Training for Combined Operations: Shortly Before the Dieppe Raid (Part 1)

Schuyt 1 and 2, Lady Helen and a Silent Pact

And Where is the Top Hat Pub Again, Dad?

Canadians in Combined Ops were likely driving some of the ALCs and

LCMs, and the location was between Irvine and Troon, Scotland, in the 

spring of 1942. Photo Credit - St. Nazaire to Singapore Vol. 1, pg. 53

Introduction:

The first 100 or so members of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve who also volunteered for Combined Operations (C.O.) in December, 1941 were transported to the U.K. and training in C.O. camps in Scotland by early February, 1942.

And it was during their first stop (after landing in Gourock, Scotland in late January, 1942), at a training camp, i.e., HMS Northney (I - IV) on Hayling Island, near Portsmouth, that they first learned they would be handling various kinds of landing craft during upcoming Allied raids and invasions (exactly when and where was not discussed with ordinary ratings).

See No. 29 on the above list of training camps. Map as found in 

Combined Operations, by Londoner Clayton Marks. Page 7

Exercise Schuyt I, an important training venture with important observers (PM Churchill, C.O. Cmdr. Louis Mountbatten, and King George VI!) took place near Irvine and Troon, Scotland prior to the Dieppe raid. My father recalls his experience aboard - and then not on board! - a landing craft that became stuck on sandbars during the exercise. Please click here to read his account at a post entitled "The Schuyts Were the Biggest Exercises Thus Far"

The following story by David Lewis (RCNVR, Combined Ops), takes over where my father's account leaves off:

LCA 17, Lady Helen

My own experiences were less desperate but equally frustrating.

I was in LCA 17, Lady Helen. During the night beaching we were able to land our troops successfully seeing them off out through the steel gates and the door at the bow of the landing craft. The beach was a fortunate one with a nice gradient in spite of all the rough waves we observed, no untoward incidents occurred.

However it was not to continue thus. As the weight of thirty men was released Lady Helen began rising in the water, and as we gained flotation, we drifted back on our kedge anchor hawser (a thick rope). It became ensnared in the whirling port propeller. In the shore wind and waves and darkness and the falling tide, we were unable to free up our boat.

A dramatist, Christopher Marlow, had described Helen of Troy in glowing terms; ''Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" But Lady Helen couldn't make it.

Then I had my one and only meeting with Lord Louis Mountbatten. Like King Henry V in the Shakespeare's play, he was walking alone at night about the battle field. He found me in a grumpy mood as we of the Lady Helen were members of a stranded crowd of craft. I had put the crew to bed in the Lady Helen and was yanking away at the rope as this tall, elegant, gold braided figure walked up. We exchanged a few muttered monosyllables as he passed on down the line of stranded landing craft. Not an impressive sight to show his Royal Uncle.

A13227. Lord Louis Mountbatten (on right) watching a landing exercise on the

beach at the combined operations centre at Dundonald Camp (south of Irvine).

Note the fact that the men are using a dummy landing craft, the ramp of which

leads into shallow pit filled with water so as to simulate a true amphibious

landing. Photo Credit - RN Photographer Lt. S.J. Beadell (IWM)

A13228. Lord Louis Mountbatten (on right) watching a landing exercise on

the beach at the combined operations centre at Dundonald Camp. Here the men

making their way out of sandbagged emplacements. Photo by Lt. S.J. Beadell,

RN Official Photographer, Imperial War Museum (IWM)

Lewis' story continues:

I've often come to think about that chance meeting with Lord Mountbatten during my later years on larger vessels plying vast waters of the South Atlantic or the Indian Ocean with the moon pouring down where flying fishes play, or when Medical lectures droned on, or when things got a bit thin trying to save suicidal lives in emergency wards; I have asked myself, "Could I have done better?" Did I not perhaps miss my great chance at that time? 

Suppose I had adopted a different script like, "Come on M' Lord, look alive. Off coats and caps. Make yourself useful getting this flicking hawser off this perishing screw!"

Or once again; "Now look here, M' Lord, to do this kind of a job properly in the face of Jerry gunfire that you are going to have to put up with at Rutter or Dieppe, you are going to need floating tanks, armoured vehicles, Royal Engineers or AVREs as you call them, and DKWs, and a few Battlers to soften up all those chaps shooting at you from their bunkers hidden in the cliffs! Elsewise, History will say you muffed the whole shooting match and lost an otherwise useful  Canadian Army!"

A14344. The Alligator amphibious tank coming out of the sea during Combined
Operations practice at Dundonald Camp, between Irvine and Troon. (David

Lewis would have seen solid support vehicles in action while at Irvine) 
Photo - Lt. S.J. Beadell, IWM.

A14345. The Alligator Amphibious Tank entering the sea during practice.
Photo Credit - Lt. S.J. Beadell, Imperial War Museum.

Lewis' story continues:

I never did find out how to behave when someone loaded with brass and dignity suddenly appeared at my elbow. But who knows, I might have had Hughes-Hallett's job and a couple or three rings to say nothing of the medals and subsequent limey Aides-de-Camp!

[Editor's Note: David Lewis is a very ambitious dreamer!]

But as it was in this momentous moment we just grunted at each other like a couple of farm animals looking for truffles in a French forest. I did try on my old greatcoat the other day and found it weighed 11 pounds dry. What would it have been like to carry it around loaded with medals and additional rings in the rain? At any rate the moment passed as quickly as it had come. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.*

[*Editor's Note: Latin for “Thus passes away the glory of the world”; worldly things do not last.]

The second Schuyt exercise was more successful but the captains and the kings had departed.

Eventually we were loaded up and taken back to Inveraray. I don't remember any official comments on our exercise but in short order we were being loaded up on either the Iris or the Daffodil and the newly enlisted LSG (Landing Ship Gantry), Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ennerdale. She could carry 14 LCMs and was much more of an ocean going vessel, though usually full of oil and High Octane gasoline.

We made off for the south coast and on the way underwent a night time bombing, our first experience of this kind of enemy action. The Ennerdale had a near miss and needed some refitting, whereas the train ferry following her was unharmed. These dear old boats suffered. I know one of them had a refit to rolling stock ferry work. I didn't find out until much later they had served Admiral Keyes at Zeebrugge 25 years earlier.

[Editor's Note: My father wrote an account of the "near miss" aboard Ennerdale in his memoirs; click here to read "Memoirs re Combined Operations"]

RFA Ennerdale, Landing Ship Gantry. Photo Credit - Wikipedia

Lewis' story concludes below:

Hindsight, which is so much more effective than foresight, has a bit to query here. Could it be that the two Schuyt Exercises showed that the Iris and the Daffodil stern-chutes were too slow and weather sensitive in discharging their landing craft for operational conditions? Both Sicily and Normandy were to be operations carried out in stormy weather. Besides that the stern-chute twins were range-limited to a thousand and one half miles, fit for the English Channel but not much else. 

The Iris was returned to the rail ferry business with a stern gangway fitted. She also was given a more glamorous title, being renamed, The Princess Iris. Daffodil was torpedoed later on in the war and lost.  Ennerdale survived the war undamaged. It became a chummy ship since she carried us of the 81st Flotilla to the African landings, and returned us to the UK.

Len Birkenes remembers her galley which served WHITE BREAD - BEAUTIFULLY WHITE - the first seen away from Canada!

St. Nazaire to Singapore: The Canadian Amphibious War, Volume 1, pages 47 - 48

Please click here to read more about training for Combined Operations: Beginnings - The Dieppe Raid

Please click here to view a significant number of photos re Combined Ops training camps.

Questions and comments can be addressed to Gord H. (Editor) at gordh7700@gmail.com

Unattributed Photos GH