Gone to Sea in a Bucket

by David Black

  ‘Stalin doesn’t like Hitler any more than Mr Churchill does,’ Harry said from his corner perch.

  ‘Stalin has done a deal with Hitler,’ said Grainger, as if talking to a particularly slow child. ‘They are best pals now, each with a half of Poland to play with.’

  But Harry had the Skipper’s attention, and Carey’s. And the Honourable Bertie, noticing this, leant forward, too. The Skipper knew his Harry.

  ‘Elaborate, Mr Gilmour.’

  ‘Jerry’s troopships. There can be only one reason they’re here. There can be only one place for them to be going: Iceland. Jerry in Iceland, with a U-boat base right on the convoy routes; it would be all over for us. If that is what Jerry is about to do.’

  ‘It is,’ said the Skipper, who sounded like he had a greater knowledge than had so far been shared with this group.

  Harry picked his words, trying not to sound like a university lecturer and more like a man of the world. ‘Hitler and Churchill at each other’s throats means Hitler is otherwise occupied. Stalin doesn’t have to worry about Hitler. But if Britain is defeated, that means Hitler’s got more time on his hands.’

  ‘They have a non-aggression pact,’ said Grainger, still bored.

  ‘Hitler’s form on honouring deals won’t have been lost on Comrade Stalin,’ said Harry. ‘And it’s happened before, with Napoleon. In 1808 the Czar did a deal with Napoleon at Tilsit; promised to enforce France’s continental blockade, keep British ships out of Russia’s ports, be a good boy and not get involved in any continental alliances; and in return Napoleon was going to leave him alone. Four years the deal lasted, then in 1812, Napoleon came after him anyway. The Russians have long memories.’

  Harry sat back, feeling quietly smug about how useful those ‘French nights’ round the Gilmour kitchen table continually proved to be. Lascar Vaizey brought in a tray of steaming mugs of ky and everyone leant forward to warm their hands on the mugs and let the steam warm their noses.

  ‘Jerry’s presumed upon their hospitality. They can’t throw him out, so they are inviting us in to do it for them,’ said the Skipper. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Our mission is to find out what’s going on, and report back,’ said the Honourable Bertie. ‘Much as I’ve been intrigued and entertained by your young Mr Gilmour’s appreciation of the diplomatic state of play, Andy, I think I can say with confidence that their lordships’ reaction to anything more than a straight reconnaissance report will not be so sanguine. Shouldn’t we be just pushing off and getting our radio antenna up once we’re outside the territorial limit?’

  ‘Matters are a bit more pressing, I’m afraid,’ said the Skipper. ‘I haven’t got round to mentioning it before now because I’ve been wondering what to do. As we were coming out, I took a last shufti around the place. I saw a troop train coming in. They’re on the move, or at least, they’re about to be.’

  ‘How does that change things?’ said Carey.

  The Skipper, lost in thought, sat back and pulled the end of his nose. ‘I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but I find the idea of a little huddle of junior officers stuck out in the arse end of nowhere with no one on the end of the telephone, debating the finer points of the war’s strategy, and trying to second-guess the thinking of Mr Churchill, and the lords of the Admiralty, on Anglo-Soviet relations, a bit bloody ludicrous.’

  The Skipper paused to let everyone finish grinning.

  ‘As far as I can see it, the issue is simple,’ he continued. ‘This is war and we are serving naval officers confronted with a tactical problem. What do we know? We know Jerry is in there and lots of them. You had a look-see, Mr Gilmour. All that barracks area, the number and size of the transports. I’m not a pongo, so I can’t accurately guess the size of the force, but there is probably room for, what? Anywhere between five and seven thousand men? What’s that?’

  Harry said: ‘I don’t know how Jerry counts it, but that’s almost the equivalent of a British army division.’

  The Honourable Bertie said: ‘Bloody Norah.’

  ‘So what do we do,’ said the Skipper, not asking the question but starting a list. ‘Let us assume my briefing before we sailed was accurate and they are headed for Iceland. I don’t know our order of battle on Iceland. I don’t know if we can repel such a force if it gets ashore. Nor do I know where they might try to get ashore. And it’s a big, big island. So, do we just forget about all that, get the antenna up and signal the Admiralty and let them worry about it? Well, what happens then? For a start Jerry and Ivan will know we’re here. What will they do?’

  They all sat looking at the buoy.

  ‘Well, I can’t worry about what they will do. I know what I’m going to do,’ said the Skipper. ‘Mr Gilmour, run along to the wireless room and get a signal pad and notebook.’

  And for the next half hour Andy Trumble outlined his plan for The Bucket and the Trumpeter to engage and destroy or at least disable the German transports berthed inside Litsa Fjord. When he was finished, he said: ‘Questions?’

  ‘We’d have to get out of there fast,’ said the Honourable Bertie. ‘We couldn’t bank on Ivan being best pleased, even if it is what he wants us to do. At the very least he won’t be able to look as if he’s best pleased if he doesn’t want to fall out with Adolf just yet.’

  ‘Jerry certainly won’t be best pleased,’ said Grainger. ‘There might be no Jerry naval escort in there, but there will be one next door in Norway. At least half a dozen destroyers. Maybe even light cruisers. Even after Narvik, they’ve still got a few left, and they’ll be coming after us once we’re out of Soviet territorial waters.’

  ‘I fully expect that to be so,’ said the Skipper. ‘Jerry wouldn’t worry about our recce flights picking up warships in Norwegian fjords. He’d know we’d expect them to be there. It’s a landing force he’d need to hide. And now we know that is exactly what he is doing . . . in there. If we obey the niceties of international law and wait until he puts to sea, one of two things will happen. We’ll lose him, in which case the entire home fleet will have to hunt across the entire Arctic Ocean to try and find the buggers before they get to their objective. Or we don’t lose them, but have to fight our way through a substantial naval escort and a lot of air cover to do any damage whatsoever. And how many of them will we get to sink, before the escort gets us? Once he gets to sea, Jerry has the initiative. With him bottled up in there, we have it.’

  And what’s London going to say about all this, if we actually launch an attack? That was the unasked question.

  Harry broke the silence: ‘The Soviets and the Germans are already breaking international law.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Skipper. ‘It’s our own Anthony Eden. You have the floor, Mr Gilmour.’

  ‘If we act now, who’s going to complain? It’s in nobody’s interest. The Soviet Union is supposed to be neutral in this war. Those are obviously military transports in there, and they’ve obviously been there a lot longer than forty-eight hours. Under international law the Soviets should have interned them all by now, just like Uruguay would’ve had to do if the Graf Spee had stayed any longer in Montevideo. If it comes down to who’s broken international law . . . they broke it first. And, will Jerry want to broadcast how badly we’d buggered their plans?’

  ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said the Skipper.

  There were a few grunts round the table. At least I raised a few smirks, thought Harry.

  ‘So what do we think?’ said the Skipper. ‘Anyone with anything to say, say it now. Bertie?’

  ‘If we actually manage to succeed, Jerry will be all over us like a ten-bob suit.’

  The Skipper looked round the table, fixing the rest in turn. Only Grainger looked like he wanted to speak.

  ‘Mr Grainger. Your thoughts.’

  ‘This is suicide, with no guarantee of success.’

  The Skipper nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we’re all agreed then . . . we’re on.’

  Chapter T
wenty-one

  When you’re young and daft, sometimes you don’t know when it’s smart to be frightened. Sometimes the stuff is all so new and exciting that the mortal danger tends to get overlooked.

  Harry had been at war for a whole year now. He’d been at the Second Battle of Narvik, taken part in a successful attack on a German heavy cruiser and had been sunk himself, trapped in the aft section of Pelorus; for the first time in his life, close to death. And he had seen the body parts raining down from that exploding Jerry patrol boat in the Bay. A quiet civilian life had been peeled away from him by random acts of war. Shocked and stunned, he had watched it all happen with the kind of immune detachment granted only to the young. Up until now, the war had been something he’d witnessed. But this was different.

  Sitting here with his face slathered black with crankshaft grease, with half a dozen ratings around him all similarly blacked up, clutching rifles, with bandoliers of .303 around their shoulders, the bullets digging in to them as they squatted underneath the forward hatch: this was fear. Happening-to-you fear. Fear in all its prosaic blandness: the dry mouth, the constricted throat and the nausea and the gaping void in his bowels; and the concentrated effort to breathe slow and deep to stop himself perpetually yawning like a couple of the younger ratings over there.

  They’d all been briefed by the Skipper, then sent off to collect their weapons. Blacking up, they’d all had a shot at nervous bravado; then the lads had politely listened as Harry spoke a few encouraging words to the men he was about to lead. He couldn’t remember now what shite he’d spouted. The fear had got in the way.

  It was when the rating doling out the guns and ammo had handed him a Webley revolver in its webbing holster, and then the shells, smiling in a grandfatherly sort of way at him, and said: ‘Always aim low, sir. That way you’ll make sure you get ’im.’ That was when the fear started. Right there. With the knowledge of what to ‘engage the enemy more closely’ could actually mean: putting a bullet in a German sailor’s body, or worse, the German sailor putting one in him.

  And now their little flotilla was piling on down the Litsa Fjord on a flood tide, in the pitch dark, The Bucket leading. The Skipper and Grainger on the bridge, Carey in the control room on his trim board, and the Tigger and his gun crew, blacked up, and the magazine open and the ammunition party all closed up and ready to go. The two diesels sucking down the freezing air through the conning tower hatch behind him, and the boat chill and dark to get their eyes used to the night, the vague reflection of red light from the control room picking out the tangle of the boat’s innards: its pipes and cable runs, every nook in its cluttered hull. Everything spectral and claustrophobic, the only connection to any world beyond being the bump, bump as they butted into the sharp chop of the fjord being whipped up by a persistent, vicious south-westerly wind. It was time.

  And then they were slowing down, and slewing. Harry could feel the motion through the deckplates. He and his men all shunted up together, too close; he shut his eyes so as not to see all the other white eyes around him, staring out of the cold black faces. Just the sound now of breathing, and low murmuring from the forward torpedo room. The diesels had stopped; they were on motors now. Going astern and moving into the position the Skipper had sketched out on the back of a signal pad all those hours before.

  ‘At least fartin’ Martin isn’t here,’ said a disembodied voice from somewhere in the dark. There were muffled sniggers. ‘Fatal in a confined space,’ said another, to more sniggers.

  ‘I dunno . . .’ Harry recognised the voice: McTiernan, an ERA, one of his deck party; his boarding party. ‘. . . point that arse at Jerry with a following wind . . .’

  ‘Properly loaded of course with one of Lascar’s bum burners.’ Another voice: his own, Harry realised, shocked, then pleased with himself, suddenly no longer crippled with fear. There was giggling now.

  ‘Naw, naw, sir.’ It was the little Glasgow Stoker called Clunie from the darkness, the one who boxed for the flotilla. ‘It’s written intae King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions: Lascar and fartin’ Martin arr no’ allowed tae serve oan the same boat . . .’

  More giggling, Harry thinking, British sailors, and then The Bucket lurched and the telltale hiss of air escaping into the boat told them the first torpedo was away and running. They were firing on the surface, from inside the reef. Close in, with clear shots.

  Everything moved faster after that. The Bucket lurched back, then forward again with the thump of her own diesels, alive again, juddering through the hull. Shouts. Another torpedo, more manoeuvering, forward, then back, then two more torpedoes and two more. All six tubes were fired, and then seconds after the last torpedo had gone the explosions began reverberating through the hull. Hit after hit, more than just six; then other explosions; it must be Trumpeter loosing her torpedoes, too. Then Tigger yelling, and the grunts as the ammunition team started slinging shells. Tigger’s distant high-pitched squeal again, yelling ‘Shoot!’ at the top of his voice. Then a crack! A 4-inch round on the way; then another.

  Harry shut his eyes again, squeezing them tight to look down on it all from a height in his mind, where all the chaos, close up, could now make sense. He saw The Bucket, where she’d gone astern into the one-thousand-yard gap between the three jetties and the reef; edging herself closer to the inside wall of the reef, going resolutely astern to where the run of the wharf ended and the steep ridge behind it curved out and down from the shore. He saw the Skipper slowly manoeuvring the boat, so that her bow swung slightly in, opening the angles on the transports where they lay tied up to the right-hand sides of the jetties. Trumpeter, out in the fjord; her torpedo tubes pointed squarely at the transports on the left hand.

  ‘We will each have a clear shot at three transports each,’ the Skipper had said back in the wardroom. ‘The track angles are broad . . . hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty degrees . . . but Jerry’s a stationary target. Two kippers each to make sure. Can’t miss.’

  But two of the transports were ‘trotted-up’; masked by the ship moored alongside them.

  ‘We’ll use our gun to deal with them,’ the Skipper had said. ‘I shall bring us up astern of them and Mr Milner will shoot them up the arse. They won’t be going anywhere with their rudders and props blown to buggery.’

  A voice cut into Harry’s mental reconstructions: ‘Mr Gilmour!’

  It was the Torpedo Gunner’s Mate. Harry’s eyes flashed open and the white of the man’s face glowed dully in the dark barely feet from his own; framed in a set of Bakelite headphones sticking around the torpedo room bulkhead door. ‘You’re on, Mr Gilmour!’

  The Skipper on the bridge took his eye off the Tigger’s handiwork yet again to glare down the length of The Bucket’s forward casing, slithery bright in the wash from the dockside floodlights, and where the forward hatch remained inexplicably shut. There was too much damn light about. How no one had spotted their dark shadow in that glare he’d never know. And where the bloody hell was Gilmour? He’d passed the order for him to get moving an age ago . . .

  Crack!

  The Tigger’s sixth shot.

  The order had been for six shells into the first tub, then six into the next, then back again for another four each. To make sure. But the Tigger’s first had sailed into the night and rattled a crane on the jetty, the second had gone through the funnel and blown a lump off the central superstructure’s boat deck and the third had merely demolished the poop deck.

  ‘Down a bit, Mr Milner, down a bit.’ The Skipper had tried to sound encouraging instead of yelling, because it wasn’t the Tigger’s fault, it was his. He’d seen the floodlights during their look-see yesterday; he knew he was going to have to take the boat in closer because of the reef, right into the spill of their glare, so he should have known Tigger would be firing right into that glare. He’d ordered the boat darkened to preserve everyone’s night vision, but when the gun crew came up they’d been dazzled by the floods that drenched the jetties and wharf in
halogen light. He’d overlooked that, hadn’t he? Silly Billy Andy – that’s how you got people killed.

  But as the Skipper squinted into the light himself, the Tigger’s fourth shell blew the transport’s rudder right off its post. Grainger, out the corner of his eye, saw the Skipper’s profile caught between the chemical glare and shadow, in a rictus, a comic gothic gargoyle, manic with delight. Grainger started laughing. The Skipper swung to face him, and became himself again, yelling, ‘Where’s bloody Gilmour?’

  As he yelled, the forward hatch opened, disgorging sailors: Harry, bundling up like the rest of his team in a big, brown watchkeeper’s duffel, distinguished only by his watch cap; the sailors in caps, their rifles slung but getting in the way when they went to haul up the semi-inflated dinghy. The Skipper wanted to shout, ‘Get a bloody move on,’ but they were moving fast and smooth, thanks no doubt to Harry’s dress rehearsals. He shuddered to imagine what kind of shambles might have resulted otherwise. And what with all the bloody banging and crashing going on, perhaps the moment called for a bit of Andy Trumble sangfroid. He didn’t want his lads flustered. And that young Gilmour, he could keep his head . . . so let him get on with it.

  He watched as Harry and his now-practiced deck party swiftly opened the dinghy’s compressed air bottle and blew it to its full shape, tightened home the small petrol outboard. Then they started piling into the big black blubbery thing, while Harry and one of the Petty Officers began sliding it over the saddle tanks and into the blacker water, dancing with reflections, before jumping in themselves. With a splutter barely audible above the diesel thump and the racket of battle, they sped away right below him on the bridge, into the night and towards the wharf and the moored lighters.

  As he leant over the Skipper saw a blackened face looking up at him from the dinghy’s bows, split silly by a grin of teeth, and a thumbs-up raised high and poking from fingerless mittens. He knew it was Harry by the watch cap. Silly bugger.