Sea Control - Sea Control 421 - Uncommon Courage: Yachtsmen Volunteers of WWII with Julia Jones

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Link:1. Uncommon Courage – The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II, by Julia Jones, Bloomsbury,  2022.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Julia Jones, and we're going to discuss her book on British yachtsmen volunteers in World War II. I'll offer one corrective here at the top. That's the first name of Erskine Childers. We both knew who he is. We just misspoke in real time, which happens pretty frequently on these things. But go read The Riddle of the Sands as well. That said, Julia's book is an early candidate for my favorite book this year.

Great for those of us out there contemplating what we might need in the event of a naval war and the contributions that could be made by every shape and size of hall and some men and women who know how to handle them. This episode, I believe, is the first that had been produced by the newest member of our team, Brennan Costello. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean. Chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you.

You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Julia Jones, and we're going to discuss her book entitled Uncommon Courage,

The Yachtsman Volunteers of World War II. So, Julia, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Well, one of the things I'd rather do, of course, is talk about the yachtsman volunteers, but I am myself a sailor. I have a lovely yacht, which I inherited from my father. my father was at the core of my interest in this. I'm a writer. I write both fiction and nonfiction. And I think what I absolutely love doing is following up forgotten stories. And that's what I feel I'm doing here. Well, thank you again for coming on. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we

might be otherwise associated. So you mentioned your father was at the core of this. How did you learn about your father's service in World War Two? And how did that lead to this book? Well, I'm ashamed to say that when my father was alive and tried to tell me about these things, I simply sort of, I was a teenager, and I simply sort of glazed over and cut him out. Because it hadn't, it didn't seem to me to be a sort of glamorous wartime service. He was somebody with very poor eyesight. So he'd much more been in the logistics side. And that didn't really mean anything to me then. And I do remember him trying to show me a little typescript he'd written about going to the Baltic in August 1939 and going through the Kiel Canal. And this was

absolutely in the weeks before the war was declared. And then, sadly, he died far too prematurely. You know, I was robbed. And a little while ago, I was searching up in a very cluttered addict actually looking for a logbook of for my own boat and when I found this suitcase that I hadn't really opened and you know this is like the beginning of a thriller isn't it but it has been a thriller for me I opened the suitcase and in the suitcase were my father's diary for the year 1939 when he was 20 he was 21 in January 1939 so and he was not a mature not a confident 21 year old but he was intelligent enough to see that war was coming so there was this diary very moving then there was the typescript that i'd refused to look at before describing how he

joined this organization called the rnv sr um and they'd gone off on a little motor yacht to the baltic um and they'd been taking photos of german warships and then they'd been warned off fairly smartly and by the time he came back um his call-up papers were waiting for him and he was straight up um to a submarine depot ship and really that was that was um it for the next six years i read the introduction as you brought up your father and how every single person's response to you was it's just like riddle of the sands which i recommend the readers if you haven't read it it was on last year's uh holiday reading list for some sake but what does the term yachtsman mean in this context and what can you tell us about pre-war yachting culture well childers

author of riddle of the sands um was a yachtsman before the first world war and he had a sort of vision of the special skills of the amateur cruising yachtsman not the not the big glamorous ocean racing type um the type who you know often a young man not always but usually a young man couple of young men and they go off and they creep around the coasts and they're pretty tough and they've got some little old funny old boat and they become very aware of the characteristics of the coastline and Childers point was that the navy is a deep sea service and that they they have different types of expertise and he believed that the yachtsman qualities of observation and coastal navigation was something quite unique and they should be used in time of war

In the same year, 1903, that Riddle of the Sands was published, the RNVR, which is the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, which Childers was advocating for, was established, but they didn't really use yachtsmen. In fact, there was lots of reasons why yachtsmen didn't join it. And in the First World War, the RNVR really wasn't used in that way. But by the mid-1930s, when it was coming up for a second war, the Navy became aware that they needed to build ships, and if they needed to build more ships, they would need more officers. And they suddenly, finally, the penny dropped that here was a group of people who, in the interwar years, had perhaps felt the shadow of the First War hanging over them. Many of them, of course, had lost their fathers in the First War or their fathers had come back, you know, damaged in some way. And they needed ways to sort of test themselves as young men. And, you know, sailing or exploration was one of them.

So the Admiralty had this very good idea. Let's have a list of people volunteering to serve in the case of an emergency. And that was the RNV SR, the Supplementary Reserve, or as I like to call it, the Oxman Volunteers. So I'm going to go slightly off script with this next question, too, because I think, you know, our modern conception of what constitutes yachting is also very much wrapped up with like a discussion like upper class versus lower class. Today, I don't know that it's quite as attainable as what these gentlemen were back doing then was that that was a much more common hobby back then, regardless of a person's class than it is today. I think, to be fair, though, I think it was certainly middle class and professional class. I don't think that you remember, of course, you know, 1920s, 1930s, we're talking about depression years. You know, there was a you know, there was extreme poverty and difficulty.

So, yes, you could be pretty impecunious like my father, who was just his father had died in an accident and he was just a clerk in Birmingham. So he wasn't grand at all, but he could manage to afford, you know, an 18-foot open boat that he could take out to sea and he could have his little adventures with. But then, you know, there were also, you know, the more professional class, the rich, the more moneyed yachtsmen, you know, who might have, you know, a beautiful yacht and they might have gone on the fast net race or something like that, you know. So it did encompass a wide social set, but not complete, by no means a complete social set, because they were looking for officers, you see, they didn't want to use the RNVR itself could be used for ratings officers, specialists, but the RNV SR was specifically going to come straight in as officers. And, you know, the Navy's got quite did have quite definite ideas about what officer like qualities they were called OLQs. If you've got OLQs, you're OK. And that was often to do with had you been to a public school, for instance. So as the war came to Great Britain, how did the RNVSR develop and what sort of missions did those involved in it become involved with? Initially, there was no phony war at sea in Britain.

On land, there was a sort of sense of anticipation which didn't materialise. And actually on the continent, the army wasn't much used. But at sea, immediately, there was a need. Mine warfare began immediately. And both mine laying and mine sweeping and patrolling. We were trying to blockade Germany, which had been very successful in the First World War. So therefore, what these men were needed for was to help take charge of minesweepers and to serve on patrol vessels of all sorts. Quite a lot of sort of stop and search, if you like, up in the northern route to Germany,

because we're very worried about the German warships coming out round Greenland and the Faroes and getting into the Atlantic, which unfortunately they did. And so it was those sort of small ship jobs to begin with. And there was absolute resistance from the regular RN officers. There weren't going to be any amateurs on submarines, for instance. They just weren't going to have it. And they weren't really going to have them on battleships either. RNVSR officers longed to serve on destroyers, but actually you had to be pretty well connected to blag yourself a place on a destroyer.

But of course, as the theatre of war spread and became a global theatre of war, you know, the RN officers were spread pretty thin. And so very soon, the RNV SR officers were stepped up to take more responsibility. And, you know, they were all over the place. But picking up a point that you made earlier about the uses of people's non-nautical experience, because the Admiralty had had this list, this list of 2000 volunteers, once they had a chance to look at that list, they discovered they, for instance, had really top flight barristers on that list. You know, some really hot shot lawyers or some people with mechanical experience. So some of those people who'd like Ewan Montague, a very famous King's counsel, he was all ready to join a patrol yacht when he was dragged back and in his words told, you're not having a holiday at the Navy's expense. And they wanted his intellectual qualities to sift evidence for sort of counterintelligence. counterintelligence. And he actually spent pretty well the whole of his war in the citadel underneath the Admiralty in London, never got a sniff of the sea at all. But he always refused to give up his executive, you know, his seagoing status, because he felt that was what he'd

volunteered for. I mean, he said in the end, he'd had a wonderful job. He ran counterintelligence, double agents, all sorts of, you know, really, really clever stuff. And you could see that that was a great use of his brain although poor chap it wasn't what he'd signed up for as it were now there were a number of famous and semi-famous personalities who joined the rnbsr could you tell us a story or two about them yeah sometimes one needs to sort of um work out were they famous before or were they famous afterwards um so i i'm thinking about your question i'll tell you one who was famous before and that was peter scott and he first he was famous um for being the son of scott of the Antarctic and that must have been quite difficult for him but anyway there he was that

was his life and he was a very multi-talented quite a complicated person so he was already an ornithologist he was already an artist but he was also a very skilled dinghy sailor and so he'd represented Great Britain in the 1936 Olympics in the dinghy sailing classes so and he'd just come back from America in the summer of 1939. And he suddenly realized what was happening. And he writes in his autobiography, I realized I needed to join something. I joined the RNVSR. And so he was immediately somebody who might have had the chance to pull the strings to be appointed to a destroyer. And his writing about his war service is very interesting. It's very honest. he says, let's never glorify war. You know, great deeds are done. You've got to put aside

your scruples. You've got to go hell for leather, you know, if your country's at war. But let's not ever forget that there are much better ways of proving yourself than at war. And later he became very involved with coastal forces, which I hope we'll get to talk about. But, you know, he's just one example, because, of course, they were quite young, even the professional ones, because initially to put your name forward for the RNVSR, you know, you had to be in your 20s or at the most 30s. Later on, they tried to recruit what they called elderly yachtsmen. And I have to laugh about this elderly term. And that meant you were over 40, you know, wow. And then they scooped off, for instance, the novelist Neville Shute, Neville Shute, Norway had also been an aeronautical

engineer. So he signed up wanting to use his sailing skills. And again, once the recruiters noticed his other skills, he was scooped right in to the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, which didn't make him pleased at all. In fact, he was very angry and he must have been very stroppy to deal with. But he had a remarkable war service. How did the RNVSR contribute in norway well i suppose norway was our first big public disaster i mean i won't say we hadn't had some disasters before that um i'm afraid the words complacency and ignorance um come to mind um so some rnvsr members like the explorer augustine courtauld for instance had spent the summer of 1939 like my father you know going up to the baltic um he in his beautiful yacht um had been

sailing the coast of Norway sort of you know pacing out piers you know taking photos and all that was sent to the admiralty where he said no use was ever made of it there was another extraordinary young man called Patrick Dalzell Job and he had been exploring the north coast of Norway right the way around to Finland very very important because the you know you know the The Norwegian curse is very intricate. And he said, you're going to need this. And again, they took no notice. But Patrick was at least somebody with a command of Norwegian, which is not a regular skill. And that had got spotted. So when the counter invasion of Norway, if you like, took place in April 1940, 1940 he was popped on HMS Southampton and Centre Cross and he was appalled at the lack of preparation

you know when he said you know there's going to be snow in Norway in April they said no what so nobody brought any white camouflage gear I mean it was awful it was it was shameful and there was another one Quentin Riley another um explorer um and again his knowledge hadn't been used but this is the point i want to make about the yachtsman what they did have and which small boat sailors i think do have is initiative resourcefulness and and so being ready to sort of as it were make the best of a bad job so they were very natural recruits for sort of irregular missions you know and sabotage and you know doing commandeering norwegian fishing boats and making use of them So that that that it was it wasn't a glorious episode, but that was where you start to see some of the qualities that these yachtsmen could bring.

Yeah, I think there is probably a natural independence in yachtsmen just because once you're out at sea, there's no one who will save you but yourself. I mean, there are someone that that will come from land if you're really in trouble and maybe try to save you. but if you haven't solved the problem by then you're you're in quite a bit of danger so there's a certain independence of them but i would think that would also make them sort of a challenge to work with in the in the hierarchical naval structure that uh you know these people are used to always being on their own doing what they want making their own decisions yes yes i think the explorer group were a particularly contrary bunch but yes definitely that that that's uh you You know, and that that would have been that's exactly why Childers thought that yachtsmen could be useful because they could use their initiative and their observations in this way.

But, yeah, it didn't make them easy to manage. And the other thing, of course, if you're a volunteer, if you get chucked out, you've got your old job to go back to, haven't you? Whereas if you're a serving naval officer and you get chucked out, you've lost your livelihood. Indeed. And to that point about independence, I mean, Childers is his own sort of cautionary tale about that. He was eventually executed for running guns to the IRA, I believe, or the Irish Rebellion at the time. So could be could be a book on his own, I think. But once the British were effectively ejected from the continent, what sort of missions were the yachtsmen supporting? Well, that changed the whole sort of balance of the war. obviously when if you've got your enemy nicely away in Germany that's one thing if they're just

straight where I live and the east coast of England it's 40 miles to the nearest bits of Holland and Belgium you know that is that is changes the whole the whole thing so first obviously they needed to support the evacuation of the British forces I'm not doing any particular order here then of course Hitler was hoping that the next bit of invasion would be the invasion of Britain. So there was a tremendous bombing campaign. Now, one of the completely unexpected things I discovered on this was when London and the major British cities were being bombed, quite a lot of the things that rained down, they'd actually been designed as magnetic mines for use at sea. And they'd been very effective at sea. And in November, December 1939, terrible British

losses at sea from magnetic mines. But they'd stockpiled a bit because we got better at dealing with these. So Goering thought it would be a good idea to sort of drop them on British cities. And of course, they didn't always explode. But because they were designed for use at sea, suddenly it became the navy's job to deal with them and here's here's this is where the volunteer ethos is quite extraordinary so quite a number of the older yachtsmen and the the rnvr rnv sr volunteers when somebody said okay you know who's going to volunteer for special services you know they'd step forward and say yeah okay um i'll do it uh by the way what is it and then you'll find that you know that you're an education officer um and and and you're out there disarming

some enormous mind with about a week's training and uh and an able seaman to help you except that you weren't meant to get you as the officer you had to take the responsibility and the able seaman was meant to sort of note down what you were doing so um you know as you as you tried to dismantle this horrible, often booby trapped pieces of machinery, you would say, I'm going to cut a blue lead here. And the able seaman would write down, you know, gentleman cuts blue lead. And if it then exploded, he would go back to the admiral to say, next gentleman must not cut blue lead, you know, but this was, this was, these were astonishing, astonishing forms of bravery, I think. And of course, then it encouraged the development of coastal forces, which were the

motor torpedo boats motor gun boats and there of course the actual boat handling skills of a yachtsman came into play and and that was you know if i had to choose just one example it was there and so they were used in aggressive actions but they were also used in quite a lot of irregular actions so for instance um running across to norway in the dark months of the year um to collect or drop off agents or supplies for the norwegian resistance and the same with the french resistance you know extraordinary again extraordinary independent um and yeah frightening operations and what was the yachtsman's role in the mediterranean well once the theater of war expanded obviously the rnvr including the yachtsman within it had to really go wherever the navy

went but there was still this thing that battleships and the mediterranean was really our major area and the pacific of course um for battleship warfare there still weren't very many I have not found many of my yachtsmen on board the major warships, but by this time they were needed to release RN officers for more technical jobs. And also the Navy had realised that it was just no good saying we can't have amateurs on submarines because, you know, they had to expand their production of submarines. So, for instance, at the seat of Malta, there was very dangerous, intense submarine action. And by that time, there was a particular yachtsman who I admire enormously. He was just a weekend sailor. And in his day job, he was the production manager for Penguin Books.

Now, I defy you to find a wartime use for that. But he became the first amateur to command a submarine. And that's astonishing. And he was the first lieutenant in the Mediterranean. Then when he came home, did his perisher course, his first command was within the Arctic Circle. And then he went to the Indian Ocean. And suddenly you realise the mobility of these small ships and the yachtsmen and the other volunteers and the regulars. Of course, none of us will never forget the service of regulars or the hostilities only seamen who just joined up, you know, for the duration. I mean, really remarkable what what what people did. Well, I don't know if you're ready to speak on this or not, but I'm going to ask anyway, and we can cut it if necessary. But so the most interesting thing I found in the Mediterranean was what was happening in the eastern Mediterranean. oh and the transit of flotilla yes yes absolutely oh i'm so if i'd been looking at my notes jared

i would have i would have um come up because that was the only theater as far as i can see where yachtsmen who were you know usually people who sailed rather than motored and were actually able to use their sailing skills and there was a remarkable chap called adrian sailingman and he before the war he'd actually taken a sort of three-masted barkentine around the world with a sort of volunteer crew and his wife and they'd had babies on the way it's you know extraordinary bloke um so he really had had to learn how to use his initiative to keep out of trouble and he'd had various jobs some of the slightly um clandestine and the Levant Schooner Flotilla was a group of Greek and I never know quite how to say this right but I'm just going to say kikes

And it's spelt C-A-I-Q-U-E-S. And those are the sort of, you know, 30 foot long, double ended fishing vessels. But what they did was add rather good engines hidden away in these fishing vessels. So they just looked like anybody else and they sailed. And from about 1942 to 45, when the situation in the Greek islands was very, very complex and confused, You know, they've been occupied by the Germans, the Italians. They were having a civil war. Very, very difficult. These this little fleet, the Levant Schooner Flotilla, ran agents between the islands, you know, dropped things, picked people up. And, you know, really that if you want really small, small boat, those are probably the smallest offensive boats because they also had guns added as well as rather decent engines. Yes, I'm so glad that you brought that in because that was really an odd one.

So how did service in the war affect all these individuals' relationships with sea? Obviously, they loved the sea beforehand. They're all sailors. They're all constantly using what little free time they have to go out and go to sea. Did that continue after the war or were some of their experiences such that they no longer wanted anything to do with it? i think i think there are probably as many answers as there are people and some people will give you their answers i mean nicholas monserrat for instance who wrote wrote the cruel sea um about the atlantic convoys we've not even touched on the contribution made by the rnvr to the atlantic convoys but anyway he just said that he couldn't get over the thought of the sea as a receptacle for so many bodies he said i couldn't i didn't touch the stuff he said and i think people who

had seen bodies smeared with oil people but you know from a burning tanker or something even if they didn't talk about it i was speaking to a daughter his family emigrated to canada afterwards and she said that her father had recurrent night he never talked to them about it But his family knew that he had these recurrent nightmares of bodies burning in oil, people choking, just just just sort of horrible. And people who served on the Arctic convoys, you know, they they were changed as people changed in their relationship to the sea. Now, my father, who had not such a terrible war, but he'd been posted for quite a lot of it to West Africa. he was just so glad to come back to his little Suffolk river he just said I don't ever want to go anywhere again and so he still he loved his river he loved his little patch of sea but his

desire to go um you know to to foreign climes was absolutely gone there's another there's another Suffolk volunteer who had been very effective um as a coastal forces captain and had a commanding officer, and also in destroyers. But his coastal forces experience in the North Sea made him tremendously in demand as a navigator, because after the war, the sort of North Sea Ocean Races circuit grew up. So, you know, Alan was, you know, much in demand. But then you'll know that people who sail together form very deep friendships. And some people whose friends had died in the war, just found they just didn't want to pick it up again afterwards because the memories were too painful so you know there are many different answers to that one but I can't see that anybody

could have done it and not been changed. Well unfortunately that's all that we have time for today I'd like to thank my guest Julia Jones. Julia where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well I've got a website and you'll laugh it's called Golden Duck and that's a combination of boat names we've got a very old um fishing boat which has boat called golden ray and then i've got my beautiful arthur ransom's peter duck so golden duck is me you can find on twitter facebook but you know come to the website or um send me an email i i you know it has been lovely since the publication of uncommon courage it has been lovely to hear other people's memories And I think we we must try and remember and record what these people did, because we need not to forget.

Well, we'll link the website along with the book in the show notes so you can go and find it there. But, Julia, thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon We'll be right back.