J. E. MacDonnell - 030

by The Lesson(lit)

  A man's feelings work like this in the face of deathly danger. At first, when he knows that he is committed to defend his life against a savage and malignant force, a chill of fear feathers up his spine and a nausea that he can taste rises into the back of his throat.

  Some men, of different racial stock, and untempered in battle, like the Italians in the Middle East Desert, are adversely influenced by that fear and its horrible taste. They fail to fight effectively, they see themselves about to be overwhelmed, and they throw down their weapons and give in.

  Wind Rode's men had been bitterly tempered in battle. And they came from a tough stock. They felt fear, all right, and they tasted its ammoniac secretions and then there occurred what always happens with men like that. The feeling vanished; it was subdued under a sort of stubborn be-damned-to-you-all sensation.

  The physiology of fear is interesting. Some re-searchers believe that when the "be damned" stage is reached a sort of shock curative process takes over. Fear is still present in the mind, but it is no longer allowed to interfere with the effective and disciplined training a man has undergone.

  The men of Wind Rode and Scimitar were like that now. The only effect of their fear was to make them recognise the threat to their lives and brace themselves to repel it. They fought stubbornly.

  There were still eight aircraft, four bombers and four fighters, in the hot sky above them. Neither the 4.7's nor the close-range guns had scored killing hits in the first of the reinforced attacks. And the Japs, cunning in their tactics, allowed them practically no time at all to recover or replenish their ammunition. The bombers turned and sailed over them again and the fighters wheeled and came howling down.

  A machine diving at you at close to four hundred knots with its engine screaming is a will-melting thing in itself. Not courage, but experience, is the strength you need to face it from behind the practically unprotected sights of an oerlikon or pom-pom. And when that machine's wings break into balls of smoke and flame and the flail of lead lashes all about you, then you need everything else you're capable of dredging up to prevent you flinging away from your gun and diving for shelter.

  Wind Rode's men had that something else to bolster them comradeship. Unthought of, but solidly present in their consciousness, was the knowledge that on either side of them were men feeling the same as they did, men who also would not run, but who at the order from the fire-control-officer would slam out at those fighters just as heavy a measure of steel as they were receiving.

  Two fighters were diving for Scimitar, two for Wind Rode. Each aircraft mounted four cannon, so that the firepower of aircraft and ship were close enough to equal, with the odds a shade in favour of the destroyer. But this small advantage in firepower was outweighed by the fact of the fighters' swift manoeuvrability. It would be experience and training, and common guts, which would decide the issue.

  Training ensured that the oerlikons took the left-hand fighter, while the four-barrelled pom-pom engaged its mate. Just under five hundred high explosive shells a minute poured out from the belching muzzles at the Jap. The barrels were converged so that their outpouring formed a cone. Into this net of destruction the Zero flew.

  He was firing, but all men on the upperdeck apart from gun-crews had taken shelter. His target was the pom-pom, and though the ship was swinging desperately a kick on his rudder could have negatived that avoiding action. But his aim was a little out, perhaps through a miscalculated deflection due to the ship's fast movement. His shells ripped into the funnel, and instantly the grey steel spouted innumerable little gouts of brown smoke, like a gigantic kettle bursting at the seams.

  Then the pom-pom had him.

  He was not diving. He had straightened out from the headlong plunge and was coming in fast and low over the sea, a line of black wing, a propeller arc, and behind it a black blunt muzzle topped by the glistening perspex of the cockpit.

  The pom-pom's cone was of precisely the right dimensions. Some shells exploded against the wings, some at the wing-roots, and other hammered powerfully at the anvil of the engine.

  It was a violent action, and the effects came violently and with abruptness. From the engine of the Zero there shot a tawny-golden flash. It sprang from a base of wind-blown black smoke and it flowered with catastrophic swiftness into an enveloping cape that streamed its fiery folds around and above and below the aircraft's nose. The moth-winged shape rocketed towards the ship, a bellowing bull with a matador's red cloth over its horns.

  There was no danger of its hitting the ship. The pilot was still alive, and he was no suicide graduate. The flaming nose pulled up convulsively to clear the ship. This slowed its speed, and as it climbed above them they could see that the fuselage was melting under the fierce breath of petrol driven flames.

  The Zero's climb was short. At the peak it tilted over on one wing and came spinning down. The ship's swing and the Zero's gyration had taken Wind Rode clear of danger. Almost vertical the fighter plumetted into the sea fifty yards on her starb'd beam. Few eyes lingered on the splash and the smoke.

  The bombers were in position. On the bridge Bentley received three reports almost simultaneously. "Number Two oerlikon out of action," Randall told Bentley, in a dispassionate voice which said nothing of the twisted metal of the gun, nor of the lacerated bodies surrounding it. The oerlikon had taken the full blast of the second Zero's cannon.

  "Bombs falling," reported Pilot, and leaned over sideways so that his mouth was close to the wheelhouse voice-pipe, at the same time as his head was craned up to stare at the sky.

  And "Scimitar on fire," informed Ferris.

  The bombs were in the sky, so Bentley knew that cannon-shell had found something inflammable on Scimitar's decks. This would not be difficult. He wanted to get his glasses on her, at the same time as he knew that not for one second could he take his eyes from that falling cluster of black blobs.

  "Hard a port!" he snapped, and Pilot repeated the order down the pipe.

  At thirty knots the ship heeled at once. The next few seconds were of such frenzied madness that an inexperienced civilian could with justification have jumped over the side.

  The ship was leaning so acutely that her lee gunnel was under water, marked by a foaming maelstrom where the sea surged inboard. X-gun was still bearing, and still firing, and the discharge shook the tormented ship. Then the bombs plunged into the sea dead in her wake, and her stern was lifted clear so that the propellers raced and she seemed as if she would shake herself to pieces. The bellow of the guns and the blast of the bombs combined into a hellish tumult that would have unhinged the sanity of minds less practised in bearing it.

  "Midships, steer south," Bentley ordered in a hoarse voice, and then he turned to look at Scimitar.

  It was Ferris again, Ferris the Argus-eyed, who told them.

  "One bomber hit," he called, "on fire and dropping fast."

  That must have been X-gun's last salvo, and though they were grateful for this diminution in their enemies they spared only a brief and hateful glance for the funeral pyre staining the pellucid blue of the sky. Every eye on the bridge was on Scimitar.

  She was, Bentley noted thankfully, still steaming fast. Not engine or boiler-rooms, then. The smoke was streaming from abaft the funnel, now and again; streaked with a tongue of red. That was exploding ammunition, and it was the pom-pom's ammunition. Once, far away from here, his own pom-pom's ready-use shells had gone up, and he could visualise only too starkly the mess aboard Scimitar. Her main close-range weapon was finished.

  Scimitar was on his starb'd beam. His reaction was swift.

  "Close Scimitar, " he ordered Pilot, "take all avoiding action to port."

  The bridge understood his manoeuvre clearly. Before, a fighter could have flown over Wind Rode and still had time and space to get down again at Scimitar. But now with Wind Rode close alongside her, the damaged destroyer would be protected on one side at least. Pilot took her over with care.

  "Fighters coming in," Randall s
aid harshly.

  For the next ten minutes Wind Rode fought the most intense action of her violent life. Her guns were choirs of flame. Coloured tracer thrust out vehemently through the sky, mingling into a fiery pattern with the shells from the fighters. The roar of her desperate defence was loud and continuous. She shuddered with her speed and she jumped under the shock of recoil of her big guns. A white cloud of foam opened at her bows and the faces of her gunners grew coppery with fumes. And their straining bodies grew tired.

  4.7 shells and their propelling cordite are heavy. For almost two hours the gunners had lifted and loaded and rammed, straining to keep their footing on the heeling and shivering decks. They could last for some time yet, but they could not hope to maintain their earlier accuracy of aim and drill. The Japs, on the other hand, though under mental strain, were physically unaffected. Their firing and bombing required only the pressing of buttons.

  Bentley saw another cluster of blobs descending to meet him and he thought with weary desperation that surely now their bomb-loads must be exhausted. The Jap had unloaded cunningly, not in large sticks but a few at a time, knowing that only one bomb penetrating those thin decks below them could rupture the target cruelly.

  "Hard a port!" Bentley said, for the twentieth time that morning.

  A moment later her stern was slowing round with all the torque that rudder and screws could give her. In closing up on Scimitar he knew perfectly well that he was concentrating and enlarging the bombers' target, but that was merely one more added to the appalling risks they had been subjected to during the morning.

  Wind Rode may have been just a fraction more competently handled, or her coxswain got his wheel on faster, or the Japs' main aim may have been Scimitar. They would never know.

  They saw the bombs hurtling closer until their speed became too great to follow. They saw the familiar and hateful spouts erupt off their starb'd quarter. They heard the multiple concussions, they watched the towers of water shred back into the sea, and then they saw what one bomb had done to Scimitar.

  Their sistership was slowing down, rapidly. Above her foc's'le stretched a steep mushroom of oily black smoke. The smoke was thick, but it did not hide the jagged hole savaged in her port bow.

  The bow had not landed directly on the foc's'le, but close aboard in the water. Its punch had reached upwards and through her thin side. Now her forepart so was open to the sea. There would be a good deal of water in there, Bentley realised with a wearied grimness. Compared to her earlier manoeuvrability, she was now a cripple.

  "Midships!" he shouted hoarsely above the roar of the guns, "bring her round, Pilot!"

  Through the exhaustion in his mind his intention was rockhard. He would move around her, shephereding her as best he could from the triumphantly savage objective of the bombers forming-up again in the sky. As though he had read his mind - which was probable -Sainsbury's voice cracked from the R/T speaker:

  "Close me and circle round. I am down to ten knots, probably less. Pom-pom and one oerlikon out of action. They cannot last much longer. We must hold them off. Over."

  The effect of his ordeal was apparent in Sainsbury's voice. Bentley tried to make his own tones normal. "Will co-operate. Well dish these swine yet. Over." There was no answer to his forced bravado.

  Rapid and white-flashed, Wind Rode ran round her crippled sister in a tight circle, under a blue sky and upon the rolling plain of a blue sea. Bentley knew that his tactics would be accurately interpreted by the Japs. He did not bother about it. They would know Scimitar was damaged, if not from sight of the hole in her side then from the reduced bow-wave at her stem.

  He took up the microphone. Before speaking he drew in several long breaths. His men were more strained than he, and the desperation in his mind must not be communicated to them through his voice. He said, as firmly as he could:

  "This is the captain. Scimitar has been damaged. She is down to ten knots. But she is still in action. The Japs cannot possibly last much longer. Their ammunition and bombs must be almost exhausted. We have got to hang on for a few minutes more. We will hang on. Good luck to you all, and good shooting. That's all."

  He replaced the microphone and the Jap fighters fell headlong upon them.

  Their attack was directed exclusively at Wind Rode. Scimitar could wait. With both ships crippled they could be picked off at leisure.

  The attack was cleverly executed. Bentley watched the fighters coming in and then his gaze switched up to the bombers. They too were beginning a run. He did not think they had any bombs left, but he could not be sure. Therefore he could not divert his big guns from them to place a barrage before the fighters. The howling demons would have to be met by his close-range weapons alone, minus Number Two oerlikon.

  The pom-pom and oerlikon crews were less physically tired than the 4.7 gunners, but mentally they had undergone more. An armoured shield surrounded each twin mounting, and the gunners behind it were not only protected, but they had been too busy at their loading to even see the fighters and bombers attacking.

  It was completely different with the close-range weapons. They were unarmoured, and every man of their crews had intimate sight of the snarling threat. They were experiencing that visual unpleasantness now.

  The strain on one of the pom-pom's loaders was so intense that he retched. But he kept his gun supplied through the wrenching paroxysm. And no one heard the convulsive protests of his stomach and nerves above the coughing roar of the mounting.

  The fighters bore in and laced her upper-deck with steel and speared up into the sky. They tilted over on red-balled wings and came hurtling down again. Four men were left on the deck. They were hauled clear with compulsive urgency by their mess-mates and left to one side, where the limp bodies moved with horrible and false animation to the roll of the ship. The big guns were firing at the bombers, but now the heavy aircraft were zig-zagging to avoid the clusters of black flowers. At last Bentley knew that their loads were exhausted. But the fighters knowing this also, kept too close in to the ship to allow him effective use of his barrage. She had only her close-range guns.

  His eyes reddened and stung by cordite fumes, his brain battered by the uproar he had borne so long, Bentley saw the fighters plunging down and heard the powered scream of their straining engines. He was ready to give his wheel order, and he knew that any second from now might see the ship's finish. Depth-charges, torpedo warheads, ready-use ammunition, even the boilers behind their thin skin of ship's side - they were all open to entry by the Zeros' two-pounder cannon-shells.

  The pom-pom opened fire. Automatically, dazedly, he waited for the oerlikons to join in. There came only a single snarl. Then he knew that he had lost another of his precious close-range guns. And knew that the guns he had left could not possibly cope with the multiple threat diving for him.

  But the fighting instinct inside him was still forceful. His mouth opened to order men from the 4.7 mountings down aft to the inactive oerlikon. Randall's bellow slashed across his intention.

  "Cease firing!"

  Bentley could not believe his ears. Nor, when he followed Randall's thrusting finger, his eyes. It was understandable. His attention for the past two hours had been completely engrossed on the bombers and the handling of the ship. There had been no time to survey the scenery.

  But he was looking at additional decorations to it now. Graceful, glorious decorations; twin-tailed, twin-engined hawks, a sweet half-dozen, slicing down like sun-glinting streaks, earning their name. Lightnings.

  The Jap fighters had not seen them. Understandable again. They were as preoccupied as Bentley had been. They eased out of their dives and came in for the ship; they showed the full lengths of their backs and the Lightnings streaked for that nicely-presented target. "Hard a port!" Bentley croaked.

  The Jap fighters could have, but they did not, follow Wind Rode's comparatively slow alteration. Two of them smashed into the sea astern of her an aircraft is difficult to fly with one of its wings blud-geoned of
f. The other two hung on their propellers, clawing desperately for height. Four Lightnings zoomed up after them.

  Sweaty, dirty, panting, the destroyer's gunners glared upwards with squinting eyes. It was too soon yet for relief. They felt, every man of them, only fierce exultation. With every fibre of their exhausted wills they urged the pursuing Lightnings on.

  Two Lightnings closed the left-hand Jap and as though their firing buttons were actuated by one finger, separate streams of tracer leaped out and converged on the Zero. He had no time to manoeuvre. His outline vanished in a formless, thrusting ball of smoke and flame, from which pieces of aircraft spun out and fluttered seaward.

  The last Zero whipped in a tight bank to starb'd. They were well trained, those American pilots. One continued on and boxed the Jap in on his left-hand side. The other swung over on his wing-tips and as the Zero flew across his line of sight he pressed his button.

  The shells raked the fragile machine from nose to tail. The Jap was in the vortex of fire only a second, but he absorbed many shells in that instant of time. Glycol streamed from his engine and his speed slowed and his nose went down towards the sea. Coolly, with disciplined thoroughness, the Americans followed him down and shot him into the sea.