J. E. MacDonnell - 030

by The Lesson(lit)

  There were no aircraft in visual yet. Radar had bounced back from their distant bodies. So their minds were not claimed by the devoted attention of firing the guns. They had time to think.

  An electric atmosphere of tensed quiet pervaded the ship. Men waited, and subconsciously checked their weapons, even though they knew they were as perfect as knowledge and familiarity could make them. Very little was spoken. The problem of maintaining threatened life was too great, too consuming, to allow indulgence of idle words. Even if they had made conversation, the thought of what radar had revealed ahead of them would have kept bobbing up in their consciousness like a red buoy shouting to them the fact of danger.

  It was not only Randall now who stared about at the sea, seeing, judging. That 25-knot wind, strong enough on the surface to ruffle the sea into ship-rolling waves, would have practically no effect on the aircraft coming towards them at three hundred knots. But if its velocity increased the added movement of the ship could affect their accuracy, even their loading of the guns. And against an airborne target, even more than against another ship, they needed to send up there as many shells as they could; steady, continuous broadsides, to make the aircraft fly through as much bursting steel as possible.

  But so far, as they waited round the guns with their braced legs alternately bending and straightening, they knew that the enemy could be engaged efficiently.

  There was another feeling pervading the ship apart from tenseness and controlled fear. Loneliness. Loneliness made more acute by the nature of the threat. From surface craft, no matter what their size or numbers, they could, if necessary, run, and be certain of out-distancing the pursuers. But here, while both ships were physically alone on the great circle of ocean, there was added the psychological ingredient of knowing that running would avail them nothing.

  There was one hope, so slight that it was more a tentative wish, a prayer, than a concrete hope. It was expressed by the breechworker of the right gun of A-mounting:

  "Maybe the bastards are on a raid to the south. Maybe they'll skip a shot at us."

  No one answered him. No one dared to believe him. From the large force the captain had warned them about, the Japs were certain to spare enough planes to wipe out this fortuitous blot they had come across on their way to bigger things. They would have to, the men round the gun reasoned, if only to ensure that no word of their position and course and strength was wirelessed back to their southward target.

  The reasoning was sound, but it had lost its significance. Bentley was already in possession of Sainsbury's warning signal. So would be the admiral back in Manus. It was highly probable that the Jap aircraft had also intercepted that warning. They would not be feeling kindly towards the little ships who had negatived the element of surprise.

  Radar, constantly echoing from the airborne fuselages, told them that the range had decreased, that the course was unchanged. Wind Rode and Scimitar were still directly in the path of the oncoming squadrons. It was time for the first move. Sainsbury made it.

  The coloured flags hauled up the foremast, remained there while Ferris repeated them, then the signal whipped down. Both ships came round, and when they were in the ordered position, Wind Rode was on her consort's beam, and well clear.

  The move had several advantages. The sea was now on their port quarter, behind them, which lessened their rolling. And they were heading back towards base. Sainsbury had also increased speed, so that every hour of life granted them would see them twenty-five miles nearer home. As well, their dispart formation would tend to lessen the chances of bombs missing one ship and catching the other ahead of her.

  All three advantages, except perhaps the reduced rolling, were minor. But they were something, they added a little to their chances of survival, and both captains knew that in warfare at sea a little could lead to the lot.

  There was nothing more to be done. Nothing except wait. Yet it is in moments of taut waiting like those that the strong, inarticulate spirit of comradeship amongst fighting men is born, or strengthened. Once the guns began firing there would be nothing to think about but the open breeches and the filling of them. Now, as each man waited, and looked up at the sky, and tasted the peculiar tang of fear in the back of his throat, he felt the warming strength of companionship all about him: the companionship of men whose skill and courage he knew, whose loyalty and sticking power had been proved. Every man in the ship felt this abstract and steel-strong feeling, from the captain on the bridge to the operator staring into his glowing radar screen. More than their physical boundaries of bow and sides and stern, it made of the ship's company a tight little island of men, trained, skilled, fearful and quietly determined.

  The blue and white sea sparkled all about them, the waves ran at the stern and lifted her, the red, white and blue ensign snapped at the gaff and pointed its proud benediction over her length, and occasionally a cough of brown smoke broke from her funnels as Monty McGuire built up his steam pressure for what might be required of her. Side by side, well apart, both destroyers steamed on under the warm, benign sky.

  As usual, it was Ferris who sighted them first.

  They were high up, black spots climbing the inverted dome of the sky. Radar was right. A large force, thought too distant yet to distinguish its component parts. But Bentley had no difficulty in judging. In this area, on that course, there would be bombers, possibly some torpedo-bombers, and escorting fighters. The fighters could have been flown off from carriers strategically placed a few miles to the north.

  The thoughts of carriers jabbed at him, a quick jolt of excitement. That would be something to trail all night... The feeling was short-lived. His concern was not with carriers, but with what they had spawned. He raised his glasses. As he stared at the enlarging black blobs in the lenses he remembered that no confirmatory signal had been received from base. There had been time enough for it to get back to them. The warning was crucial. It was possible the admiral had not received it. Sainsbury should make...

  A buzzer pierced into his thoughts. Ferris stepped to the voice-pipe. His voice came.

  "Leader's made another signal, sir. Repeat of the first."

  Under the glasses Bentley's lips twitched. He must remember he was with Sainsbury, not that other galoot in the Gulf of Guinea...

  The blobs had grown wings; as thin as the spider web in a gunsight, but still detectable. The first sound wave to reach them from those scores of pistoning engines was so faint that no one remarked on it. The sound died, like an illusion. It could mean nothing to them, for they could see their enemies and they knew their range, yet every man on the bridge strained to pick up again that illusory pulse against their ear-drums.

  The noise reached out again, a murmur, yet holding in its distant weakness a vibrant depth. Again it faded on the vagaries of high air-currents. Then it was with them, solidly, permanently, overcoming with its multisonous beat distance and currents, a blatant boom of sound.

  The thrumming dissonance seemed to fill the great circular solitude about them; it wiped out the significance of the abysses of sea and sky and concentrated all attention upon its clamouring self. The pulsing beat grew stronger, and there was nothing in their world but that and the steady, sombre machines which made it.

  Remote and disciplined, steadily and with purpose, as though manned by robots, the bomber squadrons climbed high over the two little ships, their discharged thunder shafting down and the red balls plainly visible on wings and fuselages.

  Now the main force was overhead, and the sky was filled with their bodies and their sound. In every man aboard Wind Rode the first hope grew: The destroyers were too small, they were not worth the waste of bombs, the bombs and torpedoes were needed for the main target. They might even have been mistaken for friendly ships.

  The main force moved on, compact, rigidly in formation, its outriders of fighters on either side; un-deviating, uninterested. Hope grew, and experience drowned it. Those machines were not manned by automatons. They held half a dozen me
n each, men who would be staring down, talking, cursing, because their surprise had been destroyed. Humans, like themselves - and interested.

  Side by side, Bentley and Randall saw the six bombers peel off from the rear of the formation, which had not yet passed over the ships.

  "Stand-by to receive," Randall muttered. Bentley took up the microphone.

  "Stand-by," he warned. "We will open in controlled firing, switching to barrage if they get strength. Stand-by," he said again, and juggled the instrument back into its clips.

  Ferris was at the wireless-office voicepipe again, holding a message he had hauled up in the little brass cylinder on the end of its cord. He looked at the captain. There were a few seconds yet.

  "Captain, sir?"

  "Yes?"

  "Leader's made to base the composition of the formation."

  Bentley nodded. Obviously he did not wish to be bothered with the signal's wording. Ferris crumpled the message into his pocket. Then, instead of staring where every other eye was trained, he searched around the horizon. There could be other things than aircraft in this unfriendly area. And he was a signal-yeoman. No signals came from Scimitar telling him when and how to open fire, and for that Bentley was grateful. They had been master and pupil - perhaps still were - and in matters of ship-handling and gunnery, they thought with one experienced brain.

  The six bombers had straightened out from their lowering dive. They were coming in for the first run. It was time to disturb them, to upset the cockiness which had brought them down so low to blot out these twin excrescences.

  "Open fire," Bentley ordered, in a flat, curt voice. And "Commence, commence, commence!" went to the waiting guns.

  This type of firing was totally different from surface shooting. It required a different control-table in the transmitting-station. But the guns were dual-purpose, designed so that the barrels could elevate almost vertically.

  They were cocked up steeply now, their breeches filled with time-fused shells. The director-layer's finger squeezed, and six muzzles vomited flame and billows of brown cordite smoke.

  Bentley had eyes for everything, everywhere. But there was another man besides Ferris who was concentrated on one job. Pilot had the ship, and his orders were to follow Scimitar's gyrations. This would serve the double purpose of preventing a collision, and keeping the fire-power of both ships massed against their common enemy.

  Bentley was watching, his head craned back, where the six shells had flowered suddenly and blackly against the blue, just ahead of the bombers. It was good shooting for an opening salvo, but it had to be better. Ferris noticed what was happening, and his voice came just before the roar of the next broadside:

  "Fighters coming in port beam, sir!"

  Bentley's head swung swiftly. He could spare only a second, for he had to be ready to swing her clear of what those bombers would shortly unload. Three fighters, low, their intention unoriginal and obvious - strafe the gun-crews and give the bombers a respite to line-up their targets. Randall had the microphone and Bentley turned back to his main enemy.

  "Short-range weapons engage fighters Red eight-five!" Randall ordered.

  In the next few seconds there was demonstrated the diverse capabilities of a modern warship. Each of her enemies in the sky had one main purpose; the big planes had been designed to bomb, the fighters to protect them. Yet Wind Rode was fighting off both forms of attack, simultaneously, at the same time as she used her main defensive potential, her power to turn like a cat.

  The 4.7's roared skyward and the pom-pom and oerlikons opened up in a smaller, but deadly, cone of explosive shells. And while her gunners aimed and fired and loaded the ship herself was swinging to throw off the aim of both bombers and fighters.

  The bombers had not yet unloaded. Towards the fighters a red lacework pattern of tracers streamed out. The pom-pom had taken the right-hand fighter and its barrels fastened on it and stayed there. The fighter was low, but he was still diving. The whole of his back was visible to the layer and trainer. The two-pounder shells reached out and buried their fused noses into the cockpit and the wing-roots. Inside, they exploded. There was no fire, no outward effect of their entry. But the Zero continued its dive, and it dived straight into the sea.

  The oerlikons hit, but they failed to score. The cannon-shells of the remaining pair of fighters slashed a brief and savage tattoo against her decks, then they were over, noses tilted upward, clawing for height.

  Two men of the first-aid party ran along the iron-deck, towards the tubes, where three bodies lay crumpled, and staining the steel with dark red.

  Randall, the gunnery-officer, was temporarily disengaged. He looked up and he growled what everybody on the bridge had seen:

  "Bombs away!"

  They tumbled from the spawning bellies, wobbling and almost level before the rushing air took charge of their vanes and straightened them so that the armoured noses pointed directly down.

  "Port thirty," Bentley ordered.

  Below him in the wheel house Rennie knew what that large alteration of course meant. His hands spun the spokes until they merged into a blur. The fluid in the pipes received its pressures and the steering-engine above the rudder-head obeyed that forceful impulse. The rudder was large, deliberately so, and the friction of the sea against it at twenty-five knots was considerable. Yet the area of thick metal turned easily.

  Now the rushing water forced against this obstacle. Anchored strongly to the stern, the rudder swung the whole length of her swiftly to port. Her inertia caused her to heel violently to starb'd, so that guncrews cursed and hung on to keep their footing. She had half-completed her avoiding swing when the stick of bombs entered the water and exploded.

  From below the water a steel-fisted blast reached out to her plates. She reeled in a disordered plunge to port, and the trucks of her slim masts waved in straining protest across the sky. She lay on her side for a critical moment, trembling under the blow. Then her ballast and her cunning design brought her back quickly, valiantly, and the heads of men on the upper-deck turned and stared viciously at the foiled towers of white thrown up by the bombs as they slipped astern and cascaded back into her wake.

  "Not... bloody... bad," said Randall, and licked his lips.

  "Let's hope they don't get any better," Bentley answered tightly. "What are those fighters doing?"

  "Still climbing, sir," Ferris reported, his neck muscles wrinkled as he stared upward, "looks like another run."

  Nobody disputed his judgment. The fighters were climbing, but not in an opening direction, and the bombers were wheeling in a slow, methodical bank to come back over them. Bentley glanced across at Scimitar. Though her wake too was circled with ulcers of foam, she seemed unharmed.

  "Stand-by for another run," he spoke into the microphone. "Shortrange weapons, watch those fighters. And keep an eye lifting for others that might come back from the main formation."

  Randall touched him on the arm.

  "Those bomber boys are in range. Don't see why they should be left alone till they get in position." Bentley nodded. Randall spoke to the director.

  The transmitting-station had much more to handle in anti-aircraft firing than against surface ships. Planes can turn much faster, their speed is greater, there is height as well as range to contend with, and the targets can drop or rise in their element. Barometric pressure at the heights to which the shells flew was different from sea-level, so was wind force. There were, as well, the other normal considerations-Wind Rode's own speed, her course relative to the target's and the corrections for deflection caused by her speed. But the ship's fire-control table was brilliantly designed to allow for all those equations, so that the guns received simple measures of training and elevation and fuse-lengths.

  Her mountings carried semi-automatic fuse-setting machines, and at the order "Commence, commence, commence!" the long shells were thrust into the fuse machines, then whipped away and dropped on the rammers. The drill had to be fast, for every second wasted me
ant that the fuse setting, correct now to reach those bombers, would be out by that much time when the shells burst. The drill was fast.

  The bombers were flying from left to right, so that they could come down upon the ships from their previous direction, astern and to the northward. Six ugly flowers bloomed ahead of the six bombers. The bombers flew on. Seven seconds. Then the sextuple blossoms of black erupted smack in the middle of them. "Oh... bloody lovely!" Randall ejaculated.

  It was. Beautiful shooting. The bombers were spaced fairly widely apart, and the bursting radius of a 4.7-inch shell is not great. But six of them had exploded close together, close to the right-hand aircraft. Five flew on, but the sixth took almost the full disruptive force of that perfectly-aimed broadside. Bentley saw one wing rip off and make its own private descent, zig-zagging as it fell like a piece of paper dropped to the floor. The parent body followed it almost at once, reeling over on its side and plunging straight down in a vicious spiral whose twistings would have the crew either pinned helplessly in their seats or else flung violently from side to side.