Wingfield at War: Vol. I PDF
Preview Wingfield at War: Vol. I
Wingfield at War Wingfield AT WAR VOLUME 1 OF THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR AND PEACE MERVYN WINGFIELD SERIES EDITOR: CAPTAIN PETER HORE Whittles Publishing Published by Whittles Publishing Ltd., Dunbeath, Caithness, KW6 6EG, Scotland, UK www.whittlespublishing.com © 2012 Richard M. Wingfield Series editor: Captain P. G. Hore FRHistS CMIL RN rtd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers. ISBN 978-184995-064-0 Printed by Contents Introduction .................................................................................... vii Foreword ........................................................................................... ix Preface ................................................................................................ xi 1 Early years in Ireland (1911–21) ............................................. 1 2 School days (1922–28) ............................................................ 7 3 I join the fleet (1928–30) ...................................................... 19 4 Happy days in the gunroom (1929–31) .............................. 29 5 Training for submarines (1931–33) ................................... 40 6 Odin and the China fleet (1933–35) ................................... 47 7 War on the horizon (1936–40) ........................................... 55 8 Early wartime submarine operations (1940–41) ............. 66 9 Loss of Umpire (May – July 1941) ..................................... 72 10 HM Submarine Sturgeon (1941–42) ................................. 77 11 Taking command of Taurus (1942–43) ............................. 87 12 Eastern Mediterranean (July – August 1943) .................. 97 13 Taurus goes east (1943–44) ................................................ 105 14 Peace (1945) ........................................................................ 118 15 Post-war service in the Mediterranean Fleet (1945–48) .. 128 16 Washington and Paris (May 1949 – September 1950) ... 137 17 The Gare Loch, Scotland (July 1954 – May 1955) .......... 144 18 Greece (January 1956 – August 1957) .............................. 152 19 Admiralty again and Scotland (1957–62) ....................... 159 20 Retirement of a sort ........................................................... 164 Notes ............................................................................................... 169 Index ............................................................................................... 175 Captain Mervyn Wingfi eld DSO, DSC and bar, RN. 1911–2005 introduCtion by the series editor As a freelance obituarist for the Daily Telegraph I have written more than 500,000 words on over 500 men and women of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Merchant Navy and allied services including Special Forces personnel, yachtsmen, shipping magnates and others. An im- portant national, daily broadsheet is a newspaper of record, and for an obituary to be published a very high degree of factual evidence is required. So, as well as enquiring about a man’s or a woman’s charac- ter, public achievements and private life, the obituarist is obliged to conduct much research and fact-checking. There are three people who can be trusted with the amount and nature of information which needs to be sifted: they are the priest, the doctor, and – of course - the obituarist. Like the priest and the doctor, the obituarist must analyse much sensitive evidence, and must decide where the truth sits between the Official History, what the subject told the children, and what they and his or her friends remember – which can amount to many different things. From time to time I have been trusted with unpublished memoirs or, as in this case, a full-blown autobiography. However, even these cannot be wholly relied upon because without recourse to official records and because the writing occurs many years after the event, the individual may easily make mistakes in dates and places, and in other matters. Nevertheless, the individual may have been eyewitness to or pro- tagonist in events which gave him or her a unique knowledge of what happened, and can recall details that historians are unaware of. In this series it is an honour to rescue this evidence from the grain of history and preserve it for this and future generations to read, mark and in- wardly digest. vii Wingfield at War In this volume – as I will in future volumes - I have tried to keep the immediacy of the author’s words, while making minor corrections only to the spelling and style. Also, by reference to offi cial histories and especially in this case to Admiral Hezlet’s History of British Submarine Operations in the Second World War, I have tried, by use of footnotes and endnotes, to give a framework to the story, to set it in its con- text, and to explain some of the names and places which the author assumed that the reader would know. I am pleased that Mervyn Wingfi eld’s memoirs should be the fi rst in this series: Wingfi eld at War is told with a quiet humour, he is frank in his opinions and throughout his life he managed to shrug off its ups and downs. He has recorded events, like life in the pre-war Navy or hunting and then being hunted in his submarine off Penang, in a detail which deserves to be known more widely. I am grateful to Richard Wingfi eld for providing his father’s 1983 memoirs A Sea-going Story, from which he had produced an illustrated edition for the family in 2000, and for his help in sourcing further illustrations for the present edition, Wingfi eld at War. I am also grateful to Keith Whittles for his vision in agreeing to bring out this series of memoirs, and to Shelley Teasdale and Kerrie Moncur at Whittles Publishing for their unstinting work as editors and designers of this book. PGH viii foreWord Captain Mervyn Wingfield was one of the last of his generation of submariners who made their reputation in World War II. Before the war he had served on the China station; in the war he commanded three submarines, Umpire, Sturgeon and Taurus, survived a collision in the North Sea, spent a winter in the Arctic, penetrated the Norwegian fjords submerged through a minefield, surfaced off St Nazaire in view of German guns to act as a navigation marker for the raiding force, fought cavalry in the northern Aegean, and later, off Penang, was the first to sink a Japanese submarine – and barely survived the subse- quent, vicious counterattack after Taurus was severely damaged and became stuck in the mud at the bottom. Any one of these incidents would have merited a place for Wingfield in the history of naval war- fare and the pantheon of submarine heroes. It is remarkable that one man should have been involved in so much action in so few years. His naval career and mine barely overlapped, but I can empathise with some of Wingfield’s deeds, in so far as the diesel-powered subma- rines in which I served were not so different to those in which he made his name years before, albeit that my boats were better equipped. So I can only admire his achievements, the risks that he took, and the man- ner in which he led his crew and was loved by them. Many were burned out by the war, but in the post-war years Wingfield enjoyed a successful peacetime career where, finally, his personal qualities and his diplomacy were put to the test as a naval attaché. I only regret that I never got to one of his famous, lively beef and Stilton lunches which he used to host at the Boat Show! Wingfield belonged to one of the last of the generations of Anglo-Irish families who served the Crown and provided officers and men for the Army and the Navy, and his story gives some insights into his early days, especially with regard to being a young officer in the Royal Navy in the 1930s. ix
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