Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  It was impossible in the murk to tell exactly where the shells fell but then they saw columns of water rising ahead of them.

  ‘They’re not short!’ Kelly snapped. ‘And they’re not from ahead either. They’re from the port beam!’

  As he swung, he could see himself entering a trap. There was a big ship ahead and another one, probably their original target, on the port beam, and in the darkness there were undoubtedly escorting destroyers with torpedoes like the one they’d sunk. As he concentrated, he was hardly aware of the shells bursting in the water around them. The fact that they were under fire seemed of secondary importance just then.

  The shells were still falling close and he heard the clatter as splinters flew past and hit the upperworks. His nostrils were full of the smell of cordite as the guns crashed.

  ‘Turn away!’

  The ship heeled as helm was applied. Any destroyers there were ought by now to be behind them.

  ‘Enemy ships also turning away, sir.’

  ‘We’ll maintain touch. Alter to westward. Let’s see if they really are legging it. Reduce speed to twenty-seven knots. If he turns back we’ll be in a good position to get between him and the convoy.’

  As the ship crashed through the dark seas, eyes strained towards the blank horizon.

  ‘Radar reports contact lost, sir.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘I think they’re going back into their holes, Henry,’ he said.

  Soon afterwards, with the clouds breaking, the navigator managed at last to fix their position. They had shadowed the German ships, risking another attack by destroyers, until they’d made sure they were heading away from the convoy. By now, the homeward-bound convoy must have reached safety astern of them, while Verschoyle’s ships must be coming into their area.

  ‘Signal, sir. From Langdale to Lotus. “In view of holes in forecastle and deteriorating weather, consider it advisable to proceed to Kola forthwith. Captain (D) concurs.”’

  So Verschoyle wasn’t dead! But it was clear he was out of action and his first lieutenant had taken over.

  ‘Make to Langdale that we’ll cover her.’

  Suddenly Kelly realised he was cold, and was exhausted as much by the bitter air and tension as by the long hours on the bridge. It brought a feeling of depression and with it came the thought of Hugh.

  ‘Make to Parsifal requesting information of the pilot she flew off.’

  Soon after midnight, they picked up another signal from Langdale. Lotus had taken over as senior ship of the escort and after the position and course that followed the message continued:

  ‘LANGDALE PROCEEDING INDEPENDENTLY TO KOLA INLET. ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL 0700, 17TH. APPARENT SITUATION ON LEAVING CONVOY: LINDSAY DAMAGED. WHEREABOUTS UNCERTAIN. REMAINDER OF ESCORT AND 30 MERCHANT SHIPS UNHARMED. TWO MERCHANT SHIPS AND TRAWLER THORN NOT IN COMPANY SINCE 14th.’

  It was blowing half a gale now and, as he waited impatiently for Parsifal’s reply, Kelly tried to show no emotion. It was his job to appear unaffected and concerned only with his ships.

  ‘We’ll sweep to the limit of the Russian submarine area,’ he said. ‘What’s the fuel state?’

  His mind was on his ships and the job in hand but, like everyone else he was suffering from the anti-climax that always followed a period of high tension and danger. In addition he couldn’t put aside the thought of Hugh’s frozen body lolling in his dinghy in the darkness and he wondered if anyone had informed Verschoyle.

  ‘Parsifal replies, sir.’ The signals officer appeared ‘“Pilot’s whereabouts unknown. Due to action German heavy units obliged to abandon.”’

  Kelly sighed. So that was that. Hugh had taken a dangerous chance just once too often. He caught Latimer’s eyes on him and passed a hand over his face. His features felt stiff.

  ‘I’m going below, William,’ he said. ‘Pass the word for Rumbelo to see me, will you?’

  As they entered the Kola Inlet the following morning, Russia looked depressing and cold, and Kelly wondered if they were right to ask young men like Hugh to suffer for such a bloody ungrateful ally.

  His thoughts were particularly bitter when Latimer appeared alongside him, so sulphurous in fact he was surprised to see Latimer was smiling.

  ‘Sir: Signal from the trawler, Southern Star.’

  He took the message, his mind still on his job, then the words leapt out at him.

  ‘SOUTHERN STAR TO CS ONE. REFERENCE YOUR 2040 TO PARSIFAL, HAVE PICKED UP MISSING PILOT. UNHARMED. RECOVERING.’

  Kelly looked at Latimer. He couldn’t believe it. This was Hugh’s third escape and his second encounter in a dinghy with the waves and the weather. He must bear a charmed life to scrape through with such a thin thread of luck.

  ‘God’s good, William,’ he said. ‘Better than we probably deserve. I think we’d better let Rumbelo know.’

  The battered Langdale was already alongside Varenga pier when Chichester dropped anchor. At once, Kelly called for his barge and headed towards her.

  Her paintwork was scarred and scorched by flames and her funnel and bridge were riddled with splinter holes. Two hits forward had wiped out A and B guns with their crews and almost the whole of the forward part of the ship had been on fire. The hit on the funnel had sent a shower of debris into the engine room and blown open the boiler casing. Aerials had been brought down and the range finder smashed, and because the forward capstan wasn’t working, she couldn’t move from the pier and the crew had been offered billets ashore in an ugly stone building furnished with little else but pictures of Stalin. They had elected to stay on board.

  The first lieutenant was a good-looking man who looked like a younger edition of Verschoyle himself and had probably been picked for that reason.

  ‘With their usual bloody-mindedness, sir,’ he reported, ‘the Russians refuse to believe we’ve been in action with anything bigger than a destroyer. I expect it’s political, because I’ve noticed here that only Russians can lick the Germans.’

  The hospital was a stone building in which there seemed to be remarkably little heating and the electricity kept failing, but the naval surgeon ashore had rigged up secondary lighting with aldis lamps and a torch. Verschoyle was propped up in bed, his face smothered in bandages. A splinter had smashed his jaw and sliced up his cheek. He was under sedation but was conscious.

  ‘Hello, James,’ Kelly said.

  ‘Hello, Ginger. What about my missing ships?’

  ‘I’m afraid you lost Lutine and the trawler.’

  ‘Poor old Thorn. She wasn’t very big and she wouldn’t have had much chance.’ Verschoyle paused. ‘I’m damn sorry about Hugh, Kelly.’

  Kelly put Southern Star’s signal in his hand.

  ‘I can’t see it. You’d better read it.’

  Kelly did so and Verschoyle was silent for a long time.

  ‘I must be growing old,’ he said at last. ‘I feel I’d like to cry.’

  Kelly smiled. ‘It was a bloody good show you put up,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to your captains and your first lieutenant. I’ll see you get a gong for this. The biggest I can dig out of ’em.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Verschoyle’s mouth curled under the bandages. ‘It’s nice when you become sufficiently senior to see that your friends get presents. We ought to operate on a you-kiss-mine-I’ll-kiss-yours basis. We could be the most decorated people in the Navy.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Bloody terrible. The buggers have spoiled my manly beauty at last.’

  ‘Can you see?’

  ‘Not really. But they say my right eye’s all right.’ Verschoyle paused. ‘How about the ship?’

  ‘We’ll get her repaired at Rosta and send her home as soon as possible. You as well. We’ve arranged for you to be put aboard Lindsay and sent back with the next convoy. I’ll see if we can’t get Hugh aboard, too.’

  There was a long silence, before Verschoyle spoke again. ‘Wonder how Maisie will take it. Suspect she married me because I looked presentable
.’

  ‘I think she’s tougher than that. You’ll be on your feet in no time and after this you should be well in line for that broad stripe.’

  There was a long silence. ‘But not at sea again.’ Verschoyle paused. ‘Still, I was always one for comfort, as you know, and a cushy job in some esoteric branch of the Admiralty would suit me fine. I’ll leave the battles to bloodthirsty buggers like you.’

  Kelly arrived in England long after Lindsay. They had been ordered to Iceland to refuel then sent out into the Atlantic where a German raider had been reported near the Azores. Intelligence had it that, with the German heavies short of fuel and apparently despised by Hitler, the menace at sea in future was likely to be only from such raiders, because someone seemed to have found the answer to the U-boats at last, and they were being sunk in unexpected numbers and the Atlantic convoys were suddenly immune from attack.

  There were American ships at Scapa when they returned and the picture had completely changed. The Germans had lost a whole army at Stalingrad, while in the Pacific the Japanese were also on the retreat. England was changing constantly, too. The Americans were arriving in force now, taking over the country, stealing all the girls and drinking all the whisky. There was some resentment but also a great deal of admiration because they’d learned quickly in North Africa. Off-duty American naval officers wore clothes that seemed to indicate a round of golf, but for the most part they were the product of a naval school as traditional and expert as Dartmouth, and the regulars knew their job, while the amateurs were enthusiastic and contained some unexpected faces. On one occasion, Kelly found himself drinking gin with a man he’d watched more than once on the screen at the cinema.

  Perhaps the most encouraging sign was the numbers of landing craft being gathered in English ports for the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe and, with the Eighth Army already ashore in the toe of Italy, Mussolini, defeated on every front, had been deposed.

  Hugh was at Thakeham, white, shaken and ill, but slowly recovering and Paddy was on compassionate leave to look after him. She gave Kelly a curious glance that seemed more gratitude than anything, as if she considered him responsible for giving her husband back to her, but privately she confided to him that Hugh was determined to get back into the war somehow.

  ‘What is it that drives him like this?’ she said, her small face agonised with worry. ‘Hasn’t he already taken enough chances?’

  Was it his youth, Kelly wondered. The fact that he’d been ignored for much of his childhood and early manhood by Christina? Her own tremendous vitality and zest for life even? Or was it that his father had been nothing but a cipher and he was anxious to prove that he wasn’t, too?

  At the Admiralty, everybody seemed pleased by the skirmish off Bear Island, and it seemed clear that Verschoyle, despite his wound, was expected back in uniform by the autumn. Kelly found him at Haslar in excellent spirits, though his handsome face had been transformed. A livid scar ran across his jaw, leaving a deep groove right up to his cheekbone, his nose was wrenched out of shape and his right eye was milky and turned outwards.

  ‘One fixed, one flashing, like a wreck marker,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Maisie thinks I’m wonderful.’

  Kelly produced a box of cigars and a pineapple. ‘Got ’em at Punta Delgada in the Azores,’ he said. ‘The ship was stacked with ’em. The lower deck must have made a fortune.’

  Verschoyle was smiling. ‘I’ve got something for you, too,’ he said. ‘A bit of news.’

  ‘They’re giving me the Home Fleet?’

  ‘Eventually. But not yet. No, it’s not that. I’m on the track of Charley Upfold.’

  ‘What!’ Kelly sat bolt upright.

  ‘Steady on! I haven’t got much. I heard it from a chap who was in here till two days ago. She’s still with the Navy. Or was.’

  ‘Where, for God’s sake?’

  ‘She went to Ops Division Signals Room at the Admiralty. Some lecherous bastard called Lewis had his eye on her and got her there as his secretary.’

  Kelly’s heart sank and Verschoyle grinned.

  ‘Nothing came of it, old son. I gather he was a bit of a shit and he was eventually sent to North Africa. He’s still there.’

  ‘And Charley?’

  ‘Well, she isn’t waiting for Lewis, because he turned out to be married with two kids.’

  ‘And now?’

  Verschoyle’s smile died. ‘Well, there I’m stuck for a bit. You see, she left London.’

  ‘Where for?’

  I don’t know. And neither does the Admiralty, so she’s not a Wren. But leave it to your Uncle Sherlock. When they let me out of here I’ll have nothing to do and it’ll stop me getting bored.’

  Uncertain whether to feel depressed or encouraged by Verschoyle’s news, by September Kelly was back at sea and Chichester was full of American officers, naval, military and air. There was little to fear in the Mediterranean now but the Germans were sneaking U-boats past Spain armed with acoustic torpedoes which homed in on the sound of a ship’s propellers, and several ships had had their sterns blown off. They were also believed to be developing some sort of radio-controlled bomb, and ships were taking scientists to sea with special receivers to pick up the wavelengths.

  Despite the fact that an advance into the Balkans towards Vienna seemed a good idea, somehow the American government was not in favour and they weren’t throwing their full weight behind the Italian campaign; but as the summer ended, Chichester and Sarawak found themselves moving west round Malta and Pantellaria with Force H from Gib, guarding the western flank. Sacks of orders had arrived on board and, though they knew there was to be another landing, they were still in the dark as to where it was to be.

  ‘I’ll bet the Germans have worked it out,’ Latimer said grimly. ‘I have – and I was supposed at school to be a bit dim. It has to have a suitable beach, it has to be near a major port and it has to be within fighter cover. It’s Salerno.’

  The hot purple blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea was thick with north-bound shipping west of Sicily and east of Sardinia. Capri was fifty miles away and they were all waiting expectantly when Latimer appeared on the bridge, grinning.

  ‘Allied troops have landed at Salerno, sir,’ he said. ‘And the Government of Italy’s handed in its chips. They’ve surrendered. They’re coming in on our side.’

  Kelly smiled. ‘If they do as well for us as they did for the Germans, Hitler’s got nothing to worry about.’

  People were dancing in the squares of the twin towns of Messina and San Giovanni as they passed, with wild festivities, floodlit churches and fireworks, but the fact that the Germans hadn’t surrendered, too, was obvious when the Luftwaffe attacked just before midnight.

  The first indication that something was happening was the crack of gunfire from the port side of the fleet. Immediately, the alarm sounded and the guns began to bang away. The barrage was too much and the German airmen failed to make much of their attack.

  ‘Timid as a bean-fed mare,’ Latimer said.

  By this time, they’d learned that the Italian armistice terms included the immediate transfer of the Italian fleet to the allies and the requisitioning of merchant shipping, and during the early hours of next morning, they were instructed to accompany Warspite and Valiant to meet the Italian ships twenty miles north of Bone.

  ‘Second time round,’ Kelly observed dryly. ‘I did this in 1919, too, with the German High Seas Fleet. There’s nothing quite so dramatic as seeing your enemies coming in grovelling.’

  After the dark days of Crete and Greece when Cunningham had run the Mediterranean Fleet on a shoestring, there was a strange emotion running through the ship, and they were off Bone at dawn when the Italians came in sight. As the two forces steamed towards each other at twenty knots, the gunnery officer was comparing their silhouettes with his cards. ‘I never thought in 1941 that I’d survive to see this,’ he said.

  His eyes narrowed and as the Italian ships dropped anchor – two fifteen-inch bat
tleships, Andrea Doria and Caio Duilio, five cruisers and nine destroyers – he voiced the hopes of every man on board.

  ‘Perhaps we can go home now,’ he said.

  Four

  With the Italians out of the war, they had somehow expected to put the Med behind them, but the Americans at Salerno had run into trouble and the squadron was ordered to bring their great guns to bear. The hills were close and full of German artillery shelling the airstrips and landing places, and it was the Navy’s job to knock them out.

  Observers were landed and in the sunshine they could see the leaping fountains of earth and stones and drifting smoke. How much damage they were doing it was hard to say but the American troops were enthusiastic. A heavy shell made the sound of an express train and the thought of an express train filled with high explosive passing overhead was always encouraging.

  They were so close inshore, they could see soldiers stripped to the waist unloading stores, the great fifteen-inch shells from Warspite and Valiant flinging houses sky-high, and ammunition dumps going up in fearsome explosions of black smoke and debris.

  Every hour or so, German fighters roared in with their cannon going, coming in low as they stood off the shore at night. The following morning, they moved in again, blotting out German positions as the Americans consolidated their grip. The thunder of the great guns provided a deep base to the battle, and the smaller armament of Chichester, Sarawak and two American cruisers, Savannah and Philadelphia, a higher-pitched counterpoint.

  For two days and nights they hammered the shore, until the possibility of a large-scale disaster changed slowly to success, and for safety, Kelly sent for a copy of the Admiralty report on the new radio-controlled bomb.

  ‘Make to all ships,’ he said. ‘“In the event of attack by glider bombs, one officer is to do nothing but observe and report on the behaviour of the bomb.”’

  Almost immediately, Rumbelo sang out.

  ‘High level bombers to starboard! About 16,000 feet!’