‘Aye aye, sir.’
Not much later, Cross thought. It was past eleven o’clock. In less than an hour, they’d be leading their men up those gangways.
He turned his back on them, and went down to see if any of E Company might have last-minute queries. On the way down the ramp he glanced up at the clouds again. If they blew away, and the attack had to be carried out under a full moon, bright as day: phew… There’d be the smoke-screens, of course, and they were necessary in any case because of starshell and searchlights; but with the whole area lit up by a moon, old Brocky’s smoke would need to be five times as thick as smoke had ever been. And the wind must hold… A story had gone round, leaked by one of Keyes’s junior staff officers, that after the first two attempts to launch the operation had been abandoned the Admiralty had been about to call off the whole thing, pay off the ships and disband the marine battalion, send the Grand Fleet detachments back to Scapa. Keyes had pleaded with Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the First Sea Lord, for his support in allowing a third sortie. Wemyss had said, ‘But you wanted a moonless night, as well as a high tide at midnight!’
‘No, sir.’ Keyes had told him, ‘I wanted a full moon. Couldn’t wait for it, that was all.’
Wemyss had stared at him incredulously. Then he’d grinned.
‘Roger, what a damned liar you are!’
* * *
Wyatt found Captain Halahan with Colonel Elliot of the Marines and Carpenter, who was commanding Vindictive but not her landing forces, in the cruiser’s chartroom just abaft the bridge.
Halahan was in command of the naval landing force. Until he’d volunteered for this job he’d had the siege guns on the Belgian coast. He and Elliot had worked closely together and with Keyes, in the last three months, planning the mole attack; Elliot’s Royal Marines had trained at Deal, and Halahan’s bluejackets at Chatham. At Deal they’d built a mock-up of the mole, and stormed it day after day, putting the story out that it was a replica of some position in France which in due course they’d be attacking.
Carpenter, although he was now Vindictive’s captain, was primarily a navigator and staff officer who’d been with Keyes in the Plans Division in London and since then had been the prime mover and chief coordinator of all the planning.
There was concern now in his bony, sharp-featured face as he looked up, saw Wyatt, glanced back at Halahan. Wyatt asked Elliot, ‘Something wrong?’
‘Monitors haven’t opened fire. They should have several minutes ago.’
Erebus and Terror, to the north-east of Zeebrugge, should have started their bombardment forty minutes after ‘X’-hour. And when they did start, those big guns would be audible. Wyatt said, ‘I saw three CMBs go tearing off, just as I came up here.’
‘Units A and B.’ Carpenter nodded. ‘Laying smoke ahead of us as we approach. Three waves of it.’ Halahan murmured, ‘Oh, what a fount of knowledge.’ He glanced at Wyatt. ‘Problems?’
‘None at all, sir.’
‘Good. It’s too late for problems.’
Carpenter had gone out on to the bridge. Lieutenant-Commander Rosoman, his first lieutenant, was at the binnacle, and Wyatt heard Rosoman’s shout of laughter ring out at some remark his captain made. A happy, lively fellow, Rosoman. And keen as mustard, another of Keyes’s personal selections. He’d had the responsibility of Vindictive’s fitting out, since Carpenter had been occupied with all the planning.
Osborne, the ship’s gunnery commander, walked in.
‘Shouldn’t the monitors be doing something by this time?’
Halahan glanced up, nodded, returned to his quiet conference with Elliot. They were studying a plan of the mole, checking over the details of which company would do what, and when. Osborne looked at Wyatt, raised his eyebrows, and stalked out again. Wyatt looked over Elliot’s shoulder at the mole plan.
The most vital objective was the capture or destruction of the guns on the end of it, where the blockships would have to pass. But there were other guns here and there, and a garrison with its living-quarters and other buildings on it; plus a seaplane base with four hangars, a railway station and two large goods sheds, and an overhanging submarine shelter. The mole itself was a massive stone construction just over one mile long, connected to the shore causeway by a 300-yard viaduct, a lattice-work construction of steel girders under which the tides raced and which carried a double railway line and a roadway to the mole. It was this viaduct that the submarines were intended to blow up, so that the Germans wouldn’t be able to rush reinforcements over it.
The mole was eighty yards wide. On its outer side where the assault ships would berth it had an outer wall twenty feet high; on top of this was a ten-foot roadway protected by a three-foot parapet. So the attackers would have to get over that little wall on to the roadway, then down the sixteen-foot drop to the broad surface that was concreted, dotted here and there with guns, buildings and so on.
Near the end of the mole a long building had been erected fairly recently, and its flat roof seemed to be more or less level with the raised roadway. This had been chosen as the place for the attack. The landing parties could rush over the flat roof and get close to the mole-end guns, thus avoiding the alternative of a painful advance up the mole itself against barbed wire and well-sited machine-guns. (There seemed to be trenches on the mole, too, with stone embankments protecting them.) The guns at the end, and on the extension – after the mole’s full width came to its end, the ten-foot roadway alone was carried on for another 360 yards to a lighthouse on its tip – those guns were in an extremely exposed situation, and once over the long building’s flat roof the landing force should be well placed to rush them.
The guns were thought to be 4.7-inch. Once they were taken, there was to be an advance westward down the mole, marines covering a demolition party of specially trained bluejackets whose orders were to do as much harm as possible to cranes, guns, the seaplane station and any ships or dredgers alongside. Sandford, Keyes’s staff officer who’d planned the submarine attack and was now in the rescue picket-boat, had also planned the demolition work – in such detail that he’d borrowed wicker baskets on wheels, from the Post Office in London, for the explosive charges to be wheeled along in.
Thunder, suddenly, in the north-east…
Elliot and Halahan looked up, and smiled. Halahan murmured, ‘Better late than never.’
Elliot ran a forefinger along his little clipped moustache: ‘Thank God for it, anyway!’
The monitors had opened fire fifteen minutes late. Captain Carpenter pushed in through the doorway from the bridge. ‘Hear that?’
‘Late.’ Halahan nodded. ‘Rotten staff-work.’ Carpenter opened his mouth to answer: but an aeroplane-like roar close by made speech impossible for the moment, drowned out the rumble of the cruiser’s engines and the multiple rattlings of her fabric. As the noise lessened Colonel Elliot asked, ‘What was that?’
‘CMBs.’ Carpenter had knitted this whole thing together, he knew each move, minute by minute. ‘Units C, D and E, to be precise.’ Halahan interrupted, teasing him again: ‘You’re showing off, Alfred.’ Carpenter’s deepset eyes smiled: he went on, ‘C lays a smoke-flat off Blankenberg and renews it with another every twenty minutes. D goes flat-out to the mole and lays smoke-floats in the western section, and patrols that line until he’s relieved by Unit I—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake—’
'—which consists of eight MLs. And E does precisely the same thing in the eastern section.’ He bowed to Halahan. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me—’
‘Who wouldn’t.’ Halahan turned to the others. ‘But—’ he glanced at the clock on the bulkhead – ‘we’d better go down. Fun starts in half an hour.’
* * *
Tim Rogerson stopped beside Petty Officer Harner. Harner was on the stool behind C3’s wheel, in the dimly-lit control room, although he wasn’t doing anything about steering. Rogerson said, ‘Permission for me to go up, please, cox’n.’
Harner leant sideways to the
voicepipe.
‘Lieutenant Rogerson on the bridge, sir, please?’
‘Wait a minute!’
Baldy Sandford’s voice. John Howell-Price, the submarine’s first lieutenant, was doing the steering from the bridge; down here, Harner was only standing by a disconnected wheel. In the engine-room, ERA Roxburgh and Stoker Bindall had just started the boat’s petrol engine; the rush of air through the control room, sucking down through the hatch and aft to the engine, was fierce.
Sandford called down, ‘In engine-clutch, half ahead!’
Rogerson moved to the telegraph on the after bulkhead, passed the order through to the ERA. He heard Dick Sandford’s voice in the tube again: ‘Cox’n ’ what’s the time now?’
‘Eleven twenty-six, sir!’
‘Very good.’
Rogerson wondered what was happening up top. They’d slipped the tow: that was obvious, from the fact that they were moving now under their own power. Altering to starboard, by the feel of her, the slight heel. They were supposed to wait, once they were clear of the main assault force, for C1 and the picketboat to join them when they’d slipped their tows.
‘Stop engine!’
Harner repeated the order as Tim whirled the handle of the telegraph. Stopping now to wait for the others, he thought. And then, I make a first-rate telegraphman… He was spare, really. If anything happened to Howell-Price he’d step into his place; or if Sandford was hit, and Howell-Price took over the command… But C1 had only two officers, and Rogerson wondered whether Sandford hadn’t issued him with the invitation to this party before he’d known he had Howell-Price with him anyway.
She was stopped now, wallowing, rolling like a tub. An ancient craft. Built in 1906, the Cs were almost replicas of the earlier Bs. Single-screw, 200 horsepower out of a 16-cylinder petrol motor, 135 feet long and displacing 300 tons. Entirely fit, he thought, for this conversion to floating bomb.
One was acutely aware of that Amatol up for’ard. Of what might happen, for instance, if a shell hit it, on their way inshore. But it was easier when one turned one’s mind elsewhere, and there were problems enough to come without considering the possibility of accidents, pure bad luck. Such misfortunes were insured against by having two submarines instead of only one; one would be enough to do the job, but the second was the back-up, making sure of it. Only one thing was sure, he thought: that within a very short time all this would be ripped apart, blown to shreds. He looked round the cramped, cave-like control-room. The two periscopes were down and housed; the single brass hydroplane-control wheel gleamed like dull gold. It was handy that in these old Cs and Bs there were no fore ’planes; it would have been necessary to have removed them, so as not to impede the boat’s penetration of the viaduct.
The idea was that her forepart would drive in between the girders, and explode right in the middle of it.
‘Time, cox ’n?’
‘Eleven-thirty and a half, sir!’
A moment’s pause: a muttered exchange up there on the bridge. Then: ‘Half ahead. And tell Lieutenant Rogerson he can come up.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Leading Seaman Cleaver’s seaboots came into sight at that moment, clumping down the ladder. Stepping off it, meeting the coxswain’s enquiring stare, he announced, ‘We’re on our tod. No sight o’ C1 and no bleedin’ picket-boat neither. I dunno.’ He shook sea off his oilskins. He’d been down on the fore casing, casting off the tow. Rogerson went behind him and stepped on to the ladder, hauled himself up through the lower hatch and then the dark, salt-smelling tube of the conning-tower and up from there into the rocking bridge.
Sandford, leaning in the front curve of the bridge beside Howell-Price, turned and nodded to him.
‘All well, below?’
‘No problems, sir.’
‘Well, we have one up here, old lad. The others ’ve gone the wrong way, or something. Silly cusses!’
A rumble of gunfire from astern somewhere. Turning, he saw flashes lighting a clouded horizon some miles off on the port quarter. Sandford murmured, ‘Erebus and Terror stirring the Hun up ready for us.’ He laughed. ‘But they’re used to it, they won’t think it’s anything special. The idea’s to make him keep his head down for a bit.’
Damp night air: drizzle and the stickiness of sea-salt. Swish of sea rushing aft over the saddle-tanks and washing through below this free-flood bridge. Racket of the engine, its exhaust drowned in the white-foaming wash. Rogerson thought, So we’re alone. All up to us.
How long now?
It hit him suddenly, the reality of it. This wasn’t something in the mind, a plan, something rather thrilling that one was thankful to have been let in on. It was now!
At least, in about twenty minutes…
In the circumstances, the need to make sure of it because the whole thing was in their hands alone, he didn’t think Baldy would use the gyro-steering device. Both submarines had been fitted with it. When they were a hundred yards or so from the viaduct they could, if they wished, take to the dinghies and leave the submarine to steer herself on the pre-set course.
He didn’t think Sandford would have used it anyway. Nobody had ever discussed doing so. And it would be frightful to get that close and then leave everything to a gadget that might let them down.
‘Lovely weather for a continental visit. Eh, you chaps?’ said ‘Uncle Baldy’.
‘Beautiful.’ Howell-Price was still concentrating on the steering, and looking at the white wake astern you could see that the boat’s track was ruler-straight. ‘This sort of drizzle makes a man feel he’s never left home.’
Sandford began to warble the Eton boating song. Rogerson wondered what the devil could have happened to the others. Might the picket-boat have been swamped? She’d very little freeboard. The people in C1 were pals, former shipmates and messmates. They’d be thoroughly fed up, to find themselves out of it. Engine-trouble, probably. It was sensible enough to use old scrap-iron ships for throw-away jobs, but there was that disadvantage, the element of unreliability.
He wondered how Nick Everard was getting on, in his old oily-wad. That was a throw-away job if there ever was one! And thinking of Nick, his mind turned to his own sister, Eleanor, who was – or thought she was – in love with him. Nick somehow held back: you could see he was attracted to Eleanor and that they got on well together, even got a bit spoony sometimes; but he was – oh, sort of detached, he acted like a man in love with someone else, or married, even… Strange fellow, in some ways. And mad keen – one might almost say a raving lunatic – these days about the Navy.
Howell-Price said suddenly, ‘I can smell Brockish vapour.’
‘Just as well.’ Sandford had stopped singing, which was kind of him. He said, ‘We’re going to need that smoke of his. Unless they don’t spot us at all, of course. And that could happen, don’t you know?’
Howell-Price nodded, watching his course. He muttered, ‘And pigs could fly.’ Rogerson thought of something: ‘Aren’t the birdmen supposed to be plastering ’em with bombs, by this time?’
‘So they are.’ Sandford removed his cap, and scratched his head. Even in this darkness, you could see how he’d acquired his nickname. ‘Weather, probably. Wets their feathers, or something. Shouldn’t think it’d make much odds.’ He stooped to the voicepipe: ‘Cox’n – time now?’
‘Fourteen to the hour, sir!’
‘Thanks.’
Smoke: they were running into the edges of it. Pungent, foul-smelling. It would be worse in a minute: you could see, ahead, a sort of bank of extra-thick darkness. A CMB had done that to it, pouring some chemical from its exhaust and depriving all the old ladies back home of their favourite sugar-substitute. Vindictive would be approaching the smoke-barrier too, Rogerson thought. The other side of it, they’d find the mole. Smoke – thick smoke – surrounded C3 now. Howell-Price called suddenly, ‘Hey! I say… D’you feel that?’
‘What?’ Sandford stopped, leaning to put an ear to whatever his first lieutenant had to s
ay. ‘What’s that, John?’
‘Wind. Breeze. I’d swear its – off-shore!’
‘Oh, surely not…’
Rogerson felt it too. And realised what it meant. All the smoke the CMBs and MLs were laying to shroud the advance and the assault would be wafted out to sea: which meant total exposure to the German gunners on the shore and on the mole… But the shift in wind direction might not be permanent: it could be a fluke, a false alarm. Sandford called into the voicepipe, ‘Cox’n – send Cleaver up, please.’
Harner’s voice was thin in the copper tube: ‘Leading Seaman Cleaver on the bridge!’
He was there almost instantaneously, a dark figure hoisting itself out of the hatch. ‘Sir?’ Rogerson edged sideways and aft, squeezing round the after periscope-standard, to make room for him. Sandford said, ‘Go down on the fore casing, Cleaver, and turn on the smoke-canisters. Wait there and see how it drifts.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’ The killick cocked a leg over the side of the bridge, swung over, clambered down the rungs welded to the outside of it. Sandford began, addressing Howell-Price, ‘If our own smoke could be persuaded to blow along with us—’
Westward, heavy guns crashed, flamed. Smoke made it confused, difficult to pinpoint them: but it was savage, continuous firing breaking suddenly out of silence, as if it had been held back, pent up and now suddenly released. Wreathing, eddying smoke watered the flashes still: but there were explosions of shells striking as well as the sharper spurts of gunfire: the roar of it spread, increased, thickened. A splitting crash, like close and vicious thunder, made them all look up; overhead, above the enshrouding smoke, a starshell burst into a source of brilliance that lit the clouds like daylight. The smoke was blowing past them faster than they were moving across the sea. Rogerson was sure of it. The wind had shifted: he thought of Vindictive suddenly exposed as she approached the mole at point-blank range. Sandford was shouting over the front of the bridge, ‘Pack it in, Cleaver!’ He raised his arms, fore-arms crossed, the visual signal meaning ‘belay’. Cleaver waved acknowledgement, bent to the canister to turn it off; its smoke had been streaming seawards, useless. Sandford was at the voicepipe now: ‘Cox’n?’
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 22
