GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
“The men began to slide into the water off the ship’s bottom, laughing and joking as they did, then to our astonishment someone started singing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and soon, even above the noise of the wind and the sea, we heard them all singing as they fought their way over to us. Some men still smoked, or tried to, as they swam in the icy waters, others held up wounded shipmates or dragged them along. Gem acted as a kind of lee for them in the heavy sea and our skipper (Skipper-Lieutenant H. C. Aisthorpe, R.N.R.), taking over the wheel, kept giving a touch ahead or astern if he spotted anyone in danger of floating past. In spite of this a few men did drift past, but they must have been dead, either from wounds or from the killing cold of the water; our main concern was for those who were now struggling for their lives.”
Achates sank in three minutes, taking all the wounded in the captain’s cabin down with her. Coxswain Kerslake:
“We had dropped our rescue nets over the side. We had no boats to lower, our port boat had been washed away in the gales, while as for our starboard boat, none of its running gear would work - we hadn’t been able to get to it to clear it of ice, and everything was frozen solid. In the waist of the ship some of us dropped over the side and hung on to the rescue nets with one hand, pulling and pushing the frozen survivors up to where other willing hands could lift them on deck. As we clung on to the nets we would first be lifted right out of the water as the trawler rolled to starboard, then when she came back we would be plunged up to the neck in the freezing sea, but we managed to come up again each time clinging to a man and pushing him up the ship’s side to those above.
“Every member of the crew was at Gem’s side. Those not busy in the waist or on the rescue nets stood throwing out heaving lines to men still struggling in the sea. I left the nets and ran to the port quarter to help throw out these lines and tow in the men who caught hold of them. One very young sailor, scarcely more than a boy, began drifting past the stern. We threw him a line which he caught, but as we pulled at the rope it slid through his frozen hands. Again we threw the line, but as he grasped it he panicked and began to cry “Mother, mother!” It was heart-rending. We yelled to him to hold his hand up so that we could get a turn or two of the line around his wrist, but he slid out of sight for ever with the rope still slipping through his fingers and still crying out for his mother.
“Our rescue work reached a point where we seemed to have saved all but a number of bodies floating by with no signs of life. At this moment there was a huge underwater explosion as the Achates’ depth-charges went off, certainly killing anyone still left alive and lifting Gem almost out of the water. So great was the blast that we thought at first we had caught an enemy torpedo on our starboard side; pots were smashed to pieces, cupboards blown open, clocks stopped; but she didn’t take any water and luckily escaped damage to the hull, so we turned again to helping our survivors. Except for a few who had got over to us in life-rafts they were so frozen they could not stand or help themselves in any way; we had to carry them below, strip them and rub them down as dry as possible to help get their blood circulating again. We had to do this very quickly, and possibly did not spend as much time with each man as we should have done, but there were eighty of them, nearly twice as many as us, and some of us had to carry on with the duties of the ship as well as doing battle with the ice rapidly freezing all over the superstructure and threatening the Gem’s stability. About half an hour after being rubbed down the circulation would come back again to the survivors’ shocked and maimed bodies, it was agonising too for them and their screams had to be heard to be believed.
“The wounded sat or lay down as they could, shocked and staring into nothing, or groaning with pain; others were seasick, some vomiting fuel oil, which covered them from head to foot. Being only an escort trawler we were not rigged out for dealing with severe casualties. Our crew gave up their bunks and spare clothing and did all they could, but we had no doctor on board and our medical resources were practically nil.
“One lad I helped to strip kept looking over his shoulder, though due possibly to shock or cold he never said a word. Yet as we pulled his jersey over his head almost the whole of his right shoulder came away with the jersey, and we had to separate the wool from the flesh. All we could do for him was to put antiseptic lotion over the wound and bandage the loose flesh back in place. Fortunately one of our crew, Seaman Edward Mayer, a former bank cashier from Rotherham, was able to give some treatment to the wounded; he had learned quite a bit from his wife, who was a nurse.
“I went the rounds with a rum jar both for the survivors and our own men, for we all badly needed a tot, and in the galley I came upon a lad of about twenty sitting on the cook’s seat locker. He was shivering with cold even though the galley stove was glowing red and someone had given him their duffel coat to wear. I gave him a tot and asked if he was okay, and he said his ear hurt. I examined it and saw sticking out of the bone behind the ear was a piece of shrapnel an inch long. When the surgeon who eventually got aboard us saw it he could do nothing, but when the shrapnel was removed in hospital at Murmansk it was the length of a cigarette packet; it was remarkable that the lad survived.
“One very young sub-lieutenant, who had swum over to us with the strength of an ox rapidly showed signs of weakening. We couldn’t make out what was wrong, for there was no sign of a wound, so we put his quietness and pallor down to shock, and tried to make him comfortable in a bunk on the mess-deck. When the surgeon examined him later he, too, could do nothing, the unfortunate man had taken the full blast of a shell explosion in the stomach and was smashed up internally. We gave him everything he asked for, but he died soon afterwards and was buried at sea.
“With the Gem crowded with the sick and wounded it was a ghastly night. Everything was blacked out, no lights at all allowed on deck. It was like living, or rather existing, in a howling, raging and totally black hell on some other planet; black, that is, except for the snow blizzards and the ice. Not until late morning did the wind and sea drop slightly, and it was then, despite a heavy swell, we managed to get the surgeon aboard from one of the destroyers. During the brief lull in the weather and the slight greying of the darkness at noon, the destroyer went head-on into the wind and sea at a speed just fast enough to give her steerage way and slow enough for us to come up astern of her and place our starboard well-deck alongside her port quarter. With a heavy sea running this was no mean feat by our skipper. As the two vessels closed, our starboard rail was bent inwards when the destroyer’s quarter dropped on to us, and as she lifted up again her depth-charges came up smack under our remaining lifeboat. But the eyes of everyone was fixed on the surgeon, who stood poised, waiting his chance, and when the destroyer reared again and looked dangerously like coming aboard the Gem, which was now in the trough of the sea, he jumped feet first and bag in hand, landing safely by the grace of God on to our heaving, pitching, roller-coaster deck and being caught in the waiting arms of some of our crew. It was a fantastic leap under any conditions.
“As the weather rose again there began the grim business of performing what operations we could on the badly wounded. All the time the surgeon was busy Gem was blown by gale force winds and tossed by mountainous seas that swept over the entire ship. Everything was frozen, the rigging swollen to four times its normal size and our lifeboat, boat-falls and boat-deck just solid blocks of ice. It was treacherous to move about the deck anywhere. Below, meantime, no fewer than twelve emergency operations were performed on the mess-deck table, one after the other. Each time, so that he wouldn’t be flung off by the pitching ship, the patient had to be held down on the table by two or three of the crew or the fittest survivors, anaesthetic being administered by Lieutenant Jones of the Achates.
“No words of mine can describe the courage and skill of that surgeon. We all thought he deserved a medal. Whether he received one or not I don’t know, but I do know that he lost his life a year later on another Russian convoy. On that occasion he was passed to a merchant ship to look after a sick member of the crew, and in the early hours of the next morning the merchantman was torpedoed. His first thought was to get his patient into a lifeboat, and he only just succeeded in doing this before the ship sank with him still aboard. A very gallant man.
“For the rest of Gem’s voyage through the dark to Murmansk everyone helped each other, sharing sleeping quarters, clothing and cigarettes, and the only moan to be heard was: ‘When’s this bloody wind going to drop!’ “
Gem’s Skipper-Lieutenant Aisthorpe received the D.S.C. for his trawler’s heroic rescue work.
www.dnw.co.uk
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