Several years ago I wrote a blog about this photo of my grandfather Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins with his gun crew on SS Clan Murdoch in 1940-1. He told me that he had been in action with this gun against German aircraft that machine-gunned and bombed his ship …
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A Merchant Navy gun crew in action, Part 1: the gun and its crew, 1940-1
This photo above was taken in 1940-1 on board SS Clan Murdoch, a British merchant ship that brought essential goods from Africa and India to ports in Britain during the Second World War. The man second from left is my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, who was the ship’s Second Officer and Gunnery Officer …
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Clan Macnair in the Mersey off Liverpool, photographed before the war.
SS Clan Macnair, convoy SL-74 and the sinking of the Bismarck, May 1941: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
When the German battleship Bismarck put to sea on 19 May 1941 on her one and only offensive mission, ‘Operation Rheinubung’, she carried a boosted complement of sailors to provide prize crews for the many Allied merchant ships she was expected to capture. The naval action that followed, the most momentous of the war against Nazi Germany, is remembered for the relentless determination of the Royal Navy to pursue and sink Bismarck at whatever cost ...
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M.V. Empire Elaine and Operation Bullfrog, the cancelled 1944 seaborne assault on Burma: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
This is my fourth blog on the British assault ship Empire Elaine and my grandfather’s experience as her Second Officer under Combined Operations, the British naval command responsible for seaborne landings during the Second World War. Empire Elaine had been designed for the Ministry of War Transport (M/T) as an L.S.C. (Landing Ship Carrier), one of few heavy-lift ships purpose-built to carry L.C.M.s (Landing Craft Mechanised). Despite her military role, the crew of Empire Elaine ...
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MV Empire Elaine, convoy KMS 18B and Operation Husky, 10 July 1943
This blog, revised on 21 January 2024, is one of several detailing the experiences of my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, while he was Second Officer of the British assault ship MV Empire Elaine between November 1942 and November 1944 …
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The assault ship Empire Elaine on the Cyde in 1943 during her refit in preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July of that year.
M.V. Empire Elaine and Operation Dragoon, 15 August 1944: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
'Operation Dragoon' was the codename for the Allied landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944, a massive naval and airborne assault that served as the counterpart to the Normandy landings a little over two months earlier. The assault was primarily a US operation, with most of the troops landed around Cavalaire Bay being from three US divisions, but many of the assault and supply ships and their escorts were British ...
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The extraordinary wartime voyage of M.V. Empire Elaine, 1943-4: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
The official history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In Danger’s Hour by Gordon Holman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), contains many accounts of courage and loss among the Merchant Navy crews who provided a lifeline for Britain as well as support for Allied military operations in every theatre of the war. We are used to images of ships on Atlantic convoys, their crews enduring the constant threat of U-boat attack, but an oft-overlooked role of merchant seamen was the huge part they played in seaborne assaults and the dangers they faced there as well. Just what this involved is shown in the remarkable voyage of one of these ships ...
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