire contents into the fast-ebbing tide. Not just a few slips of paper, but whole pages, even chapters, all marked ‘TOP SECRET’, top and bottom, front and back. Horror dawned quickly. ‘Action Stations. Away Life-boats crews’. And soon these were seen busily harvesting their catch of soggy paper. Quite what the natives of Milford Haven thought of this sudden maritime ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign is not recorded, but at least the Germans never found out. Nor, which was perhaps just as important, did Dickens’ admiral!
Blencathra was not one of the first echelon of assaulting ships. She sailed on D-Day as part of the escort to an American follow-up convoy, and arrived off Utah beach on D+1. Dickens described the passage as ‘uneventful’, meaning only that there was no enemy action. But then he was convinced that there would be none; the orders had more or less said so. But if uneventful from the point of view of action, it was indeed eventful, even inspiring, by other standards. As Blencathra neared the Spout, the point where the coastal channels merged and headed south through the cleared minefield lanes, the sea was filled with shipping of all shapes and sizes and in such numbers that chaos seemed inevitable. Yet each group could be identified in the book, and all seemed to be at the right place and time. The minefield channels were clearly marked by buoys, and it was the job of the escorts to keep the transports between them, even though this apparently simple manoeuvre was easier said than done, since some of the less professional sailors, unused to the strong cross tides, did not readily appreciate the need both to steer crabwise and to keep station on a line of bearing.
From the moment that the leading landing-craft lowered its doors and the assaulting infantry and tanks struggled through the surf onto the beaches, the focus of attention inevitably switched from sea to land. But the Navy’s task was by no means over - indeed it had only just begun. The soldiers fighting inland would need thousands of tons of stores, ammunition and equipment. There would be a constant flow of casualties and prisoners moving back to England, and replacements moving out. And as the Allied armies strengthened and expanded their hold on French soil, so more formations would be fed in, before the beach-head, bulging like an overfull balloon, would burst, and the advance which would lead to the final defeat of Hitler’s Germany, would begin. Everything must be brought across the Channel from England, and be landed in the early stages over the open beaches and later through the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches. The security of this, the Army’s lifeline, was the Navy’s task in the weeks following D-Day.
A landing craft fills with Gls destined for Utah beach on D+1. HMS Blencathra was one of the escort vessels.
Landing craft pass one of the bombarding warships.
HMS Blencathra delivered her charges safely to Utah Beach on D+1 and, following instructions, steamed east towards the British assault area. The sight, along the 25 mile journey, was remarkable. The concentration of ships of all shapes and sizes stretched from horizon to horizon; battleships, cruisers, destroyers, all firing desultorily from one end while sailors not on duty sunbathed at the other; transports, freighters, tankers, minesweepers, a wide variety of specialised ships; landing ships and of course hundreds of landing craft which buzzed between ship and beach like bees between heather and hive. Each ship carried some vital equipment or fulfilled some crucial function which would help the armies now ashore. The shells that sped inland did so in response to some urgent request for fire support. Unseen in the bowels of the bombarding ships men pored over maps, calculated range, elevation and direction, transmitted orders and corrections to those manning the gun turrets - all in support of the soldiers fighting inland.
Dickens weaved his way through this maze to make the appointed rendezvous with his admiral. Finding him at the correct place, of course, he was told of his role in the protection of this vast armada. This seemed an almost irrelevant task - was it possible that a force of this size could be vulnerable to any form of German attack? As he watched the continual stream of aircraft overhead, Dickens reflected that it was four years almost to the day that the Luftwaffe had owned the skies over Dunkirk. Now they could muster little over 100 fighters to oppose the 5,000 which the Allies could put into the air over the invasion area.
But war is always a story of the unexpected. And so it was that on one fine evening as Blencathra was going out on patrol, Dickens was standing on the bridge idly watching an aircraft weaving its way through the forest of masts when it made a sudden dart towards him, and he woke up just in time to order ‘Full ahead; hard a-starboard’, as the track of a torpedo slid a few feet past his hull.
‘I sweated, not so much with terror as with abject shame. After five solid years of fighting! I resolved never to take anything for granted again. The plane flew off with smoke pouring from its engines; the mixture must have needed adjusting or something - nothing to do with our gunnery!’
Each night the eastern end of the anchorage was guarded by a line of Landing Craft (Gun), and the northern edge by minesweepers, all at anchor. Ouside these, motor gunboats patrolled, controlled by radar-fitted frigates. Further out, the Hunt class destroyers, operating in pairs, supported them. A few German motor torpedo boats made several gallant sorties against ridiculous odds. But, for the most part, the nights were dull, because ‘there were never enough enemy torpedo boats to go round’. And after a particularity effective air raid on their base at Le Havre on 14 June, they virtually ceased to function.
One night, however, when two sizeable ships were detected leaving the Seine and heading north at high speed, Dickens resolved to investigate:
‘I set out with my sister ship, Quorn, whose First Lieutenant just happened to be my brother. We hadn’t gone far when our deviation became apparent to the flagship which pompously told me to ‘resume your appointed station’. But Nelson’s blind-eye technique seemed appropriate and we pressed on. Alas, the enemy was faster than us and we couldn’t make it; but what we did make was the range of the German heavy battery at Cap d’Antifer, and when we were surrounded by splashes rather higher than the mast my mind became wonderfully concentrated and duty suddenly became a pleasure!’
One unorthodox weapon which the Germans tried against the Allied fleet was the ‘human torpedo’. This was, in fact, two torpedoes; a real one, with a warhead, slung below another which was little more than an engine with a cockpit in which the luckless driver was confined for perhaps 12 hours - or the rest of his life, whichever was shortest. It could do only 2 or 3 knots, and was undetectable by Asdic (anti submarine detection device). One night the Germans released a mass of these from the east of the assault area, when the tide was west-running. The first that Dickens heard was a signal from a neighbouring patrol saying Quorn sunk, no survivors’.
‘That was a blow; you know how it is with brothers. You don’t really miss them till they’re not around. As soon as I could leave my patrol at dawn I went over there as a sort of last rite, but on the way a human torpedo suddenly appeared alongside, with the driver still on board. I thought that if we picked him up he would sink the wretched thing as he got out, and that we ought to try to take it back for the Intelligence people to play around with. So we hoisted it on board, with him still inside. When we released him from his cockpit he told us that he had set the demolition charges, which would go off in a matter of seconds. Luckily someone understood German and we all dived behind the funnel. After a huge explosion there wasn’t a piece of that torpedo left larger than a saucepan, but we found out that dozens of the things had been washed up on the beaches anyway.”
Quorn was there alright, a double echo on the Asdic. Nothing else. So Dickens turned disconsolately back towards his anchorage. On his arrival, and to his intense relief, his brother turned up in a small craft. Quorn had split in two and sunk quickly, but he had floated off the bridge. The lifebuoy sentry on the near vertical stern had managed to set all the depth charges to safe, so that they would not go off as the ship went down, and had then stepped dry-shod onto the only boat that was there. Quorn’s consort had stopped initially, but, when narrowly missed by a torpedo herself, had wisely moved off. There were only 35 survivors out of a ship’s complement of 170 - one of those all too frequent wasteful incidents in war which does not affect the outcome of the battle. Dickens’ brother had spent many hours in the water, holding on to men who were holding on to men who were holding on to a Carley raft. Some prayed; others called for ‘Mum’; one just floated away and drowned, not because he was weak but because he was just plain angry.
Lieutenant Peter Dickens, RN, in 1944.
But for Dickens and the rest of the Navy life remained busy, if unexciting. The action had moved into the Normandy countryside as the soldiers fought their way inland.
Inland from King Beach. A map to support the directions given in the text.