A fine Second War ‘Sink the Haguro!’ C.G.M., Arctic Convoy PQ 17 Mentioned in Despatches group of five awarded to Stoker Petty Officer J. Yates, Royal Navy, for great gallantry in braving super-heated live steam to perform vital tasks that saved H.M.S. Saumarez when her boiler room was hit by a five-inch shell from the heavy cruiser Haguro during the Battle of the Malacca Straits in May 1945, the last major surface action of the war; Yates was a veteran of the Dunkirk Evacuation, multiple Arctic Convoys (including PQ 17, for which he was Mentioned in Despatches), the sinking of Scharnhorst, and the Normandy Landings

Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, G.VI.R. (Sto. P.O. J. Yates, P/KX. 95334); 1939-45 Star; Atlantic Star, 1 clasp, France and Germany; Burma Star; War Medal 1939-45, with M.I.D. oak leaf, minor contact wear, generally good very fine (5) £12,000-£16,000

Buckland Dix & Wood, April 1994; Dix Noonan Webb, November 2015.

C.G.M. London Gazette 16 September 1945:
‘For great gallantry and outstanding devotion to duty. No. 1 Boiler Room of H.M.S. Saumarez was hit by an enemy shell. Stoker P.O. Yates, the sole survivor from the boiler room though badly burnt and in great pain at once shut the steam off from the oil fuel pump and heaters, and would not allow himself to be treated for his hurts until he had reported the damage. This most gallant action did much to limit the damage to his ship.’

This was the last of the 72 Conspicuous Gallantry Medals that were awarded during the Second World War.

M.I.D. London Gazette 1 January 1943.

Yates would almost certainly have been eligible for the retrospective Arctic Star, awarded from 2013 to surviving veterans and their next-of-kin only, seventy years after his qualifying operational service.

Jack ‘Spud’ Yates was born in Oldham, Lancashire, on 13 September 1918. He appears to have joined the Royal Navy in the late 1930s (acquiring the nickname ‘Spud’, as he said, ‘for some inexplicable reason’) and spent the first part of the war in the Fleet Minesweeper H.M.S. Halcyon. Halcyon could also act as an escort vessel, and when so tasked exchanged her minesweeping equipment for dropping gear for 40 depth-charges. She started her war at Harwich, clearing mines in the Channel. At the evacuation of Dunkirk, she picked up 2,271 troops and three of her crew were killed in air attacks. After repairs, Halcyon reverted to mine clearance off the east coast, where she was subjected to almost daily air attacks. She was badly damaged by a mine explosion in September 1940. Repairs lasted until July 1941.

The Arctic Run and Mentioned in Despatches
Halcyon then escorted the first Allied convoy to Archangel. She stayed on in North Russia to keep the ports clear of mines and to escort incoming and departing convoys. Returning home in October 1941, she was fitted out for Arctic service and Yates took leave to marry a local Oldham girl. In December 1941 Halcyon took part in Operation Anklet, the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands.

By Spring 1942 thirteen major convoys had made the arduous passage to north Russia, with the loss of one out of 103 merchant ships. In response, the Germans moved capital ships, including the powerful battleship Tirpitz, eleven U-Boats and 243 aircraft to north Norway.
On 27 June 1942 Halcyon and Yates, now a Leading Stoker, sailed as part of the close escort for the 35 merchant ships of convoy PQ 17 to Archangel. Further protection was provided by a Screening Force of four heavy cruisers and a distant escort of two battleships and an aircraft carrier.

On 4 July intensive air attacks began, and two merchantmen were sunk. At 2111 hrs, in the mistaken belief that the German warships had sortied to attack the convoy, the Admiralty ordered the Cruiser Screen to withdraw to the west. 12 minutes later, a second signal was sent: “Owing to threat from surface ships, convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.” 13 minutes after that, a third signal went out from the Admiralty; “Convoy is to Scatter.” The word ‘Scatter’ indicated an immediate threat from surface ships. Detailed instructions had been issued, detailing actions to be taken by each ship after it received the order ‘Scatter’ and, in accordance with them, the six destroyers of the Close Escort departed with the Cruiser Force. The remaining 13 anti-aircraft and anti-submarine Close Escorts dispersed, continuing to head for Russia but leaving the merchant ships entirely unprotected. The sea was calm, the weather bright, and there was almost continuous daylight. It was immediately obvious after the ‘Scatter’ order that the merchant vessels would be massacred.

The senior remaining close escort ship was H.M.S. Palomares, which had excellent anti-aircraft capabilities but no protection against submarines, so she ordered Halcyon and another minesweeper to close and act as her escorts. She set a course for an anchorage on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya, which was reached two days later despite many air attacks. Eventually a party of 14 ships formed up. After two days they fought their way through into Archangel, arriving on 11 July.

Halcyon performed two notable rescues of PQ17 merchantmen. In the first, she came upon the big American merchant ship Samuel Chase drifting helplessly. Chase signalled: 'Two direct hits, three near misses, main steam line broken. Shall we abandon ship?' Halcyon’s skipper replied, 'Do not abandon ship - we will take you in tow.' A strong tow was shot over to Samuel Chase, Halcyon gradually increased engine revolutions and the huge merchantman started to move. The two vessels made a steady five knots south to the White Sea until the Americans, fired up by the example of the little 1,000-ton sweeper, managed to get their engines going again, just before enemy dive bombers arrived.

Both vessels finished the journey under their own steam. In recognition of Halcyon’s crucial assistance, the master of Samuel Chase asked the minesweeper to escort him into harbour.  When Halycon docked at Archangel on 11 July, it discovered that “Five ships are all that are definitely safe.” Six more reached Russia over the following days. Twenty-three ships (68% of PQ 17) had been sunk and hundreds of seamen were dead or drifting in small boats.

‘God save the King! We knew you would save us!’
Halcyon’s second rescue was a dramatic search for PQ 17 survivors four hundred miles high up in the Barents Sea in mid-July 1942. Russian aircraft spotted three rafts and radioed their position with an estimate of the direction in which they would drift. Three British minesweepers from the recently arrived PQ 17 Close Escort group were sent out from Archangel to find them. They were allotted nine days for the search - three days to reach the area, three days to look for the rafts, three days to return.

The first twenty-four hours of vigilance slipped by fruitlessly. Every crewman on Halcyon was badly strained and tired after the dramas of the past two weeks; no one had had more than four hours sleep and most were beginning to feel downhearted. In the afternoon of the last day of the box search, the atmosphere was tense. The rafts had been adrift for thirteen days, and all the minesweepers had to go on were rough calculations made a week ago by the Russian pilot.

The remaining hours steadily ticked away. At 7.30 a.m. on the last day the black Arctic fog descended. This seemed to be the end. Their time would expire at noon. Halcyon's captain sent the signal for the final lap of the search. For this last half hour everyone lined the rails and at a quarter to twelve, with just fifteen minutes to go, a miracle happened. The fog lifted and the rafts appeared, crammed with men waving and shouting 'God Save the King! We knew you would save us!' There were over thirty survivors from the S.S. Honomu.

Halcyon remained in North Russia for another four months until returning to British waters in November 1942 with QP 15. She encountered hurricane force winds which she faced with grim determination. The Rear Admiral commanding the Cruiser Screen wrote in his report on QP 15: ‘I could not but be impressed by the cheerful way in which these very small ships were coping with their difficulties. With so little reserve of speed, conditions in these vessels must have been even worse than in a destroyer. Halcyon must have wondered more than once what happened when his fuel gave out in a position of which he was very unsure; and I would like to express my admiration for the manner in which these small ships carry out their vital, arduous and unglamorous work.’

In recognition of his contribution to the successful rescues Yates was Mentioned in Despatches.

Halcyon sailed straight to Milford Haven in December 1942 for a two-month refit. She then spent most of 1943 as an escort, with another two-month refit in September-October.

Transfer to the brand-new destroyer H.M.S. Saumarez; and the Normandy Landings
Precisely when Yates moved to the new-built destroyer H.M.S. Saumarez, which entered service on 1 July 1943, is uncertain. The summer of 1943 is the probable time for his promotion from Leading Stoker to Stoker Petty Officer in another ship. Yates saw further action as a convoy escort on the Arctic run, including the sinking of the battle-cruiser Scharnhorst during the Battle of North Cape. Early on 26 December 1943 the Admiralty signalled that Scharnhorst was at sea. She was detected by the screen of cruisers and after hours of trying to evade them and strike at the convoy, headed for home. She was intercepted and hit by the battleship H.M.S. Duke of York. A long chase followed. Scharnhorst hit back hard and disabled Duke of York’s fire control radar while pulling away out of range of her big guns. The British Admiral ordered his destroyers to attack the German warship.

Saumarez's guns fired continuously for eleven minutes, scoring hits, followed by a salvo of torpedoes. A shell from Scharnhorst killed eleven men on Saumarez, while a near-miss damaged her forced lubrication system. Duke of York and the cruisers sank Scharnhorst, three hours after the first sighting. This was the last surface action between German and British capital ships. Yates stated that it was this earlier ‘David and Goliath’ encounter that helped prepare Saumarez’s crew for her epic fight with the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro in the Malacca Straits in May 1945: “’I won't say the ship was agog with excitement because by this time most of the crew were hardened war veterans. The majority having been aboard during the Scharnhorst incident.’

Yates was definitely present at Operation Neptune, the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, earning the France and Germany clasp to his Atlantic Star. Saumarez was the Senior Officer's ship for the 23rd Destroyer Flotilla, which gave gun support to Force ‘S’ in the assault on Ouistreham. Saumarez and the destroyer Onslaught later engaged a convoy of three or four German minesweepers and one merchant vessel off St Peter Port, Guernsey on 14 August.

In September Saumarez was part of the escort of another Arctic convoy. She refitted at Newcastle from November 1944 to January 1945 as preparation to join 26th Destroyer Flotilla, British East Indies Fleet, led by Captain (D) Manley Power. The East Indies Fleet did not have the latest aircraft carriers or battleships – these went to the British Pacific Fleet. However, it had an important strategic role to play – restoring the self-confidence of the Royal Navy by avenging the humiliation inflicted on it in 1941-42, when the Battleship Prince of Wales, Battlecruiser Repulse, Aircraft Carrier Hermes and Heavy Cruiser Exeter were all sunk by the Japanese navy. In January 1945 the Japanese were on the defensive, but were not toothless and their will to fight on was strong. Survivors from sunken Japanese warships usually either attacked their rescuers or committed suicide.

The Battle of the Malacca Straits - ‘It was quite simple: We were to sink her’
Having participated in several operations against the Japanese, Saumarez returned to her base at Trincomalee after ‘splicing the mainbrace’ (an extra distribution of rum) to celebrate V.E. Day on 8 May 1945. Her ratings had just enough time to set fire to a canteen, some huts and brawl with the matelots of the French fast battleship Richelieu before being ordered to sea at dawn on 10 May.

Saumarez was to join a major Fleet search-and-destroy sweep to intercept Japanese vessels sent to evacuate the enemy garrisons stationed on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. On 15 May Captain Manley Power received reports that a Japanese Heavy Cruiser and its escort were shaping a course to enter the Malacca Strait and return to their base in Singapore. His Destroyer Flotilla was now a hundred miles ahead of the Richelieu and a British Heavy Cruiser. If Power met the enemy in daylight, he would try to drive them west towards the two capital ships. ‘If we met her at night – it was quite simple: we were to sink her’.

The tactic he intended to use for a night encounter was the ‘Star Attack’ – coordinated successive strikes by a ring of destroyers surrounding and trapping the heavy Cruiser, coming at her in simultaneous pairs from different points of the compass. Haguro was one of the largest, most heavily armed Cruisers ever built. She weighed more than twice as much as all five ships of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla put together, was as fast as them and was a wily old campaigner that had survived Midway, Leyte Gulf and most of the great battles in the Pacific.

Yates would late state: ‘We aboard the Saumarez knew roughly about 2200 hrs that night [15 May 1945] that something was about to happen... Chief Stoker Cadwallader came into the PO’s Mess and informed the watch going below for the “Middle” that anti-flash gear and gloves were to be worn by all men going below and threatened “castration” to any man found disobeying this order, a precaution which in due course proved to be the best possible advice.’

Yates states that there were four members of the Middle Watch present in the hot, cramped and noisy No. 1 Boiler Room (various books have mistaken the number of men present and even their names.) In addition to Stoker Petty Officer Yates as the senior man, they were Leading Stoker ‘Pincher’ Marten, Leading Stoker ‘Ginger’ Elliot and First Class Stoker ‘Jock’[Hendren]. ‘I and the aforementioned only took over the watch in No. 1 Boiler Room at midnight. For the first hour everything was normal.’

Commander Denis Calnan of Saumarez described the dramatic night action in the midst of a violent lightning storm in the northern Malacca Straits just after 0100 on 16 May 1945: ‘All this time I was conscious that the familiar crack of our 4.7s and the thump-thump-thump of my own guns were being blotted out by a gigantic hammering storm of tremendous noise, drowning all speech and sense. Haguro was firing at us, point-blank, with her main armament, opening with a full ten-gun broadside. Haguro’s salvos were pitching short and over, and the tons of water thrown up were swamping the upper deck. All this took but a minute or two, when Saumarez heeled far over to starboard as we slewed to port. I glimpsed the high, shining wet side of Haguro, lit by intermittent lightning flashes and our rocket flares. As Saumarez swung further to port, closing Haguro at thirty knots, a tremendous crack and a roar like the end of the world overwhelmed us; all our guns stopped firing.
An unnerving silence fell: all power was off and communications dead. Deaf, wet and confused I looked forward and saw that the upper half of our funnel - thirty feet away - had disappeared. The remnant was belching out a towering eruption of steam and smoke. The silence was not silence, but the total deafness caused by the tearing shriek of escaping superheated steam. Beneath my feet the deck tilted even more to starboard as our turn to port tightened, and looking down on the iron deck a few feet below me I saw (but could not hear) all eight torpedoes leap, one by one, from their tubes.’

As Yates later recalled: ‘It was my job as Stoker Petty Officer of the boiler room to maintain the maximum pressure in the boiler at all times and this requires intense concentration on the steam power gauge. But in actual fact one doesn’t just see the pressure gauge alone, the angle of vision covers more than one object and I saw what appeared to be a flash on the main steam pipe. Amazing how vivid this impression is yet [after 30 years]. I didn’t know until much later that the shell had actually entered the boiler [and partly detonated]. Immediately steam began to fill the boiler room and was leaving the boiler at roughly 500 degrees Fahrenheit [260 Celsius]. Please bear in mind that what follows took place in roughly 10 to 15 seconds.
Leading Stoker Marten was my water tender and as such he would be nearest the point of impact. He was stationed on the gratings above me in front of the boiler. Leading Stoker Elliot was on the diesel dynamo [always kept running when at Action Stations] which was situated on the port side of the boiler room, and he poor devil received the full impact of the escaping steam. I should imagine he died instantly. Jock was on the plates as I was.
The very first thing that came into my mind was to keep the steam away from us. The only way to do this was to open wide the throttle to the fan supplying forced draught air to the boiler room. This I did and at the same time I shouted a warning to the others... “Look Out!” Marten understood and rapidly made for the emergency hatch on the starboard side of the boiler room. Elliot was slumped in a corner and Jock was on his knees on the plates, the steam already beginning to choke him. I was lucky being directly under the fan.’

Naval procedure called for Yates to order ‘Evacuate the boiler room!’, get the others out and then immediately escape himself, but Marten had already left and ‘It would have been impossible for me to carry Jock or Ginger [Elliot] out of the boiler room. Both were very hefty lads and the boiler room ladders are very steep.’

Yates explains why he stayed on in the boiler room, contrary to the strict evacuation procedure which he was had practised many times in drills. ‘In a panic, crisis, call it what you will, things don’t actually turn out as laid down by the book... Fire then crossed my mind. This is feared on any ship, so I then proceeded to the secondary positions and shut down the Oil Fuel pressure pump, heaters and steam supply despite the scalding steam, which was spreading into many of Saumarez’s compartments, including the Low Power Electrical Machinery Compartment, causing most electric circuits to shut down, and the Action Information Centre, which coordinated the ship’s combat operations.’

These critical steps taken by Yates did much to bring the risks from the escape of superheated, pressurised steam under control. The clouds of steam subsided, compartments gradually cleared and the ship’s electrics began to recover.

Despite extensive burns and scalding which caused Yates considerable pain, ‘I then reported to the damage control position who informed the bridge that No 1 boiler room was out of action. We couldn’t raise the engine-room on the telephone so I went back amidships and informed them personally [so they could start switching both propellers to the No. 2 boiler room]. I remember how hot the deck plates over the boiler room were because I had lost my shoes somewhere and was walking in my stockinged feet. I then went back to the boiler room airlock and the ship’s doctor asked me how many men were trapped below and I told him two.;
The doctor was driven back by the tremendous heat and ‘realised that there was no chance of any survivors. I was then hustled along to the sick bay, I don’t remember much of the trip back...’

Meanwhile, the Battle of the Malacca Straits raged on. Haguro had opened fire on Saumarez with her 8-inch and 5-inch batteries, illuminating very effectively with star-shell. At 0108 Saumarez had fired on the heavy Cruiser, engaging her with main and close-range armament. At 0111 Saumarez had been hit almost simultaneously by a 5-inch shell in the boiler room, an 8-inch shell on the port side of the forecastle and a hit on top of the funnel. Speed at once fell off and the wheel was put over to bring the sights to bear before a full salvo of torpedoes was fired at 0113 at a range of 2,000 yards. All communication between bridge, steering and engine room in Saumarez was temporarily severed. Verulam then made an unopposed attack and the two destroyers witnessed three torpedo explosions on Haguro. According to a surviving Japanese officer, all three forward gun turrets burst into flame, she listed heavily to port and stayed there.

Haguro altered course drastically but at each manoeuvre found herself confronted with a destroyer. The attacks continued, achieving a high degree of synchronisation in firing salvos of torpedoes by pairs of destroyers. At 0209 Haguro, overwhelmed, sank 45 miles south-west of Penang.

Saumarez’s Engineering Officer took half an hour to make No 1 Boiler Room safe and entered it, to discover the Haguro’s 50 lb shell. He called the bridge to report an unexploded shell in the boiler, waited until his sensational news had caused consternation, then added: ‘But not to worry, we’ve thrown it over the side.’

Yates and Leading Stoker Marten were hospitalised with severe burns. After a couple of days, Marten died from his injuries, leaving Yates as the sole survivor of No. 1 Boiler Room. He rejoined Saumarez as she refitted. He was informed of his C.G.M., a rare award which, together with the promotion of Manley Power to full Admiral, clearly shows how much the Royal Navy appreciated, indeed cherished, the Battle of the Malacca Straits. ‘The sinking of the Haguro,’ wrote Admiral Mountbatten, a former destroyer captain, in his report to the Chiefs of Staff, ‘is an outstanding example of a night attack by destroyers.’

The 26th Destroyer Flotilla left Colombo on 17 November and arrived in the UK early in December 1945. Jack Yates later became a blast-furnace man and then a steel mill operator. He died in Oldham in autumn 1992

Sold with the recipient’s original M.I.D. certificate, in the name of ‘Leading Stoker Jack Yates’ and dated 1 January 1945, together with Admiralty letter informing him of the award of his C.G.M., dated 28 September 1945; the recipient’s hand written account of events aboard H.M.S. Saumarez on 15-16 May 1945; and a copy of Sink the Haguro, by John Winton, for whom Yates wrote his hand-written account.