It looked like a destroyer's picnic - a dogfight inside a small harbour crammed with troopships, but neither ship knew then what else they were about to tackle.
The jungly promontory protecting Endau Bay from the south was raised about six in the evening. Both ships at once altered course out to sea, to wait till the moon went down.
When the yellow disc at last slid below the world's rim the two little ships, impatiently keeping station in the friendless dark, settled their low tails -in the water and got down to business.
Not a chink of light revealed their black silhouettes, not even a cigarette glowed. Deadlights were tightly clipped over scuttles, all mess-deck lighting except that necessary for ammunition-supply parties was doused; they went in with black canvas screens over all upper-deck doors and hatches that weren't shut, galley fires out, instrument lights on bridges and guns a dim merging blue, stoker petty-officers in their `tween-deck hades watching so that not a spark from those roaring, boiler-wreathing jets of superheated flame reached the night air.
Totally darkened, they slid through the harbour mouth. Moran had no need to check his darken-ship routine, for the petty-officers responsible for it remembered that night off Tobruk when a carelessly-laced screen on an Italian supply ship flapped open, and brought a rupturing blast from sister-ship Waterhen's ready guns.
Now they were inside the harbour. Almost at once Vampire, leading, sighted two Japanese destroyers under way fine on the starboard bow; and, further in, others.
Now was the time to get out, to slink away unseen from those unexpected and superior enemy forces, to leave a harbour which they'd thought contained only troopships. Any one of those big Jap destroyers could have taken on both the aged intruders. The risks were too savage, they should clear out.
Moran gave no orders, vocally. His silence, which had Vampire maintaining her inward course, was just as effective as a shout. And so this handful of brave men went on in. Few of them believed they would ever get out again.
Now that first pair of Jap destroyers were so close that Cartwright, torpedo-control officer as well as navigator, almost whispered his orders as he trained his sight on the leading ship's bridge.
He had to be quick, and he was. Two torpedoes leapt out and speared for the target. They watched the twin tracks reach out, swift and straight, and touch the destroyer's side. And nothing happened.
The range was so close that neither fish had had time to regain its correct depth-setting after its initial deep lunge.
Incredibly, the Britishers were still undetected. Eyes straining, Vampire's bridge made out a third destroyer 2,000 yards ahead, dwarfed between the shapeless bulk of half a dozen troop transports.
Cartwright emptied another tube. This time the Japanese saw the red tongue across the water. The Australian replied with a broadside, echo to the brilliant gush of red flame which marked the violent expenditure of a quarter-ton of T.N.T. against the enemy destroyer's bilges. This time the range had been long enough...
At once a searchlight opened its shaft of light and, with the glare of a disturbed enemy upon them, all hell broke loose in the harbour. The sea spouted. The two Japanese boats which had been missed by the first torpedoes opened up with full broadsides, joined by guns from ashore.
A rabbit caught in a car's headlights enjoys obscurity compared to the hard brilliance which outlined Vampire and Thanet, whipping and spitting like Kilkenny cats round that silvered, spouting harbour, urged to full thrust in a cluttered waterway whose greatest depth was five fathoms. All hands believed it was just a matter of when.
Cartwright, busy on his charts under the weather-dodger, pulled his length out and queried the signal yeoman behind him:
"Why the hell aren't our guns firing?" The navigator was normally sane enough, and the surprise in the yeoman's answer was natural.
"Firing, sir? We've been in rapid broadsides for the last five minutes! Listen."
And as he listened, consciously, the din beat against his eardrums with an almost physical violence. But until then his whole mind had been totally absorbed in navigation, and he hadn't heard a shot!
They all heard the next one.
Gallant little Thanet -in this mad arena of noise, flashes, smoke, cordite stink and ships, brief vehicles of reflected light in the blackness, dashing in and out of the searchlight beams fastened steadily on Vampire, but still in her correct station astern - little Thanet caught a shell in one of her boilers.
The enormous, disciplined force of steam under superheated pressure was unleashed abruptly in a giant blast that lifted the ship's midship deck, huge leaves of steel twisting in the searchlight's glare, and burst her sides and bilges open to the sea siding with the enemy her own strength had ruptured her, as effectively as if she had stopped the whole of a battleship's broadside.
Most of her crew left alive had time to abandon her before, still making way and vomiting plumes of white into the night, she staggered under.
Still flat, out, and still the miraculously alive target for a score of concentrated guns, Vampire burned a smoke-float on her foc's'le. The wind of her speed chased the thick whitish vapour far astern, writhing silver along the searchlight's finger like cotton-wool winding a swab stick. Then Moran had a simple and brilliant idea. He leaned over the fore windbreak and shouted to the toiling shadows round A-gun.
"Heave that smoke-float over the side!" It was, undoubtedly, this quick thinking which saved her life. Believing that another enemy ship had got in, and was on fire, both Jap destroyers shifted target to the smoke, now also light-held, and opened a heavy fire. Unaware of this, and also sighting the smoke, a third Japanese boat nosed in to investigate. The first pair's belief in another enemy ship was naturally strengthened when their binoculars sighted a vague shipshape through the smoke. Exultantly they increased an already forceful close-range bombardment; to such good effect that one of his Imperial Majesty's own destroyers just managed to beach herself before, stern first, she sank.
Moran took immediate advantage of this disharmony in the enemy ranks, here was only one obstacle to their escape. He rested his belly against the windbreak and bellowed above the uproar:
"A and B-guns, local control. Take the searchlight!"
No need to designate which light. Layers and trainers squinched their eyes to slits against the magnified glare through their telescopes and let go almost together. The great eye exploded in a burst of orange light; darkness rushed in over Vampire.
Moran was ready with his orders and the engine-room more than eager to get them. At top speed, as fast as ever she'd gone in her life, she crashed out into the open sea, slewed round like a terrier-chased cat, and dug her tail down for home.
And now her men, profoundly grateful for the miracle of still being alive, prayed for another - that her engines would hold up. They did, all the way. But then she was British-built.
Even so, she beat Thanet's men home by only a few days; miracle number three.
After Jap search parties had collared Thanet's motorboat load, other survivors on rafts, floats and their own bellies, reasoning that where the Japs had looked once they wouldn't bother looking again, pulled themselves aboard the empty motorboat.
Paddling with bits of wood ripped from her bottom-boards, they got clear of the smoke-wreathed harbour and headed south for Singapore. Sailors are a versatile breed, especially destroyermen, and with sails constructed of lifejacket covers, laboriously stitched together with the sailmaker's needle and twine in the boat's bag, her crew made a jungle-covered island down-coast. Here they landed, commandeered a Malayan junk, set sail; and made Singapore four days later.
Except for the unlucky few taken prisoner, and those killed in the blast, the party had ended happily. But they would never forget it. We meet Vampire next in Trincomalee, then the Royal Navy's base in Ceylon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After her nippy night action she ran a convoy to Batavia, then gave two Dutch merchantmen the doubtful comfort of her presence on t
he lonely and dangerous run across to Colombo. Ducking south round the island to the huge, boom-defended spread of Trincomalee harbour on the north-east coast, she was given to carrier Hermes as her crash destroyer, her job to hang on the big ship's flank ready to dash up and pull out of the sea any pilot unfortunate enough to land in it.
The writer knows Trincomalee well (based there in one of the screening destroyers for the British Eastern Battle Fleet), and remembers the hours he and his shipmates spent quietly paddling in its warm blue waters alongside the ship - ten minutes at first, twenty the next day, then three-quarters of an hour, gradually increasing the period till we could stay afloat with minimum effort for two or three hours: every afternoon twenty or thirty of us, paddling like ungainly ducks, quacking as well, with the rest of the ship's company in the cool of the upper-deck watching, and finding nothing incongruous in this watery tea-party - every now and then one of them would join it.
We had a very good reason for conditioning ourselves to staying afloat; the same one which, on that hot sunny afternoon of April 8th, 1942, when the signal came, had half of Vampire's company over the side, gazing up as they paddled in meditation of Hermes' rearing side, against which their own pint-sized home snuggled.
Suddenly the signal yeoman bustled across the flag-deck, clattered down the foc's'le ladder and hurried aft, a message form in his hand. Many pairs of eyes in the water watched him halt at the quarterdeck, scan the officers-ashore board, then dive down into the wardroom. The swimmers were already heading for the scrambling net hung over the side when the bosun's mate stepped to the guardrails, blew a shrill blast on his call, and yelled: "Swimming party clear the water!"
By the time Commander Moran, with Cartwright in attendance, walked forward to the chart-house, all watches were fallen-in the ship's waist near her tubes, being detailed to secure for sea.
In the chart-house Moran dropped his signal on the polished table, fingered it aside, and laid out a chart. Cartwright read the signal as he handed the captain a pair of dividers.
"Force enemy carriers sighted 350 miles east of Ceylon. Anticipate attack. Ships in harbour are to proceed at midnight and remain 40 miles off-shore."
At five minutes to midnight Vampire slipped her last berthing wire, shot a smother of white from her throbbing tail and swung her nose seaward. Behind her as she passed through the boom gate the bulk of Hermes loomed against the starlit sky. All night both ships cruised in the ordered position, waiting for the dawn.
At 8am they were radioed that Trincomalee had been raided by about fifty Jap aircraft. At 10.25 the port bridge lookout sighted black dots low down on the line of horizon.
"Hands will go to action stations in five minutes time."
It took the 48 dive-bombers about fifteen minutes to close the range. They clawed up into the bright smiling blue, straightened out, kicked over on one wing and came plummeting out of the sun, engine-notes a rising snarl of sound.
Hermes was the target.
One second the carrier's acreage of flight-deck stretched bare and quiet, an ordered reach of tarmac, bulkheads and supporting girders. The next it was converted violently into a cratered mess of smoke and flame and bent-up sticks, like a rumpled crow's nest.
A stick of armour-piercing bombs had penetrated and, their fuses started, ruptured her ordered neatness into steel slivers. Mess tables, paint, contents of kit lockers, books, clothing, fired by the enormous heat generated in each burst, made half a dozen pouring chimneys of her flight-deck.
Again and again the bombers struck, each a winged bat preceding a snarling whine, zooming high again into the blue and laying its egg at the base of a bursting geyser of flung smoke and spray.
In twenty minutes Hermes' captain ordered abandon ship: almost as old as Vampire, she could not take such a fearful battering. She went down under a pall of white smoke, her high mast, with its ensign, sticking a second above the shroud. She took five Jap planes with her.
Now alone, Vampire increased to full speed and prepared to fight for her life. This was harshly clear daylight: there were no tricks Moran could use here. While the little ship shuddered up to high speed her gunners waited for the reforming planes, oerlikon layers strapped behind their long, black, shell-firing barrels, pom-pom muzzles moving slightly as they nosed at the approaching shapes.
The first bomber let go at 1,500 feet. Two bombs struck off the stern; the third over the bridge, cleared the whaler at its davits and exploded alongside in a blast of water that washed the port oerlikon crew clean out of their mounting and along the upper-deck, the phone number being brought up hard by the lead on his head. Quickly they scrambled back, shocked and fearful but still game.
Most sailors know the stoker who, a bit out of normal station, opened the breach of a 4-inch gun aboard his ship in Melbourne to show his popsy "where the bullet went," and found he couldn't shut it. He overcame his difficulty with an airy, "She's right. All breeches are left open till sunset."
In the next few seconds Vampire's pom-pom crew wiped out the stain.
Destroyers may be maids of all work, but certainly (and especially in old destroyers with relatively small crews) their men are jacks of all trades. For instance, a motorboat is coxswained by an able-seaman, whereas a cruiser's boat is in charge of an experienced leading-seaman and a midshipman. For further instance, Vampire's pom-pom crew were all stokers.
In charge was the chief stoker, a veteran of Greece and Crete, a man who had seen dive-bombers before. And now he was waiting with controlled patience for a good target. He got it.
There came suddenly the screaming banshee wail of a diving plane. It pulled out twenty feet above the sea, a colourless streak. A crash of cannon shells and bullets slashed a powdery path through the sea hundreds of yards ahead. The fighter whipped over in a tight bank and came driving in again, brown balls of smoke breaking from its nose and wings.
Still the stokers waited.
Then the Jap hauled his nose-up, exposing the plane's dirty underbelly. The chief shouted. The pom-pom coughed and the lines of tracer leaped out, the plane's smooth streamline erupted in dozens of vicious little explosions, with the flying pieces plain to see. He hit the water in a slewing rush, sprayed a great wall of whiteness fanwise before his nose, and dug under.
That was not only good shooting, but excellent control. And that, of course, in the face of such a menace, indicated a hefty degree of guts.
The next bomb hit. It sheered easily through the shell-like thinness of her hull to A-boiler-room and exploded among the maze of high-pressure steam pipes. Superheated steam is a marvellously efficient servant, but a frightful master; its touch can peel human skin like a cooked beetroot, and one breath of it can sear lungs to uselessness.
From the hole in her deck, from shattered hatches, gouts of steam hissed at the sky, till her after-part was hidden in a blanket of white.
That bomb finished her. Almost stopped, the sea creaming in over the starboard waist, rudder jammed hard-a-starboard, she staggered on through a convulsed sea. Moran ordered abandon ship.
A bomb landing in the vegetable locker rained potatoes on the bridge and blew in the wheelhouse door. The coxswain stumbled to the break of the foc's'le and, joined there by Cartwright, prepared to jump. As they did so, a stick of three blew the ship almost in halves abaft the funnel.
Both of them surfaced in a scum of black fuel-oil pouring from her opened belly and struck out desperately to get clear of the suction. Just as well. They had made better than fifty yards when a plane caught X-magazine.
There was much in there to help that bomb. Vampire's whole afterpart rose slowly and bodily in the air, and then shattered to pieces, but one small compartment was left momentarily intact, and its airlock kept the rudder and screws clear of the water, under the torn red, white and blue of her ensign. Then the bulkhead collapsed, the air escaped in a valedictory sight, and what was left of her shuddered, reeled, then dropped quickly under the fouled sea.
Clinging to rafts
and spars, her men watched her go, shocked and numbed like Waterhen's. The first lieutenant kept himself up with a football in his arms. On one raft they hauled a ghastly figure out of the stinging sea - a stoker from A-boiler-room. The ship's doctor swam from raft to raft, doing what he could. Others, conditioned by those calm hours in the waters of Trincomalee harbour, kept their oil-blinded mates up on arms and shoulders. The servitude of the sea is austere, but it pays dividends.
About four that afternoon a hospital ship hove in sight and lowered boats. She was the Vita, whose crew Waterhen had helped one day off Tobruk when she had been damaged by Stukas. Exhausted faces lit up as she approached. The bosun's mate pulled his pipe from his overalls pocket and yelled with cheery hoarseness: "Swimming party clear the water!"
At ten o'clock the next night Vita pulled into Colombo with her survivors. Commander Moran and nine stokers stayed behind in Vampire.
J. E. MacDonnell - 119 Page 8
