First class boys

As soon as Godfrey Gifford was drafted on to HMS Fiji his rank waselevated to Boy First Class. With his new status came a pay rise fromfive and three pence (27p) a week to eight and nine pence a week (43p),although he still only received one shilling (5p) in his hand. From themoment Godfrey stepped on to the Fiji he was put to work and there washardly a moment’s rest for the young seaman from that point onwards.
    Godfrey and the other Boy Sailors were given all the most menialof tasks on board ship. Most were set to work as pot scrubbers and potatopeelers. One of Godfrey’s jobs was to act as hammock boy to MidshipmanRobin Owen. The senior sailor gave Godfrey sixpence a week (2p) extrato unfurl his hammock at night-time and carefully stow it away in thehammock nettings each morning.
    The first operations that Godfrey took part in with the Fiji were inthe Bay of Biscay. Godfrey later recalled that the Fiji was given the taskof tempting out the two German battlecruisers the Gneisenau and theScharnhorst, known to the British Navy as the ‘Ugly Sisters’. Around twohundred miles west of the Fiji, the battlecruiser HMS Hood lay in wait.
    Should the Ugly Sisters take the bait, the Hood was ready to attack. Whenthe Fiji entered the Bay of Biscay Godfrey was immediately stricken withseasickness, as the ship rocked almost out of control in the rough seas. Hismal de mer was cured once and for all during that horrendous fortnight,however. Godfrey soon learned that in the Navy, no matter how ill youfelt, you just had to get on with the job. He realised that there was noexcuse that would let you off work, as his superiors continued to barkorders at him regardless of how much he was suffering physically.
    To Godfrey’s relief the ship then sailed further south in the Atlanticwhere the waters were calmer and they ended up off the coast of Gibraltar.
    They were in the harbour for only twenty-four hours, but Godfrey was notallowed to go ashore due to his rank and the fact that it was the middle ofthe week. It was the beginning of March and Godfrey had not been on dryland for over a month. Stanley was on the battlecruiser HMS Renown atthe time, which was serendipitously in port at Gibraltar at the same time.
    Stan knew that Godfrey was stuck on the Fiji, so he took a small boat outto where the ship was moored, climbed aboard and made sure that hisyounger brother was all right.
    It was on 1 April that, the younger Gifford brother later recalled,the Fiji and the Renown sailed to Malta as part of a large convoy carryingreinforcements. Their job was to reinforce Malta with aircraft, fuel andammunition. The convoy suffered a fair bit of bombing en route but allthe ships managed to return to safer waters relatively unscathed. After thatthe Fiji was transferred and joined the eastern Mediterranean fleet, whichwas in the seas around Alexandria at the time. The Renown, with Stanleyon board, turned back and sailed to Gibraltar again.
    In the middle of April 1941 the Fiji sailed from Alexandria to theGreek islands. Allied forces had occupied the island of Crete after theItalians invaded Greece in 1940, and the island proved a useful base forthe Royal Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The British built airfields onthe island, which became a target for the German military. These airfieldsput the oil fields of Eastern Europe, required for the impending Germanattack on Russia, within allied bombing range, so Hitler set his sights ontaking Crete. Securing Crete would amount to driving Britain and herallies out of the Eastern Mediterranean and would be a great leap forwardfor Hitler.
    Senior Luftwaffe commanders proposed the idea of capturing theisland by an audacious airborne assault. Hitler agreed to the plan andordered the invasion, which was planned for May 1941. The Germans’plan was code named ‘Merkur’, after the Roman god Mercury, and theirtroops were made ready.
    The Battle of Crete began on 20 May 1941 with the airborneinvasion. The Germans intended to use paratroopers to capture key pointson the island, including airfields, so that supplies and reinforcements couldbe brought in. The island was defended on land by a combination of localtroops and soldiers from the Commonwealth.
    The fighting on the ground was fierce, with troops sufferingexhaustion in boiling hot temperatures. While the troops on land wereembroiled in the raging battle, at sea the fighting was no less deadly, and itwas the third day of the Battle of Crete that was to have the biggest impacton the Royal Navy and on young Godfrey Gifford.
    Admiral Andrew Cunningham was Commander-in-Chief of theRoyal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet, and he was determined to stop anyseaborne invasion of Crete. On the Fiji, sixteen-year-old Godfrey witnessedthe battle raging around him for two days. The Fiji was in a group alongwith HMS Gloucester, HMS Kandahar and HMS Kingston. After eachday’s fighting, Godfrey later recalled, the Fiji would withdraw at nighttime to the north of Crete to avoid getting dive-bombed by the Germans.
    According to Godfrey’s account, at about eight o’clock at night the shipwould dash off at a rate of thirty-three knots and try to catch the kayaksfilled with German troops that were attempting to land on the island.
    On 21 May Godfrey’s ship, and all the others, were under attackfrom dawn till dusk. The fighting was so intense that the following day theFiji only had about a third of her ammunition left, according to Godfrey’saccount of the events. It was a beautiful spring day. The sky was blue andthe glistening water reflected its colour while the sun’s rays bounced offit, but the good weather was a disguised harbinger of disaster. One ofthe Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Greyhound, became stuck on the northside of the island, Godfrey remembered. So the two cruisers, the Fiji andthe Gloucester, were detached from the fleet just south of Crete and sentround to try to rescue the ailing ship. This was a decision that was to provefatal. From the moment that both ships reached the western end of Crete,the bombing started. The Stukas kept coming and attacked relentlessly andwithout mercy from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in theafternoon. During this time the Fiji’s ammunition was gradually depleteduntil it eventually ran out completely. Godfrey recalled that the ship had toresort to firing practice shells at the aircraft. The Fiji was a sitting duck.
    The captain, whose full name and title was Vice-Admiral Sir PeverilBarton Reiby William Wallop Powlett, had a duckboard on the bridgeon which he would lie down with a pair of binoculars in his hand. As thedive-bombers approached he would wait for them to drop the bombs andthen he would shout, “Hard to port!” Because the ship had a square stern,when it was doing thirty-three knots it was able to swing right over and thebombs would bounce off its side causing the least amount of damage.
    Godfrey was in a gun turret with five other boys as shrapnel raineddown all over the ship from the exploding bombs. It was Godfrey’s job topass the ammunition to the men manning the guns, but a lot of the peoplein the turrets were killed or injured by the shrapnel and extra men from theshell rooms had to be found to load the guns, replacing the men and boyswho were already lost.
    As Godfrey later recalled events, it was at three o’clock in the afternoonthat the Stukas got right round to the north side of Crete and settled on theGloucester, which had by that time also run out of ammunition entirely.
    They hit her a number of times, and it became obvious to all who could seeher that she was fatally wounded. In an attempt at rescue the Fiji circledthe Gloucester at high speed and got as close as she could without beinghit by the bombers that blackened the skies. Then the men on board theFiji released almost all of their ship’s Carley floats1. These lightweight raftsmade of copper tubing, cork and canvas were dispatched as a last resortand were designed to save the lives of sailors who found themselves in thewater. By this time the Gloucester was on fire. Godfrey watched in horroras the flames danced from the Fiji’s sister ship and desperate men threwthemselves into the sea, hoping to reach one of the floats and sit tightuntil they were rescued. The ship itself was beyond repair and graduallysank into the waters off Crete. There had been over eight hundred men onboard. Many who survived the sinking were captured by the Germans andsent to prisoner of war camps. Only a handful of men from the Gloucesterlived to see their families again.
    Now the Stukas turned their attention to Godfrey’s ship. By thistime Godfrey was in a turret on the quarterdeck on the stern half of theship. The young lad held on to whatever he could as the ship was struck bytwo bombs, which fell on either side and exploded. The power of the blastslifted the stern right up. Damaged, but not fatally, the ship sailed down tothe western end of Crete.
    By about quarter past four (Godfrey remembered the details) shehad travelled around fifty or sixty miles from where the Gloucester hadgone down, and the sailors had a brief respite from the fighting. The menwere told to fall out from action stations and they had about a quarter ofan hour in the mess where the cooks dished up some food, which the menhungrily ate before they went back to action stations.
    The skies had clouded over but the air was still warm as Godfreydashed back up to his position in the turret. He watched in terror asa German bomber flew out of the clouds and took a low dive towardsthe Fiji. It dropped two bombs that hit the ship’s side as it was turningstarboard and rolling over. These bombs inflicted an enormous gash in theside of the ship below the waterline, a wound that was to prove fatal. Thebombs had broken down all the watertight doors on the side of the shipand she immediately began to list at about ten degrees. The Fiji cut itsspeed at once but, although everyone on board did what they could, theinundation could not be halted.
    The ship was in chaos by then. Godfrey heard the commander shoutout to take cover and he was now outside the relative safety of the turret,so he sheltered under the lip of the turret and looked up to see an aircraftshedding its payload. Godfrey was immobile with fear as he watched twotiny specks fall from the plane and get closer and closer to the boat beforehe felt the impact as they hit the ship’s side in the same place as the originalbombs. Then the listing became dramatic.
    By this time the ship was full of men dreadfully injured with shrapnelwounds. Godfrey could do nothing but watch the horrific scene unfold ashe hung on to the guard rail. As the young boy clung on without orders hesaw two men arrive on the quarterdeck carrying the gunnery officer whowas wearing a life jacket. A young doctor followed them. Godfrey watchedas they lay the wounded man down on his stomach. The gunnery officerwas groaning a little, and when they opened up the life jacket and liftedhis shirt Godfrey saw a tiny mark, no bigger than a thumbnail, right inthe middle of his back. It was seeping a little blood. Then they turned theman over and Godfrey saw the true extent of his injuries. He had beendirecting the guns at the enemy aircraft and had been hit with a piece ofshrapnel when the bombs exploded. The whole of the man’s stomach washanging out. The shrapnel had cleanly gone through his back and thentravelled round his insides destroying everything. The doctor turned hispatient back on to his stomach at once and injected him with a massivedose of morphine in the leg. The awful moaning stopped right away.
    All around Godfrey there was panic as his fellow sailors, many justboys like Godfrey, came to the realisation that their ship was sinking. Thecommander stood on deck with a megaphone and ordered his men toabandon ship. “Every man for himself,” he shouted, adding, “Good luck!”As the ship slowly turned, Godfrey desperately hung on to the starboardguard rail. Next to him was another crew man who kept muttering abouthis wife and children in an extremely agitated state. Godfrey felt that therewas more to worry about than family and was concentrating on survival,but he gradually realised that he could cling on no longer and minuteslater he found himself floating in the warm water of the Mediterranean.
    Navy-issue watches at that time were not waterproof and stopped as soonas they hit the water. The time was twenty-five past seven.
    Later stories would be told of heroic rescues and of one man whocould not swim and drank a whole bottle of rum as the ship was sinkingto dull the sensation of drowning, which he knew was his fate. There wasanother story of a sailor who managed to stay on the ship as it turned overand was picked up the following day by a Canadian destroyer as he calmlysat on the propeller. He had not even got his feet wet. The validity ofthese stories will never truly be known, but one thing that is certain is thatalmost all of the class of boys who were on the Fiji with Godfrey, and whohe had trained with and grown up with, were killed. There were thirty-twoBoy Sailors on board, according to Godfrey, but he was one of just six whosurvived. One of the dead was Lesley Bates from Leamington Spa, whoGodfrey had first got to know at a recruiting centre in Derby prior to thewar. The pair had spent all their time together since then and had becomefirm friends.
    With barely any Carley floats left it was little wonder that the lossof life when the Fiji sank was so great. Godfrey said that there were onlyaround three rafts left for the entire ship’s company, and he watched asmen piled on to one float to create an enormous human pyramid.
    Godfrey was wearing his lifebelt when he hit the water. To findhimself off the ship, although the future was uncertain, gave the young boya sense of relief. As he floated in the water he was amazed at its clarity andmarvelled at the sight of his own feet as he drifted in the turquoise waves.
    As men screamed in panic and moaned in pain around him, bombers stillflew overhead and the ailing ship sank further and further into the deep,Godfrey made a decision. Slowly he swam away from everybody else andfrom the sinking ship. Although this could have proved a foolish thingto do, he felt safer away from the madness and hysteria that had befallenmany of his fellow crew men.
    From the relative calm of his isolated position Godfrey looked upto see a destroyer tearing through the water. He watched as a dive-bomberflew towards him. Its payload narrowly missed the ship but hit a lot of theFiji’s men who were in the water. The destroyer then made an about turnand headed away from danger. But at about one o’clock in the morning itreturned and began to rescue the survivors. Godfrey felt quiet and calm ashe waited for rescue.
    He was not cold and the water was tranquil. Still feeling relieved tobe off the ship, Godfrey was confident that salvation was on its way. Hewould float in the sea and look up at the sky until then. Lying on his back,watching the bright full moon and stars come out, trivial thoughts poppedin and out of Godfrey’s head such as the fact that it was a Thursday andthat it was half-day closing in the family shop. Rescue did not come untilabout quarter to eight the following morning, over twelve hours since theship sank, when Godfrey was finally pulled out of the water.
    Two destroyers, the Kingston and the Kandahar, had been rescuingmen throughout the night. It was the Kingston that picked up Godfrey.
    When he finally reached the ship, the sailors that were taking part in therescue threw scramble nets over the high sides of the ship. The sixteenyear-old tried to pull himself up, but by then he was too weak to climbthe net. His stomach was full of salty water and all his energy had beenspent trying to remain afloat and stay alive. Seeing Godfrey’s predicament,a sailor climbed down the net and grabbed the collar of his overalls, beforehauling him up the side and on to the ship. Godfrey tried to blink theseawater out of his eyes, as he was seeing double. It made no difference.
    The sailor told him to open his mouth, which he duly did, and Godfreyfelt the man poke his finger into it and rub it around the insides of hischeeks. He was checking to see if Godfrey had imbibed any oil. Luckilyfor Godfrey he had not. Then he was told to sit up before being handeda mug of rum to drink. By then Godfrey was used to obeying orders, sodown it went. The alcohol hit the salty water in Godfrey’s stomach and thewhole lot came straight back up. After another mug of rum, which stayeddown, Godfrey was utterly inebriated. In his drunken, exhausted state hecrawled under a mess table and fell into a deep sleep from which he wouldnot wake for twelve hours.