by John Winton
As soon as the magic signal was received, submarines popped to the surface all over the Western Approaches and set off determinedly towards hot baths, liquor and women. Most of them arrived together and the water around Spithead was soon churned into a foam by submarines of various nationalities queueing up to enter the channel, getting in each other’s way and sending each other fatuous signals.
Seahorse joined the queue with her control room watch singing their home-coming song: “First the Nab and then the Warner, Outer Spit and Blockhouse Corner” led with great feeling by Able Seaman Geronwyn Evans, to the tune of Cwm Rhondda.
When The Bodger saw the milling throng of submarines he felt that he was among friends again. He had had a good exercise, for a new boy (The Bodger was sure that even his most jealous critics in the Staff Office would admit that) and it was good to be home again. The Bodger’s heart swelled. He wanted to be hospitable.
“When’s the Wash-Up?”
“Tuesday, sir,” said Wilfred.
“Tell the wireless office to make to all submarines in company: R.P.C. Seahorse, 1900, Monday. We’ll have a Wake. If we’re going to tell lies we might as well all tell the same one. Who’s that just ahead of us?”
“Terrapin, sir,” said Wilfred.
“Who’s driving her now?”
“Lieutenant-Commander Lamm, sir.” Lieutenant-Commander Lamm was one of the keenest captains in the submarine service, so much so that he was known as the Lamm of God. He had reasonably expected to be given the command of Seahorse himself.
“Make to Terrapin. You’re a Blue submarine, I’m a Pink submarine, do we both use the same toothpaste?”
The Bodger was enormously amused by his own joke. Looking at him, Dagwood was reminded of the schoolboy coming home for the holidays.
Meanwhile, the Signalman was occupied with his lamp. “From Terrapin, sir,” he said. “Negative. Pepsodent.”
The Bodger groaned. “My God, what can you do with a bloke like that? Ask him where the yellow went. . . . No, no forget it. Now, what have we here?”
The latest addition to the queue was a huge steel-grey vessel with blunt bows and a swollen body. The short Channel waves were sweeping over her casing. She was as plainly out of her element as a whale in a backwater stream.
“There,” said The Bodger, “goes the future. Actually, it’s the present now. This mighty vessel of ours is the biggest, fastest and most dangerous submarine we’ve got but compared with that ugly-looking lump over there we’re about as lethal as a baby’s bottle! “ The Bodger put up his binoculars. “That monstrosity is the biggest technical break-through since . . . since the discovery of the wheel. She can stay at sea as long as Moby Dick, she’s faster than a destroyer and she’s got a weapon that can blast across the Arctic Circle and blot out a whole city. They’ve pinched a bit of fire from the sun and put it inside that submarine.”
“Cor chase me old Aunt Fanny round the dockyard clock,” said the Signalman to himself, “the Captain’s a bloody poet! “
“Stop muttering, Signalman! “ said The Bodger.
8
Exercise “Lucky Alphonse” had been important enough--in its own way. It had provided a great many people with harmless employment and with justification for their existences. As Exercises went, it had been a fair success. But “Lucky Alphonse” was only a prelude and insignificant beside its aftermath, the Post-Exercise Analytical Discussion, known colloquially as The Wash-Up.
“Lucky Alphonse” had been a mock battle. The Wash-Up was a real and bitter struggle. It was the battleground of the Staff, the faceless officers who stood behind the Admirals, the authors of the indecipherable signatures on the minute sheets. The Wash-Up was not concerned with the security of nations, nor the exchange of tactical information nor the learning of lessons taught at sea but with the more urgent and personal matters of furthering reputations and consummating careers. Those officers who would have agitated for commands in wartime, in peacetime angled for staff appointments. Command in peacetime was too often the prelude to retirement. It was not fashionable to step on to one’s own bridge and take command of events. It was more profitable to stay ashore and create the events. A successful exercise was therefore not one which tested the defences of the nation at sea but one after which the entire staff were promoted.
There were no Orders for the Wash-Up. Only sham battles needed Orders. Real battles took their cue from a hint, from a judiciously-timed signal, from a face-saving suggestion or a tiny oversight in the opposition planning. The real battles did not take place in the sonar and radar control rooms but in the signal centres and the plotting floors. The sounds of victory were not uttered by gunfire but by the clatter of cryptographic machinery.
The Bodger took Wash-Ups, like everything else, in his stride.
“They’re all the same,” he said to Gavin, who was hard at work preparing Seahorse’s track charts and attack narratives. “You never get a word in edgeways anyway. The R.A.F. will be there in force. I sometimes wonder if the R.A.F. don’t keep a special Wash-Up Regiment. You never see them any other time. The Staff will be there, of course, unto the seventh generation. You can always tell them by their brief-cases and the Japanese binoculars slung round their necks. They’re the chappies who always know everything. They tell you all about radio reception conditions over the South Pole and what the correct recognition procedure is when you’re challenged by an Abyssinian flying-boat dropping shark repellent but they never tell you anything you really want to know, like who that dangerous lunatic was who nearly ran you down the second night out. Then there will be a few blokes like you and me who actually did the exercise, and a little man at the back who’s waiting to straighten the chairs and empty the ashtrays and get back home to his football pools. And that’s about all.”
The Wash-Up was held at nine a.m. in the Royal Naval Barracks cinema, the duty R.P.O. having first ejected a class of Upper Yardmen who had been waiting since a quarter to eight to see an instructional film entitled “The Ammeter”. The first arrivals were two staff captains of the Indonesian Tank Corps and the last were the Commander-in-Chief, Rockall and Malin Approaches and his staff who included a bewildered young man in a white coat with blue cuffs who had driven a van full of mineral-water bottles up to the Barracks wardroom and had been directed by the hall porter to the cinema along with everybody else.
By nine o’clock the meeting had taken shape. The first three rows bristled with the intelligent faces, clean collars, brief-cases, Japanese binoculars and aiguillettes of the Staff; they formed a barrier of erudition, culture and enthusiasm which it would be difficult to pierce. There was among their ranks much nodding, winking, and secret signs of conspiracy; they were the Magicians who sat pulling strings while their own Petroushkas capered about on the stage.
The next seventeen rows were occupied by R.A.F. officers. They were all moustached, all serious of face, and all holding a sheaf of papers. Behind them sat the hard core of the conference, the captains of Little Richard, Great Christopher and the guided-missile cruisers, Black Sebastian and the other escort captains, the Master of the fleet tanker Wave Chiropodist and several rows of ship’s officers who, through many sleepless nights, had made the Exercise work.
In the very back row, in an aura of alcohol, sat the submarine captains and their officers. The Bodger’s Pre-Wash-Up Wake had been a spectacular success. At midnight, the captain of the Italian submarine Farfarelli had executed a variant of the Limbo Dance which had fetched him up under the wardroom table where he lay babbling faintly of the waters of the Po; he was now leaning back in his seat staring at the ceiling, his face drawn in a mask of torment similar to that of Count Ugolino, who was trapped in the lake of eternal ice and condemned to gnaw upon the skull of his murderer for ever. At two o’clock in the morning, two very correctly dressed officers from the biggest technical break-through since the wheel had called on Seahorse to collect their captain, whom they knew affectionately as Ole Miss, who had by that time
gone critical. Ole Miss was now sitting propped up at the arm-pits by his Navigating Officer and his Exec, beaming round him with a genial, if slightly vacant, smile. At three o’clock in the morning, the Lamm of God had politely taken his leave, steered himself towards his cabin, and solemnly shut himself in the wardrobe where he spent the rest of the night; he was now sitting bolt upright at one end of the row, looking carefully to his front as though he were afraid that any sudden movement would topple his head from his shoulders. The Bodger himself was flanked by Wilfred, Gavin and Dagwood, all four concentrating on preventing their eyelids meeting.
The proceedings were opened by the Commander-in-Chief, Rockall and Malin Approaches, under his abbreviated international title of CincRock, in whose domain a great part of the Exercise had taken place.
CincRock hated international maritime exercises and in particular he hated “Lucky Alphonse” because he had been unable to go to sea for a single day of it. He had, in his own words, been “stuck in a damned beer-cellar gawking at a bloody stupid Monopoly board”. CincRock was a plain seaman who had had greatness thrust upon him. He had served almost continuously at sea until he was promoted to Captain when the shortage of ships forced him for the first time in his life into the Admiralty. There, he was an innocent set adrift in a paper jungle and his immediate impulse had been to retire from the Service. But CincRock possessed one of the most priceless assets of a successful naval officer; he was adaptable. In a paper jungle, he became the most ferocious paper tiger of them all. His other qualities, of remembering what was said last week without looking at the minutes, of dealing with papers within twenty-four hours of receipt, and of catching up with the latest scandal in the pubs of Whitehall, made him tolerated, respected, and then feared. The men who sat at desks and administered the Navy began to speak of him with awe, as a naval officer who had civilized the civil servants.
Nobody suspected that CincRock paid only lip service to Whitehall. None of the men who gazed so benignly at him over their committee tables were aware that CincRock was their implacable enemy. It was CincRock who was responsible for the closure of the forty-one stores depots scattered through the United Kingdom which had long since ceased to issue stores and were quietly administering themselves. It was CincRock who obtained a new class of ship for the Navy by unobtrusively crossing out the title “Cruiser” and substituting “Destroyer” as the relevant correspondence passed through his office (the Treasury subsequently decided that the country could afford a new class of destroyers but not cruisers).
More than anything about “Lucky Alphonse”, CincRock hated having to make the speech of welcome at the beginning of the Wash-Up. As he said to his Chief of Staff, “I feel like a damned chairman congratulating his damned shareholders on how many damned washing machines he’s sold for them.”
“My first, and my most pleasant, duty,” said CincRock at the Wash-Up, “is to welcome you all here and to congratulate you on your excellent showing during ‘Lucky Alphonse’. This year’s exercise was more successful than any we’ve had in previous years. More nations contributed ships. There were more incidents. And the whole thing went with a bang! One or two things cropped up, particularly on the anti-submarine side, which were not quite as successful as we had hoped for. Submarines made a total of ninety-four attacks. Seventy-nine of those were judged successful. That’s a very high percentage. Too high. At the same time, only five submarines were judged sunk, one by aircraft and four by surface ships. That was not so good. My Chief of Staff will deal with that in detail in a few moments. My job now is to say how glad I am to see you all here and to hope you have a damned good time while you’re here.”
CincRock nodded to his Chief of Staff who had been standing, a Svengali-like figure, in the background.
The Chief of Staff made an immediate impression upon Dagwood.
“Augustus was a chubby lad,” recited Dagwood irreverently. “Fat chubby cheeks Augustus had. He ate and drank as he was told, and never let his soup get cold.”
Augustus was a brilliant officer who had risen to the rank of Rear Admiral on a series of staff appointments. As Staff Commander, Staff Captain, and finally as Chief of Staff he had been the eminence grise behind a number of successful admirals, of whom CincRock was the latest. Analytical discussions were Augustus’ forte. He was a master strategist, in terms of counters and symbols, a blackboard Bismarck, a veritable Wellington of the Wash-Ups.
“All yours, Gussie,” said CincRock.
Augustus unrolled a map, took up a pointer and began to summarize Exercise “Lucky Alphonse”. He described the rapid mobilization which had followed the proclamation of a state of emergency in Western Europe. He outlined the balance of power and the disposition of forces available at the moment the conflict began. He explained the solution of the logistical problems which had made possible the assembly of a vast Task Force of different nations far out in the Atlantic. He traced the progress of the Task Force towards the continent of Europe. Augustus had all the data at his finger-tips. Incidents, times, courses and speeds rolled from his memory. As he expounded, with cross-reference and flash-back, the unfolding of the master exercise plan, every officer present began to understand where his own limited and seemingly unconnected contribution had fitted into the whole. Augustus was like a skilled advocate building, piece by piece, a complicated case in company law and by the time he had completed his summary it was easy to see why he had become a Rear Admiral. His had been the performance of a virtuoso and there was a moment’s silence after he had finished speaking, like the momentary hush which precedes the tumultuous applause after a superlative interpretation of a concerto. Indeed, one or two of the more susceptible officers present wondered whether a round of applause might not be in order.
“Well done, Gussie,” said CincRock, sotto voce.
The audience were given no more time to decide whether or not Augustus should be given a clap. Augustus had hardly put down his pointer when a Squadron Leader with shiny black hair and a toothbrush moustache had stood up and begun to read rapidly from a sheet of paper.
“At fourteen hundred hours on the ninth, Yoke Uncle was on task over the Bay of Biscay. There was seven-eighths cloud at five thousand feet and a force two breeze from the south-west. Some difficulty was experienced in maintaining radio contact with. . . .”
Augustus, who had been about to sign off with a neatly turned phrase which would have thrown the meeting open, remained on the platform, his pointer still poised. He opened and shut his mouth several times without achieving a break through. The Air Show was exactly timed. Yoke Uncle had hardly landed when Mike Zebra was in the air, piloted by a Flight Lieutenant with a ginger bat-handle moustache. Mike Zebra had maintained radio contact successfully but had had other troubles; her starboard wheel had been reluctant to come up and once up, had refused to go down again. Mike Zebra had barely come to rest in a field by the side of the runway when Delta Eskimo, represented by a Squadron Leader in a bushy black moustache, was airborne and suffering damage to her tail-plane. Fox Pepper, with a reduced Salvador Dali and sad spaniel eyes, had been lost in fog. Indian Queen had not taken off at all. (“The ashtrays were full,” Black Sebastian said in a resonant stage-whisper.) When at last the Air Show ended the admirals and captains of the greatest Grand Alliance in history had been given a thorough exposition of the trials and hardships attached to anti-submarine flying.
CincRock found his voice. “Did you find any submarines?”
Every flying eye turned towards a pale youth with a faint blond moustache sitting in the back row of the pilots. He was the only pilot who had not yet spoken. The others looked towards him as though to one who had searched for, and found, the Holy Grail. He was their champion, the gentle knight without a blemish. He had seen a submarine.
The gentle knight rose reluctantly to his feet. “Well, actually, the whole thing was rather a bit of joss,” he said diffidently. “We were just as surprised to see him as he was to see us. It was very early in the mo
rning. We came suddenly through thick cloud down to about five hundred feet and there he was, lying on the surface. He dived straight away, of course, but we tracked him with sono-buoys until some frigates came up and took over. I believe they got him.”
The gentle knight sat thankfully down again, like Sir Galahad after a press conference.
“Well done,” CincRock said warmly.
After the Air Show there was some general discussion amongst the Task Force and escort captains about tactics. Of the four submarines judged sunk by surface ships, three were credited to Black Sebastian and the fourth to the Captain who had consulted the Second Book of Kings and Hymns Ancient &: Modern.
“I nearly got another,” said Black Sebastian, looking balefully at the back row where The Bodger had fallen into a light sleep. “With one more escort in the right place we’d have got him.”
This remark touched the Wash-Up audience on its most sensitive spot. The shortage of escorts had hampered everyone. The cry was taken up on all sides. Carrier captains complained of being asked to fly off strikes whilst completely unprotected against submarine attack. The Master of Wave Chiropodist complained of being detached from the main body to carry out his own anti-submarine search. “Let me say now, once and for all,” he said, “no fleet tanker I ever heard of is equipped to look for submarines. I only hope the Unions don’t get to hear of it.” One of the guided missile cruiser captains claimed that he personally had made more submarine detections than either of his two escorts. The escort captains retorted that no anti-submarine vessel yet designed could have covered effectively the areas they had been called upon to patrol. The R.A.F. listened curiously, as deep thus called out deep.
