Rear Admiral Courtney Anderson CB

REAR-ADMIRAL COURTNEY ANDERSON

Confronted by the Admiralty Interview Board, the thirteen-year-old Anderson was visibly very nervous. “Fie my lord, fie. A soldier and afraid?” quoted the parson member. “Afeard” quavered the little boy. “Are you telling me I’m mistaken?” said Dog Collar. A Collected Shakespeare was fetched, but Anderson had just played Lady Macbeth at his school and knew her lines.
The son of a lieutenant-colonel in the Australian Light Horse who had died of influenza after the Dardanelles without meeting his son, Anderson was accepted for naval training at Dartmouth, getting to sea as a midshipman in September 1934 in the light cruiser Achilles. The conventional progression of qualifying courses and promotions culminated in command of a motor torpedo boat at Portsmouth as war broke out in September 1939.
Courtney Anderson’s Seagulls in My Belfry appeared in 1997 and is a dazzling account of his unique wartime experiences. Full of interesting and often very funny anecdote, he is utterly frank about the failures of a nation and naval service that with its under-funded armed forces and a legacy of unrealistic concepts and strategies was unprepared for a global war.
Promoted lieutenant in January 1940, he was appointed in command of the newly-created 10th MTB Flotilla at Gosport but was alarmed at the motley collection of five boats he had been given – small, unreliable, built as ‘experimental types’ and with a miserable armament of machine guns, nothing like the heavily armed motor gun boats that were to come.
After an abortive attempt to rescue Leopold, King of the Belgians, his flotilla was ordered to land its torpedoes and make for Dunkirk. Pillars of smoke made the navigation easy. Anderson had been given instructions to pick up General Lord Gort the CinC whose reply was terse and to the point – he would not consider leaving his army at such a time. 10th Flotilla did all they could, often under fire, to rescue soldiers and ferry them to larger ships offshore.
Quite unsuited to offensive patrols across the Channel, the ‘Wobbly Tenth’ patrolled inshore against the invasion threat until warned off that they were to be freighted to the Middle East. Anderson swiftly married Pamela Miles, a Wren, at the Garrison Church in Old Portsmouth, days before it was destroyed by bombing.
A long two-month voyage around the Cape to Suez in a freighter saw the 10th Flotilla arriving in the eastern Mediterranean in April 1941 and sailing almost at once for Crete which was clearly the next Axis target after the Allied evacuation of Greece.
The boats fuelled at Mersa Matruh and arrived at besieged Tobruk in darkness, picking a way through a harbour full of wrecks. Refuelling laboriously with jerry cans, they set off before dawn and the arrival of Stuka dive-bombers. Two broke down and had to return to Mersa Matruh. Three eventually made it to Suda Bay, but only No 67, Anderson’s boat, was fit for service. Air raids were incessant and material support non-existent. After three night patrols against a seaborne invasion, Anderson was ashore when he noticed that the sky was full of German paratroopers.
His three MTBs were noisily destroyed by fighter-bombers. Anderson was sad to see his No 67, faithful and a unique veteran of Dunkirk, Tobruk and Crete, submerged in the clear water. Cowering in olive groves while Stukas dive-bombed all around, he and his crews were evacuated as useless mouths by the destroyer Jaguar.
The evacuation of Crete cost the navy dear, but 18,000 Allied troops were rescued.
With the remaining two boats that had not reached Crete, Anderson with two seconded Swordfish aircraft briefly blockaded Vichy French Lebanon from a base in Cyprus, sinking a destroyer. Re-equipped with powerful American MTBs, the ‘Wobbly Tenth’ gallantly supported the siege of Tobruk until the calamity of its ineptly-defended fall to Rommel’s Afrika Corps in June 1942. Anderson’s account of the collapse of morale, destruction of equipment and abandonment of posts at Alexandria by naval personnel – albeit mainly irregular ‘base-wallahs’ – makes uncomfortable reading.
His home leave was interrupted by orders to act as naval liaison officer to a large troopship full of American infantry, bound for North Africa and Operation Torch. Returning again to England he was appointed second-in-command of the
‘tired old sloop’ Scarborough based at Londonderry and which took part in several hard-fought Atlantic and Freetown convoys. Well reported upon, in the spring of 1944 he was awarded command of the destroyer Wivern, commissioning at Devonport after damage repairs and allocated to East Coast convoys from a base at Harwich.
Fog, foul weather and drunken ship’s masters were some of the hazards to be met by these necessarily strung-out convoys, steaming between buoys, sand-banks and minefields. On March 14, 1945 a ship was sunk by U-boat 714 to the rear of Wivern’s convoy – Anderson swung round and was delighted to see the new anti-submarine South African frigate Natal armed with the lethal ‘Squid’ ahead-throwing mortar arriving in support. Guided by Wivern, Natal attacked with one salvo and departed on her way. Anderson was unsatisfied and continued his search, finding an oil slick and, because his ancient asdics could not pick up a submarine on the bottom, plastered the area with all his depth charges. More and heavy oil appeared. Wivern rejoined her convoy. Three days later a hunter-killer group found U714 in Wivern’s position and broke it open; Wivern was clearly credited with the kill. There was much celebration with congratulatory signals from flag officers – an elderly ‘V&W’ destroyer had sunk a U-boat – “it was if a pedestrian had run over a car”. Later, politics got in the way and Natal alone was credited and was awarded the medals despite having made no paper records of the engagement. Anderson was mentioned in despatches with two of his shipmates, a curiosity if his ship was not supposed to have been there.
After the Japanese surrender, Anderson volunteered to command the frigate Loch Killisport and take her to the Far East. This was a difficult period; everyone wanted to go home and there were mutinies amongst the army in Gibraltar and the RAF at Aden. The morale in Loch Killisport was very low with many ‘hostilities only’ ratings. But the British had come back to the Far East where their reputation was in tatters. By strong leadership, Anderson won his people round, demonstrating that the White Ensign still counted for something amidst the chaotic events in Java where Indonesians had obtained Japanese arms and were killing British servicemen and massacring Dutch prisoners. He rescued over a hundred Dutch women and children under fire and transported them to Singapore, where he received expressions of displeasure from the authorities – it might affect Malay opinion.
Subsequently commanding the frigate Loch Achray, he took a ship’s boat ashore to a small island to cogitate about how to raise esprit de corps amongst this equally depressed ship’s company. He came across two beautiful naked women doing their laundry by a stream who greeted him enthusiastically. To escape, he started to make for the village – which yielded about a hundred more. ‘howling with primitive joy’. Running for the jetty and his boat, which had fortunately arrived, he ordered the coxswain back to the ship, quick. The coxswain viewed the scene, his face expressionless. “My God, sir, you don’t do things by halves, do you?”. (This was a colony of ex-Japanese army ‘comfort girls’.)
His post-war tours included a period as assistant chief of naval intelligence in Occupied Germany, requiring a careful briefing in ‘tradecraft’ and dealings with some very peculiar people engaged in espionage for whichever side of the Cold War.
Now a lieutenant-commander, Anderson’s last sea command was the handsome destroyer Contest in the Home Fleet. An insufficiency of ships and a surplus of eligible captains now prompted the Admiralty to create what became known as the ‘wet and dry lists’ – those condemned to the ‘dry’ list with no further seagoing resigned in multitudes. Despite his creditable command performance, Anderson was labelled ‘dry’, his subsequent land-based appointments included a tour in the British Joint Services Mission in Washington USA, an interesting period in the Admiralty intelligence division during the 1956 Suez crisis, management of the Devonport naval barracks, second-in-command of the naval air station at Yeovilton and, after promotion to captain, a year at the prestigious Imperial Defence College, British naval attaché in Germany and director of naval recruiting.
He was promoted rear-admiral in 1969 and was chairman of the Admiralty Interview Board – experience coming full circle – until retirement in 1971 with the CB.
His exercised his talent for writing in many directions and wrote the Admiralty Board’s annual Bulletin for seven years.
He is survived by his wife Pamela and their three sons.

Rear-Admiral Courtney Anderson CB
Flag Officer Admiralty Interview Board
1969-71 was born on November 8, 1916.
He died on December 8 aged 92.