http://home.freeuk.com/johndillon/airattack.htm:
The First Lieutenant of the Kashmir was Jack Scatchard. When the Kelly and the Kasmir were sunk, Scatchard and Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten were two of the 279 survivors from the two ships who were rescued by the Kipling. Scatchard was to go on to become a Vice-Admiral with DSO and two bars. He died at the age of 90, and his obituary was in the Daily Telegraph, July 5, 2001.
Officer who tackled E-boats off Britain's East coast and helped to end German naval power in the Aegean
VICE-ADMIRAL JACK SCATCHARD, who has died aged 90, was awarded a DSC and two Bars during service as a destroyer commander in the Second World War.
Subsequently, he rose to be Flag Officer, Second-in-Command, Far East Fleet, from 1962 to 1964, an appointment in which an appreciative Admiralty extended his tenure by six months and promoted him to Vice-Admiral.
John Percival Scatchard, the son of a doctor at Tadcaster, was born on September 5 1910 and after Aysgarth School, Yorkshire, went to the RNC, Dartmouth, in 1923. Before the Second World War he saw service in the Far East, visiting both China and Japan.
During the early part of the war, Scatchard was First Lieutenant of the destroyer Kashmir, which in May 1941, along with the destroyers Kelly, Kipling, Kelvin and Jackal of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, under Captain (D) Lord Louis Mountbatten, set out from Malta for Crete.
Allied strategy at that stage was to deny the Germans the use of the sea to make landings on Crete, to keep open sea communications to enable the garrison on the island to be supplied and reinforced - and to be in readiness to evacuate troops if or when the situation demanded it.
Mediterranean Fleet forces sailed from Alexandria in mid-May, and from May 20 came under aerial bombardment. Kashmir and the ships of 5th Destroyer Flotilla arrived to reinforce Rear-Admiral E L S King's force on June 22, and were ordered to patrol off the north-western end of Crete.
With Kelly, Kashmir carried out a short bombardment of Maleme, severely damaged two caiques, and at dawn retired around the western end of the island. Within hours, they were experiencing the first of a series of heavy air attacks, the third of which, carried out by 24 dive-bombers, did for them.
Kashmir was hit and sank in two minutes; Kelly turned turtle, briefly floated upside down and then sank. Kipling, whose captain had watched the attack from the south, now closed at full speed and, though subjected to six bombing attacks, managed to pick up 279 officers and men from Kashmir and Kelly, among them Mountbatten and Scatchard.
Soon afterwards, Scatchard was appointed in command of the Hunt Class destroyer Garth, operating in the Channel and on escort duty in the convoy channel running up the East coast of Britain. In the summer of 1942, Garth joined the naval force which took part in the Dieppe raid.
The next year, on the night of February 17-18, Scatchard - by now with a DSC, and having returned in Garth to the East coast - received a report that a group of German E-boats, which had been subjecting convoys to constant night attacks, had been detected by shore radar near the convoy channel.
Garth and Montrose, the destroyers on patrol, went in pursuit and caught the E-boats - which turned out to have been laying mines - off Yarmouth, successfully destroying at least one.
Later in 1943, Scatchard was appointed to command the Troubridge Class destroyer Termagant, retaining the appointment until 1945. During the early part of this period, Termagant took part in operations in the Mediterranean, and here Scatchard was awarded a Bar to his DSC for sinking an enemy submarine.
The second Bar to his DSC came for operations in the Aegean in the autumn of 1944, as the Germans withdrew from Greece. The sinking of former Italian destroyers TA.37 and TA.18 by Termagant and Tuscan on October 7 and 19 1944, followed by the destruction of TA.14, TA.17 and TA.38 by bombing, and the scuttling of enemy warships which could not get away, brought an end to German naval power in the region.
After the war, which Termagant ended in the Far East, Scatchard became Executive Officer of the Naval Air Station at Easthaven. He was then appointed First Lieutenant of the battleship Vanguard in September 1946, earning promotion to Commander that December.
Subsequently, Scatchard served in the Plans Division of the Admiralty, as Captain (D) Portsmouth, and as Chief Officer (Administration) to the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth.
In 1957, after attending the Imperial Defence College, Scatchard was appointed Captain 5th Destroyer Squadron, commanding the Daring Class destroyer Duchess.
A term as Director Naval Equipment at the Admiralty followed, and then in 1960, after promotion to Rear-Admiral, Scatchard was appointed Commandant of the Joint Services College at Latimer, Buckinghamshire. His arrival at Latimer coincided with the setting up by the Chiefs of Staff - with Lord Mountbatten as Chief of Defence Staff - of a working party to review command and staff training in the three Services.
Asked to give his views, Scatchard wrote plainly of "inter-Service ignorance, intolerance and bigotry affecting joint matters in Whitehall and elsewhere". But of the value of Latimer, he was in no doubt; his strong impression, he said, was of the remarkable broadening of thought and exploiting of talent that the College enabled its students to achieve.
As Commandant of Latimer, Scatchard was noted for his modesty, in particular for his habit of never volunteering his own opinion when introducing or thanking lecturers. Moreover, the College felt confident in its work under his headship, not least because it seemed to be approved of in Whitehall.
Scatchard's final appointment before retirement was as Flag Officer, Second-in-Command, Far East Fleet - No 2 to Admiral Sir Desmond Dreyer. Tireless in visiting the ships of the fleet, Scatchard displayed an exceptional gift for assessing accurately, and at high speed, the efficiency and mood of each ship's company.
In his own affairs Scatchard was a model of efficiency. Whenever he had been a guest at a cocktail or dinner party, he would ensure that he rose early the next day to write and dispatch his thank-you letter before appearing on the quarter-deck in time for the hoisting of the colours and the playing of the National Anthem at 8 am.
Known since his days as a destroyer commander as "Black Jack" for the firm grip he kept on a ship, Scatchard was also a generous and considerate superior officer. As Flag Officer, he made a point of remembering, and marking, the birthdays of his staff.
During the Indonesian Confrontation in Malaysia in 1964, Scatchard noted the support British forces received from the indigenous people. He was so impressed by the efforts of one man, who had reached a military base to offer his services after days spent rafting down a river, that he presented him with his silver cigarette case.
After retirement from the Navy in 1964, Scatchard was for a time involved in the positive vetting of officers for security purposes. He then settled permanently at Warsash, near Southampton, where he gave many years' service as a churchwarden, and from where he sailed his small boat in the Solent.
Jack Scatchard was someone who brought out the best in those around him. Scrupulously fair, he would only bark if he thought it necessary, and he would never remain angry for long. Although naturally reserved, he was notably warm, kind and humorous in the company of family and friends.
He was appointed CB in 1963.
He married, in 1943, Margaret ("Marg") Niven, who predeceased him. He is survived by their daughter.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,520269,00.html:
Jack ScatchardAs a lieutenant aboard the destroyer HMS Kashmir on the outbreak of war, first as gunnery officer and then as "number one", Scatchard took part in two of the greatest naval setbacks of the first half of the war, the botched campaigns in Norway (1940) and Crete (1941).
Nor was there any change in his luck - or that of the navy - when, in September 1941, he got his first command. This was as skipper of the light destroyer HMS Garth, which joined the escort for the disastrous commando raid on Dieppe in August 1942. He won his first DSC for his part in the shore bombardment.
Scatchard was a doctor's son, born in Tadcaster, north Yorkshire, and after Aysgarth school he joined the navy as a Dartmouth cadet at the then customary age of 13. His first sea posting was on a battlecruiser in 1928. Much of his pre-war service was spent in the Far East, where he was to finish his service as second in command of the Far East Fleet in the early 1960s.
After 16 pre-war months on the Kashmir, Scatchard played a prominent role when the ship sank a U-boat in home waters in November 1939. The ship was still attached to the Home Fleet when the British and French mounted their intervention in Norway in spring 1940, just as the much more ruthless Germans got the same idea.
The gallantry of the Royal Navy's destroyers was one of the few positive as pects of a debacle which ended with the first of many British strategic retreats in the early part of the war.
Kashmir emerged unscathed, to be reassigned to Lord Louis Mountbatten's destroyer flotilla in the Mediterranean. Scatchard was mentioned in dispatches for his part in Operation Tiger, one of many attempts to relieve besieged Malta in the teeth of Axis air superiority.
Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham's Mediterranean Fleet prevented the Germans from reaching Crete by sea in spring 1941, after another miraculously successful but strategically disastrous British withdrawal from Greece.
But German paratroops captured the island while the Royal Navy sustained massive losses: Mountbatten's destroyer, Kelly, and the Kashmir were lost in minutes to massed dive-bomber attack off Crete in May 1941 - just two more naval losses as the Cretan intervention was followed by yet another near-miraculous evacuation by sea.
A third destroyer rescued 279 men from the two lost ships, including Mountbatten and Scatchard. In September Scatchard took command of Garth, which was assigned to convoys in home waters on the east coast, duties to which she returned after Dieppe.
In February 1943, she took part in a destroyer ambush of a pack of German E-boats, sinking one of them. Scatchard picked up enemy survivors, including their ship's dog, which he adopted as his own ship's mascot.
In August 1943, he was given command of a larger destroyer, Termagant, back in the Mediterranean, where she and two others sank U451, the enemy submarine that made the last successful attack of the war in the Mediterranean, in May 1944.
This brought Scatchard his second DSC. His third was awarded for his contribution to the allied landings in southern France and for helping to clear Greece and the Aegean of German naval and military forces. With allied victory in Europe, Termagant was assigned to the Pacific Fleet in June and took part in the war against Japan, which ended in August 1945.
As a commander, Scatchard was by turns a fearsome bully - which earned him the nickname "Black Jack" - and a benevolent father-figure. He inspired the fear of God, but also knew every man on board and tried to improve conditions for them.
His explosive but short-lived temper was motivated by dedication to fighting efficiency and a belief that slackness cost lives. The Norwegian campaign and the other failures he witnessed encouraged his passionate conviction that half-measures in wartime were positively dangerous.
On achieving flag rank as rear-admiral in 1960, Scatchard was appointed commandant of the Joint Services Staff College. His last appointment was as second in command of Admiral Sir Desmond Dreyer's Far East Fleet, which saw off Indonesian "confrontation" over the adhesion of formerly British Borneo to the new Malaysian Federation.
On retiring with the CB and the rank of vice-admiral, Scatchard stayed on at the Ministry of Defence, vetting officers and officials after the spy scandals of the early 1960s. He retired from this work in 1979, settling on the Solent near Southampton, where he enjoyed small-boat sailing. He also served for many years as a churchwarden.
In 1943 he had married Margaret Niven, who died in 1988: they had one daughter, who survives him.
John Percival Scatchard, sailor, born September 5 1910; died June 22 2001