Very Special Ships. Arthur Nicholson
to England in 1940 to defend Britain from a German invasion. While in Britain, he was one of the first two Maoris to be sent to Sandhurst for training and passed out with an ‘A Outstanding’.53 After hard fighting in the Maleme sector in the opening days of the battle for Crete, Lieutenant Logan and his men began an exhausting retreat, over the White Mountains and along the Askifou Plain until they reached the high ground above Sphakia. There, they could finally rest and find something to eat and drink for the first time in days. Armed with just a captured Luger, Lieutenant Logan helped form the rearguard at Sphakia, barring the way to the Germans as well as to Allied stragglers. At nightfall on the 31st, the order came for Logan and his men to move to the beach to be embarked. Lieutenant Logan recalled, ‘I suppose every man had the urge to get ahead and make sure he got into a boat, but there was no such move from any of the men. If anyone felt the urge to do so, the urge for self-preservation, he kept in under control.’
Finally, after all of his men had boarded a boat, it was Lieutenant Logan’s turn to leave.
In time I came to the water’s edge and this was the last boat, loaded deeper into the water, the dark shape of the boat getting nearer; I reached out my hands, stifling a little feeling of panic – if the boat should move out now – and then my hands were on it. I grasped the gunwale, nothing could make me let go now; I pulled myself out of the water and my boys pulled me into the boat – oh, the relief and then the boat was grounded because of the excessive load, so several of us got into the water again to push. It didn’t take much effort and the boat was clear and we hastened to clamber aboard again. As the boat moved quietly away from the shore to the waiting ships, the evacuation of Crete was almost over; I was the last NZ’er to leave Crete in the official evacuation.
Lieutenant-Commander Paul Chavasse, a chief petty officer and a rating examine the taut wire measuring gear. (Robin Pleydell-Bouverie)
‘In no time at all’, he recalled, he and his men had boarded the Abdiel via the stern doors. Once in the bowels of the ship, Logan and his men ‘gathered around huge chests containing cheese and biscuits; we just ate and ate, nothing to say, but thankful to be there’.54
Other New Zealanders aboard the ship were just as grateful for the ride. Lieutenant Alex Atchison of the 2nd New Zealand Division’s Cavalry Regiment wrote, ‘The ship’s crew gave us biscuits and hot cocoa. It seemed the best meal we had ever had. Afterwards the Officers brought us whiskey and offered us their beds. Everyone was so tired that I am sure that those who slept on the floor [sic: deck] were just as happy as the ones with beds’.55 Private Charles Pankhurst of 23 Battalion wrote, ‘The sailors fed us and treated us very well’ and ‘We were in the space where mines were usually kept and, as we were very crowded, it was a hot as a furnace. But it would not have mattered to us if the ship had been a slave trader so glad were we to be off Crete.’56 Some of the famished passengers got a bit carried away and helped themselves to store crates containing tomato puree. The result was predictable. With so many passengers, the ship’s sanitary arrangements were overwhelmed and she would later need a considerable hosing-down.
On the voyage, Rangi Logan observed that the Abdiel was tucked in behind the two destroyers; being faster, she would zig-zag and settle in behind one destroyer and then zig-zag and settle in behind the other. ‘Anxious eyes would scan the skies behind us, looking for sign of enemy bombers’ and the passage back to Alexandria was made under almost continuous red warning. Nevertheless, except for one ‘halfhearted attempt at intervention’ that hit nothing but got a hot reception from the anti-aircraft gunners, the passage was without incident.
Unfortunately, it was not so for two venerable anti-aircraft cruisers, Coventry and Calcutta, that Admiral Cunningham sent from Alexandria to shepherd them in. Ignoring the Abdiel’s troop-laden band, a Ju 88 attacked up-sun at 09.45 and put two bombs into the Calcutta’s engineering spaces. She sank in just five minutes, with two officers and 116 ratings,57 the Royal Navy’s last loss in the painful battle for Crete.
As Alexandria came into sight, Major Dyer of 28 Battalion told his men, ‘Let’s tidy ourselves as best we can, smarten ourselves up and march off the ship like the good soldiers we are.’ His men went to work with a will and did what they could. The force arrived at Alexandria at 17.00 and Midshipman Goodwin recalled the Abdiel’s arrival. ‘Once we knew which side we were going to at the landing wharf, all troops were cleared to the other side. This gave us quite a list, which quickly prompted an anxious signal from the C-in-C, Admiral Cunningham, asking if we had suffered any damage’, but he was assured there was none.58 Once the men had disembarked, waiting trucks took them away to camps.
Admiral Cunningham signalled, ‘I congratulate you all on a very successful effort on the night of 31/5’.59 The evacuation of Crete was finally over. By this time, the Abdiel was one of only five or six ships in the Mediterranean Fleet left unscathed. In the previous forty-two days, she had been at sea for thirty-six of them and had sailed about 17,000 miles.60 The Abdiel had played a vital part in the battle for Crete, though certainly not in a role she was designed for.
The month of June was relatively quiet for the Abdiel, as she was not needed in the Syrian Campaign and all that came her way was working-up, drills and exercises, a boiler clean and various odd jobs. Perhaps at this point she was repainted into an unusual scheme of light gray overall with very dark gray or black geometric shapes on her funnels and superstructure and on her hull extending from the waterline to the uppermost row of scuttles.
On 21 June, the Abdiel was joined by her sister-ship Latona, so she finally had a companion that could keep up with her. The Latona had sailed from England all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, an adventure in itself. More adventures would follow for both ships.
THE LATONA TAKES TO THE WATER AND SAILS AROUND THE CAPE, 1941
THE second ship of the class to complete, the Latona, had the shortest career of all the fast minelayers, but it was in no way an unexciting one. She was built by Thornycroft & Co. Ltd. at Southampton and was the largest ship ever built by that firm.1 She was laid down on 4 April 1939, was launched on 20 August 1940 and was completed on 4 May 1941.2
The Latona was manned out of Portsmouth,3 and was assigned the pennant number M 76. Her motto was Vestigia Nostra Cavete, which translates as ‘Beware our tracks’.4 She seems to have had two crests, an official one with a gold sun eclipsed by a white crescent moon and another – which adorned the Captain’s stationery – featuring a bird on an island.
When new, the Latona was painted up in a layer-cake camouflage scheme of three tones, with the darkest one lowest and the lightest one highest in the ship. She was the fourth Royal Navy warship to bear this name, the Latin version of the Greek ‘Leto’, the mother of the god Apollo and the goddess Artemis. The Latona was also named after the small, old protected cruiser that was converted to a minelayer in 1908 and served in the First World War,5 during which she supposedly laid the mines that sank the German light cruiser Breslau and badly damaged the battlecruiser Goeben off Imbros in the Aegean Sea on 18 January 1918.6
The launch of the Latona on 20 August 1940. (National Maritime Museum N 14035)
The Latona’s first and only commandeering officer was Captain Stuart Latham Bateson, who took command on 15 January 1941, when she was still fitting out. Wanting to know more about this Latona woman, he wrote to his sixteen-year-old son Alec, who was then pursuing a classical education at Rugby School. Alec told him that Latona ‘was a