Between The Hunters And The Hunted

by Steven Wilson

  All of the officers, except Kadow, chuckled at Mahlberg’s joke.

  “You may return to your stations, gentlemen,” Mahlberg said. “Kadow. Join me on deck, won’t you?”

  Kadow and Mahlberg walked along the narrow deck below the conning tower, a cool wind washing over them. They stopped near a quadruple 20mm mount. The ship was silent except for the soft blast of a wave disintegrating under her bow, and the rush of water against her gray hull.

  “All my life I’ve dreamed of commanding such a ship,” Mahlberg said, looking out to sea. He turned to his executive officer, absentmindedly rubbing his left elbow with his right hand. It was a habit that he had had since he was a child. “To command a vessel such as this and to take her against the enemy. I despaired under the republic. We were allowed only ships of no consequence. I could not think of our great fleet scuttled under the nose of the British at Scapa Flow. Resting deep in the darkness of enemy waters. But now”—he looked around proudly—“here is the Fatherland’s future. The power of the Kriegsmarine.” He waited for Kadow to speak but his executive officer merely listened. “You have reservations?” Mahlberg said. “About my intentions?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Kadow,” Mahlberg said kindly, “I have never denied you the opportunity to speak freely.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kadow said. “I appreciate your confidence in me.”

  “There is another one of your infernal ‘buts’ hanging there. I could order you to speak, you know. If you were not so obstinate.”

  “Kapitan,” Kadow began, “I sometimes have difficulty following your rationale. We have been fortunate. We have remained undetected since our encounter with the British cruiser. We are set to overtake and destroy Prince of Wales. I have every confidence that when she falls within range of our guns we will sink her. But …” Mahlberg saw Kadow troubled by his own use of the word. “But are you really planning to then turn and attack the Home Fleet?”

  “Why not? Why settle for half a victory when we have complete victory within our grasp?”

  “Because it may be beyond our reach.”

  “Now we have stumbled into the realm of the philosophical, Kadow,” Mahlberg said. “We have the greatest warship ever built. The most powerful weapon on earth. I vowed to myself that I would undertake a voyage so amazing that nothing whatsoever could match it. From the moment I heard ‘Muss I denn’ played at our departure, I knew that Sea Lion was indestructible.” He placed a fatherly hand on Kadow’s shoulder. “We are warriors, old friend. Sailors in service to the Fatherland. Our nation has given us a wondrous vessel by which we can give her victories. Don’t be reluctant. We must be bold. Cunning. When the British expect us there, we will be here. When Doenitz reports to Grand Admiral Raeder that his tiny boats have encountered the Home Fleet, Raeder can reply, yes, but it is Sea Lion who destroyed them.”

  Kadow hesitated and finally answered, “Yes, sir.”

  “We will triumph,” Mahlberg reassured his executive officer. “The British will encounter the unexpected on both sides of the North Atlantic. They will face Sea Lion.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good,” Mahlberg said, clapping Kadow on the shoulder. “Good. Now have our famous Kapitanleutnant of engineering come to the bridge. I wish to speak to him. Our ship is fast but she is also thirsty. I will charge him to give us more speed with less fuel consumption.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kadow said. He watched Mahlberg walk away. A single idea was gnawing at him, an elusive voice that whispered foreboding in his ear; doubt sitting on his shoulder. Mahlberg had placed it there with a phrase—encounter the unexpected.

  Bismarck had done so. A single torpedo striking her bow allowing tons of seawater to rush into her hull, fouling fuel and driving her down at the head. From that injury she is denied the fuel in her bow tanks, and that which leaks leaves an oily path—blood in the water for the hungry sharks to find her. Now her speed is reduced as the vengeful waves of the North Atlantic batter her, sensing that the great ship is wounded. But that is not the worst blow. Another aerial torpedo strikes her during an attack by flimsy enemy aircraft and her rudder is jammed. A one in a thousand chance that this could have happened. One in ten thousand. A hundred thousand. Now Bismarck is condemned to death because she cannot maneuver; with her rudders jammed she steams around in lazy circles, waiting for death. Waiting for the Home Fleet. They come, distant vessels across a gray plain. Rodney, King George V, others. Ninety minutes. In ninety minutes Bismarck is gone.

  Kadow had been there when the band played “Muss I denn”; the song played as all capital ships of the Kriegsmarine prepared to set sail on extended voyages. He was moved as well by the music and the pageantry. One could not help but be moved by it. See Lowe, Sea Lion—a magnificent vessel of unimaginable abilities. He felt the pride in her, in the Kriegsmarine, in the valor of the crew that every man felt. But they had played “Muss I denn” for Bismarck as well and she was never coming home.

  Encounter the unexpected, Kadow thought. How does one prepare for the unexpected?

  H.M.S. Firedancer

  Cole was shown to the tiny bridge by a yeoman. It was no bigger and perhaps a bit smaller than the open bridge on the old flush-decker on which Cole had trained. He noted the location of the binnacle and the clump of brass voice tubes amidships and forward. Directly behind him was the wheelhouse, the pale face of the helmsman visible through one of the large portholes. In one corner of the bridge were thin stanchions to hold life vests and helmets and in the other corner was a mount for a pair of Lewis guns. The windscreen was down and the man that Cole supposed to be the captain, a short stocky man with a bull neck, stood to port, eyes pressed to binoculars. There was another officer, younger, thinner, taller, reading a message just handed to him by a seaman.

  The younger man looked up and smiled. “Cole, is it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cole said.

  “Captain,” the younger man said to the stocky figure, “here is our visitor.”

  “Well,” the man said. “None the worse for wear, I trust. Came as quick as we could. Bit of luck finding you right off. George Hardy, captain, Royal Navy. This is my number one, executive officer to you chaps. Land.”

  Cole saluted. “Jordan Cole, lieutenant J.G., United States Naval Reserve.”

  Hardy waved off the compliment. “Let’s do away with all of that saluting nonsense. Doubt if I’d recognize one aboard old Firedancer if I saw it. Not likely to get one, eh, Number One?”

  “On the contrary, sir. The officers and men respect you deeply.”

  “Bullocks, Number One. The officers are insolent and the crew can barely tolerate me. But let’s not air our dirty laundry in front of Cole. Do you know what you’ve dropped into, young man? What we’re about?”

  “No, sir,” Cole said. “We assumed that you were part of a convoy.”

  “Never assume, Cole,” Hardy said. “Makes an ass of you and me. Understand? Ass-u-me? Ever heard that one before, Cole?”

  “No, sir,” Cole said, but no one on the bridge missed the trace of sarcasm in his reply. Except Hardy.

  “Well, we’re bound for home. We’re rejoining two other destroyers and a cruiser and have set our course for Scapa Flow. You were out here looking for that commerce raider then? Not that I believe it’s a commerce raider. This one’s a capital ship, eh, Land?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s a battleship,” Cole said. “I’d bet my bottom dollar that you’re going to be in the hunt as well, sir.”

  “So you know all about her? I suppose, as soon as someone takes the bloody time to let us know what’s going on, we’ll be after her. We were escorting another vessel, so I’ll give you half a point for your guess about the convoy, but we got pulled off that. For your information the enemy ship’s name is Sea Lion. We got that over the W.T.”

  “Have they told you anything about her, sir?” Cole asked.

  “She sank poor Nottingham so she’s a bloody threat, isn’t she?”r />
  “What do you know, Cole?” Land asked.

  “She’s over sixty thousand tons with a speed in excess of thirty knots, sir. Her main armament is twelve sixteen-inch guns and maybe twenty five-or six-inch guns.”

  “How the bloody hell do you know—” Hardy began.

  “I’m with Photo Ops. We picked up intelligence about the vessel and her class. She’s an H-class, Captain Hardy.”

  “Good Lord!” Hardy said. “No wonder she cut us loose.”

  “Sir?” Cole said.

  “You might as well know it. We were escorting Prince of Wales to America. The prime minister is on board and he is to meet your President Roosevelt.” Hardy looked at Land knowingly. “She cut us loose to outrun the bastard. That’s her only hope. She has to get out of the Mid-Atlantic Air Gap and under Canadian air cover faster than you can say Jack Sprat.” Air coverage from England, Canada, or Iceland, when it wasn’t socked in, could only reach a small portion of the vast reaches of the North Atlantic. It was the area in between, the Mid-Atlantic Air Gap, that was the most dangerous. “We’ll have to return to the Flow for fuel,” Hardy said. “Unless we can pick up a spot along the way.”

  “Prometheus can stay out a bit longer,” Land noted.

  “Oh, Prometheus can fly around the world without bumping her arse,” Hardy said.

  Cole lowered his head to hide his grin. He was beginning to like this guy—he was the sort of man that said the first thing that came to mind and said it the way that he felt and to hell with everything else. He watched as the captain regained his composure.

  “Yes, of course Prometheus can stay out longer and we’re the better for it. If Cole here is correct, and no offense to you, sir,” Hardy said.

  “Not at all, Captain,” Cole replied.

  “The Royal Navy has its hands full, doesn’t it?” Hardy continued. A telephone in a box on the wheelhouse bulkhead behind Cole jangled heavily. A yeoman of signals quickly answered it, listened for a moment, and reported to Hardy: “Foremast starboard lookout reports ships sighted green oh-eight, sir.”

  Land and Hardy immediately swung their binoculars to that location.

  “Can you see anything, Number One?” Hardy said.

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Yeoman,” Hardy said, “confirm to the lookout. Number of ships.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Mr. Cole,” Hardy said, adjusting the focus on the binoculars. “What was an American naval officer doing aboard an English bomber?”

  “I’m an observer with Coastal Command, sir.”

  “I see,” Hardy said, dropping his binoculars and fixing Cole with a sly grin. “And now you’re an observer with H.M.S. Firedancer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hardy searched the horizon again and said merrily: “I wonder what we will all observe together.”

  It was a magnificent sight. Gray ships big and small, their dazzle-pattern camouflage, wild slashes of black, white, and gray paint that destroyed the order of the vessels, as it was meant to do. It was meant to challenge the enemy gunners so that at a distance the symmetry of the vessels’ shapes would be destroyed. Their size, speed, power, and direction would be safely hidden like an actor’s face behind greasepaint.

  First came six destroyers, two each coming out of Scapa Flow from the Sounds of Hoxa, Hoy, and Switha; small ships whose names were far from intimidating and, despite their 4.5-inch rapid-firing guns and torpedo tubes running fore and aft, might not be taken seriously. They were paired, sweeping the channels leading out of the Flow and into the three channels of the huge main field that protected the ships within the Flow from U-boats. In the North Channel were Icarus and Nestor, Icarus slightly in the lead so that her paravanes weren’t fouled by Nestor. If the German Condors or U-boats had seeded the channel with mines, either vessel’s paravanes might cut the anchoring cable, and the mine would float to the surface. It was then that the antiaircraft gun crews had their fun, shooting the bobbing sphere, only a small part of its glistening, algae-covered black hide, studded with prongs, visible above the surface. But there was not fun for the gunners today; the destroyers plowed the depths to no avail.

  Astern of the destroyers came H.M.S. Hermione, a cruiser and veteran of the Bismarck chase, although to her crew’s disgust she had only been posted to block Bismarck’s path and had never had the chance to engage her.

  Astern of her, regal, calm, her thirty-seven thousand tons driven easily through the black, icy waters by the 4x Parsons single-reduction-geared turbines spinning four three-bladed manganese-bronze 14.5-foot-diameter screws, was H.M.S. Rodney. She was two decades old but she carried herself as well as she did when she came out of the Cornwell-Laird-Birkenhead Shipyard. She was stately, as she sailed out the North Channel, and when the sea parted before her bows in respect it did so knowing that it was Rodney who sank Bismarck. Perhaps it was H.M.S. Dorsetshire who dashed in to let go a few torpedoes at the smoldering wreck, but the cruiser could not have done it; by God, she couldn’t have gotten close to the mighty ship had not Rodney with her nine 406mm guns pounded Bismarck into submission. It was H.M.S. Rodney who had sunk the mighty Kriegsmarine vessel, not H.M.S. Dormouse, Rodney’s crew proclaimed, and they were more than willing to fight for her honor.

  But there was a problem with H.M.S. Rodney, a very apparent flaw in her beautiful lines, brought about by a gaggle of haggling politicians who did not know a ship from a sheep. To meet the requirements of various naval treaties her main armament, all of it, was placed forward. There was nothing of consequence aft except a truncated stern that gave her a very ungainly appearance. But appearances aside, because appearances can be deceiving, the problem, the flaw, was that the three-by-three-turret arrangement meant that A Turret, well forward, was nearly flush with the deck. And B Turret, right behind the first turret, was high up over A, sitting on an armored barbette so that she could shoot over her sister turret. Well enough designed because that brought six guns to bear straight ahead. But C Turret was placed directly behind B Turret, flush on the deck as if the Admiralty was ashamed to acknowledge its presence. So C Turret could shoot to port or starboard but not forward. And none of the three turrets could protect the exposed stern.

  In the Middle Channel steamed the destroyers Tarter and Active, mimicking the actions of their sisters in the North Channel. Behind them at a respectful distance were the cruisers H.M.S. Kenya and H.M.S. Norfolk. They, like Hermione, were fast and in surface actions they would be the spoilers, waiting to slip in and unleash torpedoes at capital ships, laying down smoke with the destroyers; hounds after a boar.

  In the South Channel came Lance and Anthony and behind them, towering over the destroyers, was H.M.S. King George V. KGV. Vickers-Armstrong, Walker Navy Yard, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and only a child. Laid down on 1 January 1937, she was completed in 1940 and after her working up trails, she was accepted by a grateful Royal Navy. She had ten fourteen-inch .45-caliber MK VII guns and she’d fought Bismarck, but she was young and arrogant and wanted more. She wanted Sea Lion. She wanted to be the first in and the first to draw blood, and the one to send Sea Lion to the bottom of the North Sea.

  Out of the three channels, North, Middle, and South, steamed the Home Fleet and when they were well clear of the channels they would increase speed and seek out the enemy. At a time that would be most opportune for the mission, the six destroyers would fall out and return to Scapa Flow because this was an emergency, and the three cruisers and two battleships would make a high-speed run, traveling much farther, to save Prince of Wales and sink the enemy, and the destroyers could not keep pace.

  The six destroyers would turn once the others were safe out to sea and, bidding a farewell to the larger ships, sail home. Destroyers—born many years before to destroy torpedo boats that could quickly run up and launch torpedoes into the side of slower vessels, adapted to fight U-boats during the First World War, now designed to find and sink the descendents of those U-boats. The natural enemy of U-
boats: fast, loaded with depth charges, vicious little predators that bit happily into the green seas with a bone between their teeth so that they could run up on the U-boats and kill them—destroyers.

  Irony.

  Twelve U-boats, in the hands of twelve skilled Kapitans waiting precisely in the path of the Home Fleet; targets aplenty for the six veteran destroyers of the Royal Navy that escorted the battleships to sea. Battleships not nearly as maneuverable as destroyers and cruisers not as adept at fighting U-boats as destroyers. Big targets for U-boat torpedoes.

  Soon the vessels that could best fight and certainly defeat the U-boats that lurked in the depths of the ocean would be turning their backs to their traditional enemies and steaming back to Scapa Flow.

  Chapter 27

  H.M.S. Firedancer, the North Sea

  “It’s called kye,” Land said to Cole as a rating handed the American a cup of thick hot chocolate.

  “It’ll foul your plumbing if you take too much of it,” Hardy added in disgust. “Best to stick to tea. You’ve got to piss a pot full every ten minutes, but you can do that over the side if times demand it.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any coffee,” Cole said, deciding against the kye. He found the only use for the sludge with a thin sheen of grease floating on the top was to wrap his hands around the chipped porcelain cup for warmth.

  “You suppose right, Mr. Cole,” Hardy said. “The Royal Navy does not have the luxuries that you’re used to in the American Navy. We’re smaller and not as wealthy, but we’re as keen as mustard when it comes to a go at Jerry.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cole said, handing the kye back to the seaman.

  “For God’s sake we’re civilized enough to have alcohol on board. Well managed of course. Takes the edge off the excitement a bit. Smoothes a man’s nerves when the time’s right. You chaps don’t go in for that sort of thing, do you? Prohibition and all that. Uncivilized practice. Goes against nature.”

  “I believe Prohibition was repealed some time ago,” Land offered.