As wireless telegraphist on board the frigate Amethyst, when she was shelled and trapped in the Yangtse River for two and a half months under the guns of the Communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the steamy summer of 1949, Jack French was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for the role he played through the crisis. During the entire period his transmissions kept the beleaguered ship in touch with the headquarters of C-in-C Far East Station, and the wider world, enabling her crew to know that they had not been forgotten.
The Amethyst’s daring escape from the Yangtse after a high-speed night passage of more than 100 miles down river to the open sea, under constant fire from shore batteries, was a stirring episode that gladdened hearts in a Britain in the throes of postwar austerity.
In the middle of bitter civil war between Chinese Communists and the Nationalists who formed the country’s Kuomintang government, Amethyst was in April 1949 on her way up the Yangtse to Nanking (then the Nationalist capital) to relieve the destroyer Consort as guard ship at the British Embassy and to deliver supplies for the British community there.
At 9.30am on April 20 she came under fire from a Communist shore battery. Her wheelhouse was hit, injuring the coxswain who grounded the frigate on Rose Island. Another shell hit the bridge, mortally wounding Amethyst’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander Bernard Skinner, and injuring her first lieutenant, Lieutenant Geoffrey Weston.
Amethyst returned fire but she had grounded in such a way that her forward guns could not be brought to bear on the enemy batteries. Weston, who had taken over as acting commanding officer, ordered her remaining guns to cease firing in the hope that the CPLA batteries would do the same. In the event they continued firing until 11am by which time 22 of Amethyst’s crew had been killed and a further 31 wounded.
Weston ordered the evacuation of most of the crew, including French. But it was realised that he was the only surviving telegraphist on board, and he returned to the ship, for whom radio contact with the outside world was now to become a prerequisite of survival.
An attempt was next made by Consort, steaming downstream at 29 knots from Nanking, to pass a tow to Amethyst and get her out of danger. But she too came under heavy fire from Communist batteries, and the attempt was abandoned after she had suffered ten crew killed and a further three wounded. Consort herself was forced to seek safety further downstream.
On April 21 a determined attempt by the heavy cruiser London and the frigate Black Swan to force their way up the Yangtse and bring Amethyst out was also a failure. Both ships were beaten back by a furious fire from Chinese Communist batteries concealed in the reed beds on both banks and difficult to target by the cruiser’s 8-inch guns. The cruiser and frigate were compelled to retreat, both having sustained damage and casualties — in London’s case 15 dead and 17 wounded.
Amethyst was left to her own devices, with shrinking resources of fuel and food, both of which had to be severely rationed with the prospect of a long enforced sojourn in the Yangtse. On April 22 the wounded Weston was relieved as CO by Lieutenant- Commander John Kerans, assistant naval attaché at Nanking, who came on board during a lull in hostilities.
His first action was to float Amethyst off the mud and move her upstream to a place where, for the moment at least, she was out of range of the enemy’s guns. In all this time French had been Amethyst’s vital link with the C-in-C Far East Station, remaining at his wireless for 48 hours, sleeping by it and rousing himself to take incoming signals.
During a tense summer, as Kerans tried to negotiate with the Communist commanders, French transmitted messages to and from the families of those trapped on board, greatly helping to preserve the crew’s morale. The need to conserve fuel made it impossible to use electric fans below decks where conditions, in the heat of a Yangtse summer, were almost unbearable. The crew also suffered severely from rats and mosquitoes.
Finally, Kerans realised that the Communists, who insisted that the British Government confess to the “criminal act” of Amethyst’s “invasion” of their territory, had no intention of offering him safe conduct down the river. So he decided on a breakout by night. At 10.12pm on July 30, 1949, Amethyst slipped her cable — its links had been heavily wadded and greased so that no sound might alert the vigilant enemy.
While Amethyst negotiated the river shallows in the dark and under fire from shore batteries — she sustained only one hit, on her starboard bow, from a 75mm shell — French transmitted a short agreed signal to the C-in-C to indicate that the ship, though under heavy fire, was still afloat and in business. At Kiangyin a boom of sunken boats stretched across the river with only a narrow channel through it. Kerans realised he had no chance of navigating through the small gap at night and simply crashed through the boom.
With 100 miles accomplished, Kerans allowed French to transmit the signal “Hundred up”. Later “Woosung in sight” indicated to the C-in-C that Amethyst was approaching the last peril of her voyage, the powerfully gunned Communist forts at the river mouth. Finally, as she sped past at high speed and left this hazard astern, French tapped out Amethyst’s most famous signal: “Have rejoined the Fleet. No damage or casualties. God save the King.”
Bloody but unbowed, Amethyst sailed for Hong Kong and a rapturous welcome. This was repeated when the ship returned to Devonport in November. Her crew were permitted to march the streets of Plymouth and London, where they were dined at Guildhall.
For his skill and daring Kerans was awarded the DSO; Weston received a Bar to his DSC for remaining with his ship, though wounded, until his relief had been ordered; and French received the DSM for carrying on “single- handed continuously and unsleeping, receiving and transmitting vital wireless messages with accuracy and speed for a considerable period before arrangements could be made to give him periods of rest”. Skinner, who had died of his wounds, was awarded a posthumous mention in dispatches.
Simon, the ship’s cat, was awarded the Dickin Medal — the “animals’ VC” — for his role in keeping down rats on board and helping to sustain morale through his companionable behaviour.
The ship’s breakout was applauded by the US and UK alike, in a lean time for British and American prestige and policy in the Far East. In the 1957 film The Yangtse Incident (US title Battle Hell), Richard Todd played the role of Lieutenant-Commander Kerans; that of French was taken by the character actor Ray Jackson.
Jack Leonard French was born in Teignmouth, Devon, and grew up in Ashburton where his father worked as a baker. He joined the Navy in 1944 and trained as a telegraphist.
After the Yangtse incident, he continued in the Navy until 1970, finally serving on the South Atlantic Station at Simonstown, South Africa, and retiring as a chief petty officer. He later worked for Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham.
His wife, Phyllis, died in 2009. He had three daughters, one of whom predeceased him.
Jack French, DSM, naval telegraphist, was born on June 26, 1926. He died on May 3, 2011, aged 84
Rolf Weinberg
Fugitive of Nazism who helped with a disinformation campaign in Montevideo and served with the Free French in North Africa and Italy
Born the son of a Jewish chocolate manufacturer in Germany, Rolf Weinberg was helped by his father in 1938 to escape from the clutches of the Gestapo to Uruguay, where he was subsequently involved in the disinformation campaign by which the British authorities there managed to persuade the captain of the damaged German pocket battleship Graf Spee, in harbour in Montevideo, that a powerful force of British warships had assembled at the mouth of the River Plate.
Low on ammunition, and shaken by the damage and casualties his ship and crew had sustained in the battle with the three British cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles, the German captain, Hans Langsdorff, chose to scuttle his ship rather than put to sea and engage these imaginary foes. In fact the 8-inch gun cruiser Exeter had been so badly damaged during the Battle of the River Plate that she had had to make for the Falkland Islands for repairs. The only reinforcement the light cruisers had received was that of the heavy cruiser Cumberland. The battle cruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal had been ordered to the scene by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, but had more than 2,000 miles to steam to get there.
After the Graf Spee episode Weinberg made his way to England and joined the Free French with whom he subsequently served in North Africa and Italy.
Rolf Weinberg was born in Herford, Westphalia, in 1919. He did not go into the family chocolate business but trained as a textile engineer in Stuttgart, subsequently obtaining his engineering diploma in 1938.
Learning that he was about to be arrested by the Gestapo he went to Hamburg where his father put him on a boat to Montevideo where he arrived in October 1938. There, through a Jewish committee in the city, he found a job as a technician in a textiles factory. On September 3, 1939, he volunteered his services to both the British and French embassies, but they were not accepted.
After the Battle of the River Plate, in which the Graf Spee chose to retire to Montevideo after a sharply fought action with three British cruisers in which both sides sustained damage, Weinberg was approached by the British Embassy in the city. Thereafter, by passing as a non-Jewish German immigrant, he was able to help in the process of feeding false information to the crew and officers of the German warship about the strength of the British naval forces gathering out at sea. After scuttling his ship Langsdorff shot himself.
After the fall of France in June 1940 Weinberg responded to Charles de Gaulle’s appeal for volunteers to carry on the fight against Germany and joined the Free French in London. He fought with a French unit to the end of the North African campaign, later serving with Free French units in Italy.
Demobilised at the end of the war Weinberg worked for some years in Germany, on prefabricated housing, before moving to Marbella where he ran clothing shops. He finally settled in London where he was a committee member of the Association des Français Libres en Grande Bretagne. He was decorated with the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star and the Médaille Militaire, and in 2003 was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.
Twice married, he is survived by his partner, Ruth, and by three sons.
Rolf Weinberg, veteran of wartime Free French Forces, was born on March 6, 1919. He died on June 23, 2011, aged 92
Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek
Priest who endured ten years’ hard labour in Siberia and later rose to be Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev
Until he was nearly 90, relatively little was known of the life of Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, Archbishop of the Belarussian diocese of Minsk-Mohilev.
But in November 2003 an Italian newspaper revealed that he had been sentenced by Stalin’s secret police to a decade of slave labour. For nine of these he had worked as a logger in the Siberian tundra.
He had been, Swiatek explained in his Prison Diary, considered a waste of a bullet and his survival astounded the chief commander in his prison camp. “How on earth have you been able to bear it all?” the commandant asked when he found Swiatek to still be alive in 1954.
“I owe my life to my unshakeable faith in God,” replied Swiatek. “It was He who saved me.” Tense moments followed while Swiatek waited to hear if he would, at last, be set free, he said in his prison diary, extracts of which were published in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Once liberated, he returned to Pinsk, where he had served as a young priest, and after attending a priestless rite at the cathedral, offered to minister there.
Although it was 1954 and a year since the death of Stalin, Swiatek was interrogated for five months until the Soviet authorities decided to allow him to work as a priest. He found himself with a vast parish, stretching from the River Bug in the west to the Pacific Ocean. At times he would travel 1,000km a day to celebrate secret Masses in private homes, or Catholics would travel equal distances to hear him say Mass in the cathedral, one of the few Catholic churches allowed to operate in the Soviet Union outside Lithuania.
Swiatek’s ministry did not escape the notice of Karol Wojtyla, the future Archbishop of Cracow, who in 1978 was elected Pope John Paul II. He made Swiatek Bishop and later Archbishop of the Diocese of Minsk-Mogilev in independent Belarus.
Although by then in his seventies, Swiatek began the vast task of reconstructing the Catholic Church nationwide. This involved rebuilding churches and setting up administrative structures.
Kazimierz Swiatek was born in 1914, to Polish parents, in Valga, Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, a soldier in the Polish Army, died in 1920 defending Vilnius against the Russians, and Swiatek’s mother and her children were deported to Siberia. At 18 he entered a seminary in Pinsk, then in Poland, and was ordained on April 8, 1939. He briefly ministered in a local parish in Pruzhany, then part of Poland.
In 1941 Swiatek was sentenced to death without trial by the Soviet authorities and put in a death cell in a prison camp in Brest. Two months later the Germans invaded and he was liberated and promptly returned to his parish in Pruzhany. In July 1945 Swiatek was sentenced by the Russians to ten years’ forced labour in Siberia. By then under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that had divided Poland, Pinsk was part of the Sovient Union.
For most of his imprisonment Swiatek was kept in isolation. However, in his final years in the gulag some Catholic prisoners managed to smuggle consecrated wafers into the prison. Swiatek hid them in a matchbox and at Easter managed to celebrate Mass in a laundry, amid clouds of steam.
On another occasion, he was interrupted by a prison guard while celebrating a Christmas vigil Mass. “As I was speaking the door flew open,” Swiatek wrote in his diary. “With riot stick in hand, a government official rushed in with a soldier bearing a rifle and bayonet. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. I explained that we were celebrating the Christmas rite. Then, while holding the host, I asked if he wanted to receive it, too, so as to exchange Christmas greetings with us. It was a very unusual and tense situation: both our hands were held tight — his clutching a riot stick and while mine held firmly on to the host. The officer put down the club in his possession, excusing himself for not being able to receive the host while on duty, and allowed us to continue our vigil service.”
The following morning Swiatek was banished to the northern tundra. His ten-year imprisonment, he said later, had isolated him from what was happening to the Church in Belarus, “where all believers in God were persecuted with Satanic ferocity”. He accused the West of having known of the suffering of the faithful but having chosen, possibly for political motives, to ignore it. Nonetheless, Swiatek claimed the Belarussian Church “suffering, and even bleeding at times, remained alive and active”. He attributed the survival of the Catholic faith in communist times to the robust determination of Belarussian grannies, “Babushkas of gold”, to teach prayers to their grandchildren.
Made a cardinal in 1994, he continued to serve as Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev until 2006.
Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, former Archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, was born on October 21, 1914. He died on July 21, 2011, aged 96
