by David Black
‘War is hell, eh?’ another had observed, reaching for more eggs.
And there Harry had stayed until one day, the phone rang, and it was the S10’s office telling him his boat was ready for patrol, and he might want to cast his eye over her before proceeding to sea.
Those had been long, long sunkissed days in Mdina, exploring the medieval town and walking alone through the terraced fields north-west to overlook the sea. The evenings had been spent in convivial company. The apartment had been commandeered as a mini rest camp by the growing flotilla of minesweepers that now shared Marsamxett harbour with the Tenth, and the half dozen or so sub lieutenants and lieutenants up there having a lie-down were happy to share it with a fellow wavy-navy lad ‘from the mob up the road’. But they showed absolutely no curiosity whatsoever about Harry’s life as a submariner.
‘Rather you than me, old boy,’ had been the general consensus. Which coincidently, had been Harry’s thoughts on minesweeping; all that working in close proximity to all those high explosives put there in your path and designed specifically to blow you to kingdom come had never been Harry’s idea of a cushy billet. He remembered his pal from King Alfred days; the one whose minesweeper had set off a magnetic one off West Mersea and there’d been nothing left of him but smoking boots. But he’d kept that to himself. Instead, they’d talked about the war in general and what was going to happen once it was won. The whole island was bustling again, this time for the upcoming landings on mainland Italy itself; so how long could it be now? And then there were the girls they’d left behind and the Yanks. Everyone had been agreed: they were amazing. Both the girls and the Yanks. But when it came to the Yanks, it was all the stuff they’d brought with them everybody wanted to talk about.
‘They could win this war just by bombing Jerry with Hershey bars ’til he’s so fat he can’t fight anymore,’ had been one strategic option put forward over the late-night brandy decanters.
Harry had decided not to mention things like the four P38s who’d shot up his boat and killed one of his crew, so these sessions had stayed light.
He’d even once ventured back down to Valetta with a shopping list of books to be presented to Louis. ‘The ones we’ve got, we don’t need to read ’em anymore,’ one wag had assured him. ‘We just recite them by heart.’ Acquiring new works had become that urgent, so since he ‘knew a man’, it was the least Harry could do.
‘I’m sorry for that bollocks I talked when I was last here,’ Harry had said to Louis’ back, as the old man had been scouring his shelves for the titles on the list.
‘Ah, so what,’ Louis had replied. But yes, ‘so what’, Harry had insisted. Louis had told him to shut up until he was finished and they had some coffee on the go.
‘I was just being a big girl,’ Harry had assured the old man as he was adjusting the spirit lamp under the percolator. ‘And it was an imposition on you. I’ve no excuses.’
The long walks and the evenings on the veranda had got him out of the habit of chasing all those nagging voices in his head, speculating endlessly on stuff he could do nothing about. He had responsibilities after all, right in front of him, that needed concentrating on. It was a big war, and Harry might have no power over what happened in it and only a small part to play, but it was an important part. Especially for his crew; it was their lives. And for his superiors, for their plans to succeed, it required that he do his bit. Everything else was just noise. That thirty hours’ sleep had bought him the time to realise he had to stop picking at the threads of everything and get on with it.
He hadn’t actually said any of that to Louis, but looking at him, Louis could work out what had been going on in his head.
‘What age are you?’ Louis had asked him.
‘I dunno. Twenty-four?’
‘Twenty-four. It’s young for the responsibility,’ Louis had said. ‘And for the cost. Because I can see now, you know you’re going to have to pay for it, don’t you?’ A long pause followed. ’Make me a promise.’
‘Of course. What?’
‘When you go home and…’
‘…If I get home.’
‘When you go home and you start to tally it up. Be kind to yourself. Don’t count what it’s done to you as loss. And remember me, and all the people here… all the people all over Europe… that through your bit in all this, you’ve given back their future. Don’t just look at the cost, look at what you’ve bought with it, for so very, very many.’
So he had promised, and now he was back on his bridge, heading for a patrol billet that ran north-east to south-west from the island of Capri out into the Tyrrhenian basin, there to form part of an anti-U-boat picket to cover another major US amphibious landing, due for the second week in September and aimed at the beaches around a small seaside resort called Salerno, south of Naples.
Harry had never tackled a U-boat before, while in command. So his head was full of submarine tactics – as it should’ve been – as they dived to begin their transit up past the eastern shore of Allied-occupied Sicily, heading for the Messina Straits.
Down in the forward spaces, Scourge’s ratings were getting used to their new crewmates. While Scourge had been in the dockyard’s hands, a number of ratings and most of the wireless telegraphists had been nabbed by other boats. And two of the new lads had a new job aboard. They were there to operate Scourge’s latest piece of kit, an RDF set – or range and direction finder – the antenna for which the dockyard mateys had welded to the after ends of the conning tower. It was an awkward X-structure that looked like a parrot’s pied-a-terre. ‘It’s there to stop any shagbats creeping up on us, sir, no matter the weather, night or day,’ one of the new lads had explained. ‘Up to a certain range, it’s good for surface targets too, sir.’
‘By “surface targets”, you mean ships?’ Harry had asked when being shown the contraption; he hated all this new technical jargon that was creeping in.
‘Or U-boats… on the surface, sir,’ the rating had assured him, beaming with enthusiasm. His name was Smith, and he was another of the increasing number of nineteen and twenty-year-old leading seamen technical ratings being thrust on the trade these days. ‘The Yanks call it radar, and we’re doing the same now, really, sir. Saves confusion, sir.’
Whose confusion? Harry had wanted to ask him, and what’s a ‘certain range’? But there’d be time for that later, once they’d got to sea and settled down.
There was also a new POTel – Petty Officer, Telegraphist – Ken Dandy, and Grieve had been replaced too, by a big-grinning, south London cheeky-chappie, called Leading Seaman Arthur Boxall.
Quite a few of Warrant Engineer Bert Petrie’s stokers had been nabbed too, but Harry would leave it to Mr Petrie to see to bringing the new lads up to scratch. It had been a long tradition on this boat that back aft was engineer territory, and Harry was a great believer in not trying to fix things that weren’t broken.
Boxall had turned up early to report, before most of Scourge’s established crew, who had all still been on their way down from one of the rest camps. Sub Lt McCready and the cox’n had seen him onto the boat’s books and then sent him for’ard to claim his place. Hooper, Scourge’s now-legendary gun layer, was already in the forward spaces, having spent the morning helping load all the stores that had been ready to load and had now retired to his hammock for an afternoon nap. Awakened by a clatter, he watched an unusually large amount of kit come through the watertight door, followed by a shortish Leading Seaman ‘Sparks’ in work rig and sporting an irritating flop of blonde curly hair sticking out from under his cap.
‘Wotcher!’ said the newcomer and introduced himself. He then plunged into his kitbag and produced a huge glass jar of boiled sweets which he placed by the aft bulkhead and announced, ‘…a little sumfin’ I picked up on me travels, for the comfort of all deservin’ souls.’
Hooper’s eyes lit up. On account of it being inadvisable to smoke on a submarine while submerged, their lordships had long ago generously began supplying
crews with sweets as a substitute: regulation barley sugars by the hundredweight. But this jar had lime ones and red ones and what Hooper could’ve sworn were butterscotch! Then Boxall had produced a small squeezebox. ‘I do trust we like a tune in this mess?’ he said, with a winning smile, followed by two swift bars of Hearts of Oak, and rounding off with a final flourish of Mademoiselle from Armentières. Hooper was already laughing before he’d finished.
There wasn’t exactly an official hierarchy in the forward spaces, but it was generally reckoned that Hooper and Biddle, the boat’s lead Asdic operator, were the senior rates and were listened to. So, when Boxall asked where he should sling his kit, on a hunch, Hooper decided he could have Grieve’s old perch, above the starboard torpedo reloads. There had been a few eyes on that space once it was known Grieve was off, but Boxall was here now and they weren’t, and Hooper’s gut told him they might have good ’un here, worth looking after.
‘Nice one,’ said Boxall and slung his kit up.
‘I wouldn’t unpack right off,’ Hooper advised. ‘There’s usually a couple of boards of fresh bread gets slipped in under you. Makes the lying more comfy while we’re still eating our way through ’em!… what’s that big lump in yer bag?’
‘Oh, that?’ said Boxall, giving it a tap with his knuckle. ‘An electric iron. I’m thinkin’ I might go into business when we gets back from patrol.’
That made Hooper frown, not because, if he thought about it, his ‘gut’ was wrong as often as it was right, but because he’d already granted Boxall the berth.
*
The Straits of Messina was now the Allies’ front line, with Commonwealth and US troops occupying the Sicilian shore and Jerries and the odd reluctant Italian, the Calabrian on the opposite side. So Harry didn’t intend hanging about driving Scourge through.
It was their second night out from Malta. Scourge had surfaced about eighteen miles north-east of Taormina for the run-through. They had come up to a starless black sky, almost slap bang in the middle of the straits’ entrance, each shore several miles distant. There was a heavy haze on the water that made the random searchlight activity on each bank look like it was being shone through muslin. But way ahead, Harry, on the bridge, could see the odd star shell going up out of the gauzy night. That would be the straits at their narrowest point. They were going to have to slip through submerged up there, so the sooner they got up there, the more night they’d have left to run out the other side.
The threat for the time being, however, was from aircraft. On the Allied side, the air forces should’ve been alerted that a British submarine would be effecting a transit, but the Scourges knew only too well that merely alerting the fly boys meant nothing, and Harry could practically feel the two bridge lookouts straining their senses into the night.
Down below, Harry also had had the two radar lads scanning the sky with their electronic toy from the moment they’d surfaced for the run. However, he wasn’t placing a great deal of confidence in them. The previous night’s experiments with the new kit had proved patchy to say the least. Harry had sat in as they’d warmed up the set.
‘This is the latest Type 291 set,’ Leading Seaman Roy ‘Smudger’ Smith had assured him with a proprietorial air. ‘With this brand new PPI display that simplifies everything, sir…’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Smudger,’ Harry had said with a blank smile. He could tell the rating liked him using his nickname. Good. Get him feeling part of the crew right off.
‘Oh,’ said Smudger, momentarily crestfallen. ‘PPI?’
Harry nodded.
‘It’s the plan position indicator,’ said Smudger, now as aglow as the screen in front of him, that he was being asked to explain his pet toy. ‘You see the circular screen? The dot at the centre is the radar antenna, and the concentric circles marked on it represent the range and height above sea level. As the radar antenna rotates, the trace on the PPI sweeps round, sending out pulses at five hundred hertz, on a hundred and forty centimetres…’
‘To do what…? Harry had interrupted.
‘Um! Oh, it’s very good, sir. Very good. Any aircraft flying at… five thousand feet… the pulse has the power to hit it at up to thirty nautical miles… we’re generating over a hundred kilowatts… and then it bounces back, sir, so we see it right here, sir, as a blip.’ And Smudger had tapped the glass screen. ‘And we always know the bearing because the lubber line here,’ another tap, ‘represents the bow of the ship, er, boat… and our heading, sir, and shows us the bearing off.’
Harry, thinking about those P38s, had then asked, ‘What if they’re flying lower than five thousand? What about right down on the deck?’
‘Em, well, the beam is limited by the curve of the earth, sir…’
‘So, four, five miles warning then? Same for a small ship too? Or a U-boat?’
Smudger had looked glum again. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, only as good as the Mark One eyeball, then?’
And at that, Smudger had regained his confidence. ‘Yes, sir. If the eyeball can see as clearly at night or through fog, sir.’
Last night, there had been frequent sounds of aero engines in the starless sky and HE from the Asdic and for most of the night, not a single identifiable ‘blip’ on Smudger’s precious PPI. Every ten minutes or so it seemed, Smudger’s oppo, Able Seaman Liam ‘Darky’ Mularky had the back off it and was jabbing the conductor ends of a megger into its innards or twiddling it with a screwdriver. By the end, they had, at last, been picking up something blipping but had been unable to say whether it was on the deck at four miles or ten thousand feet at thirty.
Tonight, Boxall was on radio watch with the two radar operators squeezed in beside him with their set, all the new boys together. He had just finished listening in on the admiralty band, broadcast from Rugby on sixteen kilocycles, to see if there was any traffic for Scourge from home, and was turning the dial up onto the submarine wavelength at 4,900 kilocycles for any morse chatter from S10 in Malta when Smudger began swearing again.
The foul tirade had seemed so jarring at first, coming as it did out of a child’s snaggle-toothed mouth, his big, baby-round face and downy-smooth cheeks were too wholesome to spew forth such filth. But out it was coming.
Boxall said, out the side of his mouth, ‘I’d say, “why don’t you just give it a good dunt,” but…’ But indeed. As he turned, expecting to see some complicit grins, he was stopped in his tracks by the dark, dead-pan stare of Darky Mularky. Pretty early on, Boxall had worked out the chap’s ‘Darky’ moniker, apart from the rhyming slang, because Mularky was as ‘Black Irish’ as could be – the pale pudding face topped by a jet, obsidian mop of curls on his head and a five-o’clock shadow that looked like it started growing shortly after breakfast. His piercing blue eyes were normally pretty vacant, but not now. On their short acquaintance, Darky had proved to be a man of few words, never had much to say. And right now, he didn’t need to. Not by the look in those eyes. Right now, Darky looked downright dangerous. So Boxall shut up. Here was a man it looked sensible not to piss off.
After a few moments though, Boxall made a peace offering. ‘You don’t think my set might be causing some interference, do you?’
Smudger and Darky paused to consider this. ‘Maybe if we could look at your shielding?’ said Smudger.
Twelve
‘He’s sailed on patrol. Yesterday,’ said Capt Philips. ‘Bugger!’ said Wincairns. The two men were sitting in the S10’s office in the Lazaretto. Not much sun was coming in through the open shuttered window, on account of all the high hazy cloud about, but it was bloody hot for this time in the morning.
They’d been sharing their Harry Gilmour/Bonny Boy stories, and both were looking concerned. ‘I agree it is time we heard his version of events,’ Philips said. ‘But what do we do with it when we have?’
Wincairns sighed and rubbed his hands. ‘How many guesses do I get?’ He had come to see the Captain S to tell him the story he’d heard about
the attack on Scourge off JOSS beach and to ask him if he could shed any light as to how it might have happened. And in return, he had heard Philips’ retelling of CPO Gault’s potted history, which had included Shrimp Simpson’s account of the existence, somewhere, probably still in the C-in-C Med’s in-tray, of the Bonny Boy’s report on Lt Gilmour baying for his blood.
‘I think we are both agreed that there is something extremely questionable afoot here,’ Wincairns had said. And Philips had promptly concurred. ‘So I strongly suggest that getting to the truth of the matter should be strenuously avoided. Bury it. That’s what I say. But how?’
Philips looked momentarily shocked but quickly recovered. ‘We’re helped, I suppose, by all the confusion back in Alex,’ he said, referring to Admiral Harwood being relieved due to ‘ill health’. Poor Henry, he’d proved a dead loss at running a fleet. Their lordships had first hived off half his command and given it back to Admiral Cunningham for Operation ‘Husky’, and now they’d delivered the order of the boot.
‘Your Admiral Cunningham, I’d imagine, has his hands full right now,’ Wincairns observed, lighting a cigarette for something to do with his hands. ‘It’ll get relegated to some staff bugger. We have to ensure he shuts this idiot Bonalleck well and truly up. Seeing as he is the one making all the racket and not your Lieutenant Gilmour, who we know is quite a doughty fellow.’
‘Well, I’ll help all I can. I don’t like the look of what’s going on here anymore than you do,’ said Capt Philips, ‘but if this bastard is up to what it looks like…’
‘What does it look like, Captain?’ said Wincairns, with some steel in his voice. ‘Do you really want to be the one to come out and say what it looks like?’ Wincairns gave him a withering look, ‘It’s your navy, Captain, and its reputation. And history tells us, does it not, that washing dirty laundry in public never ends well. For anyone. It also tells us that “getting to the bottom” of things always requires too many people having to know about those “things”, and “too many people” is my definition of “in public”.’
