by David Black
All the attack angles were playing out in his head now, and if he was going to get it right this time, right now he needed to close the base of his triangle.
‘Keep sixty feet. Group up, full ahead together,’ he said, and his will was done. ‘We’ll run out for four minutes. Mark and tell me, Mr Harding.’
He could feel Scourge sink beneath his feet, and a little urgency creep into the thrum of her hull. ‘Now,’ he said, now that he had time to think, ‘what the bloody hell is that thing up there?’
McCready thought he knew. He had produced a pencil and a notebook from his back pocket and was sketching the very contraption Harry had just been looking at. He was a smart lad, McCready; keen without getting on your nerves. Harry couldn’t help thinking he reminded him of someone.
‘Did it look like this, sir?’ McCready asked, offering his beam elevation drawing.
‘Yes, how did you know that?’ asked Harry, handing it back.
‘What you said, sir. Big and boxy. I guessed right away. If it is the same ship, her name’s Atilla, and she’s a tank transporter. I saw a PRU shot of her at Scots Street. She’s an Eyetie, but the Jerries have nabbed her for themselves, apparently. There were intel notes. A blow-up shot of her Hun ensign. She’s a Kriegsmarine ship now, sir. And nearly four thousand tons!’
It all came in a gush. Poor McCready, so eager to live down all the hilarity he’d caused on the trip out.
As officer of the watch, Scourge running at three knots at periscope depth just south of Marettimo Island, McCready had sent the periscope up for a routine all-round look and immediately ordered ‘Stop together!’ on the telegraph and sent the crew to diving stations. When Harry had come tumbling into the control room, McCready was wide-eyed, but still in control, ‘Sir, we are in the middle of a clutch of mines … on the surface … maybe half a dozen in sight … close in … floating.’ He’d been breathless, yet continued as calmly as he could to detail what he’d done so far in order to save them all from being blown to kingdom come. So as Harry would know. Harry, still listening, had ordered Farrar to raise the periscope again, slowly, and report.
The whole control room was holding its breath. Everybody had heard. Mines. Fucking things. Everybody hated mines. It must have been the same back in the engine spaces – wondering what could have happened to make Scourge suddenly heave-to. What horrors was Farrar going to see?
Harry, watching like a hawk, remembered first seeing number one’s shoulders shaking violently; then he’d managed to control himself.
‘Mr McCready,’ Farrar had stood up, his face like judgement, ‘I think you need to take another look.’
It was a rotten trick, but if it had been him, Harry had to admit later, he would’ve probably done the same. It had been too good to miss.
And to make it worse, Farrar must have turned the ’scope to maximum magnification before he’d stepped back. McCready leaned in, stuck his face to the eyepiece and froze solid. Only the explosion of Farrar’s unconstrained laughter seemed to snap him free. Everybody was staring, lost.
‘Turtles,’ Farrar had choked, through his mirth.
When McCready had looked again through the periscope, all he had seen was a giant, wrinkled, ancient, reptilian eye, blinking at him as if he was a long lost relative.
‘You’re not the first to have had the shite scared out of them by the damn things,’ Harry had consoled McCready later. And after thumping McCready on the back and congratulating him on not, ‘filling your trousers’, Farrar had explained, ‘the Straits get full of them this time of year. They come to surface to let the sun heat their carapaces, and even up close, bobbing away without a care in the world, looked at from their arse end they’re the spit of a mine that’s slipped its tether.’
And so for the last 27 hours, McCready had been the crew’s hero, taking all the jibes and the laughter on the chin. Harry had noted his good grace with approval and later had confided in the lad, ‘If they had been mines, what you did would’ve saved the boat.’
Right now Harry was looking at his sketch, wondering what the hell McCready had been doing hanging around the PRU – the RAF’s photo-reconnaisance unit – until he remembered there were WAAFs there now. ‘How many tanks can it carry? he asked instead.
‘Um …’ said McCready – and it had been going so well.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Harry, ‘she’s low in the water so we can assume she’s fully loaded. Excellent. Let’s sink her.’
‘Picking up more high-speed HE, sir,’ Biddle called from his cubby.
Two steps took Harry in beside him, ‘More escorts?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Biddle, his brow wrinkled in concentration, one hand holding the headset to his ear and the other fine-tuning the set. ‘At least two … they’re on other side of the transport.’
Four Spica class torpedo-boats and a lumping great tri-motor shagbat for one boxy, over-grown ferry boat; she really must be what McCready had said she was.
‘Four minutes,’ said Harding.
Harry stepped back to look at the plot. Harding had drawn the collapsing triangle between Scourge, the so-called Atilla and the enemy’s projected track, and he was now adding the estimated angles, and a very pretty sketch it was too, thought Harry, excitement rising in his chest.
‘Periscope depth. Plane us up gently, Mr Ainsworth,’ he said, then as he felt Scourge rise, he ordered, ‘Group down, slow ahead together. Up periscope. Asdic, what’s my bearing?’
Biddle called it, and Harry told Dickie Bird to lay him on it. The yeoman, eye on the bezel, guided him round as the tube slid out its housing. ‘Stop!’ called Harry as the head broke surface. And there they were, not even zig-zagging. But it was something else he saw that gave him a sinking feeling. But first he cranked up the lens and did an all-round sky search, and there was the shagbat, sweeping back, still a good three miles off but looking like it was flying directly at him. He didn’t risk doing an all-round horizon search. Didn’t even pivot back to fix the bearing and range.
‘Down periscope,’ he announced to the control room. ‘The two Spicas this side of the transport … I’ve met these bastards before. CP and PY on their bows. Capella and Procyon.’
He jammed his hands deep in his watch jacket pockets and frowned. These were the bastards that almost did for him on Nonpareil, right here in the Gulf of Cagliari, all those weeks ago. And here they were, still plying their trade in the same back yard. He let a few moments pass, then he called, ‘Up periscope,’ again.
Up came the tube, Harry grabbed the handles and the Yeoman used the bezel to line him up.
‘Stop! … Bearing is that! Range … that!’ Harry did a quick all-round look, then, ‘Down periscope!’ He stood back, adding, ‘the shagbat is sweeping back south again.’
McCready called out the DA. Scourge closed for the attack. Harry talked to Powell on the sound-powered phone: a three-torpedo salvo, first shot on command, the remaining two at five-second intervals. Set the depth to 15 feet. Harry checked the plot. His track angle was still 85 degrees. From his last look, Atilla was going to cross his bows in four minutes. If he wanted to fire at inside 1000 yards, he needed to speed up a little.
‘Keep sixty feet, group up, full ahead together!’ He needed to go deeper so as not to cause a kerfuffle on the surface when he cranked her up to 9 knots. He checked his watch. A 90-second run should be good enough. McCready had already called the DA at, ‘Twelve, red!’ He’d need one more look to confirm. The second hand crept round. ‘Biddle, how’s the transport’s bearing?’
‘Continuing to close, sir. Maintaining course.’
Shaping up nicely. Ninety seconds. Harry stepped forward and ordered the ’scope up again. One last look at the target set-up. He checked the bezel himself for where he expected to see the target. And there it was, big and fat and right where it should be.
Except he hadn’t done an all-round look for a while.
Careless.
He began to pivot left.
&n
bsp; And then he leapt back from the periscope as if he’d been electrocuted.
‘Down periscope! Flood Q! Keep one hundred feet! Port thirty, full dive on the planes, Mr Ainsworth!’
No-one needed an explanation; it came echoing through the hull.
Ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky-ricka-chicky!
Instead of running away, Harry had turned Scourge into the on-coming escort, and now it thundered directly over them with what sounded like inches to spare.
As the noise retreated, they heard splashes: depth charges entering the water. But they were way behind them, right where a fleeing submarine should have been; and the detonations, when they reverberated through the hull, were far away.
‘More high-speed HE,’ called Biddle. ‘Bearing green four zero. Drawing aft. And, sir, the transport, she’s increased speed. Sounds like they’re flogging her. Bearing green five zero. Drawing aft too.’
Atilla was running past them, going the other way, heading directly into Cagliari. The sounds coming from the sea were again confused by exploding depth charges, and the engine noises of Eyetie torpedo boats dashing hither and thither.
It took at least four minutes to turn Scourge 180 degrees going flat out at this depth. What was Atilla doing now? At ‘flogging’ speed? A good 20 knots? That meant she’d be almost 3000 yards away and still running before Scourge was even pointing in the right direction.
‘Group down, dead slow together,’ said Harry. ‘Somebody must’ve seen our periscope. ProcyonPY was coming right for us. Another twenty seconds and she’d’ve given us a haircut.’
The attack was over. Harry didn’t have to give the order to shut it down. He had had Biddle concentrating on the target’s bearing, instead of keeping his ears open to the big picture – Harry’s fault. The same fault that had cost Jacko Dunham his Perisher. And now had almost cost Harry, and his crew, their lives. Jesus, you couldn’t let up for a minute, could you.
Everybody listened as the Italians’ concentrated depth charge attack unfolded a long way astern, and Scourge crept silently away. Harry wondered what his crew thought about him now. But Farrar knew, and so did Chief Petty Officer Ainsworth. What was it they said about good skippers: any halfwit officer can get you into the shite but only a good one can get you out?
****
‘Twelve hundred tons, maybe fourteen if the crew’ve all just had spaghetti for dinner,’ said Harry, face stuck to the periscope.
She was a heavily-laden, old fashioned, 1900s, three-island tramp steamer with a natural-draught funnel and smoke streaming from it like a child’s daub. They were about a mile and half north of Perd’e Sali on the western side of the Gulf of Cagliari, and the steamer was coast hugging her way south. Puttering along astern of her was what looked like an armed trawler of some sort that still had all her fishing gear aboard, but augmented by a gun on the bow that looked bigger, but a lot older than Scourge’s three-incher. She also had a line of washing drying between a derrick and her backstay.
Harry was deliberating. So far today he’d seen a regular air patrol – one of those Capronis that looked like an RAF Anson – plying up and down the Gulf’s shoreline. That, and a few smaller fishing boats. After their abortive attack on the tank transporter on the other side of the Gulf yesterday, there was little hue-and-cry abroad. Harry surmised that was because the Italian anti-submarine johnnies had decided no sub skipper would be daft enough to hang about a coast where he’d already been spotted. Which was why Harry had decided to hang about – that and another incentive he’d discussed round the wardroom table earlier, over dinner.
Meanwhile, he was weighing up whether this tramp steamer was worth a torpedo. The steamer looked so old that a gun action should be enough to sink her, but did he want to risk mixing it with the armed trawler? In the run of things, the answer was yes. Harry really wanted all of his torpedoes for that tank transporter.
Word had spread they were stalking another target, but nothing on whether it was to be a gun or torpedo action.
When Harry sent the ’scope down and looked up, he could see Leading Seaman Hooper lurking around the control room for’ard door – underneath the gun tower. It wasn’t his crack-shot, gun-layer’s poverty-grey countenance that Harry noticed, but his eyes, fixed on him, like a gundog on the 12th of August. Bloodthirsty bugger! That really decided it for Harry; this was surely an attitude to duty that a skipper should encourage.
‘Stand by, gun action!’ called Harry. ‘First target is an armed trawler. Bearing green four zero, range fifteen hundred!’
There was the tramp of feet as the magazine relay team closed up, and Hooper shot up the tower, to be ready underneath the hatch.
‘Full ahead together!’ called Harry, ‘Surface, gun action!’
Behind him he heard Meacham, the outside ERA, call, ‘All main vents shut, sir!”
And Farrar ordered, ‘Blow two and four main ballast!’ The valves opened and there was the roar of high-pressure air flooding into the tanks fore and aft to ensure Scourge rose out of the deep on an even keel; no-one wanted Hooper slipping off the deck because they were coming up like a broaching whale.
Farrar, looking at the depth gauge, placed a whistle in his mouth, and as the indicator swung round, he blew it hard. The gun tower and conning tower hatches were clear. There was a sudden whush! of air as both were swung open and the pressure in the boat blew out, and the control room echoed to feet pounding on ladders as the two lookouts shot up onto the bridge. Hooper was already behind the three-inch gun, reaching for his first round and Powell was right behind him, there to direct the shoot.
The gun’s breach was always left open when submerged, to shave another few seconds off, but there was still water trickling out the barrel when Hooper slammed home the first round and trained the gun himself while the other two members of his gun team were piling out of the hatch behind him.
Bang!
The first round was away, and its brass casing clattering, steaming onto the wet deck, as Hooper’s loader slammed home the next shell.
Round two was away before the first shell hit the base of the derrick behind the trawler’s bridge, collapsing it – and the drying washing – into the sea.
Bang!
It had taken 45 seconds between Hooper throwing the gun tower hatch open and him firing the first round – 49 seconds to the second. Harry got to the bridge in time to see a figure running out onto the trawler’s bridge wing, looking frantically in every direction but the right one, when round two disintegrated the wooden wheelhouse behind him and blew him into the sea.
Since he hadn’t intended to waste any of his torpedoes, Harry’s approach to the targets had been to run past them, and turn in on their quarter before surfacing. It hadn’t occurred to the Eyetie that the firing might be coming from behind.
On the deck below Harry, Hooper had paused to notch down the gun elevation a turn. He resumed firing. The next three shells went into the hull, on the water line.
It was like theatre being played out under a lovely warm Mediterranean sun, with seagulls wheeling away with every crack of the three-incher. Harry watched mesmerised as the trawler’s crew ran aimlessly about the deck, remembering what Powell had told him at dinner round the wardroom table one night, about Hooper’s shooting: ‘He usually gets the first couple rounds into them before they know they’re being fired on, it really knocks the fight out them. They just don’t get it together after that. Lots of running about, shouting, “Mama Mia!” and waving their arms in the air. It’s a shame for the poor bastards, but it’s still a hoot to watch.’
And right now, Harry was watching two of them running forward to where the gun was, until one of Hooper’s shells went into the hull underneath and slightly ahead of them; when the gout of smoke got whipped away by the wind, he could see them running back aft again. That was when he could see the trawler was under helm, turning to starboard. Powell looked up to him on the bridge, and yelled, ‘I think he’s going to try and beach himself, sir!’
‘Check firing, Mr Powell,’ said Harry, ‘Change targets!’ and he ordered Scourge about, in pursuit of her duck.
Running on the surface, Scourge could make 13 to 14 knots going flat out; this old tramp was lucky if she’d made 10, even after a boiler clean. Harry estimated seven knots right now, and he could even hear her engine clanking itself to death above Scourge’s diesels.
‘When you’re ready, Hooper,’ he heard Powell say. And barely were the words out his mouth, when, bang!
No splash, just a jet of smoke and splintered deck planking erupting out of the tramp’s old-fashioned clipper stern. The tramp immediately began to stagger; had Hooper taken out her rudder with his first round? Bloody hell, the man was a menace with that gun of his!
A pause for a minor traverse, then the rounds started pouring out. Bang! Bang! Bang! All of them slammed into the hull beneath the central bridge superstructure. Harry watched as a cluster of crew appeared and began trying to lower a lifeboat. He didn’t want to shoot at ordinary sailors abandoning ship, but as he was issuing an order to check fire there was a great roar and a plume of even denser smoke – if that was possible – came shooting out of the stack, tinged with flame in the heart of it, and the tramp began to heel, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until Harry was looking down on her deck plan and he could see half a dozen sailors running down her starboard side and over the tumblehome of her hull as she capsized.
Hooper had got his shells into her engine room, and that had doomed her.
Scourge was now crossing behind the tramp’s stern, and on her shore side, Harry could see another lifeboat one the crew had successfully launched – pulling furiously for the shore. Behind it though, there were still several survivors splashing in the sea. He rang the telegraph for slow ahead, and called down to Powell, ‘Get a party on the casing, Mr Powell, and standby to rescue survivors.’
