Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte 995
NAVAL GENERAL SERVICE 1915-62, 1 clasp, Yangtze 1949 (D/KX.92134 A. Garns. P.O.S.M. R.N.) very fine
£2500-3000
Petty Officer Stoker Mechanic Albert Garns was one of the “Few” who served in Amethyst throughout the entire Yangtse incident. He was frequently involved in activities on board as illustrated by the following extracts taken from Yangtse Incident by Lawrence Earl:
‘On board Amethyst, at about eight o’clock on the evening of the 20th, Hett had asked for volunteers who would gather the dead together, removing them from where they had fallen at the time of the action to X-gun deck. “Me, sir,” McNamara, the canteen manager, said. “Me, sir,” George Hartness and Leighton Rees echoed.
A little later McNamara, Rees, and Albert Garns - Hartness was needed elsewhere, and Garns had volunteered to substitute for him - set to work at their grim task of collecting the dead together.
Garns went out on the upper deck through the captain’s hatch, crouching low. He was afraid of the snipers on the far shore. He stumbled on over the body of one of the ammunition numbers. Garns tried to lift the body without any assistance, and as he did so a groan seemed to leave the dead man’s mouth. Garns almost dropped the body.
“He’s alive!” he thought. But the body was quite stiff, and the man had been dead for some time. The sun was quite warm now, and getting warmer, and the corpses were beginning to throw off the sweet, unwelcome, sickly smell of death. Monaghan brought up a bottle of whisky from the wardroom. “Better have a tot of this,” he said.
Each of the three men had a long drink. Then they went back to collecting the dead. The bodies which were still in one piece were carried down to X-gun deck by the arms and legs. The others were rolled into hammocks and carried that way. The men had another tot of whisky. Then the job was done.
On the 28th the sampan arrived, It was operated by three women, two of them in their early twenties, the third wrinkled and aged. One of the younger women carried a baby.
These three Chinese females, in their small sampan, became Amethyst’s sole contact with shore. Each morning, weather permitting - and the women seemed to have an unerring instinct for diagnosing rain or high winds - they paddled out to the ship and fastened, leechlike, to her side. Each evening they paddled ashore again. At first the rice diet of these three women was supplemented by left- overs from Amethyst’s galley.
They were the only women Amethyst’s men were to see for a very long time. The youngest of them, a small, very dark, and quite pretty woman, the men called Midnight. They named the ancient one Gran and the mother of the small child Cheesi. “How about a date, Midnight?” Garns yelled, grinning, over the side. “How about a date?” Midnight yelled back in high-pitched Chinese. Garns asked a Chinese steward to tell him what Midnight had said in reply. The steward hesitated for a moment. “Maybe better you not know,” he said.
As early as mid-May Kerans reserved a corner of his mind for thinking about a possible break-out from the river in case his negotiations for a safe-conduct should fail. With this in his mind he decided to get the ship into seaworthy shape as soon as possible. He appointed Garns and Saunders, under the supervision of Strain, as a damage-control party, which soon became jocularly known among the ship’s company as the Wrecker’s Union. But Kerans did not mention to anyone his secret fears that a break-out might eventually become the only avenue to freedom.
Garns and Saunders pitched in with great enthusiasm. They busily stuffed hammocks with mattresses and blankets and old clothing - anything they could lay their hands on that could be spared. Then they took these bulging, sausage-like wads and stuffed them into the gaping shell-holes. They used from one to three of these at a time, according to the size of the hole.
After that they shored up the damaged area with planks, using the stock of timber - which they cut down to the proper sizes - which, fortunately, had been taken aboard in Malaya some time previously. In a month they had succeeded in adequately filling in eight holes along the waterline; but one waterline hole, dead astern and directly over the rudder, resisted all their efforts. During this time Garns’ official period of service in the Navy came to a close.
Garns was a short, sandy-haired man of about thirty years of age. “Here I am, stuck.” he said sadly to Saunders. He had been in the Navy for twelve years. “One thing I can tell you, though: the Navy will never get me again after this. No, Sir!” Saunders grinned. “Don’t be an ass, Garnsey. Don’t you know you’ll never get out of this predicament? Don’t you know you’ll never be demobbed now?” Garns gave him a long, sideways look of suspicion. “You’ll be soldiering on, me lad,” he said, “long after I get back to Civvie Street. And, brother, am I going to have the laugh on you!” [For the record, Garns did in fact sign up for another term of service in the Navy.]
Kerans was feeling pretty good about the break-out now that the decision had been made. He had worked out all the angles, quietly and alone, during the long, tiresome wait. He drew up a list of seventeen petty officers and key ratings, and ordered them to meet in his cabin at about eight that evening. The seventeen trooped silently into Kerans’ small cabin. There was not much room to spare. The door was shut, and almost at once the air became stifling.
“I’m going to break out to-night at ten,” Kerans said matter-of-factly.
One or two of the men nodded silently. Some of them were still stunned. Garns, who had been put in charge of the quarterdeck - ordinarily a petty officer’s job - suddenly felt sick in his stomach.’
When Amethyst finally slipped her mooring, a brief maelstrom of firing, mostly inaccurate and causing much damage to the Communists themselves, enabled Kerans to steer Amethyst neatly through and under and around the wild barrage and make good his escape. After an anxious dash downriver Amethyst rejoined the fleet on 30 July, and eventually reached England on 1 November, 1949, where the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, notified the ship’s company that their conduct had been ‘up to standard’.
www.dnw.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224 |
Page 225 |
Page 226 |
Page 227 |
Page 228 |
Page 229 |
Page 230 |
Page 231 |
Page 232 |
Page 233 |
Page 234 |
Page 235 |
Page 236 |
Page 237 |
Page 238 |
Page 239 |
Page 240 |
Page 241 |
Page 242 |
Page 243 |
Page 244 |
Page 245 |
Page 246 |
Page 247 |
Page 248 |
Page 249 |
Page 250 |
Page 251 |
Page 252 |
Page 253 |
Page 254 |
Page 255 |
Page 256 |
Page 257 |
Page 258 |
Page 259 |
Page 260 |
Page 261