by Bob Barnetson

In March 2008, Casemate Publishing began distributing Gunboat Command: The Biography of Lieutenant Commander Robert Hitchens. Written by Hitchens’ son, Antony Hitchens, Gunboat Command provides a thorough account of the development of motor gunboat (MGB) combat in the English Channel from 1939 to Hitchens’ death in 1943. Gunboat Command retails for $50 US.

Initial Impressions
Gunboat Command arrived in a padded envelope with no damage. With a hard-cover binding and thick stock, the book is quite substantial at 348 pages. The dust jacket contains a nice montage of a service photograph of the senior Hitchens (hereafter “Hitch” as he was called in the service), an MGB and a posthumous painting of Hitch.

I’ve previously read several MGB and motor torpedo boat (MTB) memoirs and Hitch features prominently in all of them. To have access to an edited version of his personal diary as well as significant portions of Hitch’s uncensored (and now out of print) We Fought Them in Gunboats is a boon to historians and wargamers interested in battles of the narrow seas.

Pre-Service Biography
The author provides a brief accounting of Hitch’s life prior to joining the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, with attention to Hitch’s upbringing in Cornwall, education and marriage. The intent of these two chapters is to provide some basis for understanding Hitch’s subsequent success as a gunboat commander and tactician. In this, the author is partially successful.

The material in these two chapters does prove useful in understanding some of the decisions Hitch was to make as a commander. Yet trying to infer motives for unobserved behaviours from a portrait itself gleaned mostly from weak documentary record and family stories is a difficult task. That the narrative is somewhat uninteresting compounds the problem and I had significant difficulty getting through this section.

Minesweeping and Dunkirk
Hitch’s experience on a minesweeper and at Dunkirk are much more engaging. The author does a good job of outlining the thankless yet dangerous work that minesweeping entails. Descriptions of such support work are often absent from published war-time memoirs and provides insight into the operation of support units. Much of the text is derived from Hitch’s diary, which provides a compelling first-person account.

The bravery and heroism other authors (such as Peter Dickens and Peter Scott) attribute to Hitch in their books is evident in his work at Dunkirk. Ordered to transport men off the beach, Hitch leaves the relative safety of his ship to coordinate the ferrying of exhausted troops off the beach to waiting boats. Again, this is an interesting angle on the well worked Dunkirk tale, illustrating the challenges of evacuating an army of foot sloggers off a beach under fire.

MGB Command
Hitch was subsequently able to transfer to the new MGBs. These craft were designed to interdict the activities of German Schnell boote (called E-boats), which used mines and torpedoes to attack convoy traffic in the Channel. The author nicely makes the point several times that the presence of MGBs—despite having little chance to sink an E-boat—often caused E-boats to abort their mission. In this way, the effect of the MGBs was significantly greater than their early armament might suggest was possible.

And the early boats clearly had deficiencies in their seaworthiness, reliability and armament. These problems are nicely illustrated by Hitch’s commentary and reports on encounters with E-boats. Initially, most carried only machine guns and no weapons mounted on the foredeck. For heavy firepower, MGBs relied on depth charge attacks which required them to cut across the path of a larger ship (which might be firing at them) close enough to scrape paint and drop a charge—all at full speed so as to get out of the blast zone.

Hitch’s diary and, subsequently, excerpts from his posthumous book We Fought Them in Gunboats provide both compelling descriptions of combat and a sense of how tactics and weaponry changed over time. The installation of effective engine-sound suppression equipment and the fabrication of rudimentary hydrophones to locate E-boats through their engine sounds were among the useful inventions.

Heavier armament also came with powered turret - power derived from the engines thus the guns could not be used when the boats were not moving and would lose power if the lines were hit by shrapnel (a common occurrence). Navigation by guesswork (based on time and engine revolutions calculations) and communication by flags (most MGB combat occurred at night!) further compounded problems.

Yet slowly solutions presented themselves and the tactics employed from 1942 centred on lying in wait for returning E-boats or German coastal convoys and ambushing them. The addition of man-powered gun mounts, heavier weapons (including eventually torpedoes for MGBs), and short-range radios improved matters.

Gaming Implications
Hitch’s memoirs are useful to gamers. For example, the amount of non-critical damage MGBs routinely took during an average encounter is quite interesting. Hitch’s accounts detail significant damage above and below the waterline, yet rarely were boats sunk. To me, this suggests that combat mechanics ought to limit the number of hits of significance: either by limiting the amount of firing or making hits difficult to obtain (but perhaps with a reasonable chance of a critical hit). The alternative (giving boats lots of hull points) mans greater granularity, but at the expense of many meaningless combat resolutions.

As with most books about the coastal forces, this one provides exceptional descriptions of combat. Hitch’s own recollections (supplement by the author’s research and excerpts from other memoirs) provide superb grist for scenario development. Hitch’s unfortunate death in 1943 limits these scenarios to pre-1943 encounters, but there is enough variety here (e.g., E-boat ambushes, convoy attacks, joint MGB and MTB operations) to keep a gamer busy most of the winter months.

Comment
Casemate has made a significant effort to distribute memoirs of former service personnel. I think this decision laudable. The market for general histories is quite crowded but it can be hard to find quality first-hand accounts. Gunboat Command does a nice job of supplementing the existing collection of books addressing coastal vessels, many of them focused on technical aspects of the boats.

While I’m not particularly sympathetic to arguments on objective versus subjective writing, there appears to be something to the maxim that one ought not conduct research in one’s own backyard. The first two chapters of Gunboat Command support this warning. These chapters are a bit maudlin and frankly not that interesting. For example, it is relevant that Hitch raced cars—it speaks to his nerve and temperament. That Hitch’s car was posthumously entered in a post-war race is really not relevant and ought to have been excised. There are several similar examples in the early part of the text that shouldn’t have made the final draft.

Yet the meat of the book—Hitch’s assignment to MGBs and the slow development of effective tactics is very nicely handled. The difficult operational circumstances (a 70-foot power boat is not really meant for open-sea operations) and boredom are clear. So to is the suddenness with which combat could occur and the difficulty both sides had in winning clear victories.

Conclusion
Gunboat Command is a strong memoir. It is not, however, a general history of coastal combat and it ends in 1943 with Hitch’s death. In this regard, Peter Scott’s 1946 book The battle of the narrow seas: A history of the light Coastal forces in the channel and North Sea, 1939-1945 is perhaps the most complete history to date. It is long out of print but perhaps a title for a publisher to bring back?

Again, reading a personal account of combat has whet my appetite to finish my torpedo boat rules (based on the Ground Zero Game’s Full Thrust spaceship mechanics). And again a personal account has deepened my understanding of the nature of the combat in ways that technical histories of MGB and E-boats have not.

Pros:

• Provides access to otherwise unavailable memoirs.
• Significant scenario-development potential.
• Thorough discussion of gunboat tactics and their development.

Cons:

• Initial chapters slightly maudlin.