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Commander Michael St John World Naval Ships Forums Archive

Commander Michael St John

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[B]Commander Michael St John[/B] Commander Michael St John, who has died aged 93, was involved a dramatic operation on the island of Rhodes when his submarine landed part of a SBS section to raid on German airfields in September 1942; he returned a fortnight later to rescue its two survivors. St John’s Traveller spent the intervening period off the Libyan coast, where he sank the 1,245-ton Italian merchant ship Albachiara, before returning to find the Greek island’s hills and shoreline thick with enemy troops, while coastal craft searched the waters. He remained submerged until surprised to see the recognition signal flashed from the shore. Wondering if this could be an ambush, he replied by shining a torch through his periscope, surfaced and entered the bay stern-first, fearing enemy fire at any moment. He was expecting the men to return in collapsible canoes, and was astonished to hear a stream of basic Anglo-Saxon being shouted out of the darkness. Two naked figures were then hauled from the water over Traveller’s foreplanes: Major “Dinky” Sutherland and Marine John Duggan, who had been hunted, hungry and thirsty, for several days. They had swum a considerable distance before being spotted from Traveller which, as soon as they were recovered, St John crash-dived to avoid a patrol boat speeding into the bay. While he manoeuvred to avoid a depth charge attack, Sutherland and Duggan were revived with tin mugs of rum. St John recalled that both men were so skeletal that it was difficult to find clothes to fit. When in 1953 Lewis Milestone directed They Who Dare, Dirk Bogarde reprised Sutherland’s exploits on Rhodes, and Harold Siddons played St John. Traveller was lost two months after the operation when it was under the temporary command of another officer while St John was in hospital on Malta suffering from dysentery: he never got over the loss of his 70 comrades. Michael Beauchamp St John was born on May 13 1915, the son of a soldier. He described himself as a mongrel Briton who could trace his ancestry back to the Normans via the longest line of undischarged bankrupts in England. After being brought up between Oxfordshire and Aberdeenshire, he went to Dartmouth in 1929. St John joined the fleet as a midshipman in the cruiser Dorsetshire just after the Invergordon Mutiny, and served in the Home Fleet and on the South African station before being appointed to the submarine service in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was a junior officer in the submarine Pandora on the China Station, as he recounted in his Tale of Two Rivers (1989). It described his family history and life in the pre-war Navy, when a young man could sign chits for anything, anywhere ashore, and expect to be billed at the end of the month. When the war began St John was first lieutenant of the elderly training submarine L26; on completing his “perisher” in 1940, he returned to take command of the boat in dry dock during the blitz of Plymouth. After running aground in fog off the Isle of Mull, he was lucky to be exonerated. “We consider this young officer to have benefited from his salutary experience and he is to be congratulated on successfully salvaging his vessel,” pontificated the Admiralty. St John also rescued escaping airmen by rendezvousing at night with a boat in the Brest fishing fleet. His first war patrol was in Tuna, which fired a full salvo of torpedoes at long range on the battleship Scheer. All missed, leaving St John wondering what his career might have been if they had hit. At the end of the year St John reconnoitred the coast of Norway and despite blizzards and wildly rolling seas, placed Tuna off Vaagsö as a navigational beacon for Operation Archery, one of the first commando raids under Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s combined operations organisation. The raid took place on December 27 1941, causing significant damage to factories and warehouses, sinking eight ships and feeding Hitler’s paranoia about an invasion of Norway. It also helped divert German surface ships from the North Atlantic convoy routes. After the loss of Traveller in December 1942, St John took command of the submarine Parthian, in which he was awarded a DSC for bravery and skill in attacking coastal shipping and German warships in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 1945 he commanded Otway and then took Totem to Fremantle, Western Australia, where his war ended. While returning home across the Pacific the ship was presented with a small totem pole by Micmac Indians in British Columbia. It was said that to sail without the totem pole would result in the loss of the ship, and when the original was stolen another had to be carved quickly. When the Israeli Navy bought the submarine they left the totem pole behind, and Totem was lost with all hands on passage between Gibraltar and Haifa. St John was set to be promoted captain, but his appointment to command the cruiser Ceylon was cancelled when the Navy was divided into a “wet” and “dry” list. Declaring that he was not going to sit behind a desk, St John left the Navy in 1955 to join National Employment Mutual. He enjoyed country life, especially shooting, and in retirement recorded more than 100 audio books for the blind. Recalling late in life the distressing experience of writing to the next of kin of the dead, St John warned that while heroism and comradeship are worthy qualities needed to face danger and conquer fear, succeeding generations would do well to remember that, in his opinion, there was no glory in war. Michael St John who died on January 23, married, in 1944, Pamela Guinness, only daughter of Sir Arthur Guinness; she survives him with their son and two daughters. Published: Daily Telegraph 22 March 2009
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