1914 - War Declared
1915 - Dartmouth College
-----------------------------
1917 - Off to Sea

The operation orders, passed to the flotilla by signal as Hardy closed the destroyers to attack that strange harbour with its unknown defences, are a model of concise clarity. Surprise was effected. Our destroyers had almost completed their second attacking circuit inside Narvik harbour when reinforcing German destroyers appeared. A running fight followed in which Hardy was set on fire and beached, her Captain killed. We lost a second destroyer, a third was damaged. Two German destroyers and seven merchant ships were sunk, four other destroyers damaged.

By Narvik town there stands today, a monument to Captain Bernard WarburtonLee, V.C.. Veteran's entry into the Norwegian campaign came a week later, starting with a warning from CinC WA that we were to be temporarily released to CinC Home Fleet, who followed with signalled orders to meet Chobry, a fast troopship, off Scapa Flow and escort her to Namsos. This was all in a destroyer's day's work, even though it came in an unsettling period of mounting shipping losses and gloomy Norway news.

Relaxing at Formby Golf Club
There was only one solution - relax. The day before we sailed from Liverpool to seek our troopship brought a heaven sent chance for a game of golf. Another destroyer skipper had a car. Our motorboat had some petrol. Ignoring the risk of German invasion in the next few hours, we left Gladstone Dock unobserved, bound for Formby Golf Club. The course was netted with barbed wire, pockmarked with tank traps; the clubhouse, now a sandbagged fortress was in military hands, but there was still a golf course. A remarkable obstacle race was followed by a riotous dinner with the Army in Occupation. After a few gins my friend, John, the one with the car, was apt to eat wineglasses. On this occasion he rounded off the meal chewing up the Army Padre's spectacles. As we descended the stairs to leave, there, in a glass case, was the open-mouthed for'd end of a Hippo, breaking surface through the reeds of a plastic swamp. A small brass plaque named the donor and, in case we might think it had wandered from the asual water of the 5th green, it also named the beast's home river, in darkest Africa. We all agreed it looked sad and wan. The Army Doctor diagnosed and unhesitatingly prescribed a sea voyage. The Navy's reply: Hippo, be our guest. With great care we withdrew him from his case. He was then blessed by the groping Padre who had no idea what he was blessing at a solemn little ceremony in the hall, then transferred to the car and wrapped in rugs in the back, for it was a raw night. In Liverpool we were greeted with a full scale air raid, out of which sprang a tense young policeman who immediately ordered us off the road. We pleaded a wounded aunt. He pulled off the rug in the back; and gave us no more trouble. We arrived alongside Veteran shortly before she was due to sail. The duty part of the watch nonchalantly, and without comment, hoisted Hippo inboard, and secured him tenderly on the searchlight platform.

We had an adventurous trip to Norway, twisting into fiords, wondering where to land the soldiers, accompanied by near misses from the Luftwaffe. After one bomb splash drenched us with very cold water, a lookout on the bridge was heard to say to his swearing mate: "What's up with you? In peacetime old ladies pay thousands of pounds to come up these fiords. Now take that there 'ippo.."I still believe that that was the bomb that dislodged Hippo's wisdom tooth. Having returned the empty Chobry, we went back to Liverpool; apart from the missing tooth, encrusted salt, and the seawater he must have swallowed, a new light shone from those glass eyes. Hippo looked a different pachydermatous quadruped.

No sooner had we secured to the Liverpool oiler, however, than trouble started. The local Admiral, an ardent golfer and member of Formby GC, had heard the story. I was summoned and threatened with a Court Martial. Having got that off his chest, the Admiral cooled and settled for instant return of Hippo and a personal apology to the Golf Club Committee from all concerned. Hippo was the picture of health when we returned him. Our engineers had turned up, threaded and fitted a glistening great one and a half inch diameter steel tooth. What the President and Members seemed to like most was the plaque which we had supplied in place of the lost one, which was inscribed simply: Shot down over Narvik.

Western Approaches Escort Duty
The memory of the Hippo's cruise was but a small shaft of light through the gloom, but as to the rest of the Norwegian campaign, this is no history book; I kept no notes, all I have left in the corners of my memory are dim impressions. A few days later, Veteran found herself forming part of the screen escorting Glorious down the Firth of Clyde. Glorious, Courageous and Furious were Grand Fleet survivors from World War I; built as heavy super cruisers they were, when air power first loomed, converted into our first operational aircraft carriers. Courageous had already been sunk by a Uboat in Western Approaches; the commanding Admiral in Norway was desperate for air support, and the old Glorious was all the fleet could spare. Having escorted her out there, Veteran set off on a month's hectic cruise of Norway's legendary fiords. All we knew was that the German carpet was unrolling rapidly from the south, up the coastal road. What we were doing to halt it and where it had got to at any given moment, was never clear. When we sought information by intercepting signals from those in authority, we generally found that someone was asking someone else what the hell was going on. Orders to us trickled in from the local CinC, from CinC Home Fleet, and occasionally from the Admiralty. They were invariably stale, conflicting or impracticable. Sometimes they were all three and one had to decide which made most sense. Our job varied from escorting troop or store ships, generally to the northeastward, from one fiord to the next, punctuated by sudden interruptions to scoot off after a "suspected" Uboat. Sometimes, we too rushed an object of vital importance. Life was full of surprises. I was giving ourselves a break from the bomb lobbing Heinkels by nestling under cover of the fir trees lining the steep banks of a fiord, when I was told that a British Army Officer wished to speak to me. On my bridge appeared Peter Fleming (who I knew) of all people! In his calm way, he said "Jackie, can you lend me a corkscrew?" I never knew what on earth he was doing there, except that apparently he had acquired some whisky. He thanked me and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. He still owes me a corkscrew.

Veteran’s Scandinavian Tour
In a lighter vein, once, while pelting up one of those fiords carrying someone or other to somewhere or other, Veteran passed several British armed trawlers on a reciprocal course. Having identified each other, the leading trawler signalled “IS COMMANDER BROOME ON BOARD?” What with high-speed navigation and constant bomb dodging, I tried to give this silly signal the treatment it deserved, and replied: “VERY MUCH REGRET COMMANDER BROOME IS AT THE VICARAGE PLAYING TENNIS”.

Returning to seaward a few hours later, still at high speed, we came up on those trawlers again and, out in the middle of the fiord, right ahead of Veteran, was a black speck which, as we approached, started flashing with a signal lamp. Our glasses soon made out a skiff with two people in it, one of whom was wearing, no, it couldn't be, yes it was, by golly, a United Services rugger vest. The signal: “STOP OR I SHALL SINK YOU”. It was a most unexpected reunion with a very old friend. He came on board, had a drink and went his way. Next came a quick dash out to sea to collect another fast troopship, Ulster Prince. Wherever her destination was intended to be, we finished up with our most picturesque trip of all, up a beautifully peaceful fiord in dead calm, to berth on the jetty of Mosjeon, at the fiord head. As we started unloading, the inevitable Luftwaffe snooper spotted us, which meant, with no respite from darkness in those parts, inevitable air attack to follow. I walked along the jetty to speed up the unloading and was fascinated to watch bundles of pairs of beautiful steel rimmed skis swinging on to the jetty. The colonel in charge and I wondered how useful these would be to carry soldiers who had never seen such things before over miles of bare rock in summer. Peace still prevailed as we snatched the empty Ulster Prince and scuttled down the fiord, but it couldn't have lasted long. I see by the history book, we landed those troops on 2nd May; they were withdrawn on the 10th. I wonder who got those skis. On the meantime, further north, we had attacked Narvik again with HMS Warspite, escorted by nine destroyers. The town remained in German hands, but the eight German destroyers which had survived WarburtonLee's attack were driven into a mini fjord called Rombaks and sunk. After Mosjeon, the last chapter of Veteran's Scandinavian tour was to join another destroyer and patrol off Narvik: here vital iron ore was still pouring into German hands by coastal railway from the mines just as quickly as they could unload the trucks.

On contacting my consort and senior officer I received the following signal:
“ORDERS FOR OPERATION LET'S PLAY TRAINS. THE 1130 AT NARVIK CENTRAL IS ALMOST DUE. PROCEED FORTHWITH EAST OF NEAREST TUNNEL AND HASTEN TRAIN INTO IT WITH H.E. AFTER YOUR FIFTH SALVO I WILL COMMENCE GREETING TRAIN WEST OF TUNNEL IN SIMILAR MANNER”. The operation was a smashing success.

Whenever I see a train go into a tunnel, I am still reminded of another that never came out. The Eastern limit of our patrol was this Rombaks fiord, entered by a bottleneck. Its natural beauty, fringed by silver sand, backed by fir covered mountains, was scarred by the twisted wrecks of what had recently been German destroyers in wishful hiding. On our way out of the bottleneck there, on the sand, lay a glistening German torpedo, which must have missed one of our pursuing destroyers. My Torpedo Gunner's Mate implored me to let him recover it. Veteran retired to a safe distance while he drew its fangs and we stowed our only souvenir of the Norwegian campaign beneath our torpedo tubes.

The campaign itself came to its inevitable end on 8th June, when everyone who managed to jump clear of the northern end of the German carpet congregated at Harstad to escort, or be escorted home in a sadder but wiser convoy. A convoy that, without all the air support the gallant old Glorious could muster, would have been considerably smaller. She had pulled her venerable weight almost to a standstill with her RAF and Fleet Air Arm personnel turning frozen lakes into airstrips, and she, herself, making carrier history by being the first ever to "land on" Hurricanes. But, she could do no more than her best while the Luftwaffe gathered strength and our Navy and Army learnt the hard way that, naked and alone, they could not stand up to non-stop air attack. When it was time to go, Glorious was a weary ship with tired aircrews. Escorted by destroyers Acasta and Ardent, she was detached from the evacuating convoy and routed far to the northward, hopefully out of harm's way.

As the troop convoy cleared the Norwegian coast, Veteran and Vanoc were suddenly detached from the convoy escort and ordered northward to intercept Glorious and supplement her destroyer screen. On our way, we were spotted by two JU88s who attacked us with a generous issue of badly aimed bombs. Later, we sighted a small, unidentified, floatplane, which kept well clear. When we reached our rendezvous, we were in "midnight sun" latitudes, calm sea, maximum visibility, but no Glorious. We searched unsuccessfully until the old fuel problem loomed then headed for the Faroe Islands, which harboured our nearest tanker. On arrival, we found a small Norwegian merchantman carrying, to our amazement, thirty exhausted, frostbitten survivors from Glorious and her escort, picked up from wreckage and rafts far to the northward of our rendezvous. What a grim story we heard from the handful still able to speak. The sleepy carrier had been by no means out of harm's way. Spotted by enemy air patrol, possibly the JU.88's who attacked us, she was then surprised, attacked and sunk by the powerful battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, in little more time that it takes to write it, without being able to get off even a radio report, let alone aircraft. Whether or not it was those Ju88's who first spotted Glorious, it must have been the German warship's floatplane that we saw. We embarked the survivors and sent Admiralty and CommanderinChief Home Fleet their first news of the sad fate of three fine ships.

On leaving the Faroes, in calm sunshine, Veteran and Vanoc parted company. We were ordered to Rosyth. Many of the survivors were perking up, so we ranged them on mattresses along the upper deck in bright sunshine. Soon they seemed distressed; they started protesting. What was wrong? Normally, sunshine and warmth would be sensible treatment, but it made no sense at all to those wretched chaps who had just spent two days in endless sunlight on open rafts with nowhere to hide from constant gunning by German planes. Some had been killed, several hit. No, what they needed was safety, darkness and peace. It was only when they were down below with the lights off, that they felt secure and slept. By the time we approached the Orkneys, I had pieced together all the information I could collect, into a rough report about the fate of Glorious. I signalled CinC Home Fleet, then at Scapa Flow, asking him to send someone out for this report as I went by, which he did. My report had made no mention of the screening destroyers Acasta and Ardent, because there was only one survivor from both ships and he was in too bad shape to talk. Later, he, Leading Seaman Carter, recovered to add a shining postscript to the disaster, which Winston Churchill quotes in "The Second World War". Ardent received a direct hit, which sank her early on, leaving Acasta alone. Brilliantly handled by Charles Glasfurd, her captain, in and out of homemade smoke, she scored an invaluable torpedo hit on Scharnhorst before being sunk. "...When I was in the water" Carter ends his report " I saw the Captain leaning over the bridge, take a cigarette from his case and light it. We shouted to him to come to our raft, he waved "Goodbye and good luck" the end of a gallant man". By a strange shuffle of events, Scharnhorst's gunnery officer on that occasion was picked out of the water by Vanoc, several months later, when he was serving in a Uboat which Vanoc sank. The German officer confirmed that Scharnhorst had been heavily damaged and he described, in glowing terms, the swansong of my old friend Charles Glasfurd. I had been Best Man at his wedding.

On this sad note, the Norwegian Campaign closed. We never looked like stemming this brilliantly timed, planned and executed German invasion but, from the Navy's point of view, it certainly jerked the balance of power in our favour. Our losses: one aircraft carrier, two cruisers, one sloop, and nine destroyers. The effective German "Fleet in being" at the end of June 1940, was reduced to an 8inch cruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers. Not much backing for an invasion of England. After passing Scapa Flow, Veteran continued her journey to Rosyth. Ambulances collected the survivors, the sun was over the yardarm, and we were berthed alongside our recent consort on patrol off Narvik "What became of that German torpedo?" asked her Captain. I had forgotten all about it, but it was still where it had been stowed. Another round of gin and off went a priority signal to the Dockyard Torpedo Officer: “VETERAN IS HAVING TROUBLE WITH ONE OF HER TORPEDOES. REQUEST IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE”. When the dockyard had collected it, there was a pause: then, from Himself, the Dockyard Admiral: “THIS TORPEDO APPEARS TO BE OF GERMAN ORIGIN. REPORT FORTHWITH”. We liked "appears to be". On its shell one could hardly see between the German exhortations, except for in red paint  "I miss you again and again. A.Hitler".

And so, back to Atlantic convoying, thereby missing the evacuation of Dunkirk. But, this evacuating was getting far too fashionable. Our poor, harassed soldiers had all our sympathy, but fancy having to ask them "What was your last ship?" Following the latest withdrawal, with everyone back in square one, was it our turn to be invaded? Through that tense summer of 1940, I, like many others, said the thought of invasion was rubbish while inwardly believing it inevitable. An armed trawler skipper off Margate stopped a fishing smack manned by one aged trespasser: "What are you up to" he hailed, "leading the invasion, or catching up the last?"

Overnight our role in Veteran reverted, refreshingly, from convoy escort back to offensive destroyer. A flotilla of six, later eight, commanded by a splendid character, Captain Tom Halsey, in Malcolm, was based on Harwich. Veteran was no.2, leading a division. I remember the stacks of written orders which erupted from our shore based CinC Nore, implying that the beaches he listed and pictured from the Wash to Dover, were all basically designed to accommodate Hitler's invading forces. In the weeks that followed there was no shore leave at all. We swung round our buoys on slip wires, with steam on our engines. Every dusk, one division or the other would slink out and patrol off the mouth of the Scheldt, where the invasion barges were alleged to be congregating. Once or twice the whole flotilla crept close into the Dutch coast, and blazed away at anything we met. Once, our target turned out to be our own Eboats, doing the same thing. No hits were scored.