J. E. MacDonnell - 119

by The Brave Men(lit)

  At this particular moment, for some reason, it was not raining; but all the other weather aspects were present, in their normally large measure. There was an oilskin hung over the mouth of a little-used voice pipe clamped against one.side of the bridge. The oilskin suddenly swung wide away, as if under the effect of some mysterious levitation process, and came back clinging to the side. It was not the only thing clinging on that reeling bridge - mainly gloved hands.

  Two of them, gripped around the binnacle, belonged to a man with that sort of quiet, hard, yet pleasant face which you find so often amongst British officers with senior responsibility. It was a face you respected for the qualities of experienced toughness marked so plainly upon it, while at the same time there was something there which engendered trust. Men of the Gestapo were experienced and tough - and brutal. This face on this bridge was different, you knew it belonged to a good man, and decent. It belonged, in fact, to Peter William Gretton, who could write Commander before his name, and D.S.O. and two Bars, O.B.E. and D.S.C. after it. Yet he was only twenty-nine years of age. He was also lord of the 326-feet length, 36,000 horsepower and 36 knots which sailed under the name of H.M. destroyer Duncan; and also in command of the 14th Escort Group, which had on its slop chit thirty-eight heavy-bellied merchantmen. Kokoda, Burma, Tobruk? Admittedly nasty. But there could hardly be a dirtier or harsher war than the one Duncan was fighting. Its significance was tremendous, for if it were lost those men in Tobruk and Burma would go short of petrol and food and ammunition, not to mention men in a hundred other places. Its bitterness was total, for the sea could be as savage as the human enemy. And in its fighting no quarter was given or taken: there were no survivors from an exploded fuel tanker, nor prisoners from a U-boat sent down to be crushed flat by the pressure at a thousand fathoms. This was the Battle of the Atlantic, and brave men fought it, on both sides.

  Always and naturally apprehensive (and hardly alone in that), always tired but somehow managing to remain alert, Gretton at the start of this particular convoy was lightened by a feeling of anticipation. The reason for this was inherent in a message he had passed to the convoy's Commodore. This jocular signal (Lora knows there were few enough of that nature sent), intimated that, as Gretton was getting married shortly after the convoy's scheduled time of arrival, he would appreciate it if the convoy would maintain, or even exceed, its ordered speed. In return, the Commodore offered his full co-operation; forebearing to mention, due to his ignorance of the fact, that four groups of U-boats were being concentrated to attack the convoy.

  Gretton was chaffingly known among his lowerdeck fraternity as the "Ace of the Atlantic." He did not know this; nor did he know that as he swayed behind his binnacle on a bucking bridge the size of a shore-side kitchen, he was, positioning his ship to screen the most savage Atlantic convoy of his young and violent life.

  Beside him, waiting to take over his customary (4 p.m. to 8) dogwatches as officer of the watch, the first lieutenant stared miserably ahead over the white-streaming foc's'le.

  Like Nelson, and also a very experienced captain under whom I served, the first lieutenant was seasick - always was when they left harbour in any sort of a lop after a period ashore, and would be for the next few hours. Then, as had happened on so many convoys before, the squeamishness in his stomach would settle, the tightness round his forehead and the cold sweating would ease away, and he would be able to bring all his experience as a U-boat hunter to bear on seconding his captain in the job of protecting-the fat, wallowing convoy and of beating the life out of any submarine that tried to get in amongst it.

  Because of this proneness to seasickness, and because sailors are as heartless in their soubriquets as they are apt in their choosing of them, Number One was known to his lowerdeck fraternity as the "Sea Rover." But in his case the nickname was an affectionate one; the-Rover was a first-class seaman. He could hardly have been otherwise to hold down his job of deputy to the commander of an Escort Group.

  The sub-lieutenant, officer of the dying afternoon watch, was consciously busy getting the ship into correct station before turning her over to the Rover; though leader of the Group, Duncan was not necessarily always in the van. So the sub. had to bring her up to, and regulate her speed so that she would remain in a position on a line of bearing 45 degrees from his own bridge to the next destroyer ahead on the starboard bow.

  The sub. well knew there would have been no indecision with his orders if he had been alone - Gretton had trained him, too - but the captain's presence there right beside him as he carefully checked his bearing from the other destroyer rattled him. He knew it was time to reduce speed so that she would not overshoot her station, but before he could make up his mind to speak...

  "All right, Sub., you can come down to nine-oh revolutions. We're in position, aren't we?" That's the sort of judgement years of destroyer time gives a man.

  Incalculably priceless, and to Gretton draggingly slow, the convoy ploughed on at about ten knots. Night fell, dark and rough. Duncan bucked and screwed and thrashed through the murk, the white splather of her passing the only relief in the blackness which encompassed her densely on all sides. To starboard, just visible, a long line of dim shapes bulked against the horizon. To port, distant about ten miles, another convoy drew level on its way west to Newfoundland.

  The wind was blowing across from it. Suddenly a sullen boom reached the muffled ears on Duncan's whistling bridge. Far away over the tumbling sea a tongue of flame licked up, then died.

  "They're starting early..." Gretton began; the staccato crackle of the bridge radio-telephone speaker clearing its throat interrupted him. A voice came through - the commodore of that other convoy talking to his escorts.

  "There has just been a big flash astern of me." A second or two, while Duncan's officers swayed waiting, then:

  "That flash was the frigate Itchen." Thus began a new phase in the pitiless Battle of the Atlantic - send escorts down first, then slaughter the merchantmen at will. Gretton broke the taut silence.

  "They won't have a chance in this sea - they'll freeze almost as soon as they hit it." No one answered him - the statement was too obvious to need comment; in water at this temperature a man usually lasted about three minutes before his heart, literally, was frozen to a stop. They were thinking of these ninety-odd men whom the torpedo had left alive, flung without warning into a pitch-black winter sea a few miles south of Iceland. They were thinking, too, of the possibility of a periscope with the picture of their own silhouette swimming in its watery, cross-wired lens.

  Gretton voiced the general thought. "Warn the asdic team, Number One - an extra sharp lookout."

  All that menacing night the mass of ships stole eastwared, alert, apprehensive, darkened for their lives.

  At frigid dawn Duncan closed-up for action; men fully dressed tumbling reluctantly from their hammocks and groping their way into upperdeck air that cut like a knife; coughing as its chilliness touched their lungs.

  They had slept fully dressed in accordance with Captain's Standing Orders; closed-up, they carried out the rest of them.

  "All guns are to be trained, laid, and all moved parts moving through their full limits to prevent freezing.

  "The morning watch (four till eight), stand-fast depth-charge crews, is to be employed before breakfast in chipping the ice from the upper-deck and main armament.

  "No man is to remove his clothing for bathing or turning-in. If hammocks are slung, men are to sleep fully dressed."

  This last order was meant to be taken literally, boots and all; Itchens fate supplied the reason for it.

  On the bridge, muffled to his cold-stung eyes, Gretton peered at the gradually forming shapes of the convoy. He saw that they had lost the rigid alignment they'd held at yesterday's dusk; that meant an hour of shepherding, signalling and bellowing, cursing and being cursed at in return.

  The thought made him check, by eye, his own station. He spoke to the Rover, now officer of the morning watch:

  "
Bit astern, Number One?"

  The Rover had also noticed - with the aid of his bearing-ring.

  "Just a bit, sir. I'm bringing her up now." He had bent to the wheelhouse voice pipe when a sudden shove sent him stumbling to the edge of the grating. A bull voice shook the pipe.

  "Full-ahead together! Port twenty!"

  Then, an ominous accompaniment to the urgent grinding and bell-ringing of the engineroom telegraphs in the wheelhouse below, a swift succession of strident "whooos" reached them from the destroyer on their quarter astern. The Rover regained his balance in time to see the last plume of white (Gretton had caught the first) stream from her siren and shred to streaks in the whistling wind, and a whipping flag climbing its halliards towards the upper yardarm in long jerking swoops.

  U-boat!

  The Rover also saw, from the rear ship of the port wing, a tanker, a vast pillar of flame thrust vehemently at the leaden sky.

  Duncan's crew swayed, slowly and in unison, to meet their ship's heel as she listed to starboard on the turn, while the sea creamed inboard of her low waist and gave an individual how-wave to each guard-rail stanchion.

  The other destroyer was speaking to Duncan in stuttering blinks of yellow light. Gretton didn't have to wait for the signal yeoman's shouted: "Contact bearing 270!" He read the message himself, and spoke with harsh clarity into the voice pipe that ran aft to the quarterdeck:

  "Standby depth charges!"

  Now his face was simply hard, with a singular lack of pleasantness. A destroyer on a revengeful hunt for her main enemy is a cruel hound, and Duncan's hunt-master was as savage as his hound.

  He crouched over his vital bearing-sight and drove her along the line of bearing flashed by the other ship, the asdic's sonic beams spearing ahead in an embracing fan of sensitivity. They searched out, urgently, right, left; and finally laid their fingers on a sub-surface cigar of steel and rebounded joyously to the operator's ears. Duncan had eased her initial headlong speed so as to give asdic all the help she could. Gretton heard the echoing "peep" on the loudspeaker and slammed his hand on the bearing-ring.

  Now both ships had contact, and hurried on converging courses at their best operational speed to get above the quarry, fleeing in the dark tranquility 60 feet below the smoking waves. Then the charges were over, splashing, dropping down.

  The other boat, junior to Gretton, hauled clear and maintained contact. Boat to boat (submarines and destroyers are so-called by their crews), a submarine has most of the advantages. But here was the classic situation - two destroyers on the job, one remaining clear in contact and signalling ranges and bearings, while her consort did the hammering.

  Contrary to Hollywood conception, a submarine capable of withstanding the pressured tons of mid-ocean is not blown to slivers by one depth charge, nor indeed by a full pattern of even ten charges, unless they burst very close. But to a hunter as experienced as Gretton, his asdic set reports were an all-seeing eye; he knew by the German's manoeuvring, his uncertain changes of course and speeds, that he had hit him hard; and he knew he would have to belt him harder.

  He continued to do so, pattern after pattern, until the sea astern was a frothing maelstrom, convulsed every few minutes by bursting eruptions of white water, the mounds becoming smaller as the charges searched deeper.

  Gretton had not moved from the gyro compass, not even to glance astern, where, fascinated by the ship's discharged fury, the others watched the ocean heaving. So he did not see the brown stain that seeped up and laid a calm, oily hand on a wide stretch of water. But he smelt the wholly peculiar, pungent tang of diesel oil.

  On that convoy Duncan carried a secret weapon for U-boats - a terrible machine which had not yet been used. Now was the time. The submarine might be only slightly damaged, or maybe that oil had been discharged deliberately. They had to make sure.

  Gretton now spoke quietly, affectedly nonchalant, trying to hide his acute awareness of the things he was about to do.

  "All right, Number One. Let him have it." Once again at high speed - this, she needed! - Duncan rushed down on the oil stain - not straight for it, but towards the invisible source from which the current was slanting it surfacewards.

  An order passed. From one of her torpedo tubes the huge charge splashed over the side.

  Seconds passed. Duncan thrust on, shaking with speed. On the bridge they waited. They had been told what their new weapon should do. But would it?

  Then the sea astern, for a distance of 100 yards, heaved up; it fell back, seemed to gather itself, then leapt skyward in a crashing, shaking roar. The ship's stern was punched bodily from the water, then slammed down again, a smacking jolt which shuddered through her as though she had rammed a pier.

  Now Gretton was looking back there, with his glasses up.

  "My God," he breathed.

  They all saw it, and were struck dumb with awe. The sea was littered with hundreds of pieces of woodwork, very small, about the size of half -a-crown. The U-boat had been shattered to pieces.

  But the violence of that blast had also shaken some of Duncan's vital and sensitive anti-submarine gear out of action. This was a quite unacceptable state of affairs, and Gretton acted promptly to rectify it. With the convoy's position known to the enemy, W/T silence was broken and a signal flashed to base for spare parts. These were to be flown out and dropped by parachute from a Sunderland flying-boat.

  Duncan hauled out of line, well to the northward and outside, as she thought, the U-boat path, and waited for her plane.

  The Sunderland arrived all right, but with a Morse light flashing urgently from her side. "Submarine surfaced bearing 240 degrees, 10 miles."

  This was roughly south-west.

  Gretton ordered the signal acknowledged and grinned:

  "Good hunting country, Number One - sound action. Starb'd twenty! Two-seven-oh revolutions!"

  This was definitely thirty knots.

  The whine of the engineroom blowers rose to a roar, and she rolled as she turned, lifted her bow high and shocked it down on a mountain of apparent liquidity which jolted her as though it were iron-ore. A lather of spray from the hose of her bow-wave curved up over the flare, lifted gracefully on the wind towards the bridge and drove swift and sharp as needles into the skin of their faces.

  It would be goodnight for a submarine crew to forsake their hull for this pitiless sea. Swiftly through the gathering dusk of the sub-Arctic night Duncan pitched, her asdic set feeling out. When close enough she eased her rush for better operating efficiency, but still her movement was rough. Gretton was swaying behind his bearing-sight, his weather-reddened nose thrust forward at the horizon like the bloodhound he was - every nerve taut, everything subjugated to the intensity of his need to find, and track, and destroy. The convoy lay to the south, and it was not hard to guess the U-boat's destination.

  It was almost dark when the asdic speaker peeped its message. The same method of attack - the fairly fast rush down to escape self-inflicted damage and to give the target a minimum of time to manoeuvre; shower of charges from throwers and rails both sides; and then the tracking and positioning for the next run-in.

  It wasn't needed this time. There was still light enough to see the black, glistening shape, that dreaded and hated shape, shoulder its length up from beneath. No sooner was the bridge clear than a stream of men clambered out, ran to their rails and plunged with the desperation of some private knowledge into the icy sea. "Like rats," said the Rover, now with his sea-sickness long forgotten.

  Duncan was about fifty yards off, shuddering with speed and the belt of waves, when the U-boat cocked her saw-edged nose in the air, high so that the watchers saw clearly the streaming sockets of her starboard tubes, and slid quickly back whence she had come. "Hard-a-port!" rasped Gretton.

  Round she careered, missing the struggling swimmers by an oar's length, straight on over the creaming patch which marked the U-boat's grave. Breaths held, they waited, braced for the shock of collision, the Rover gripping with both h
ands the brass chart-table cover, Gretton choking the compass.

  The drowning Germans were yards astern before, shock-free, Gretton realised the U-boat had beaten them under by a whisker. His breath eased out on a phew of relief.

  "Bring her round, Pilot," Gretton ordered from where he now leaned over the starboard windbreak, looking down. "We might get a couple of prisoners."

  He would be lucky if he got them, from this sea. Slowly Duncan passed through the bunch of bodies. Nearly all were dead, stiff and floating on their backs. The red lights on their life-jackets were burning, shining macabrely into their frozen faces and staring, sightless eyes. "Horrible," muttered the Rover.

  Gretton heard him, coming back to the compass.

  "Yes," he answered quietly, "that's what Itchen's boys must have thought."

  With the chief bosun's mate reporting two live prisoners hauled on board, Duncan hurried on into the night, while her asdic team completed fitting what the Sunderland had dropped. Presently she was back to full operating efficiency.