J. E. MacDonnell - 030

by The Lesson(lit)

  "We'll be in the contact area just about dusk," he said conversationally. He took his binoculars off and hung them round a soft-iron sphere. "Sea-cabin, Pilot."

  Discipline is a wonderful thing. To enlarge on that "boss's-man" claim - when you know you have to do a thing, when you know for absolute certain that there is no profit, only loss, in bucking your fate, you entertain no regrets or pointless wishful thinking of what might have been.

  Wind Rode's men knew they had to be up in the Pacific, they knew they had to fight a war, to go where they were told and do what they had to do. As well, they had experienced the wrench of parting from loved ones many times before; knew that they would soon settle down into the old routine. It's easy when you know simply that you have to.

  So she was now, once again, a happy ship. There was not in her the stomach-churning excitement which she had carried all the way home from the Mediterranean. But nor was there any griping - except for the perpetual whingeing which sailors claim as their natural right, and which meant nothing. Indeed, if Hooky Walker and his petty-officers had not heard this sailorly complaining about food and leave and beer and women and night-watches, they would have been deeply worried.

  Sailors were shaken from their warm hammocks to go on watch or lower the seaboat or heave the anchor inboard, and they whinged forcefully - and they jumped to the tasks and performed them with experienced competence. Then they whinged that they would have to hoist the seaboat and lower the anchor, but there was no malice in their grumbling.

  A civilian would have thought them a morose mob. But Hooky and his henchmen heard the humour in the old gripes, saw the jobs done, and knew and were content. There was, in fact, no better place to hear outsize gripes than in the petty-officers' mess. There the whingeing was done by experts. And so was the work.

  For hour after hour they drove on across the polished sea. The sun was hot, the wind was kind, the sea gleamed and glittered in a million of reflecting facets. And, unbelievably, the sailors whinged about this lovely weather. For they of all weather - bound people knew that there is nothing so constant at sea as change, that that hot air was rising up into the stratosphere, that there it was being cooled before it would come sinking down in the form of sullen clouds and high wind. Every man knew, not from meteorological knowledge but from experience, that by night-fall their beautiful day would have turned into strong wind and possibly rain.

  And it was thus.

  An hour before Pilot's worked-out time for night-fall, it was already murky. The erstwhile balmy air, now wet cloud, hung low and sullen over a leaden coloured sea. Visibility was still clear, but it would be a rainy moonless night.

  Radar was playing up a little, as in those comparatively early days of its use it normally did through temperature inversion. The sea had risen, thought not enough to bother the destroyers, not enough to reduce their high speed.

  Scimitar's crew was as well-trained as Wind Rode's, and it was the pure accident of geographical position which allowed the junior ship to sight the masts first. Due to the earth's curve, fifteen miles is about the limit of sight from a bridge at sea, and from her station fifteen miles to port Scimitar could not see what was now in Bentley's informed binoculars.

  Objects come into sight swiftly when the hunter is travelling at thirty knots. Not masts now, but bridges and hulls filled the circle of Bentley's interested vision. Four of them, four Japanese destroyers in close formation, steaming at an economical speed of twelve knots, obviously unalarmed, obviously on their way home to base; having sighted nothing of interest, expecting to sight nothing more with the lowering night about to fall about them.

  Bentley was eager, but he was still an experienced commander. He took his glasses from the targets and trained them right around the horizon. Nothing. Even as he searched for possible friends of his enemy he was judging that he himself would make a small target, coming up from astern. And that the japs, having already traversed that guiltless area behind them, would hardly bother to scan it thoroughly now. Having steamed all day with sight of nothing, they would not expect enemy ships to be coming up on them at thirty knots.

  No, he decided, the Japs would be intent on what lay ahead of them, and lulled even more deeply into their security by recognition of the dark night shortly to fall.

  He had thought, naturally and at once, of signalling Sainsbury. Not by wireless, but by light. Yet a light might be sighted by a casually roving eye, and in any case Scimitar, hull down to port, would hear his guns plainly enough. Not more than an hour was left him. He had to jump those four ships on his own, and fast.

  His glasses were still at his eyes. From the straight line of mouth below them the words came quiet and crisp:

  "Clear for action."

  Her men had been getting ready for the never-neglected closing-up for night action stations, when all her armament and communications would be tested so that they should be ready for whatever came upon them in the dark. So that now her guns and tubes were manned quickly, and the breeches of the six four-pointsevens loaded with the long yellow shells.

  They waited round the guns and the tubes. They felt the ship's high-powered shuddering, and they were quiet, and felt fearful, as they always did before action, and confident. They had their own knowledge of their superiority, and they had Scimitar and its Victoria Cross captain on their port quarter.

  The odds of two to one hardly exercised their minds. They could not remember a time when they had gone into action against equal odds, and they had certainly never fought with the balance of weight in their favour. Those conditions were yet to come, and this was the time when the Allied forces were inferior in numbers, before the great armadas of shipping built up to overwhelming strength in the Pacific.

  She drove on, her bow rising in great swooping lunges over the swells and then sinking down so that the sea bubbled almost up to her upper-deck. Bentley had an eye for that sea, and the height of its rise. If it had been rougher, at this speed A-gun might have been out of action. But there was less than an hour for it to rise further, and in that time he hoped to have completed his savage business.

  He stared ahead, at the plainly visible hulls of his enemy. The Japs had not increased speed, nor had they altered formation. All ships were steaming in line-ahead from the leader, and though this formation lessened the breadth of the hitting area for his shells, at the same time it lengthened it. If he shot over the last ship in the line he would almost certainly land somewhere on the next one or two ships ahead.

  But, he knew, he must not land over. He must land on. God knows they had done that often enough before, and there was no reason why Lasenby could not do it now. There would be no deflection to worry about, only range. And Lasenby, Gunner, was a past-master at correcting for range. He was still alive, wasn't he?

  The pointer on the range-repeat in front of Bentley clicked over inexorably and steadily. Another minute, perhaps two, and he would open fire.

  He looked at the Japs, and then he looked all about him, and his mind was as taut as piano-wire with all the considerations weighing upon it. And then the most important consideration of all rushed in on his consciousness. Sainsbury would have seen his masts drawing ahead of the ordered beam position. He would be wondering what the hell was going on. If he transmitted his thoughts into action, if he opened the glaring eye of is ten-inch signalling lamp at them...

  Closer, further. Bentley could not distinguish Scimitar's thin topmast drawing aft on his port quarter, and he had not the time to search for it.

  "Yeoman?"

  "Sir?"

  "Scimitar still in visual?"

  "Yes, sir. Bearing Red one-three-five."

  "Good." He might have known the yeoman's hawk-eye would still have her. "If she starts to signal, shut her up quickly."

  "Shut Scimitar up, sir, aye, aye, sir!" Ferris repeated, and no one noticed any humour in the words. Closer. In the director above the bridge, Lasenby had his target fairly in his monocular sight. In his magnified vision
the Jap destroyer seemed strangely foreshortened from this dead-astern angle; she seemed to be all bridge and funnel and quarter-deck; telescoped together into a nice fat target. The director held its rangefinder as well as radar aerials, and Lasenby knew that that high length of foremast was making a perfect ranging point for the operator - he would be constantly "cutting" it in two, and each time he put the two parts together again with his little wheel he was sending down a range to the transmitting table.

  "Come on," Lasenby muttered to himself in silent urging to Bentley, and at once he took his eyes from his sight and breathed in deeply. This would have to be as accurate shooting as ever he'd performed, and neither eagerness nor impatience must be allowed any part of it. Calmed, his face went back to the sight.

  The point of aim, already passed to the director-layer, would be the base of the funnel. Hits anywhere round there would be most satisfactory. He might open up the funnel, making a streamer of red for them to follow through the night, or he might smash into the controlling bridge. And anywhere aft of those points... There were the boiler-rooms and the engine-room, the torpedo-tubes, the depth-charges packed on the quarter-deck. There were the after magazines, the depth-charge magazine, all open to entry to his shells from this firing position.

  All he wanted was the permissive order to... "Open fire!" the voice crackled in his phones. Mr. Lasenby, Gunner, began his drill.

  Orders went down. Wheels turned in the transmitting-station and at the four forward guns. A palm of a hand pressed in hard on a large brass knob. At the gun-mountings a fire-buzzer hooted. Then Wind Rode's forepart exploded in fire and smoke.

  She had been a lucky ship only insofar as she had kept herself in first-class condition for the deadly game she had been engaged in. There was not much luck in what she did now; any more than the shell which sank the Hood had been lucky. That German projectile had been hurled at the battle-cruiser's magazine and had reached its target through a combination of highly-trained gunners and excellent instruments. Wind Rode's broadside spat out with the same equations urging it.

  Because the target was dead ahead, there was no deflection to be set, no divergence of the guns' aim. The four shells landed with only the distance apart of the parent barrels between them, and they landed smack at the base of the Jap's funnel.

  Bentley saw the vivid splash of red against the murk with a grim and intense satisfaction. His stomach had quietened now, as it always did with that first broadside. And, because he had trained himself to keep his mind open, aloof from the confined fact of his shell's hitting, he could think about what was happening aboard that enemy destroyer.

  Wind Rode's guns were loading again, and by now the initial shock would have been thrust aside in those alerted Japanese minds.

  There would have been an instantaneous reaction in another ship. Scimitar would be thrusting to reach her full thirty-six knots, her bow would be swinging to starb'd, to close the range to where her consort had opened fire.

  And there was the first visible reaction. The white-spawning stern of his target was moving to his right. Bentley saw it, Lasenby saw it, the director-layer and trainer saw it. She was altering course to port. This would mean a correction for deflection, but it also meant that her port side was now open to entry to the Australian's shells. Providing they got there quickly, before she thrust herself up too high a speed.

  "Enemy altering to port, sir," Randall reported. Bentley did not answer. He was thinking with forced calm, pushing down on his exultation, thinking that the Japs were altering to run across Scimitar's eager bows.

  But there were still four of them. That number had to be reduced.

  It took about seven seconds for Wind Rode's gunners to load the four forward breeches. In that time the target's stern had swung little. Not much, but enough. The enemy's lack of vigilance was to cost him cruelly. Bentley had closed the range until he was sure of maximum hitting effect, and the next four shells drove into her.

  One landed near the base of the streaming funnel. Another hit near the torpedo tubes, with no more visible effect than a spectacular gush of bright red. The last two punched into her port side, aft.

  A destroyer's side is thin steel, and a battleship's shell would have pierced right through and out the other side without exploding. But she was not hit by a 15-inch shell. Those two 4.7-inch projectiles had their fuses startled by the jolting impact on meeting the steel of her side. The fuses burned, swiftly, and exploded the main T.N.T. charge of the shells inside the compartment behind the steel side.

  That compartment was the magazine which served the Jap's after gun-mounting. It was crammed with shells and long brass cylinders of cordite. The white-hot splinters from the Australian shell-casings ripped into the brass containers, opening them, spilling their contents. Then the brief but intense heat of the exploding T.N.T. did its work.

  On Wind Rode's bridge they saw the flame first. It leaped up from the destroyer's after part, a thin high jet of white flame. Then, instantly, the jet widened into a bursting wall of fire. It writhed far into the gloomy sky, and up and around it, smothering it from sight, then opening as it swirled to reveal again that ghastly light, came the pouring smoke.

  "Down!" roared Bentley.

  The blast of displaced air dewed out and took hold of the cause of that disruption and shook her. The bosun's mate did not duck in time. Air as solid as a fist took him in the face and hurled him in a sprawled mess of arms and legs to the rear of the bridge. The cosmic noise beat into their ear-drums, dulling their hearing and numbing their senses.

  Bentley came upright. His ship was still driving on at thirty knots. He saw the water to port leap upwards in a pillar of white and the sound of the shells' exploding seemed like a puny pop-gun in comparison with the shattering disruption which had left of the Japanese destroyer nothing but a still-writhing mountain of black smoke.

  "Shift target!" Bentley snapped, "next in line!" The guns swung.

  They swung, they steadied, they fired. But the Jap line was now at full speed, and Wind Rode was losing her speed as she turned to follow. The range was opening, the deflection was increasing, the target was moving fast across the line of fire.

  The next broadside plunged into the sea astern of the third Jap destroyer. She was fully awake, and her returning salvo screamed over their heads. Another degree or so less of elevation and Wind Rode herself might have changed into component atoms.

  Bentley heard the clang of the loading rammers below him. He trained his sight to the left. There she was, dimly grey hull, brightly white bow-wave, and as he looked at Scimitar her forepart spat four red tongues of fire.

  He had been wrong in his assessment of how much light would be left them. The sullen sky seemed to be pressing closer down upon them, malignantly, as though it had given them their chance and now wished to hide the enemy ships from further hurt. Another few minutes and it would be dark.

  Wind Rode's guns bellowed and Bentley himself crossed to the voice-pipe.

  "Radar? How is your contact?"

  "Not clear at all, sir," the radar-officer answered him, "there's a hell of a lot of interference out there." Bentley straightened. He had known the answer. The sky ahead was black with rain; here and there close to them the sea gleamed fitfully with the last reflections of the dying light, but further off sky seemed to be joined with water as the laden clouds dropped at last their burden.

  "Look at that!" Randall said suddenly, in a satisfied, excited tone, "leading ship."

  The first destroyer, the one nearest to Scimitar, carried at her four gun-mountings hundreds of rounds of ready-use cordite. Sainsbury's shells had found some of it on the foc's'le. Out of confinement cordite burns with a clear, almost smokeless flame. The remaining two destroyers were practically invisible, dark shapes against the darker mass of rain they were racing to meet. But Scimitar's target was a flaring beacon.

  "Shift target," Bentley ordered, "leading ship in the line."

  Because it was out in the open, t
hat burning cordite had done little structural damage. The leader was still under full power and steering normally, though now she had turned to starb'd, away from the second threat which had so spectacularly revealed itself.

  In the next ten seconds that betraying flare had become the aiming point for twelve guns. She was fighting back, her challenge spaced flashes of red in the darkness, but either under orders or else through their own inclination the other two destroyers had hauled off clear of their revealed sister. They were now completely out of sight.

  The Jap was handled gamely and competently. She twisted and zigzagged and her defiance cracked back at them, but where she was plainly revealed, her attackers were only dimly silhouetted against the lingering light behind them. Bentley could visualise plainly enough what was happening around that flaming cordite - it would be too dangerous to handle and throw over the side, and the fire-