by David Black
‘So what do you suggest, Mr Wincairns,’ said Capt Philips, now equally icy.
‘I refer you to my previous answer, ibid, “How many guesses do I get?”’ said Wincairns, now sounding utterly deflated.
*
The skies had cleared, so there was a riot of stars going on when Harding came out the conning tower hatch right after Harry to shoot Jupiter and confirm their position on their patrol billet. The two lookouts were right behind him, followed by McCready, whose watch it was.
Scourge had just finished Sunday service. The ‘Holy Willy’ back-aftie who normally conducted the bible-reading, hymn-singing part had been one of the victims of the Vice-Admiral, Malta’s sweep for spare crew while Scourge had been laid up, so her captain had done the honours, rounding up all the crew not on watch, in the usual place in the control room, him propped by the chart table and the rest all squeezed in around the periscopes and the diving board valves and the two planesmen, now jammed up against their wheels.
Harry had kept the ‘God’ bit brief – a reading from Psalm 107, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, ending with God promising to turn ‘a desert into pools of water… and there he lets the hungry dwell’, followed by one verse of Eternal Father, Strong To Save, all of it sounding suitably reverent and sombre, being delivered under red light because they would be surfacing shortly into darkness. Then with that out of the way, he’d got to the bit they’d all been waiting for: what was happening and where they were going.
‘We sailed under sealed orders,’ Harry had said, in sonorous tones that got the usual smirks and chuckles from the old Scourges. ‘Now there’s a story you can drive folk to drink with, in bars up and down the nation when you get home.’
There had been a few giggles. ‘As for the contents of those sealed orders, well I can only share them if you promise not to tell anyone else… well? I’m waiting.’
Much eye rolling as each had man contemplated the steel hull around them and the fact that they were all sixty feet under the water and a long way from anyone to talk to. ‘Ye-ess,’ said several silly voices, in unison.
‘Excellent. Extra barley sugars for all those who promised,’ Harry had said, beaming now. The lads liked him like this, the daft schoolboy they knew he wasn’t. More proof the skipper was back on form.
‘We’re up here in the Tyrrhenian basin for another nice day out in support of our friends and Allies,’ he’d then continued in a more serious voice. ‘It’s called Operation Avalanche, and it is being launched to put the US Fifth Army ashore near a small town south of Naples, called Salerno. Our mission is quite simple, and that is to form a patrol line with Subedar, Turbid and Tulwar… to warn of any enemy ships or U-boats trying to get in amongst the landing force.’
The line was to stretch west, out along the latitude of the island of Capri and the Sorrento peninsula, with the small town and bay of Salerno at the peninsula’s base. Subedar’s patrol box would be inshore of them, towards Capri, and the other two would be strung out further to seaward. He’d then gone on to tell them that Monty, as he was speaking, was already ashore around the heel of Italy with Eighth Army, so, with a bit of luck, Jerry might not be expecting this second punch. There had been more details about how they would be operating well out from the main landing force, so hopefully, there’d be no repetition of their last outing and that Ken Dandy, their new PO Tel, would be passing out all the call signs and recognition codes for the radio watches and those on lookout duties. Then there’d been some general war updates culled from the BBC about the Eastern Front, what was happening in the Pacific and the stepping up of the bomber offensive against Germany proper, now that the US Eighth Air Force was really getting going.
‘And that’s it, gentlemen,’ Harry had concluded. ‘Dismiss. And stand by to surface in fifteen minutes.’
A night of unrelieved tedium followed. Nothing was sighted, nothing heard, and the only events of note were the changing of the watches. No one called Harry to the bridge or to the control room, and as the first light began to creep over the far horizon and swallow the stars, Scourge slipped back below the gentle swell for another day of tootling around her own patrol box. In the finest trade tradition of reversing mealtimes – with the dawn now broken above and the boat at watch, diving in the gloom at sixty feet – Windass laid on a splendid ‘dinner’ of pea soup, roast leg of mutton, roast potatoes and braised onions, followed by tinned pineapple and custard.
It was the same the next day, and the day after. Nothing to report apart from the food was good.
Then, at the end of day four on the line, with the last dog watch about to change over, Scourge was at watch, diving with not long to go until she surfaced for the hours of darkness. Harry was sitting on his own at the wardroom table, bathed in red light, drinking coffee, when Ken Dandy popped his head round, ‘A signal from S Ten, sir, for CO’s eyes only.’
Harry sighed, got the code books out and settled into decode. He was expecting more bumpf regarding ‘Avalanche’, which he knew from the now infamous ‘sealed orders’, was supposed to launch later that night, but what he read made him exclaim, ‘Well! Bugger me!’
McCready, who had joined him only a few minutes before, all gummy-eyed from sleep and getting ready to go on watch, looked up from his coffee and bacon-and-egg sandwich. ‘Sir?’ he said.
‘It’s the bloody Eyeties,’ said Harry. ‘They’ve just surrendered!’
And there was more.
Harry had Harding woken, and when he too had slid into the wardroom benches, Harry had told them the signal was also alerting their patrol line to a sortie by major Italian Navy units sailing from Genoa and La Spezia.
‘It’s the Littorio, Vittorio Veneto and Roma,’ he said. ‘Our old battleship chums, I believe. The ones we didn’t bag because I let them get away. Except this time, they’re not coming out to fight but to surrender. This says they’re heading for Bone in Algeria. There’s no specific course detailed, but we’re to let them proceed unchallenged if they come our way and help defend them if they come under attack by Jerry. Fancy that. Maybe they’ll sell us some ice cream on the way past. That’d be nice.’
Harding said, ‘Aw, sir. You didn’t let them get away… they ran away.’
And Harry said, ‘Shut up, Miles, and go through the boat and brief everyone about Italy’s throwing in the towel.’
As Harding left to spread the word, he said, with an arch wistfulness, ‘We could’ve had a spaghetti dinner tonight, to celebrate, if it wasn’t for Windass and his stupid ban on Axis grub.’
Which was true; you’d never have found a frankfurter or anything at all schnitzeled in Windass’s pantry.
Then they’d not long gone to middle watch when Ken Dandy summoned Harry to the radio cubby again. The ‘Avalanche’ frequencies he’d been listening in on had all just sprung to life. ‘It’s all crash, bang, wallop over there, sir,’ he said in his thick scouser twang, holding onto his headphones so they scrunched down what was left of his thinning pate. The landings had begun.
With the middle watch about to change, it had again been, ‘Captain to the bridge!’ And when Harry got up there, the eastern horizon had been glowing and pulsing.
Windass’s ‘dinner’ that dawn had been based around oxtail soup and veal & ham pie, rounded off with apple pie and cream. Afterwards, stuffed full and distracted by his thoughts about what must be happening on the beaches away to the west, and in Jerry southern command, Harry found himself knocked out of the wardroom versus the POs’ mess uckers tournament. Bugger!
The next night, this time two-thirds of the way through the middle watch, the call came again: ‘Captain to the bridge!’ Harry had been sound asleep on his bunk, but he was out of it and up the conning tower ladder in seconds.
Harding had the watch, and he was scribbling frantically into a notebook as one of the bunts who just happened to have the middle was dictating to him, eyes still jammed into his night glasses. Harry followed the young signalman’s line of sight to loo
k directly astern, and there, he could see a blinking light, brighter than the residual starlight through the high haze and blinking to a beat.
‘…signal ends, sir!’ said signalman.
‘Thank you, bunts. Well done. Carry on,’ said Harding, looking at Harry. ‘It was Subedar signalling, sir. She’s picking up E-boat HE on her Asdic. Quite a few of the buggers, apparently. Coast hugging round Point Campanella. Heading into Salerno Bay. She’s shadowing but doesn’t want to break radio silence in case they take fright.’
A swarm of E-boats could be decidedly fatal for a submarine to tangle with on her own, but down Salerno Bay, there was a US Navy destroyer gun line. They’d be more than capable of dealing with them, so they needed to know.
Harry leaned to the voicepipe, ‘Yeoman to the bridge, and tell him to bring his Aldis!’
Within seconds, Bird was there, and Harry had Harding re-dictate what the bunts had decoded for him while Bird flashed the Aldis signal lamp to raise Turbid, the next boat on the line. ‘Tell them to on-pass to Tulwar,’ he said. ‘She can raise the USN on the tactical net and let them know. She’s so far away, Jerry won’t twig it’s someone’s spotted them.’
The flurry of activity was soon over. Everybody had got quite animated for a moment, something to do for a change. Then it was done. Bird went back below, and the lookouts went back to scanning the dark horizon. For this patrol, Harry had doubled the watch roster so that lookouts spent only one hour on the bridge with their binoculars stuck to their faces before receiving a break. It ensured they weren’t peering into the night for too long, lest their minds start to drift or their eyes became so tired straining in the dark that they’d miss something.
Harry said to Harding, ‘Well I suppose that was our excitement for the night.’ Then he went below himself with the next flip of the lookouts. But despite this coddling of them, it turned out not to be one of the lookouts who triggered the next alert.
‘Captain to the radio room!’ It was the new boy, Boxall, shouting.
Harry’s head was round the cubby door in seconds, ‘What’s up, Boxall?’
‘It’s not me, sir. It’s Smudger, sir. He thinks he’s got something.’
Harry looked down and saw, to his surprise, the two radar operators perched low on a pair of tinned fruit boxes right under his nose. The ‘Black Irish’ one was in the process of giving Boxall the evil eye, obviously resenting him making the call and not letting his boss, Smudger Smith, do the job.
‘Smudger,’ Harry said. ‘What d’you have?’
‘I didn’t want to alert you, sir, in case it wasn’t…’
‘Smudger, on this boat I decide whether it’s worth it or not,’ said Harry. ‘Now, what is it?’
‘The set’s been coming and going, sir. Playing up more than…’ Smudger was saying. But Mularky was watching the expression on Harry’s face. The skipper wanted an answer.
‘It’s a U-boat, sorr,’ Mularky butted in, in his ripe brogue. ‘On the surface. Range four miles. Bearing green seven zero. Course one four zero, speed approximately fifteen to seventeen knots, sorr.’
‘Show me,’ said Harry, leaning over the PPI.
‘…We’ve had a quite a few false traces, sir,’ said Smudger. ‘Aircraft that…’
‘It’s a U-boat, sorr,’ interrupted Mularky again. ‘I’ve seen one before, on a set like this.’
‘Good show, Mularky,’ said Harry brushing off Smudger’s caveats and leaning back to yell into the control room, ‘Diving stations! Close up the forward torpedo room! Gun crew close up in the well!’
On his way up the ladder, Harry ordered a turn to starboard. Bodies tumbled down the passage behind him; it was a complete scrum, but the diving stations order was carried out without even a mutter, just the pounding of feet on the deck plates and then silence. Scourge was only moving at three knots, so she was making next to zero wake or bow wave. When Harry reached the bridge, he addressed the lookouts, his voice quiet and measured, like they were all twitchers in a bird-spotters hide, ‘Target on the starboard bow. What can you see?’
A pause, then, ‘I can see a bow wave, bearing green ten!’ yelled the lookout, just a black lump on the bridge because Harry’s night vision was still acclimatising. ‘So can I,’ called Harding, straining through his own night glasses. ‘It’s not Subedar, Turbid or Tulwar is it?’
‘Can’t be,’ said Harry, not bothering to look yet, knowing he’d still just be seeing black, dark nothingness. ‘Their patrol areas are to port and starboard of us, not dead ahead. No other Allied boats in the area.’ Then he turned to the other lookout, ‘Put me on the bearing.’
The lookout grabbed Harry’s shoulders as he bent to the binnacle. ‘That’s you fine on, sir!’ he said, steadying his captain on the line to the darkness. And yes, Harry could now just make out the glimmer of phosphorescence. He peered back at the binnacle, ‘I estimate target’s true course to be one five five degrees. Call it down to the fruit machine, Mr Harding.’
Harding got McCready on the voicepipe and told him enemy course 155 degrees. The range was going to be tougher for Harry to call, with nothing but a vague black shape to gauge against a black background and right down on the water, as a U-boat would be. What he could see was that the shape was a couple of points below the night horizon, not right on it. And since he knew Scourge’s line of sight to the horizon, to the yard, he simply subtracted.
‘Range, four thousand yards!’ he called down the voicepipe now, talking directly to McCready. ‘Estimated speed, twelve knots!’
The bearings began coming up to him from Biddle on the Asdic set, ‘…target bearing, three five zero.’ And from Smudger on the Type 291, and they were concurring. Harry ordered all six bow tubes readied. Full salvos were the standing order for U-boats, they were considered such high-value targets that they were worth it. Although convention dictated that he should fire them to cover one and a half lengths of the target for safety, one just ahead, one just behind, Harry knew that simply wasn’t going to work. Not here, not with where he and the Jerry were fine on each other’s bow.
He needed an edge. Then, out the corner of his eye, Harry noticed the poor glimmer of phosphorescence in the water below the bridge wing, curling off Scourge’s saddle tanks as they made the barest of way. Not nearly enough to reflect their presence at this range.
At this range, the night was shielding them, while the bubbling phosphorescence of the U-boat’s bow wave, coming on at twelve knots, was lighting him up.
But Scourge’s torpedoes, once Harry had fired them, if the phosphorescence was this bad, Jerry would see them coming like horizontal rocket trails. If Jerry was keeping a good watch, he’d have time to turn and comb them and dive away to safety.
He bent to the binnacle again and began calling the latest bearings and the target’s estimated speed. Then he called, ‘Range eighteen hundred yards!’ In the time it had taken him to think and call his orders, the U-boat had already travelled more than halfway towards where he wanted his range on firing to be. The bugger was coming on too fast. He needed to be closer before he fired so as the U-boat would have less time to see his torpedo wakes.
The gun! That would do it!
‘Hooper!’ he called into the voicepipe. ‘Close up for gun action!’ And seconds later, as Scourge’s magic gun layer came tumbling onto the casing, Harry was leaning over the bridge front, calling out the bearing and range.
The words had just left his mouth when an insistent voice was in his ear: the port lookout. ‘Target’s under helm, sir! Lots of wake, sir!… She’s turning away! Her helm’s hard over, sir!’
Harry already had his night glasses up. Indeed, she was turning away. Even he could see the welter of foam the U-boat was chucking up as it heeled around. The bastard had spotted Scourge.
‘Commence firing, Hooper!’ Harry was yelling now.
BANG!
But before Harry had even time to think, that was quick, even for Hooper!… a tiny green thread of light came jerking
out of the night, like little occasional stitches, one bounding behind the other as if the next one was pushing on the first, until the stitches, as they crept closer, suddenly speeded up to racing flashes, and then they were ending in a running gout of tall pillars of exploding water, acutely angling in down Scourge’s starboard beam. Tracer. The bastard was firing on them, using its bandstand 20mm anti-aircraft gun. And then the stitches suddenly stopped, like a tap had been switched off, the last two continuing to arc towards them out of the night.
‘Target is diving!’ It was Biddle’s tinny voice out of the voicepipe, who must be listening to the din of the U-boat flooding all tanks.
BANG!
Harry turned his night glasses in time to see the first shell hit the water where the U-boat had been as it had gone into its turn. A second or so passed and then… an explosion… sparks… had the second round hit? Had that been the back end of the Jerry’s conning tower? But where Jerry had been a moment before was now all tumbling water and more glowing phosphorescence.
‘Check fire! Clear the casing!’ And as the bodies vanished into Scourge’s bowels, Harry hit the tit twice. The klaxon almost drowned out his shouts of, ‘Clear the bridge!’
Harry’s first U-boat while in command, and the bastard was getting away! Well, not if he could help it! A jumble of images ran through his head from his time in Radegonde, the Free French submarine he’d been appointed to as British Naval Liaison Officer, and their encounter with a forming wolf pack in the north Atlantic. And what they’d done to attack all those massing U-boats. He held those thoughts as his feet hit the control room deck plates.
‘Keep periscope depth! Slow ahead together. Maintain heading!’ Then, ‘Mr Harding, start a plot,’ he said it as he stepped aft out the control room door to the Asdic cubby, and as he passed the fruit machine, he added, ‘Mr McCready, continue to update on the target.’
