Yangtze Showdown Read online

  In the early hours of 22 April, Fearnley gave Weston more morphine and Benzedrine tablets to help him carry out duties. A signal from Madden told the first lieutenant to move Amethyst and she went 10 miles up river, attracting sporadic machine-gun fire from the north bank – and the Nationalist south bank.

  Group Captain Jefferson and Letford spent the night at Shanghai’s Palace Hotel and in the morning returned to the office of the assistant naval attaché, where they learned that Madden had asked for another Sunderland flight to take eight naval officers and ratings and a chaplain – for burial duties – to Amethyst. The Sunderland took off later with the same crew and Monaghan but without the two soldiers because there would not be a parachute drop. Letford found the ship’s new position and made three runs. The south bank was ‘a hive of activity with the Nationalist troops digging in energetically’, but there were few signs of activity on the north bank. The plane landed near Amethyst and an inflatable dinghy was tossed out, only to be swept away by the current, estimated at five to seven knots. The Sunderland, which no longer had an anchor, also found itself sailing past the ship. At that moment artillery and small-arms fire erupted from the north bank.10

  ‘I opened the door, ready to jump out and swim to the ship,’ said Monaghan. ‘However, some of the damage control crew pulled me back and said, “Don’t be so bloody silly”. I said, “Let me go”. But the door closed and we flew off.’

  Amethyst was shelled again and moved further up river. The Sunderland remained in the area for about 45 minutes doing reconnaissance at the request of one of the naval officers on board, and then headed for Shanghai. From the rear gun turret Gerard Devany spotted two Mosquito fighter planes about two miles away and reported it to Letford. The pilot told him to keep an eye on them. Both sides were using Mosquitoes.

  ‘During the war we used to have a method of making ourselves a difficult target to the enemy fighter aircraft by doing what we called corkscrewing,’ Devany explained.

  This simply meant at a given signal from the rear gunner the pilot would do a pretty vicious roll and dive to port, then roll and climb to starboard and keep doing this as long as necessary. It was assumed that this manoeuvring would make it difficult for the fighter pilot to line his sights on us in order to fire his guns.

  Bearing all this in mind I called the pilot and said, ‘Be prepared to corkscrew’. At this point one of the Mosquitoes did the usual turn in on our tail at about 800 yards. At 600 yards I said, ‘Corkscrew now’. The poor old Sunderland must have wondered what had hit her. They are not built for this undignified type of flying. While all this was going on, I gave a couple of three-second bursts on my machine guns in the general direction of the Mosquito.

  We will never know whether the pilot was startled or just highly amused at the incredible behaviour of a flying boat suddenly spitting bullets out of her tail and leaping round the sky like a skittish moth round an electric light bulb. He certainly had second thoughts for he turned off in the direction of Nanking.11

  The Sunderland was still flying low when shortly afterwards there was small-arms fire from the ground. The plane was hit in two places, one bullet passing through the co-pilot’s sleeve. Letford climbed for cloud cover and the plane returned safely.

  Monaghan was asked to report to Vice Admiral Madden again. He told him: ‘I wanted to get back to the ship but that crowd prevented me.’ Madden replied: ‘I’m glad they did. If you had got in the Yangtze, the way that tide was flowing, you would have drowned in no time.’

  The next day, 23 April, Madden again asked for the Sunderland to undertake a mission. This time he wanted reconnaissance of the Yangtze to see the position of Nationalist warships, with the idea that these vessels might help Amethyst to escape down river. The Sunderland took off with the same crew but without navy or army personnel and headed for Chiangyin, flying at about 800 feet because the cloud base was 1,000 feet. Communist forces had already crossed the Yangtze between Chiangyin and Nanking. Some five miles south east of Chiangyin heavy machine-gun fire was directed at the plane and the port petrol tank was hit. It was an unlucky shot, as Devany pointed out:

  These tanks are covered with a bullet proof skin, but just round where the straps hold the tank fixed to the wing there is a small area about the size of a coin that is not bullet proof. The bullet had gone in there. Why didn’t it blow up? Search me. Petrol was pouring into the wing close to the wireless operator’s cabin. All electrical switches we could do without were turned off and the wireless operator was busy rushing back and forth with cooking pans full of petrol. I held back from asking, ‘Where are you taking it?’ By the look of his face I will swear that he was a born actor and the direction he was heading told it all. It was going down the toilet. Now to my mind when I think of it that was a terrible thing to do. As soon as the petrol hit the slip stream it would be highly volatile and one spark would do the rest.

  Devany had experienced his own close shave in the rear gun turret. ‘I was rotating my turret from side to side when suddenly it went dead,’ he recalled. ‘I used the hand winder to bring the turret round to the fore and aft position and climbed into the rear of the fuselage. Then I could see the reason for it. In the body of the aircraft and just behind the gun turret there is a control valve called the dead man’s release. The object of this is to get the gunner out of the turret if he is out of action.’ The dead man’s release had been ‘shot to pieces’ and all the oil operating the turret had flowed out onto the floor. Devany was thankful: ‘When you think this valve was about ten inches away from my back when I was in the turret, I felt I should take a lottery ticket as this was my lucky day.’12

  Because of the fuel problem and other damage the plane returned to Shanghai. Some 300 gallons were lost in less than an hour. A second Sunderland had arrived from Hong Kong and the first flying boat was sent back to Kai Tak. But Group Captain Jefferson, wondering if another mission might be requested by Madden, decided to keep the original crew ‘who already had experience of this difficult undertaking’. But no further requests were made because ‘efforts were being made to arrange a safe passage down stream’.

  In his report on the missions, Jefferson said there had been crucial help from the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation and Jardine Matheson at Lungwha airport. He paid tribute to the Sunderland’s crew and the two soldiers from the Royal Army Service Corps, and ‘I was particularly impressed by the great skill and coolness displayed throughout by Flight Lieutenant Letford’. He ended his report by saying that ‘at no time was fire opened from the Sunderland’. But Devany was clear that he had fired ‘a couple of three-second bursts on my machine guns’ at a menacing Mosquito fighter. He would be ordered to deny this action.

  Air force involvement was not confined to the Sunderland’s missions. On 23 April the senior officer at RAF headquarters in Hong Kong, Air Commodore Adolphus Davies, was in bullish mood and sent a ‘top secret’ message to Vice Admiral Madden, with copies to the First Sea Lord and the Foreign Office, saying that ‘if Amethyst has to fight her way out I most strongly advocate the use of Beaufighters as I sincerely believe that after a few attacks gun crews would desert’. The offer was not taken up.

  7

  Not Kerans!

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JOHN KERANS WAS the wrong man in the right place on the morning of 20 April. If the Admiralty had been in possession of a list of officers who could be sent to help Amethyst, Kerans might well have found himself at the bottom of it. In fact, another officer was chosen to replace the wounded Weston and he had been on board the flying boat when the Sunderland made its unsuccessful second flight. Kerans was not a man in favour. There had been run-ins with authority, and he was sent to the Far East Station without an appointment and ‘for disposal’, a rather unfortunate term that was used if an officer had committed ‘a misdemeanour’ in his previous post. The 33-year-old Kerans was a heavy drinker and had ‘an incorrigible desire for women’. He ended up in Nanking as an assistant naval attaché. Captain D
onaldson, the naval attaché, needed help because he was being inundated with signals traffic stemming from the growing crisis over the civil war. On 20 April, after only a few weeks in the city, Kerans was about to experience a remarkable change in his fortunes, beginning with a journey that would see him become a national hero.1

  He was born at Birr, King’s County (later County Offaly) Ireland on 30 June 1915. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Kerans, served in the Worcestershire Regiment during the First World War, winning the Distinguished Service Order. The colonel had shown bravery early on – at the age of 13 he was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s bronze medal for trying to save a man from drowning. He was wounded at Gallipoli but went on to fight on the Somme and in the Battle of Arras. His health never fully recovered after his war service. John Kerans was 11 and a boarder at a prep school in Gloucester when his father died in 1927, aged 47. Two years later he entered Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, as a cadet. He was good at some sports but did not shine academically, and was often caned for flouting the strict discipline. In 1933 he found himself in the Far East as a midshipman in the cruiser HMS Cornwall. After a spell in the Mediterranean he returned to the Far East in a staff job doing intelligence work. When war broke out in 1939, he asked to be transferred to Atlantic convoy duties, later going to the Mediterranean in the cruiser HMS Naiad, where he saw a lot of action. In May 1941, during the evacuation of Crete, the cruiser HMS Orion, carrying many soldiers, was attacked by dive-bombers, with the loss of some 360 lives. Orion managed to reach Alexandria, where Lieutenant Kerans was put in charge of the working party clearing the bodies. He was left traumatised. The previous month his brother Mickey, a captain in the Worcesters, had died of wounds received during the battle of Keren in Eritrea. On 11 March 1942 Naiad was sunk by the German submarine U 565 after an air attack. Seventy-seven crew died but Kerans was rescued unhurt, though exhausted.2

  In August 1944 he was given his first command, the destroyer HMS Blackmore. Alan Tyler joined Blackmore as navigating officer when she was having a refit at Sheerness, but he was not impressed with the new captain: ‘Kerans was a senior lieutenant who had probably spent most of the last five years at sea under considerable strain, and in his case the escape was drink, which he did not carry well. He sometimes returned aboard the worse for wear and had to be helped to bed, which was embarrassing for the duty officer and for morale. He was also not a great ship handler, nor an easy man to work with.’ On a trip to Scapa Flow during trials the ship was caught in a boom, and on her return to Sheerness a cable became entangled in one of the propellers, requiring the services of divers.3 After convoy duties Blackmore headed east but returned home when the war ended, at one point grounding. Kerans was admonished after a court on inquiry. There was a more pleasant experience in Plymouth on 7 January 1946, when he married Stephanie Campbell Shires, an officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

  Kerans was given another command in January 1947, the frigate HMS Widemouth Bay, which was based in Hong Kong. In the March, the ship was transferred to the Mediterranean to reinforce the Palestine patrol. By May Kerans had a crew verging on mutiny. Discontented sailors claimed there had been petty restrictions and ‘insensitive practices’ over several months. One incident brought matters to a head. Crewmen had been told to paint the ship during stormy weather. The trouble was considered so serious that it led to a board of inquiry.

  But worse was to come. One night when Widemouth Bay was berthed at Malta, some of the ship’s company – probably officers among them – returned from a heavy drinking session ashore and urinated over the side of the ship before stripping off and jumping into the harbour. Kerans may have joined in, or perhaps been thrown overboard by those seeking revenge. Unfortunately for Kerans, the antics were witnessed by the admiral superintendent of the dockyard, who was having a cocktail party on his veranda. The board of inquiry recommended a court martial, and Kerans was found guilty of negligence and a charge relating to alcohol. The commanding officer and his first lieutenant were dismissed their ship. A leading stoker was also punished. Interestingly, after Kerans’s departure there was ‘a notable change in morale’.4 The lieutenant commander ended up back in the Far East with a desk job doing intelligence work. He was even seconded to the police in Kuala Lumpur. The future did not look promising.

  With Vice Admiral Madden’s options running out, the naval attaché in Nanking decided to send his assistant to Amethyst. Captain Donaldson also told Kerans to try to find out what had happened to a group of Amethyst’s wounded, as there were conflicting reports about their whereabouts. At 1000 on 21 April, Kerans set off from Nanking in a Jeep borrowed from the Australian military attaché, with medical supplies and Chinese navy charts of the Yangtze. He had a Chinese driver and was accompanied by the assistant military attaché at the British embassy, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Dewar-Durie, who had been commissioned into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The first destination was the Nationalist navy headquarters at Chingkiang, but they had only gone a couple of hundred yards when the Jeep broke down. The driver leapt out, tinkered with the engine and swore, and they carried on, only to break down several times. The road surface was poor and dusty, and they arrived at the naval headquarters in the early afternoon. They were greeted by Captain Mark Meh, the local navy commander, whose English was ‘as impeccable as his uniform’. Meh said fifty-six men from Amethyst had left Wu Tsin, 40 miles to the south east, by train for Shanghai. Kerans asked for a boat so that he could go to the frigate but the captain said it was too dangerous – and, in any case, there were few serviceable craft left. During the conversation a young Chinese lieutenant turned up. He had been near Amethyst in a landing craft earlier but was fired on by Communists on the north bank. Kerans spoke to Captain Donaldson by phone and was told to return to Nanking ‘as there was nothing else we could do’.

  But shortly afterwards Donaldson changed his mind and phoned to give new orders. Kerans should travel overland and try to reach Amethyst with the medical supplies. A doctor from the US Navy, Lieutenant Commander James Packard, arrived at the naval headquarters in a saloon car with an assistant and agreed to go with Kerans and Dewar-Durie. Packard, who ran a clinic in Nanking and also acted as the assistant naval attaché at the American embassy, had been alerted to the plight of Amethyst’s wounded and came with plenty of medical supplies. The Nationalists provided two trucks to evacuate casualties. Captain Meh insisted on going as well and the convoy set off on a heavily pot-holed road, arriving at a village about 23 miles east of Chingkiang. The trucks could go no further but the local army commander arranged to send on stretcher-bearers. The Jeep and the car continued for two miles until the track petered out. Waiting there were six soldiers who had commandeered a large wheelbarrow and two coolies to push and pull it. The wheelbarrow was loaded with the medical supplies, and the group set off on foot in single file on a path between rice fields, heading for a creek where they were told Amethyst lay. The path twisted and they rounded the southern slopes of a ridge.

  ‘As evening drew on our shadows lengthened before us and it got much colder,’ Dewar-Durie recalled. ‘Conversation in single file is always difficult and soon there were no sounds but the shuffle of our feet, the creaking of the wheelbarrow, and the grunts and heavy breathing of the two coolies. Soon it was quite dark and it was while looking down to see where next to put my feet that I cannoned into the man in front and we all concertinaed.’ For Kerans the journey seemed ‘never ending’. They arrived at the river bank and found a creek, which turned out to be the wrong one. After a further ‘appalling’ trek they reached the right creek. There they came across four badly wounded sailors on stretchers. An uninjured able seaman, Raymond Calcott, was in charge of the men, and there were also about forty soldiers. Calcott was able to give Kerans some news. He said twelve wounded men had been escorted away a short time earlier using another track. Amethyst was not far and an RAF doctor was on board after arriving in a Sunderland flying boat. The US Navy
doctor treated the four wounded men and decided he would accompany them to an agreed assembly point, Ta Kang, the village where the two army lorries had been left.

  It was arranged that Kerans, Dewar-Durie, Able Seaman Calcott and a Chinese doctor would go to Amethyst, and after a 40-minute wait they set off in a sampan at 0100 on 22 April. The ship, not showing any lights, was soon spotted thanks to a misty moon but to the dismay of Kerans she started moving slowly away. He tried to signal with a torch but the frigate carried on, and there was no hope of catching her. The sampan headed back to the bank. It was a nervous time as Dewar-Durie pointed out: ‘As the sampan made its return trip I couldn’t help thinking that we were in rather an unenviable position, floating around between two rival armies. What if the Nationalist sentries mistook us for the first wave of the Communist assault? Every minute I expected some nervous soldier to let fly, but nothing happened, not even a challenge.’ Before Amethyst set off the remaining wounded were sent ashore in a sampan, with Weston refusing to go, despite the advice of the RAF doctor, because too few officers would be left. ‘How this batch missed us will never be clear,’ Kerans remarked. These wounded were taken to a nearby village, where they spent the night.

  After some ‘very welcome’ cups of tea at a farmhouse Kerans and his group walked through the night to the assembly point, Ta Kang, arriving just before dawn. Dewar-Durie recalled: ‘Here in the dim light was a sorry sight. Around the lorries lay wounded waiting for their turn for treatment or to be bedded down in the trucks. Packard was busy moving among them, injecting, bandaging or giving blood transfusions. We soon realised that the two lorries would not be enough and so a call was put through to the Fourth Army headquarters, which readily agreed to send more. In fact, it was quite amazing how much help was given, especially if one remembers that everything was done under the shadow of an impending attack by an implacable enemy.’ Packard’s description of his patients: ‘They were shot to hell.’ Two men died on the journey to Ta Kang, Amethyst’s captain, Skinner, and Able Seaman George Winter. Soldiers had carried the badly wounded on stretchers for about nine miles over appalling tracks in pitch darkness and dropping temperatures.5