Week III
Exhausted and unwell, and severely shaken following the unexplained disappearance of Snapper (taken out by his second in command, Lt Jimmy Prowse, and lost on his first patrol ), Commander King was sent to Beirut on a restful mission as an executive officer of the submarine base there. His commanding officer was an old friend Capt Ruck-Keene, who knew instinctively just what was needed to cure an exhausted submarine commander: Good food and mountain air.
Soon, with others, he was trekking and skiing in the Bekaa valley which stretches between the Lebanon mountains and Syria. There was one woman among the party, a remarkable woman in her own right, Anita Leslie, from Co Monaghan.* She too was resting from her duties as an army driver, and would soon become an ambulance driver with the French army during the last year of the war. Romance blossomed.
On one occasion, fed up with food rationing in England, saying that his crew needed some decent food, King brought his crew to Northern Ireland, and filled them up with bacon, eggs, and brown bread and butter. He crossed the border into the Republic, and walked into the Leslie estate. Anita was amazed to see him at the front door. The telegram announcing his arrival arrived the following day.
They were later married in 1949, and embarked on an extended honeymoon sailing around the West Indies in a small yacht, Galway Blazer. The idyll came to an end, when their first born, Tarka, learned to climb out of his basket, and to head for the side.
Northern lights
Meanwhile, back in the war, King’s courtship of Anita came to the notice of Winston Churchill, whose American mother and Anita’s grandmother were sisters. During the terrible first winter of the war, Britain’s losses at sea were 75 per cent. As First Lord of the Admiralty, and later as Prime Minister, Churchill always had time for his submarines, and their brave captains. Life expectation for submarine crews was abysmal. Bill King was the only person to command a British submarine on both the first and last days of World War II.
King and Anita were frequently invited to Chartwell, a government residence, and after dinner, Churchill would motion that King was to remain behind by the fire. Churchill wanted to mull over first hand gossip, the state of play, and opinions on the war at sea. He clearly liked Bill King. He was well aware of what hell war at sea could be, and he admired enormously the men who fought there.
Deep water
One evening he asked King what was his least happy experience; and King, with typical self-effacement, told a story against himself. On night patrol off the Norwegian coast (which the Diary recorded last week ), his submarine got stuck on a sand bank. There was nothing for it but to wait until the tide came in, shortly after dawn. If the boat failed to get off, it would be a sitting target for enemy planes which began their patrol at dawn. Just as two German war planes appeared on the horizon, engines straining, and men pushing, the submarine slipped back into deep water.
Stuck on a sand bank, and putting the entire crew and ship in danger, is a serious offence in any navy. In the Royal Navy it was always followed by a court of inquiry; and could result in the dismissal of the captain. But Captain Ruck-Keene, commander of submarines, and famous for his fiery temperament, and ability to blast an officer like any other, looked King in the eyes and said quietly: “ The grounding is a technicality. It need not be mentioned. We are too busy fighting this war to waste time with courts of inquiry.” They later became firm friends.
When Churchill asked him what moment did he enjoy most when at sea, he may have expected a particular victory of action at sea, the fact that while still in his twenties King was treated as a senior officer by all naval staff, or moments coming home on leave...but instead King recalled an amazing spring patrol into the Arctic, with the sky ablaze with northern lights.
The amazing Anita Leslie.
Anita’s interesting life began in 1914. She was born in New York, where for a time she lived with her American mother, Marjorie, who was more interested in buying couture gowns than in bringing up Anita and her two brothers. Her Anglo-Irish father, Sir Shane Leslie, was Winston Churchill’s first cousin – his mother Leonie, Anita’s grandmother, was Churchill’s favourite aunt.
Sir Shane – a poet, author and philanderer – was an equally distant parent. ‘Our own father did not exactly dislike us – he would merely have preferred us not to have been born,’ wrote Anita.
Anita was happiest at Castle Leslie, her grandparents’ ramshackle home at Glaslough, Co Monaghan, Ireland, where she could climb trees, ride and fish. But when she left school, she was propelled on to the London social scene as a reluctant debutante. She was willowy and beautiful but found the dances dull and failed to attract a marriage proposal, to her mother’s chagrin.
She met a charismatic Russian aristocrat, Paul Rodzianko. He was penniless, three decades older than Anita, but a brilliant horseman, who sliced off champagne corks with his sword, and walked on his hands while singing Russian songs.
They were married but it was a disaster from the beginning, and would end in divorce. By August 1940, with Churchill now Prime Minister and the Battle of Britain raging, she volunteered for war work in order to escape her miserable marriage. She was posted to North Africa, where she drove an ambulance across the scorching desert, ferrying wounded men to hospital.
Mortars and bullets
She saw more action when she volunteered as an ambulance driver with the First French Armoured Division. Unlike the British, the French allowed female drivers on the front line. Landing at Marseilles, she found herself in the thick of the fighting as the Allies began to retake France. It was dangerous work but it had its moments of madness. Her female commander, a glamorous French woman, instructed: ‘Whatever happens, remember to use lipstick because it cheers the wounded.’
Just how dangerous this work was became clear when a shell nearly landed on her and she snatched up a tin basin to use as a helmet. Soon she was regularly dodging mortars and bullets. In one French village, Anita came across a mother whose young son had been shot by the Germans. Two German prisoners were brought before the mother and she was given a revolver and invited to take revenge. ‘She was expressionless as she shot them,’ Anita observed.
By December 1944, they were in Northern France and Anita was in the thick of battle. ‘In all directions, men advancing through the fields were suddenly blown up in a fountain of scarlet snow,’ she recalled. She ran forward to drag wounded men out of the snow, under heavy fire, gaining a reputation as ‘Une Anglaise Formidable’.
The ‘ambulancieres’, as the French called them, were never far from danger themselves and were often ahead of the Allied tanks. On one trip to pick up an injured artilleryman, Leslie’s ambulance bonnet was riddled with bullets.The danger was not over. Two of her best friends – sisters – were shot in cold blood when retreating German soldiers ambushed their ambulance.
Oranmore castle
Her attitude towards the Germans hardened further when she entered a labour camp at Nordhausen and saw the huge gibbet on which 40 corpses used to dangle at a time, and tended the shivering, skeletal survivors. One of the most shocking episodes was a mission to bring a group of starving, TB-infected, deformed French POWs back to their homeland.
She lunched with Churchill at Potsdam and wrote home on swastika-headed writing paper, one of the souvenirs she collected from Hitler’s bombed chancellery in Berlin. Her heroism was recognised at the end of the war when she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Marching into Berlin with the Allied Forces and joining the Victory in Europe parade was the culmination of Leslie’s captivating war experience – a story she told in her 1948 memoir ‘Train To Nowhere’.
Anita and Bill returned to Ireland war heros, but felt empty and depressed. Anita’s mother’s solution was to buy them the large 15th century Norman keep at Oranmore, practically on Galway Bay, where they tried to settle down. They bought a farm nearby, where Bill endeavoured to bury the horrors of submarine warfare by removing all stones and rocks by hand, and develop an organic farm to feed his family.
Next week: Reaching again to the sea, but this time ‘for healing’.
NOTES:
*Anita Leslie-King’s grandmother, Leonie Leslie, was one of the colourful, and well educated New York Jerome sisters, Jennie, and Clara. They came to England to marry well. Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874. They had two sons, one of whom was the famous Winston Churchill. The marriage, however, was not a success; but Winston adored his mother.
Clara and Leonie, also married, more or less disastrously, for love. Leonie, the youngest, married Jack Leslie, the son of an Anglo-Irish baronet. Even though the family was usually broke, at least it had the comfort of the family estate in Co Monaghan.
Clara married the interesting but fecklessly impecunious Morton Frewn (who owned an estate in Connemara ), but known to his friends as‘ Mortal Ruin’.
Anita Leslie became a prolific writer, notably Edwardians in Love, and Cousin Clare, the life of the sculptor Clare Sheridan, who spent her final years in Galway, all published by Hutchinson, London, 1976.
King was awarded seven medals including the DSO, and Bar, and the Distinguished Service Cross. A typical citation reads: ‘For outstanding courage, skill and determination’... ‘For bravery and determination’, and ‘For daring, endurance and resource in the conduct of hazardous and successful operations against the enemy’.
Anita was also awarded for her ‘exceptional bravery’, and presented the Croix de Guerre, to her personally by General Charles de Gaulle in 1945.
Notes on Bill King taken from his Adventure in Depth, published by Putnam and Sons, 1975. Notes on Anita from her biography by Penny Perrick: Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie, published February 2015; and from an article in the Daily Express by Dan Townend August 21 2017.
