HISTORICAL LOGS

In July 1943, during Operation "Husky", the invasion of Sicily, Unison anchored off Cape Passero, the south-eastern tip of the island, to act as a navigation beacon for ships carrying the assault troops of the 51st Highland Division. While waiting, Daniell watched gliders pitching into the sea only a mile away, but had to make the hard decision not to move out of position to look for survivors in case he misled the incoming convoy. Unison was supposed to shine an infra-red light along the bearing, which the convoy would pick up with suitable receivers. But the weather worsened, and Daniell only sighted the first ships when it was too late to shine the light. "So I strung together as many short Anglo-Saxon words as I could think of," he said, "and got the reply in suitably phrased Scots."

As the campaign in Sicily got under way, the great increase of surface and air traffic across the waters west of Malta made the chances of a "Blue on Blue" incident, when a British submarine was mistakenly attacked by friendly forces, all the more likely. As a safeguard, submarines returning from the Straits of Messina were routed far to the north of Sicily and then west of known minefields and south to Bizerta, where they would join a Malta-bound convoy. Unison and Unrivalled, another submarine, left Bizerta on Aug 2 to join a convoy. But the convoy had not been adequately warned about their presence, and Unison had no sooner taken up her position as "tail end Charlie" just before midnight when the nearest ship, an American tanker, took her for a U-boat and opened fire. One shell hit the pressure hull forward, penetrating the torpedo stowage compartment where off-watch sailors were asleep. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. The other shell hit Unison's bridge, exploding on the forward periscope standard. Daniell, the officer of the watch, and the lookouts were all badly injured. The first lieutenant, the late John Haward, below in the control room, heard the commotion and went to the bridge ladder, but was horrified to see blood dripping from above, followed by a blood-spattered lookout, who had fallen down the ladder. Haward took command and headed the boat back towards Bizerta, escorted by the Polish destroyer Slazak. Slazak's doctor was sent across to Unison, but he could do nothing for the officer of the watch, Lt King, RNR, who died of his wounds that night and was buried at sea the next morning. Daniell suffered horrific injuries in his hip, thigh and left leg. He lost four toes, his spine was permanently affected, and pieces of shrapnel in his body were still "surfacing" 50 years later. Unison had made 14 war patrols and was credited with sinking 18,000 tons of enemy shipping. In September 1943, when he was still in hospital, Daniell was awarded the DSO. He was invalided from the Navy in 1945. Anthony Robert Daniell was born on Feb 23 1917 and went to Dartmouth as a cadet in 1930. His first ship as a midshipman in 1935 was the cruiser Devonshire in the Mediterranean. He joined the submarine service in 1938, and in 1939 served as a sub-lieutenant in the minelaying submarine Porpoise, whose CO was "Shrimp" Simpson. His next submarine was H.50, and in 1940 he joined Upright as first lieutenant. Upright was one of the most successful boats in the 10th Flotilla (although the flotilla did not officially become the 10th until September 1941), and Daniell was awarded the DSC in 1941 after Upright sank a 5,000 ton cruiser in a night attack east of Sfax in Tunisia on Feb 25. Daniell went home late in 1941 to the take the "Perisher" submarine CO's qualifying course. His first command in 1942 was the ex-American "lease-lend" boat P.552, which he brought across the Atlantic. His next command was P.216, later renamed Seadog. Daniell's retirement was a great loss to the submarine service and to the Navy. He looked after his sailors, and they in turn respected and trusted him. Many ship's companies would have been daunted and depressed by what happened in the convoy that night, but Unison's took it as the fortune of war. The esprit de corps which Daniell inspired in Unison was marvellously well expressed by their coxswain, Petty Officer "Happy" Day, who had both his legs shattered. As he was being lowered over the side of Unison on a stretcher, he exclaimed, "Let's break open a jar of rum and blame the spillage on this shambles!" Daniell always made light of his disability. He farmed in Suffolk, and was a keen shot and a sailor. He was one of the principal sponsors of The Fighting Tenth, the history of the flotilla, written by John Wingate, who himself served in the flotilla.

***Another British Submarine story:
REAR ADMIRAL TOM MAXWELL, who has died aged 84, was the engineer officer of the submarine Trident when she pulled off one of the numerous successful ambushes of Axis ships in the Second World War, made possible by Ultra Special Intelligence. In February 1942, there were indications from radio traffic analysis and from decrypted Enigma machine signals that the German Navy was preparing to send heavy warships up to Norway. By Feb 21, it had been revealed that the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and five destroyers were on their way to Trondheim. Four submarines were positioned to lie in wait off the approaches to Trondheim. Trident, whose station proved to be only one and a half miles off the enemy ships' mean line of advance, sighted Prinz Eugen early on the 23rd. She fired three torpedoes, one of which hit aft, damaging Prinz Eugen's rudder and blowing away some 30 ft of her stern. (Enigma later revealed the precise extent of the damage.) Prinz Eugen limped into harbour and took no further part in operations in Norway. Trident had previously sustained considerable depth-charge damage, and was only able to maintain her patrol and carry out the attack through the hard work and dedication of Maxwell (who was awarded the DSC) and of his engine room department.

At the end of the war, Maxwell was much involved with U 1407, a captured Type XVIIB U-boat fitted with a revolutionary hydrogen peroxide turbine, invented by Professor Walter. She was capable of very high underwater speeds. U 1407 had been scuttled in Cuxhaven, but was raised, towed to England, refitted by Vickers at Barrow, with Walter's assistance, and commissioned as HMS Meteorite. Maxwell took part in the fitting-out and trials of Meteorite, and of the two experimental British hydrogen peroxide boats, Explorer and Excalibur, which entered service in the 1950s.