by David Black
The more Harry thought about this, the more it seemed a hopeless case. ‘A thousand Jerries are going to swamp them,’ he said and shook his head. He ordered Scourge to stand off until someone could tell him what the state of play was ashore. He was buggered if he was going to motor into that little harbour only to see some pile of fishing nets at the end of the jetty whipped aside and a battery of Jerry mountain guns ready to start blasting away at point-blank range over open sights.
Radio contact wasn’t established until after dark. For a force of under a hundred, the paras had put up a more than creditable defence.
Probert made sense of the para’s signals on the map. The island was all rough terrain, and the only easy approaches to the main town, Ano Symi, were along two valleys, one short, to the north-west, and one long, to the south-west. While their artillery was all mountain guns, the Jerry troops were all Panzer Grenadiers – motorised infantry but without the motors. And according to the para captain, until now, the Jerry approach hadn’t included any mountain-goat tactics. ‘He says they’re just coming straight at them up the roads, and so far, their roadblocks are holding.’
The thing was, said Probert, as more Jerry troops got organised after coming off their boats, the more they’d start to infiltrate, and then the game was up. The para captain was hoping to hold out until the next night, and if he could, then he had a plan, if the Royal Navy would agree.
Scourge spent the next day at sixty feet, off the long inlet that led into Pedi beach. He wasn’t going to let that bloody Storch alert Jerry to the fact that the enemy submarine was still hanging about. Harry told Windass to lay on a slap-up feed for the crew and then ordered everyone not on watch to get a good sleep. He spent the time studying the chart and the slim finger of Aegean sea that poked into the eastern cliffs of the island, and the longer he looked at it, the less he liked it. Long and thin and brooded over by high, rugged slopes, it ran in for almost half a mile, and he was supposed to steer Scourge up it. He was eyeing its narrow throat and was doubting Scourge’s ability to turn in it. Once in, would he have to come out going astern?
That he was going to try was never in any doubt. He thought back to Shrimp Simpson, his Captain S in Tenth Flotilla; he would have roasted him alive for thinking what he was thinking, for daring to risk a strategic asset as important as a submarine for a hundred soldiers’ lives. But what the hell. Either he was going to pluck these lads off that beach or they were going into the bag, and there were terrible stories now about what Jerry was doing to Allied island raiders when they caught them. And anyway, there was bugger all left for a submarine to sink down this end of the Med these days; they’d done too good a job. So how strategic were they now? Weighed against the lives of a hundred British soldiers? Bugger it. The evacuation was going ahead. They were going to get them out or get sunk trying. What had Admiral Cunningham said? ‘It takes three years to build a warship but three hundred to build a tradition.’ No bloody pongo was ever going to say the Royal Navy left them behind while Harry Gilmour was on watch.
At the changeover from the last dog watch, Harry ordered Scourge up, and in they crept on their motors. Progress was dead slow, but at least there was no diesel thump to alert the shore. What was left of the moon, when it rose, shone directly down the damn inlet, casting Scourge’s long shadow along its beam. But no alarm was raised.
The bridge was crowded; Harry, four lookouts, the .303 gun team, Yeoman Bird, to spot for the signal from shore, and Probert, to make sure the pongos, when they came, did what the matelots told them. Harry also had Hooper’s gun team up, but he was refusing to think on how few three-inch rounds were left and any good they might do if things got sticky.
And there, in the wash of moonlight, dully shone the beach, dead ahead, and not a sign of the paras. Scourge hove-to. The sound of intermittent firing could be heard in the distance, in the stillness that followed.
The para captain’s plan had been for his lads to continue putting up a stubborn resistance around their positions on the roadblocks and around the town until well after dark. Meanwhile, the minute the sun went down, an advance party of the signallers and engineers would double over the neck of the peninsula between Ano Symi and Pedi Bay to be there when Scourge showed up. It wasn’t far, less than a mile and not particularly steep terrain, but they’d be carrying the wounded.
Some time after 2200, the paras would start to disengage; the town defenders first, because they were the ones who were going to have to carry the inflatable rafts – the ones they’d recovered from where Farrar had buoyed and sunk them when the whole mob of them had first arrived. And the rafts were going to have to be already inflated because there’d be no time to inflate them by foot pump once they’d got to the beach.
For a moment, Harry thought: did they need the rafts? What about Farrar’s grass hawser? But from the chart and the evidence of his own eyes, he knew immediately that the shallow, barely sloping beach stretched out too far. Any attempt at grounding Scourge close inshore so the paras could haul themselves out was just not practicable.
‘The disengaging is the hard part,’ Probert was whispering in Harry’s ear as he studied the pale beach for any sign of life. ‘Trying not to let Jerry know you’re pulling back, in case he decides to follow you. You can’t turn and run and stand and fight at the same time, if you get my drift.’
‘I get your drift,’ said Harry, trying not to let his impatience show. It wasn’t Probert’s fault the bloody pongos weren’t there. How many times had he sat off a bloody beach waiting for bloody pongos to show up? He was about to say something when he heard one of Hooper’s gun crew down on the casing, shouting, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
The next thing he knew, two of the gunners were leaning down over the saddle tanks, dragging a sodden figure in singlet and skivvies from the water.
‘It’s a bloody pongo, sir,’ Hooper shouted up from the deck. The soldier had obviously swum from the beach, two hundred yards off. He didn’t look in any fit state to climb the bridge ladder so Harry dropped down.
The soldier’s story was simple. Right after dark, the Panzer Grenadiers, supported by two of the 7.5cm guns, had outflanked the para position in this ancient Byzantine fort on the road to the main town called the Kastro. With the paras pinned down there, Jerry had started infiltrating round the back end of the town. So the British party with the three stretcher cases had had to go to ground on the saddle because there was a platoon of Jerries now swarming all over it.
‘What time is it?’ wheezed their visitor, a Royal Signals corporal who looked about fourteen years old.
Harry looked at his watch and told him.
‘In twelve minutes time, our lot are going to start fighting their way through,’ said the corporal. ‘They’ve been working down round a gully, and they’re going to come out of it and try and pin the Jerries up against this scarpe… so as the rest of us can run through… rafts… wounded… everybody…’
‘Where?’ said Harry.
‘Can you see that line of boulders… and then what looks like a camel’s hump and the head is turning back to look at you?’
Harry called Hooper over to listen and look. They could.
‘…they’re going to try and jam Jerry up there ’til everyone’s through…’ said their still-breathless visitor.
‘They’re going to need help, Hooper,’ said Harry. ‘What d’you think? It’s in range, but can you drop some rounds in there without hitting our lads?’
‘I can if I light them up,’ said Hooper.
Back on the bridge, Probert said, ‘Not until everyone’s through, sir. Dark’s their best friend.’
So they waited again. But not for long.
Harry didn’t bother with night glasses; with the moon and the flash of white phosphorus grenades and the billowing smoke, it was pretty clear to see. The chatter of automatic fire rose into a continuous tearing sound, echoing off all the slopes. The noise of the fight quickly built into something truly terrible, like a
rmies clashing. And it went on, and on.
But Harry could also see what Probert had meant. With all the flashes and tracer now – green stuff, Jerry, likely an MG 42 – little lakes of dark were being created. Harry decided there was something he could do to kill the gut-wrenching tension of all this waiting. He stepped to the voicepipe and called down, ‘Engine room, bridge. Stand by to answer telegraphs. Control room, bridge. Stand by to get under helm.’
There was a loud explosion aft and a gout of dark smoke – the diesels coming to life. Then the steady, comforting thrum of them, echoing through the hull and coming back off the cliffs through all the noise of gunfire, like the rising of hope.
Harry, with a long steady gaze, measured by eye the distance to the far shore, and then he rang for half ahead port, half astern starboard. As Scourge began to stir under him, he bent to the voicepipe and called the turn. And slowly, Scourge’s bow began to swing. Mere moments passed, the bow edging round, then he rang for stop together, then half astern together. And slowly he nudged his boat around, 180 degrees until her bow was pointed at the open sea, far too many hundreds of yards away for comfort. There’d be no need now for Hooper to light up any target on the hills; or risk dropping shells so close to friendlies. He could put his precious few shells away now, his gun was pointing the wrong way. If Scourge was going to offer any fire support now, it would be from the .303 mount. Meanwhile, onshore, the firing never ceased.
‘Here they come!’ shouted Probert and one of the lookouts together, and Harry turned to see a gaggle of shadowy figures staggering out the scrub with three stretchers slung among them. The gaggle turned to a flow, many of the men walking wounded, white bandages glowing in the moonlight as they scrambled down to the water’s edge.
Then came the rush, a huge commotion in the scrub at the top of the beach, heads bobbing. And then out onto the sand came the raft carriers at an ungainly stomp, with the huge black slugs being half-carried, half-dragged between them, the carriers stooping with exhaustion, tripping over their own feet as they lurched the final yards towards the lapping waves, the rafts collapsing onto the sand and being dragged now, into the water.
Harry was aware of a lull in the firing. He scanned the rising ground leading up to the saddle. When his eyes dropped again to the beach, it was to see it crowded – thirty, maybe forty-odd figures in a crush around the now floating inflatable rafts. But he could see it wasn’t a mob; disciplined hands had already loaded the stretcher cases into the first raft, and the walking wounded were being seated in orderly rows.
Down on Scourge’s casing, Farrar had taken charge. The torpedo loading hatch was open, and half a dozen ratings were lining the side, ready to secure the rafts once they’d rowed the two hundred yards to them. When Harry looked back, the first raft was coming, paddles and oars of various descriptions propelling it on in rhythmic strokes, its black rubber hull all but disappeared under the crush of the bodies it carried.
Renewed firing made Harry look back to the beach. It was closer now. The Crack! Crack! of two grenades going off blasted a flurry of debris skywards, close to the scrub’s edge.
Christ! he said to himself. There were Jerries right on their tail.
Puttick, the second cox’n was on the .303. Harry turned to him and said, ‘Did you see the blasts there, in the bushes?’
‘Yessir!’
‘Drop suppressing fire on it, now!’
The twin guns started juddering enough to make his teeth shake; the din was so loud it was as if he was feeling it rather than hearing it. He watched the tracer reach out in a lazy arc, scything into the vegetation. Two short bursts for ranging, then a longer one, until Harry saw a figure at the shrubs’ edge, a familiar figure, waving wildly.
‘Check fire!’ said Harry. The figure was the para captain, the side of his head plastered in his own wound dressings. Four soldiers burst from the shrubs at a run, and the captain turned and limped off with them. Two stopped to heft the captain off his feet, and the entire group jumped a small parapet of sand where two other soldiers lay stretched, one with a Bren and the other a Thompson sub-machine gun. The staggering group went past, and the two on the ground began peppering the shrubs.
Harry could hear the captain yelling above the din, ‘Go! Go!’
The second raft pushed off, paddles biting the water as the group carrying their officer splashed through the tiny waves, and with one heave, they lobbed him in, scrambling after. The Bren gun and the Tommy gunner were charging in now too. As Harry watched, Probert was suddenly there, shoving him aside, hissing, ‘Sir! Sir!’ There was a para beside him from the first raft, and he had a Bren gun too. The para immediately dropped, flicked down the gun’s bipod and began firing at the beach. Harry saw Probert’s eyes boring into his, understood, and nodded, and Probert took command of Scourge’s guns. Barked, clipped single-word commands, his hands pointing, muzzle flashes from the bushes now, lots of them, like twinkling fairy lights, and spurts of water running through waves, and little bursts of metallic tinging as Jerry rounds hit Scourge’s casing and conning tower. Harry felt himself trying to shrink his torso behind the periscope stands. The battle was taking place with him as a bystander. He stepped back to the bridge front, ordering all the lookouts below as he went.
Below him, there was only Farrar and the para captain on the casing now, the captain rising after casting off the second raft – the other was already floating away. Harry bent to the pipe and yelled, ‘Full ahead together!’ And when he looked back, the water was already churning as Scourge’s twin screws bit into the water. He had to yell the course down the pipe twice, his orders being drowned by all the automatic weapons fire pumping out three feet away over his shoulder.
He saw Farrar standing half in the torpedo hatch, but when he looked for Tolland, he couldn’t see him. Then, out the bottom of his eye, he saw him on the aft casing, in the act of throwing a grenade, then another. Why? Then as he turned to run back, his left arm suddenly shot up and out at a wrong angle. He yelped, almost thrown off the casing, then staggered on into Farrar’s arms and was bundled below, the hatch being yanked shut behind him.
Harry was aware, behind him, of the firing petering out. Then two cracks as the grenades detonated, shredding both rafts and whatever was left in them.*
Scourge had cleared to the open sea before Harry decided he should take a turn below, leaving Harding on watch on the bridge.
Soldiers filled the boat’s gangway, and going for’ard from the control room, Harry had to pick his way between the tangle of legs and slumped bodies; nearly all of them had some wound or scratch. Earlier, Farrar and Tolland together had taken a headcount. One of the Royal Signals corporals hadn’t made it, cut off with his transmitter up in the Kastros fort. But all the Royal Engineers were there. And of the three under-strength para platoons who had gone ashore, thirty-four men had made it off, three of them seriously wounded. Capt Tolland told Farrar they’d been lucky.
The wounded who needed space were all laid out on the forward torpedo room deck plates, and up on the empty reload racks. When Harry stepped into the space, the smell of blood was winning against the smell of feet and diesel and bilges. Ainsworth was in there, but two para medics were doing nearly all the ministering, wound cleaning and dressing. They had a drip into one of the stretcher cases. Propped right by the watertight door was Capt Tolland, his floppy, mousy hair all caked and brittle now with dust and blood. He sported a big, wadded wound dressing taped to his right cheek and covering his ear. From the livid welts round the edges, Harry could see it covered a nasty flash burn. His shirt was in shreds, and there was a hole in his arm, seeping blood; from the way it dangled, the bone was obviously shattered. For some reason, all Harry could think of was all the stiff-upper-lip war film scenes he’d ever seen at the cinema and truly what a load of bollocks they all had been. He wanted to say something, but all that came out was, ‘Fuck me.’
Tolland looked up at him, as if just noticing him, then he looked round his men a
nd the carnage that was filling the torpedo room. ‘You took the words right out my mouth, Captain Gilmour,’ he said.
Harry took a step further into the space and tapped the stooping cox’n on the shoulder. ‘Mr Ainsworth,’ he said. ‘Open the spirit locker. I think there are a few of our Parachute Regiment guests here who could do with a drink.’
Twenty-two
Captain de Launy had managed to borrow a Riley staff car from the PNO (Principal Naval Officer) for Algiers port for the short drive down the Corniche. The two leading seaman regulators he’d brought with him sat in the front with the PNO’s driver, smart as pins in their whites, with their lanyards and sidearms in webbing holsters on their hips, caps on straight and socks pulled up. Their destination was the requisitioned pink stucco villa, all garlanded in bougainvillaea with the big wooden sign outside saying, ‘ETOUSA’ – meaning European Theater of Operations, United States Army – ‘Staff Offices: Authorised personnel ONLY’, and below that, all the acronyms in a descending list that said who else lived there. It included NAAF, the Northwest African Air Force’s headquarters staff, and finally, in small print, SSLO, the Senior Submarine Liaison Officer, meaning this was where Captain Bonalleck had his cupboard he called an office.
It was mid-morning, and de Launy felt himself getting sweaty in the back of the car, despite all the windows being wound down. That, and the building anger in his chest. That he was being forced to carry out this outrageous duty infuriated him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it, in fact, he was looking forward to it. It was the affront itself that this madman, this degenerate, had perpetrated against the service he loved, that he should have to clean it up.
