128 CHALLENGER 



placed in a net at sea and hung from the deckhead as anywhere else 

 in the mess they would get broken. Each night he set up his camp 

 bed beneath his precious cargo, but finally the cord holding the 

 net chafed through with the rolling of the ship and two dozen 

 eggs fell upon the sleeper's face — like a scene from a custard pie 

 film. 



On the afternoon of Friday , 2 8th August, 1942, C/ja/ien^er sailed 

 into Table Bay and berthed alongside in the harbour beneath 

 glorious Table Mountain. But she did not dally long here, for 

 orders were awaiting her to go on to Kilindini to join the Fleet. 



The British Eastern Fleet had at the beginning of April 1942 

 been composed of the aircraft carrier Formidable and two other 

 aircraft carriers, Warspite and four old 'R' Class battleships, seven 

 or eight cruisers and about twice that number of destroyers. 

 These ships were based on Trincomalee in Ceylon, Colombo and 

 Addu Atoll, a remote fleet anchorage on the equator south of 

 Ceylon. Very heavy Japanese forces were at sea in the Bay of 

 Bengal at this time, including a force of five aircraft carriers, four 

 fast battleships, cruisers, destroyers and tankers; but it was not 

 until this force had delivered heavy air attacks on Colombo and 

 Trincomalee and had sunk the British cruisers Dorsetshire and 

 Cornwall and the carrier Hermes by air attack that the size of the 

 Japanese Fleet in the Indian Ocean was apparent. The old 'R' 

 Class ships were slow and with low endurance, and until greater 

 British forces were available it was reluctantly decided that the 

 Fleet could not be based again in Ceylon. Meanwhile the Eastern 

 Fleet established itself at Kilindini on the East Coast of Africa 

 so that the vital sea route from Britain to the Middle East by 

 way of the Cape would at least be protected. 



Although the asdic apparatus was primarily developed as an 

 anti-submarine device, relying on the returning echo of a sound 

 impulse to detect and then range upon a submarine, the surveyor 

 also uses it as a deep echo sounding machine. A baffle placed 

 within the dome below the ship's hull directs the out-going sound 

 vertically towards the sea-bed. By fitting an echo sounding recorder 

 to the asdic receiving apparatus soundings to the greatest depths 

 may be taken, as the sound signal emitted is a very much stronger 

 one than that issuing from the normal sounding machine. For 



