Yangtze Showdown Read online

  Copyright © Brian Izzard 2015

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Seaforth Publishing,

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

  47 Church Street,

  Barnsley S70 2AS

  www.seaforthpublishing.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 84832 224 0

  EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47385 495 6

  PRC ISBN: 978 1 47385 501 4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission

  in writing of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

  The right of Brian Izzard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted

  by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Typeset and designed by M.A.T.S. Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1 Under Fire

  2 The Fatal Decision

  3 Machine-gunned in the Water

  4 Consort’s Dash

  5 The Navy’s ‘Charge Of The Light Brigade’

  6 The RAF Flies In

  7 Not Kerans!

  8 A Diplomatic Challenge

  9 Trapped

  10 War Of Words

  11 The Politicians Fight It Out

  12 The Navy Sails Away

  13 A Chinese Puzzle

  14 The Threat To Hong Kong

  15 Deadlock

  16 The Colonel’s Big Mistake

  17 Thoughts of Escape

  18 Typhoon Gloria

  19 We’re Going Tonight

  20 Salute to Amethyst

  21 The Cover-up

  22 Lieutenant Weston’s Escape

  23 The Nervous Colony

  24 Kerans’s Drunken Escapade

  25 Welcome Home – ‘Up To Standard’

  26 The Case Against China

  27 Mao’s Trap

  28 The Tragic Sam Leo

  29 Looking Back

  30 The Fading Hero

  Appendices

  1. Ships in Action

  2. Amethyst’s Ship’s Company

  3. Casualties for Consort, London and Black Swan

  4. Awards

  5. Timeline of Main Events

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  For Helen

  Author’s Note

  For style and consistency the following names and spellings have been used: Chingkiang, Chu Teh (general), Formosa, Hankow, Hong Kong, Kwei Yung-ching (admiral), Mao Tse-tung, Nanking, Peking, Yangtze.

  Some place names in Admiralty and Foreign Office reports and messages may not correspond to those in current use.

  1

  Under Fire

  A COUPLE OF SHELLS WHISTLED overhead and a group of sailors on board the frigate HMS Amethyst came to the same conclusion: ‘They couldn’t hit a barn door.’ Amethyst was heading up the mighty Yangtze River from Shanghai to the Nationalist capital of Nanking, where she was due to spend around a month as the guardship for the British embassy. The firing, medium artillery and small arms, was coming from a Communist battery on the north bank, the ship’s starboard side. Large canvas Union Jacks were unfurled on both sides of Amethyst’s hull and the firing stopped after about 15 minutes. There were no hits. The ship was at action stations but did not return fire. The main topic of conversation resumed, the run ashore in Shanghai two days previously. Thomas Townsend, a 19-year-old able seaman from a village near Swansea, who was manning an Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun on the port side, said: ‘We’d lowered the Union Jacks, they’d seen it, they knew who we were, they’ll be no bother. Later on we discovered they could hit a barn door.’1 The Union Jacks remained over the sides but it was no guarantee that Chinese soldiers who had spent their time fighting on land would recognise them as British, let alone a ship of the Royal Navy on a peaceful mission.

  It was the morning of 20 April 1949 and a critical time during the civil war in China. Mao Tse-tung’s Communist troops had swept south to strategic areas on the northern banks of the Yangtze and were set to cross the river, aiming to finally crush the forces of the ruling Nationalists. Amethyst was sailing between the two opposing armies. But it was a voyage she should not have taken. At the last moment she replaced an Australian frigate, HMAS Shoalhaven. The Australian government had decided the mission was too dangerous and refused to allow Shoalhaven to sail. The Australians were not the only ones with fears. The US Navy also refused a request from the American ambassador in Nanking to send a warship.

  Forty minutes after the first attack there was a huge splash of water forward of Amethyst’s bow. Communist batteries near Rose Island, about 60 miles from Nanking, had opened up, this time with heavy artillery as well as machine guns. Full speed ahead was rung and the ship moved closer to the southern side of the river to increase the range. On the open bridge the captain, Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, soon realised he was facing a much more serious attack. He shouted, ‘Hoist battle ensigns’, and gave the order to return fire.

  Amethyst’s main armament was six 4in guns in three twin turrets, two of them forward and one aft. Stewart Hett, a sub-lieutenant serving in his first ship after training, was at action stations to direct the fire of the main guns. ‘The first few shots didn’t hit the ship,’ said Hett. ‘Up in the director I was told to get on the target. In the director you have two people, one’s the gunlayer and one’s the trainer who both have binoculars looking at the shore. I’m sitting behind them and above them with a pair of binoculars which points in the same direction of the guns so I can see what they’re looking at. We couldn’t see where the fire was coming from. It had been foggy and it was still a bit hazy on shore. Eventually we got pointing in the right direction and it was at this stage that we got hit. Three shots hit us almost simultaneously.’2

  The first hit, probably an armour-piercing shell, tore into the wheel-house, fatally wounding a rating and badly injuring the coxswain, Chief Petty Officer Rosslyn Nicholls, who was steering the ship. Nicholls collapsed on the wheel and Amethyst veered to port. The bridge ordered ‘hard a starboard’. Leading Seaman Leslie Frank, the only other crewman in the wheelhouse, who was dazed but unhurt, took over.

  A shell hit the bridge, killing a sailor and wounding everyone else, Skinner mortally. Donald Redman, a 20-year-old navigator’s yeoman from Bridgwater, Somerset, who had been standing next to the captain, said:

  The shell landed right in the centre. Lieutenant Berger [Peter Berger, the navigating officer] was also caught in the blast and he had most of his clothes blown from him and his underpants were in shreds. The Chinese pilot who was two feet behind me had the back of his head blown off. We were all spattered on the deck.

  Years later at a reunion in London Jimmy the One [Geoffrey Weston, the first lieutenant] came up to me and said, ‘Hell, Redman, I thought you were dead. I remember on that day coming up to the bridge, picking you off the skipper, looking at you and saying he’s a goner and throwing you on the deck’. I said, ‘Thank you very much, sir’. He promptly said, ‘No problem’, and trotted off to the bar for another brandy.

  I was helped from the bridge by someone and taken below. I had large lumps of shrapnel sticking out of me and I was patched up by a shipmate because the sick berth attendant had just been killed. I was able to stand up but
I was bleeding rather badly. I thought that if I don’t get this stopped I’m going to bleed to death. There were lots of wounded. Someone said, ‘What we need is a doctor down here’. It was one of the lower mess decks. I said, ‘I’ll go and find him’. I got on deck and the firing was still going on, ping pong, and the shrapnel was going around. I thought this is a silly thing to have volunteered for. I ran along the deck and found the doctor, who was obviously dead. So I automatically turned around to go where I’d come from and as I was passing the galley I was shot in the elbow. I went a little bit further and I was hit by another bit of shrapnel. The first thing I said when I got back to the mess deck was, ‘The doctor’s dead and if you don’t mind I won’t go out there again’. It drew a little smile from a couple of my mates.

  I was then helped down on deck leaning against a bulkhead and they brought a shipmate towards me. He was in a poor state, his tummy had been ripped open. They propped him against me. Someone pulled his stomach together and with my good hand I held it. After about half an hour he died and they pulled him away from me.3

  Another sailor desperate to find the doctor, Surgeon Lieutenant John Alderton, was Townsend, the Oerlikon gunner on the port side. ‘From my position I never fired a shot,’ he said.

  I had nothing to shoot at. The only bank I could see was the Nationalist bank, and nobody was shooting at me from there. All the firing was coming from the starboard side. Before I knew it, I couldn’t believe the carnage. I left my action station – there was nothing I could do, so I went to see if I could help anybody. I went round to the starboard side. The Oerlikon there was damaged from a shell burst. The fellow who was on the gun, his throat had been cut from one side to the other. I went down to the boat deck, there were people lying wounded and we tried to ease them as best we could.

  One chap had a huge hole in his chest and I said I would find the doc. I went running down the boat deck, hit the ladder to drop down to the quarterdeck, landed in a crouch and as I did that a shell came in. The doc was on my right and he had a needle to give someone a dose of morphine. The sick bay attendant was at his side. On my left there was a fellow with acid burns on his face. A shell had come in, burst a battery and he had got splattered with it. As I say, as I hit the deck this shell came in – the doc was killed instantly, the sick bay attendant was killed instantly, the fellow who had the burns was killed, the ladder behind me went. Nothing touched me.

  Amethyst could not train her two forward main turrets (‘A’ and ‘B’) on the Communist batteries because of the angle of the ship, and the aft 4in guns (‘X’ turret) were the only ones that could be used. But a shell had exploded in the low power room, making it impossible for Hett to direct the fire. ‘The low power room provides all the electricity for the gunnery control circuits,’ Hett explained. ‘My attempts to get the guns to open fire failed because there was no electrical link between the director and the guns. When we pulled the trigger in the director nothing fired.’ Hett ordered the guns to fire independently. ‘As soon as I realised we couldn’t do anything in the director I clambered out and got down to the bridge and could see it was a complete shambles. I decided the best thing I could do was go to the after gun and take charge and engage the enemy. I discovered that the after gun, which was the only one that could bear on the enemy, had been hit. The training rack had jammed so there was no means of moving the gun. We were in the position of not being able to fire any guns at anything.’

  ‘X’ turret had fired about thirty rounds before taking a direct hit, which killed one seaman and wounded three others. Amethyst was William Smith’s first ship since joining the navy in 1947, and four days earlier he had celebrated his twenty-first birthday. The Scot made the surprising disclosure that ‘X’ turret had not been firing live ammunition. ‘When Amethyst fired she used practice shells,’ said Smith. ‘Live ammunition had not been brought up from the magazines. The ready-use lockers were still filled with practice shells. So the first few shells that were fired off were practice and did no damage at all. By the time they got the real ammunition up the guns had been hit.’4

  As a teenager Ronald Richards had survived the wartime bombing raids on Birmingham. When the bridge was hit, the twenty-year-old able seaman was wounded in the back by shrapnel. Richards was sent below and went aft where a shell exploded, smashing him against a bulkhead and breaking a shoulder blade. ‘So I thought, sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m off towards the centre of the ship. That was a stupid thing to do because that was where all the ammunition was. And then another shell came in and I was wounded in the legs.’5

  Charles Hawkins, an 18-year-old stoker, was off duty and having a shower when there was ‘a thud on the side and I thought, what the hell?’ Hawkins said: ‘I ran out and saw everyone shouting and hollering. I didn’t have any clothes on, so I grabbed a towel. The first thing I saw was two or three bodies lying around. Everybody was diving for cover. I remember a friend of mine, Harry Morgan, got hit. I pulled him off the deck. He wasn’t dead at the time. I got him under shelter. Somebody else was screaming and crying, and I went to see if I could help. Of course, when I came back Harry was dead. There were bodies and blood everywhere.’6

  In the wheelhouse Leading Seaman Frank was desperately trying to get orders from the bridge, unaware of the casualties and destruction. The wheelhouse explosion jammed the starboard telegraph and the starboard engine remained full ahead, with the port engine stopped. In the engine room Leonard Williams, who had survived the sinking of two ships during the Second World War and three and a half years as a Japanese prisoner of war, quickly realised there was a major problem with the starboard telegraph. The engine room artificer stopped that engine. But Amethyst was out of control and slowly ran aground on a mudbank near Rose Island in the middle of the river. The stern was almost facing the north bank. Only five minutes had passed between the time the Communists opened fire at 0930 and the ship’s grounding.

  After Lieutenant Commander Skinner’s mortal wounding the executive officer, Lieutenant Weston, assumed command, but he had suffered a chest wound, a piece of shrapnel passing through a lung. He did, however, manage to go to the wireless office and arrange to send a ‘flash’ signal that Amethyst was under attack. The signal was not sent because of transmitter problems. Weston thought of taking the ship’s motorboat, flying a white flag, to the north bank to ‘parley with the Communists’, only to find that the boat had been smashed.7 It was feared that the Communists might try to board the ship. Bren guns and rifles were brought from below and armed sailors took up positions at key points on the boat deck.

  Lieutenant Berger, the navigating officer, who was caught in the bridge explosion, regained consciousness. He, too, had a chest wound. At about 1015 he gave orders for the secret radar sets and Typex cipher machine to be broken up and the pieces to be thrown overboard.8 This was no easy task, as Telegraphist Jack French discovered. He spent about half an hour trying to destroy the Typex machine with ‘a massive spanner, the kind used for undoing bolts on cranes, and a hammer. Believe you me, trying to break steel is a lost cause, it just bounces back at you. You’re liable to do more damage to your body than the equipment.’9 Confidential books were also collected for burning. The boiler room was shut down to avoid the risk of fire.

  At 1030 Weston told Berger to evacuate men, giving priority to the wounded, to the south side of Rose Island, with the aim of returning to the ship at nightfall and trying to refloat her. The first lieutenant would note later: ‘It was an unpleasant decision to have to make, even partly to abandon one of HM ships which was not sinking but the situation was unusual. We were unable to inflict further damage upon the “enemy” even if there had been an orthodox enemy to engage.’ The Communists were continuing to fire at the ship and the casualties were mounting. Some of the wounded had been taken to the quarterdeck, only to be hit again.

  Amethyst was an easy target in the confines of the river for battle-hardened gunners on land. One of Mao’s leading generals, Chu Teh [Zhu
De], had long before set up a school of artillery in Yan’an to improve skills after failings against Nationalist positions. US ambassador John Stuart – thankful that his navy had refused to send an American warship – observed: ‘Their marksmanship was excellent.’10

  Part of a report that the Admiralty originally wanted to keep secret until the year 2025 – a staggering seventy-six years after the attack – revealed that Amethyst had tried to sail past an area on the north bank identified as San Chiang Ying, ‘an assemblage point of craft for a main crossing of the Yangtze River. The batteries would, therefore, be very much on the alert and extremely trigger happy.’ The Communists were in no mood to show caution. Warships of the Nationalist navy had been ‘extremely active’ in bombarding Communist positions in the weeks leading up to Amethyst’s voyage.11 That morning four Nationalist destroyers were reported in the area.12 There were about forty junks, each capable of carrying between 500 and 1,000 soldiers, in a creek on the north bank opposite Rose Island. The attack on Amethyst cost twenty-three lives. But British sailors would soon be paying a higher price in blood.

  2

  The Fatal Decision

  BY APRIL 1949 CHINA WAS a war-weary country. Civil war had broken out in 1927, going on to produce numerous complexities, military and political, and the loss of more than three million lives. The Communists grew from an insignificant guerrilla movement into a major army. Fortunes seesawed during the 1930s. The Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, had several chances to beat their enemy, but they were never able to land the fatal blow, largely because of poor strategy and the incompetence of some of their generals. In 1937 the Nationalists and the Communists found themselves facing a common enemy – invading Japanese soldiers who soon captured Shanghai and Nanking. The fight against Japan carried on during the Second World War, although the Nationalists and the Communists still were not averse to battling each other. In 1945, with the defeat of the Japanese, Chiang and Mao were involved in peace negotiations with the aim of rebuilding their country. But the truce collapsed in June 1946 and the civil war resumed with a vengeance. Mao’s army had grown significantly, regulars and militias. His decision to use guerrilla tactics against the Japanese proved less costly in men and materials than Chiang’s more orthodox campaign.