Scotland's connection with Jeeps and Chariots
or, 'Loch Cairnbawn’s Darkest Secrets'
In 2015 I published The Real X-Men, about the extraordinary exploits of the young Royal Navy volunteers who designed, tested and deployed both Chariots (known first as ‘jeeps’ by their users) and X-Craft, taking them to war against this country’s enemies in a series of exploits that defy the imagination. The coast of Sutherland has a deep connection with the exploits of both Chariot and X-Craft operations in the war, though I suspect that few travellers, be they tourists or locals, following the meandering North Coast 500 around Kylesku in Sutherland, crossing the bridge over those dark, haunting waters, know anything about events under water here between 1942 and 1944. (Until 1984 when the bridge was built a ferry crossed the channel just to the west of the village that connects Loch Glencoul and Loch Glendubh to Loch Cairnbawn.)
Intriguingly it all started in Alexandra Harbour, thousands of miles away in Egypt, one hot night in December 1941, when the mighty battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth was sunk at anchor after a mystery explosion. It transpired that Italian frogmen had managed to creep up on the sleeping giant, supposedly safe behind her anti-submarine boom, to place an explosive charge under her hull. After some scratching of heads it was discovered that the Italians had successfully deployed what the Royal Navy would thereafter call a ‘Chariot’. The Italian Regia Marina called it the Maiale – ‘pig’. Two trained frogmen, riding atop what was effectively a manned torpedo, discharged from a surfaced submarine some miles out to sea, navigated their way through places that normal submarines simply couldn’t go.
Prompted by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, an embarrassed Royal Navy decided to create their own. They had their own targets in mind, not least of all the massive Tirpitz, holed up seventy miles inside a sub-fjord of the mighty Trondheimsfjord in northern Norway.
The story of how these new devices were designed, and how the men were trained, demonstrates the remarkable adaptability pressed on a desperate country by the demands of war. Led by the New Zealand-born submariner Captain William ‘Tiny’ Fell, within six months four prototypes of a British version of the Italian vessel had been built and shipped up to the Highlands for testing and crew training. It was ‘testing’, however, only in a very lose sense. The science of the effect of oxygen on the bloodstream was new. Consequently the early Charioteers were forced to become guineapigs as they practised diving to ever greater depths in their newly designed diving suits, named after their inventor, Commander Geoffrey Sladen DSO. The ‘Sladen Suit’ was a rubberised diving suit designed to enable a man to survive in cold northern waters, incorporating a rebreathing set based on the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, operating as deep as 100-feet. The DSEA was a ‘rebreather’ device, allowing divers to remain underwater without expelling to the surface the telltale air bubbles typical of compressed air exhalation, as in modern scuba equipment. Testing was designed to understand the effect of prolonged submersion, and the depths at which men could safely operate while breathing pure oxygen. Remarkably, none of these limits were known in 1942. It was discovered that oxygen poisoning – known as ‘Oxygen Pete’ -occurred below about 30-feet. When Pete got hold of you, that was the end, unless rapid decompression was undertaken.
Fell needed somewhere secluded to test his first four Mk 1 prototypes. He first chose Loch Erisort (codenamed Port ZD), lying about seven miles south of Stornoway on the island of Lewis. But this proved a poor choice, chiefly because the region was exposed to appalling weather and sea conditions that limited the training time available to the crews. Fell moved location to the remote western coast of Scotland. There, on the western side of Loch Linnhe – which runs north like a dagger from Oban towards Fort William – he found the calm and sheltered waters of Loch Corrie, codenamed Port HHX. It was ideally suited to his purposes. Protected from the gales that had assailed them at Erisort, Loch Corrie had a gently sloping bottom, which allowed for shallow-water training at one end and deeper training at the other.
The training of his first four operational crews took four months. He reported to the Admiralty in November 1942 that his men were ready for their first mission. It is amazing to consider that the first British operation to be attempted only six months after Fell had first experimented with a weighted log on Horsea Lake in Portsmouth and less than a year since the Italian attack on the HMS Queen Elizabeth. The first target of these tiny vessels was to be Germany’s last remaining battleship, Tirpitz. Her presence constituted a threat to the Arctic Convoys that carried military material from Britain and the United States to the USSR.
But how could the tiny Chariots be placed in a position where they could launch an attack on this leviathan lurking 1,000 miles across the North Sea? The option settled upon was to tow them, employing the services of the remarkable M16 operation nicknamed ‘the Shetland Bus’. Led by Leif Andreas Larsen, a Norwegian patriot who commanded a crew of fishermen-cum-smugglers, an immensely dangerous ferry service operated to take agents between Britain and occupied Norway. The idea was that Larsen’s small fishing boat – the Arthur – would tow the two Chariots on steel hawsers across the North Sea. At the entrance of the fjord in which the Tirpitz lay hid the two Chariots would leave the protection of their mother ship and enter the enemy’s lair.
It was the deep waters of Kylesku that were chosen for the final training workups before the two crews departed on their mission. In early October 1942, the men set sail for the remote and sparsely populated Loch Cairnbawn in Larsen’s Arthur. The code name for Cairnbawn was Port HHZ. When the Arthur reached its destination, its distinctive two-stroke diesel ‘tonk-tonking’ its way up the loch, it passed the forbidding grey mass of the 35,000-ton battleship HMS Rodney on its right-hand side. The Rodney had been brought into Loch Cairnbawn from Scapa Flow to allow the Chariots to practise their attacks on a vessel akin to the size of the Tirpitz. The visit of HMS Rodney was so successful that Fell was able to persuade the Admiralty the following month to send up to HHZ the brand-new 45,000-ton battleship HMS Howe, on its first voyage out of Govan on the Clyde, for three nights for the purpose of training Fell’s Chariot crews. As with HMS Rodney, these practice runs were tremendously successful – the battleship was sunk many times over – although tragedy struck on the last night when Oxygen Pete overcame and killed one of the crewmen. With a draft of 28 feet, HMS Howe was right on the safe limit for oxygen diving, and every Chariot crewman took risks in exceeding this depth so as to place their warheads under its vast steel bulk.
The Chariots, towed by Arthur, then returned to the Shetlands prior to the operation. Sadly, it was destined to fail. The two tow hawsers snapped in rough weather and the two Chariots lost only miles from their release point off the Norwegian coast. The crews, however, returned safely to the Shetlands. It was only one of many attempts made to cripple the Tirpitz. Others, which also used the deep waters of Kylesku, included those of the equally remarkable X-craft, the mini-submarines which were ultimately to succeed in attacking the Tirpitz in September 1943.
The story hidden in the dark waters of Kylesku is one of both ingenuity and bravery. Imagine even contemplating taking a Chariot to attack the Tirpitz? And yet it was done. These and other operations took place because of the quality of the men who volunteered for this dangerous task, of which there was no scarcity of brave volunteers. They were a breed apart. The courage required to sit astride 600 pounds of high explosive in a cold, dark and claustrophobic underwater environment, at a time when little was known about the effect of oxygen on the body at more than two atmospheres, to enter a heavily guarded enemy harbour and then to leave its explosive device underneath the enemy ship, called for men to whom the otherwise largely devalued title of ‘hero’ can properly be given. They willingly took on the challenge of mastering entirely new skills in a hostile natural environment, pushing the boundaries of physiological science, military technique and human endurance as they strove to defeat their country’s enemy.
Kylesku was their proving ground. Today, a newly commissioned memorial and information boards, the work of retired submariner Tim Honnor, retell the story of the submarine operations carried out here between 1942 and 1944. A brass plaque, first installed in 1993, has been replaced with a more substantial version, unveiled in a moving ceremony in September 2024. In particular, it recalls the sacrifice of the forty people who lost their lives while preparing for or undertaking these remarkable underwater operations. Take time to remember their bravery when you drive past, and marvel at the courage and ingenuity of our forefathers.
I am a regular visitor to the memorial, recently rededicated in part thanks to the efforts of the last lord lieutenant. Btw he flew the plague flag from his house for the duration of COVID. A very sound gent. We need more like him especially now.