Lord Mountbatten & The Disappearing Ship

[OneWingedBird]

This story was told to me earlier today by two of my elderly neighbours, sisters in their 80s. I'll run it with the caveat that they're both pretty good for a tall tale, though it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing they'd spin one about.

According to them, cira ww2, a member of their extended family (an uncle i think) was in the Royal Navy, and was serving on a ship that disappeared without trace, leaving the entire crew missing presumed dead.

Neither of them knew the name of the ship, but said that at the time, it was travelling in convey, and that Lord Mountbatten was on the lead ship, and that later, during the 1950s, he'd been on television speaking about the mystery dissappearance.

Apparently there was no distress call, sign of fire, or known presence of hostile forces, just one minute the ship was in convey with the others, and the next it was gone...

Has anyone heard of this before? Or knows more about it?

I can't seem to google anything right now as my isp is playing up and blocking me rather abstractly from some websites, will see what i can turn up later when it's in a better mood...

 

[Anonymous]

Nope. Doesn't ring any bells...sorry. :cry:


PS. Waiting for the pedant police re: title....whistles


Edit: am also having some search engine probs today - How demonic ( :lol: ) for 6/6/06.

 

[Spookdaddy]

Mountbatten was a vain and rather stupid man who was capable of telling outrageous lies to cover his arse, and an incompetent to boot. His naval and military career was disastrous to the point of being almost comedic if it wasn't for the fact that so many died because of his idiocy. When he asked to remain at sea Churchill said "what could you hope to achieve except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship this time". He defamed the Canadians who died as a result of the mistakes caused, at the very least, in part, by his vanity and stupidity at Dieppe by accusing them of cowardice and he rushed the British withdrawal from India which many historians believe caused hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. He spent much of his time designing uniforms for himself.

Mountbatten was perfectly capable of losing a battleship without the intervention of mysterious forces.

Sorry if that all seems a little abrupt, and I know that, as monsters go, he's not exactly the worst you could name, but Mountbatten is one of those characters who make me incredibly angry

 

[OneWingedBird]

Title edited for mis-spelling...

Connection working again, can't seem to find anything about the story either, though the info is rather scant... maybe it was some sort of cover up for incompetence (Mountbatten is rather before my time... the first i recall of him was the bad dandruff joke that went around at middle school!)

 

[Anonymous]

Beach...head and shoulders. Remember it well.

 

[George_millett]

Not sure about incompetence, but the sinking of HMS Egret was buried for several decades, as it was the first ship to get sunk by a German wire guided anti-ship missile, and we didn't want the Germans to know how successful it was.

You got any more details of where/when the sinking occured? HMS Egret sank 27/08/1943 in the Bay of Biscay as part if an anti-submarine sweepif it helps.

IIRC the survivors were denied pensions by the millitary as no record of the sinking could be found in the accessible records.

 

[OneWingedBird]

You got any more details of where/when the sinking occured?

I'll see if i can crib a bit more information out of them next time i see them, though they seemed fairly vague, seems odd that they didn't know the name of the ship, though i think they'd have been in their early teens at the time, and had so many relatives who didn't come back from ww2, or came back and 'were never the same again', as one of them put it, that it may not have stuck in their minds. Or perhaps just the years have washed away the finer recall of it, who knows...

 

[George_millett]

Think I know what you mean by didn't come back the same. My paternal Grandfather flew bombers in WW2 and wanted his log books destroyed after he died as he was not proud of some of the things he had written after a couple of his missions.

Thankfully they are still in the family as they form a record of part of the family history.

 

[Spookdaddy]

As a result of bad seamanship and the fact that Mountbatten went everywhere at full speed his ship, HMS Kelly, only spent 57 days at sea in the first eight months of the war. When hunting a submarine off the coast of Denmark he made the fatal error of hanging around and signalling pointless and inane messages such as "How are the muskets? Let battle commence" before the Germans got a fix on the destroyer he'd so kindly lit up for them and fulfilled the desire expressed in his witless signal by chucking a torpedo at him and killing 27 of his crewmen. Just after this incident he attempted to get himself awarded the DSO.

In an action against three German destroyers Mountbatten turned his five destroyers ninety degrees to port which was, as quoted from Andrew Roberts book, Eminent Churchillians, "in contravention of all naval experience since Nelson". Mountbatten stated afterwards that they were "lucky to escape with fifty killed and with the bow and stern blown off." He also claimed to have been facing five destroyers rather than the three that were actually there and the battle was claimed as a victory despite the fact that the Germans were completely untouched.

Mountbatten was so incompetent that there was serious conjecture in some circles at the time, and may still be, that he was in fact a Stalinist agent (his wife had been an outspoken champagne communist before the war) and fucking up everything he touched on purpose - which would be funny if it wasn't so bloody tragic.