By 1942 the
biggest threat to the Allies was from U-Boats, which the Germans used in ‘wolf
packs’ to attack shipping and disrupt supply convoys. Finding and destroying
enemy submarines had become a top priority for British forces, with Churchill
later commenting that the only thing that really frightened him during the war
was the U-Boat peril. So when, on 30 October, a U-Boat was identified in the
Mediterranean Sea, travelling westwards some 70 miles off the coast of Egypt,
several destroyers were sent to hunt it down.
The
U-Boat – later found to be the U-559 – was located by HMS Petard, which immediately launched an attack. It took almost 10
hours of fighting for the sub to be forced to the surface, but it eventually appeared
in the destroyer’s search lights at around 10.40 pm. The crew were evacuated and
placed under arrest, but not before they had scuttled the sub. Knowing there
could be important information inside, Petard’s
Captain, Lt Commander Mark Thorton, asked for
volunteers to search the damaged vessel.
Three
men, who must by this time have been physically and mentally exhausted,
accepted the risk: Lieutenant Francis Fasson of Jedburgh, Able Seaman Colin
Grazier from Tamworth and, just 16 years of age, NAAFI canteen assistant Tommy
Brown. Jumping naked into the freezing ocean, they swam to the stricken sub. Fasson
and Grazier went inside to search for anything which might prove useful, managing
to pass books and documents to Brown, who stayed on the conning tower. But the
U-559 finally went under, and Fasson and Grazier were unable to escape in time.
They
had, however, changed the course of the war, because the books they passed to HMS Petard contained code keys to the now-famous
German Enigma machine.
Enigma
was used to encrypt Nazi messages and was so sophisticated that it was
calculated the odds of breaking the code without a key were 150 million million
million to one. It had been invented as a commercial device in 1923, but was
picked up and refined by the German military, who believed its ciphers to be
unbreakable. The Poles, with their knowledge of German engineering industry,
had managed to re-create an Enigma machine as early as 1933, and had had some
success in reading the Wehrmacht’s messages. But, come the Second World War, analysts
were unable to break the stream of information sent by German forces on land,
sea and air.
It
took three weeks for the code books taken by HMS Petard to reach Bletchley Park, the secret base set up by the
British government to intercept and crack enemy communications. But because of
the books, analysts at Bletchley were finally able to break the codes used by
the Germans to plan U-Boat attacks. The breakthrough occurred on 13 December
1942, and within an hour of the news being given to the submarine tracking unit
the position of 15 U-Boats in the Atlantic had been revealed.
It
has been said that the war was shorted by as much as two years because of the
actions of Fasson, Grazier and Brown, with countless lives saved. Certainly the
number of British vessels sunk in the months following the discovery was halved.
However, with anything to do with Bletchley Park being subject to the Official
Secrets Act, their heroism was not widely publicised and they did not get the
recognition they so deserved.
Lieutenant
Fasson and Colin Grazier were recommended for posthumous Victoria Crosses but,
as they did not actually die ‘in the face of the enemy’, were instead awarded
the George Cross. Tommy Brown was awarded the George Medal. Tragically, he was
killed in a house fire in North Shields in 1945.
Today
Tamworth has begun to acknowledge the debt owed to Colin Grazier and his comrades,
and visitors to the town might find themselves on Grazier Avenue, Fasson Close, Brown
Avenue, Bletchley Drive or Petard Close. A memorial to the men has also been built in
Church Square, where a service is held on Colin Grazier Memorial Day.
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