WW2 100 – 19 December 1941 – Sacrificed for the sake of ‘Enigma’? Able Seaman Franklin William Bristow (1913-41)
Continued from 10 December 1941:
A Casualty of Force Z: Chief
Electrical Artificer Henry Harold Gray (1900-41)
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/10/ww2-759-force-z-casualty-chief.html
Budleigh Salterton War Memorial at the junction of Coastguard Road and Salting
Hill
Franklin
died in one of the great naval disasters of WW2 on 19 December 1941 while
serving on HMS Neptune.
It seems that the 29-year-old Able Seaman had numerous relatives living in Devon, though most of them originated from villages in the Tiverton area rather than from Budleigh, and came from large families. Franklin himself had eleven aunts and uncles who were blood relatives, many of them born in places like Uffculme, Clayhidon, Willand and Burlescombe. Various cousins were living in Devon in the post-war era when the WW2 names were listed on the War Memorial.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes Franklin’s parents as Joseph William and Alice Bristow, of Budleigh Salterton, and Franklin himself appears to have been born in the town in 1913. According to Budleigh parish records, his father, with an address in Granary Lane, died at the age of 66 at Budleigh Cottage Hospital on 20 March, 1943.
Image credit: Geoff Hill and www.egs-reunion.org.uk
Could that Frank Bristow on the above list be our man? This is a photo of Exmouth Grammar School’s War Memorial for its ex-pupils who died in WW2.
I learnt from the Exmouth Grammar School website at www.egs-reunion.org.uk that the memorial was previously situated in the School’s hall. When amalgamation of Exmouth schools took place at the end of the 1960s, the then headteacher decided that it was, perhaps, no longer apt for items referring to only one of the schools to be exhibited as such. Thanks to the work of former members of staff the memorial was liberated and now has pride of place in Withycombe Parish Church and is regularly maintained.
HMS Neptune in 1937 Australian War Museum Collection AWM 302461 Wikipedia
As an Able Seaman, Franklin would have had a minimum of two years at sea. However with no service record but only a Service Number - D/JX 213706 - to ascertain when he joined the Royal Navy, the focus has to be on his time with HMS Neptune, a Leander-class light cruiser commissioned into the Royal Navy in 1934.
Memorial to the sailors who died on HMS Neptune, in Dunedin, New Zealand. The crew of 764 men who lost their lives included 150 New Zealanders, making it the country’s worst naval disaster. Image credit: Wikipedia
During WW2, the ship operated with a crew drawn predominantly from the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, and also carried a large contingent of seconded South African personnel.
The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee
in 1936
Image credit: Wikipedia
In December 1939, Neptune was part of a group
of Royal Navy ships patrolling the South Atlantic in pursuit of the German
pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. Neptune was sent to Uruguay
in the aftermath of the Battle of the River Plate – when the German ship was
damaged by a combined British and New Zealand naval force and sought shelter in
Montevideo – but was still in transit when Graf Spee’s captain scuttled his
ship off Montevideo on 17 December.
After the sinking of Graf Spee, Neptune was deployed to the Mediterranean, where, on 9 July 1940, she was the first British ship to spot the Italian fleet in the Battle of Calabria. This was the first major naval engagement between Italian and British battlefleets in the Mediterranean, but concluded in a draw, with all ships returning safely to their bases.
Map of the Mediterranean area in which Neptune was operating
In December 1941, Neptune was leading a
single line of ships known as Force K when she met her end. A previous version
of Force K had been created in 1939 to operate in the South Atlantic. The
Mediterranean Force K was created on 21 October 1941, with the light cruisers
HMS Aurora and Penelope and the destroyers Lance and Lively,
to operate from Malta against Italian ships carrying supplies to the Axis
forces in North Africa. As a result of these Allied naval operations, by
November 1941, the Axis supply line had suffered 60 per cent losses. Force K
was reinforced at Malta with more ships including the cruisers HMS Ajax
and Neptune, and on 18 December a combined force set out from Malta in
a single line to intercept a convoy bound for Tripoli.
A German mine, probably of the type in the
minefield encountered by Force K ships on 19 December. ‘A
German six-horned mine’ was the description given to the Board of Inquiry by an
expert witness
Disaster struck at 1.06 am on 19 December when Neptune sailed into an allegedly uncharted minefield which had been laid six months earlier by the Italian Navy. The first mine left her unscathed, but a second exploded under her bow causing damage. HMS Penelope and HMS Aurora had followed Neptune into the minefield, and sustained damage when they too hit mines. Neptune then attempted to reverse out of the minefield but a third mine destroyed her steering gear and propeller, leaving her dead in the water.
The destroyers HMS Kandahar and HMS Lively were sent into the minefield to attempt a tow but Kandahar hit a mine and began drifting. Neptune’s Captain, Rory O’Conor signalled Lively to keep clear. At 4.03 am Neptune subsequently hit a fourth mine and soon capsized.
A total of 764 sailors died, including 30 who initially survived the sinking but gradually perished. Only one survivor was picked up five days later by the Italian torpedo boat Achille Papa. Kandahar was scuttled, having lost 73 of its crew.
It's a tragic story which inspired relatives of the crew to found the Neptune Association in 2002. The Association aims to commemorate those who died, and, in the words of its website at www.hmsneptune.com, ‘to promote historical and educational research into the background to the “Force K” naval campaign, the mining and loss of the two ships, the disputed context of their sinking, and the key part played by sister vessels and their Commanders in attempting to rescue the two ships’.
Captain Rory O'Conor, Commanding Officer HMS Neptune at the time of her loss. Image credit: www.hmsneptune.com
The captains and crews of the three ships, HMS Penelope
in addition to Kandahar and Lively, showed immense courage by
risking their own lives in going to the aid of Neptune, following her
into the minefield. Just as remarkable was the courage and calmness of Captain
Rory O’Conor, who realised the danger that the floating mines around his ship
presented to all who attempted to approach Neptune.
We have no indication of how Franklin met his end. The grim situation after the ship’s sinking is well described by Neptune’s only survivor, Able Seaman Norman Walton. Most of the crew drowned when the ship went down. But about 30 men, including Captain O’Conor, managed to keep afloat on a raft, only to die, one by one, over five days. The sea was thick with oil from Neptune’s ruptured fuel tanks. ‘Most of us had swallowed a lot of it,’ recalled Norman Walton. Later, in a Tripoli hospital, he found that the oil had made him totally blind. Fortunately this was a temporary condition.
It’s clear that Neptune Association members feel frustrated that the full and true story of the loss of the two ships has not been told. A Board of Inquiry was set up after the disaster and met on 24 December 1941. Many of the Association’s members believe that the description of the minefield as uncharted or ‘unexpected’ is wrong. ‘I am quite sure that the higher command of the Navy in the Med knew the minefield was there but whether the full detail was known is questionable,’ wrote John McGregor, the Association’s Chairman, in 2005.
Bletchley Park Mansion in 2017 Image credit: DeFacto/Wikipedia
An explanation of the tragedy may lie in the role played by Bletchley Park. Some historians estimate that its massive codebreaking operation, especially the cracking of Enigma – the encryption device used by Axis commanders to send and receive secret messages – shortened the war in Europe by as much as two to four years, saving many millions of lives.
All information about Bletchley Park’s wartime operations and the role played by codebreakers like Alan Turing was classified until the mid-1970s, and only recently has the public become more aware of its importance.
A German military Enigma machine, model ‘Enigma I’, used during the late 1930s and during the war; displayed at Museo scienza e tecnologia Milano, Italy. Image credit: Alessandro Nassiri - Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ - Wikipedia
Less widely known are the stories of lives lost during WW2 because
of the need to disguise Allied awareness of enemy operations thanks to Bletchley
Park’s codebreakers. The Allies were seriously concerned with the prospect of
the Axis command finding out that they had broken into the Enigma traffic. To
disguise the source of the intelligence for the Allied attacks on Axis supply
ships bound for North Africa, "spotter" submarines and aircraft were
sent to search for Axis ships. These searchers or their radio transmissions
were observed by the Axis forces, who concluded their ships were being found by
conventional reconnaissance.
There are notorious cases where the British Ministry of Defence was aware, through intelligence gained from Enigma, that Italian ships might be transporting Allied Prisoners-of-War transported across the Mediterranean. Warning any British submarines not to attack such a target would have been the most natural thing to do, but the danger of such a warning being intercepted by the enemy was very real. It would prove that the Allies had access to Enigma codes, resulting in counter-measures which might have defeated Bletchley Park’s experts.
The plaque at the National Memorial Arboretum, Alrewas, Staffordshire, commemorating over 2,000 ‘sacrificed’
servicemen Image credit: www.camp59survivors.com
Such a case was the Italian cargo steamer SS Scillin, torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Sahib. As many as 806 PoWs died in the incident; only 27 were saved.
It took over half a century for the truth in these cases to come to public notice, with media coverage of the issue referring to Allied servicemen whose lives had been lost as ‘sacrificed’ for the sake of protecting intelligence work. The website Remember the Fallen cites specifically the case of the SS Scillin: ‘The Ministry of Defence kept this incident a closely guarded secret for fifty-four years, misleading relatives by maintaining that they had died while prisoners-of-war in Italian camps or simply “lost at sea”. It was not until 1996, after repeated requests for information from the families of the drowned men that the truth came out.’
The sad fate of over 2,000 ‘sacrificed’ servicemen was publicly commemorated with the unveiling in 2003 of the above plaque at the National Memorial Arboretum. The victims include Allied Prisoners-of-War on ships torpedoed by their own side.
Above: Hut 8 was a section in the Government
Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with solving German
naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was led initially by Alan
Turing. Image credit: Ian
Petticrew/Wikipedia
From what I’ve read on the Neptune Association website, Franklin Bristow and his fellow-sailors on Neptune and Kandahar should be added to the ‘sacrificed’ servicemen who lost their lives for the sake of protecting Enigma’s codebreakers and the high-level enemy intelligence that they had obtained – designated Ultra.
Only a small number of Royal Navy top brass in the Mediterranean had access to Ultra, and to such secret information as the location of the latest minefield, ‘presumably from Enigma decrypts of the Italian mining operational order in May and June 1941’, as John McGregor writes. The question of sharing intelligence regarding the exact location of the minefield, as gleaned from Ultra, was complicated. It evidently depended on a chain of command. In the case of Neptune and Kandahar, the tragedy was caused, in the words of the Association’s website, by ‘a sequence of Staff misunderstandings’.
It is clear that Captain O’Conor took Neptune into the minefield during that fateful night of 19 December 1941 not knowing it was there. Whether or not he had been fully briefed about its full extent has been ‘successfully obscured’ by officialdom in the view of John McGregor.
And he concludes: ‘The decisions, both in the minefield and during the Board of Inquiry were by honourable and distinguished officers, doing their best in frightfully difficult circumstances. They were different times and the disregard for the feelings of the families, which seems so strange these days, must be viewed from that perspective. Having said that, I see little reason for hiding the truth any longer.’
Image credit: Colin Sweett/Imperial War Museums
The above monument honouring the crews of HMS Neptune and HMS Kandahar was dedicated on 9 July 2005 at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire. The monument is a 7ft tall Derbyshire gritstone pyramid which carries plaques with details of those lost and the action in which they were lost. Franklin’s name also appears on Panel 46, column 2 of the Royal Navy Memorial at Plymouth Hoe.
This one has the caption ‘Franklin's sister Joan getting married'.
The photo is not of Franklin Bristow but of Herbert Sidney Pearcey who married Alice Joan Bristow (Franklin's sister).
'Out of the 836 men who died in the two ships Neptune and Kandahar I am proud to say that we have photos or mementos of 429 of them,' wrote John McGregor. 'Where relatives have been unable to find a photo of the Neptune casualty I have attached a photo of a brother or sister to show the family likeness - in this case Franklin's sister Joan. An added tragedy is that Joan's younger daughter Sally died on the fateful day of 19 December 1947 just six years after her uncle Franklin.'
Perhaps these pictures and Franklin's story will inspire another member of the family to provide more information and photos.
The next post is for PETTY OFFICER SIDNEY GERALD HAYWARD (1919-42) who died on 17 January 1942, while serving on HMS Matabele during the Arctic Convoys.
You can read about him at
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/10/ww2-7511-casualty-of-arctic-convoys.html
These ‘orphans’ are listed on Budleigh Salterton War 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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