Marine L SBS

by Ian Blake

  Once at sea Jewall broke open his orders, then called the others into the wardroom. ‘Cap d’Antibes is our destination,’ he said. ‘Kingpin is a man called Giraud. General Henri-Honoré Giraud.’

  Hawkes had included a photograph of their prospective passenger. It showed a tall, lean, straight-backed officer with hollow cheeks, keen eyes and a large moustache. He carried a walking stick and was looking straight into the lens. His expression, which must have made the photographer nervous, was just slightly out of focus.

  ‘A real martinet by the looks of him,’ said Pountney, examining the portrait closely.

  ‘At least he’ll be easy to recognize with a moustache that size,’ Ayton commented.

  ‘The name’s familiar,’ Jewall said. ‘But I can’t think how.’

  ‘French First World War hero,’ said Captain Wright, who was the oldest among them. ‘The Germans took him prisoner, but he escaped on a horse. He put up a fight in June 1940, too, before the Jerries captured him again.’

  ‘How come he’s in France if he was made a prisoner of war. I thought they were all shipped to Germany.’

  ‘Search me,’ said Wright. ‘I guess he escaped just as he did in 1916. He’s quite a guy, though he must be in his fifties now.’

  ‘Says here he limps from a war wound,’ said Jewall. ‘It adds: “Treat with extreme caution." Sounds as if he is some sort of explosive.’

  In the following days and nights the Seraph ran on the surface in the dark at maximum speed, diving only during daylight to avoid the attention of enemy aircraft. On the evening of the fourth night they reached a point two miles off Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. Jewall brought the submarine up to periscope depth and ran in towards the bay where they were to pick up General Giraud.

  Through the periscope it looked a fine night, no moon and a calm sea; perfect weather for the operation. Jewall handed over the periscope to Pountney so that he could examine the exact spot where he and the others were to land.

  ‘What’s their call-sign?’ he asked Jewall, who was standing beside him.

  ‘The letter “S",’ Jewall replied.

  ‘Looks to me as if that’s being flashed from a house on the left-hand end of the bay.’

  He stood back and Jewall took his place.

  ‘Right place, but they’re early,’ said Jewall doubtfully. ‘There’s another hour to go before they’re meant to call us.’

  For a moment there hung between them the spectre of a trap. Any minor deviation from the accepted plan always alerted the taut nerves of those undertaking a clandestine operation.

  It was Wright who gave them their answer. ‘Remember the French are an hour ahead of us,’ he said.

  Jewall swore in relief. ‘You’d think they’d have told the poor old bastard that. Ready to go?’

  Pountney nodded.

  ‘Down periscope. Stand by to surface. Blow main ballast.’

  Jewall was first on to the bridge, followed by the two lookouts and then the three SBS men, who immediately went forward with two of the crew to receive their folbots from the torpedo hatch. Pountney and Meredith went in the first folbot; Ayton and Harmon followed in the other two. They would not land until Pountney had signalled it was safe for them to do so.

  ‘Let’s have the Bren up here,’ Jewall said into the voice pipe. ‘Better safe than sorry.’

  From the periscope it had seemed a perfect night; on the water the surface was ruffled by a chilling westerly wind which blew straight out of the Pyrenees.

  The ‘S’ winked regularly from the left end of the bay, coming, Pountney could see now, from a large, blacked-out villa situated well behind the curving beach.

  The folbot grounded and the two men leapt out and crouched on the sand. Pountney held his tommy-gun at the ready. The sea murmured behind them and in the distance a dog barked persistently; otherwise there was nothing except the signal which kept winking.

  ‘Guess we can call the others in,’ whispered Meredith, but Pountney put a warning hand on his arm. In the shadows below the villa something was moving now, he was sure of it. He eased his weapon forward. He felt the American tense under his hand and knew that he, too, had seen the movement. They waited. The dog stopped barking; a clock somewhere in the town struck twice. Then they saw a man emerge from the shadows and walk on to the beach. As he approached they could see he was wearing a trilby hat, a polo-neck sweater and canvas trousers, his hands deep in the pockets.

  Pountney felt rather silly crouched on the sand while the man strolled across the beach towards them. He stood up and Meredith did the same. The signals stopped. The man began to talk rapidly in French as he approached them, taking his hands out of his pockets to gesture as he spoke. He didn’t seem particularly friendly. Meredith replied, then told Pountney: ‘He asks if we’re Americans.’

  Pountney gestured to the United States Army patch on the shoulder of Meredith’s uniform. The man responded with an expressive Gallic shrug.

  ‘Show him something American, Walt,’ Pountney suggested.

  Meredith dug in his pockets and produced a packet of Lucky Strikes. He held the packet out to the man, who took it, turned it over, then pocketed it. He still looked sour, but now he shook Meredith’s hand and spoke in rapid French.

  ‘He’ll take us to the General,’ Meredith said.

  ‘He’s not taking us anywhere,’ Pountney snapped. ‘The General’s coming to us. I trust him as much as I would a rattlesnake.’

  If it was a trap, Pountney reasoned to himself, they wouldn’t want shooting on the beach, because they would know there was a submarine out there somewhere. Much better to lure Meredith and himself off the beach and dispatch them quietly behind one of the villas which lined the bay.

  ‘He says the General’s not quite ready.’

  ‘We’ll wait,’ said Pountney phlegmatically.

  This brought a volley of French which made Meredith raise his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘He says it’s dangerous to stay on the beach. Sometimes police patrols come down here.’

  ‘Great,’ said Pountney. ‘They choose a beach which has police patrols.’

  ‘I think the guy’s genuine,’ said Meredith.

  ‘We’ll soon know,’ Pountney replied sceptically.

  They picked up the folbot and followed the Frenchman to the fringes of the beach, where there was a small park guarded by ornamental railings. They left the craft under some bushes near the gate and followed the Frenchman into the park, in the middle of which stood a bandstand, its white paint peeling, its wooden frame in bad repair.

  The Frenchman indicated that they should stay by the bandstand, and vanished quickly into the dark. Before long he returned with a tall figure who walked briskly with a walking stick. The tall man was dressed in civilian clothes and wore a raincoat over his shoulders like a cape. Only when he got close did Pountney detect a slight limp. He was accompanied by several civilians, all of them armed with Sten guns.

  There were brief, hurried introductions before the group moved to the edge of the beach. Pountney and Meredith carried their folbot back down to the water’s edge and then flashed the recognition signal out to sea. Moments later the other two folbots slid smoothly out of the dark. Without waiting, and without even looking to see if the coast was clear, the General strode down the beach to meet them, and his aide hurried after him.

  ‘Walks as if he bloody owns the place,’ Pountney muttered to Meredith.

  ‘Probably does.’

  Giraud proved to be extraordinarily agile for so tall a man and he had little difficulty in fitting himself into Ayton’s folbot. In fact he was rather like a schoolboy on an outing, giving Meredith a running commentary on his youthful canoeing adventures as they steadied the folbot for him. The aide kept quiet but looked permanently terrified, not only for his own safety but also for Giraud, who seemed totally oblivious to danger.

  Jerry Wright, wearing the full uniform of a US Navy captain, saluted Giraud when he stepped on to the submarine
and a large American flag fluttered in the breeze above the bridge. The General was hurried below and Jewall watched impatiently from the bridge as the folbots were fed through the torpedo hatch as in the distance the lights of a fishing fleet were gradually growing brighter.

  Pountney lowered the hatch as the last folbot disappeared below, applied the clips and hurried back to the bridge. Jewall ordered the submarine to turn and head out to sea, and water sloshed across the forecasing as Pountney ran along it towards the conning tower. He reached its footholds and swung himself over the bridge casing.

  ‘About time, too,’ said Jewall.

  He pressed a large brass button and the sound of the klaxon clamoured in Pountney’s ears as he half climbed, half slid down the ladder into the control room. He heard the hatch of the conning tower slam shut above him and Jewall shouting that all clips were on. Moments later the submarine’s captain was standing beside him in the control room.

  ‘Take her to eighty feet, Number One,’ Jewall told the First Lieutenant. ‘I don’t want to tangle with any fishing nets.’

  Beyond the dividing curtain Pountney heard the General’s aide speaking rapidly in French to Meredith and there was a good deal of laughter, generated by relief that the operation had been successfully completed.

  Pountney joined them and Jewall followed him and produced a bottle of rum and some glasses. Soon the bottle was half empty. Giraud, flushed and smiling, sat bolt upright at the head of the table. Pountney had never seen anyone with such dignity and presence. The General stood up, shook Pountney’s hand with both of his and said something in grave, slowly spoken French.

  ‘He thanks you on behalf of France,’ Meredith explained.

  Giraud turned to Wright, then Jewall, and shook their hands too, and repeated his short speech. Wright told the General through Meredith that he was going to be flown back to Gibraltar. Giraud asked the date of the invasion and when Wright told him the Frenchman’s eyebrows shot up in amazement. The General had hoped, Meredith translated, to persuade the Allied governments to divert their forces to southern France, as the Germans would occupy it if North Africa were invaded.

  ‘Christ,’ Pountney said to Jewall. ‘I thought de Gaulle was bad enough. This chap obviously thinks he can give Winston and Roosevelt orders.’

  Wright then asked Meredith to explain that, as Eisenhower’s naval representative, he was empowered to ask the General to approve the contents of a speech that he, Giraud, would be asked to broadcast to North Africa immediately he reached Gibraltar. It called on all French forces there to join the Allied forces when they landed. He placed the sheet of paper in front of Meredith, who translated it and handed it to Giraud. The General drained his glass of rum, took the piece of paper in his hand and spoke so quietly that Meredith had to strain to hear him.

  ‘He says he cannot do it,’ said Meredith. ‘He is a soldier, not a politician. And now he needs to sleep. Tomorrow he has to take command.’

  ‘Take command?’ Wright queried. ‘What does he mean? There’s nothing for him to take command of at the moment. And there never will be if he doesn’t make that broadcast.’

  Meredith grimaced. ‘He’s under the impression that he has been rescued in order to command all Allied forces taking part in the invasion.’

  There was a moment’s stunned silence, before Wright broke it by asking: ‘Who put that in his head, I wonder?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Meredith.

  After the Americans had argued fruitlessly with the General in an attempt to change his mind about making the broadcast, the party broke up in a sombre mood.

  ‘We seem to have risked our bloody necks for nothing,’ Ayton grumbled when Pountney explained the situation to the other two SBS men.

  ‘I hope bloody not,’ said Pountney, ‘for all our sakes’, and he described the conversation he had had with Hawkes.

  Once past the fishing fleet, the submarine surfaced and ran for the rest of the night towards its rendezvous with the Catalina flying boat seventy miles off the coastline. Just before dawn Wright broke wireless silence to send a coded signal to Gibraltar saying that the operation had been successful but that Giraud had refused to sign the communiqué.

  By the time this had been done, and confirmation that the message had been received had been transmitted to the submarine, the sun was edging above the horizon and it became too dangerous to stay on the surface. The klaxon honked its warning and the Seraph dived to eighty feet. An hour later it reached the rendezous and Jewall brought it up to periscope depth.

  The submarine’s officers took it in shifts to watch for the Catalina through the periscope. At ten o’clock the First Lieutenant said excitedly: ‘Aircraft dead ahead, sir’, and stood back to allow Jewall to look. The silence in the control room was broken only by the whirr of the electric motors as Jewall concentrated on the dot above the horizon. The dot turned into a blob and the blob into the distinctive shape of the high-winged, twin-engined Catalina, with floats at the end of its wings and the twin blisters of the gun turrets in its fuselage.

  ‘Down periscope! Stand by to surface! Shut main vents.’

  The rating on the control panel on the starboard side of the control room moved a series of small levers and there were several muffled thuds as if someone was banging the submarine with their fist.

  ‘All main vents closed, sir.’

  ‘Blow all main ballast!’

  The roar of high pressure air expanding into the ballast tanks filled the control room, and the planesmen spun their wheels to put the planes to the correct angle to surface. Jewall unclipped the lower hatch and entered the conning tower, and the First Lieutenant shouted out the changing depth of the submarine to him. ‘Twenty-five feet . . . twenty . . . fifteen.’

  Jewall swung open the hatch and a blast of fresh air swept through the control room, mixed with a sprinkling of Mediterranean sea water. Wright followed him up, ready to play his role when the General appeared.

  ‘Stop blowing,’ shouted the First Lieutenant above the roar of the compressed air.

  ‘Signaller on the bridge!’ Jewall called down through the voice pipe. ‘Make it snappy. He’s almost on us.’

  The signaller carrying a small lamp and the wide-barrelled Very pistol scrambled up the ladder, followed by the two lookouts with their powerful binoculars and the crew of the Oerlikon gun. Those below heard the steady throb of the Catalina’s engines and the dull thump of the Very pistol being fired.

  The throb of aero engines grew louder, but then receded, and the Very pistol was fired again. The Catalina’s engines dwindled, then steadily increased.

  ‘Major Pountney on the bridge,’ Jewall called down through the voice pipe. ‘Unstow folbots. Oerlikon crew, close up.’

  When Pountney reached the bridge he saw that the sea was flecked with white. The occasional wave slapped hard against the Seraph’s ballast tanks and cascaded spray over the forecasing. Overhead the Catalina was circling in a cloud-flecked sky, a lamp winking from one of its gun blisters.

  Wright had joined them on the bridge. ‘What do you think, Jumbo?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Looks bloody choppy,’ said Pountney doubtfully.

  Jewall watched the Catalina as it made a pass across the water before landing.

  ‘We’ll get it to taxi as close as possible,’ he said.

  ‘Can you pick up the folbots?’

  Jewall shook his head. ‘You’ll have to sink them if the Catalina can’t take them aboard.’ He bent over the voice pipe. ‘I want the General ready to come on the bridge. But he’s not to come until until I say so.’

  The flying boat skittered across the water, founts of spray flying from its floats, then the pilot revved the engines and it lumbered into the air again.

  ‘He doesn’t like it,’ Jewall commented.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Pountney.

  The Catalina gained height and circled.

  The signal lamp blinked from its blister and the signaller said: ‘Oil, sir.
He wants oil.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Jewall. ‘Chief ERA on the bridge,’ he said into the voice pipe. The long, lugubrious face of the chief engineer peered out of the conning tower’s hatch almost immediately. ‘You wanted me, sir?’

  ‘Chief, we need oil on the water. Plenty of it.’

  The ERA disappeared without comment. Submarines always had spare oil. As a last resort it could be pumped out while a submerged submarine was under depth-charge attack. If bits of old clothing and other debris were added to it the attackers could sometimes be duped into thinking the submarine had been sunk.

  They watched the oil being pumped out of the leeward side, to be spread across the water by the wind. It had a remarkable effect on the waves, damping them down and suppressing the spray.

  ‘Tell him to land as close to leeward of us as possible,’ Jewall instructed the signaller.

  The oil slowly turned a large patch of water into a dark-brown, velvety slop. The Catalina did one dummy run, then landed in the middle of it. The pilot revved its engines and taxied slowly towards the submarine.

  ‘The General on the bridge,’ Jewall said crisply into the voice pipe. Pountney clambered down from the bridge and on to the forecasing.

  Giraud appeared on the bridge wearing his raincoat and carrying his walking stick. He looked less gaunt and seemed to be enjoying himself, though his aide, who followed him on to the bridge carrying a briefcase, looked seasick.

  ‘Aircraft dead astern, sir,’ one of the lookouts suddenly shouted. ‘Elevation fifteen degrees. About ten thousand yards.’

  Jewall and Wright exchanged glances.

  ‘Talk about being caught with our pants down,’ said Wright drily.

  ‘You’d better be ready to take him below,’ Wright warned the aide, who spoke some English.