The new attack, Beale was asking about. He didn’t want to talk about the Savoia, which had been an easy target that he’d missed. McCall told him, “Stukas again. From the Sicily direction, and the carrier boys said there were Hun Stukas as well as Wop ones, so these’ll be the other kind, most likely.”
Gunfire was closing in again as the enemies droned over, high. Paul asked McCall, “Was that the only hit they scored?” On the American, he meant. McCall yelled, “Destroyer. One of the fleets, astern.”
“Sunk?”
He’d nodded. “A Hunt got some survivors.”
That was the engine note of diving Ju87s, now, lacing through the noise of the guns. Quite a different note was the commodore’s signal for a turn back to port. All the heaviest firing was from astern. Then he saw the burning American open fire, and from the volume of it you’d have guessed she had a gun on every square foot of deck-space. All the merchantmen’s guns opened up again as a single Stuka, its dive completed, came racketing over from astern, lifting through streams of tracer, straining towards the sanctuary of the surrounding dark. With luck there might still be some Sea Hurricanes waiting for stragglers out there. The ships were all under helm, coming round to port. Heavy firing astern and the intermittent snarl of diving bombers, the rising note and then the full-throated roar as they flattened out and sped away … Paul was out at the ship’s side, at the starboard rail, from where he hoped that if any other Stukas came this way out of the action astern he’d get an early sight of them and warn the gunners. Back there in the tracer-streaked, flash-pocked near-darkness he saw a flash bigger than all the other flickering, a flare of yellow spearing into an orange-coloured fireball that spread and then snuffed out abruptly: it had lasted about three seconds. Then, from the general roar of action astern, there was one much heavier explosion.
McCall shouted, “They’re after the carriers!”
Paul had thought the second mate had left them. He went over to him. “Did you mean we’ll be at action stations all night?”
Perhaps he hadn’t heard him. The fire on the American freighter was a bright glow that brightened as the darkness gathered, and the bridge superstructure of the fire-fighting Hunt was blackly silhouetted against it. Astern, gunfire faded and died away. As your ears came back to life, you could hear the pounding of the ship’s engines and the swish and thump of the sea around her stem.
With Bizerta thirty miles to starboard, the convoy had altered course to enter the Skerki Channel. Ahead, destroyers streamed minesweeping gear, and astern the heavy escort of battleships and carriers had turned back westward.
There was a sense of total commitment at this point. In fact the convoy had been committed to its purpose from the moment it had left the Clyde, and more deeply so again when, passing through the Gibraltar Strait into the Mediterranean, it had been joined by its heavy naval escort. But now, with only three cruisers and a dozen destroyers remaining, it was actually pushing its head into the noose—the Sicilian Narrows, where there’d be U-boats and E-boats to contend with as well as German air bases on Sicily and Italian torpedo aircraft from Pantellaria.
For the moment, things were quiet, and Paul went aft to get something to eat. The guns were to be manned all night, but the DEMS men would have stand-off periods with their number twos—Short and McNaught, for instance—taking over. Paul, unconvinced of his own value to the community on the foc’sl-head, didn’t think his absence was likely to upset anyone.
The atmosphere in the saloon was cheerful, laced with tension, awareness of the crucial stage they’d reached. There was satisfaction, too, in the fact that losses so far had been light. To have eleven ships still in convoy at this point was better than anyone had expected.
Brill, the doctor, offered, “Beer?”
“I think a large Scotch might fit the occasion better.”
“Oh you do, do you!”
“So would you, if you poked your nose out into the cold. It’s freezing, up on that damn—”
The ship trembled to the deep crump of an explosion.
He thought first, Mine? Because with the sweeping gear out ahead you were conscious of the danger of them, now the convoy was in narrow waters. A second thought was that it might be the Santa Eulalia, her fire reaching the ammunition in her for’ard holds.
Matt Harrison, the Montgovern’s second engineer, began, “Best get up top, boys, or—”
A second explosion was closer, much louder. Movement towards the door became a rush. Up till now most of them had been listening and wondering, waiting for an explanation and not keen to leave their food and drink. Paul was on his way up to the boat deck when the third bang went off. He and Brill and John Pratt, the third mate: they’d been the last out of the saloon. The ship was under helm. He’d thought about the Santa Eulalia because although it had looked from the outside as if her fire had been put out, it could still have been alive inside her; but at the second crash he’d thought, Torpedoes … And the third seemed to confirm it.
Then suddenly he was up on deck, in the open, and off to starboard the Caracas Moon was a sheet of flame. To port of the Montgovern, as she swung under helm to starboard, the AA cruiser—the old C-class ship who’d been ahead of them—lay stopped with her stern deep in the sea and her bow lifting as she flooded aft. Humphrey Straight was swinging his ship around her, handling the clumsy merchantman as she’d never been designed to be handled. The whole seascape was lit by the burning tanker. She was stopped, and the Santa Eulalia had had to put her engines astern to avoid running into her.
They’d passed the cruiser. There were ships all over the place, as helms were flung over to avoid collisions. And on the bow another cruiser—a big one, Mauritius-class—was circling to port with a heavy list.
It was incredible. Two cruisers—out of a total of three—and one tanker, the convoy’s only tanker, full of the stuff Malta needed most … In one salvo of torpedoes? There’d been three freighters between those two cruisers. If it had been just one salvo, picking out those particular ships and thus denuding the convoy of its protection—protection against surface attacks, Italian cruisers, for instance—some German or Italian submarine captain had been extraordinarily lucky. And the Caracas Moon was in the other column—she had been, she wasn’t in any column now, she was a mile astern and burning—so the fish that hit her must have passed through this port column, probably between the cruiser and the Montgovern.
Unless that one had come from the other side, a simultaneous attack by a different submarine … Brill was asking him what he thought had happened. He told him, “We’ve taken a beating, that’s what.” Torpedoes from E-boats? It didn’t seem likely: and they’d have been seen, or at least picked up on the warships’ RDF screens. There’d been no alarm, no gunfire, just three hits at fairly regular intervals. It had been one salvo … He saw McCall coming down the ladder from the bridge, and moved to intercept him.
“What was it?”
“U-boat, apparently. That’s the flagship and the anti-aircraft cruiser gone. The only two fighter-direction ships we had!”
So when fighters from Malta had the convoy in range, they wouldn’t be able to communicate with them?
The convoy was in a mess. Ships in all directions, and they were pointing in all directions too. Some had turned one way and some another, some had put on speed and some had slowed. They were strung out and widely separated, in single and small groups. Depth charges went off somewhere astern. A destroyer passed at high speed, bow-wave and stern-wash foaming high, close under the Montgovern’s stern. It was a Tribal-class destroyer, big and two-funnelled, and it was heading towards the heavy cruiser—the flagship—which was still circling slowly around out on the quarter. You could see it all in the yellowish flickering light from the burning Caracas Moon. Another destroyer creaming up now—you saw the bow-wave first, then the ship, and this was one of the Hunts. Its captain’s voice, magnified by a loud-hailer, boomed across the gap of dark water between that slim hull and this st
out, lumbering one: “Will you step on it a bit, Montgovern? Close up on the Woollongong please, captain?” An answering shout, unamplified but strident enough to carry, was Bongo Mackeson’s: “Where is the bloody Woollongong?” But the Hunt was already surging ahead again, heeling with her rudder hard a-port as she cracked on speed, heading to round up another member of the flock, herd the stragglers together. If the enemy had an attack ready to come in now, Paul thought, they’d make hay with us … He’d been intending to put on an extra sweater, and he hadn’t done it. Nor, he realized as he went for’ard to his action station, had he had even a sniff of whisky. He’d have settled, now, for just one good sniff … It was colder. And Withinshaw was belly-aching, complaining that if the destroyer screen had been doing its job that U-boat wouldn’t have had such an easy shot. Paul explained that there was no A/S screen on the convoy’s beams now. There couldn’t be, because destroyers as well as freighters had to be inside the strip of sea that had been swept for mines.
Withinshaw still griped. Beale snarled at him to shut his face. “You’ve come to no ’arm, ’ave you, you great fat—”
“No thanks to them, I ’aven’t!”
Gunfire: it was on the port bow and ahead. Astern, there was much less flame visible from the Caracas Moon: enough, though, to silhouette the convoy for the benefit of any enemy attacking from ahead. Paul blew up his lifebelt, and suggested to the DEMS men that they should do the same. The firing was thickening. And a Hunt came up between the columns at high speed, making about thirty knots and heading for where the action was. The ship ahead of them now was presumably the Woollongong. The one astern didn’t look like the Empire Dance, who’d been there earlier. Abeam of the Montgovern now was the Kinloch Castle, and ahead of her—he thought—was the Neotsfield, and that was the Santa Eulalia bringing up the rear of the starboard column. So what was left of the convoy seemed to have got itself fairly well together, after all. Most of the gunnery that was in progress ahead would be from the cruiser that had been leading the starboard column, and the minesweeping destroyers and two or three other escorts … Then suddenly they were all in it—all the ships, all the Oerlikons, pompoms, Bofors, rockets, Brens, the sky hung with skeins of tracer, flashing and flickering with shell-bursts. The attackers were Junkers 88s in low-level, shallow dives. A stick went down across their next-ahead—Woollongong, if that was her. There was a bomb-splash close on her port side, then the crash and flash of a hit amidships and the usual, now-to-be-expected leap and spread of flames; and more splashes on her other side. The Neotsfield had fallen away to starboard, outwards from that other column, with smoke gushing from her and the Woollongong’s flames illuminating it. The Montgovern was hauling round to port to get past the Woollongong; and the Woollongong blew up, in a spurt of fire and an ear-splitting roar of detonating explosives, debris flying through the tracer-laced darkness while bombers dipped overhead and soared upwards out of havoc. The Montgovern was back on course, steaming through littered water into which the Australian freighter had disintegrated. There were torpedo-bombers coming in now, as the Junkers finished. They were approaching on the other bow, and Paul saw the wide, blurred shadow of the first one like a great evil bat lifting over the lead ship of the starboard column. He knew what it must be, immediately, because it obviously wasn’t an 88, and logic did the rest. Tracer was hosing at its nose and then pompoms or Bofors or both were hitting. It was a Heinkel with its port wing on fire, the black crosses of Nazi Germany floodlit as it stalled, turned nose-down and dived into the sea between the columns of merchantmen in a great fountain of black water. But a second Heinkel was over the centre too, Beale’s gun amongst fifty others flinging coloured beads of explosive to meet it. Its torpedo fell away, splashed in, and the big aircraft was lifting, in a hurry to get up and away now while gunners in a dozen different ships tried to make sure it didn’t. Humphrey Straight’s loud-mouthed Willet-Bruce let out one short blast, meaning he was shoving his helm a-starboard. Paul thought he’d be too late if that fish was on course for the Montgovern. The ship had barely begun to swing when it hit her, abaft the stem on the starboard side.
It felt as if she’d steamed full-tilt into a stone quayside. Sea that had flung up was raining down on them now. He’d been thrown across the foc’sl and grabbed the wire rails to stop himself going over the side. Only Beale and Withinshaw, clinging to their guns, had stayed on their feet. Beale was yelling at Withinshaw to watch out for new attackers, and to the other two to stand by with more ammo. Beale was a hell of a good hand, Paul thought. The Montgovern’s engines had stopped, and she was settling by the head. Looking down over the side he couldn’t see much except that the water seemed closer to him than it had been before. A freighter was passing, almost close enough for him to have reached out and touched her, or to have jumped, cadged a lift to Malta. She’d been their next astern but now she was overhauling them and would close up—by two spaces, one for the Montgovern and one for the Woollongong—on the leaders. Paul remembered, as the ship rolled sluggishly in the other one’s overtaking wash, that he’d wondered what it might feel like to be dropping out while others—the ships that mattered now, was how he’d thought of them—pushed on. Now, he’d find out.
CHAPTER NINE
Gant came in and shut the cabin door. Nick told him, “Come and sit down, Bob. Like some coffee?”
“Thank you, sir, but I just had some. That was a hell of a barrage again, wasn’t it?”
They’d just been visited by Val dive-bombers. Defiant and Sloan had been the targets, but the Dutch AA gunners ashore had put up such a solid umbrella barrage over them that no bombs had come anywhere near.
Now it was 7:20, and Nick was eating breakfast. Making himself eat, although he wasn’t hungry. Last night’s grim events were in his mind—in Gant’s face too, as the commander pulled back a chair and eased himself down into it, like a dummy being let down on a rope—on account of that back of his, which he swore had nothing wrong with it.
The repair work to the boiler room and bridge superstructure had been going on all night, and you could hear them banging around now in the ACP.
Gant said, “Let’s hope no news is good news, sir.”
News of the other ships, he meant: of Exeter and the two destroyers with her, and of the four Americans. Nick had been up and dressed since 5:00, waiting for it. He knew he should have been resting, and he’d every intention of leaving all today’s problems to Gant, but you couldn’t just lie there and wait. Perhaps some men could have. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to have more self-control. But old dogs got to know what they could or couldn’t do.
Jim Jordan of Sloan had accepted Nick’s invitation for dinner yesterday evening, and Gant had joined them. They’d known that Perth and Houston had been due to sail from Batavia at 9 PM, and when the meal had ended, at about that time, Nick had proposed a toast to them, to their safe passage through the Sunda Strait to Tjilatjap.
“Perth and Houston.” Gant put down his empty glass. It was the last of the Laphroaigh. Jim Jordan said evenly, “May God go with them.” He was a very direct, plain-spoken sort of man, and you could tell that for him it hadn’t been any mere form of words or pseudo-pious hope, that he’d meant literally, “God, please look after them.”
God hadn’t heard. Or he’d had his hands full elsewhere. Soon after 11:00 a telegraphist on duty in Defiant’s W/T office picked up a signal from Perth to the Dutch admiral at Batavia. She and Houston had run into a Jap invasion fleet in Banten Bay, troop transports with a covering force of heavy cruisers and destroyers. After that, messages were sparse and brief, scraps of information sent in the heat of battle with increasing damage and ammunition running low. What it amounted to, when that distant radio had fallen silent, was that Perth and Houston had fought like tigers and gone down still fighting. Perth had sunk first—just after midnight—and Houston had followed her within half an hour. From some of the earlier messages it seemed likely they’d taken quite a few of the transports to the bottom
with them; but not even a hundred Jap troopships could make up for the loss of those two cruisers.
In the case of the American destroyers who’d run for the Bali Strait, Nick thought, it might be a case of no news being good news. Because that strait wasn’t far, and if they had not got through one would surely have heard something by now. But Exeter and Encounter and the USS Pope—well, some time today, probably this forenoon, they’d be trying to pass through Sunda, where HMS Perth and USS Houston had been overwhelmed last night.
Gant sighed. “They could have better luck. The fact there was a Jap cruiser squadron there last night doesn’t mean it’ll still be there now.”
Nick thought he was talking nonsense. The troopships had been putting men ashore in Banten Bay, at the eastern entrance to Sunda. They wouldn’t get themselves unloaded in ten minutes, and while they were there they’d have warships to protect them.
And it didn’t have to be in the Sunda Strait that it happened, either. There could be an encounter anywhere. Since the invasion of Java had now started, the entire coastal region was likely to be infested with Japanese, and the air would be thick with them too … You could only wait, hope, guess; and there was no way of guessing how far the three ships might have got at this stage. Exeter had sailed with a known capability of sixteen knots, after repairs here to her damage, but her engineers had been hopeful of working her up to quite a bit more than that. She’d been hurt badly, but she was a very tough old bird. At the Battle of the Plate, in December 1939, she’d played the leading part in running the Graf Spee to earth, and in the process she’d stood up to an incredible amount of battle damage. With two turrets out of action from direct hits by the Graf Spee’s eleven-inch shells, with her bridge and control tower wrecked, no internal communications and no W/T or electric power, on fire below decks and several feet down by the bow and listing ten degrees to starboard, she’d stayed in the fight—with only one turret in action, finally, and with her captain using a boat’s compass to steer by.
All the Drowning Seas: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 3 Page 18
