Under Two Hulls I N the anxious period after Munich our
arrangements for both taking and interpreting high-altitude aerial photo- graphs were primitive; indeed ' they scarcely existed. !aterpretation of all photographic reconnaissance material was, I rather think, an Army responsibility, and the RAF had not yet evolved an adequate technique for taking photographs tr,m11 great heights, or what were then great heights. A small civilian firm, however, was well on the way to doing this, ,,and for some time before war broke out their aircraft were ring over German territory—mu/ails mutandis—very much what Commander Crabb was doing last month in Portsmouth Harbour. I do not know at what, if any, level these activities were )proved in 1939. but in the tense atmosphere of those days LheY must have involved risks far greater than those taken '1,,.' Whoever sponsored the underwater reconnaissance of the urdthonikidze. Luckily there were no engine failures or other 1ishaPs which might have let the cat out of the bag; and "lese clandestine, piratical sorties were regarded afterwards 11S a Good Thing. ,, Enterprises with this peculiar status are very rare. In them "IC penalties of failure are always disproportionately severe. `rind the rewards of success extremely uncertain. To refrain 1.0111 undertaking them when opportunity offers is, however, inech more irresponsible than to undertake them and to court xPosure: although of course when they are exposed exactly fie opposite appears to be the case. ,SIIPPose, for the sake of argument, that later this year a crisis occurs in Far Eastern waters, and a Chinese warship su,ceeeds in sinking a British warship because it is equipped with some underwater device invented by the Russians and itevealed as being in general use throughout their Navy. illagine the brouhaha and tut-tutting in the clubs and in the Press! What (everyone would ask) were the authorities doing 1,° let three modern units of the Red Fleet ride at anchor in . ertsmouth for a fortnight without making a .surreptitious 1,118Pcction of their hulls? Why did nobody think of sending ilOwn a frogman? Really! There might almost have been a 111011011 of censure. ' °I1 the question of responsibility the Government seems to "tre to have got off lightly because nobody noticed the context in ‘',Ilieh there must surely have" been, to say the least, consider- ple carelessness at a high level. It is tacitly admitted that `\'..hen the cruiser Sverdlov was here Commander Crabb carried `'.ut duties similar to those which cost him his life. At the lime advance knowledge of this earlier operation may have ueeit restricted to one or two comparatively unimportant rpe°Ple: but afterwards the information acquired must have heeh passed, through the Naval Intelligence Division, to the i:PPer reaches of the Admiralty if not beyond. And however r'ilrri those who procured this intelligence may have tried, or reasons of security, to cover up its source. it is not much g°N pretending that a report of the underwater parts of a larship was obtained by a foreign countess or an Embassy 'e ta,rwoman: it could only have been obtained by a frogman. It is easy to believe that Commander Crabb's operations inst the Sverdlov were not authorised at a high level, but (inult to believe that the Government. or at least one of (i..;,, kmembers, was not aware that they had been carried out. ills might not have been the case if the intelligence obtained 4Lueltit the Sverdlov was of negligible value, but if this had ..ueen so the delicate task of examining the Ordzhonikidze would hardly have seemed worth undertaking.) If these premises are sound. it was clearly up to someone. and someone pretty senior, to say 'No funny business this time' before the ships bringing Bulganin and Khrushchev took up their moorings in Portsmouth. Nobody did say this: and the omission to do so must (I should have thought) indicate either failure to take a precaution by someone to whom the need for that precaution should have been obvious. or else the fact that the risks involved in the operation were regarded as •worth running for the sake of a good look at a second cruiser's hull.
To the layman it appears in the highest degree unlikely that Commander Crabb would have brought back from either of his reconnaissances anything of the first importance. All technical intelligence is interesting to experts; but you cannot, so to speak, take the hull of a cruiser home with you, and it is difficult (for the layman) to imagine what worthwhile lessons could have been learnt from a brief underwater inspection of it.
Nevertheless. Commander Crabb, having looked at the Sverdlov, was asked to look at the Ordzhonikidze. There is some evidence that on April 19 Ile looked at her twice, being seen by the Russians on his first attempt and losing his life on the second. This evidence is supplied by his friend Mr. Pugh, writing in the Daily Mail. Mr. Pugh says that at 9.30 a.m.—two hours after the Russians say they Saw him on the surface close to the ships—Crabb telephoned to his 'business associates' in London and said that he was going to do his 'little job' that afternoon. Mr. Pugh also says that between 1 and 2 p.m: Crabb was seen in the bar of a Ports- mouth hotel where he was well known, and suggests that he made his second and last dive early that afternoon, 'just in time to catch slack water at low tide.' If it is true, this version 'of what happened suggests that his reconnaissance at least had some specific and supposedly valuable purpose.
I am glad that Mr. Gaitskell paid a tribute to Commander Crabb's gallantry. We talk a lot about the sanctity of human life, but among the hubbub of reactions to the frogman's death I have not often detected, particularly from the Left, that note of passionate sympathy which we should have heard if after a fair trial Crabb had been hanged for murder in this country or for assassination in one of her dependencies. It is true that his war-time deeds have been praised by his friends, but in general he has emerged as the central figure in a shady cause corebre rather than the hero of a courageous exploit undertaken in his country's service. Compared (for instance) with Mr. Malenkov, who was a Good Thing, the general feeling seems to be that Commander Crabb was a Bad Thing. So it is right and proper that Mr. Gaitskell should have said. 'This country would be the poorer if it were not for men like Commander Crabb.' and that the statement should have
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