Last Lift from Crete: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 2

by Alexander Fullerton

  “You don’t mean there’s land in sight?”

  They all laughed—except for Bell-Reid, who only raised an eyebrow. Robson, a lieutenant-commander and electrical specialist, asked Melhuish, “How are your patients doing?”

  He meant the military wounded. Melhuish told him, “All responding nicely, touch wood.”

  Jack had his eggs now. The powdered stuff had seemed uneatable when it had first appeared, but you got used to it: surprising what you could get used to. Including, he wondered, Stukas? He asked Major Haskins, “Must have been pretty awful, the last few days?”

  “Well.” The New Zealander sipped at his coffee. “I’ll admit there’ve been happier times.”

  “On the Corinth Canal, we heard—”

  “Christ, that.” He shook his bandaged head. It was like a turban only with short hair bristling from the top of it. “That was something.”

  A very large, younger man, a captain with one arm in a sling, came and stood behind him and took over the answering as Haskins seemed to dry up. The newcomer told Jack, “They sent 88s over first to draw our ack-ack so they could spot the batteries. Then Stukas came after to dive-bomb the guns first and then our positions, fifty or sixty bloody Stukas routing around like mad dogs and I’d say maybe a hundred Messerschmitts strafing anything that moved. It just went on and on like that. I tell you it was plain unbelievable, and when they had us about cooked, the gliders and paratroops came over and went down behind us.” He turned away. “Damn right it was something. Something like I hope to God I never—”

  The action-alarm bell silenced that single voice. The bell was ringing short-long, short-long, as for aircraft alarm, action stations.

  Jack was getting out through the doorway and the bell was still sounding off when the four-inch guns opened fire overhead: the noise of them, down here inside the ship, was something you felt as well as heard, as if it jarred the bone of your skull. Like an incredibly violent impact of iron on iron: solid, ringing. But he was up the ladder now and out of the screen door, turning for’ard, hearing a burst of fire from the multiple pompoms at the other end of the ship as he ran that way: the four-inch fired again and he felt the blast from the midships mounting as he passed below it. Up the ladder at the foc’sl break, level with the second funnel and between the whaler and the starboard motorboat, then in the door to the bridge superstructure, taking the ladder several steps at a time, racing up towards whatever …

  The guns had ceased fire. He was in the bridge, and he could see no aircraft anywhere. Napier told Bell-Reid, who’d arrived a few yards behind, “One Messerschmitt—a 110, the twin-engined kind. It came out of the sun”—he pointed—“and we didn’t see it in time to get a barrage going. It aimed two bombs at Gelderland and missed by fifty yards or more.”

  Bell-Reid, panting from the fast hundred-yard run, leant against the side of the bridge, shielding his eyes and staring towards the sun. AB Noble came lurching from the ladder, bringing a tray with the captain’s breakfast on it.

  “Sorry I got ‘eld up, sir. Trouble was—”

  “Doesn’t matter, Noble.” Napier told Bell-Reid, “We’ll stay closed up now. Action messing henceforth.”

  Jack was checking the ship’s position by land bearings, and Irvine was saying to Overton, “I’ve got the weight, sir. Many thanks for my breakfast.”

  “My dear boy.” Overton stepped down from the binnacle platform, the slightly raised bit in the centre of the bridge. He was a lieutenantcommander but before the war he’d twice been passed over for promotion, and he was older than Bell-Reid. His only burning enthusiasm was for golf.

  Course 159: revs for 16.5 knots. Halberdier, the leading destroyer, was in sight to the left of the Dutchman, who must have swung off course during that surprise attack. There was nothing for Carnarvon to do about it: Gelderland was the one out of station and it was up to Anton Beukenkamp to get back into it. One might imagine that the Messerschmitt’s visit would at least have got him out of bed?

  Glancing round, Jack saw the snotty, Brighouse, leaning against the starboard searchlight sight and picking his teeth with a matchstick. Brighouse was an untidy, rather hairy little lad, with small sharp eyes and an insolent manner, and Jack wondered whether brother Nick might not have been something like Brighouse when he’d been a snotty. According to Nick’s own stories he’d been constantly in trouble—disciplinary trouble—in his early years at sea. It would certainly delight this little brute, Jack thought, to be told he might have anything in common with a brass-hat baronet who had a DSO and two DSCs …

  Coming up from Suda Bay they’d had air cover—Fulmars—until dusk, and until dusk they’d steered a course well away from the Nauplia direction, so as to mislead the enemy in case one of his recce flights did get past the Fulmars and see the ships. The point of an air escort was more to keep the Hun reconnaissance flights away than to shoot down attackers after you’d been spotted.

  But the Luftwaffe would know where they were now, all right.

  Napier was in his bridge chair; he was munching his breakfast, but his eyes were on the sky. Bell-Reid was leaning against the port side of the bridge, thumbing tobacco into his pipe. Jack checked the time: it was 6:58.

  “All guns follow ADP!”

  There was a loudspeaker in the bridge so that Napier could hear what Jock McCowan’s team up on the foremast were saying to the guns. He could have it switched on or off, loud or quiet, and when he wanted to he could chip in on his own sound-powered telephone line to McCowan. But the voice from the speaker had been that of Paymaster Lieutenant Clutterbuck, whom McCowan had trained to operate the HACS, high-angle control system. Clutterbuck had been telling the layers and trainers at the cruiser’s four, twin four-inch guns to line up the pointers in their dials with the pointers which were controlled electrically from the sight in the ADP.

  A red air-warning flag fluttered at Carnarvon’s yardarm. Bell-Reid murmured, his glasses trained almost right into the sun, “Twelve of ‘em. Four flights of three. About six thousand feet.”

  Twin-engined, black against the sky, and with the sun behind and under them: Junkers 88s. Clutterbuck would have a chance to go through the HACS drill this time. The system involved the feeding of information such as height, range, course, speed, and angle-of-sight to a machine down below called a Fuse Keeping Clock, which then provided the guns with fuse-settings and aim-off, but it wasn’t often of much use because attacks tended to be made in a less orderly way: aircraft jinked, dived, dodged about. There was a type 285 RDF set up there as part of the system, but it was no good for anything but ranging; you had to see your target and then point the aerial at it. It was mounted on the director above the ADP platform and it looked like three broomsticks with small cross-pieces all down their length.

  “Open fire!”

  Highflier had opened up with her four-sevens at that moment. Some of the H class—including Huntress—had been fitted with three-inch AA guns in place of their after tubes, but this one hadn’t. The low-angle four-sevens could really engage only approaching aircraft, or put a barrage over other ships. Now Carnarvon’s high-angle four-inch opened fire, brown smoke and cordite fumes blowing back from “A” gun, down for’ard; the Ju88s seemed to be rising across the sky as they came over on a straight course towards the ships. Shell-bursts were opening below them and to the right. You saw the smoke-puffs appear and only afterwards, if surrounding noise permitted, you heard the thudding sounds of the bursts: by which time there were a lot more of them, all the ships shooting fast now, the sky a mass of shell-bursts and the bombers not wavering at all, coming on and rising into the littered sky-bowl overhead. The first flight of three had gone into shallow dives—going for Gelderland, the biggest and most obvious target for their bombs.

  “Pompom open fire!”

  Noise-level leapt as the multiple pompom, eight-barrelled, added its fast thump-thump-thumping to the general din. It was immediately below and in front of the bridge, where in former days the old crui
ser had had her “B” gun-mounting. The destroyers were shooting at the succeeding flights of bombers, the ones still coming in behind this first bunch, but Carnarvon’s guns were throwing a barrage over the Dutchman and ahead of the three front-running Junkers, who seemed to be flying straight into the mass of shell-bursts. Tracer was flaring up from Gelderland’s own close-range weapons; by the look of it, one Bofors and several lighter machine-guns. You could see the black-cross markings on the bombers’ wings and the shine of the early sun on them, and then the bombs falling away, a tight black rain of high-explosive slanting seaward, quite slow-moving it seemed when they first started but then speeding—obeying, Jack mentally noted, the formula of 32-feet-persecond, the acceleration due to gravity: hardly surprising that one lost sight of them.

  Paymaster Lieutenant Clutterbuck’s even tones were ordering Carnarvon’s four-inch to shift target and engage the second flight of Junkers. Jack could visualize him up there with his pale face and bluish jaw, pale eyes blinking surprisedly through his spectacles: he wondered if they steamed up—the spectacles—as they did when Clutterbuck drank pink gin. Either the Dutch ship had discovered she had reserves of speed or Carnarvon had slowed down: Irvine bent to the voicepipe and called down, “Up four revolutions,” just as Napier turned to draw his attention to the increasing gap and three geysers of water—four—towered astern of the Dutchman, momentarily blotting him from sight. Another stick fell short, closer to Highflier than to Gelderland, and the rest were out ahead, a short avenue of waterspouts out on the transport’s bow. Three more flights to come.

  “‘X’ and ‘Y’ guns shift target, Messerschmitts green one-five-oh, blue barrage, fire!” Clutterbuck’s voice sharp and urgent …The number three look-out on the starboard side had seen the new threat at the same time as the paymaster had given tongue: he was up on his feet, pointing and shouting, no words audible, only a mouth open in the middle of ginger beard. They were fighter-bombers, 110s, slanting in low, curving over towards Carnarvon. The starboard point-fives were letting rip, tracer streaming out on the quarter and seeming to curve away behind the oncoming planes: Bell-Reid had rushed to the back of the bridge to tell that look-out to get down—he was bawling now at everyone to take cover—down! There wasn’t really any cover but you could duck, throw yourself flat in the stupendous noise as the Germans tore over with their guns flaming, hammering, sparks flying from the side of the bridge and torn steel where a nest of voicepipes had been smashed.

  Everyone was getting up now: but Napier had never left his seat. Clutterbuck’s voice was cool, back to normal as he told “X” and “Y” to follow ADP. Bomb-splashes were lifting in quick succession beyond the Dutch ship. The Messerschmitts had flown over Huntress, raking her with machine-gun fire as they crossed and then banked the other way to swing left, swooping upwards with the land behind them: bombs were falling from the third flight of Ju88s, and Carnarvon’s four-inch were shifting to engage the last flight as it approached. And one Messerschmitt had been hit: there’d been a burst beside it as it turned, and the end of the raised wing disintegrated, the aircraft rolling over and going down, upside-down and falling sideways towards new bomb-splashes rising ahead of Gelderland—the Dutch ship was steaming into them, passing through them with salt water raining down across her. More bombs were falling close to Halberdier. A dozen things happening at once, and in all directions …

  The Messerschmitt had gone into the sea: it must have been Huntress, he thought, who’d got that one: and she’d suffered, there was movement around her “B” gun, it looked like men had been hit and were being lowered from the gundeck. The gun was still in action, though. Napier called out, pointing, “That’ll larn ‘im!” He was pointing up at a Ju88 trailing smoke, losing height and diverging to starboard while his two companions held to their straight course. There were flames coming out of him now as well as smoke. Clutterbuck’s voice came out of the speaker: “Check, check, check …” The other Messerschmitt had turned back over the land, climbing as it circled northward. Below Carnarvon’s bridge the pompom gunners were cheering: that Junkers was in a dive, all flame and smoke, and it was going to crash in Greece, not in the sea. Either the pompom crew were just glad to see it, or they reckoned they’d hit it. Looking at his watch, Jack saw they’d been in action for six or seven minutes. It had felt more like half an hour: it was all one, now, a smear of violence wrapped in noise, but at the time each picture had been frozen in your mind as in a frame. It felt marvellous to have it over, threat and noise so suddenly removed: he felt an urge to laugh, chat …

  Napier looked around at Bell-Reid and pointed up towards the ADP: he said, “They were beginning to get the hang of it.”

  Bell-Reid was inspecting the side of the bridge, the smashed voicepipes to the plot, captain’s sea-cabin and signals office. He glanced round at Napier and nodded, and Clutterbuck’s voice came booming from the loudspeaker, “Alarm port! All guns follow ADP, red one-seven-oh, angle of sight two-oh, large formation of Ju87s, closing!”

  Christ. Not a bloody moment … And Junkers 87s were Stukas. Jack thought, putting it to himself calmly, rationally, that his advisors had been right, that there always was a first time, and the anticipation was probably worse than the actual experience. He told himself, There’ll be hours of this …

  “Red barrage …”

  Red was the long fuse-setting, blue the short one. There was a fusesetting machine at each gun and also a few shells with these pre-set standard fuses, dabbed with coloured paint to make them easily recognizable, in the ready-use racks. Highflier had opened fire with her foursevens: and Jack had the attackers in his glasses. His first sight of Stukas: a big group of them, squat and evil-looking. Like vampire bats, he thought: not that he’d ever seen a vampire bat … They were splitting up, some circling off one way and some the other, just one pair flying straight towards the convoy, shell-bursts opening in front of them, brownish puff-balls flowering in irregular batches and the Stukas racing in through them and between them, ignoring them, bat-like and yellownosed, beginning to weave now as the anti-aircraft barrage thickened: some of the others who’d swung off to circle the ships at a safe distance were turning in.

  He looked over to the other side, saw it was happening there as well. Huntress on that side was throwing a barrage ahead of the ones approaching from that landward side: the whole sky was already pock-marked with shell-bursts and full of weaving, jinking bombers. Clutterbuck had ordered a switch to blue barrage and Carnarvon’s were bursting over the Gelderland, roofing her with a layer of explosions through which no pilot in his right mind would consider flying: but Jack saw the first two Stukas suddenly tip over and go screaming down in steep dives towards the Dutch ship, their sirens screaming through the racket of the guns, which was now one continuous roar. There were more Stukas coming in from starboard, pompoms and point-fives blazing at them, the Dutch closerange guns all busy, Huntress making a violent course-alteration as a plane dropped down at her like a plunging eagle. He saw bombs falling towards the Gelderland and the first Stuka pulling away out of its dive, streaking away to the right with the second one following some way behind it. He hadn’t seen that one’s bomb go but it burst now, the sea erupting on the Dutch ship’s bow so close it could as easily have hit as missed. Stukas everywhere you looked, weaving between bursts of shells and streams of tracer: one on fire spinning away to port and another diving over Carnarvon, coming down right on top of her and almost vertically. Napier shouted, “Port twenty-five!” and Irvine passed the order down the pipe to CPO Partridge: crouching with his beard touching the voicepipe’s rim he watched the Stuka, seeing shells bursting all around it as it came rushing in that dead-straight dive with its angled wings and the undercarriage like a vulture’s legs and claws: a bomb dropping from it was turning over and over with the sun’s glitter on its fins, Irvine scowling up at it and Jack Everard guessing it was going to land in this bridge—and nothing anyone could do about it. The noise was enclosing, isolating; Carnarvon
was swinging fast to port, heeling as her rudder dragged her round, and the bomb went into the sea off her starboard bow, a sheet of water leaping and the thud of the explosion like a hard kick in her belly. Napier shouted, “Bring us back on course!” Irvine called down, “Midships,” and Partridge acknowledged the order, then confirmed, “Wheel’s amidships, sir.” Irvine told him, “Starboard twenty.”

  The destroyers were under helm too most of the time, but the barrage over the Dutch ship never slackened much. It was keeping the Stukas high, or high-ish, and the Dutchman’s own close-range weapons were helping too, but another Stuka was diving on her now and higher up were two more just at this moment tilting their yellow noses down. Bell-Reid was talking into a telephone, getting reports from below about possible damage from those near-misses. Napier was on the phone to the ADP, conferring with Jock McCowan; bombs were splashing in astern of the Dutch ship, and one Stuka was careering away landward just a few feet above the water, passing so close to Huntress they could have thrown spuds at it. Another was coming down—now—on top of the Dutchman and one on Carnarvon, and Highflier was swinging hard a-starboard with a bomb-splash rising just ahead of her: he saw the muzzle-flashes of her for’ard four-sevens as she shifted target and began to put a barrage over Carnarvon to ward off this attacking Stuka. It was silvery-grey against bright smoke-stained sky, yellow-snouted, disgusting, screaming hate: Irvine was ready at the voicepipe, waiting for Napier’s order, when a shell burst close to that yellow nose and the machine exploded, wiped out in mid-air in a spread of smoke-trails and debris. A Stuka was pulling out of its dive over Gelderland, its bomb on the way down, tracer arcing up to converge on the plane as it flattened and presented a broader and perhaps temporarily slower-moving target; Huntress, inside her station and very close to the Dutchman, was turning her point-fives on it. And that bomb had hit the Gelderland …