Convoy of War (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  On the port side of HMS Carmarthen’s compass platform, Donald Cameron, ordinary seaman on lookout, scanned his allotted arc through binoculars. His sector was from right ahead to the port beam, and God help him if he missed so much as a leaping fish. The trick was to spot what was there to be seen before the Officer of the Watch had done so; and on his vision, and that of the other lookouts scanning the other sectors in full protection — theoretically at any rate — of HMS Carmarthen and her charges, depended the lives of very many men. A split second could make all the difference to the destroyer’s ability to dodge torpedoes and to turn effectively to the attack herself.

  On this occasion, however, there was nothing: only the other escorts from time to time as they altered course to weave in and out of the convoy lines, chasing stragglers, passing orders by loud hailer; and the merchantmen themselves, their masters and mates normally unaccustomed to sailing the seas in company. The station-keeping was naturally poor enough; merchant ships were not equipped for small alterations in engine revolutions such as kept the warships easily in station.

  But apart from a few near misses as the mass of ships weaved about it was peace, perfect peace in the midst of war; and it couldn’t possibly last. Donald Cameron, straining aching eyes through his binoculars, seeing things after a while that were not there, removed the binoculars for a spell of naked eye work, then went back to the binoculars to check. Again and again, and still nothing but the ships and the sea, which was covered with white horses, just the sort of sea condition that best suited a U-boat captain’s purpose, though in point of fact attack normally came during the night watches: at night the U-boats could cruise on the surface and make better speed — and, when surfaced, they enjoyed an immunity from the Asdics of the escorts. It was not unknown for daring captains to take their boats right into the middle of a convoy at night before despatching their torpedoes.

  But today fate had decided differently: the conditions were perfect for submerged day attack. Carmarthen’s Asdic picked up a contact and almost simultaneously the signalling started from the Senior Officer of the escort: more contacts had been established. A hunting pack of U-boats was in position. As aboard Carmarthen, to the orders of Sub-Lieutenant Stephenson, Officer of the Watch, the action alarm sounded throughout the ship and brought the upper deck alive with officers and men, Cameron spotted a feather of water, standing out a little above the small, breaking crests. Keeping his glasses on the feather he reported in a voice high with excitement, ‘Dead ahead, sir, a periscope!’

  Stephenson’s glasses moved to the bearing. ‘Right! I have it.’ He bent to the voice-pipe connecting with the wheelhouse beneath the compass platform. ‘Full ahead both engines, steady as you go!’

  The reply came up, metallic-sounding, phlegmatic. ‘Full ahead both engines, sir, steady as you go, sir.’ As Carmarthen’s Captain, a young lieutenant-commander carrying an immense responsibility, reached the bridge, a 45-degree turn to starboard was ordered by signal from the Commodore of the convoy, and as the convoy swung the warships increased speed, their wakes deepening and widening. The first casualty came within minutes: a three-island 10,000-tonner, in ballast for North America to bring home war materials, suddenly spouted water and smoke and flame from her starboard side for’ard and began at once to go down by the head. As her speed came sharply off, she was cut into astern by a tanker altering course to the Commodore’s orders, and then came a second explosion. Cameron saw more trails of torpedoes running through the lines of the convoy.

  It was to be a massive attack.

  Instinctively, Cameron felt for the inflated lifebelt nestling round his body beneath his duffel-coat, and pulled his steel helmet more firmly down upon his ears. As he listened to the quickening pings from the Asdic he felt he could congratulate himself on having beaten the set to it by giving the Officer of the Watch a visual bearing to attack…

  *

  Cameron had joined the Navy on a hostilities-only engagement some seven months earlier. At the age of nineteen, he had enlisted at the first possible opportunity, as a volunteer who had not waited to be called up for service. He had joined, not in the first place in the seaman branch, but in the rating of ordinary signalman. The first weeks were to prove that he would never be able to get the hang of flag-wagging, Aldis lamps and the Morse code, but he was a good seaman — his father had seen to that — and on being recommended for a commission in the executive branch had been transferred to the rating of ordinary seaman. That had been at the former Butlins’ holiday camp at Skegness in Lincolnshire, right on the wind-swept Wash, now a naval shore establishment known as HMS Royal Arthur. Cameron would not forget his arrival there, in a coach that had met the train from Portsmouth, where he had enlisted along with a number of other new entries.

  Over the gate was still set, in very large letters, Butlins’ welcoming message to holiday-makers: OUR TRUE INTENT IS ALL FOR YOUR DELIGHT. And an equally large and loud Chief Gunner’s Mate, the Navy’s equivalent to a Regimental Sergeant-Major, had drawn the draft’s attention to it with a wave of a hammy hand.

  ‘Now then. See that sign?’

  There had been a chorus of polite yesses.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t bloody well apply to you lot,’ the Chief Gunner’s Mate had said with a certain degree of satisfaction in his voice. ‘Get fell in properly…’

  They had shambled into some sort of line and had been taken by a petty officer and marched beneath the sign of welcome. Cameron was to find that its message certainly did not apply to the establishment’s wartime occupants. The training routine was hard, the life rigorous, the day long — it started at 0630 hours when the trainee sailors were turned out from the chalets in which they slept to muster for inspection by their petty officer instructor, and then set to ‘scavenge’ — scrabble about among the chalet lines and pick up any piece of paper or other un-Naval objects that might be lying around. The chalets themselves were more spartan than the holidaymakers had known them: each contained three men in two bunks, the double one being for decency’s sake split in half by a deep board. Here they washed and shaved in cold water which had afterwards to be emptied. After scavenging there was breakfast in a vast, noisy building, one of several that were known by such names as York House, Kent House and Gloucester House; and after breakfast Divisions, in the course of which the various classes marched behind a Royal Marine band playing, daily, ‘Sussex by the Sea’ and ‘Heart of Oak’, marching past the Training Commander and the First Lieutenant to be dispersed to the different classrooms or other training areas. Much of the daily routine was taken up with square-bashing and with long route marches into the surrounding countryside; the rest was devoted to instruction in Naval routine, shipboard organization and the art of signalling; the latter included many sessions at the semaphore flags, when the arms of the assembled trainees moved rhythmically to the tune, never to be forgotten, of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Every fault, however small, of work, dress or behaviour was pounced upon hard by the PO Instructor, one Yeoman of Signals Possett, a small, wiry man, a Fleet Reservist who had been called back for active service after some eight years on the beach. A kindly enough man when off parade, he tended to ramble on about the past when he had served in the old Iron Duke, Lord Jellicoe’s last-war flagship in the Grand Fleet.

  ‘You young lads,’ he would say fairly often, ‘you’ve got it soft compared to what we had at your age. Bloody soft! I tell you something, though.’

  ‘Yes, Yeoman?’

  Possett would give a characteristic hitch to his trousers. ‘Never had a good laugh ashore I didn’t! Not till I got back in the andrew. Then I laughed again. And every time I sees you lot I laughs again till I splits me sides.’

  It was not encouraging, but it was not unkindly meant. Cameron learned, as he was to continue learning throughout many facets of the war, that the chiefs and petty officers of His Majesty’s Navy were mostly the salt of the earth, hard but fair, utterly dependable, utterly honest. They chased and chivvie
d the new entries but the new entries, as their service proceeded, quickly realized that it had all been for their own good and that of their seagoing mates: one piece of bad seamanship, one signal read too slowly, one moment of slackness, could mean real danger. Yeoman of Signals Possett and his fellow petty officers were not going to have that happen. And many of the new entries needed a good deal of chivvying: they were a mixed bunch, some volunteers, some conscripts — some keen, others far from it. There were plenty of mutinous mutters about hardship. And the backgrounds were just as mixed. The majority were of the working class, from any number of trades from bricklaying to farming. There were clerks, waiters, bookies’ runners, shop assistants… men from banks, solicitors’ offices, Town Halls, slaughterhouses. There were those who stood out on account of their appearance and their accents: the sons of professional men, of service officers, even of peers of the realm. Cameron was one of those who attracted attention from above, and after a couple of months of being observed discreetly by his Divisional Officer, he was summoned for a word in private. His Divisional Officer was a lieutenant of the Wavy Navy, the RNVR, named Stubbs.

  ‘Sit down, Cameron,’ Stubbs invited — or ordered.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Cameron sat.

  Stubbs said, ‘I’ve been looking through your service certificate.’ The reference was to the ‘parchment’ that was started when a man joined and accompanied him as a continuing life-history throughout his lower-deck service. ‘You were at a public school, I see.’

  ‘Yes, sir. A minor one, sir.’

  Stubbs looked up sharply. ‘Not apologizing for that, are you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Cameron said, flushing. ‘It’s just that — well, it’s not the thing to confess to —’

  ‘Amongst your messmates. So you try to minimize it. I think I understand, but try to drop the habit. You’re who you are and that’s that.’ Stubbs looked down at the service certificate again, then up at Cameron, seeming to stare right through him. ‘School certificate, six credits, Matric exemption. Going on to college, were you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’d have gone into my father’s business, sir.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Trawlers, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He owns a small fleet sailing out of Aberdeen.’

  ‘Yes. Yet you joined in Portsmouth, I see. How come?’

  Cameron said, ‘I was staying with an uncle, sir. He was in the Navy… invalided out before war started. I had my nineteenth birthday while I was there, sir —’

  ‘And joined. I see. Like it?’

  Cameron smiled. ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ There was a pause, and he filled it. ‘I’m used to the sea, sir. My father often sent me away with the trawlers in the holidays.’

  ‘Yes, I was wondering,’ Stubbs said reflectively. ‘Yeoman of Signals Possett tells me you’ve taken to boat-handling like a duck.’ He grinned. ‘Knowing Yeoman Possett, the “duck” could be taken two ways, of course… but I think I got the right translation. Tell me this: if you’d gone into your father’s trawling fleet, which I take it would have been on the management side, would you have got yourself some kind of seafaring qualification?’

  Cameron said, ‘Yes, sir. My father would have insisted on that.’

  ‘He has one himself?’

  ‘He’s a master mariner, sir.’

  ‘I see.’ Stubbs paused, then said rather sharply, ‘You’re a pretty rotten signalman, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I just can’t get to grips with it.’

  Stubbs nodded. ‘That’s honest. Why did you join in that rating?’

  ‘The Chief PO at the recruiting office said there was a shortage of signalmen, sir, and I’d be likely to get to sea quicker than as a seaman.’

  Stubbs laughed. ‘Yes, and it’s true, oddly enough. I’m afraid the Navy’s a bit of a shambles in some ways… seamen can spend months sweeping the parade at RNB while signalmen always go to sea. However, since you’re no signalman, how would you feel about a transfer?’

  ‘I’d like it, sir.’

  ‘Good! If you wish, I’ll put the wheels in motion. And something else: a commission. How about that?’

  ‘A commission, sir?’ Cameron looked startled.

  ‘That’s what I said. I’m sure you’ve envisaged the possibility, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, sir —’

  ‘Of course you have,’ Stubbs said briskly, and stood up. ‘That’s settled then. In my view, and in the view of the Training Commander, you have the right qualities of leadership and common sense and personality… they’re all summed up in the service phrase, Officer-Like Qualities, or OLQ for short. I’m prepared to put it to the Captain that you should have a White Paper started.’

  ‘Thank you, sir —’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself — and Yeoman Possett. Once it’s all put through, you’ll be sent to Ganges at Shotley for seamanship training, along with your White Paper, and after a course there you’ll be drafted to RNB Portsmouth and thence to sea. You’ll need to do a minimum of three months’ actual sea-time and get your Captain’s recommendation for a commission, then you’ll be put before a board at Portsmouth. Pass that, and you go to King Alfred in Sussex as a cadet rating. All right?’

  Leaving the Divisional Office, Cameron knew that hence-forward life would be a little different. Harder; for he had to prove himself even more and repay Stubbs’s confidence that he could make it. He had to show not only seamanship but the vital elements of leadership and initiative. OLQ would loom very important, and his ships and establishments would have eagle eyes on the White Paper, the avenue to a commission that would carry every detail and every report upon his character and abilities. He was now what was known officially as a CW Candidate, CW standing for Commission and Warrant, the hawse-hole in effect through which every member of the lower deck must pass to the warrant officers’ mess or the wardroom. And he would pass through it in the hard and bloody world of war.

  Within the next two weeks Cameron was drafted to Ganges, the former boys’ training establishment opposite Harwich at the mouth of the River Stour. Here he learned to climb the great mast on the parade-ground and sit nonchalantly on its truck; learned to scavenge as at Royal Arthur but this time with brooms and squeegees along the sloping covered way that ran between the seamen’s messes; learned elementary gunnery and torpedo work and how to handle whalers and cutters under oars and sail and how to take charge in his turn as coxswain. After six weeks he was drafted with his class to Portsmouth, with more words of praise on his White Paper. In RNB he loitered, in a seafaring sense, as a seaman of the Commodore’s Guard, belted and gaitered and slamming to the Present Arms with a ceremonial rifle made simply of wood. Time-wasting though this might be, a couple of weeks of it gave him a better insight into the Navy than he had so far acquired, for his guard duties included acting as escort for miscreants at Commodore’s Defaulters, and as gaoler in the Detention Quarters housing men under such punishments as ninety days’ detention for various offences. It also improved his parade-ground efficiency to the satisfaction of the Chief Gunner’s Mate of the Guard.

  ‘Know something, Cameron?’

  ‘What, Chief?’

  ‘It’s always said, though never in my hearing, that the order is, Royal Marines will advance in column of fours, seamen will advance in bloody great heaps. Now laugh, cos it’s true.’

  Cameron laughed.

  ‘But you’re better than that. White Paper, eh?’

  ‘Yes, Chief.’

  The Chief Gunner’s Mate clapped him on the shoulder, ‘Go to it, lad, and the best of luck. I’m putting in a word that you should get to sea pronto, and put your time in.’

  He was as good as his word; within the next week Cameron was on his way from Portsmouth Harbour Station to Thurso in the far north of Scotland, to go from there by the aged ferry St Ninian across the Pentland Firth to Lyness in the Orkneys, to join His Majesty’s destroyer Carmarthen on North
Atlantic convoy escort duty. Her task was to shepherd the America and Canada bound merchant ships as far as was possible, taking into account the limited availability of escort vessels, whence the convoys would chance their luck alone; and to bring in the laden vessels homeward bound. He found life in the fo’c’sle messdeck of a lurching, water-shipping destroyer to be different again from Skegness, or the Ganges, or the Pompey barracks. Life here was real and tough and largely filthy, both as regards language and the few amenities: the seamen’s heads, or lavatories, containing only five cubicles for some eighty to ninety men, were continually blocked, had no doors, and opened into a space below the break of the fo’c’sle right alongside the messdeck and the galley. The stench was foul and wrecked the appetite. The messdecks were usually awash at sea, and water swirled about below the slung hammocks and around the lockers upon whose tops those unfortunates who had no slinging billet had to sleep. Cameron was one of these: all the billets, fitted for peacetime requirements and not enough for a full war complement, had been taken long before his arrival. His accent, he found here, was against him: it yelled White Paper. The Carmarthen already had another would-be officer in the seamen’s messdeck.

  A fat able-seaman, a man with three good conduct badges on his left arm, apprised him of this. ‘WC candidate, aren’t you, Lofty?’

  Cameron admitted the fact, accustomed by now to the inversion of CW.

  ‘Join the other little sod,’ the three-badgeman, whose name was Tomkins, said with a belch. ‘Know what? When you ‘ears the pipe, ‘ands to dinner, it includes wot it don’t say, wot is, we candidates to lunch.’ He gave a loud laugh and thrust Cameron into a stanchion with his stomach as he moved past towards his locker. ‘I s’pose somebody ‘as to be officers…’

  Carmarthen sailed out through the boom to pick up her convoy before Cameron had been aboard four hours. She sailed into vicious weather, to be thrown about like a cork on vast waters that rose sheer like hillsides and then ebbed away as the destroyer lurched into the troughs, leaving her suspended while her men stared down into a great valley. Cameron, despite his experience in trawlers, was as sick as a dog for the whole ten days of the escort, out and home. He stuck to his duties because he had to, but he couldn’t eat anything beyond an occasional biscuit.