HMS Ganges Association
"Shift Gun Sights and a Hero becomes a Demon"
The poem was Rudyard
Kipling's If and it was painted on the wall of the number one gymnasium that
served as the Anglican church at Her Majesty's Ship Ganges, the Royal Navy's
training establishment for 2000 junior entrants who had signed on for 12
years before the mast. The Free Church and Church of Scotland mob had a
chapel all of their own in which to relax for a couple of hours or so and
the Catholics too had a proper church. I tried them all but settled on being
a Catholic after working out that the faces at the front of the Sunday lunch
queue had one thing in common, they claimed to be Catholics and their Sunday
service finished a good half an hour before everyone else. This meant more
time for recreation on a Sunday afternoon. But my time as an Anglican was
usefully spent learning that poem, as various lines have drifted into my
mind often in the last 30 odd years.
We young sailors inhabited 50 or so wooden huts, which formed the majority
of the buildings that made up Her Majesty's Ship Ganges. The huts were built
at the turn of the last century to house boy seamen undergoing basic
training. It has been said that HMS Ganges was possessed of a reputation in
the navy that brought to the Shotley peninsula (on which Ganges stood), a
depth of infamy, as a geographical hell hole, touched on only lightly by
Devils Island and the Gulag Archipelago. It was also suggested that Dante's
inscription on the gates of hell should be placed on the imposing black
steel gates that stood sentinel at HMS Ganges's entry. 'All hope abandon, ye
who enter here' might have seemed especially fitting to some observers.
For most of us though, a year long spell at Ganges was but a step in the
escape from life in the raw working towns of Great Britain where free orange
juice and comprehensive schools had done little to alleviate their meanness.
HMS Ganges was certainly my salvation. I loved the brisk winds, blowing in
off the North Sea, the tides and currents of the Rivers Stour and Orwell
where I sailed in an immaculately kept large fleet of 32 foot naval cutters
with their billowing gaff rigged canvas sails and the smaller, neat, two
masted 27 foot naval whalers. Much to the delight of my competitive
divisional officers I found I could win sailing races and with eight friends
as crew was given almost unlimited access to the boat pier and crisp waters
nudging the North Sea. Drake Division, named after that murdering and
rapacious Elizabethan pirate whom later became an Admiral and a hero, had a
trophy cabinet full of silver thanks to us. My proudest moment occurred when
our skipper presented me with that most prized award for sailors, the
Admiral Phillip King Enright Trophy named after the only Ganges Boy to
become an Admiral.
Our skipper was an enigma for most of us. The reason why most of the Ganges
Anglicans learnt Kipling's poem, was because he, his wife and beautiful
raven haired sixteen year old daughter mostly arrived in the gymnasium
church half an hour after us, an entry which provided the signal for the
service to commence. His diminutive, immaculately tailored figure was seen
but rarely. For many of us, we met him at the weekly punishment table. This
is where we received traditional Ganges disciplinary fare. This mostly
involved extra work and extreme physical exertion but occasionally meant the
ritualised and brutal barbarity called 'cuts'. Our skipper was the remote,
austere Captain B C G Place, Victoria Cross; he was a national hero. On
September 11 1943 twelve men set off on what many thought would be a suicide
mission to attach a bomb to the underside of a mighty symbol of a great and
powerful enemy. Six bombers died, while Captain Place and five others where
captured after successfully putting the German battleship Tirpitz out of
action. For us, he was a shining; living example of all that Kipling's poem
If spoke about.
But in addition to his own penchant for ritualised floggings, Captain Place
presided over a camp where every few months some poor youth attempted
suicide and where sadistic brutality was used to break the spirit of those
that rebelled. As well, paedophilia was an acknowledged and accepted
eccentricity of some of the instructors.
Yet our leader had that definable element of a hero, someone who had
willingly offered his life for a cause held dear by the many. Our camp had
produced many heroes, including Leading Seaman Magennis from Belfast, who
also placed bombs and survived incredible hardship to destroy a Japanese
warship. There was Able Seamen McKenzie, democratically elected by his
surviving comrades to receive the Victoria Cross during the raid on the
seemingly impenetrable fortress of Zeebrugge in 1918. Boy First Class
Cornwall, at 16 the youngest and a posthumous recipient of this supreme
award for valour in the face of the enemy, also was constantly remembered as
an example to emulate.
In my youth I often wondered what it felt like to carry the burden of being
a hero. There were lots of other stories and photographs of heroes liberally
scattered on walls around the camp and they were an object of intense
scrutiny for most of us. Since time immemorial it has been demanded of young
men that they offer themselves for sacrifice when their people are
threatened. When one of my grandfathers was diagnosed with tuberculosis and
invalided out of the navy as a Petty Officer Gunner during WWII, women in
the neighbourhood placed white feathers on his doorstep. These, now more
commonly associated with the valued dove of peace, were then a symbol of
disgust that the recipient was avoiding military service. His gunnery school
at Whale Island, Portsmouth had as it's motto O Sweet it is and fitting too,
to die for one's country.
I have the honour and privilege of counting among my friends many heroes.
However I also find myself despairing when the country to which I belong so
tarnishes their examples of selflessness by giving power to warmongers, self
seekers and mischief makers, those who are least suited to be trusted with
it. By the accident of birth I was born into a time and place of economic
prosperity and relative peace. I count as comrades and friends many people
of my generation who were not so fortunate. These, like Captain Place, have
been flawed yet heroic men, who had the misfortune to be born into other,
more harrowing circumstances.
There is Humphrey, who has spoken stories of courage and sacrifice in the
struggle to free the world from the infamy of apartheid. He was a student in
Soweto when South African police opened fire on school children, killing
them for refusing to attend schools that preached the hatred of racial
superiority. Humphrey organised the bombing of key installations and the
assassination of murderous South African police, military personnel and
their collaborators.
There is Sean, a member of the fledgling civil rights movement in Northern
Ireland in the mid 1960's. As a Catholic he suffered discrimination and
victimisation. In the pogrom of 1916, 10,000 Catholics had been driven from
their jobs in the North, 23,000 had been driven from their homes and 500
Catholic owned businesses were destroyed. To celebrate the 50th anniversary
of that pogrom in 1966, Protestant gangs burned out Catholic homes and
businesses, shot Catholics with impunity. This was done with the active
involvement of the notorious Police para militaries, the B specials. In 1969
the Irish Prime Minister in the South, in response to increasing attacks on
Catholics, moved to establish army field hospitals along the border in
preparation for ethnic cleansing. The threatened Catholics demanded that the
IRA defend them and not allow another pogrom nor allow the Catholics to be
forced across the border.
There is Sergio, the Chilean actor who escaped the torture centres of
Santiago. These had been set up by the Chilean military who overthrew and
killed the democratically elected President Salvadore Allende, before
systematically torturing and murdering thousands of innocent people. There
is Ali, only a child when the Israeli army bombed his village and destroyed
his family's house as they ethnically cleansed most of the country, which
became the modern state of Israel. At Deir Yassin in 1948, Zionist forces
massacred 150 women and children as part of the wider plan to drive the Arab
inhabitants out of their country, and into the never-ending poverty,
violence and humiliation which became the Lebanese refugee camps. There is
Fernando, who fought in the mountains of East Timor as the Indonesian
military occupied the country for 24 years, bringing about the death of over
a quarter of the population. And there is Augusto, who at the age of 13 was
sent by the Sandinistas to the port city of Corinto in Nicaragua, to prepare
for the coming revolution. This revolution toppled the barbaric dictatorship
of General Somoza. All of these friends were once described as terrorists by
governments who created the environment of despair that drove them to acts
of war, which resulted in the death, and torture of innocents.
None of these friends fought in uniform, nor did they have a government to
declare war on the enemy. They are as heroic and as flawed as my first
skipper and those other Ganges heroes I had been encouraged to emulate as a
very impressionable 15-year-old boy. As young men they had done what young
men have been doing since time immemorial, offered their lives in what they
and their peoples considered a just cause in desperate times.
Of all these friends, only Ali still fights an enraged enemy who refuses to
accept responsibility for causing massive suffering, refuses to offer the
compromises so necessary for the relief of that suffering. For the others,
they have seen change. Partly change came because their enemies were
defeated militarily. Fernando's leader emerged from the prison cells of
Indonesia after leading a guerrilla army to become President of an
Independent East Timor. Sean has a Minister for Education who led the
ruthless Derry Brigade of the IRA. Augusto's leader emerged from the
jungles, AK 47 in hand to become the elected President of Nicaragua for
almost 10 years. Sergio is performing again in Chile and has a President
from the same political party of the murdered Salvador Allende. And
Humphrey, now a scientist who lives in a large house in the rolling hills
outside Pretoria saw his leader emerge from 27 years in jail to be elected
President and hailed by the world as everyone's hero.
Other heroes from my grandparents' generation led the Allies in the defeat
of fascism, while adhering to Clauswitz's dictum that: 'To introduce into
the philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity-war is
an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.' Winston Churchill ordered
the carpet bombing of the women, children, sick and infirm of Dresden and
Hamburg; President Truman ordered the vaporisation of the civilian
population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In my travels since staring at that poem, high on a brick wall during my
Anglican period I have come to realise that the world is far too complex to
be divided into good and bad and that our heroes are just as flawed as other
mortals. I am also certain that the sooner we stop demonising so called
suicide bombers, the better we will understand the reasons for their acts of
courage and sacrifice. The sooner we start to look at the world through
their eyes, the quicker we will accept the need to change the world they
live in - a world where they believe that making the supreme act of
sacrifice is the only way to inflict damage on an enemy seen as intent on
destroying their very reason for living.