Clan Macnair in the Mersey off Liverpool, photographed before the war.
When the German battleship Bismarck put to sea on 19 May 1941 on her one and only offensive mission, ‘Operation Rheinubung’, she carried a boosted complement of sailors to provide prize crews for the many Allied merchant ships she was expected to capture. The naval action that followed, the most momentous of the war against Nazi Germany, is remembered for the relentless determination of the Royal Navy to pursue and sink Bismarck at whatever cost ...
Read More
This is my fourth blog on the British assault ship Empire Elaine and my grandfather’s experience as her Second Officer under Combined Operations, the British naval command responsible for seaborne landings during the Second World War. Empire Elaine had been designed for the Ministry of War Transport (M/T) as an L.S.C. (Landing Ship Carrier), one of few heavy-lift ships purpose-built to carry L.C.M.s (Landing Craft Mechanised). Despite her military role, the crew of Empire Elaine ...
Read More
The assault ship Empire Elaine on the Cyde in 1943 during her refit in preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July of that year.
'Operation Dragoon' was the codename for the Allied landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944, a massive naval and airborne assault that served as the counterpart to the Normandy landings a little over two months earlier. The assault was primarily a US operation, with most of the troops landed around Cavalaire Bay being from three US divisions, but many of the assault and supply ships and their escorts were British ...
Read More
The official history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In Danger’s Hour by Gordon Holman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), contains many accounts of courage and loss among the Merchant Navy crews who provided a lifeline for Britain as well as support for Allied military operations in every theatre of the war. We are used to images of ships on Atlantic convoys, their crews enduring the constant threat of U-boat attack, but an oft-overlooked role of merchant seamen was the huge part they played in seaborne assaults and the dangers they faced there as well. Just what this involved is shown in the remarkable voyage of one of these ships ...
Read More
The broadcaster and historian Dan Snow had written a moving tribute in The Radio Times to his grandfather’s experience as a merchant seaman during the Second World War, as part of the commemoration of the abatement of the Battle of the Atlantic seventy years ago that’s been taking place this summer in Liverpool and elsewhere. Because my grandfather was also a Battle of the Atlantic veteran I’ve wanted to post a few blogs remembering the role of the Merchant Navy, focusing on some of the less well-known aspects. One of those is that the battle was not just ...
Read More
