by Ian Blake
Tiller shook his head. The nearest he had ever come to feeling claustrophobic was when hiding in a French farmer’s cupboard while Gestapo men in long raincoats searched the farm. That had been when he was on the run after the canoe raid on German shipping at Bordeaux. Come to think of it, it hadn’t been claustrophobia he’d suffered from – just sheer paralysing fright. In action he found there’d rarely been time to be frightened, but just waiting in that cupboard for the worst to happen had been something else. He shuddered inside at the memory.
‘Good thing, too,’ said the seaman. ‘One of the last lot we trained, he got it, panicked, pushed the joystick the wrong way, and nosedived into the mud. Took us twelve hours to get the poor sod up to the surface. Not much help to him as the oxygen supply only lasts ten hours.’
Claustrophobia was one of the first things the chief petty officer instructor asked them about the next morning.
‘It’s not something some people like to admit to,’ he said, surveying their faces closely. ‘Some silly buggers even think they can overcome it by volunteering for a course like this. But now’s the time to say if you do suffer from it. No disgrace. You sure?’
The group of five SBS men shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but all nodded with sufficient confidence for the CPO to say: ‘That’s all right then. Let me just give you a bit of background. This ship’s the training depot for Charioteers as well as yourselves. A chariot – or Jeep as they’re also called – is different from a Welman. It’s powered by compressed air and has a crew of two who ride on top of it. They wear special suits and have individual oxygen equipment. We call them Jeepmen; they call us Sardine Men. Any of you ever seen a Welman?’
Everyone shook their head.
‘Well, you’ll see one in a few minutes, and when you do you’ll see why they talk about Sardine Men. The Welman’s a one-man submersible, nearly seventeen feet long unarmed, and just over twenty with its warhead. It weighs, with the warhead, 4600lb. It’s battery-powered and has a range of thirty miles.’
Sketched on a blackboard beside the instructor was the electrical layout of the craft with its twenty-four batteries. When he had finished explaining how the batteries were connected to the starter motor, which came from a London Transport bus, and worked the prop shaft, he took them on deck.
Under a small crane amidships lay, side by side, several large, cigar-shaped steel objects. Their propellers and hydroplanes were plainly visible and each had a tiny conning tower amidships.
‘What nut came up with this gimmick?’ Tiller asked as the group approached the strange-looking objects.
‘Officially, that’s hush-hush,’ said the CPO. ‘Unofficially, it was the idea of a boffin at a secret weapons establishment at Welwyn Garden City which belongs to the same mob who have taken over Kingairloch House. Something to do with the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Don’t ask me who they are because I don’t know. Even if I did I wouldn’t tell you.’
When the group had gathered round one of the Welmans, the instructor started pointing out its main external features. ‘You can see that the warhead is attached to the bows and fits very snugly on to it. The warhead has two very powerful magnets on top of it – here and here. The idea is for the Welman to come alongside its target and once the warhead has become locked on to the target with the magnets, the driver releases the charge by turning a small wheel situated directly in front of his seat. Then he puts the Welman into reverse and scarpers. Quite easy, really.’
‘How is the charge detonated?’ Tiller asked. ‘A time fuse of some sort?’
The instructor nodded. ‘The fuse, normally a five-hour one, is automatically activated when the warhead is detached.’
‘But supposing the target gets underway, won’t the pressure of the water knock the warhead off the hull?’ one of the group asked.
‘Or the Welman’s seen and divers are sent down to detach the charge?’ another queried.
‘There must be a sympathetic fuse as well,’ Tiller said instantly.
The instructor looked at him quizzically. ‘You know your explosives then, Sergeant.’
Tiller grinned awkwardly. He did, but he knew he should learn to keep his trap shut when under training. However, the instructor smiled at him in a friendly way and said to the group: ‘Sergeant Tiller’s quite right. There’s a sympathetic fuse as well which reacts to vibration or any movement.’
‘What’s the explosive charge, chief?’ Tiller asked.
‘Torpex – 560lb of it.’
Tiller whistled. He knew they’d just started using Torpex in depth-charges with devastating effect.
‘What’s that?’ one of the group piped up. ‘I thought all explosives were TNT.’
Tiller looked at the instructor, who nodded.
‘It’s a mixture of amatol and aluminium which can be up to eighty per cent more destructive than TNT,’ Tiller explained. ‘That Welman charge could blow the bottom off a bloody battleship, no trouble at all.’
‘Which,’ the instructor interjected quietly, ‘is exactly what it’s designed to do.’
Silence settled on the group. They were all volunteers and volunteers rarely, if ever, had a clue what they were volunteering for – except they knew it was hazardous. Now that was confirmed. For it was no secret that the Tirpitz, Germany’s most powerful battleship, still lay in the fiords of Trondheim, a constant threat to the Arctic convoys supplying the Russians. The X-craft had damaged her, and she would be non-operational for some time yet, but their explosives had not been powerful enough to sink her.
A gust of wind blew a light dusting of snow in their faces and Tiller tugged at his greatcoat collar to close it. Norwegian waters would be a lot colder than Loch Linnhe, so he’d better get used to it.
No one asked if the Tirpitz was their eventual target because the only answer would have been a frigid stare from the instructor. But they knew two and two made four.
‘Right, gentlemen,’ the instructor said briskly. ‘Let me give you a guided tour of one of these little beauties.’
He opened the access hatch on the top of the conning tower of the nearest Welman and pointed to the bucket-type seat positioned immediately below. ‘If that seat looks familiar to any of you, then you drive an Austin Seven. That’s where it comes from. And in the unlikely event of anyone recognizing the joystick in front of it, then you must be a one-time fighter pilot, as it comes from a Spitfire. The luminous direction indicator on the instrument panel here is also from a Spit. All made up from odds and sods is the Welman. Very ingenious.’
The instructor pointed out what the different gauges were on the instrument panel in front of the bucket seat – an ammeter, inclinometer, depth gauge and so on – and described the miniature submarine bit by bit, working from bow to stern. He showed them the wheel of the trim weight control – which the pilot turned to bring the Welman on to an even keel after diving or surfacing, and which compensated for the loss of weight after the charge had been placed – and the wheel which released the charge.
He then showed them the hydroplane and rudder controls, the bilge pump, the ballast tanks, the banks of batteries and the oxygen bottles. He explained that the ballast tanks, one on either side, were filled with water by operating the main vent lever, which he pointed out to them. Once the ballast tanks began to fill, and the Welman began to submerge, the motor was switched on and the hydroplane, manipulated by the joystick, manoeuvred the craft vertically. When the craft was surfacing, the ballast tanks were emptied by compressed air and it was guided up by the hydroplane. It could also rise vertically to the surface if the motor was switched off and the tanks were ‘blown’, emptied of water, with the hydroplane set in a horizontal position.
‘The pilot wears an oxygen mask and is fed oxygen through a rubber lung strapped to his chest,’ said the instructor. ‘It’s a Yank invention called a Munsem lung. It’s inflated before the operator enters and is then fed from the bottles. The pilot has enough oxygen to last him about ten hours.’
>
It hadn’t been enough for that poor sod stuck in the mud, Tiller thought.
‘See the keel here,’ the instructor said, pointing with the toe of his boot. ‘Lead – 630lb of it. But if you get stuck on the bottom it can be detached from the hull. Without the keel the Welman has enough positive buoyancy to rise to the surface even if the ballast tanks are fully flooded.’
‘What happened to the bloke who got stuck on the bottom last week, then?’ Tiller asked.
The instructor glanced at him and shrugged. ‘He landed upside down in the mud. Christ only knows how he managed it. The keel just pushed him further into it. Releasing it didn’t do any good, of course. He must have gone through one hundred and eighty degrees while submerged. Or hit the bottom vertically and toppled over. It’s not meant to be possible.’
Sod’s Law, Tiller thought, and pushed the image from his mind.
They spent the rest of the morning climbing in and out of the Welman and familiarizing themselves with how it worked. Then came two days of lectures before one of the tiny subs was cranked over the side by the crane and lowered into the cold water of the loch alongside a small wooden raft. The Welman was then connected to the instructor by a telephone wire which was plugged into the hull via a waterproof connection. The instructor wore headphones and a microphone.
The first student climbed into the Welman while it was still attached to the crane and was ordered by the instructor through the intercom to flood the ballast tanks. Tiller watched the craft sink and then rise again as the water was expelled from the ballast tanks. It was, he found when his turn came, surprisingly easy to work, but it was horribly cramped and visibility was very restricted.
By the end of the week they were allowed to manoeuvre the Welmans on their own, though the instructor had taken the precaution of attaching a red buoy on a long line to each of the miniature submarines.
The instructor, whom everyone by now called Tammy, was interested in Tiller’s expertise in explosives, and would often talk to him about it. One evening he asked Tiller if he would like a run ashore, if only to get out of uniform for a few hours.
‘Is there anywhere to go?’ said Tiller, surprised.
‘Lochuisge. There’s a pub in the village run by an ex-navy chap. We can sometimes get a bit more than our ration of beer off him. Have you been drinking your tots?’
Tiller shook his head. He’d never fancied rum. The sweet, sickly smell of it when it was being dished out below decks always made his stomach turn. As attached personnel he wasn’t entitled to the threepence a day that a member of the crew could receive in lieu of his tot. But he knew enough about naval customs to draw what was due to him and to preserve it in a bottle. The precious liquid could be bartered for just about anything.
‘Take it with you, then. Mac enjoys his rum. He’ll give you several pints for it.’
The liberty boat, empty apart from themselves and its two-man crew, chugged its way up the loch towards Kingairloch House and then pulled alongside a wooden pier. The wind sawed eerily in the pines clustered around the edge of the loch.
Tammy wrenched two old bikes out of some nearby bushes and they set off along the narrow road that meandered towards the house, which, though largely shrouded in darkness, showed a number of lights in its windows. Tiller had hoped to get a close look at it but as they approached, it was obscured from view by a high brick wall which ran alongside the road.
They cycled up over the brow and down a gentle incline for three or four miles before coming to a small cluster of houses, one of which turned out to be the pub. It was called The Ship and Compass and its sign, showing a black-hulled barque sailing across an old-fashioned compass rose, creaked gently in the wind. They propped their bikes against the wall and went inside.
The place was surprisingly full. A few elderly men, obviously local, sat silently by a large open fire or played dominoes in one corner, but the room was dominated by several groups of young men and women who were talking and laughing loudly. Tiller knew at once that they were from Kingairloch House. One or two of them glanced across at the instructor and raised a hand or beer mug in greeting as the two men walked towards the bar.
‘Evening, Tammy. How’s tricks?’
‘Hello, Mac. This is a friend of mine, Colin Tiller. Tiger we call him. Joined us at the start of the week.’
Mac, like many athletes past their best, had run to fat, but he was big and powerful and the tattoos on his arms rippled as he wiped the glasses with a cloth. Behind him was a large wooden badge consisting of crossed clubs, the naval insignia for a physical training instructor, which was why they were always nicknamed ‘clubs’. Either side of it were photographs of teams: boxing teams, football teams, hockey teams, running reams. Mac seemed to be in all of them, arms akimbo, his muscles bulging out of whatever kit he was wearing.
He stretched out his hand and shook Tiller’s. ‘Welcome to Kingairloch,’ he said, and then added shrewdly: ‘You’re no brown job, are you?’
‘Course he’s not, he’s a Bootneck,’ Tammy said, using the naval slang for a Royal Marine. To an outsider, it didn’t sound too complimentary a description. But the Marines were part of the Royal Navy and on the whole the two got along well enough, bound, if by nothing else, by their contempt for anyone even remotely connected with the Army. The senior service was the senior service, and no one had better forget it.
The rum was exchanged for two pints of beer and four more were put on the slate to Tiller’s credit.
Tiller glanced around him as they moved away from the bar. ‘Seems full.’
‘Yeah. Knowing your professional interests, I thought you might like to meet some of them. I’m a married man, but I thought you might be interested personally as well.’
He could say that again, Tiller thought. There were several ATS – women from the Auxiliary Territorial Service – among the crowd, and one or two girls in civvies, but most were wearing a uniform he did not recognize. When he asked Tammy about them, the instructor replied: ‘They’re FANYs. Never heard of the FANYs?’
Tiller shook his head. Looking at their curves it seemed an appropriate word.
‘Stands for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.’
‘Kingairloch House is partly a hospital then?’
The instructor chuckled. ‘The name’s a bit of a misnomer really. It started off that way the last time we gave the Krauts a beating, but this time round they mostly work as cipher clerks, confidential work, that kind of thing, or as drivers for the top brass. All strictly volunteers.’
‘Is that right?’ But Tiller was more interested in what filled the uniforms than in what their contents did.
But then the instructor said quietly: ‘You’ve worked in Special Operations, haven’t you? I’ve seen your records. So you know how to keep your mouth shut, don’t you?’
Tiller nodded. What was Tammy on about?
‘And you know Kingairloch House is a training ground for some hush-hush mob?’
‘So I heard.’
‘Those girls. They’re here to be trained. Just like the men.’
‘For what?’
The instructor shrugged. ‘How would I know. But I got friendly with one of them once. We even spent a leave together in Glasgow. But she never, ever said what she was up to and shut up like a clam if I even got close to asking. Then one day she was gone. Just a note: "Goodbye. Wish me luck." That was all. Never seen her since.’
Tammy still seemed astonished by the memory. And aggrieved.
One of the men, dressed in civilian clothes, strolled over to them and said: ‘Come and join us, Tammy. Some of our newcomers want to know what fish you can catch in the loch. Who’s your pal?’
He was an older man with a bristly military moustache, and Tammy introduced him to Tiller as Sergeant Rod Winant, an instructor at the house. ‘Tiger’s well up on your line of work, Rod. If you like we might be able to spare him for an afternoon. He could give your pupils a talk on the practical application of some of the stuff
they’re learning to handle.’
‘Good idea. I’ll fix it.’
Introductions were made all round. The only thing Tiller knew about fish was how to eat them and after a while his eyes fell on a dark-haired girl in a FANY uniform who looked as bored with the conversation as he felt with it. They smiled at each other and two beers were cancelled from Mac’s credit slate.
She introduced herself as Susan and spoke with just a trace of a foreign accent.
‘Are you French?’ Tiller asked.
She just smiled. It was a slow, sad smile. She had the most beautiful wide, deep-set eyes. ‘Partly. Are you here for long?’
Tiller spun her some yarn which she interrupted by laying her hand on his arm.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. I think you’re awfully brave. I’d get claustrophobia and panic if I had to do what you do.’
It was a stock remark but she seemed to mean it. Tiller grinned awkwardly and, without thinking, asked her what she did.
‘Just a typist,’ she said vaguely. ‘Nothing interesting, I’m afraid.’
They spent the rest of the evening together, but when the pub closed Tiller didn’t ask if they could meet again, partly because he didn’t want to go through what Tammy had, but mostly because he knew she would find a way of saying no in the nicest possible way.
It wasn’t until after the war that he learnt who she was from a photograph in the newspapers. He would have known those eyes anywhere. He read the caption beneath the photograph and felt himself fill with anger at her terrible fate. As a member of the British sabotage and subversion organization known as Special Operations Executive, she had been parachuted into France at the end of 1943 as a wireless operator. But she had been betrayed to the Germans, who had shot her in Ravensbrück concentration camp the following year. She had, the newspaper reported, been awarded a posthumous George Cross for her bravery. A lot of frigging good that would do her now, Tiller had thought bitterly. It was then September 1945 and it seemed to him that all the best people were dead.
