‘Sir!’
Gunfire to port was tremendous. Vindictive must be getting hell. But whoever was being shot at, it wasn’t C3. Not yet. Sandford shouted to the coxswain, ‘Come up, all of you!’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
Cleaver’s head appeared over the rim of the bridge. Sandford ordered, ‘After casing, old lad. Shelter behind the bridge. After we strike, take charge of the port dinghy’s for’ard fall.’
‘Port dinghy’s gone, sir.’
‘Gone?’
A great leaping flash to port: like a sheet of lightning. One could hear, between the thunder of big guns, the chattering of machine-guns and the steady thump-thump-thump of pom-poms. Sandford told Cleaver, ‘Starboard dinghy, then.’ Cleaver vanished, down on to the catwalk and aft round the conning-tower to the casing behind it. Stoker Bindall shot up out of the hatch, with Roxburgh the artificer behind him; Sandford told Rogerson, with glasses at his eyes and searching for the viaduct, ‘Send them down to the after casing and then join ’em there yourself, there’s a good chap.’ Suddenly it was light. Starshell breaking overhead, hanging, flooding the whole area with their harsh magnesium brilliance, and the smoke drawing off them, pulling aft, shredding away and leaving them naked to German eyes: the sea leapt, shell-spouts springing up right ahead of the submarine as she clawed in landwards, floodlit, an easy target for gunners on the mole, on the viaduct itself when they chose to open fire. Gun-flashes in a ripple of bright spurts to the westward of where the mole must be: where the mole was, by God! You could see it, the great black bulk of it – and the viaduct too – as clearly as if this was midday, not midnight, and Howell-Price was altering course by about five degrees, aiming her to strike it in the centre and at right-angles. More shells fell – abeam, this time, to starboard – grey spouts jumping, hanging, collapsing back into black rings on the sea, and the rush of others ripping overhead. Now a searchlight beam sprang out – from the viaduct – swung to them and fastened. A second one joined it: C3 was speared on their points, held between them as if she was a piece of chicken and the beams two chopsticks. Sandford shouted in Howell-Price’s ear, ‘Hold hard now, John! Smack in the centre now, old lad!’ Another shell plumped into the sea to starboard: and then the searchlights, to everyone’s astonishment and relief, switched off. Gunfire to port was rising to a crescendo, a continuous and rising roar. Sandford grabbed Tim’s arm: ‘Damn it, I told you to go down!’
‘Sorry!’
Not only had the searchlights switched off – which could have resulted from a power failure, that was the most likely explanation – but that western gun battery had ceased fire. No easy explanation covered that. C3 had the viaduct right ahead of her, she was cutting a dead-straight white track across the sea towards it: and a flare burst suddenly to hang over the harbour on the other side of it, silhouetting its struts and girders and the high roadway it carried: a vast, looming, criss-cross structure – and men moving about on top of it: still no shots aimed this way. What did they think-that she was harmless, mistaking the viaduct for a gap she hoped to pass through, so she’d get stuck there and be easy meat? Rogerson, climbing over the side of the bridge, saw that towering lattice-work of steel etched black against the brilliance of the flare, growing, expanding across the sky as it towered towards them, and men running about on the roadway like upright ants, and he thought brutally It’ll be German meat…
C3 plugged doggedly in towards it, her petrol engine hammering away: the Germans looked down, watched her come, did nothing at all to stop her. She had about a hundred yards to go.
* * *
Wyatt shouted back to Cross, ‘Tell ’em to wait there till we send for ’em! There’s no way up yet!’ He was on the false deck: he’d been there all the time, and although it was littered with bodies and slippery with blood it was safer now, protected by the sheer wall of the mole. Vindictive still rang with the noise of her own guns and the crashes of German shells ripping into her and exploding, showering her decks with steel splinters which in turn drummed on steel, screeched away in ricochets, but for the same reason-the mole’s protection – it was only in her upperworks now. The stone wall was a solid shield to her vitals – which, God knew, had suffered enough as she’d forged across the last few hundred yards of sea through a hail of shells. Now she was flinging herself about as if in agony, rising and falling and seesawing against the wall, rocking close to it and then away again, still nothing like close enough alongside. She’d come in at full speed and the surge had come in with her, her own following wash and the thrust of water from the bottom forcing up between herself and the mole: a maelstrom of her own making, and there was no escaping it. Half the gangways had been smashed against the wall: three-quarters of the others had been shot to matchwood before she’d got that close, during that last murderous three hundred yards. When they’d burst out of the smoke they’d been too far east: Carpenter had swung the wheel over and increased to full speed, to save the ship and the men in her more punishment than they needed to suffer: in the process, conning her from the port flame-thrower hut, he’d overshot the mark – engines were going full astern now, Wyatt noticed, and they were adding to the turbulence and motion – overshot by nearly four hundred yards: she was that distance from where she should have been. It wasn’t going to be at all easy to reach the guns at the mole’s end: they were a quarter of a mile away, there’d be a quarter-mile of exposed, shot-torn concrete to cover… Well, they’d do it, somehow, E Company’d do it – for the simple reason that it had to be done, it was what they’d come here for. And the first thing was to get ashore… Another shell had just burst in the bridge: but the guns from the foretop were still blazing, and the howitzers were in it now. (Not the for’ard one. The foc’sl howitzer had had two complete crews wiped out, and then the gun itself.) Wyatt, staring upwards as the ship rocked away from the mole again, realised that the derricks carrying the grappling-hooks weren’t tall enough: the hook on this for’ard one wouldn’t – couldn’t – be dropped to grab the parapet, which was what it was designed to do. If it could be got over, the ship could be secured – with the after one as well, of course: and the only way to effect it would be to put it there: to get up there and damn well do it! He pushed past Cross, dodged round a hurrying stretcher-party – below, the doctors were already inundated with work – reached the derrick and began to climb it. The ship’s superstructure was in ribbons, torn and shattered, sieve-like, and she was ringing like a gong – a cracked gong – from the ceaseless pounding she was getting. Bedlam: a screaming slaughterhouse. It would be all right, he told himself, deliberately steadying himself with the thought, once they could get ashore and sort things out a bit: this was just the awkward interval, the sort of thing you had to expect, should have expected, really. A sailor hurrying down the ladderway from the flammenwerfer hut suddenly sprang off it, crashed down, bounced once, hit the deck below it and lay still in a spreading pool of blood. The higher you were, the more exposed, of course. He was getting to the derrick’s curve, and this was the tricky part. He was no lightweight, no monkey, damn it. But it would be all right, everything would work out: a couple of the gangways were still intact and serviceable and several of the others could probably be repaired; when she was properly secured there’d be cover enough to do that, under the mole’s wall. A cracking sound and a sting on the back of his neck was a splinter or a bullet passing. They’d been in against the wall and trying to get secured for – how long, two minutes? Three? It had been much worse before she’d got in close. The bridge had been hit for the first time within seconds of the Huns opening fire; Elliot of the Marines and his second-in-command, Cordner, had both been killed by that shell. Less than a minute later Captain Halahan had been cut down. Wyatt had been standing within feet of him at the time, on the false deck. Most of the senior men, company commanders and others, had been waiting there ready to lead their men ashore the minute there was a gangway to get over. Halahan had gone down, and Edwards had been shot through both legs; H
arrison, who by that time had inherited command of the naval landing force, had been shot in the jaw. He was below now, unconscious. Wyatt inched out along the derrick: it was an unpleasant thought that if he was hit he’d drop between the ship’s side and the mole and be squashed. The foretop must have been hit a few times but the chaps up there were still blazing away with their pom-poms and Lewis guns and, please God, killing Germans. He was in semi-darkness here, shadowed as the lower part of the ship was by the mole, but a few feet above his head her upperworks were lit by the glare of German searchlights and shells were bursting on and in her several times a minute, machine-gun and small-arms fire continuous. The sharply-etched dividing line between lower shadow and upper brilliance was the margin between life and death, and as he dragged himself out along the derrick and the ship rocked on the piling sea he was sometimes within inches of it. He had his legs behind him with their ankles crossed over the derrick’s curve while his arms took most of the strain of hauling his own weight out towards the wires with the hook dangling on them; suddenly there was a crash that had nothing to do with gunfire, and an almighty lurch: the ship rocked, and he and the derrick rocked too, over towards the parapet: at the same time she was shooting upwards, lifting on the surge: he’d thought he was about to be flung off but in the next second he saw his chance and grabbed it, swung and swivelled, launching his body out to hang by his arms and swing with his feet and legs extended towards the grappling-hook: and he’d got it… On deck they cast the wire loose as he forced the hook across: it dropped – over the parapet, and he was blinded, in the searchlight glare, hearing the slap-slap-slap of machine-gun bullets streaming past his ear: he didn’t wait for the gunner to adjust his aim, but slid down the derrick head-first, ended in a thumping somersault on the deck. Cross began trying to haul him up, grabbing at his shoulders and stuttering congratulations or something of the sort; Wyatt shook the idiot off, snarled at him to go down and see what casualties they’d had. There’d been plenty, he knew, on the way in; if any company was up to half strength by this time, it was lucky. So many shells had penetrated and burst in crowded spaces. He could see what had happened to cause that sudden lurch: Daffodil had arrived, at last, put her great rounded, heavily-fendered bow against Vindictive’s side and pushed her bodily against the mole. That hook was holding her, at this for’ard end. There was a tinny, rattling sound, what would have been a roar except for the bedlam of sound drowning it, as Carpenter let go his port anchor. And Daffodil was staying where she was, holding the cruiser hard against the wall. Plenty of movement still, though, on both ships. Where the hell was Iris? Those two brows crashed down: Wyatt heard a cheer, drowned in gunfire; he saw Bryan Adams – commander of A Company, and now after Halahan’s death and Harrison’s wounding Adams was in command of the whole bluejacket landing force – leading his men up and on to the mole. Running, cheering: Wyatt whipped round to tell Cross to get the men up, but Cross had already gone: reappearing, now, with Wheeler and about twenty men behind him.
‘All we have left, sir.’ Two dozen at most, out of fifty. Royal Marines were pouring up the second of the two surviving brows. Wyatt roared, ‘Forward!’ drew his revolver, and flung himself up in the middle of them: it wasn’t a time for ‘after you’s’. As he reached the top, Adams was leading one bunch of men straight down the roadway while others climbed down to the surface of the lower, broader mole; Brock was with the roadway lot. The guns in the ship’s foretop were jabbering and thudding, firing fast to cover the rush of men on to the mole and down it; then a shell came from heaven knew where and burst right in the foretop, a gush of flame and objects whining, trailing smoke, and now no covering fire. The flame-throwers would have been the thing: and Brock had even sworn that if Vindictive had been berthed in the right place – which everyone had assumed she would be – those flammenwerfers of his would even have wiped out the crews of the guns on the mole-end, without any other help from guns or landing-parties. In fact the oil-supply lines to both of them had been cut by German gunfire minutes before the ship had crunched against the wall. So there were no flame-throwers. The main body of the Marines was going westward: they had to ensure that no Huns could push up this way from the viaduct end and take control of the mole close to where Vindictive lay; if they did, the landing-parties would have been cut off. Adams had stopped to help Rosoman, the cruiser’s first lieutenant, settle the after grappling-hook across the parapet; they weren’t having much success. But the rush was slowing, bogging down, with mortars bursting here and there and machine-guns from the buildings farther up raking across the concrete. A, B, D and E companies were all earmarked to rush the mole-end guns, but 350 yards of open, flat concrete, enfiladed by machine-gun and mortar fire from half a dozen different places and directions – mostly at the moment from No. 3 shed, on the mole’s inner side, and from actually behind the advancing bluejacket companies – remnants of companies – from where two Hun destroyers were berthed on the mole’s inner curve almost opposite Vindictive – Wyatt admitted to himself, It isn’t going to be all plain sailing. Noise indescribable. Adams going forward now, to a small blockhouse on the raised roadway: Wyatt decided to go for No. 3 shed, to try to knock out those machine-guns. The mortar-fire might be coming from somewhere close behind it, too. If E Company could deal with that lot, others – A Company of the Marines, for instance, who were moving up in support of Adams – could push on through, eastward. There was one of the iron ladders just level with him now, leading down to the mole proper: stone chips were flying from the wall near it and from the parapet. He turned, looked back, saw Cross clasp both hands across his belly, sink down and double over in an attitude of prayer: Wyatt waved his revolver and screamed, ‘E Company, with me!’ and ducked down on to the ladder, half climbed down it and half fell, hit the concrete at its foot and started running, zigzagging towards No. 3 shed. It was about ninety yards long and he was aiming roughly for the centre of it. Behind him, Lieutenant Wheeler was limping as he ran, grasping the region of his hip with both hands and shouting to the men behind him. Shrapnel screamed from two successive mortar-bursts: Wyatt was halfway over, telling himself, They can’t hit everyone, the more of us there are the better the chance that some of us will get there. Poor old Cross: wasn’t a bad fellow, bit slow-witted sometimes but – nearly there: and an open window or embrasure right ahead of him with the barrel of a machine-gun spitting fire towards a group of Marines with Adams’s crowd; the Marines were setting up a mortar behind that little blockhouse on the higher level – well, they had been, the German gunner was scattering them now, he’d dropped two of them and the other three had dived for cover: Wyatt bent double as he ran and stopped zigzagging, aimed straight for the gun and pulled a grenade off its clip on his webbing: he tugged the pin out with his teeth, a sideways jerk of the head – and he was there, throwing himself flat then rising again to lob the grenade in the window. He’d dropped flat, heard it explode and a yell of pain or fear, sent another in after it to make sure. This was dead ground; he flattened himself against the wall while blue smoke eddied from the open window. Wheeler was still limping over, lumbering this way and that; there was a petty officer by the name of Shrewsbury with him, half a dozen E Company men and a mixed bag of others, including a Marine with a machine-gun. Wyatt grinned, waved his pistol, beckoning them to join him. The more the merrier, he thought. We’ll pull it off! By God we will! On an impulse he hoisted himself up, right up with his head and shoulders in that window: it was a sort of bunkhouse, and he could see two dead men sprawled against the far wall: below him, a German groaned, called something in his own brand of Hun-talk: Wyatt leaned right in, saw him, a boy of about sixteen, fair and pink-faced, scared stiff: he shot him in the head, and slid down again, turned to meet Wheeler who was only a dozen yards away: and it was at that moment that he saw it. Westward – a mile or so away – the biggest sheet of flame he’d ever seen in his life before. The place was bright with starshell anyway, but that great tongue of fire dimmed everything with
its own fierce brightness. Now as it dimmed, smoke poured upwards: black, pluming up and the plumes bending, carried northwards on the wind. But no sound came, and none had; there was so much noise close-to and everywhere else as well that nothing had been audible in any separate way – and yet it must have been a bang like the crack of doom. Wyatt roared with pleasure, exultation: there was only one thing it could have been, and that was the viaduct, the submarines had pulled it off, God bless them! He was bellowing, as Wheeler reached his side and sank down at the end of a trail of blood he’d left across the concrete, ‘Well done, by God, well done!’
Shrewsbury said, ‘Goin’ to be tricky getting’ off this wall, sir.’
‘What?’
The petty officer pointed. Two of Adams’s party had just tried to rush across and join them there, carrying a mortar between them. They were both down: one lay still, sprawled on his face, and the other was trying to crawl in that way, dragging the mortar and using only his elbows for propulsion, his legs trailing and blood pouring from a black gash in his neck. Then as they watched the machine-gun found him again and the stream of its next burst of bullets bent him round in a sort of knot, eel-like: it stopped, moved on, leaving him to unwind slowly like a broken spring in a spreading, scarlet stain. Other men were joining Wyatt here against the wall, dodging as they ran, scrambling for the cover and diving, flopping into it. Over on the other side, the high-level roadway, a mortar-bomb landed and burst on the roof of the blockhouse behind which Adams’s bluejackets were gathering. Wyatt saw them crouching, trying to make more of its cover than it was capable of giving them: and Adams was sending a runner back, either for reinforcements or for covering fire. If Osborn could use his stern howitzer, Wyatt thought, to drop a few shells on the mole just here to the east of them: that, or if they could bring up some of the Marines with mortars? He scowled, staring round: it wasn’t in his nature to sit here and wait. They were wasting time: they hadn’t been trained for months on end and then brought here just to sit… He stared at Wheeler.
Sixty Minutes for St George Page 23
