The Fighting Captain

Captain F.J. Walker was a boyhood hero of this reviewer still in possession of a tired, well-thumbed ‘cadet’ edition of Walker RN by Terence Robertson, read and re-read as a teenager. Therefore, it was fascinating, after so many years, to turn to Alan Burn’s The Fighting Captain, an unashamed homage to a man who, according to a 1950 Admiralty communiqué, ‘won the Battle of the Atlantic’. Alan Burn first encountered Johnnie Walker when the sloop HMS Starling commissioned in March 1943 and the famous 2nd Support Group was formed. This book also covers the earlier period from 1941 when Walker commanded the 36th Escort Group in HMS Stork and made his name as an outstanding and innovative exponent of anti-submarine warfare tactics. Despite an impressive start to his career, Walker failed to build on his undoubted talents in the inter-war years and was very nearly passed over for promotion. Throughout, however, he remained convinced of the need to develop and to practise anti-submarine tactics at a time when it was unfashionable and there was too much reliance placed on the proficiency of Asdic as the key countermeasure. To say that Walker was a zealot is something of an understatement. By sheer force of personality and through example, he drove his ship and, most importantly, his support group, ‘the thousand tars’ as he called them, very hard. He honed the Modified Black Swan Class sloops into a formidable fighting unit. Particularly in the period 1943-45, freed from the requirement just to provide close convoy escort, he pursued U-Boat underwater contacts and sightings at will, thus taking the fight to the enemy. He was relentless. If a submarine was there to ram, Walker rammed it and hang the subsequent dockyard bill for repairs. He invented tactics such as the ‘creeping attack’; his group’s expenditure in terms of depth charges and shells was phenomenal and his ships constantly suffered structural damage not from enemy action but self-inflicted by the sheer force of huge and multiple underwater explosions. Walker’s battleground embraced the mid-Atlantic, the North American littoral, the Arctic but principally the Bay of Biscay where, with increasingly close cooperation from Coastal Command in the months leading up to the D-Day landings, he hounded the U-Boats, paralysing their attempts to pass to and from the submarine bases on the French coast. Alan Burn’s book is a straightforward memoir of what must have been the formative life experience for a very young sub-lieutenant, RNVR. But, on occasions, his sheer admiration for Walker ‘s stamina, his leadership, force of personality and yet instinctive humanity bursts through the narrative. Sadly, his captain paid the ultimate price. Johnnie Walker drove himself to an early death at the age of 48. Shortly before his passing there was talk of promotion to flag-rank, of command of an aircraft carrier. Would that have motivated him? Somehow, one doubts it; he seemed to be most fulfilled when standing on the open bridge of HMS Starling directing yet another blistering attack on an unsuspecting enemy beneath.