Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Two things, actually,’ interrupted the Skipper. ‘Having Able Seaman Reginald Martin Fagg, and Lascar, on your boat.’ Then he fixed Harry with a flinty glare. ‘Lascar’s curries, and “fartin’ Martin” don’t mix.’

  ‘Don’t mix!’ Carey exclaimed. ‘Put Lascar’s cuisine and fartin’ Martin’s arse together, and you’ll contravene several Geneva conventions!’

  ‘A lesson for you, young Gilmour,’ added the Skipper. ‘Never get on a boat with Lascar or fartin’ Martin. And try not to irritate Lascar.’

  ‘We like Lascar,’ said Carey.

  Harry looked irritated now, so Carey began to explain for the good of wardroom peace: ‘Lascar’s one of those “Jacks” who somewhat ostentatiously takes no obvious pride in his abilities, and treats the whole world around him, especially the naval world, with an affected contempt. He does this so as to avoid as much as possible his pet hate . . . having to talk to officers. That is why Lascar likes to keep his conversation with the likes of us to “aye aye, sir”. You, insensitively, just forced him into a conversation. It’s never been known.’

  ‘Words we didn’t know he knew,’ said the Skipper.

  ‘He’ll never forgive you,’ said Carey.

  ‘Foreign bodies in your mince, Harry,’ warned the Skipper.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Battle of Britain had been won, but in the Atlantic it was another matter. The newspapers and the BBC weren’t saying much, but the word from the wardroom at the HMS Dolphin submarine base to the Fort Blockhouse maintenance shops was that the U-boats were getting more and more active in the western approaches and merchant shipping losses were climbing at a dismaying rate. Everyone knew it must be getting serious, because some submarines were now being diverted to try and disrupt Jerry’s hunting sorties.

  The mine-laying subs and the smaller S-boats sailing out of Dolphin and numerous other small ports up the east coast were being allowed to pursue their traditional targets, heading into the North Sea to attack shipping off the Low Countries and southern Norway, hunting down the blockade runners, but The Bucket and the other bigger T-class boats were routinely being ordered west to patrol in huge arcs from the Irish coast to the Bay of Biscay as a U-boat screen. The U-boats were near impossible to find; not only that, it was an extremely dangerous job with little to show for the risks, which bizarrely, mainly came not from the highly trained German U-boat crews. They were usually too wily to become entangled with British submarines, their mission was to sink merchant ships and they tended to obey their orders. No, the ever-present threat was still RAF Coastal Command: if it was a submarine, they reasoned, it must be a Jerry, and so they blasted away.

  And while the North Sea boats would come back with growing tallies of sunk merchant ships, boats like The Bucket discovered that they were returning from patrol with a full set of torpedoes and without so much as a sighting of Jerry. In the autumn of 1940, The Bucket only sighted two U-boats in the course of her three-week-long patrols. Many sported quite a few dents from the RAF, however. And some boats didn’t return at all.

  By this time it had become quite apparent to Harry and the rest of the crew, that his night vision was not particularly good. ‘Lascar’ Vaizey could stuff him so full of carrots he’d start growing rabbit teeth, but it was never going to improve by one jot his ability to see in the dark. Night vision was something some people had, like the Tigger and the Skipper. Harry didn’t, which made his usefulness as a watchkeeper in the hours of darkness somewhat limited. But he still tried, which was why he was on the bridge with Carey with about an hour to go on the middle watch.

  They were quartering their billet, a patrol box about 130 miles west-sou’west of Ushant, on a blustery night in mid September, with the wind coming out of the south-west at about force 6. The Bucket, steering one-two-one degrees, was rolling like a pig in the beam sea as she zigzagged her way in the general direction of France – the zigzag course designed to make her a less predictable target for any Jerry who might spot her before she spotted them.

  It was an overcast night, so Harry had left his sextant below, and instead of furthering his knowledge of celestial navigation he was straining to peer into the middle water, taking that chore off Carey and the three lookouts dotted round the bridge. They kept their binoculars firmly on the horizon, each slowly panning their slice of sea for distant targets, while Harry’s job was close in.

  He was wrapped in an oilskin coat and leggings with several layers of vests and shirts below his white pullover against the cold and wet. He had a towel wrapped round his neck to try and keep out the constant slap and spray driven by the wind, but it was by now sodden and so doing little to keep the chill autumn waters of the Bay from trickling inside those oilskins. What with that, and the constant bracing against the rolling beneath his feet, it was all becoming a bore and a strain. It would be fair to say he was miserable, but then so was everyone else on the bridge; although they were just black lumps in the darkness, you didn’t need to see them to know.

  Except, perhaps, Carey in his flashy Ursula suit, an all in one number with padding and seals and pockets with snap studs all over it, the invention of some other Skipper in the trade called Phillips, and named after his boat. Carey never said much about his kit, unless anyone asked. ‘Does the trick,’ would be the reply; that, and a smug look, especially when everyone else was peeling off their sopping kit. And, of course, it made him look dashing, which was also very important to Malcolm Carey.

  Harry was half-thinking whether staying dry on watch was worth the humiliation and ridicule he’d certainly face if he was to emulate the number one and get an Ursula suit himself, so he was only half paying attention to the dark waters sluicing past a few feet below. He’d been caught out a couple of times being lax on watch and had learned how easy it is to mistake a playful cetacean for a torpedo track, or miss the bobbing of a drifting mine, broken free from a distant minefield, or lifeboats from some far off sinking, whether they still carried survivors, or whether their cargo was long dead. And that was when one of the lookouts said quite matter-of-factly, ‘Contact on the port beam, bearing three-two-zero degrees.’

  Carey instantly turned his binoculars jerking around the lookout’s bearing, and then said, ‘Got it!’ There was only the barest moment of delay before he opened the voice-pipe to the helmsman in the control room. ‘Steer port thirty, bring us on to zero-four-zero! Captain to the bridge!’

  Seconds later Andy Trumble shot out of the bridge hatch and was peering into the night with his binoculars. ‘Bugger . . . bugger . . . bugger.’ Red shift lighting below or no, he still hadn’t got his full night vision. ‘What do you have, number one?’

  ‘It’s definitely a U-boat, Skipper. I’ve turned us bow on to lessen our silhouette.’

  The Skipper flipped open the voice-pipe. ‘Diving Stations! Close up for surface torpedo attack!’ He turned to Harry. ‘Get down on to your box of tricks, Mr Gilmour, and you, Malcolm, on the trim board.’

  The now familiar glint of bloody mayhem was in Trumble’s eye as he bent to the TBT, a gimbal-mounted device midships on the bridge that was the equivalent to the range and target-bearing bezels on the periscopes. The Skipper was going to take this one at the gallop. Harry went into the hole, no time to climb down, just wrap hands and feet round the vertical rails and slide; Carey hit the control deckplates right behind him. They were in time to see Milner scooting forward, and the balding head of Tubby Tevis, the Quartermaster, slip in to the helmsman’s seat. Everyone was at their stations as the Skipper’s voice came down the pipe, ‘. . . flood tubes one through six!’

  Six torpedo tubes represented The Bucket’s maximum fire power; she used to have two external tubes, but those had been chopped out because they created merry hell with the sea-keeping in rough weather.

  ‘Poor Jerry,’ said Carey to no one in particular, ‘Skipper’s going to make this one pay for all the kippers we’ve had to haul back home.’

  Everyone in the control r
oom allowed themselves a quiet smile.

  ‘Half ahead together,’ they heard from the bridge. ‘Target is a U-boat on the surface, we are on a ninety-degree track angle to the target.’

  Harry, his oilskins in a heap on the deck and his watch cap on top of them, cast his wet towel away and punched in the track . . . ninety degrees. They were on a course to cut the U-boat’s course at almost exactly a right angle – couldn’t be better!

  ‘. . . I estimate the range at nine-thousand yards . . . she’s a homeward bounder . . . and she’s got a bone between her teeth’ – a bow wave, showing white against the black water – ‘. . . going at a fair clip . . . twelve knots . . . target’s course is . . . one-three-zero. Doesn’t appear to be zigzagging. Too busy thinking about beer and bratwurst and mademoiselles. Will engage at six-thousand yards. Give me a deflection angle to the target at that range, Mr Gilmour.’

  Harry had all the numbers punched in, and he pronounced with a steady annunciation he certainly did not feel: ‘Red-one-six, Skipper!’

  ‘Sixteen red it is.’ Then there was a silence as The Bucket burbled along on her diesels with Andy Trumble bent to the TBT, looking to port along that sixteen-degrees bearing. Only the noise of The Bucket’s diesels could be heard now.

  Andy Trumble’s voice started up again, echoing down from the bridge, giving a running commentary. The crew, down below, blind, tense and waiting, liked that. It was considerate. It meant the Skipper didn’t just dismiss you as a piece of machinery. It was the sort of thing good submarine Skippers did.

  ‘Oh, he’s tootling along, not a care in the world. Going to fire one, two, three and four . . . I’m going to give it a spread over two ship’s lengths. Then for safety’s sake, we’ll fire five. Going to give it a track, a length and a half behind her conning tower, in case the bugger sees our torpedoes, decides to slam the anchors on and go full astern . . . bow doors open on one to five,’ he said, and then he gave an evil little laugh. Below, another smile went round the control room.

  ‘Tubes one to six flooded,’ came Milner’s disembodied voice, echoing from the forward torpedo room.

  ‘OK, coming up . . .’ said the Skipper, and then, slowly, almost exquisitely, the U-boat crossed the bearing: ‘Fire one! . . . Fire two! . . .’ he said until all torpedoes had gone.

  Carey had the stopwatch in his hand. Seconds ticked away, into the silence of the diesel thump.

  ‘Dive! Dive! Flood Q! Full down angle on the planes!’

  The lookouts were plunging into the red glimmer of the control room even before the Skipper had finished yelling.

  All at once, from aft, the Engineer’s curt orders: ‘Clutches out, group up, full ahead together!’ And the lookouts were plunging into the red glimmer of the Control Room even before the Skipper had finished yelling.

  Harry felt The Bucket lurch forward and down, and the deck began falling from beneath his seat. Then from above: ‘One clip on, two clips on!’ as Trumble secured the bridge hatch, and he hit the deckplates shaking the water from his oilskins, and slapping his watch cap on the ladder. ‘Make your depth one hundred and eighty feet, then hard right rudder and all stop.’ Trumble’s orders were given in a measured tone to Carey and Tevis, then, ‘These damn bloody Jerries are getting too damn bloody good at this! Bugger him! He saw the tracks. Piled on more knots then turned towards us and combed them. Damn and blast him. He’s up there now chortling away to himself!’

  Suddenly The Bucket began to heel, and then the hum of her motors died, and she hung suspended, silent, one hundred and eighty feet down below in the Atlantic. Trumble turned: ‘Asdic, have you got anything?’

  But before the Asdic operator could reply, everyone could just hear the swishing growing, but still very faint. Leading Seaman Devaney, leaning out of the Asdic cubby, had the headset for the device held away from his ear; you could see the sick expression on his face beneath the thick black beard and dense matching thickets that passed for eyebrows. ‘Twin screws, diesel, moving fast astern of us,’ he said.

  They heard the U-boat churn away above them, then there was a series of distant rushing sounds.

  ‘Target diving,’ said Devaney, pressing the phones to his ears, listening more intently.

  Trumble propped his backside against the chart table. ‘He’s running. Probably got no torpedoes left.’ He turned quickly and looked at the chart. ‘Where’s he running to, Harry?’

  Harry joined his Skipper. They got the dividers out, and the protractor, and they projected courses, The Bucket’s and Jerry’s, and they drew lines to the edge of their billet, but it was useless. The U-boat had got clean away. There would be no catching him before daybreak, and his rendezvous with his torpedo boat or minesweeper escort, and his air support, there to take him safe home into Lorient or La Rochelle or wherever he was headed. Bugger, indeed, as the Skipper was often wont to say.

  In early October they were directed to a billet immediately off Brest. Harry was on the periscope, with about three quarters of an hour to go on the forenoon watch. The Bucket, submerged, was ambling along at a battery-conserving three knots, steering zero-six-zero, heading towards the French coast. Above them there was a breezy chop coming from the south-west, which meant Harry had a shallow trim on her to raise the periscope that little higher over the wave crests. Any danger of it being spotted by some sharp-eyed Jerry lookout, however, was reduced by the flying spume effectively disguising any telltale ‘feather’ from the periscope. Periscope watch was a routine that Harry sometimes did now in his dreams. And in-between sending the scope up and down, and sweeping round the compass, you marked the chart, keeping a constant eye on speed and course, and a finger in the almanac, to factor in tides and known currents; it was all dead-reckoning in deep water, but you had to be as accurate as possible for any number of pressing reasons, like making sure you kept within your patrol box. Straying beyond might take you into the cross-hairs of a ‘friendly’ submarine in an adjoining box, who would automatically assume that, since no other ‘friendly’ was operating in his particular bit of sea, you were a U-boat, and would promptly sink you.

  Then there was the trim: technically the overall responsibility of the number one, it still fell to the watch officer to ensure the submarine maintained periscope depth – usually about thirty feet – and that she steered level at neutral buoyancy. But then the crew had the irritating habit of moving about, carrying out heavy repairs, shifting stores, making the boat sometimes bow-heavy, sometimes stern-heavy; then there were the surprise little changes in water densities. All of them conspired throughout the day to bugger up the trim, and when that happened it was the responsibility of the officer of the watch to ensure the rating on the trim board was ready to pump little packets of water from one trim tank to another to put everything back in harmony and balance. If it was only minor adjustments to the depth, you could always use the hydroplanes, and the motors; a bit more speed so as the planes bit a little tighter into the water, and a tweak here and there, fore and aft, you could adjust your angle just fine. Except more power drained the battery faster, and that never made you popular, with the Jimmy or the EO.

  It was the danger of losing trim that really struck fear into Harry; ending up too buoyant and breaking surface under the nose of a Jerry destroyer, or worse, you went down, too heavy and out of control; too heavy to recover before you hit the boat’s crush depth, where the pressure of water outside the hull was greater than her construction could withstand, and then ribs would buckle and the hull would implode. For The Bucket, crush depth was supposed to be anything over 300 feet, except everyone knew she would probably take a lot more. How much ‘a lot more’ was, no one ever found out, or at least never found out and lived to tell.

  So watchkeeping was a busy time aboard a submarine; no time to daydream or dwell on matters. No time to think of past lives and who you were now, who you were becoming, and the vast distance travelled from a student’s smug Sunday morning lie-in, deep in the quilts with a mild hangover to nurs
e till midday, to here, out in the Atlantic, conning one of His Majesty’s submarines at thirty-five feet, a couple of dozen miles off the enemy’s coast, looking for people to kill.

  Harry was into the second quadrant of his latest sweep when he spotted an aircraft, way to the north; too far away to be any immediate threat. Harry was pretty good at aircraft recognition, and he reckoned it to be a Junkers 88, a light Jerry twin-engined job; a bomber first, but being a fast, nifty little brute, Jerry had been throwing more and more of them out into the Bay to hunt the RAF Sunderlands that were increasingly making a nuisance of themselves among departing and returning U-boats. When the aircraft began a slow turn to the south-west, its wing shape confirmed it.

  ‘Make a note for the log,’ said Harry to the control room rating, without removing his eyes from the periscope. ‘11.47. Junkers 88 spotted to the north-west, course two-seven-zero approximate . . . range . . . ooh, say ten, no, make it twelve miles.’ There; the Skipper would see that and know he’d been keeping his eyes open. He made a mental note to speed up his sweeps, just a little, as he worked through the compass. After a final ‘down periscope’, he ran his eyes over the trim board, then attended to the chart; then it was time to start again: ‘Up periscope!’ And there it was, barely five degrees into the start of his next all-round sweep. There was no mistaking it.

  ‘Captain to the control room!’

  In the seconds it took Andy Trumble to practically levitate off his bunk, Harry had twiddled the range knob, just to give the Skipper something to get started with. Harry stepped back, and as the Skipper grabbed the handles, he said, ‘U-boat on the port bow’, and read off the bearing from the bezel above the scope; he also checked the difference in inclination between the periscope’s top lenses, the ones he’d used to get the U-boat dancing on its image, as he grabbed the slide rule from the chart table. A quick calculation and: ‘The range is twelve hundred yards, sir.’