Hush! Most Secret! De-censoring a wartime memoir by Julia Jones
When their job was done, the MLs returned to Felixstowe while the MGBs went on the hunt. They stalked and attacked an enemy trawler (an armed offensive war vessel, not some innocent fisherman) and a gun coaster. The waters off the Netherlands and France were, at that time, an essential supply route for the occupying German forces, therefore a regular conflict zone for the British Coastal Forces. Peter Scott gave these fierce, small scale fights a collective title, The Battle of the Narrow Seas.
On this night ‘Hitch’ and his small group had silently manoeuvred up wind of the enemy vessels, then sped at them out of the darkness, engines roaring, guns blazing. They hit the trawler with a heavy mortar, setting it on fire. Starshell illuminated the area with its harsh white glare. Hitch was standing in his usual place next to the mast of MGB 112, watching, commenting, ready to give the next orders to his little fleet. A 20mm Oerlikon shell hit and killed him instantly, also seriously wounding Derek Sidebottom, MGB 112's commanding officer and three others.
The shock was palpable. These were men used to death and terrible injuries – both given and received – but they hadn’t believed death would come to Hitch. Peter Scott, who was in action in the Channel that night, leading a different small group, remembered the ‘incredulity’ as the news passed between the boats: ‘Surely there must be some mistake they seemed to say. Others can be killed in action but not Hitch.’
It’s probably difficult for us, eighty years later, to understand why people thought this man was special. Peter Dickens, a career Naval officer (and great-grandson of the novelist) was there when MGB 112 returned to HMS Beehive. Every man and woman on the base was lining the dockside and surrounding the steps where the body was carried ashore. Many were weeping. Dickens wrote:
I cannot define what I felt as I saluted his body carried up the steps of the dock entrance: there was no shock because I knew what had happened to be inevitable, but sadness at the loss of someone so outstanding was poignant and very deep, so deep that I quite forgot the selfish picture I had formed of my own corpse being carried up those same steps. Remember Hichens. A perfect, gentle, indomitable knight in very truth. (Night Action Peter Dickens 1976)
For Dickens, and others fighting the Battle of the Narrow Seas, this was their Nelson moment.
Peter Scott made a broadcast for the BBC. 'The officers and men who fight these battles will not forget Robert Hichens […] that example of courage that makes people think as they go into action "This would have been a mere nothing to Hitch."'
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| RH after the first unequivocally successful MGB action November 1941 |
Hitch, himself, had not expected to survive the war. His wife, Catherine, had known that. As soon as she could, she collected the manuscript of the book he had been writing and sent it to the Admiralty, with three typewritten copies. I wonder how she felt about the response she received.
Robert Hichens had taken his book seriously – it’s yet another tribute to his capacity and to her understanding and support that he found time to write it at all. We Fought Them in Gunboats covers the period from February 1941 when Hitch became the first RNVR officer appointed to command one of the relatively new high-powered vessels which had carried such high hopes as the answer to the E-boat menace, yet had seemed so unreliable and disappointing.
At one point he comments wryly that it was probably because the initiative seemed doomed to failure, that Volunteer Reservists like himself were even considered for command. He doesn’t scruple to spell out the hostility he encountered from the ‘straight-stripers’ and holds nothing back in his criticism of the way the young RN Commanding Officers managed these fragile highly stressed vessels. He is angry about the Navy's unimaginative tactics and also their fundamental failures to arm the boats properly.
From his first rough journey from Dartmouth to Fowey, Hichens had come to love these boats:
We were wet, yes, soaked, but what other little ship could go through this at 24 knots and not be drowned ? The stability of the boats was wonderful, the way they adapted themselves to the tumbled surface of the sea was a joy, and there grew up in me a confidence and pleasure in my gunboat that I have never lost.
He also profoundly admired the men who went to sea in them.
When I considered the cool and unflinching bearing of my men in the recent bitter encounter, many of them removed by but a few months from peaceful occupation ashore in garages, factories, fields or machine shops, the full import of our sea heritage was brought home to me.
Long before his book was finished -- which it never was -- he had dedicated it to them. It's his testament. He has seen mismanagement, he has challenged authority and devised tactics, he has witnessed beauty and bloodshed. Because he doesn’t expect to survive, he needs to write it down so the same mistakes are not repeated.
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| RH (3rd from left) and his crew |
And perhaps he is writing for his children too. Catherine and their two boys had moved away from their home in Cornwall to rent a temporary home near his base in Suffolk. His younger son. Antony would supply him with bullseyes if he knew he was going out on a raid. Mentally Hichens had accepted that he would leave his wife a widow and would never see his children grow up. Catherine must have known how much this book mattered.
Generally the WW2 Admiralty managed publications well (or so it seems). Nicholas Monsarrat’s Three Corvette volumes were published as soon as they were completed and JPW Mallalieu was given time off to write Very Ordinary Seaman. When permission for the publication of Most Secret was refused, Nevil Shute was surprised and angry.
We Fought Them in Gunboats was necessarily incomplete when its author was killed – no one could know the story’s end. Lt Cdr JC Moore Interim Director of the Admiralty Press Division was making only a speculative commitment when he advised Catherine Hichens that she should apply to the Secretary of the Admiralty for the release of her husband’s papers ‘when hostilities were ended’.
Antony Hichens, who has written his father's biography (Gunboat Command), believes that the Admiralty would have preferred not to publish his father’s book at all. Extensive negotiations needed to take place with Michael Joseph, the potential publisher. I don't know whether anyone else was involved. I can’t believe that Catherine Hichens would have allowed her husband’s work to be suppressed without a struggle but it's quite likely that she had no voice in the discussion.
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| RH's younger son Antony who supplied his father with 'comfits' (Bullseyes) to take with him on night missions He will speak at the Felixstowe Book Festival 24.6.23 |
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| Robert Hichens both admired and criticised the Royal Navy |
Hichens was an enthusiast, a patriot, an innovator and a very good writer. His friend and fellow-officer David James, who wrote a foreword for a later edition described the action passages 'pouring from his pen like molten lead, searing hot and without so much as a comma of subsequent correction.' Such writing reflected so well on the spirit and bravery of Coastal Forces. It was good for morale. The manuscript was not entirely suppressed. Extracts appeared in the Sunday Express in the autumn of 1943 and the first edition in spring 1944.
It had been heavily censored. As Admiral Hugh Hext Rogers, writing the foreword, freely admitted ‘We know of so much that might have been there and isn't.'
Censorship was a fact of wartime publication. Margery Allingham’s The Oaken Heart, published by Michael Joseph two years earlier in 1941, was known to have been censored but when I came to examine the original, I discovered that the cuts only amounted to two extended passages. The scale of change to We Fought Then in Gunboats is a completely different order. Whole sections are gone and there are line by line amendments throughout.
Nothing had prepared me for this when I asked Antony Hichens for permission to re-publish his father's book in an ‘HMS Beehive edition’ for the Felixstowe Book Festival this summer. When he advised me, in passing, to be sure to use the 1956 paperback edition as it reprinted the original text I easily agreed. But I couldn't find a copy. All my friends and the libraries which were easy to access all had the 1944 version, in a variety of bindings.
Antony entrusted me with the original typescript to work from. It was a both a revelation and a much bigger job than I’d anticipated. It's a more human, thoughtful and grounded document that the book I thought I knew. I can understand why the 1956 full-text version, published at a moment when gung-ho war stories were the fashion, seems to have slipped past with little notice. The typescript has been both censored and edited. Hichens’ sentences have been discreetly re-punctuated, people’s names have been substituted for boat numbers. Locations and specifications are gone as are whole sections of criticism and analysis.
The HMS Beehive edition -- to be published on June 24th - will be as close as possible to the text which typed out in Felixstowe during those rare off-duty moments when the author was not at sea, or writing reports or attending conferences or battling with the Admiralty.
It will also include wider information about the base and some of the others who served there. Robert Hichens was a leader but was also part of an interdependent community. HMS Beehive was well named. Today the dock where the boats were moored and from which they they set out and returned -- too often carrying their wounded or dead -- has been filled in and tarmaced over to make a car park. An inconspicuous plaque is all that records the location of the former base.
The scene is dominated by the stacked containers, louring cranes and vast vessels of the modern Port of Felixstowe. To the south, however, between the car park and the bleak 18th century exterior of Landguard Fort, lies Felixstowe Museum. a former mine-assembly building which now houses HMS Beehive memorabilia, a specialist library and a small well kept archive where I was shown the humorous almanac produced by service personnel to entertain each other at Christmas 1942. Its title (I now know from Hichens typescript) pokes fun at a Combined Operations header that Coastal Forces considered especially fatuous.
Hush! Most Secret!
The fully de-censored, HMS Beehive edition of We Fought them in Gunboats will be published at the Felixstowe Book Festival 24.6.23 with speaker Antony Hichens and Captain Chris O'Flaherty RN Tickets are now available https://felixstowebookfestival.co.uk/events/we-fought-them-in-gunboats-the-new-hms-beehive-edition
Meanwhile we'll be gathering at the Museum on April 13th to raise our glasses to the memory of Robert Hichens and all who served at HMS Beehive 1940-1945 The toast will be proposed by Kate Trelawny whose father, Ian, had been severely wounded in August 1942, but returned to HMS Beehive in spring 1943 as senior officer of the Motor Torpedo Boats and was once again in action on April 17th,1943, just days after Hitch's death. For more information please contact julia@golden-duck.co.uk
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