The Steel Fist

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Taggart wondered whether perhaps Odile was disappointed that they had not killed another sale Boche.

  They carried their canoes down to the water’s edge, assembled them and prepared to launch them on the ebbing tide.

  Eager to complete his task, Taggart was nonetheless reluctant to leave. But Odile gave him a brief, impersonal handshake, she shook hands with the others in turn, in silence. She stepped back and addressed them all in a whisper.

  “Good luck... and thank you... as long as England remains free there is hope for France.”

  The three crews paddled away towards the entrance of the outer harbour in line astern. The wind agitated the sea into sharp waves separated by narrow troughs. It whipped spume from the wave crests and drove it into the Commandos’ faces. These were not the conditions they had anticipated during the fine weather of the past days. They had to battle against the increasing chop of wind over tide to stay on even keels.

  Taggart had intended to paddle eastward, past the harbour mouth and well out to sea, and then turn to approach parallel to the shore. Before launching he had given revised orders. They would turn parallel with the shore when 100 yards out, and make towards the western wall of the harbour. They would then stay close to the wall and follow it towards open water, turn east again around it, and make for the entrance still in the wall’s shadow.

  Paddling parallel to the coast, the canoes rocked violently and the wind, thrust them further inshore than they wished. Following the long western wall, they were constantly slammed into it. When they had rounded its end and were paddling towards the entrance, they were alternately sucked away from the northern wall by the tide and hurled back onto it by the wind. The trip that should have taken them forty minutes took twice as long and demanded much more exertion than they had expected. By the time that the three canoes lay rocking together against the outer wall, all six men were near to exhaustion. Taggart allowed only five minutes’ rest before he and Corporal Fysshe-Smith, leaving Udall and Wallace to handle their canoes, began to climb the wall, knocking in pitons with mallets faced with thick felt to muffle them.

  Taggart reached the top of the wall with his pulse racing as if he had run a 220-yard sprint. He paused with his head below the edge and then cautiously raised it behind a bollard and at last looked across the outer anchorage. The sound of jackboots treading leisurely and of low voices reached him. Two Germans approached, strolled to the end of the wall, stood for a moment, then turned and retraced their steps.

  Taggart and the corporal each dropped a rope’s end and secured the other end to two bollards. They hauled up the explosives. The other four shinned up after making the canoes fast to iron rings attached to pitons that they had driven into the sea wall.

  They were crossing the quay when a searchlight licked out and began to sweep across the harbour. They dropped flat behind a pile of casks and a stack of crates. The light flashed to and fro, then went out. They moved on.

  In pairs, they crept round the northern and western sides of the outer harbour, placing their explosives below the water line on board the barges: each pair could deal with eight. Taggart laid explosive at the base of a pump that supplied petrol for boats’ engines and another under the trapdoor covering the vast tank beneath it.

  He kept looking at his watch. Three times more the searchlight came on and its beam crossed and recrossed the water, while the Commandos lay flat on the bottoms of the barges.

  The task took seventy minutes. Taggart had allowed for forty. He and Udall were the last to finish. Fysshe-Smith was waiting for them by the ropes.

  There was no time to go down the coast to reconnoitre the other place but Taggart was filled with elation at all they had accomplished without being caught by search-light or sentry.

  Tied together in the same manner as when they had arrived two nights before, the canoes made northwards.

  They had plodded through turbulent water for an hour before a wave swamped Taggart’s canoe and capsized it. He clung to it as the waves tossed it and tried to wrench it free from his hold. When he managed to stay on the surface, draped over the hull, he called to Udall.

  “Here, sir.” The voice came from many yards away.

  “Can you see me?”

  “Yessir... and I’ve grabbed the line.” The line between their canoe and the one crewed by the corporal and Wallace.

  Taggart heard the corporal shout, “We’ve turned over... are you O.K. Jock?” and Wallace’s answer, faint in the distance; “Och... bloudy hell... I’m hanging on.”

  They clambered aboard and began to paddle hard, shivering in the breeze that blew on their wet clothes.

  Another hour, and by Taggart’s reckoning they must be within a mile of their R.V.

  He took out the waterproof torch that each canoe carried and shone it in an arc from east to west.

  There was no answering signal. Dismay flooded Taggart’s mind. They could easily be far off course. He shouted to the other boats to resume paddling and was answered by a yell from the sergeant.

  “We’ve capsized, sir... Gallagher?”

  No answer. The wind might have snatched away a man’s yell on a night like this. The sergeant called again. Then: “Got him, sir.”

  And, a couple of minutes later, the beam of a powerful light to sea. It searched the tumbling water and came to rest on the three boats, which were tied with only twenty feet between each.

  All Taggart’s energy seemed to ebb and he sagged. It was all over and the reaction made him tremble with shock and weariness as much as from the bitter chill, waiting for the submarine to close the distance between them.

  The searchlight came nearer. In its backwash they saw a bow wave. The bow wave became bigger and behind it they saw the sharp prow of a surface craft.

  From seaward came a burst of tracer that ripped through the darkness with terrifying and unexpected venom. The canoes were close enough to the motor boat to hear the glass of the searchlight shatter as the light went out. The glare left them dazzled. They saw tracer from the boat rake the air over their heads and the water to one side of them.

  More tracer, both small-calibre shells and machine-gun bullets, came from the north. A searchlight sprung to life and settled on the motor boat which was by this time 100 yards from the canoes, which had been carried far and fast by wind and current.

  In the pool of brilliance cast by the second searchlight, the rakish hull and swastika flag of an E-boat stood out as boldly as the figures of the sailors at its guns.

  The Commandos heard the crash of a heavier gun and saw bright muzzle flashes beside the searchlight. Shells fell around the E-boat. The seventh shell in quick succession hit it. A sheet of flame lit the sea for more than 100 yards around the listing boat. Tracer bullets zipped over the canoes. A second large shell landed on target and the E-boat blew up. The shock wave and the sudden swell on the water almost overturned the canoes again.

  The beam of light swung and settled on the canoes. A call came from a loud hailer: “Stand by to come aboard.” The submarine slipped into view.

  Lieutenant-Commander Merrick leaned down from his conning tower.

  “Hello, Taggart. Bring the groceries?”

  “Sorry, sir, we all capsized. Lost the camembert and the bubbly overboard.”

  “Did you, by Jove? In that case, I think I’ll leave you to paddle the rest of the way to Pompey.”

  “Maybe we’d better; and give you a tow: you were late on R.V. I don’t think you’re too sure of your way.”

  They were alongside the submarine by this time and Merrick was laughing down at Taggart.

  “Fair enough. But come aboard and have a tot first, old boy. Be quick: I want to dive before that little spot of bother attracts a whole flotilla of E-boats here.”

  Taggart waited until his five men had clambered onto the submarine before he climbed stiffly after them and the sailors hauled the canoes up from the water. He mounted the ladder to the conning tower.

  Merrick lowered t
he night glasses with which he was searching the surface for unwelcome company.

  “How did it go, Taggart?”

  “Not bad, sir. But we’ve still got a lot to learn about this sort of operation.”

  He hoped that Odile would hear about the sinking of the E-boat. He could picture the look with which she would welcome the news. He shivered, and it was not only cold, exhaustion and the after-effects of tension that caused it.

  If you enjoyed reading The Steel Fist, you might be interested in Fighters Up, also by Richard Townsend Bickers.

  Extract from Fighters Up by Richard Townsend Bickers

  One

  Images and sensations; and the cold.

  The pictures forming in his mind of violent death and flaming destruction, the icy tremors of his body, the voices - sometimes the screams - in his ears: all formed a pattern, and, he supposed, a kind of crazy rhythm. Every experience, every event and situation, had its own rhythm, and this one was the rhythm of aerial combat.

  The memories came whether he was sleeping or awake. If asleep, they roused him with a start and sweating: in bed, or a deep doze in a canvas chair in the pilots’ but out at dispersals, where the Hurricanes and Spitfires stood ranged in their blast pens. They came when he was wide awake: ostensibly reading Flight or The Aeroplane in the dispersal hut, or the Daily Telegraph in the mess ante-room. They recurred even when he was in conversation, or among a group with a pint tankard in his hand in mess or a pub. All it needed to set the images and the sensations going was the glimpse of a face that had shared them, the mention of a name, or some allusion.

  “Break! Blue Two, break!”

  “Behind you, Simon!”

  And his own voice: “Break right, Tug!” “Bandits, two-o’clock, above, coming in.” “Blast you, Robbie, you nearly took my tail off.”

  But Robbie had not heard him. When the Hurricane flashed past, Howard saw that it was burning and its pilot was limp, head lolling.

  The rhythm of air fighting: attack and defence, thrust and parry in a three-dimensional brawl at over three hundred miles an hour, closing speeds of twice that much.

  The rhythm of gunfire from an adversary, coming at him in short bursts: of multi-coloured tracer drawing curved lines across the sky, the bark of cannon and the rattle of machineguns; the cadence of his own shooting and the joyful shock of the bright splashes his incendiaries made when they hit their target; the dazzle from his .303 Brownings and 20 millimetre Hispanos, at first light and dusk, from muzzle flashes and tracer; the wing-overs, half-rolls off the top of a loop, sideslips and stall turns that were the aerobatics of battle; the shrieking of the wind in his gun muzzles when he had blasted their canvas covers off, the howling it made as it tore through the holes that enemy fighters or flak had punched in his Hurricane or Spitfire: these were the kaleidoscopic fragments of sight and sound that composed the pictures and noises which tormented him.

  The war would enter its third year in four months’ time. In 1939 - away back in 1939 - four months had been a short period which brought no change to his life; except the addition of several hours’ flying time in his logbook. Now, in the early summer of 1942, four months seemed as long as a peacetime year used to. No operational fighter pilot could delude himself with the certainty that he would live so long.

  The mental pictures, lively with their accompanying noises, were sharper now than they had been for six months. R.A.F. Monkston lay only another twenty miles ahead; and it was at Monkston that he was stationed when war broke out.

  With his recollections came the physical response that made him shiver as though he were in an unheated cockpit at 30,000 feet, or crouching in a slit trench in Norway while the Germans bombed the airfield. He had always loathed the cold, but those few weeks of the farcical, abortive Norwegian campaign had made his hatred personal, it was so deep; as though Cold were an entity, anthropomorphic, tangible.

  The Medical officers had said he would get over his nightmares and the horrors that could descend on him at any time in broad daylight. The bad memories and physical reactions never assailed him in the air; which, it seemed, was all that mattered. The doctors’ bland earnest reassurances were sometimes, however, accompanied by a look of such intensity that it made him wonder what was really in their thoughts.

  Two years later, driving his six-year-old Morris Oxford two-seater along a country road in Sussex on a summer’s day, he still felt the cold biting into his flesh when he remembered the snow and strong winds, the frozen lakes; and the North Sea, where the ship that was taking him home was torpedoed.

  The doctors had been kind, patient and emphatic. He would find out soon enough about himself and the truth of what they had said. His six-month “rest”, instructing at an operational training unit, was over. Now another - yet another - tour of ops confronted him. Not that instructing had been much of a respite from the danger of calamity. Flying in close formation with inexperienced pilots was often lethal: especially at low level - down to less than twenty feet, on some exercises - or in cloud; and in mock fights, when pupils also had a tendency to collide with their instructors. He had had to bail out only three weeks ago, his Spitfire’s tail fin and half a tail plane ripped off by an over-enthusiastic nineteen-year-old Canadian who had pressed a dummy attack as though he were a Japanese bent on suicide.

  That brolly-hop was his fourth; so far. Thinking about it brought no sweat or chilly shudders, which was encouraging.

  Intrepid, he told himself wryly. That’s what I am, downright intrepid. Come to think of it, I didn’t exactly funk a fight in Norway... or the B of B - the Battle of Britain - or on the sweeps and Circuses and Rhubarbs that followed it. But I still get the fantods and flaming abdabs from those days.

  He could see Spits taking off and coming in to land, although the airfield was still hidden by a slight rise in the ground, by trees and by Monkston village. High above he saw condensation trails made by others which he could not discern except as small shapeless glints of silver, their green and brown camouflage reflecting the sun like mirrors. At 5000 feet a Halifax lumbered past, presumably on a navigation exercise. In another direction a bright yellow Oxford trainer was cruising. Elsewhere in the sky he made out a Tiger Moth, circling an anti-aircraft site so that the gunners could practise aiming; a black Beaufighter night fighter; a pair of Blenheims. Everybody’s doing it now, he reflected. Three years ago, being able to fly an aircraft was a rare accomplishment. Now, insurance clerks and stock-brokers, undergraduates, grocers’ assistants and vacuum-cleaner salesmen, carpenters and lawyers are all getting in on the act.

  A world gone mad with war! He smiled as he recalled the parodic recitation, popular in R.A.F. messes when drink was flowing, in which the sententious phrase recurred.

  A world gone mad on defying the law of gravity, it seemed to him: it must be the pay that attracted them in preference to the Navy and Army. Or maybe it was the special appeal they thought a pilot’s wings held for the girls. It was all right with him: he didn’t care what the motive was, as long as they watched where they were going and didn’t fly into him or any of his friends. He didn’t resent the wartime intake. They were amateurs, but they were needed, they had their uses. Some of them, particularly those who joined at eighteen, would be good enough to be kept on after the war. Anything that was good for the Service had his approval. But it had taken a lot of getting used to: to fly with, to put his life to a great extent in the hands of, men whom he scarcely knew and whose ability he doubted. After two years of peacetime flying with the same squadron, that had come very hard.

  There had been few changes among his comrades in those two years. A couple had been posted overseas, another two had died in accidents; his first Commanding Officer had been sent to Staff College, but his successor had taken over more than a year before war was declared. All the other pilots, both officers and sergeants, were his friends as well as his brothers-in-arms. He trusted their judgment and skill in the air, whether in formation drill, aerobatics or battle;
as he knew they trusted his.

  The first time he was shot down it had been because a Volunteer Reservist who had been only ten days on the squadron lost him while supposed to be keeping watch for an attack from astern. This had made him suspect all non-regulars; which in turn had made him the most demanding, and often intolerant, instructor at the O.T.U. he had just left. An Irish pupil had called him Hard Man Howard and the name had been taken up by all the others. It amused, and rather pleased, him. The R.A.F. was prolific with nicknames and he had been known, on his old squadron, as Boost: because he was a scorching sprinter on the track and rugger field. He played right wing three-quarter for the station or Fighter Command on Wednesdays and for a leading Sussex club on Saturdays. He won the 100 and 220 yards at Service and civilian athletics meetings consistently in the summer. Part of the pleasure of returning to squadron life was that he had left Hard Man behind and would be Boost again.

  There was comfort in any link with the old days, the pre-war years and the first few months of the war; and he had two: returning to a long familiar station and, he knew, the use of his friendly and flattering nickname.

  The Pig and Whistle was on the left as he drove through the centre of the village and he looked on it with some of the affection with which he regarded his family home in Wiltshire. But at The Manor he could still count on seeing his parents, his brother and sister, while too many faces he remembered with affection would never be seen again in the snug old inn.

  The thought brought back the devil who sat so persistently on his shoulder. His hands felt cold and pins and needles prickled his feet, his pulse quickened. Then the main gate appeared around a curve in the road and all emotion had gone except the excitement of being back on a squadron.