“Two very fast and heavily-armed German raiders attacked a convoy in the North Sea, about midway between the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian coast, on October 17th. Two British destroyers—H.M. ships Mary Rose (Lieutenant-Commander Charles L. Fox) and Strongbow (Lieutenant-Commander Edward Brooke)—which formed the anti-submarine escort, at once engaged the enemy vessels, and fought until sunk after a short and unequal engagement. Their gallant action held the German raiders sufficiently long to enable three of the merchant vessels to effect their escape. It is regretted, however, that five Norwegian,
one Danish, and three Swedish vessels—all unarmed—were thereafter sunk by gunfire without examination or warning of any kind and regardless of the lives of their crew or passengers.... Anxious to make good their escape before British forces could intercept them, no effort was made to rescue the crews of the sunk British destroyers or the doomed merchant ships, but British patrol craft which arrived shortly afterward rescued some thirty Norwegians and others of whom details are not yet known.... The enemy raiders succeeded in evading the British watching squadrons on the long dark nights, both in their hurried outward dash and homeward flight.
“It is regretted that all the eighty-eight officers and men of H.M.S. Mary Rose and forty-seven officers and men of H.M.S. Strongbow were lost. All the next-of-kin have been informed.”
A few days later a second Admiralty report announced that ten survivors of the Mary Rose had reached Norway in an open boat, and also gave a few further particulars of the action in which she had been lost. From this it appeared that she had been many miles ahead of the main convoy when the latter was attacked, and that, possessed of the speed, with many knots to spare, to have avoided an action in which the odds were a thousand to one against her, she had yet deliberately steamed back and thrown down the gage of battle to the heavily armed German cruisers. Just why her captain chose the course he did was not, and never will be, fully explained. He went down with his ship, and
to none of those who survived had he disclosed what was in his mind. It was certainly not “war,” the critics said, but they also agreed that it was “magnificent” enough to furnish the one ray of brightness striking athwart the sombre gloom of the whole disheartening tragedy. “He held on unflinchingly,” concluded an all-too-brief story of the action issued to the public through the Admiralty, some time later, “and he died, leaving to the annals of his service an episode not less glorious than that in which Sir Richard Grenville perished.”
From the time I read these Admiralty announcements I had the feeling that some, if not all, of those ten survivors of the Mary Rose would surely be able to offer more of an explanation of why her captain took her into battle against such hopeless odds than any that had yet been suggested to the public, and in the months which followed I made what endeavour I could to locate and have a talk with one of them. It was not long before the ten were scattered in as many different ships, however, and though I had the names and official numbers of two or three, almost a year went by before I chanced upon the first of them. Indeed, it was but a day or two previous to the first anniversary of the loss of the Mary Rose and Strongbow and the destruction of the Norwegian convoy that, in the course of a visit to a Submarine Depot Ship at one of the East Coast bases, I sauntered forward one evening and fell into conversation with a sturdily
built, steady-eyed young seaman—some kind of torpedo rating, evidently, by the red worsted “mouldie” on his sleeve—who had just clambered up to the forecastle from the deck of a hulking “L” moored alongside.
“How do you like submarin-ing?” I had asked him, by way of getting acquainted.
“Not so bad, sir,” he replied with a smile, “though it’s a bit stuffy and rather slow after destroyers. With them there’s something doing all the time. I was in one of the ‘M’ class before I volunteered for submarines. P’raps you’ve heard of her—the Mary Rose, sunk a year this month, in——”
“Wait a moment,” I cut in, as the ribbon he was wearing caught my eye; “you’re one of the men I’ve been looking for for a number of months. Ten to one you’re Able Seaman Bailey, who received the D.S.M. for his part in the action, and who is specially mentioned in the Admiralty story” (refreshing my memory from a note-book) “for having, ‘despite severe shrapnel wounds in the leg, persisted in taking his turn at an oar’ of the Norwegian lifeboat which picked up the Mary Rose survivors, and for his ‘invincible light-heartedness throughout.’”