Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  ‘They must be in serried rows at HQ,’ Latimer commented. ‘It’s a wonder they don’t trample each other to death.’

  Everybody seemed to want to buy them drinks and they ended up at a party in one of the flats overlooking the Sporting Club at Gezira. Who owned it nobody seemed to know, but it was full of officers from all three services, together with a sprinkling of Wrens, ATS and WAAFs.

  The Wrens seemed to have the edge on all the others when it came to good looks and Latimer was very quickly busy with a blonde who looked as if she’d once been a film star, while Kelly found himself talking to a Wren Third Officer with a pretty face that seemed vaguely familiar.

  ‘We were expecting Captain Verschoyle,’ she said and he smiled, knowing at once where he’d met her.

  ‘You’re Maisie,’ he said. ‘From Dover.’

  She smiled. ‘Actually it’s Hermione Pentycross, but Captain Verschoyle always said it was too much of a mouthful.’ She introduced him to one or two other girls and eventually to a First Officer older than the others.

  ‘This is–’

  ‘I know who it is,’ Kelly said briskly. ‘We’ve met before.’

  Miss Jenner-Neate hadn’t changed much since they’d met in Santander. ‘Gin-and-It to the girls, these days,’ she said with a small smile. ‘They consider anybody over twenty-five to be decomposing.’

  ‘How do you come to be here?’

  ‘I married in 1939 but my husband was lost in Courageous and I thought I’d better join up. I reverted to my maiden name because we’d only been married a few weeks and I seemed a fraud masquerading as a married woman.’

  He decided she wasn’t half as bad as she made herself out to be, because she was slimmer and the splendid figure he remembered from Spain was even more splendid than before. In addition, she was undeniably good-looking with thick chestnut hair, wide grey eyes he’d not had time to notice in Santander, a straight nose and a full firm mouth. For the first time he realised that her voice was low and musical and that what she said was to the point, so that it seemed to enhance her character. The habit everybody had of addressing her by her surname seemed to put people off but Kelly decided she could grow on a man and that but for Teresa Axuriaguerrera he might have noticed her before.

  Everybody was still a little euphoric after the success of the convoy and the battle off Cape Matapan and he was just wondering if he could invite First Officer Jenner-Neate out to dinner when suddenly the news worsened. As they’d been expecting, the Germans had gone into Greece and Yugoslavia, and Alexandria suddenly seemed like an ants’ nest stirred up by a stick. It looked very much as though the British High Command had been caught with its trousers down, because Tobruk was in danger of being besieged and everybody seemed to be wailing that the decision to send troops badly needed in North Africa to Greece ought never to have been made.

  ‘My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.’

  When Foch had said that, he had doubtless had his tongue in his cheek, but Kelly could see what he meant. Disaster seemed no time to go into a decline and, with everybody in Cairo and Alexandria in a state of nerves, he decided that First Officer Jenner-Neate was the only calm one in view, and he suggested she had a drink with him at the Club.

  She seemed a little startled at his interest and flattered that he should wish to see her again.

  ‘Most people seem to prefer my underlings, Captain,’ she said. ‘Even senior officers.’

  She knew his record. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘I knew of you in Spain. You were in a book my brother had, called “Best Stories of The Great War”. It described Jutland and how you brought your ship home. I was always pinching it from my brother. Perhaps that’s why I married a naval officer.’

  They were careful not to refer to her husband. Nor even to the news, because the Luftwaffe had caught three ammunition ships in the harbour of Piraeus and, when one of them had been hit, the eruption had flung blazing debris everywhere, igniting buildings and small craft, and engulfing the area with smoke and dust. Eleven ships had been lost, damage had been enormous and Piraeus had ceased to function as a port.

  Jenner-Neate was in no doubt about how people regarded her. ‘To the girls under me,’ she said, ‘I’m as old as God. But to the men who come in from the desert I’m the answer to their prayers. You’d be surprised how many of them tell me I’m beautiful. If I were, I’d be pleased. But I know I’m not.’

  ‘You look all right to me,’ Kelly said cheerfully.

  She gave him a quiet smile. ‘Perhaps you’ve been a long time at sea.’

  She invited him back to her flat for coffee and he wondered if she were throwing out invitations. She lived in a modern block overlooking the desert but casting its shadow over a huddle of filthy Arab shanties. Everything was modern and sumptuous.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ she said, ‘the fittings, which were put in by Egyptian labour, fall apart at the first touch. The bottom floor contains a garage and a cotton broker; the middle floor, offices and what, judging by the girls and the traffic, is without a doubt a brothel; and the top floor, us and the headquarters of the Society for the Redemption of Fallen Women, run, so I’m told by an Italian spy and three elderly English spinsters. I share with another First Officer, but she’s on duty.’ She gave him a sharp look. ‘Which makes us entirely alone. Does that frighten you?’

  He grinned. ‘No.’

  She smiled back. ‘It does me. I’d prefer that you got no ideas in your head, because I invited you here for coffee and that’s all you’re going to get.’

  He found he enjoyed her forthrightness and the way she moved. She seemed sparing of effort yet there was a regal swing to her skirt as she went in or out of a door, and he decided that what distinguished her above all the other Wrens was style.

  They sat drinking brandy in the semi-darkness and when he leaned over and kissed her, she stared calmly back at him and said nothing. When he tried again, she kissed him back but then she pushed him away.

  ‘That’s as far as we go,’ she said.

  He was faintly disappointed and decided she was playing hard to get, but when he asked when he could see her again, she gave him a sad little smile and shook her head.

  ‘War’s a sad time, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Nobody meets anybody under normal circumstances.’

  He remembered Teresa Axuriaguerrera saying some- thing of the same sort in 1937 – years ago now, it seemed. Circumstances were always strained and every meeting had to be conducted as if it were the last.

  ‘In any case,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t depend on me. Your flotilla’s due for sea. I saw the signal this afternoon.’

  He was silent for a moment and she gave him her sad smile once more, so that he realised she’d probably said goodbye in the last two years to many men, including her husband, who had never returned.

  What she’d said proved to be correct and the following morning a signal came ordering Impi, Inca and Indian to Suda Bay in Crete. Even the war in the desert seemed to have edged nearer and it was possible from time to time to hear the grumble of guns to the west.

  Despite the suddenness of the departure, not a single member of the ship’s company was missing and there were only three drunks, one of them inevitably ‘Dancer’ Siggis, and they arrived in Suda after a voyage through high seas whipped up by strong easterly winds, to find the place in a panic because everybody knew that if Greece capitulated the next target would be Crete itself.

  The place lay like a basking lizard in the sunshine, the brown cliffs lapped by the dark waters of the Aegean. The mountains behind rose in rocky folds, their slopes covered with scrub with, here and there, flowers and small cultivated patches among the olives and cypresses.

  Already soldiers were struggling to set up guns and weapon pits. Parties of them tramped along the roads, and staff cars containing worried-looking officers trailed plumes of yellow dust as they hurried past. The tanker, Pericles, which had
been damaged by Italian frogmen lay touching the bottom, with a tanker alongside her, pumping out her cargo. Not far away, another victim was the cruiser, York, which had had to be beached and was serving as an AA battery.

  Her crew were already supplying men for landing craft – as good for getting men off beaches as for putting them on – and news had just arrived that the Greek Army of the Epirus had capitulated without informing the Greek government or the British, and it had been decided that evacuation plans must be prepared if any of the Australian-New Zealand Army Corps was to be saved. Military events were moving with frightening speed and changing like a kaleidoscope as the German blitz-krieg advanced almost unchecked. Measures and counter measures conflicted. Precautions became useless and, as confusion created more confusion, orders were out of date before they could be implemented.

  By the middle of the month, with the situation reaching disaster proportions, commercial shipping was brought to a standstill as military and naval needs took over. The evacuation of troops, with all their military paraphernalia, mechanical transport and equipment, who had been put ashore only a matter of six weeks before, became the top priority, and Impi, Inca and Indian were sent with two assault ships, Glenbyre and Eastern Prince to Kalamata.

  The evening sun was still above the horizon as the first of the bombing attacks developed almost at the moment they arrived. A large Greek yacht was alongside the pier, a fast-looking capacious vessel due to sail after dark, and civilians, British troops, walking wounded and the nursing staff from an Australian hospital had just finished boarding her when seven Junkers 88s appeared over the hills. Two of their bombs struck her at once and others exploded on the quayside. Within minutes her graceful lines were obscured by flames and smoke and they could hear the screams of men, women and children coming from the inferno.

  The guns were roaring at the aircraft as they swung away and one of them spiralled down trailing smoke, but the yacht was already ablaze from stem to stern, and the wooden jetty where she was moored also caught fire as the ship became a blazing trap for hundreds of people. The Greek sailors had not rigged their fire hoses and, manoeuvring alongside, Impi managed to turn her own hoses on to a patch of deck to keep it clear enough for screaming people to reach it and jump overboard. As they moved as close as they dared, every man who could swim jumped into the sea to drag the survivors to scrambling nets.

  The flames seemed to claw upwards for hundreds of feet as Kelly edged Impi still closer. Heads were bobbing in the water, faces blackened with oil, and the whaler was lowered and, with the Sub in command, was left astern as Impi moved away to gather in the more distant survivors. Oil had leaked from the blazing ship and was spreading outwards over the surface of the water, and it was a grim race to pick them up before the flames reached them. By this time, dozens of men were jumping over the side with lines and bringing burned survivors alongside. As they moved in and out of the flames and smoke, scattered bombers were still dropping – mines by parachute but, apart from the guns’ crews whose weapons were hammering into the sky through the smoke, they were all too busy to notice.

  When they could no longer see any heads in the water and were just about to return to pick up the whaler, Siggis yelled up to the bridge that he’d seen a man on a raft. As the ship swung, the direction of the smoke changed and they saw an oil-soaked soldier sitting on a tangle of debris surrounded by flames. As they approached, one of the stewards kicked off his boots and, going into the water with a magnificent dive, dragged the man from his raft and swam with him to the after landing net.

  It was dangerously hot now and the yacht was a pillar of fire, and black and filthy clouds of smoke were filling the sky overhead. The men on deck were covered with sweat and, with their own load of fuel oil and ammunition, it was growing dangerous.

  ‘We can’t stay here any longer,’ Kelly shouted. ‘Tell him to hold tight!’

  As the ship went astern, he was certain the two men would be washed away, but the steward had one arm through the net and the other round the survivor’s neck, almost throttling him. Whipping them aboard and, picking up the Sub with more survivors, they backed off to safety.

  They had seventy-eight people on board, men, women and children, dirt-streaked, wet-through and shivering, filling the ship with the stench of oil and seawater. Tea had been brought for them but as fast as they drank it they were vomiting it up again. Children were screaming with fear and women were sobbing, and among them a hysterical man was shouting that he was drowning as he was held down by two of his friends.

  They pushed them on board Glenbyre but the incident had wasted hours that should have been used for evacuating troops; and in the harsh world of war, troops were of more importance than civilians, and they were still pouring into the port in their thousands by every means at their disposal from lorries to bicycles and their own two feet. Morale had reached rock bottom and many of them no longer carried weapons. A pall of defeat hung over the place like a leaden cloak, and the only glimmer of light in the gloom was the hope of rescue by the Navy that they all cherished.

  Impi finally secured alongside under her own searchlights and without any help from ashore, and within minutes, hundreds of men had appeared, standing in bunches waiting for embarkation. But time had to be wasted rigging clusters of lights and making preparations to marshal them into some semblance of order, things which should have been done long before their arrival. By the early hours of the following morning, the harvest of men totalled over eight thousand, but since they had to leave before daylight it was a saddening experience to know that thousands more had had to be left who would have been aboard if someone had only shown some initiative.

  As the convoy assembled outside the harbour just before daylight, a New Zealand colonel appeared on Impi’s bridge to say there were two of his companies at a fishing village further along the coast, so, ordering the convoy to leave with Inca and Indian, Kelly took Impi close inshore and found the harbour just before daylight.

  As they groped their way through the unlit and deceptive entrance, the quay appeared to be deserted. One of the Maltese stewards could speak Greek and Kelly sent him ashore in the whaler with Latimer and the New Zealand colonel. They returned half an hour later with only nine soldiers and the New Zealander on the verge of tears.

  Apparently nobody had heard of the impending arrival of the rescue ships as the telegraph system had been put out of action and the army radios had failed to pick up any signals. It was growing daylight now and becoming dangerous to stay much longer.

  ‘Sound the siren,’ Kelly ordered and the high whooping cry began to echo among the hills. Almost immediately, men appeared about two miles away, popping up like jacks-in-the-box among the folds of ground.

  ‘Keep it going!’

  The distant figures were joined by others and began to stream out of the rocky fissures until they clotted together into a black mass of men hurrying down the dirt road to the harbour. They arrived alongside, panting and sweating, and were driven like sheep up the gangways.

  As they went astern, more men appeared and Kelly put the ship’s bows against the dockside, keeping her there with the engines running slowly ahead. Considering what a reputation he had for handling ships alongside, he thought, he was taking a hell of a chance. Ropes were dropped ashore and, as the men scrambled up them, the ship finally went astern in almost full daylight with two soldiers still clinging to a rope ladder dangling from the bows.

  The air attacks started not long after sun-up. It was a clear bright day with a fresh wind, which whipped the sea into a short ugly swell. The dive-bombers immediately singled out Glenbyre, the largest ship, but Inca and Indian took station between the two transports to afford them protection while Impi moved ahead to throw up a barrage through which the Stukas would have to dive.

  It didn’t seem to put the Stuka pilots off in the slightest, and within minutes Glenbyre was shaken by two direct hits, one engulfing the bridge in a sheet of flame. She swerved, almost collid
ing with Inca and swung helplessly head to wind so that the flames were fanned along the length of the ship, which was soon burning fiercely from end to end.

  Kelly’s face was taut. He knew they daren’t stay and his eyes hardened as he turned to the yeoman of signals. ‘Make to Inca to remain and pick up survivors.’

  As the rest of the convoy continued, the Stukas were still flying over the burning ship, spraying it with their machine guns and cannon and subjecting Inca to sporadic attacks. As the noise died and the aircraft disappeared, nobody was under any delusions that there wouldn’t be more.

  The buzzer went. ‘Masthead to bridge. Four ships in sight dead ahead.’

  They swung round, wondering what they were in for next. For a long time, with the sun still behind the distant ships, it was impossible to tell what they were, but then they turned slightly to starboard to come up on their port side and Latimer grinned.

  ‘Hunt-class ships, sir. Chatsworth in the lead. And there’s an I-class ship bringing up the rear. I think it’s Impatient.’

  The four newcomers closed them at full speed, – and Verschoyle’s signal was a repetition of one he had sent to Kelly up the Yangtze in 1927.

  ‘Fancy meeting you.’

  As the four ships crashed past them, Impatient’s roughly-patched wounds clearly visible, her light flashed.

  ‘Request permission to escort little sister Inca home.’

  ‘Make “Granted”.’

  Almost immediately, more Stukas arrived and the holocaust of sound started again as the guns threw their barrage of steel into the sky. As they came in Kelly found himself cataloguing and analysing his thoughts. It wasn’t fear that filled his mind but grim fatalism. The muscles of his mouth were drawn taut and he felt that Impi was only a minute fragment in the catastrophe of events that were taking place.