Idle, dangerous speculation. He dismissed it. He had his glasses on Grebe’s stern, and he thought Bravo was creeping up a bit, inside her station.
‘Come down ten revolutions, Bailey.’
‘Down ten, aye aye, sir!’
Astern of Unit ‘M’ steamed another pair of destroyers, one of them towing a picket-boat whose function would be to rescue the submariners after they’d transferred to their dinghies. Rogerson’s captain in C3 was a lieutenant named Sandford, and it was this Sandford’s elder brother, who was on Keyes’s staff, who’d brought the picket-boat along.
The centre column, the line of heavyweights, was led by Vindictive. She was an old cruiser – the same class originally as Arrogant – but she’d been substantially modified now for her role of assault ship. She was carrying the main body of the landing force, sailors and marines who were going to storm the mole and neutralize the gun-batteries on it – particularly on its end part, what was referred to in the orders as the mole extension – so that the blockships could get past it and on across the harbour into the canal mouth. The rest of the bayonet-and-bomb brigade were in Iris and Daffodil, two old Mersey ferry-steamers. Not well suited to long journeys in the open sea, they were being towed now by Vindictive.
Behind that assault group came the Zeebrugge blockships, the old cruisers Thetis, Intrepid and Iphigenia. They’d been fitted out during the last few months at Chatham. All their control equipment had been duplicated, with alternative conning and steering positions protected by steel plating and splinter-mats. Concrete had been built in to protect their boilers and machinery and steering equipment, and charges fitted for blowing the ships’ bottoms out, with firing keys in both conning positions. Their masts had been taken out of them, as had all their guns except those right for’ard, which they’d be able to use on their way through and in. Twenty rounds of ammunition for each gun were stowed in shot-ready racks. Every piece of unnecessary equipment had been removed, and so had all items of copper and brass, since the Hun was known to be short of both. Only just enough coal for the journey was carried in their bunkers; and finally all accessible and suitable below-decks spaces had been filled with cement blocks and cement in bags, and rubble and concrete.
All the blockship and submarine crews were volunteers – and there’d been hot competition for places in the ships. Command of Iphigenia had been given to a lieutenant of Nick’s own age, twenty-two, a man named Billyard-Leake: Keyes had approved the appointment for the same reason he’d approved Nick’s: Lieutenants Billyard-Leake and Everard had both acquired reputations for coolness, judgement and leadership in action. He’d said so. As a commanding officer, one actually met and talked with admirals!
* * *
Sarah had written,
Are you all puffed-up and important, with your medal and your ship, my famous stepson? If you are not, I shall be for you! I am! While your dear uncle – who so far forgot himself as to condescend to pay us a visit here last week – is so proud of his nephew that he can barely speak of him coherently!
She’d had other cause than that for writing, though. The main content of her letter had been news of her own, and sadness and thoughtfulness, and a need to tell him about it. It had left him no less thoughtful, but perhaps – wrongly, he thought – less sad. Much less sad? No point trying to hide it from oneself: her letter had made him happy.
Not for a man’s death, he tried to convince himself. By the fact she’d turned to him to confide in. And yet – one stranger, amongst the thousands dying…
* * *
Astern of the three Zeebrugge blockships steamed the pair that would be going to Ostend – Brilliant and Sirius.
‘Coming up to position “G", sir!’
Bailey, Bravo’s RNR midshipman who’d seemed so timorous, was becoming a useful navigator. The previous captain – an RNVR lieutenant-commander, and he’d developed heart trouble – had handled all the pilotage himself, but it had seemed a better idea to let the snotty earn his keep and gain experience.
‘G’ was the last checkpoint before they began the run-in to the target areas. It was also the point where the two forces would divide, the Ostend ships turning five points to starboard and heading almost due south to rendezvous with Commodore Lynes who’d be coming with small craft from Dunkirk. Lynes commanded the Dunkirk base, under Keyes, and the Ostend operation was being left to him.
Ahead, a shaded light flashed briefly. The Ostend blockships would be putting their helms over now, passing astern of this starboard column and disappearing into the night. Nick was watching Grebe, who seemed unable to maintain constant revs.
‘Up ten revolutions, Mid.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ He heard Bailey shout the order down the tube. Elkington reported, ‘Brilliant and Sirius passing astern, sir.’
‘Mid, what’s the time?’
‘Ten-thirty, sir.’
Perfect. And the visibility was still closing in as the drizzle thickened. This was ‘X’-hour, and in precisely ninety minutes, at midnight, Vindictive should be alongside the Zeebrugge mole with her assault force pouring ashore. She’d been fitted with special hinged gangways all down her length, which would be dropped to rest against the top edge of that massive stone barrier.
Elkington said, ‘Wind seems to be holding, sir.’
‘Yes. Touch wood.’
A change of wind from north to south had forced Keyes to cancel the operation and turn the force back to England when they sailed the first time, on April 11th. A northerly wind was an essential weather condition: the smoke-screens, vital to the whole business, had to be carried shoreward, not dissipated or blown back seaward. There’d been a second attempt on the 13th, but that had been abandoned too; wind and sea had risen to such an extent that a landing on the mole would have been impossible.
Third time, and third time lucky, Nick thought. This was the last chance they’d get, with high water falling in the right period of darkness; and if it had to be cancelled for a third time the Admiralty wouldn’t let Keyes try again. There was the matter of security, for one thing; you couldn’t go on for ever putting to sea and turning back again, and holding an assault force locked up in their ships in the Thames estuary, without some knowledge of it finally leaking to the enemy.
It could have happened already. Even now, the Germans could be waiting for them.
Nick asked Elkington, ‘Is McAllister all set up, aft?’
‘It’s a daunting sight, sir. You wouldn’t recognize your cabin.’
He’d got McAllister, who’d been Mackerel’s doctor, appointed to Bravo. She’d had no doctor, and Andy McAllister had proved his worth after that Christmas Eve action. He’d stayed in Dover when Mackerel had left for the London dockyard, and Nick on a visit to the hospital yacht to see Mackerel’s wounded had found him there still looking after them and hoping for a new destroyer job.
However well matters turned out in the next few hours, no hospital yacht would be much use. Whole wards of big hospitals in London and elsewhere were being held ready; special trains had been ordered, staffed by doctors. Even with total success, they’d all be needed.
The ruse of that letter from Admiral Wemyss to Keyes about a possible evacuation of Calais and Dunkirk, and perhaps having to block those two ports, had worked splendidly. Right up to the final briefings, everyone had believed it. And the German land offensive which Ludendorff had launched a month ago – with alarming success – had seemed to justify and support the fears of having to pull out. Now, with the German army still attacking and gaining ground, determined to make the most of their numerical superiority before enough American troops arrived to tilt the balance, this attack from the sea would be a timely diversion as well as a naval necessity.
Nick glanced round his bridge, at new steel plating that had been welded to its rails. There were splinter-mattresses outside that shielding steel. The guns – six-pounders-on the upper deck, and the torpedo tubes, had been given extra protection too. Bravo and Grebe were to be in
side the mole, backing up the CMBs and MLs who’d be inshore to lay smoke and to rescue blockships’ crews. Things were likely to be fairly brisk, inside that mole.
‘There they go.’
Warwick – Keyes’s flagship – with Phoebe and North Star astern of her, and with Whirlwind and Myngs on their port beam, were all putting on speed, drawing ahead to act as vanguard and deal with any enemy patrols that might be encountered between here and Zeebrugge. Everything was happening exactly as planned and scheduled in the orders; and as each stage was reached there was a degree of relief in moving forward to the next.
Elkington said, his voice echoing Nick’s unspoken thoughts,
‘Be glad when we get to grips with it.’
What must it be like, Nick wondered, for the men in the landing parties, cooped up over there in Vindictive, Iris and Daffodil. For them, this raid would be something like Russian roulette – with five of the six chambers loaded.
He lowered his binoculars, and answered Elkington: ‘Better than sitting over that damn minefield, isn’t it?’
* * *
‘Mind you roast ’em, eh?’
Edward Wyatt, in Vindictive, nodded to Brock, the RNAS Wing-Commander whose smoke, smoke-floats, flame-throwers and other pyrotechnical products were to be much in evidence during the coming battle. Brock was planning to land on the mole with the storming parties, too, to try to find some new sound-ranging apparatus which the Germans were believed to have installed there. He’d smiled at Wyatt’s proposal: Wyatt added to it.
‘Or boil ’em in oil, while you’re at it?’
Brock was making adjustments to the after flame-thrower. Wyatt left him in the steel shelter they’d built for it, went down the ladder and over to the starboard side of the upper deck. There was plenty of time in hand, and he could still have been down in the old cruiser’s wardroom, where coffee and sandwiches were available; but it was difficult, he’d found, to sit about, doing nothing. Tension, expectancy: it stretched the nerves, made you want to move, crack jokes, flex your muscles! Plenty of other men were doing the same thing: prowling to and fro, joking, laughing: or alone, silent and deep in thought. He walked for’ard along the starboard side; there was open deck-space here, room to move – unlike the port side, which was a mass of fittings and equipment for the mole boarding operation.
Destroyers’ shapes were visible to starboard, and the white curls of their bow-waves. He stopped, leant with a shoulder against the cutter’s after davit, and stared across a jumping, loppy sea at the attacking force’s starboard column. Those two destroyers’ silhouettes were unmistakable, dark or no dark: they were thirty-knotters. For inshore work, he guessed – expendable, stern of them, just abaft Vindictive’s beam, were two much more modern boats – Trident and Mansfield – towing the submarines. Narrowing his eyes, he peered at them through the darkness. He could make out the destroyers well enough, but only one submarine. The leading one was there, in tow of Trident; but the other seemed to have disappeared.
The harder you looked, the less you saw. One needed binoculars to make sense of it. They must both be there. Otherwise surely both destroyers wouldn’t be.
He pushed himself off the damp, grey-painted steel, and strolled on for’ard. Hardly any motion on the ship: but plenty of squeaks and rattles. Well, she’d seen a bit of service in her time, had Vindictive.
Nothing to what she’d see in the next hour or two!
Up on the level of the false deck, on his left, loomed one of the 7.5-inch howitzers that had been installed to bombard gun positions on the mole after the ship was secured alongside. She’d be below the level of the parapet, so howitzers were the obvious things, for their high trajectory. There was an 11-inch one on the quarterdeck, and another of these 7.5s on the foc’sl.
It was going to be hellish noisy, alongside that mole.
A false deck had been built on the skid-beams – the supports on which seaboats normally rested – all down the port side from foc’sl to quarterdeck. Wide ramps from this starboard side sloped up to it: three of them, providing ample and easy access to that higher level, which would be almost as high as the mole’s parapet. Not quite, though; and there’d be a wide gap to be bridged as well, so there were eighteen gangways hinged to the false deck and triced up. Released, they’d crash down on to the parapet. The false deck provided cover, too; while they were waiting to be ordered up the ramps and over the gangways, the storming parties could take shelter under it.
Wyatt’s palm stroked the butt of the revolver at his side. He’d like to be moving now: leading his company of fifty sailors with their grenades and rifles and machine-guns in a swift, wild charge on to the mole and over that shed’s roof to the guns. Speed was the thing: speed and ruthlessness and the hell with what might be coming at you. Attack: and think of nothing else. Like a rugger dash, in a way; and as one who’d played rugger for the Navy, Edward Wyatt knew all about that.
Not quite as gentlemanly as rugger. Bullets and cold steel and high explosives and no handshakes either before or after. The training at Chatham had been rigorous and intensive: the men were hard as nails and they wouldn’t be looking for prisoners.
He saw Harrington Edwards strolling aft with Peshall, the padre. They were coming this way, and he didn’t feel like joining their conversation, so he turned away quickly and went up the nearest of the ramps to the false deck. Padre Peshall would be going ashore with the storming parties: he’d played rugger for England and he was unlikely to confine his activities to saving souls. Edwards, a bearded and one-eyed RNVR lieutenant-commander, had been all through the Gallipoli campaign and had since been wounded in France; it was odd, Wyatt thought, that a naval officer should be in a position to claim three years of trench fighting experience. But he was a good fellow. They all were: fighting-cocks, handpicked; it was just that he didn’t feel in the mood, at the moment, for chatting.
At each end of this false deck a ladder led up to a flame-thrower hut. And all along it were the brows, gangways with hand-rails and transverse ladder-grips for footholds; they were upright on their hinges, angled slightly outboard and held there by topping-lifts which were secured to eyebolts in the midships superstructure. The mole would be something like six feet higher than this raised deck, and the brows would lead upwards to it across a gap of twenty or thirty feet. As well as the flammenwerfers and howitzers, there were three pom-poms, ten Lewis guns and sixteen Stokes mortars on this side of the ship; and in the foretop, which of course would be high above the parapet of the mole, were three more pom-poms and another six Lewis guns to fire downwards and sweep the mole’s surface clear of Germans as the men rushed ashore.
Vindictive’s port side had been lined with huge fenders to protect her as she bumped alongside; and the mainmast had been lifted out of her, and laid horizontally across the quarterdeck with its heel embedded in concrete and its end projecting over the port quarter. It would fend the stern off and keep the port propeller clear of the mole’s underwater projection.
Wyatt heard someone coming up the ramp behind him. Glancing round, he saw that it was Cross, his second-in-command in E Company.
He frowned. ‘Looking for me, Cross?’
‘Not really, sir.’ Jimmy Cross smiled. He was one of the contingent lent to the operation from the Grand Fleet in Scapa. Beatty had called on Flag Officers commanding the battle-fleet’s squadrons to provide selected volunteers from their ships; they were to be ‘stout-hearted men, active and keen, who could be depended upon in emergency; and having regard to the hazardous nature of the enterprise, wherever possible, unmarried or without dependants.’ Officers were to be those whose powers of initiative and leadership were known to be high. Flag Officers were to select officers, and Captains the petty officers and men. And one of those selected under this edict had been Cross, who was a gunnery officer and a fleet boxing champion. He stopped at Wyatt’s side.
‘Just it’s getting a bit stuffy below, sir.’ He stared up at the tracery of wires, jackstays and t
opping-lifts above their heads. Black parallels against a background of night clouds that were faintly lighter because they had a full moon behind them. He said, ‘The Germans won’t believe we’d be such idiots as to attack with a moon that could show through at any time it feels like it, d’you think?’
Wyatt didn’t like that much. It sounded like a criticism of Keyes. He grunted, stared across a couple of hundred yards of sea at a whole pack of MLs keeping station on the beam. There was another horde of them, smoke-screen boats, further astern. Cross was looking aft, at the huge grappling-iron suspended from its derrick; there was another for’ard. He murmured, ‘They’ve done a pretty thorough job of disfiguring this poor old hooker, sir.’
Wyatt growled, ‘Dare say the Huns’ll add their tanner’s worth.’
‘Anyway—’ the younger man sighed – ‘not long to wait for it, now… The men seem to be in good heart, sir.’
‘Why shouldn’t they be, for God almighty’s sake!’
Explosive… You never knew, with Edward Wyatt. It was so easy to say the wrong thing, rub him up the wrong way. Crusty swine: worth his weight – which wasn’t inconsiderable – of course, but – Cross shrugged it off. There was a touch of nervous tension in them all, just now. Wyatt added, as if he wanted to justify that outburst, ‘They’ve all asked to be here, haven’t they?’
Every man in the storming parties, whether marines or sailors, had expressed a personal wish to take part in what had been described only as a ‘hazardous enterprise’. Then early this month Admiral Keyes had visited the ships at their anchorage in the Swin, the Thames estuary, described the operation in detail and told them that any of them who were married, or had other reasons to wish to withdraw, could do so without being thought the worse of. Not one man had expressed any such wish.
‘I’m off for a word with Halahan.’ Wyatt turned away. ‘Join you down there presently.’
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 21
