Marine L SBS

by Ian Blake

  Normally Pountney considered all Royal Marines constipated with tradition and incapable of innovative thinking, but he liked the younger man’s sense of humour, admired his icy calm under fire, and they soon found that they shared a passionate interest in canoeing. Pountney also noticed that, though Ayton was slightly built, he was tough and resilient, had an inexhaustible supply of energy and was possessed of a quick, intuitive intelligence.

  For Ayton, ‘Jumbo’ Pountney was the elder brother he’d never had, who, he hoped, would lead him into some interesting scrapes – and perhaps out again if necessary, though Ayton had few qualms about his own ability to extract himself from danger if the need arose. The Marines had a long tradition of being able to look after themselves, and were trained to give no quarter and expect none.

  Not every Marine would have had the initiative – or the determination – but on the return of the defeated British forces from Norway Ayton had badgered and argued until he had wangled a secondment to the new Commando force.

  The present escapade seemed rather a lark to Ayton, though Pountney had impressed upon his companion that he would be as dead from a British bullet as he would be from a German one. Invasion was expected at any time and they had been told that the shore patrol would fire on sight if it caught anyone in the prohibited area they had entered. The patrol’s motto, Pountney knew – because it had been his business to find out all about the patrol – was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

  But Pountney’s special training with the Independent Companies, the two bleak months in Norway and the initial training course they had both recently attended at the School of Special Warfare at Inverailort, had taught them how to move unseen and unheard at night. Besides, the shore patrol was mostly composed of elderly men with even more elderly rifles. They just added a certain piquancy to the adventure, but no real danger.

  That would come once they were on the water, for the harbour patrol boats were efficiently manned and their crews were alert and well armed. Some of them even possessed the much-prized Thompson sub-machine-gun, an American automatic weapon that fired heavy .45-calibre slugs. At short range it could do an awful lot of damage to a man’s health. In July 1940 it was as rare as hen’s teeth and even the Independent Companies had been issued with only a handful. If the harbour patrol had these weapons they would know how to use them. On the whole, Pountney and Ayton had agreed, it was best to avoid the harbour patrol, though one of Pountney’s earlier plans had been to capture one of the boats and come alongside the Glengyle in it.

  Then there would be the ship’s own patrol system. Unlike the shore and harbour patrols, those aboard the Glengyle were expecting a raid, and the crew might well have a cutter in the water as well as a standing patrol on deck. Because the ship’s company had been alerted, they might not shoot the intruders. But the shame of being captured by a bunch of matelots was, the two commandos agreed, worse than being shot.

  ‘It’s due any minute,’ Ayton whispered.

  ‘We’ll let it pass, then launch the canoe.’

  The two men eased themselves down among the rocks. They were both dressed in khaki overalls and brown plimsolls, and their faces were blackened with cork. They wore woollen hats and each carried a sheath knife on a leather belt around his waist. Stowed in the canoe were wire-cutters, two hip-flasks of whisky, a torch, night-glasses and a can of water. The most important item of all – a piece of white classroom chalk – Pountney carried in the pocket of his overalls.

  Ayton heard the patrol first, and touched Pountney’s arm. It was just the faintest of scrunching sounds as the men plodded along the beach on the fringe of the ebbing water. The murmur of subdued talk was carried to them by the freshening breeze. Metal clinked on metal, boots scraped on rock, and the two commandos saw the glow of a cigarette furtively cupped in the hand, before the patrol, four shadowy figures, sloped along in front of them and passed out of sight to their left.

  ‘Fucking shower,’ Ayton whispered cheerfully.

  ‘Let’s get going,’ Pountney snapped. Sometimes Ayton was just a bit too relaxed. The shore patrol was no concern of theirs.

  They lifted the canoe carefully from its hiding-place among the rocks and carried it down to the water’s edge, crouching to keep their profiles low. Pountney climbed in first, then held the canoe steady with his double paddle as Ayton slid in behind him.

  It was a civilian canoe with a wooden frame which had a piece of rather tired, crinkled canvas stretched over it. There was one open cockpit but no seats. They both sat on a wooden grating that covered the bottom and Ayton immediately felt water seeping through his overalls.

  ‘It’s leaking,’ he said in disgust.

  ‘Tough,’ Pountney answered brusquely. ‘It’s all I could find at short notice in the Sea Scouts’ shed.’

  Shit, thought Ayton, the war’s going to be won in a fifteen-foot canoe, circa 1912, which leaks like a sieve and is owned by the Dover Sea Scouts.

  Old it was, but the canoe moved sweetly enough across the water, slicing through the wavelets without fuss. The leak, if it was a leak, seemed to get no worse. If I get away with just a wet arse, Ayton thought, it will have been an evening well spent.

  Pountney had planned their approach in a series of grandmother’s footsteps. He was not going to attempt to reach the Glengyle directly, because it lay a long way out in the harbour. Instead, they moved in its general direction by paddling from one moored ship to another, for Dover was full of all sorts of ships, many of them merchantmen which had escaped in the nick of time from countries recently overrun by the German armies.

  At each ship the two men rested for a while by sheltering under the bow and hanging on to the chain that secured the vessel to its mooring buoy. They took long draughts from their hip-flasks and eased their aching legs and shoulders. Paddling in such a position put an enormous strain on the upper torso and Pountney made a mental note to ask the ’sawbones’ – the surgeon commander at Dover Command, who had taken an interest in Pountney’s ideas – how best to alleviate this stress.

  Each time, before moving on, they scoured the dark waters around them with their night-glasses to make sure they did not run across the harbour patrol. They did see it once, a dark, moving shadow between two anchored destroyers, but it was a long way away and not heading in their direction.

  After they had been on the water for about half an hour the rain clouds above them broke up and in the clear patches of night sky the stars glittered brightly. Pountney turned to Ayton, pointed skywards, then raised his thumb. Ayton nodded and grinned. Good visibility was just another piece that needed to fit neatly into the jigsaw of their operational plan – well, not plan exactly, Pountney thought: gamble was nearer the mark.

  Eventually, after nearly an hour, they reached the ship nearest to the Glengyle. An old tramp steamer in ballast, its rusting hull was so high out of the water that the two men were able to cling on to part of the barnacle-encrusted rudder while they got their bearings. The Glengyle, lying on the tramp steamer’s starboard quarter, was a large ship, a former cross-Channel steamer now converted to take a number of small raiding craft, and these hung from special davits on both sides of the boat deck. Some were used in the harbour, for commando exercises or for ferrying the crew, and these were secured to a boat boom which stuck out horizontally from the Glengyle’s side to keep them from bumping the hull.

  The two men took it in turn to study the ship’s outline with the night-glasses. The twin Oerlikons on the foredeck were plainly visible, their long barrels pointing skywards. They were dual-purpose guns firing 20mm shells. Of Swedish manufacture, they had been purchased in large quantities by both the Germans and the British and had proved to be extremely accurate and reliable. There was another pair in the stern and on either side of the bridge anti-aircraft quick-firing pom-pom guns had been fitted.

  To complete its armament, the Glengyle had just astern of its squat, single funnel an anti-aircraft device that fired rockets from a s
imple tube. Pountney had seen it in action in a Norwegian fiord where the ship had been anchored and knew it to be quite useless against the low-flying German aircraft which had swept down to strafe and bomb it. The appearance of the rocket blasting its way skywards might have distracted the pilots, he imagined, but they were certainly never in any danger of being hit. His original aim had been to remove this useless piece of apparatus as proof that he had been aboard, but that was before he had found that the only canoe he could get was small, old, leaky and very fragile. He had to face the fact that, though he had planned in great detail how to get up to and then on to the Glengyle, he had not thought what he would do once he was aboard.

  As if sensing what his companion was thinking, Ayton whispered, ‘What now, Jumbo?’ in Pountney’s ear.

  ‘How far away do you reckon she is?’

  ‘Two cables,’ said Ayton. ‘Four hundred yards,’ he added, in case Pountney was not familiar with naval terminology.

  Pountney grunted. Ten minutes’ paddling, ten minutes’ exposure to those guarding the ship. It was a long time, but at least there was no cutter patrolling around the Glengyle. The donnish captain must really feel as confident as he had sounded earlier in the day.

  Pountney glanced at his watch. They hadn’t much time. ‘We’ll move into a position so that we approach her bows on,’ he said.

  ‘The tide’s almost finished ebbing,’ Ayton reminded him. ‘She’ll start swinging towards us soon.’

  ‘Can’t wait that long. You know how punctual our Luftwaffe friends are.’

  They pushed off from the tramp steamer’s rudder, paddled gently along the vessel’s rusting sides, skirted the mooring buoy and, feeling naked and vulnerable, headed into open water. They paddled for two or three minutes, then turned to starboard. The Glengyle now lay directly ahead of the canoe, its bows pointing towards it.

  By lying motionless and keeping their upper bodies bent forward, Pountney knew they would either be virtually invisible to anyone looking in their direction or they would be thought to be a piece of flotsam that had drifted into the harbour. After the mayhem of Dunkirk, he thought grimly, there were plenty of bits of wreckage floating up and down the Channel, and those aboard the Glengyle had no idea that a canoe was going to be used by the raiders. It would probably not occur to anyone that such a flimsy craft could be employed seriously or that its occupants would be crazy enough to use it to try to avoid the harbour patrol. Broakes had only been called into the meeting to hear that his vessel would be attacked, not how it was to be done.

  ‘Hope Jerry is his usual prompt self,’ Ayton whispered. ‘I make it 0130 exactly.’

  ‘Perhaps Goering’s given them a night off,’ said Pountney, but even as he spoke the air-raid siren on Dover Castle began to crank itself up before beginning its undulating, penetrating whine. It rose and fell, a banshee warning of death and destruction to come, and moments later fingers of searchlights began to stab the sky, criss-crossing one another as they sought out the intruders. Then the two men heard the first throb of an aircraft’s engines and, almost simultaneously, the 4.7-inch anti-aircraft battery on the cliff at the far end of the port opened fire. It sounded like a series of old tin doors being continually banged shut in the wind.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Pountney. They dug their paddles into the water and spurred the ancient canoe forward. As they paddled they could hear the sound of the aircraft engines increase, then the crump of the first bomb falling. By the time they had reached the Glengyle the raid was in full swing. Tracer criss-crossed the sky, sparkling red and white, and the Oerlikons aboard the commando ship coughed out their 20mm shells at the dark shadows sweeping overhead. They made a terrible racket.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the distinctive outline of a Dornier swept towards the Glengyle almost at water level and machine-gun bullets whined and skipped around the canoeists. Then abruptly it roared skywards and swung out to sea.

  ‘Shit,’ said Pountney. ‘Too close for comfort.’

  They had gambled on the nightly German ‘tip-and-run’ air raid on Dover as cover for their own attack, but Pountney had not reckoned with the Glengyle being one of the Luftwaffe’s targets.

  The canoe was now under the bows of the commando ship and they could feel the hull vibrating as the Oerlikons pumped their shells into the night sky. As the canoe moved slowly down the ship’s side Pountney fumbled for the chalk. He held up his hand palm forward to indicate to Ayton to stop the canoe and then he chalked, well above the water-line so that it would not be washed off, a large cross on the ship’s side.

  The first explosive device had been fixed.

  He raised his hand again, this time making a forward motion, and Ayton eased the canoe towards the commando ship’s stern.

  Right by where he reckoned the engine-rooms were situated, Pountney made another cross and, for good measure, wrote ‘bang’ in equally large letters. Then he raised his hand again and this time indicated with a circular motion of his forefinger that Ayton should turn the canoe around.

  Now came the really tricky bit.

  Pountney turned and leant back so that he could whisper in his companion’s ear: ‘They might be keeping an eye on the boat boom. I’m going up the mooring chain.’

  Ayton nodded. Suddenly, as if someone had blown a whistle for half-time, all the guns in Dover stopped firing at the same moment. The canoe was now facing towards the town and the two men could see an ominous glow of flames where a bomb had fallen on a row of terraced houses near the docks.

  Above them someone began heaving empty shell cases over the side and shouting for more ammunition. Ayton glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, then bent forward. ‘Second round should start in two minutes,’ he whispered. Pountney nodded and took a swig from his hip-flask.

  The second wave of German bombers came from a different direction, showing, Pountney thought, at least a degree of imagination. But the defenders knew this little trick and were quickly in action. The canoeists watched one bomber caught, like a fly in a web, by three searchlights and a fourth quickly joined in. However it ducked and weaved, the searchlights moved with it and then the puffs of exploding shells from the heavy anti-aircraft battery on the cliff surrounded it.

  One moment the bomber was there, a black beetle surrounded by light; the next there was a flash of flame and it was gone. Inwardly Pountney cheered. Somehow it was a good omen for his own mission.

  As they moved the canoe towards the Glengyle’s mooring buoy, the ship’s armament opened up again. Ayton held on to the large, can-shaped steel buoy with one hand and steadied the canoe as Pountney cautiously lifted himself out of its cockpit, grasped the steel chain and hauled himself on to the buoy. For a moment he crouched there, taking in his surroundings, then began slowly, steadily ascending the massive chain that held the commando ship to the buoy.

  The chain sagged slightly under Pountney’s weight and the buoy dipped and swung. Using the links as footholds, he managed to stay balanced until he was almost two-thirds of the way up the chain. But it then became too steep and for the last third he had to haul himself up arm over arm.

  The hawse pipe was not big enough to allow him to squeeze through it, but he was over the bulwark in one quick movement and crouched down behind the anchor winch which dominated the forecastle. The deck vibrated under him as the twin Oerlikons a few yards from him began pounding out their shells again. He could see the sun crew gathered round the mounting, their white anti-flash masks standing out plainly in the semi-darkness. The noise was appalling. He might be seen, but he certainly wasn’t going to be heard.

  He dodged from the anchor winch to another piece of machinery and considered what to do. He could chalk another cross, but it could easily be obliterated. He really needed to take back something tangible, something that was identifiable with the ship. Bent double, he moved cautiously aft towards the Oerlikons, which were still pumping out their shells, while at the same time watching for any movement further aft. Suddenly his
foot hit something soft and he crouched down and examined it. It was just what he needed. He stuffed it down his overalls, ran doubled back to the ship’s bows and slid down the mooring chain so fast he felt his hands and thighs burning painfully. He lowered himself into the canoe and took up his paddle.

  ‘Go like shit,’ he shouted to Ayton above the hammering of the Oerlikons. ‘We’re in business.’

  Keyes shuffled the papers in front of him and looked over his spectacles at the captain of the Glengyle seated at the other end of the table. ‘Why don’t you kick off, Dick?’

  Broakes cleared his throat and opened in front of him a large, black book. ‘This is the deck log for the last twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘After our meeting yesterday I informed my executive officer that someone might try and board the ship during the course of the night. He therefore doubled the sentries and asked if I required a standing patrol to be mounted in a cutter around the ship. I said I considered this unnecessary, but that a lookout should be detailed for the bridge with specific instructions to watch for any unusual movements in the harbour.’

  Broakes glanced down at the black book and began reading from it. ‘"At 0128 he reported what looked like a piece of wreckage directly ahead but neither he nor the officer of the watch could discern what it was. Two minutes later the nightly German ‘tip-and-run’ raid began. The for’ ard Oerlikon opened fire at 0135, the after Oerlikon at 0136. The for’ ard Oerlikon fired 172 rounds, the after Oerlikon 194. Both guns ceased firing at 0156. The pom-pom crews were closed up but did not open fire. No damage reported, except for superficial damage caused by machine-gun bullets from a low-flying Dornier. These chipped . . ."’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ Keyes interrupted gently, not wanting a list of where the paintwork of the captain’s precious ship had been damaged. ‘What about Lieutenant Pountney? When did he arrive and what did you do about him?’