Ivor Morgan 2
World War II Heroes - Ivor Morgan
Dartmouth seems to attract remarkable men and women who come to the town for a quiet retirement – and one of these was Lt Cdr Ivor Morgan.
Ivor lived in Dartmouth for the last 14 years of his life, and was an entertaining raconteur with an incredible memory for detail from his fun and sometimes breath-taking tales of World War 2 derring-do. He had a wicked sense of humour and knew how to tell a tale well.
Born in Kent in 1923, Ivor dreamed of being in the Military – his father was less than supportive. Having served at Ypres and Passchendaele, Morgan Snr had a healthy dislike for both the military and officers. Ivor decided he would achieve his dream despite his old man’s lack of support.
On his 18th birthday he walked seven miles through the snow to sign up for the Royal Navy.
He was soon sent to Florida after his initial training to become a pilot – but, after excelling there, an infection resulting in two burst eardrums, left him without a hope of becoming a pilot.
He was sent to Canada to recover and be reassigned, but both eardrums miraculously healed and he was back in a cockpit as soon as he was able. He showed his flying ability and perhaps his lack of fear, by flying under the Thousand Islands Bridge at Gananoque on the downstream end of Lake Ontario, something for which he would have been court martialed if he had been caught. A colleague tried the same trick a few weeks later and was killed, showing that high spirits can sometimes get out of hand.
When he passed out as a pilot he was handed his wings by World War 1 ace Billy Bishop, a Canadian who had won the Victoria Cross and shot down 72 enemy aircraft. It was a proud moment for Ivor, who idolised the now Air Vice Marshall.
He took his first active service providing cover for convoys travelling across the Atlantic flying ‘Seafires’ – Spitfires converted for life aboard ship. He lived on board the HMS Tracker – a commercial vessel converted into an aircraft carrier. Ships like this were known as ‘Woolworths’ carriers because they were so basic, rather like the goods sold by the now-defunct shop.
It was a tough life – heavy seas on the less than stable ship meant that planes could roll around the deck if not properly secured. Ivor told of one occasion when the ship nearly capsized because a plane came loose, and its crashing about the deck could have taken the whole ship over. The day was only saved by the crew, including Ivor, forcibly grabbing the plane and tying it to the wall.
The flying was sometimes even harder, trying to spot the U-Boats before they sank ships bringing supplies to Britain. The infamous U-Boat ‘Wolf Packs’ scoured the North Atlantic, meaning that the crew and pilots on board knew death stalked them at every turn. One night, as Ivor was on board, they heard the two ships either side of them go down, sunk by torpedoes. One torpedo narrowly missed Ivor’s ship.
On his next posting, Ivor found himself nearly dying again after a member of his squadron failed to remember the proper way to fly in formation and instead flew into him. Ivor had seen his parachute taken off him just before flying – ironically for safety checks. Left with a heavily damaged plane and no way to parachute to safety, he coaxed it down to land with considerable skill.
In April 1944, his Fighter Wing were sent south to RAF Culmhead to carry out low-level fighter sweeps over occupied France, using Bolt Head as a forward operating base.
He described the posting as ‘Sheer Joy’ as the crews flew at ‘zero metres’ above the channel across to France and ‘shot anything German that moved’. This is where he achieved his first ‘’kill” shooting down a Messerschmitt Me110, which had the misfortune to take off from an airfield directly on Ivor’s line of flight and appear ‘in front of my sights’.
It was during one of these missions that Ivor found his story forever linked to one of the most tragic episodes of the war – Exercise Tiger.
He was sent with others to scan the sea for survivors in Lyme Bay following an attack by German E-Boats on a convoy involved in a secret training exercise for the upcoming D-Day landings.
Ivor wrote of the flight: “As the sun climbed over the Eastern horizon we saw the full extent of the catastrophe. The sea was full of sinking ships, bodies and flotsam, but we saw no signs of life.”
Then Ivor’s squadron leader mistakenly took a turn towards France, rather than north to home. They saw the returning E-boats off Guernsey and had to quickly retreat as they came under fire.
On their return to base, their commander gave them a severe ticking off for going the wrong way, but said there was an operation to go and destroy the E-Boats responsible for the Exercise Tiger attack. Ivor and his colleague who had gone in the wrong direction would lead several Typhoons to the place the boats were moored – ‘firing at everything in sight’ to draw fire, allowing the typhoons to line up their missiles. If they returned safely, they were told, their detour would be quietly forgotten.
The mission was a complete success. All the E-Boats were sunk, including one by Ivor himself, whilst they were moored in St Peter Port Harbour.
In 1944, he joined the HMS Indefategable and was involved in raids in the Baltic and the Far East, surviving a crash landing on deck and a direct hit on the bridge of his ship by a kamikaze pilot, even though on that occasion his flying boot was sliced in half by flying debris.
After the war he became a teacher, and retained his connections to the Navy and to flying, taking to the air for the last time in 2004 in a Tiger Moth - one of the planes in which he had first trained. He died in October 2010 after a long illness, and Dartmouth was the lesser for his passing.•
First published October 2013 By The Dart
