by David Black
He could feel the water pressure tighten in his ears. That stupid bastard Harding in the control room, why hadn’t he listened to him and stopped the dive?
‘Shut main vents!’ He’d shouted it loud enough.
But no. And now they were going to lose the boat. There were holes in the conning tower too, at least that was what he reckoned the final thuds had been. Scourge could have survived that. Getting back up again might have proved a bit tricky with a conning tower full of water. But there was going to be no way back for them now, not with bloody great holes in the hull, and the boat continuing down, the pounds of pressure per square inch behind the water jetting in, doubling for every thirty-odd feet they dropped. And what about those bloody bombs, flying through the air with the greatest of ease, what the hell were they doing there, like they were sight-seeing? The Yank pilot must have tried to skip them into Scourge but dropped them too late and they’d gone sailing over her. Another stupid bastard, couldn’t even sink one of his own boats properly. Except, it looked like he had anyway.
Chapman, the young lookout had started writhing, it wasn’t going to be long now for him. Harry? He was abstractly wondering how long he’d last before the pressure in his chest defeated his will and he had to gulp for air. Except it wouldn’t be air he’d inhale but seawater. It was still remarkably light though, he thought. He could see it through his scrunched-tight eyelids. Shouldn’t it have been getting darker the deeper they went? And he was just starting to wonder why the pressure in his ears had gone when all the water sluiced off them, and he and Chapman were suddenly revealed in their contorted embrace, to a deserted bridge, fresh air and sunlight. Looking at his arm, Harry was suddenly aware why the hand on the end of it, holding his nose and mouth, was screaming in pain; the arm was clenched round one of the bridge voicepipes, holding him and Chapman in the boat. But before it dawned on him it would be a good idea to release it and breathe, to release the vice-like grip he had on Chapman’s nose and mouth too, the conning tower hatch flew open and Dickie Bird was out and crouched on the bridge aiming what looked like a bloated, ugly, fat pistol at the sky.
A loud phut! And reload, and phut! And a third. All executed with the speed and sleight of hand of a music hall magician.
And then time stopped concertina-ing.
Other bodies were tumbling up. Number One was there, and Gooch, the TGM, other lookouts, lugging up long metal cylinders. What the…? Smoke pots! Of course! The signal floats submerged submarines released to alert friendly skimmers as to where they were. Harry suddenly noticed Farrar’s face, jammed right in his. Farrar was yelling something at him, impertinent bastard!
‘Are you all right, sir? Are you all right?’ Harry thinking, Yes, yes. I can hear you, but looking behind Farrar, to where the bridge was now chaos… which, curiously, had the effect of leaving Harry feeling suddenly, serenely relaxed. He wasn’t even registering the screaming roar of aero engines or the yelling from his crew.
Ten
‘There is no goddammed submarine on this order of battle in that position,’ said Lt Col McBundy Grier, stabbing the desk with his finger. ‘Yet you keep saying there was. You keep saying it was assigned to patrol a designated box marked on the map. Goddammit! Look at my operational map! There is no goddammed box!’
The USAAF staff officer from Northwest African Air Forces HQ, all the way back in Algiers, was indeed goddammed if he was going to let this jumped-up, tri-service, Allied kangaroo court hang this snafu around his airmen’s necks. And he wasn’t the only one who was grumpy in the sweatbox confines of this Nissen hut, out on the fly-blown perimeter of Luqa airfield, Malta, with the noise of all the ineffectual fans inside and the endless, pulsing din of aero engines outside. A gaggle of middle-ranking staff officers, army, navy and air force, British and Commonwealth and US, a hastily convened committee, all sat round an equally hastily flung-together box of tables, sitting there, shirts saturated, unanimous in their verdict that they’d been handed the shittier end of a shitty stick. Their task? To assess all the incidents of Allied forces firing on Allied forces during the landing phase of Operation Husky and to offer suggestions as to how similar incidents might be avoided in future operations. In other words, who do we blame? And how best do we dodge the blame when it happens again?
The US Army stenographer sergeant, taking the minutes of the meeting opted to omit all Lt Col Grier’s goddamms and goddammits.
There were a lot of incidents to go through, dozens of them concerning friendly fighter aircraft being randomly pot-shotted by warships from the covering force over both the Western and Eastern Task Force disembarkation areas; then more seriously, was the systematic anti-aircraft barrage thrown up at the C47 and glider formations passing over Eastern Task Force, carrying the landing’s airborne component. A lot of Allied paratroopers had died in the wee small hours of 10 June at the hands of Allied sailors. And then, of course, there was the airstrike, specifically launched from a USAAF airstrip in Tunisia, against His Majesty’s Submarine Scourge.
That one was different. All the others were the drearily tragic results of inexperience, failure to observe recognition codes, to even bother to glance at recognition charts, lack of training, poor fire control, gung-ho and downright stupidity. But the attack on Scourge had been planned.
Lt Col Grier had sat seething through a lecture from that tedious little preppy USN commander from Vice Adm Hewitt’s staff, in his razor-pressed khakis that now drooped under the saddlebags of his sweat stains, sitting there, all horn-rimmed spectacles and document-shuffling pedantry, not even looking at Grier. Droning on about the centralised control of the operation, how each arm had been issued with centralised recognition procedures, all the units involved, their approach lanes shared, co-ordinated. But Lt Col Grier had come prepared. He was a career soldier in the Army Air Force, this was going to be his war, and no bullshit fest was going to divert his career-defining mission. He’d been to interview every one of his staff in that ops room leading up to the first missions launching for Sicily, taken note of all the planning that had gone into those ops and quizzed every radioman in the room as to all the radio traffic back and forth to the squadrons involved.
‘My crews were told to expect a submarine on the surface to the west of the disembarkation areas,’ said Lt Col Grier. Unlike the preppy little USN commander, the rest of the hut was now looking at him, sat at attention, a question over whether the beads of sweat on his scalp you could see through the steel-brush bristle of his haircut were there because of the heat or his anger. He held up a neatly folded air navigation chart, all marked up with pilots’ annotations.
‘Here is the submarine’s patrol box,’ he said, jabbing it. ‘…where the CO of the Three Hundred and Fifty-Ninth bombardment group, medium… among others… among several others… reported a submarine on the surface. And here!’ He hit the chart again, in a blank area of water, ‘…is where they reported another submarine. Directly south of Licata, where there is no submarine patrol box marked up and where no submarine was supposed to be. No Allied submarine!’
Listening to all this was George Wincairns, sitting behind a British Army full colonel, in the hut and at the table as representative of Eighth Army. Wincairns was hidden in full sight among the colonel’s pencil case holders. The USAAF officer, for all his belligerence, seemed to be making a valid point, thought Wincairns, who was there to report for a higher master, one who took an interest in all inter-Allied vested interest matches no matter at what level they were fought. Despite his fancy dress, pick-n-mix uniform, no one had been paying him the slightest attention, which was how he liked it. Anyway, the Eighth Army lot were used to his unexplained presences by now, and if any Yank were to ask, he’d just say he was lancer in the Submarine Kilties, and how would they know any different?
‘As they went over the Western Task Force beaches, several of my crews raised the Monrovia on the designated frequencies and alerted them to a potential U-boat in their AOO,’ the lieutenant colonel was telling the committee
who, Wincairns thought, were mostly thinking, put a sock in it and take your beating like the pen-pusher you are. Wincairns was also thinking, AOO? Then he remembered, ‘Area Of Operations’. The military and their acronyms. Dearie me. But the lieutenant colonel wasn’t taking his beating, he was mad, and he was going to be heard.
‘…they were told to stay off the frequencies,’ Grier continued, ‘“She’s on your operational map”, was the reply. “She’s the RN guide boat for the JOSS beach left flank approach lanes. She’s a friendly”.’
All the while Grier was jabbing at his chart. ‘But the Three Five Nine group crews weren’t talking about this boat. They were talking about a second boat. Out here. And no son-of-a-bitch on Monrovia was giving a damn!’
‘Lieutenant Colonel Grier,’ the emollient voice came from down the far end of the table, from a US Army colonel who had been convening the committee as its chairman when Wincairns had slipped into the hut. He remembered whispering in the ear of one of the British colonel’s pencil case holders, who is this chap? And was told, ‘Direct from Ike’s own staff.’ Wincairns couldn’t remember his name now, but if this gathering was going to have any clout in the great Allied edifice, then this would be the man who wielded it.
‘Herein obviously lies the confusion,’ the US colonel was saying, ‘Monrovia repeatedly advised your crews the western-most submarine on the surface was a friendly. But because its patrol box wasn’t on your operational navigation charts, you ignored that advice and laid on your own mission to attack that submarine without clearing it first with Monrovia…’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ Lt Col Grier interrupted. Wincairns’ ears pricked up. Interrupting your superior was never a good idea, and he was now curious as to how this was going to end up. ‘We didn’t “ignore” any advice, sir. We could see the western-most Allied submarine because it was in the patrol box marked on our nav chart. We took a tactical decision to launch against this other submarine that Western Task Force was ignoring despite our repeated warnings!’
Ike’s colonel let a lengthy silence hang in the hut, and Wincairns wondered how long it might have lasted if another USN officer hadn’t butted in.
‘Western Task Force ops staff requested the additional Brit submarine as a back-up guard boat as well as extra beacon after consulting with the senior submarine liaison officer,’ the USN guy was saying. From where Wincairns was sitting he could barely see his profile. As for his rank, all he could see was one of those US Navy collar insignias that Wincairns could never understand. This one was some sort of silver leaf pin. He could hear the New England glass in the officer’s voice clear enough though, ‘That officer… an RN officer, I might add… then arranged for the submarine to be deployed and updated the operational navigation chart accordingly. For the entire Western Task Force. Now, it was, and remains, the responsibility of Northwest African Air Forces command to ensure their operational maps are up to date. So, perhaps our senior air force officer could address why his operational navigation charts only show one submarine to the west of the Task Force’s AOO? And before he does, I should also like to point out the senior submarine liaison officer’s desk was, and is, just down the hall from Lieutenant Colonel Grier’s ops room in Algiers.’
Wincairns immediately looked to Lt Col Grier’s end of the table. He half-expected to see steam coming out of Grier’s ears. But when the airman spoke, there was an icy calm to his voice. ‘If you think you can provoke me, commander, into turning this into some kind of inter-service, Yank versus Limey beef, you are mistaken. My staff have nothing short of total respect for, and trust in Captain Bonalleck’s submarine liaison work. If the chart information he supplied to us said there should have been no Allied submarine there, then there should’ve been no Allied submarine there!’
A siren went off in Wincairns’ head. Surely there was only one Royal Navy Captain Bonalleck in the Med? ‘The Bonny Boy’ Bonalleck and HMS Scourge being mentioned in the same breath, again? What was all this about? What was being said here? Had there been some suggestion that Scourge getting shot up hadn’t just been down to trigger-happy Yanks?
As unobtrusively as possible, Wincairns scribbled some notes on his writing pad. For a moment, the atmosphere in the hut had verged on the bad-tempered, but inevitably, the dead hand of procedure and the heat quietened everyone down. Proper wording to record this incident of communication failure and the committee’s considered recommendations on how to prevent it occurring again were agreed and minuted. The meeting moved on to the next item. But Wincairns’ attention was still on the implications of what he’d just heard. He’d liked to have left the hut there and then, but his mission dictated he must stay, lest some other potential for Anglo–American discord suddenly break surface. The afternoon wore on, and the heat got worse. Eventually, they adjourned, and Wincairns slid out of his seat and headed for the door. There had been stuff happening in that hut earlier he hadn’t fully understood, and that wasn’t allowed in Wincairns’ world. There were people he needed to talk to.
*
Harry was sitting in the back of Louis’ bookshop while Louis served a customer. On the outside, the old shop, up on the top of Valetta old town, was much as it had been during the worst of the bombing, being a half-flight of stairs down from the street, it had escaped the worst of the blasts, and the rubble that ended up half-burying it ended up protecting what was left. Inside, it was still the warm, comforting snug it had been when he first visited, in what seemed like a hundred years ago now; the same dust motes hung in the air, the same oaty smell, the same old creased and burst leather armchairs. The only new smell was from the knocked-off wardroom coffee Harry had brought, wafting up from the little primus stove the pot was simmering on.
Harry was splayed out on one of the old armchairs, looking down on his crisp, new 3Cs – the official rig number for the new, dazzling white uniform that now adorned his reclining frame. He’d made a point of indenting for new kit when Scourge was last in, and when he’d sailed back, the new kit had been waiting. It all contributed to his general feeling of well-being.
Louis came back in from the counter, folding some notes. Harry had noticed how much older he was looking. He might have swept all the dust from the rubble out of his shop, but he’d missed the dust ingrained on him. A bit more stooped too, and slower. ‘They’re charming boys, these young Americans. Not like the English, who are all hooligans,’ he said airily. ‘And scruffier.’
‘The English? Couldn’t agree more,’ said Harry.
‘He was looking for something on the Turks and their siege.’
‘So he was after something racy and modern then?’
‘Oh, I’d say there are many on Malta today who would say three hundred and fifty-odd years ago would still count as modern, wouldn’t you?’ Louis paused to top up his coffee and then add a little tot of brandy from the bottle he kept by his chair. He poured another measure into Harry’s mug. ‘You are in a good mood these days.’
It was true, although he was still wondering how he could be.
Yesterday, the ship’s company had held the funeral for young Able Seaman Archer, the junior bunts who’d died in Scourge’s conning tower during the P38 attacks. It had been a sombre affair at the cemetery up at Kalkara. But the atmosphere among the crew had seemed more stunned than grieving. Archer had been a well-liked lad, but what was there to say about a nineteen-year-old who’d never got to be old enough to see or do anything? He was the first man Harry as CO had lost, killed in action. But the death had been so stupid and pointless, Harry didn’t really know what to feel about it. He could barely even remember the lad’s face or the last time he’d actually seen him alive and kicking, although it must have been on Scourge’s bridge, before those Yank P38s had strafed them.
He hadn’t mentioned any of that to Louis, of course, about the attack, or the funeral, or how hard it had been to write the letter to the lad’s parents. You weren’t supposed to spread gloom and despondency among the civilian popula
tion, and telling stories about the Allies actually shooting at each other wasn’t a good message to bring back home.
He did tell him, however, about how he’d had to abort a crash dive and hold onto a junior rating to stop him being washed away, and how the rating, Able Seaman Chapman, was his name, how the lad had approached him afterwards. He could see Chapman now, slight frame, his whites hanging on him, rather than fitting snug like a uniform should and his cap pushing down on his ears.
‘Sir. Excuse me, sir,’ he’d stammered, holding himself at a smart attention
‘Yes?’ Harry had said, eyebrows arched in enquiry.
‘Sir, sorry to interrupt, sir, but I just wanted to say thank you, sir. For saving me, sir. Haven’t had a chance before, sir.’
It had been only then that Harry had recognised him:
‘Ah. Able Seaman Chapman. Of course. It was my pleasure. Think nothing of it.’
‘Aye, Aye, sir. I didn’t mean to… I just wanted to…’
‘Of course you did, and it’s much appreciated… actually…’ Harry had paused then, thinking, then rubbing his chin and smiling, and then he’d said, with one of his winning smiles, ‘Actually, Chapman, do think something of it. Do the same for me one day, please, because, Christ, the way things are going, I’ll probably need it!’
And how a grinning Chapman had snapped off a salute, ‘Aye, aye, sir!’
Louis had liked that story.
As for everything else that had happened, Harry knew he wasn’t going to talk about how Archer had died or even mention the attack, the deliberate attack, how it could have actually happened or the pitiful sobs of the two stokers wounded in the engine room. To himself, the more he’d struggled for the words, the less point there seemed in raking over the whole sorry tale.
‘Yes,’ said Harry eventually. ‘I do appear to be somewhat chipper, although God knows why. The minute the Vice-Admiral, Malta’s vultures heard Scourge was heading in for damage repair, they descended on my crew. I’ve lost at least half a dozen to other boats. “Can’t have prime hands lolling about the beach while you wait for the dockyard mateys to patch up your boat, Gilmour. Won’t do at all,”’ he mimicked in gravelly tones. ‘And what really hurts is that not one man Jack of them has had the common decency to moan about being shifted. Most of them bought off with promotions. So much for loyalty. They are quite shameless.’
