- Author
- Roberts, W.O.C., DSC, Lietutenant Commander, RAN
- Subjects
- Naval history
- Tags
- None noted.
- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- September 1976 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
For reasons to which I am not privy the Command decided we should repeat this action two days later. Accordingly at about 1500 on Sunday 30 September we weighed and proceeded to repeat the operation except on this occasion we went the short way, via Piccadilly, which was just as well as it turned out. As soon as the ship was well committed along Sickle she came under the kind of fire which made it obvious that the enemy had been anything but idle in the past 48 hours and had in fact increased his firepower by a factor of at least three.
As before, our gunnery was superb but this time the three second spaced broadsides of the 4 inch aided by the roar of the Bofors were insufficient to drown out the sound of passing shells and heavy bullets especially as one by one the Bofors fell silent until all five had been put out of action by hits in their hydraulic lines. A number of armour piercing shells passed clean through the hull causing negligible damage, a bazooka hit was recorded as were several near misses by mortar shells which sprayed the ship with splinters; heavy machine gun bullets raked the ship and churned up the water around. It was too hot to last.
As the ship turned on her anchor at Pall Mall the stern swung through the bearing of the enemy and the director became wounded. ‘A’ mounting, no longer able to bear, fell silent, but a measure of the efficiency of our gunnery is that ‘X’ mounting in the stern slipped into local control without missing a beat with ‘A’ gun chiming in again in perfect synchrony as the ship swung further and the director bore again.
I retain a vivid mental picture of this moment taken from my vantage post on the bridge looking aft. There is ‘X’ mounting, the only guns in the ship in action for the moment, trained right aft, its crew working frantically around it, the flashes, the brown cordite smoke, the recoiling breeches and most of all the Officer of Quarters, the Chief Boatswain’s Mate standing straddle legged on a ready use locker totally exposed and making no concession to the enemy fire which was churning the water beyond him into a lather whilst he urged the crew to greater efforts for all the world like the coach of a tug of war team, using arms, body and voice to maximum effect although the latter, of course, was inaudible through the prevailing noise.
Also at this time occurred a remarkable incident; one of our recruit seamen crew of ‘X’ gun had cradled in his arms a round of ammunition ready to thrust it into the breech when a splinter cut through the brass cartridge case to such effect that the whole thing folded double in his arms and the cordite fell out at his feet. The remains were smartly dumped over the side which was unfortunate as they would have made a fascinating museum exhibit, whilst the lad, completely unhurt, carried on with his job. It is interesting to speculate upon the path that a shell splinter would be required to follow in order to achieve this effect without harm to the holder of the projectile.
On the return journey with the action running as hot as ever a shell exploded in the engine room and a splinter cut the lagging of one of the main steam lines without touching the line itself. This was a close call. Had the line been fractured the engine room would have immediately become uninhabitable and the ship would have lost all power on that engine. As at that time she was steaming at absolutely maximum speed there is no question but that she would have developed a sheer which would have swung her into the riverbank where she would have gone firmly aground. In this position, despite the rising tide, only a miracle of seamanship and fortitude could have refloated her before her destruction by the enemy.
Eventually Murchison returned to Fork, the enemy fire ceasing as she pulled out of effective range. She was holed in several places and battered around the upperworks and had suffered casualties, one at least serious, and only the four inch armament remained effective, but going around the ship immediately after anchoring I was astonished by the number of sailors who were fighting mad, demanding to know why we had retreated and why could we not return there and then for another run when they were sure we would teach the enemy a real lesson.
But there was no going back; the extra damage to be inflicted upon the enemy by a ship prowling around the channels in the river could in no way be equated with the possible, or even probable, loss of a frigate with much of her company, so from that day on for the rest of the time in the river no ship ventured beyond Fork and all bombardments were conducted from there.
The Command decision that the ships should cease their adventuring in the ill-charted channels of the Han estuary was quite inevitable; they carried no armour and their metal was bulletproof at best, indeed, here and there in Murchison were found .5 inch bullets which had penetrated her plates sufficiently to become wedged with the base sticking out showing they were only just lacking the force required to pass clean through.
It is of interest to note that the ship was hit only by armour piercing projectiles which literally went in one side and out the other. The exception which exploded in the engine room did so only after penetrating the ship’s side, then a longitudinal bulkhead and finally the heavy I girder carrying the chain lifting tackle for starboard engine repairs. The explosion eventually occurred when the shell hit the port I girder. The fact that both I girders were involved is a measure of the flatness of the trajectory, hence the closeness of the engagement.
Whether the enemy guns were supplied only with anti-tank ammunition or whether the enemy commander had a choice but assumed all warships must be armoured is open to speculation. If the latter was the case then his decision was a fortunate one for Murchison.
On calm appraisal the vulnerability of the ships was horrendous; the hedgehog ready use locker containing at least half a ton of explosive stood totally exposed on the forecastle; ready use ammunition lockers were dotted around the upper decks; the disablement of the Captain on the bridge, the Coxswain at the wheel, the steering gear aft or an unlucky hit in the boiler or engine rooms would have resulted inevitably in a high speed grounding and the almost certain loss of the ship as a result. Murchison was very lucky but perhaps no luckier than she deserved.
Now winter was approaching and each patrol was noticeably colder than its predecessor, and eventually Murchison was forced to give in to the exigencies of the weather.
With the onset of winter the river did not freeze but the weather became very, very cold and chunks of ice up to maybe motor car size began to appear racing down river with the outgoing tides. The temperature fell to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 28 degrees below freezing on the old scale and much colder than inside a domestic deep freeze. Murchison, having been built in Australia for temperate to tropical conditions, was not arcticised in any shape or form and we felt the cold very badly indeed.
In temperatures such as these it is an entirely new world; though packed with anti-freeze grease it was necessary to keep the guns in constant movement through their full limits as a five minute break would see them frozen solid, requiring hours of work with steam hoses to free them; bare skin freezes to exposed metal so gloves were obligatory; food stowed in upper deck lockers froze solid followed shortly by the food stowed below; the water supply to the heads froze so there was no sanitation and the water providing pressure for the galley fuel froze so there were no cooking nor even thawing facilities and thus over a few days life in the ship ground to a halt until there was no alternative but to give the weather best and request a relief to enable her to proceed to sea where conditions were infinitely better in comparison.
The ship’s side bulkhead of my cabin in common with the rest of the ship was not lined and over this period, despite the fact that there was a radiator constantly burning in the cabin, the condensation built up on the bulkhead until there was a good half inch layer of ice on it. Normal bedclothes were useless but oddly enough large sheets of brown paper placed immediately above the mattress and between the upper blankets turned the trick and made a snug berth despite the ice a few inches from my nose.
Murchison was unique in her discomfort. The Royal Navy frigates, having been constructed with Russian convoys in mind, suffered little more than mild inconvenience. An officer from one of them visiting Murchison just before she was forced to retire was appalled by the conditions he found on board and was vociferous in his praise of the way in which the ship’s company had endured them so well.
Now the Han River operations were running down in any case and shortly afterwards the last of the ships were withdrawn and the estuary left to its mudflats and the birds; but there was one final scene to be played, the date was 31 January 1952, Murchison’s last day on patrol on the coast before returning to Kure and thence home.
On the last day of our last patrol we were in company with the cruiser Belfast flying the Flag of Rear Admiral A. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Flag Officer Second in Command Far Eastern Fleet and Murchison’s ultimate superior during the time of her Korean deployment. The Admiral, who for some reason had always had a soft spot for Murchison, transferred his flag to us and we took him up to the old anchorage at Fork for a last look at the river. We carried out a shoot at some of the old targets and the clear, still afternoon was waning as we turned and proceeded out of the Han for the last time. As we moved away from the anchorage I was taking a last nostalgic look astern through binoculars when there appeared in my field of vision a very large shell splash – not the 3 inch or so which we had seen previously but something much larger, maybe even 6 inch. It was about a mile astern and more or less in the position of the anchorage we had just left. I reported it and for a while everyone on the bridge watched astern but there were no more splashes, and in the absence of any further evidence I think some people attributed it to an overactive imagination on my part but I am sure of what I saw. My theory is that the Chinese finally positioned a long range gun which would dominate the estuary and had held their fire whilst we were at Fork hoping we would come closer and had only opened fire when they realised we were going away, by which time we were already out of range.
Murchison’s Captain and Officers were dined by the Admiral on board Belfast that evening and the following morning as the ship made her final farewells there was received from Admiral Scott-Moncrieff a most astonishing signal which, bearing in mind the fact that Admirals in His Majesty’s Fleet have a well established reputation for taciturnity, deserves to be quoted in full: ‘I dislike the thought of continuing the war without Murchison but I will have to accept it now as a fact. You have been a tower of strength and your good name will always be associated with the infamous Han. No ship could have done better. For fine seamanship and steadiness under fire you have proved yourselves beyond reproach. Good luck in all your sailings and a happy homecoming to you all. ‘
And as a final farewell gesture one of our companion ships of the Han slipped a clandestine signal into the system: To: Murchison From: Kirn II Sung (President of Communist North Korea) ‘Goodbye, good luck. We shall miss you as you have so often missed us.‘