WW2 100 - 10 December 1941 - A Boy aged 17: Boy 1st Class Peter Robert Anstey (1924-1941)
No words can describe the ugliness and chaos of war. For the families who’ve lost loved ones there’s some small compensation in the neat orderliness of war cemeteries. On land, all over the world, 23,000 of them are beautifully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
And for shipwrecks at sea, most governments with any humanitarian awareness have a policy of treating war graves as protected places. So the recent news that there are parts of the world where scavengers have been stripping WW2 ships for metals such as aluminium, brass and steel is a cause for distress and anger.
The Royal Navy’s battlecruiser HMS
Repulse and battleship HMS Prince of Wales are just two of the
wrecks where there has been evidence since 2012 of such illegal activity involving
divers employed by scrap metal businesses. Both ships, alongside Dutch war
wrecks, lie in waters in the South China Sea off the east coast of the British
colony of Malaya, having been sunk by enemy action in 1941.
Like Henry Harold Gray, whose name appears in the WW2 list on the Budleigh Salterton war memorial, Peter Anstey was lost when Repulse went down on 10 December 1941 in the South China Sea off the east coast of the British colony of Malaya. He was only 17 and was still rated as Boy 1st class – the term used for a boy aged 16 to 18 under training in the Royal Navy during World War II. His friend, Ordinary Seaman Norman Clyde Perry, from Exmouth, aged 17, also perished.
Peter was the son of Robert and Louisa Anstey (née Stuart), who lived on Fore Street Hill in Budleigh Salterton. His father was the gardener at Elvestone, which in the 1920s and 30s was the home of Henry and Katherine Wilson, parents of the Olympic oarsman Jack Wilson.
Born on 17 September 1914 in Bristol, Rhode Island, USA, Jack had evidently moved with his parents from America to a new home in Budleigh.
Jack Wilson, right, with his rowing partner Ran Laurie
While a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he rowed in three successive Boat Races (1934–36) in which Cambridge defeated Oxford. During the 1935 and 1936 races, he rowed alongside Ran Laurie, father of the actor Hugh Laurie, who became his rowing partner after Cambridge and a life-long friend. While on leave from colonial service in 1938, he joined Laurie to win the Silver Goblets at Henley Royal Regatta.
Jack Wilson was ten years older than Peter, but perhaps they would have met each other in the grounds of Elvestone, and young Peter might have been excited to share with his family in the news of Jack Wilson's sporting success.
I am just thinking of good things that Peter might have enjoyed in his too short life, about which we know so little, before he joined the Royal Navy.
HMS Repulse in Haifa habour, 1938
The German battleship Scharnhorst at sea Bundesarchiv, DVM 10 Bild-23-63-12 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
In late October, she was transferred to Halifax with the aircraft carrier Furious to protect convoys and search for German raiders. Repulse and Furious sortied from Halifax on 23 November in search of the German battleship Scharnhorst after it had sunk the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi, but Repulse was damaged by heavy seas in a storm and was forced to return to port.
The ship escorted the convoy bringing most of
the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to Britain from 10–23 December 1939 and was
reassigned to the Home Fleet. In February 1940, she accompanied the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal on a fruitless search for six German blockade runners that had
broken out of Vigo, Spain.
Repulse was assigned to support Allied operations during the Norwegian Campaign in April–June 1940. On 7 April, along with the bulk of the Home Fleet, she was ordered to sea to intercept what was thought to be another attempt to break-out into the North Atlantic.
The ship was detached the following day to search for a German ship reported by the destroyer Glowworm, but the destroyer had been sunk by the German cruiser Admiral Hipper before Repulse arrived and she was ordered to rendezvous with her sister Renown south of the Lofoten Islands, off the Norwegian coast.
On 12 April, Repulse was ordered to return to Scapa Flow to refuel and she escorted a troop convoy upon her return. In early June she was sent to the North Atlantic to search for German raiders and played no part in the evacuation of Norway.
Accompanied by Renown and the 1st Cruiser Squadron, Repulse attempted to intercept the German battleship Gneisenau as it sailed from Trondheim to Germany in July. Until May 1941, the ship escorted convoys and unsuccessfully searched for German ships. On 22 May, Repulse was diverted from escorting Convoy WS8B to assist in the search for the German battleship Bismarck, but she had to break off the search early on 25 May as she was running low on fuel. The ship was refitted from June to August and received eight Oerlikon 20-millimetre (0.79 in) autocannon as well as a Type 284 surface gunnery radar. Repulse escorted a troop convoy around the Cape of Good Hope from August to October and was transferred to East Indies Command where it was assigned to Force Z.
The ship was assigned in November 1941 to Force Z which was supposed to deter Japanese aggression against British possessions in the Far East. Following the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, and attacks on Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, the British government declared war on the Empire of Japan.
HMS Repulse sailing from Singapore on her last operation, two days before she was sunk by Japanese aircraft along with HMS Prince of Wales. Photograph A 29069 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 4700-01)
It was Prime Minister Winston Churchill who in late 1941 decided to send a small group of fast capital ships, along with one modern aircraft carrier to Singapore, to deter expected Japanese aggression. In November, Repulse which was in the Indian Ocean was ordered to Colombo, Ceylon to rendezvous with the new battleship Prince of Wales. The carrier Indomitable, which was assigned to join them, was delayed when she ran aground in the Caribbean.
Prince of Wales and Repulse and their escorting destroyers, comprising Force Z, arrived in Singapore on 2 December 1941. On the evening of 8 December, the group, consisting of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and four destroyers together with HMS Repulse sailed from Singapore without air support but failed to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet.
Force Z was spotted during the afternoon of 9 December by the Japanese submarine I-65, and floatplanes from several Japanese cruisers spotted the British ships later that afternoon and shadowed them until dark. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips decided to cancel the operation as the Japanese were now alerted. Force Z turned back during the evening, after having tried to deceive the Japanese that they were heading to Singora. At 00:50 on 10 December, Admiral Philips received a signal of enemy landings at Kuantan and correspondingly altered course so that he would arrive shortly after dawn.
The crew of I-58 spotted Force Z at 02:20, reported their position, and fired five torpedoes, all of which missed. Based on this report the Japanese launched 11 reconnaissance aircraft before dawn to locate Force Z. Several hours later 86 bombers from the 22nd Air Flotilla based in Saigon were launched carrying bombs or torpedoes. The crew of a Mitsubishi G3M reconnaissance bomber spotted the British at 10:15 and radioed in several reports. The pilot was ordered to maintain contact and to broadcast a directional signal that the other Japanese bombers could follow.
Mitsubishi G3M Nell of Genzan Air Group, based in North Korea during WW2 Image credit: Wikipedia
The first attack began at 11:13 when 250 kilograms
(551 lb) bombs were dropped from eight G3Ms from an altitude of 11,500 feet
(3,505 m). The battlecruiser was straddled by two bombs, then hit by a third
which penetrated through the hangar to explode on the armoured deck below. This
inflicted a number of casualties and damaged the ship's Supermarine Walrus
seaplane, which was then pushed over the side to remove a fire hazard.
Survivors from Prince of Wales and Repulse
in the water as a destroyer moves in for the rescue. Some 2,320 men from both
ships were saved. Image credit: Wikipedia
Anti-aircraft fire damaged five of the Japanese bombers, two so badly that they immediately returned to Saigon. In the ensuing attacks, Repulse was skilfully handled by her captain, Bill Tennant, who managed to avoid 19 torpedoes as well as the remaining bombs from the G3Ms. However, Repulse was then caught by a synchronised pincer attack by 17 Mitsubishi G4M torpedo bombers and hit by four or five torpedoes in rapid succession. The gunners on the Repulse shot down two planes and heavily damaged eight more, but the torpedo damage proved fatal.
At 12:23, Repulse listed severely to
port. It was clear that she was sinking, and her Captain, Bill Tennant, gave
the order to abandon ship. Within about six minutes she capsized with the loss
of 508 officers and men, among them Peter Anstey and Henry Harold Gray. The
destroyers Electra and Vampire rescued the survivors, including
Captain Tennant.
The recent unhappy news about the state of wreck sites such as those of Repulse and Prince of Wales has been matched by views of historians and many other people on the responsibility for this Royal Navy disaster of WW2. Both issues feature on the website set up for the members of the Survivors’ Association and their families and friends. https://www.forcez-survivors.org.uk/
The author argued, for example, that Churchill was guilty of using the ships of Force Z as ‘live bait’ to antagonise Japan and thereby cement the Anglo-American alliance against the Axis powers.
Repulse and Prince of Wales were left, in Alan Matthews’ words, as ‘sitting ducks’ after war had erupted in the Far East with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December and the USA’s entry into the conflict.
Memorial to HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse at the National Memorial Arboretum Image credit: Steve Bowen
They are also remembered at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. And I have read that it is currently traditional for every passing Royal Navy ship to perform a remembrance service over the site of the Force Z wrecks.
The next post is for CHIEF ELECTRICAL ARTIFICER HENRY HAROLD GRAY (1900-41) who died on 10 December 1941 in the Java Sea while serving on HMS Repulse
You can read more at
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/10/ww2-759-force-z-casualty-chief.html
Memorial, but have not been identified. Their first names,
date of death and service numbers are not known.
They are recorded on the Devon Heritage website as
'Not yet confirmed’
If you know anything which would help to identify them,
please contact Michael Downes on 01395 446407.
F.E. Newcombe
F.J. Watts
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