Ex-Liner Fights Warship and Saves British Convoy

Indeed at the end of 1940 whilst returning from escorting Convoy HX86, Captain James Alexander Pollard Blackburn, previous Captain of the Jervis Bay, took HMS Voltaire, another armed merchant cruiser, to the site of the sinking of HMS Jervis Bay on his way back to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He brought the Voltaire to a dead slow and he ordered a rifle volley salute to his former ship and shipmates resting on the bottom of the sea.

by Tania Long

The Jervis Bay Goes Down in Flames, Her Guns Barking to the Last;

29 of 38 Merchantmen Escape; Berlin Said Raider Sank Them All

Published 12 November 1940

Sinking and afire from stem to stern but with her guns blazing to the last, the 14,164-ton armed British merchant cruiser Jervis Bay fought a German warship—believed to have been one of the 10,000-ton "pocket battleships," the Admiral Scheer or the Lützow—at dusk last Tuesday, 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic from the American coast, and enabled a convoy of thirty-eight merchantmen, bringing vital supplies from the New World to scatter.

Twenty-nine of the freighters escaped, and twenty-four of these reached a British port today. The fate of the nine other ships in the convoy is uncertain. All may have been sent to the bottom after the destruction of the Jervis Bay. Among the surviving vessels were the 16,698-ton motor liner Rangitiki and the 4,952-ton Cornish City, whose distress signals last week were the first indications that a raider was active in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic.

The German high command said the entire convoy had been destroyed, but the Jervis Bay, fighting as gallantly as the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi had done against the Deutschland (later renamed the Lützow) last winter, sacrificed herself to allow nearly three-fourths of the vessels to escape in the gathering gloom.

Details of the action were told by some of the men who, aboard the freighters in convoy, watched the Jervis Bay steaming out from the line to meet the powerful raider. In peace time the Jervis Bay was an Aberdeen and Commonwealth liner plying between England and Australia, carrying freight and the poorest classes of immigrants.

British and foreign vessels in the convoy, eyewitnesses recounted, followed one another across a calm sea. It had been a perfect day. Just as darkness was gathering the silence was shattered by a distant explosion. Then came the scream of a shell from below the horizon. It fell harmlessly a few yards from a ship.

The shell was followed by another. Soon the silhouette of a warship emerged, and the firing grew more intense. Immediately the order to scatter was given, and, as the ships obeyed, the raider began to concentrate on the Rangitiki, the largest vessel in the convoy.

The raider stood off about seven or eight miles as she poured shell after shell in the direction of the Rangitiki. Suddenly when it seemed that the merchantman could no longer escape the devastating fire, the Jervis Bay steamed straight out in front of her, turned slightly and raced toward the attacking warship.

The crew of the Jervis Bay must have known that she stood little chance against the raider's superior armament, but they manned their guns and blazed away furiously, drawing the fire from the Rangitiki.

As the convoy ships disappeared one by one into the safety of the night, the Jervis Bay fought grimly on. The battle did not last long. The Jervis Bay, battered from stem to stern, began to burn. Soon she was blazing. Still her last remaining gun could be heard barking defiantly between the thunderous explosions of the raider's heavy guns.

Full details of what happened then are not available. The Admiralty said that nearly two hours after the beginning of the engagement an explosion was seen aboard the Jervis Bay. Sixty-five survivors, the Admiralty added, were known to have been aboard a merchant ship.

The Jervis Bay was manned by officers and men of the Royal Naval Reserve. She was commanded by Captain H. S. F. Feegan.

A British captain of one of the convoy ships, interviewed on landing today, said he thought the raider was a pocket battleship and believed her shells were fired from 11-inch guns.

Fegen's Service Record

1922 Jan: promoted to Lt Cmdr Seniority 15/10/21, serving in HMS WHITLEY

1922 Dec: appointed to HMS SOMME

1924 Jan: appointed to HMS VOLUNTEER

1925 Jun: appointed to HMS COLOSSUS Accommodation ship, 20,000 tons, Boys training ship.

1926 Jul: appointed to HMS FORRES as Lt/Cmdr in command

1927 Nov: on S O T C (Senior Officer`s Technical Course) at Portsmouth

1927 Dec: appointed to R. A. N. - (RANC at Captains Point, Jervis Bay) on Naval staff

1928 Jan: believed promoted to Cmdr on 20/1/28

1929 Dec: still at R A N

1932/1934: HMS OSPREY

1934: on S O W C (Senior Office`s War Course ) at R.N. College at Greenwich from 15/10/34 to February 1935

1935 Mar: HMS DAUNTLESS to June 1935

1935 Aug: HM Dockyard, Chatham to August 1938. HMS CURLEW - Reserve Fleet, and HMS DRAGON - Reserve Fleet

1939 Jul: HMS EMERALD, Cruiser, 7,550 tons, Reserve Fleet at the Nore (Incidentally, the Capt of HMS EMERALD was Capt A.W.S.Agar, VC, DSO.)

1940: appointed Acting Capt of AMC HMS JERVIS BAY in Feb 1940; 49 when killed in action.

 

Click on image to view larger version.

This photo was published in the Telegraph-Journal, local Saint John newspaper, in November 1940. The complete accompanying text is also provided below. As well, names in Red denote Killed, while Green denotes Missing, Presumed Killed.

Identity of officers, pictured above, of HMS Jervis Bay, British armed merchant cruiser, sunk in a gallant battle with a German pocket battleship in the North Atlantic on November 5, while defending her convoy of 38 ships, was established last night by Paymaster Lieut. J.G. Sargeant and Sub-Lieutenant Guy Byam-Corstiaens, two of the survivors of the hero ship, who arrived here yesterday to remain with friends in Saint John and Rothesay prior to returning overseas. When the above picture was previously published in the Telegraph-Journal, on November 14, only partial identification was available and for the benefit of those who are treasuring the picture, it is being re-published with complete identification, as follows:

Back row - left to right - Gunner E.R. Stannard, Lieut. Richard Shackleton, Surgeon-Lieut. H.St.J. Hiley, Paymaster Lieut. A.W. Stott, Lieut. Hugh Williamson (chief radio officer), Lieut. A.H.W. Bartle, Lieut. Norman E. Wood, Lieut. Walter Hill, Lieut.-Commdr. George L. Roe, Lieut. H.G.B. Moss, Paymaster Lieut. J.G. Sargeant.

Middle row - left to right - Paymaster Commdr. E.W. White, Lieut. Commdr. K.M. Morrison, Commdr. J.A.P. Blackburn, D.S.C., Capt. E.S. Fogarty Fegen, V.C., Engineer Commdr. J.H.G. Chappell, Lieut. Commdr. A.W. Driscoll.

Front row - left to right - Wireless Operator Donald Curry, Midshn. Owens, Midshn. Ronald A.G. Butler, Midshn. C.C.T. Latch, Midshn. W.B. Thistleton.

Other senior officers of the vessel, including Surgeon Lieut. Commdr. T.G. Evans, Lieut. Dudlet J.H. Bigg, and Sub-Lt. Guy Byam-Corstiaens are not shown in the picture.

Surgeon-Lieutenant Hiley was relieved by Surgeon-Lieutenant-Commander Evans, who rejoined the ship shortly before she sailed, in her last convoy. He had been a patient in hospital in an East Coast Canadian port for a few weeks.

Remembrance Day ceremony at the HMS Jervis Bay memorial at Albouy's Point, in the City of Hamilton, Bermuda, including personnel from the Royal Naval Association Bermuda Branch, HMS Malabar, and the Sea Cadet Corps, c. 1990.

 

The Jervis Bay Goes Down

H.M. Armed Merchant Cruiser Jervis Bay (center) deliberately sacrificing herself for the sake of the convoy she was escorting. A drawing showing her commander, Captain E.S. Fogarty Fegen - posthumously awarded the V.C. - taking the Jervis Bay full speed ahead to engage the Admiral Scheer (left), an action which resulted in 33 out of 38 ships making good their escape. (C.E. Turner, The Illustrated London News, 23 November 1940)

by Gene Fowler

The Jervis Bay Goes Down" was recited for the first time over the radio by Mr. Ronald Colman in a nation-wide broadcast for the "Help Greece" pro­gram on 8 February 1941. Weeks before this, how­ever, the fame of Gene Fowler's stirring poem had been spreading through the land. Every visitor from Hollywood, it seemed, had a multigraphed copy of "The Jervis Bay Goes Down" with him.

The Jervis Bay went down in mid-ocean on 5 November 1940. A rickety old liner, converted into an armed merchant cruiser, she sacrificed herself deliberately in a hopeless encounter with a Nazi pocket battleship in order that twenty-nine ships in a convoy might successfully effect their escape. It was one of the most gallant and heroic episodes in all the history of the sea.

Following the author's comments and the poem, is a vivid newspaper account of the sinking of the Jervis Bay.

•

"The Jervis Bay Goes Down" is a sprig of laurel laid upon the crypt of a deed. It was not written for publication. It had been intended as an airwave item for Bundles for Britain—nothing more.

A few copies of the poem were struck off and given to friends of the author. It was with considerable amaze­ment, then, that the writer began to receive requests for more copies. There had not yet been a broadcast of the poem. There had been no publicity. How can one explain the wanderings of words?

The first assumption of an author—any author other than the truly great ones—is that a work well received is a work well done. So many of us believe we have gold in our hands until Tomorrow tells us we are holding iron pyrites.

I would like to think that "The Jervis Bay Goes Down" is worthy of a people in travail. Yet so many times a word rides to glory on the back of a deed.

•

She is an old freighter

Of some fourteen thousand tons,

Standing in the road stead

Of a port somewhere south of Singapore.

She lists a bit,

As if wearied by the typhoons of the China Seas;

By the whole gales of Tasman;

By the turbulence of wind off Borneo.

Her gear is obsolete,

Her iron skin blistered,

Pocked with rust.

Her engines are rheumatic,

And her saw-tooth screw

Will yield less fourteen knots …

She is the old Jervis Bay,

Of Australian registry,

Resting, between tides, from her obscure drudgeries,

Somewhere south of Singapore.

She nods at her mooring cables,

Head bent to the dry monsoon.

The Jervis Bay is nodding, half asleep,

When a gig draws alongside,

And there is brought aboard,

Solemnly, a flag with a blue field-

A storied ensign-emblem of Britain's Naval Reserve.

This of itself becomes a rousing circumstance

To one so frowsed, so drably sleeping,

Somewhere south of Singapore.

•

Up the starboard ladder-way

There comes a new master,

Puffing somewhat with middle age.

He looks about, he looks above, below.

Forward, aft he peers.

His is the manner of a man recapturing a memory.

He is Fogarty Feegan,

Called from retirement

To command the Jervis Bay.

For ten years Fogarty Feegan

Has walked in his English garden,

Watching the roses bud, the violets bloom,

Enjoying each miracle of season

That brings white blossoms to the hawthorn hedge.

But now he has left his barrow and his ships

To bring the storied ensign, with its blue field-

Blue as the violets of his garden—

Bringing it from afar to the old Jervis Bay.

His voice rolls against the breakwater.

His big hands grasp the teakwood rail.

He swears a bit, and finally

The Jervis Bay awakens.

Soon a battery is supplied—

A small one—

Guns of five-inch caliber.

Then, with a hundred young reservists for her crew,

The Jervis Bay puts out to sea,

From somewhere south of Singapore.

•

Captain Fogarty Feegan

Has a distance rendezvous

With other old masters,

Summoned from retirement,

Called by their King

From their little farms,

From their office stools,

From their fireside chairs,

From the cities and the shires-

For threefold war—earth, sky, sea-

Beggars the world.

Ships go down … each day go down,

And bottoms must be had

To bear cargoes to Britain.

•

Now up comes the Jervis Bay,

Up from tropical waters,

Through Suez, through the Strait of Gibraltar,

Out and across the Atlantic,

And to the Americas.

In a harbor of the North,

And with brave haste, the old hulls

Are laden to their loading lines

With cargoes for Britain.

Captain Fogarty Feegan

Listens to the rumbling of winches;

Hears the samson posts creak;

Hears the chains and blocks complain;

Harries his First Officer, Mr. Wilson, with commands,

As things needful for the life-beat

Of England's great heart

Are stowed aboard.

"Hurry, damme, Mr. Wilson, sir!"

He shouts to his First Officer.

"We are not sleeping now, Mr. Wilson,

Somewhere south of Singapore!"

•

From a Canadian Bay,

From behind the fog-bank of November dawn,

A convoy line puts out:

Thirty-eight ships put out to sea

With cargoes for Britain,

A consignment to help sustain

The life-beat of England;

Goods to provision an Isle

That for a thousand years

Has prized the freedom

And the dignity of Man.

The gun crews of the Jervis Bay

Sleep beside their battery.

They seem young seminars

With Parka hoods cowling their heads

To keep out the cold sea-rime.

Night falls, a great and somber hymn.

The night of November fourth—

Nineteen hundred and forty years since Our Lord—

Is an anthem of wind and small, following sea.

The morning comes like a priest,

Upholding a golden monstrance.

The morning of the fifth

Finds the Jervis Bay and her convoy

Strung like a procession of pilgrims against the dawn.

The ship's bell sounds;

The practice rounds are fired.

The sun is on the meridian,

And Fogarty Feegan shoots the sun

For latitude.

Eight bells again,

And Fogarty Feegan shoots the sun

For longitude.

And then, at five o'clock

The lookout calls from the crow's-nest:

"Ship, sir, off the starboard bow!"

•

Through his glass,

Fogarty Feegan makes out smoke—

A black gargoyle in the sky—

East by southeast,

Then sights a ship, hull down.

And now a battleship

Comes boiling over the horizon.

She opens fire with heavy guns.

Captain Fogarty Feegan telegraphs his engine room

To strain the boilers till they burst.

He bellows, curses, brings to bear

The popguns of his battery

Against the Goliath armor the battleship.

He sends up smoke to screen the fleet.

He orders all the convoy ships to scatter wide and fast.

Then Fogarty Feegan

Sets out alone to meet the battleship.

Five-inch guns against eleven-inch guns.

Egg-shell hull against Krupp plate.

"Damme, Mr. Wilson, sir," he shouts,

"We're not hearing mandolins today,

Somewhere south of Singapore!"

This is a mad thing to do

This sea-charge of the Jervis Bay,

Yet a sky of dead admirals looks down

From the Grand Haven,

Looks down at Fogarty Feegan,

Whose senile tub

Steams bows-on for the battleship.

Nelson, Drake, Beatty, Harwood;

Yes, and the Americans:

Porter, Farragut and John Paul Jones,

All look down in wonderment.

•

And now a burst of shrapnel rakes the Jervis Bay,

And tears the right arm from the sleeve of Fogarty Feegan.

He does not fall.

He grasps the teakwood rail with his other hand,

Masking his agony with bellowings that rise above the guns.

Nor will he let a tourniquet

Be placed upon the stump.

He waves the stump, and Mr. Wilson knows

(and the sky of dead admirals knows)

That if a hand were there,

It would be making a great fist.

Still steaming toward the battleship,

Fogarty Feegan keeps his little guns ablast.

The eyes of the setters

And of the pointers

Grow black and blue from the recoils—

Their eardrums dead.

A salvo comes with the top roll of the battleship.

And now the ensign—

Emblem with the blue field—

Is shot away.

Enraged, bloody, rocking on his heels,

Fogarty Feegan roars

"Hoist another ensign, damme, Mr. Wilson, sir!

Hoist another flag,

That we may fight like Englishmen!"

A boatswain procures a flag from the locker—

A flag used for the burial of the dead at sea.

"Here, sir," he cries,

As to a brace he bends

The Banner of England.

•

The Jervis Bay, ablaze from stern to bow,

At dusk, still fires her puny guns,

And will not change her course.

Salvos from turrets,

Guns three-over-three,

Make great geysers grow about

The old ship's wake.

But still her guns give voice.

And now she's struck below the waterline.

Her boilers go.

The Jervis Bay begins to settle by the stern.

Yet, sinking, still she faces her antagonist.

Then the waters begin to close over her.

The waters close over Fogarty Feegan,

And over the flag

That once was used for burials at sea.

And now night spreads its shroud.

•

Of thirty-eight ships in the convoy,

Twenty-nine are saved,

Their cargoes saved,

To help sustain the life-beat of England,

While from the sky dead admirals look on,

And claim Captain Fogarty Feegan for their own.

•

The Jervis Bay goes down

Goes down as no mere casualty of storm,

To rust out, fathoms-deep, in common grave

With sisters unremembered by the years.

The Jervis Bay—of Australian registry,

From somewhere south of Singapore—

Goes down in the history

Of an Isle that for a thousand years

Has prized the freedom

And the dignity of Man.