by David Black
‘Diving Stations!’ shouted Trumble, and hit the klaxon twice.
The U-boat was moving fast, and in a straight line. A long, sleek, grey wolf, sporting slashes of rust, worn like battle honours, heading home after a long patrol; and there, a cluster of heads on her bridge, the one distinctive white-topped watch cap; his opposite number, the U-boat Skipper. Again, no zigzag; but this time she had an excuse. According to the chart, they were running close to a minefield, and the U-boat was obviously pointed directly at the swept channel. She was also accompanied by a surface escort, a minesweeper, which had come out from behind the U-boat as Trumble watched.
‘Down periscope!’ He turned from the scope as the crew settled into their stations. ‘Asdic. What have you got?’
The beard and the eyebrows appeared from their cubby: ‘Two sets of screws, passing down our port side, range about twelve hundred, moving at between ten to twelve knots.’
Andy nodded, gripping his nose with two fingers, while the other hand rested across his chest. Harry interrupted: ‘There’s a JU 88 up there too, probably.’
‘What d’ye mean “probably”?’
‘I spotted it about half an hour ago, away to the north. It could’ve been doing a sweep for our chum.’
The Skipper leant back and eyed the entry in the log. He grinned his ‘murder in mind’ grin, and gave Harry an approving pat on the cheek. It was a short reach from where he stood by the search periscope to Harry’s seat on the fruit machine, and the Skipper could get quite tactile when his dander was up. He moved to the attack scope. ‘Up periscope! Let’s start the attack, gentlemen.’
Jerry was going too fast; they’d missed their chance to get to a position where they could turn in on him for anything like an ideal ninety-degree track angle, and they were submerged, and so slow. Every knot they wrung out of the electric motors meant less amps in the batteries, and there was still a lot of daylight left. It wouldn’t be good if they ran out of juice and had to surface. Not good at all. Yet Andy ordered a course change, a group up and the throttles wide; they were going to run down Jerry’s course.
The U-boat was steering one-three-five degrees, heading right for the charted minefield, with the minesweeper off his port bow. When they got closer, the minesweeper would slip in front and lead the U-boat through, but right now they were both doing what was probably the minesweeper’s top speed to get them to safety in the shortest time. Trumble did the sums and laid The Bucket on one-zero-zero, then called out the figures to Harry, who punched them in.
In order to get within a decent range to fire, The Bucket was going to have to make its approach at a brutal one-four-five degree attack angle, their converging courses like an arrowhead on the chart, with the target all the while moving fast away from her. The Bucket’s motors were delivering seven knots, still too slow, but that kind of speed was going to drain the batteries in a very short time.
Harry delivered several solutions, but the ranges were too great for Andy; he wanted a sure kill. It was only after the outside ERA began calling out the charge left on the battery that Andy seemed to return to the reality of his narrowing options; daylight remaining, charge remaining, distance to target. ‘Periscope angle now?’ he asked, eyes still glued to the scope.
‘Nine degrees red,’ said Harry.
‘Tubes one to four flooded?’ he asked again.
Milner’s pipe came aft, ‘Aye aye, sir, one to four flooded.’
He fired at three-second intervals on the stopwatch, a tight salvo; but firing on such a broad track . . . the target was so, so tight, and moving away.
Four times The Bucket lurched, and each time the air pressure jumped as the compressed air used to launch the torpedoes vented back into the boat.
Trumble issued a stream of orders; the motors grouped down and the knots came off; they turned to starboard, and went deep, diving away from the two enemy ships.
The Skipper wasn’t interested in the minesweeper. Although it had depth charges, it was small beer compared to a U-boat. And anyway, there was a Junkers 88 stooging around up there, so why tempt fate? Andy Trumble was known as a wild chap in the trade and ‘Jack’ liked that; but he wasn’t a nutter, and ‘Jack’ liked that even more.
They waited as the seconds ticked away. Carey had the stopwatch and had calculated the running time: torpedo speed, distance to the target, plus speed of the target.
‘First torpedo . . . ten seconds to target,’ he said, and began counting. Nothing. Then, ‘Torpedo two . . .’ Nothing. And again, nothing.
Andy’s face was a picture of strained insouciance. He stared at the deckhead. And again, nothing. All that tension, and then just silence. Expressions fixed – one rating even managed a quick exhalation – and resigned. The words of some smart-alec remark were already forming on the Skipper’s lips . . . but that was as far as they got.
It was as if some giant had struck The Bucket’s hull with an even gianter hammer. The concussion, when it hit, shot a deep tremor through the whole fabric of the boat. The noise was so great as it reverberated around every plate and bulkhead that Harry felt his vision blur.
Trumble clenched his left fist, and tapped it against the chart table, once; and then he nodded, once, generally, to everyone in the control room. Everyone nodded back, once.
Trumble picked up the mic for the tannoy: ‘This is the captain. What you just heard was one of our torpedoes hitting a U-boat, which I think we can fairly claim must now be destroyed . . .’
The beard was leaning out of the Asdic cubby with the phones to one ear, nodding. But no one needed his confirmation anymore; the sound of tearing steel began echoing loud enough for everyone to hear through The Bucket’s hull; the sounds of another submarine, not unlike theirs, breaking up as she took her final plunge. It was what their deaths would sound like, if or when.
Devaney interrupted the morbid revelry: ‘Twin screws, high-speed, moving astern of us, left to right, and closing.’
‘The escort,’ said the Skipper.
Piecing it together later as they headed home triumphant, sitting round the wardroom table with a scatter of stiff belts from the Skipper’s gin bottle, they worked out that the Junkers 88 had probably spotted their torpedo tracks and directed the minesweeper on to them – except that by the time the minesweeper got there The Bucket had long gone.
Jerry hadn’t given up the hunt that easily, continuing to sprint and stopping to listen on his hydrophones for the sound of their screws. What had followed was a series of leaps and bounds as Jerry picked up their track, and sped towards them while The Bucket, hiding behind the racket they made, sprinted off in a different direction, only going silent after Jerry had dropped his depth charges, and again stopped to listen.
Harry had heard depth charges before, when the Von Zeithen’s escorts had dropped a few. They’d been a long way off, and although Harry thought them loud, Pelorus’s crew barely noticed them. The first depth charges this time, when they came, sounded to Harry’s inexperienced ears, very, very loud indeed; and to his bowels, very disconcerting, for they were followed by a shock wave which shook The Bucket as if she were a tram going through a well-worn set of points.
Carey counted the blasts out loud, in a bored ritual liturgy, and Harry found it was easiest to curb the first gripe of terror in his guts by looking at the bland indifference on everyone’s faces. The Skipper looked bored; Able Seaman Devaney kept up his running commentary on Jerry’s various manoeuvrings in his naval monotone. Harry, who initially thought the bangs were two feet above his head, flinched accordingly, enough to provoke an indulgent smile from the Skipper.
Because he was the new boy, Trumble began an inane commentary: ‘Oooh, not even warm . . . cold . . . cold . . .’ then a bang closer, ‘Bloody Norah! That verged on the almost tepid!’ And everyone else in the control room responded by smirking, as they concentrated on their duties.
None of it lasted long. Twelve detonations in all was Carey’s count. Ten from the minesweeper and wh
en they got round to awarding points on the bangs, they reckoned the other two had been from the Junkers 88.
The Bucket should have remained on patrol for its duration – she still had her six reload torpedoes – but a radio message the very next day summoned them back.
‘The King wants to see you about that Jerry you clobbered,’ Carey assured the Skipper, as they sat round the Dolphin’s wardroom table over one of Harry’s donations to the mess fund. ‘Wants to award you the VC and Bar, and create you Viscount “Arsend of Nowhere”, with bezants and fluffels!’
‘Malcolm,’ said the Skipper, contemplating his tumbler-full of Harry’s single malt. ‘Were it but true! Alas, you are a mere colonial and know not . . . of the capricious malice that drives those who run our lives. We are recalled, because they have a better joke to spring upon us . . .’ He raised the tumbler and tossed it down, a slam of glass back on the wardroom table, and then: ‘Scottish person . . . can I trouble you for another sample of your generous donation to our cellar . . . please?’
In his assessment of their recall signal, it was the Skipper who, not surprisingly, had turned out to be right. The Bucket was ordered to join Third Submarine Flotilla, based on HMS Forth at the Holy Loch on the Firth of Clyde.
‘That’s Harry’s home port,’ the Skipper announced, after passing on the news to their gathering back ashore in the Dolphin’s wardroom. ‘Harry, you better book a military priority call to your local police station . . . tell ’em to lock up all Dunoon’s daughters . . . it’s going to be raining “buckets”!’
They all groaned, and the Tigger attempted a witticism of his own. ‘But they’ll be Scottish . . . and all look like Harry.’ That got a laugh.
There had been almost thirty hours of bustle and preparation. A lot of stores were moved ashore, and space was cleared for all the new clutter they’d take on at Holy Loch. Even The Bucket’s racked torpedoes were shoved and cajoled up through the loading hatch amid much grunting and blasphemy – she would only keep the kippers already in her tubes, and replenish her empty racks from Third Flotilla stocks.
Although the Tigger was notionally in charge of the manoeuvre, nobody even considered asking him; it was to Harry, who was overseeing everything else, they turned.
‘D’you think we’ll be getting them new mark eights, Mr Gilmour?’ . . . ‘The Third Flotilla’s a crack mob, sir, they’re bound to be first in line for any new uns going, sir, don’t you think?’ . . . ‘You could always fix their Captain (S) up wi’ yer sister, sir.’
On a big ship, that sort of remark would have landed the wag responsible with a personal invitation to the next defaulters’ parade, but The Bucket wasn’t big and she wasn’t a ship. Submarines. They were like that. And as everyone knew, you had to like a laugh in order to be a ‘bucket’.
‘I don’t have a sister,’ replied Harry, with mock formality, ‘and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t swap her virtue for a set of mark eight torpedoes!’
‘You don’t have to tell ’im that, sir!’
And all the while the hard graft went on, never losing pace, until it was done, and they were off, on time.
The sullen pewter of an autumn afternoon had leached to darkness before they finally slipped out of Haslar Creek, and then out of Portsmouth Harbour. Off watch, sitting at the wardroom table, Harry had set to one of his many junior officer tasks: decoding all the incoming radio traffic and encoding the out-going.
All the intelligence signals singularly failed to mention U-boat activity in their area, thus confirming the scuttlebutt: that the U-boats had moved farther out into the Atlantic in their search for targets. And the skies appeared to be clear, too. That, at least, was the word; since the end of the Battle of Britain, Jerry wasn’t venturing anywhere near their way, at least not in daylight, and a submarine was an absolute bugger to spot on the surface – at night.
The only threat left, it appeared, was complacency. Not that the ‘buckets’ would ever allow themselves to be accused of that; but as they went round Land’s End and began heading up through the St George’s Channel the following morning, the passage began to take on a bit of a holiday cruise atmosphere. The stomach-clenched anxiety that was standard issue for a patrol in the Bay was singularly missing. You couldn’t stay screwed tight all the time.
The entire passage from Portsmouth to the Holy Loch was completed on the surface, in company with another of those geriatric H-class submarines, and another T-class boat, all three of them escorted by an old sloop of ‘last lot’ vintage to keep the Brylcreem boys at bay. The sky was typical winter for the Irish Sea: glum, grey, solid cloud, but thankfully with very little wind; just listless airs rarely rising to force 3 from the east, holding the clag static right across the western approaches.
Harry did all his watches on the bridge, doing all the watchkeeper things he was supposed to, but goofing too at the other ships in their little convoy, and enjoying just being in the fresh air away from the interminable reek of unwashed bodies and diesel, their stinky cocktail now augmented by vague wafts of mould, courtesy of the weeks of condensation now making itself felt. You always got a lot of condensation on a sub – heat from the engines and all those bodies in close proximity; no real ventilation; the endless damp clothing and the cold steel of the hull where the fetid air coalesced into rivulets, gathering in tiny pools on pipe flanges, behind control boards and bunks, and every other nook and cranny.
On the bridge there was always a show going on. The lack of rain produced the sudden appearance of washing aboard the sloop; a row of vests and dungarees stretched from the galley pipe to the mainmast, wafting in the cold, clear air. The seagulls soared overhead, and always, at every point of the compass, bobbed fishing smacks with their own personal gangs of seabirds, swooping and harassing like the Stukas from the newsreels of Dunkirk and Norway and Poland.
Off watch, Harry laboured away on the never-ending coding work, and when he finished that, he started censoring the crew’s letters. There had been no time to write in their quick turnaround back at Dolphin. So they were taking the time now that they had it. Letters to mums, sweethearts, wives, dads, mates, grandparents. Most lumpen, saying nothing, others really quite lyrical, apart from one of the engine-room back-afters, a Stoker called Mottram, whose letters showed an unexpected sensitivity for an 18-year-old from Gillingham. His wistful reminiscences of domestic life amid his mum and sisters and the cat brought Harry up short with a slap of guilt at how little he had even thought of home and the life left behind.
They didn’t talk much about hearth and home around the wardroom table. Being short-handed in the officer department, there wasn’t that often a quorum even for a game of uckers or cribbage, as at sea each officer often ate alone. Even when Harry didn’t, the Tigger had no conversation beyond his precious weapons; Rita Hayworth, whom he was in love with; and rugby.
On the odd occasion Harry ate with Andy Trumble, the Skipper would continuously quiz him on what he’d do in an endless procession of unlikely emergencies:
‘Right. You’ve been caught inshore . . . shoals and islets between you and deep water . . . Jerry is after you with an E-boat and aircraft . . . you’ve only three hours’ charge left on the batteries . . .’ – then he would laugh like a drain when Harry fluffed his responses – ‘. . . dead, Harry, and all who sail in you. Dead-dead-dead. And sunk too. You’ve lost us the war. Not that you’ll care, because you’ll be dead.’ Etc., etc.
The mundane daily life of a submarine at sea unrolled as they chugged north in their own little cocoon. After dinner on the second night, somewhere west of the Isle of Man, they even had a ‘sods’ opera’ in the disconcertingly empty forward torpedo room. Harry and the Skipper, neither being on watch, were invited. Harry was taught to join in the chorus of ‘The Three Black Bastards from Baghdad’. The Skipper didn’t need any lessons.
‘We are the three black bastards from Baghdad . . . the pox ’n’ syphilis we have had . . . we have no fear of gonorrhoea . . .’ and on and on ar
ound the crush of sailors, each contributing verses vying in extreme crudity with the one gone before, to a squeeze box and a quintet of harmonicas.
Harry reciprocated in his untrained but delightfully melodic baritone with a rendition of ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ which brought a tear to several eyes among the more sensitive ‘Jacks’, disguised by extra-deep pulls on their bottles of pale ale, shipped specially at Portsmouth for such a little en route celebration by the bloke who was doubling as supply officer: Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour.
He looked around the press of shiny, happy faces – teenagers and middle-aged POs, the Skipper, red-faced and belting out his filthy ditty – and he remembered the delicate words and the delicate hand of young Mottram, and the drip, drip of the war was upon him. Everything. From the bombed-out houses, the bits of German sailors floating in the Bay, the crash dives and the depth chargings, and the noise of ships breaking up as they sank, from the Von Zeithen, when he really didn’t understand what it meant, to that U-boat out in the Bay, when he knew only too well.
And the faces: Sandeman at the periscope during the attack; McVeigh, whom he’d thought was going to be his friend, watching his back disappear, not knowing it would be for the last time. And in-between, cradling Ted Pagett’s crushed skull as the Pelorus sank beneath them . . . and then their ascent, out of the escape hatch and into the perfect black and a cold beyond numb. He dreamt about it now, a lot. And that bastard Bonalleck. What had happened to him? The drip, drip, drip of stuff. He might be heading back home, physically, right now, but inside he was a long, long way from home, and still going.
Chapter Eighteen
Harry could see a number of heads at the kitchen table as he came around the back of the house, so there was definitely someone in, even though it was a Saturday afternoon and his father would be out on the hill somewhere, tramping away, or fishing with his pal in their little clinker-built dinghy on Loch Eck; at least his mother was not away gallivanting among her legion of friends.
