Table Of ContentWingfield at War
Wingfield
AT WAR
VOLUME 1 OF THE BRITISH NAVY AT WAR AND PEACE
MERVYN WINGFIELD
SERIES EDITOR: CAPTAIN PETER HORE
Whittles Publishing
Published by
Whittles Publishing Ltd.,
Dunbeath,
Caithness, KW6 6EG,
Scotland, UK
www.whittlespublishing.com
© 2012 Richard M. Wingfield
Series editor: Captain P. G. Hore FRHistS CMIL RN rtd
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, recording or otherwise
without prior permission of the publishers.
ISBN 978-184995-064-0
Printed by
Contents
Introduction .................................................................................... vii
Foreword ........................................................................................... ix
Preface ................................................................................................ xi
1 Early years in Ireland (1911–21) ............................................. 1
2 School days (1922–28) ............................................................ 7
3 I join the fleet (1928–30) ...................................................... 19
4 Happy days in the gunroom (1929–31) .............................. 29
5 Training for submarines (1931–33) ................................... 40
6 Odin and the China fleet (1933–35) ................................... 47
7 War on the horizon (1936–40) ........................................... 55
8 Early wartime submarine operations (1940–41) ............. 66
9 Loss of Umpire (May – July 1941) ..................................... 72
10 HM Submarine Sturgeon (1941–42) ................................. 77
11 Taking command of Taurus (1942–43) ............................. 87
12 Eastern Mediterranean (July – August 1943) .................. 97
13 Taurus goes east (1943–44) ................................................ 105
14 Peace (1945) ........................................................................ 118
15 Post-war service in the Mediterranean Fleet (1945–48) .. 128
16 Washington and Paris (May 1949 – September 1950) ... 137
17 The Gare Loch, Scotland (July 1954 – May 1955) .......... 144
18 Greece (January 1956 – August 1957) .............................. 152
19 Admiralty again and Scotland (1957–62) ....................... 159
20 Retirement of a sort ........................................................... 164
Notes ............................................................................................... 169
Index ............................................................................................... 175
Captain Mervyn Wingfi eld DSO, DSC and bar, RN. 1911–2005
introduCtion by the series editor
As a freelance obituarist for the Daily Telegraph I have written more
than 500,000 words on over 500 men and women of the Royal Navy,
Royal Marines, Merchant Navy and allied services including Special
Forces personnel, yachtsmen, shipping magnates and others. An im-
portant national, daily broadsheet is a newspaper of record, and for
an obituary to be published a very high degree of factual evidence is
required. So, as well as enquiring about a man’s or a woman’s charac-
ter, public achievements and private life, the obituarist is obliged to
conduct much research and fact-checking.
There are three people who can be trusted with the amount and
nature of information which needs to be sifted: they are the priest, the
doctor, and – of course - the obituarist. Like the priest and the doctor,
the obituarist must analyse much sensitive evidence, and must decide
where the truth sits between the Official History, what the subject told
the children, and what they and his or her friends remember – which
can amount to many different things.
From time to time I have been trusted with unpublished memoirs
or, as in this case, a full-blown autobiography. However, even these
cannot be wholly relied upon because without recourse to official
records and because the writing occurs many years after the event, the
individual may easily make mistakes in dates and places, and in other
matters.
Nevertheless, the individual may have been eyewitness to or pro-
tagonist in events which gave him or her a unique knowledge of what
happened, and can recall details that historians are unaware of. In this
series it is an honour to rescue this evidence from the grain of history
and preserve it for this and future generations to read, mark and in-
wardly digest.
vii
Wingfield at War
In this volume – as I will in future volumes - I have tried to keep
the immediacy of the author’s words, while making minor corrections
only to the spelling and style. Also, by reference to offi cial histories and
especially in this case to Admiral Hezlet’s History of British Submarine
Operations in the Second World War, I have tried, by use of footnotes
and endnotes, to give a framework to the story, to set it in its con-
text, and to explain some of the names and places which the author
assumed that the reader would know.
I am pleased that Mervyn Wingfi eld’s memoirs should be the fi rst
in this series: Wingfi eld at War is told with a quiet humour, he is frank
in his opinions and throughout his life he managed to shrug off its ups
and downs. He has recorded events, like life in the pre-war Navy or
hunting and then being hunted in his submarine off Penang, in a detail
which deserves to be known more widely.
I am grateful to Richard Wingfi eld for providing his father’s
1983 memoirs A Sea-going Story, from which he had produced an
illustrated edition for the family in 2000, and for his help in sourcing
further illustrations for the present edition, Wingfi eld at War. I am
also grateful to Keith Whittles for his vision in agreeing to bring out
this series of memoirs, and to Shelley Teasdale and Kerrie Moncur at
Whittles Publishing for their unstinting work as editors and designers
of this book.
PGH
viii
foreWord
Captain Mervyn Wingfield was one of the last of his generation of
submariners who made their reputation in World War II. Before the
war he had served on the China station; in the war he commanded
three submarines, Umpire, Sturgeon and Taurus, survived a collision in
the North Sea, spent a winter in the Arctic, penetrated the Norwegian
fjords submerged through a minefield, surfaced off St Nazaire in view
of German guns to act as a navigation marker for the raiding force,
fought cavalry in the northern Aegean, and later, off Penang, was the
first to sink a Japanese submarine – and barely survived the subse-
quent, vicious counterattack after Taurus was severely damaged and
became stuck in the mud at the bottom. Any one of these incidents
would have merited a place for Wingfield in the history of naval war-
fare and the pantheon of submarine heroes. It is remarkable that one
man should have been involved in so much action in so few years.
His naval career and mine barely overlapped, but I can empathise
with some of Wingfield’s deeds, in so far as the diesel-powered subma-
rines in which I served were not so different to those in which he made
his name years before, albeit that my boats were better equipped. So I
can only admire his achievements, the risks that he took, and the man-
ner in which he led his crew and was loved by them.
Many were burned out by the war, but in the post-war years Wingfield
enjoyed a successful peacetime career where, finally, his personal qualities
and his diplomacy were put to the test as a naval attaché.
I only regret that I never got to one of his famous, lively beef and
Stilton lunches which he used to host at the Boat Show!
Wingfield belonged to one of the last of the generations of Anglo-Irish
families who served the Crown and provided officers and men for the Army
and the Navy, and his story gives some insights into his early days, especially
with regard to being a young officer in the Royal Navy in the 1930s.
ix
