Beneath The Coventry Blitz

Al Murray (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to our series of Family Stories, the podcast written by you, the listener. Today, we're bringing you a whole range of stories and accounts from a sailor sunk off Lisbon, the reality behind Anzac Digger life, and the forgotten letter from the Coventry Blitz. First up, we have this story from Will, who writes, I want to tell you about two men whose stories I've spent the last few months piecing together. One is my grandfather, one is my wife's. They never met, served in completely different parts of the war, and neither family knew the full story of what either man had actually been through, until my father-in-law found a stack of log books in the loft. My wife's grandfather was Stanley Paul Smith, Stan, a Spitfire and Mustang pilot who flew with 43 Squadron across North Africa, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, and Italy between 1942 and 1944 And then with 611 Squadron from Arnhem through to the end of the war. Towards the end of his life, with his memory going, he said something out of nowhere that nobody in the family understood at the time. There was these poor buggers in the water. I never forgot that. That was it. He never explained it. When the log books came down from the loft, I went looking for what he meant and found it, a log entry from the 27th of March 1943, after a torpedo bomber intercept off the Algerian coast. I saw two aircraft floating and in flames, men in water waving, convoy fired on us, Italian air crew in the water, and then the Royal Navy opening fire on their own air cover. That was what he'd carried for 60 years. My grandfather was William Cummins, a merchant Navy officer from Middlesbrough. He left a tape-recorded memoir submitted to the BBC People's War Archive, completely verbatim, deadpan North East and extraordinary. He survived the torpedoing of SS Thurso in June 1942 by U-552.

In the chaos below decks, William grabbed an axe to free the lifeboat, but his hand landed right on top of his wallet, his watch and his Rolls razor. He took the axe. The watch sank off Lisbon and he was still bitter about it decades later. He used to say, you know where there is a good watch? Off bloody Lisbon. Chief Stuart and Chief Engineer had broken into the bonded stores when the torpedo hit and drank as much whiskey as they could. By the time they looked up, the lifeboats had gone.

William's response when they started screaming from the deck was, to hell with them if they were so keen on spirit they could stop there. They launched the jolly boat. Clearly under the influence they forgot the plug. It sank. Cargo was cork and as the therzo went down it erupted to the surface everywhere. Fortunately, the men were rescued from the floating cork.

The corvette that picked William up, HMS Marigold, was sunk by an Italian torpedo six months later. The crew she rescued outlived her. This is where the two stories connect. In November 1942, William joined SS Fox, a second officer, ferrying war supplies along the Algerian coast as part of Operation Torch. Ammunition encased aviation petrol in containers called flimsy's. William noted, by goodness, they were flimsy. They would only just stand up to their own weight more or less. At the same time, Stan's logbook has him flying daily patrols with 43 Squadron over the same stretch of coastline including repeated entries of Patrol Bougie. The 43 Squadron operational records confirm fuel shortages at the forward airstrips during exactly this period. William was delivering the fuel, Stan's Squadron couldn't fly without. A Bougie, a city in Northern Algeria, the Fox loaded cased petrol that had already been transferred once from a bigger ship, degraded, leaking, soaking the hold with 100 octane fumes.

William noticed a ventilation fan arcing in the DMS accommodation and mentioned it. Nothing was done.

Towards the evening there was a crunch and the petrol went up. It went up aft first, blew up the DMS gunner's legs.

He ran through his burning cabin, face on fire, reached the gangway and found the radio operator hanging upside down from the ladder, frozen with terror, coattails brushing the key refusing to let go. I ran over and immediately I stood on his hands. He let go of course, having let go he just flopped on the key, picked himself up and went.

Everyone survived. The fuel intended for Stan's squadron burned in the harbour. Stan's log books got more remarkable the further you go through them. He flew the Sicily invasion on the 9th of July 1943 Invasion took off in darkness so as to be over acid beach at dawn, and logged what is probably the best friendly fire entry I've come across. A flight lieutenant in his squadron got shot through the glycol radiator by an American P-51 whose pilot mistook the Spitfires for ME-109s. The American then got hit by Italian flak. The same Walrus rescue aircraft picked both of them up under intense fire from Italian shore batteries. Stan's verdict? Bloody good show. From August 1943, Stan flew as number two to Polish squadron leader Eugeniusz Horby Horbaczewski. Stan flew over 60 operational sorties under his command. His logbook entry when Horby was posted home, all very sorry to see him go.