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Full Circle
Log of the Navy's No. 1 Conscript
by John Gritten
Foreword by Dr Peter Liddle
Director of The Second World War Experience Centre, Leeds
ISBN 0953503690. Hardback £19.99 £7.00
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Foreword
When a good journalist is on the trail of a good story one can expect a quality report. In Full Circle we have such a journalist with his very own good story: his wartime service at sea. Though it has its origins in the unpromising literary environment of the boiler and engine room as a stoker, John Gritten’s early experience of action amidst the dramatic events of the Norwegian campaign are followed by the abundant interest of his service at sea and on land in different locations.
In due course he is commissioned—how fortuitously is a story in itself—and, armed with notebook and pen, fulfils his D-Day role in a tank landing craft bound for King Red beach in the Gold sector. His contemporary notes give a sense of immediacy to what has passed into history as a combined operation on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Just as graphic are some of the images of his final months of service in the Far East, observing the undiminished commitment of defeated Japanese sailors.
John Gritten’s story is told with verve, humour, irony, illuminating context, insight and compassion. When he writes of what it feels to be below decks in a destroyer ‘swaying and dipping, rolling, pitching, crashing and shuddering’ as the vessel ploughs through turbulent seas, you feel identified with him. The smell and heat of the engine room are as well conveyed.
Relationships and duties, routine and action, are all here and we learn much as well. Of course we know that a ‘Bunting Tosser’ is a signals rating but do we know what a Sand-scratcher or Dab-toe is? If you respond to close observation of those who face the challenge of the sea and of their wartime protagonists, this book is for you. It is also admirably illustrated. Gritten has a facility of communication which draws you into sharing his circumstances.
In the Second World War Experience Centre it is our mission to rescue from oblivion stories such as his and associated memorabilia. He has succeeded where so many have striven unavailingly. With warm congratulations to author and publisher, I commend this book.
Dr Peter Liddle
The Directory
The Second World War Experience Centre
5 Feast Field
Horsforth
Leeds LS18 4TS
About the author
Full Circle is the autobiographical account of nearly seven years in the wartime Royal Navy, the last three as Official Naval Reporter (Lieutenant RNVR) following four years on the Lower Deck as a stoker. John Gritten was the only ONR to land on a D-Day beach after his craft was holed.
As an Official Naval Reporter he filed reports on:
a gun-toting German woman, allegedly firing on American troops (which prompted questions in Parliament);
Hitler's secret weapons' attacks on Allied Normandy shipping (blue-pencilled by the Admiralty censors and recounted here for the first time);
operations with Royal Marine Commandos in France, Holland and Burma; and with the British East Indies Fleet, including the liberation of Rangoon.
Gritten was aboard the Tribal class destroyer HMS Afridi in 1940 when it was bombed and sunk in the evacuation from Namsos, Central Norway - the Second World War's first 'Dunkirk' - and again aboard the Tribal Class Tartar, near-missed by a Japanese bomber shortly before the end of the war. That completed his 'full circle'.
Other highlights include:
an account of near-obliteration by 'friendly' rockets;
the ordeal of HM Submarine Shakespeare;
the sea rescue of prospective 'comforts' for the Japanese troops;
mind-searing descriptions by French and British survivors of what happened to their comrades when two destroyers were sent to the bottom by dive-bombers.
Following a brief spell as a trainee reporter on the Daily Mail, John Gritten was called up under the Military Training Act of May 1939, ostensibly for six months training in the Royal Navy. This was the first time in the UK that conscription was introduced in peacetime.
To acquire some of the publicity the Army's 'Militiamen' had monopolised since the call-up, the Admiralty decided to make Gritten 'RN Special Reservist No. 1' so that he could write about it in his newspaper. Eighteen days later, however, war on Nazi Germany was declared and the 'six months' became almost seven years.
After the war, Gritten resumed his career on national newspapers until 1978 when he began a ten-year stint editing London-based African news magazines. He is the author of A Musician Before his Time, a biography of Constantin Silvestri, principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the Sixties.
Gritten initiated the placing of a war memorial in Namsos, Central Norway. The memorial was unveiled by the UK ambassador in May 2000, sixty years after the event it commemorates and forty-three years after the French had established their memorial at the site.
John Gritten lives with his concert pianist wife in London on top of a Second World War unexploded bomb.
Author’s Note
I wrote this book of war memoirs principally for my sons and others of their and subsequent generations, not as a line-shoot or to glorify war – just the contrary, as some of the grimmer episodes attest – but as an historical fragment to add to the plethora of Second World War literature. For, to the best of my knowledge, nothing previously has been written by a ‘hostilities only’ rating about the Navy’s Engine Room Branch, nor by an Official Naval Reporter attached to the Admiralty’s Press Division, whose equipment on operations consisted of nothing more lethal than a pen and notebook. Some stories blue-pencilled by wartime censors are give a first-time public airing.
John Gritten
What the Reviewers say …
~ This is indeed a unique book. Beautifully printed, lavishly garnished with real photographs and maps, an extensive index, bibliography, glossary, acknowledgements and most important of all, superbly crafted by a talented writer. Books on the Royal Navy do not often come this good … Books on life in the RN during WW2 are many. This one ranks with the best! The Nautical Magazine
~ This is a remarkable book. In 1939, when conscription was first introduced, the author was a young reporter on the Daily Mail. The Admiralty, with unusual prescience, wanted to enlist a journalist who could be useful for Public Relations so Gritten was called up … The Lordships apparently then forgot what they had done and he found himself becoming a Stoker 2nd Class …The author provides authoritative background to his story and he describes his varied experiences with an objective restraint which only brings them more alive. Well produced, with over a hundred pictures, this is one of the best books about the war I have read. Highly recommended. CCA Warship World
~ Too many books unfortunately have poor quality maps, illustrations and photographs; Full Circle is not one of these. Its maps are pertinent and clear, combined with numerous photographs, some of which are familiar and some new. Gritten’s accounts themselves illustrate the haphazard, impersonal nature of war for the individual serviceman whose fate is seemingly determined by military bureaucracy, chance, and the enemy – all largely beyond his control. His writing successfully relays the humour, gallantry and stoicism of war without any glorification. Those who already enjoy a good grounding in World War Two history will find something new and interesting in Full Circle. Those who know very little about the subject will be educated, moved and entertained. Journal for Maritime Research, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
~ It is an absorbing, riveting story, brilliantly chronicled and written with great vividness and a disciplined emotion. The whole saga unfolds in a way which captures the reader by its realism and control. One feels like a living passenger on John Gritten's ship ... Geoffrey Goodman CBE, Founding Editor & Emeritus Chairman of British Journalism Review
~ The book is a joy for any reader, not least because of the fluency of the style, the breadth of vocabulary and the descriptive power of the author’s pen. The pace of the narrative is such that the pages fly by with the speed of the destroyer on which the author first served. Nor is it devoid of the critical and investigative faculties of the good journalist which informs and reports. George C Kieffer, Everyone’s War
~ Full Circle provides the reader with a vivid backdrop of politics behind war and, moreover, the decisions that desperate men are forced to face in times of terrible dilemma. Gritten is an enthusiastic, witty writer with a vibrant narrative style that he punctuates liberally with a warm personality and strong sense of irony. His experiences are sometimes harrowing, often amusing, and he gives the events a tangible credibility with images, maps, notes and documents. Dumfries and Galloway Standard
~ John Gritten reveals an atmospheric, often emotional, personal testimony of his experiences, with appealing literary panache. I was particularly impressed by his conscientious recording of detail, compassionate recollection of characters and profound observations about the human dilemma of war, enhanced with copies of documents and old photographs, which add authenticity to the narrative . . . Anyone with an interest in wartime naval manoeuvres will appreciate this compelling historical document. John Weller, Hull Daily Mail
Review
Gritten, J 2003 Full Circle: log of the Navy’s No. 1 Conscript,
Cualann Press, Dunfermline, Scotland. ISBN 0-9535036-9-0. Hardback:
£19.99.
The scale and complexity of the Second World War is equalled only by the number of memoirs or autobiographical accounts that continue to appear over half a century after its end. Some of these scarcely justify their publication; this excellent book more than does so.
The accidents of conscription and service placed a young and observant journalist in a succession of positions from which to record in microcosm a wide variety of aspects of the conflict within their wider settings. The Norwegian campaign is described from the point of view of a stoker, the Normandy and Walcheren landings (and much between) and some of the naval war in the Far East from that of an Official Naval Reporter (ONR), with a considerable degree of access.
Throughout the book, a kaleidoscopic series of vivid, and sometimes disturbing, images is presented with clarity, accuracy and care in a style which is lightweight and economical of words, but never journalistic. To this reviewer, the only mistake lies in the use of a confusing flashback (in the non-engineering sense, for once) to describe the sinking of HMS Afridi (pp. 274-300) far out of context.
Disregarding, if one can, the sober presentation of the horrors, lowering of moral standards and inevitable soul- sapping tedium of war, the book illuminates three of its aspects which have been severely under-represented. The first of these is the extreme social stratification then characteristic of the service, with its inevitable political repercussions. The unwitting encounter ashore with a member of the officer class (pp. 61-3) and the author’s (unanswered) telegram to Churchill (p. 142) calling for the opening of Second Front are events which are probably more representative than might be imagined. The leftwards-leaning lower-deck response to a lecture by General Ismay (p. 154) is a point well made while the account of the author’s appearance before Captain (later Admiral) Vian (pp. 84-6) may give a far more informative impression of that officer than does his own autobiography.
Second, by virtue of much of the author’s background, he has much to say of human circumstances, particularly the fate of ‘neutrals’ and ‘enemy’ civilians caught up in a conflict not directly of their making and observed during his periods of ONR service ashore. The stories of Samuel Dorfmann and ‘Myra the sniper’ (pp. 184-91) are rendered all the more poignant by their incompleteness while that of M. Legrand (pp. 205-6) is true of many. In the same light, the difficulty and value of tactical interrogation are well recognised (pp. 201-2).
The third most interesting revelation (to the engineering-biased taste of the present reviewer) is the nature of engine-room work in specialised warships of the period, making it evident that the change from coal to oil firing did not solve every propulsion problem as has often been assumed. The inherent problems of working a boiler face at sea are graphically described (pp. 22-3, 41-3, 51, 75, 93-4) as are those of boiler-cleaning (pp. 59-61, 126-9), but it comes as a surprise to learn (p. 96) that in some classes it was necessary to run refuelling pipes through messdecks. The significance of the post-war concern for ‘habitability’ in warship design becomes clear and the episode of the loaf of bread (pp. 96-8) links the themes of social stratification, human interest and marine engineering to perfection.
It remains only to add that the book is exceptionally well presented. The typeface is eminently readable and the page layout easy on the eye; misprints are few and insignificant. The numerous photographs are apposite and well-reproduced, while the maps and glossary of terms are of interest and value in themselves. Cualann Press has done well to produce such a remarkable book at an entirely reasonable price.
Robert J C Mowat, RD MA Dip Sci