Sunk by a U-Boat, Attacked by Kamikazes: Memoirs of a War at Sea
240 pages
Capt Andrew Welch
This is (yet) another of those WWII wartime personal sagas. John Marsden has taken Joseph, his father’s, taped recollections and done much research in the various archives at Kew to validate and amplify them.
Having survived the Liverpool Blitz in May 1941, Joseph Marsden joined on his 18th birthday two months later. He describes his basic training, as a seaman, at HMS Duke, Great Malvern, an establishment that in due course became the Royal Signals & Radar Establishment. It was to be 18 months, mostly spent in HMS Drake, before he went to sea, by then as a stoker, in HMS Woodpecker, one of Captain Johnny Walker’s famous Second Support Group. Initially, the 2SG was employed in ASW ops in the Bay of Biscay, until the air threat became overwhelming.
After a brief refit, Woodpecker rejoined the 2SG and they embarked on further ASW sweeps in support of convoys. After Capt Walker’s most successful deployment, with six U-boats sunk, the Group was returning to Liverpool, for a well-publicised heroes’ welcome, when Woodpecker was hit by an acoustic torpedo and eventually had to be sunk by HMCS Chilliwack. After survivor’s leave and a period convalescing in HMS Helicon, the convoy assembly base at Aultbea,[1] on Loch Ewe, Joseph Marsden was drafted to HMS Empress, a ‘Woolworth’ aircraft carrier.[2] He joined her in the Clyde in the summer of 1942 and they immediately left for the Far East. As these ships were intended to become merchant ships after the war, they had merchant ship propulsion systems, which were merchant navy manned. The £10/day pay differential (the MN stokers were paid ‘danger money’) was a cause of much aggravation. Marsden became a flight deck fitter. This was clearly no sinecure as the flight deck equipment was not up to its task and required frequent repairs. He was well placed to observe flying operations and observed the kamikaze attack on HMS Sussex during Op LIVERY, clearing the approaches to Phuket.[3] The flight deck equipment failed again and HMS Empress was back in Trincomalee when the Japanese surrendered. By mid-December, she was back in Greenock to pay off, before returning to the USA, where she was scrapped. Stoker First Class, as he now was, Marsden was drafted briefly to HMS Zealous in Kiel. He was demobbed in July 1946.
The strength of this book is Joseph Marsden’s accounts of day-to-day wartime life as a stoker. He was clearly a bit of a ‘lad’, liked a few beers and got into several ‘scrapes’. The weakness is that his son has done a lot of research and the father’s observations of life, both his and those around him, as the war progresses are followed by detailed accounts of the events his father has just mentioned, often in passing. This does not allow the narrative to flow and overall, the book is disjointed. At £25, this book is unlikely to appeal to most members.
[1] Aultbea is now home to the highly recommended Russian Arctic Convoy Museum
[2] HMS Empress was a Ruler-class, single screw escort carrier.
[3] Despite the book’s title, he was not in a ship attacked by kamikazes.
