Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte

Naval General Service 1915-62, 1 clasp, Yangtze 1949 (D/KX.92134 A. Garns. P.O.S.M. R.N.) very fine £2500-3000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte.

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Petty Officer Stoker Mechanic Albert Garns was one of the “Few” who served in Amethyst throughout the entire Yangtse incident. He was frequently involved in activities on board as illustrated by the following extracts taken from Yangtse Incident by Lawrence Earl:

‘On board Amethyst, at about eight o’clock on the evening of the 20th, Hett had asked for volunteers who would gather the dead together, removing them from where they had fallen at the time of the action to X-gun deck. “Me, sir,” McNamara, the canteen manager, said. “Me, sir,” George Hartness and Leighton Rees echoed.

A little later McNamara, Rees, and Albert Garns - Hartness was needed elsewhere, and Garns had volunteered to substitute for him - set to work at their grim task of collecting the dead together.

Garns went out on the upper deck through the captain’s hatch, crouching low. He was afraid of the snipers on the far shore. He stumbled on over the body of one of the ammunition numbers. Garns tried to lift the body without any assistance, and as he did so a groan seemed to leave the dead man’s mouth. Garns almost dropped the body.

“He’s alive!” he thought. But the body was quite stiff, and the man had been dead for some time. The sun was quite warm now, and getting warmer, and the corpses were beginning to throw off the sweet, unwelcome, sickly smell of death. Monaghan brought up a bottle of whisky from the wardroom. “Better have a tot of this,” he said.

Each of the three men had a long drink. Then they went back to collecting the dead. The bodies which were still in one piece were carried down to X-gun deck by the arms and legs. The others were rolled into hammocks and carried that way. The men had another tot of whisky. Then the job was done.

On the 28th the sampan arrived, It was operated by three women, two of them in their early twenties, the third wrinkled and aged. One of the younger women carried a baby.

These three Chinese females, in their small sampan, became Amethyst’s sole contact with shore. Each morning, weather permitting - and the women seemed to have an unerring instinct for diagnosing rain or high winds - they paddled out to the ship and fastened, leechlike, to her side. Each evening they paddled ashore again. At first the rice diet of these three women was supplemented by left-overs from Amethyst’s galley.

They were the only women Amethyst’s men were to see for a very long time. The youngest of them, a small, very dark, and quite pretty woman, the men called Midnight. They named the ancient one Gran and the mother of the small child Cheesi. “How about a date, Midnight?” Garns yelled, grinning, over the side. “How about a date?” Midnight yelled back in high-pitched Chinese. Garns asked a Chinese steward to tell him what Midnight had said in reply. The steward hesitated for a moment. “Maybe better you not know,” he said.

As early as mid-May Kerans reserved a corner of his mind for thinking about a possible break-out from the river in case his negotiations for a safe-conduct should fail. With this in his mind he decided to get the ship into seaworthy shape as soon as possible. He appointed Garns and Saunders, under the supervision of Strain, as a damage-control party, which soon became jocularly known among the ship’s company as the Wrecker’s Union. But Kerans did not mention to anyone his secret fears that a break-out might eventually become the only avenue to freedom.

Garns and Saunders pitched in with great enthusiasm. They busily stuffed hammocks with mattresses and blankets and old clothing - anything they could lay their hands on that could be spared. Then they took these bulging, sausage-like wads and stuffed them into the gaping shell-holes. They used from one to three of these at a time, according to the size of the hole.

After that they shored up the damaged area with planks, using the stock of timber - which they cut down to the proper sizes - which, fortunately, had been taken aboard in Malaya some time previously. In a month they had succeeded in adequately filling in eight holes along the waterline; but one waterline hole, dead astern and directly over the rudder, resisted all their efforts. During this time Garns’ official period of service in the Navy came to a close.

Garns was a short, sandy-haired man of about thirty years of age. “Here I am, stuck.” he said sadly to Saunders. He had been in the Navy for twelve years. “One thing I can tell you, though: the Navy will never get me again after this. No, Sir!” Saunders grinned. “Don’t be an ass, Garnsey. Don’t you know you’ll never get out of this predicament? Don’t you know you’ll never be demobbed now?” Garns gave him a long, sideways look of suspicion. “You’ll be soldiering on, me lad,” he said, “long after I get back to Civvie Street. And, brother, am I going to have the laugh on you!” [For the record, Garns did in fact sign up for another term of service in the Navy.]

Kerans was feeling pretty good about the break-out now that the decision had been made. He had worked out all the angles, quietly and alone, during the long, tiresome wait. He drew up a list of seventeen petty officers and key ratings, and ordered them to meet in his cabin at about eight that evening. The seventeen trooped silently into Kerans’ small cabin. There was not much room to spare. The door was shut, and almost at once the air became stifling.

“I’m going to break out to-night at ten,” Kerans said matter-of-factly.

One or two of the men nodded silently. Some of them were still stunned. Garns, who had been put in charge of the quarterdeck - ordinarily a petty officer’s job - suddenly felt sick in his stomach.’

When Amethyst finally slipped her mooring, a brief maelstrom of firing, mostly inaccurate and causing much damage to the Communists themselves, enabled Kerans to steer Amethyst neatly through and under and around the wild barrage and make good his escape. After an anxious dash downriver Amethyst rejoined the fleet on 30 July, and eventually reached England on 1 November, 1949, where the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, notified the ship’s company that their conduct had been ‘up to standard’.