I often have to edit my posts. I live in the boonies without even the benefit of DSL and sometimes have to build them up bit by bit. My rambling discourse on HMS Onslow vanished last night into a cyber black hole, along with the conection. I'm trying again here... this time first in Word.
Anyway, there is an interesting background to Sherbrooke's VC. Not to slight his heroism, but there is another personality (my wife's uncle) that was left in the shadows.
Imagine this far fetched, but fitting fable.....
A young star quarterback is given the opportunity to coach an NFL expansion team in its first year. The new young coach builds the team, leads them through a difficult, but successful season, defies the wild card odds and then for some mystic reason, gets replaced two weeks before the team goes to the Super Bowl, by say, a decendent of Vince Lombardi.
The Super Bowl begins. The new coach, in a brave sideline confrontation with a 400 lb. lineman from the other side, gets knocked silly during the middle of the second quarter. The well trained coaching staff and players finish the game on their own, desperately clinging to a thin lead, holding off an "unstoppable" offense until saved by the clock, defeating an opponent who entered the Super Bowl favored by at least a 49 point spread.
The press goes crazy. The new franchise, realizing the marketing potential, re-packages the team into the "Lombardi Legacy", infusing the team with the League's most treasured traditions. The brave new coach is immediately inducted into the football Hall of Fame, but is never quite right after waking up from the lineman's left hook, and gets a series of promotional jobs in the front office.
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Sherbrooke assumed command of Destroyer Flotilla 17 only a month before the Battle of the Barents Sea. When he led it to sea two weeks later, he hadn't even met most of his officers. During the battle, he was grievously injured, but struggled to remain at his post. The leadership of DF 17 during the battle transferred from destroyer to destroyer, as each subsequent leader was put out of action. It was ultimately, a "soldier's battle", won by the tenacity and skills of Destroyer Flotilla 17's crews.
The Battle of the Barents Sea is constantly studied and disected, but the principal architect of the victory, Captain Thomas Harold "Beaky" Armstrong doesn't even show up in a combined google search.
By the time he took command of both Onslow and DF 17, in August 1941, Armstrong had demonstrated excellent leadership abilities, talents for turning green crews into elite fighting units and coolness under fire over four different commands. His first wartime command was the Wren, an old WWI relic, crewed by reservists, most of whom only spoke Gaelic! Wren did well in Norway and France, and Beaky was subsequently given a Tribal, the Maori, in Phillip Vian's DF4. He was credited (until the 1950s) with two torpedo hits on Bismark during the battleship's last night.
Bismark made Vian an Admiral and Armstrong a "Captain D". At 37, he was the youngest flotilla leader in the Royal Navy. He led DF 17 through its training and work up, most PQ convoys and commanded the destroyer escort for PQ18. DF 17 also participated in the Vaagso Raid, Malta Convoys and Operation Torch under his command.
Armstrong was known for innovative methods for training and maintaining discipline in extraordinarily difficult arctic conditions. Beards, non-regulation uniforms and head gear were tolerated. Gun crews were reported to have manned their stations in bowlers! When Onslow's ancient high angle 4" AA mount scored a direct hit on an HE-111 during the Vaagso raid, Armstrong allegedly called the gunnery officer to the bridge after the raid, had him kneel, and knighted him with a navigator's scale. According to Dudley Pope, Armstrong "had been a man with an infectious and very forcefull personality, whom his staff almost worshiped".
At the end of November, 1942, Armstrong was given the assignment to develop training and tactics for an entire command, MTBs fighting E-Boats in the North Sea and English Channel.
Sherbrooke replaced him, and then a little over a month later sailed into eternal glory. The propganda value of Barents Sea was immense. Times were still uncertain in January 1943. Here was a descendent of a great admiral from the age of Nelson, commanding a small force of destroyers, beating off an attack by a heavy cruiser and a pocket battleship! Sherbrooke was given the VC and public limelight on the spot.
By the time the world got around to writing the history of WWII, Beaky was dead, lost with his ship HMS Laforey off the beaches of Anzio in March 1944, battling U-223 (literally to the death for both vessels). Armstrong shows up in passages and footnotes of many books, but here has never been a biography published. I have been collecting material for years and have found him to fall into that category of "if I made this guy up, he wouldn't be believable".
But relative to Barents Sea, he First Lieutenant of Obedient describes the sailor's viewpoint in DF 17's published history:
"....motivated by a no defeat attitude inspired by Beaky Armstrong's training and by St. Vincent Sherbrooke's example"