Wingfield at War – a review
We are grateful for this review by Robin Knight which was written back in 2016. The book is available on Amazon.
This book has an unusual provenance. It was written by Old Pangbournian Mervyn Wingfield “primarily for the amusement of my family” in 1982-83 and was then called A Sea-Going Story. A limited edition was produced in 2000 before the author died at the age of 94 in 2005. A dozen years passed. Then in 2012 the naval obituarist of the Daily Telegraph, Capt. Peter Hore, alighted on the manuscript and decided that it should be the first in a series of books about life at sea in the 20th century. Four years later, while researching OP obituaries, I came across a mention of the book and hunted it down.
In many ways Wingfield At War, as the book is now titled, is a good choice to kick off such a series. It covers a seminal phase in the evolution of the modern Royal Navy. It has a lively, frank, amused tone. It is full of well-rehearsed vignettes. Wingfield does not take himself too seriously, is studiously unimpressed by many of the Royal Navy’s arcane traditions and happily pokes fun at those in authority who for one reason or another irritated him. 22
It is also a book of some historical importance. Anyone looking for eye-witness material to illustrate the societal (and military) changes that have occurred in the U.K. during the past century could do a lot worse than consult this book. To give one example: as late as 1940, Wingfield, by then a Lt. Commander, was still taking his dinner jacket and golf clubs to sea in his submarine on wartime patrols.
Wingfield’s reputation in the Navy was made in World War 11 when he commanded foursubmarines, H 43, Umpire, Sturgeon and Taurus, was awarded the DSO and two DSCs and Mentioned in Despatches twice, sank a huge amount of enemy shipping in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, landed scores of Allied agents behind enemy lines, surfaced off St. Nazaire in full view of German guns, and became the first RN commander to sink a Japanese submarine (off Penang in 1944). Retired from the RN in 1963 at the age of 52, he then forged a varied and relatively successful post-war career in multiple roles in civilian life. In other words, he has quite a tale to tell.
The Nautical College, Pangbourne plays a small part in this evolving story. Wingfield, like many early cadets at the College, arrived in 1924 at the age of 13 having failed the year before to get into Dartmouth. The NCP then became a back-door route into the RN, and he duly scraped into Dartmouth at the end of 1925 47th out of a term entry of 50 after three terms at Pangbourne. Many OPs were to cross Wingfield’s path in the next 38 years, and he looked back on his brief time at the NCP with some nostalgia. “I remember pleasant afternoons on the Thames in the College boats and picnics in the woods. The smell of wood smoke still makes me think of frying sausages over an open fire.” He was also one of those cadets who took part in working parties to clear Big Side and turn it into a cricket field – “cheap labour indeed.”
In 1933 Wingfield opted to serve in submarines and the core of this memoir begins at Chapter 5. A few pages earlier, Wingfield reveals a rather startling fact about himself – in 1931 he joined the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley. He gives no explanation and never says if or when he resigned from the movement. But his involvement could be linked to events that year following the Invergordon Mutiny when he was at Greenwich Naval College “and the sub-lieutenants were organised into companies and armed with pick handles ready to combat any civil unrest.”
Wingfield’s war began with “a couple of games of golf” at the Penang Club. It was never short of incident. Umpire was rammed and sunk by an RN trawler; Wingfield was fortunate to survive. Sturgeon habitually broke surface after firing a salvo of torpedoes. In Taurus he got into a firefight in the northern Aegean with a troop of Bulgar horsemen on the Greek-Bulgarian border. On another occasion he actually left Taurus for a few days R&R in Cairo while the submarine sailed along the Suez Canal.
All this suggests a light-hearted approach and the reader may well suspect that it is a pose. But Wingfield’s crews respected him – crucial in a submarine – and he always led by example. At one point he writes: “My time in submarines was the most important of my life and left deep impressions…Fear is something I became well acquainted with during the war years. I believe most people feel fear to about the same extent. But the trained man doesn’t show it and doesn’t let it influence his actions.”
This is about the limit of Mervyn Wingfield’s introspection which probably was just as well given the attrition rate of all submarine commanders 1939-45. Theirs was an often hair-raising existence made tolerable only by an ability to switch off ashore when the chance arose. Along the way Wingfield had the self-confidence to circulate across the social spectrum of the era, at one time becoming an associate of Lord Louis Mountbatten – and happy to mock this vain and regal figure in a telling vignette on p152 as the great man tries to impress him by sketching out his convoluted relationships with the royal families of Britain and Greece.
Wingfield At War is always readable, often entertaining and deserves a wide circulation. It records a 20th century career in the Royal Navy and a related lifestyle as the author found it. Itis never boring or predictable. In his Preface the author quotes Voltaire who once said: Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire (The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.). In contrast, Wingfield leaves the reader wishing for more.