Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An outstanding ‘Battle of the Barents Sea’ D.S.M. group of five awarded to Stoker J. J. Colley, Royal Navy, for gallantry when H.M.S. Achates was sunk by the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper on 31 December 1942, while on escort duty protecting convoy JW 51B to Murmansk; the 81 survivors included Stoker Colley, who led community singing of ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ whilst awaiting rescue from the icy waters by the trawler Northern Gem

Distinguished Service Medal, G.VI.R. (KX.77619 J. J. Colley,. Sto.) impressed naming, minor official correction to one letter of rate; 1939-45 Star; Atlantic Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45, mounted as worn, nearly extremely fine (5)
£2000-2600

D.S.M. London Gazette 27 April 1943: ‘For bravery in Northern Waters.’ This list of awards included the following to H.M.S. Achates: one Posthumous D.S.O., one C.G.M., one D.S.C., seven D.S.Ms., five mentions, and eleven Posthumous mentions.

The official recommendation for Stoker Joseph John Colley, whose award is listed first in order of merit amongst the survivors, states:

‘This man showed remarkable coolness in action, and carried out his duties in the engine room in a calm and most efficient manner. On being ordered to abandon ship he assisted a wounded shipmate out of the engine room on to the upper deck and subsequently got him on to a Carley Float.

Throughout he displayed great cheerfulness and in spite of the cold and semi-darkness led community singing while waiting to be picked up.’

On 31 December 1942, Achates was on escort duty protecting the convoy JW 51B en route from Loch Ewe to Murmansk when she was sunk in the Barents Sea. The German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, pocket battleship Lützow and six large destroyers had been ordered to attack and destroy the convoy. Despite being heavily outgunned the escort, under the command of Captain R. St. Vincent Sherbrooke in Onslow (subsequently awarded the Victoria Cross), beat off the attack and not one merchant vessel was lost.

At 11:15, Achates was laying smoke to protect the convoy when she was hit by gunfire from Admiral Hipper, killing the commanding officer, Lt Cdr Johns, and forty crew. The First Lieutenant, Lt L. E. Peyton-Jones, took over command and, despite having sustained severe damage in the shelling, Achates continued her smoke screen operation. At 13:30 she went down 135 nautical miles ESE of Bear Island. 113 seamen were lost and 81 were rescued, one of whom later died on the trawler Northern Gem which had come to the aid of Achates. In response, the light cruiser Sheffield damaged Admiral Hipper, and subsequently sank her escort, Z16 Friedrich Eckoldt.

The following poignant and harrowing account is extracted from Trawlers at War:

‘The dark morning of New Year’s Eve saw the storm abated and the ice-covered ships of the now depleted convoy pressing on under constant snow squalls. Elsewhere in the darkness, unknown to them, the enemy cruiser Hipper and pocket battleship Lutzow, together with six destroyers, had sailed out from Norway to the attack. Aboard Northern Gem, rear escort on the convoy’s starboard quarter, they saw the first gun-flashes in the blackness astern as the enemy destroyers moved in; it was 9.30 a.m. At fast speed the destroyer Achates steamed across the convoy laying a protective black smoke screen, but within minutes she was hit, partially flooded and ablaze with several fires. The fires were quickly brought under control and she carried on laying smoke as the escort’s senior officer, Captain R. St V. Sherbrooke, in Onslow, took the remainder of his destroyer flotilla to meet the enemy.

From Northern Gem they could see the faint outlines of the British destroyers and the repeated gun-flashes as they harried the Hipper. But the German cruiser scored several hits on Onslow, causing considerable damage and casualties and severely wounding Captain Sherbrooke, blinding him in one eye (for this action he was awarded the V.C.).

The blizzard came down again, but the one-sided battle went on. The minesweeper Bramble was sunk, then it was again the turn of Achates. Hipper’s guns blasted and damaged her severely, a direct hit on the bridge killing her captain. The coxswain and signalman, the only survivors on the bridge, carried on until the ship’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Loftus E. P. Jones, D.S.C., who had been controlling work against the floodings, returned and took over. He steered the crippled Achates on a zig-zag course, still valiantly making smoke to protect the merchantmen. For four hours the battle went on, until the returning British cruisers finally drove off the raiders, sinking one German destroyer.

Achates was now nearing her end. Hit again on the port side, which was like a pepper pot from shrapnel holes, and with more men killed and the boiler room flooded, still she tried to protect the convoy, reducing speed to keep afloat. But her engineers reported that they could not keep speed on her one remaining boiler, so she stopped engines and her wounded signalman flashed to the Northern Gem to stand by.

But when Gem closed the Achates it was already too late for many of the destroyer’s crew, including some thirty-five badly wounded men gathered in the captain’s day-cabin, and cared for by two volunteers who elected to stay to help them when the order was given to abandon ship. Acting-Coxswain Sid Kerslake of [Northern] Gem:

“Suddenly Achates rolled over on to her port side. In the darkness we could see the red lights on the lifebelts of the men and the red-tipped cigarettes of some ratings who were even smoking as they clambered over the rail and on to the ship’s starboard side, which in a few seconds had become the ‘deck’. Seconds later the ship’s bottom started to rise out of the water as the superstructure vanished from view on the side away from us.

“The men began to slide into the water off the ship’s bottom, laughing and joking as they did, then to our astonishment someone started singing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and soon, even above the noise of the wind and the sea, we heard them all singing as they fought their way over to us. Some men still smoked, or tried to, as they swam in the icy waters, others held up wounded shipmates or dragged them along. Gem acted as a kind of lee for them in the heavy sea and our skipper (Skipper-Lieutenant H. C. Aisthorpe, R.N.R.), taking over the wheel, kept giving a touch ahead or astern if he spotted anyone in danger of floating past. In spite of this a few men did drift past, but they must have been dead, either from wounds or from the killing cold of the water; our main concern was for those who were now struggling for their lives.”

Achates sank in three minutes, taking all the wounded in the captain’s cabin down with her. Coxswain Kerslake:

“We had dropped our rescue nets over the side. We had no boats to lower, our port boat had been washed away in the gales, while as for our starboard boat, none of its running gear would work - we hadn’t been able to get to it to clear it of ice, and everything was frozen solid. In the waist of the ship some of us dropped over the side and hung on to the rescue nets with one hand, pulling and pushing the frozen survivors up to where other willing hands could lift them on deck. As we clung on to the nets we would first be lifted right out of the water as the trawler rolled to starboard, then when she came back we would be plunged up to the neck in the freezing sea, but we managed to come up again each time clinging to a man and pushing him up the ship’s side to those above.

“Every member of the crew was at Gem’s side. Those not busy in the waist or on the rescue nets stood throwing out heaving lines to men still struggling in the sea. I left the nets and ran to the port quarter to help throw out these lines and tow in the men who caught hold of them. One very young sailor, scarcely more than a boy, began drifting past the stern. We threw him a line which he caught, but as we pulled at the rope it slid through his frozen hands. Again we threw the line, but as he grasped it he panicked and began to cry “Mother, mother!” It was heart-rending. We yelled to him to hold his hand up so that we could get a turn or two of the line around his wrist, but he slid out of sight for ever with the rope still slipping through his fingers and still crying out for his mother.

“Our rescue work reached a point where we seemed to have saved all but a number of bodies floating by with no signs of life. At this moment there was a huge underwater explosion as the Achates’ depth-charges went off, certainly killing anyone still left alive and lifting Gem almost out of the water. So great was the blast that we thought at first we had caught an enemy torpedo on our starboard side; pots were smashed to pieces, cupboards blown open, clocks stopped; but she didn’t take any water and luckily escaped damage to the hull, so we turned again to helping our survivors. Except for a few who had got over to us in life-rafts they were so frozen they could not stand or help themselves in any way; we had to carry them below, strip them and rub them down as dry as possible to help get their blood circulating again. We had to do this very quickly, and possibly did not spend as much time with each man as we should have done, but there were eighty of them, nearly twice as many as us, and some of us had to carry on with the duties of the ship as well as doing battle with the ice rapidly freezing all over the superstructure and threatening the Gem’s stability. About half an hour after being rubbed down the circulation would come back again to the survivors’ shocked and maimed bodies, it was agonising too for them and their screams had to be heard to be believed.

“The wounded sat or lay down as they could, shocked and staring into nothing, or groaning with pain; others were seasick, some vomiting fuel oil, which covered them from head to foot. Being only an escort trawler we were not rigged out for dealing with severe casualties. Our crew gave up their bunks and spare clothing and did all they could, but we had no doctor on board and our medical resources were practically nil.

“One lad I helped to strip kept looking over his shoulder, though due possibly to shock or cold he never said a word. Yet as we pulled his jersey over his head almost the whole of his right shoulder came away with the jersey, and we had to separate the wool from the flesh. All we could do for him was to put antiseptic lotion over the wound and bandage the loose flesh back in place. Fortunately one of our crew, Seaman Edward Mayer, a former bank cashier from Rotherham, was able to give some treatment to the wounded; he had learned quite a bit from his wife, who was a nurse.

“I went the rounds with a rum jar both for the survivors and our own men, for we all badly needed a tot, and in the galley I came upon a lad of about twenty sitting on the cook’s seat locker. He was shivering with cold even though the galley stove was glowing red and someone had given him their duffel coat to wear. I gave him a tot and asked if he was okay, and he said his ear hurt. I examined it and saw sticking out of the bone behind the ear was a piece of shrapnel an inch long. When the surgeon who eventually got aboard us saw it he could do nothing, but when the shrapnel was removed in hospital at Murmansk it was the length of a cigarette packet; it was remarkable that the lad survived.

“One very young sub-lieutenant, who had swum over to us with the strength of an ox rapidly showed signs of weakening. We couldn’t make out what was wrong, for there was no sign of a wound, so we put his quietness and pallor down to shock, and tried to make him comfortable in a bunk on the mess-deck. When the surgeon examined him later he, too, could do nothing, the unfortunate man had taken the full blast of a shell explosion in the stomach and was smashed up internally. We gave him everything he asked for, but he died soon afterwards and was buried at sea.

“With the Gem crowded with the sick and wounded it was a ghastly night. Everything was blacked out, no lights at all allowed on deck. It was like living, or rather existing, in a howling, raging and totally black hell on some other planet; black, that is, except for the snow blizzards and the ice. Not until late morning did the wind and sea drop slightly, and it was then, despite a heavy swell, we managed to get the surgeon aboard from one of the destroyers. During the brief lull in the weather and the slight greying of the darkness at noon, the destroyer went head-on into the wind and sea at a speed just fast enough to give her steerage way and slow enough for us to come up astern of her and place our starboard well-deck alongside her port quarter. With a heavy sea running this was no mean feat by our skipper. As the two vessels closed, our starboard rail was bent inwards when the destroyer’s quarter dropped on to us, and as she lifted up again her depth-charges came up smack under our remaining lifeboat. But the eyes of everyone was fixed on the surgeon, who stood poised, waiting his chance, and when the destroyer reared again and looked dangerously like coming aboard the Gem, which was now in the trough of the sea, he jumped feet first and bag in hand, landing safely by the grace of God on to our heaving, pitching, roller-coaster deck and being caught in the waiting arms of some of our crew. It was a fantastic leap under any conditions.

“As the weather rose again there began the grim business of performing what operations we could on the badly wounded. All the time the surgeon was busy Gem was blown by gale force winds and tossed by mountainous seas that swept over the entire ship. Everything was frozen, the rigging swollen to four times its normal size and our lifeboat, boat-falls and boat-deck just solid blocks of ice. It was treacherous to move about the deck anywhere. Below, meantime, no fewer than twelve emergency operations were performed on the mess-deck table, one after the other. Each time, so that he wouldn’t be flung off by the pitching ship, the patient had to be held down on the table by two or three of the crew or the fittest survivors, anaesthetic being administered by Lieutenant Jones of the Achates.

“No words of mine can describe the courage and skill of that surgeon. We all thought he deserved a medal. Whether he received one or not I don’t know, but I do know that he lost his life a year later on another Russian convoy. On that occasion he was passed to a merchant ship to look after a sick member of the crew, and in the early hours of the next morning the merchantman was torpedoed. His first thought was to get his patient into a lifeboat, and he only just succeeded in doing this before the ship sank with him still aboard. A very gallant man.

“For the rest of Gem’s voyage through the dark to Murmansk everyone helped each other, sharing sleeping quarters, clothing and cigarettes, and the only moan to be heard was: ‘When’s this bloody wind going to drop!’ “

Gem’s Skipper-Lieutenant Aisthorpe received the D.S.C. for his trawler’s heroic rescue work.